Quotulatiousness

May 10, 2018

Enter ADOLF HITLER stage left I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1919 Part 4 of 4

Filed under: Germany, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 8 May 2018

The fledgling democracy in Germany struggles to survive as the German Revolution escalates into a downright civil war. In one of the German States Bavaria, Adolf Hitler appears on the stage within the context of the Bavarian Soviet Revolution.

Click here for the rest of the Between 2 Wars series: http://goo.gl/enXJWf

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CORRECTION: Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution gave the PRESIDENT of the German Reich the power to suspend civil rights and take armed action, nothing else… our apologies. In this episode we meet Adolf Hitler for the first time. Now some might be surprised about how we portray Hitler and his political views in 1919 and this needs some commentary. Before you go off in any specific direction about Hitler and Naziism, you should therefore read our commentary here https://community.timeghost.tv/t/enter-adolf-hitler-from-the-left-between-2-wars-1919-part-4-of-4/262/3:

Commentary regarding our portrayal of Hitler:

Those of you who follow our work since a longer time will know that we are loath to tell a skewed or biased version of the events we portray. Our aim with how we tell Hitler’s story is neither to exonerate him, nor to vilify him; the facts speak for themselves and we are convinced that we neither need to add, nor subtract emphasis to the story of Hitler and the Nazis.

In many other works covering Hitler you will see a tendency to hang the events of this epoch on the leaders that rose to power in the period. While it is unquestionable that the impact of those leaders was far reaching and instrumental in how the events evolved, it should not be forgotten that these men (and a few women) were not created in a bubble. As postulated in the main historiographical theory dealing with the impact of leadership, Zeitgeist Theory (from where we take or brand name btw.) it is easily seen at that it was not the characters that created the times, but the times that created the characters who then steered the events as they evolved.

This is an uncomfortable position to take, because it leads to the next conclusion: Germany, Japan and Italy did also not exist inside bubbles. This in turn leads us to have to look at the entire picture of the world to understand the events that followed. Inevitably this will not lead to a black and white picture of good guys vs. bad guys. Instead we face a complex situation where many cogwheels interact to bring about the situation that eventually leads to war.

To be clear: once again we are not seeking to exonerate, or vilify anyone. What with the extensive crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Axis powers before and during the war, there is always the risk of comparing apples and oranges when you dive into this area. To avoid that conundrum, the war crimes perpetrated by the Allies are often brushed aside, or simply justified as an unfortunate part of war. Again to be clear: while the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Osaka and many other cities does constitute war crimes, it does not exonerate the murder of tens of millions of people by the Nazis. Furthermore the sheer difference in numbers and method speak for themselves (if you must look at a comparison of who was worse than the other).

Our interest will always be to tell the story as accurately as we can and let the story itself provide judgement. At no point will we waiver from telling a part of the story just because it makes one side or the other look better or worse. Also, we will not get involved in the moral arguments surrounding this, such as that certain acts were justified because they led to victory, or were the lesser evil. It is not our job to make that kind of moral judgement – that is up to the philosophers of the world and we’re mere tellers of history.

Regarding Hitler’s political views in 1919:

The fact that Hitler had liberal sympathies in 1919, should not be misunderstood as a foundation for an argument that Naziism was a left wing ideology. While Hitler and Drexler did incorporate social welfare concepts and anti-capitalist ideas into their agenda, the national socialist doctrine is clearly a derivative of conservatism, not progressivism.

Contrary to communism that focuses on class and internationalism, Naziism focuses on race and nationalism. Naziism espouses traditional social conservative views regarding gender roles, division of labour, social values, and foreign relations. Communism claims to be egalitarian while Naziism espouses an elitist world view. Communism seeks to create a completely new economic system based on overthrowing traditional trade and profit ideas, Naziism espouses economic protectionism and state regulated capitalism. In one aspect the two ideologies do share a common denominator, namely in the repression of the financial transfer economy (money lending, property speculation and so on). This last bit has often been misrepresented as proof that Naziism is a left-wing ideology, but that would be a fallacious conclusion as this is not at the centre of the ideology, but rather an artifact of the somewhat contradictory antisemitic ideas of Naziism.

Last but not least the main unique feature of Naziism that differentiates it from Fascism is the outspoken antisemitism at the heart of the ideology. Absurdly Hitler came to equate Jews with robber capitalists AND communism. As strange as that is, it’s a way of thinking that was not only prevalent with Hitler, but also with other political thinkers like Charles Maurras, a Frenchman who formulated an early form of Naziism already in the late 1880s and 1890s (yes we will cover him). The basis of this is their belief in a world conspiracy led by the Jews that was aimed at the overthrow of what they perceived as ‘their race.’ Based on that, robber capitalism and Bolshevik Communism were seen as instruments in this imaginary war of the races. The idea was also promoted within the context of the Russian Revolution, where for instance the fabricated Protocols of The Elders of Zion, aimed to show that the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ was a driving force behind the revolution.

March 1, 2018

Churchill: The Man Who Saved the Free World

Filed under: Britain, History, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

PragerU
Published on 26 Feb 2018

The West is free today thanks in large part to one man – Winston Churchill. Historian and bestselling author Andrew Roberts explains how Churchill saved the world from Nazi Germany.

Script:

In May 1940, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi war machine were sweeping across the European continent.

The future of the free world hung in the balance. An isolationist-leaning United States was an ocean away. There was one man who stood between Hitler’s seemingly invincible army and crushing defeat.

That one man was Winston Churchill.

He was born on November 30, 1874. Though we think of him as the quintessential Englishman, he was actually half American.

His mother, Jennie, was the daughter of a wealthy New York stock speculator. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was of English nobility and a major political figure.

From his early school days, Churchill recognized the power of words. Throughout his life, he used them with consummate skill. They never let him down.

He first made a name for himself as a war correspondent in the 1890s, covering conflicts in Cuba, Northern India, the Sudan, and South Africa. Though he never abandoned journalism, and became one the greatest historians of his age, Churchill used his family connections and his own fame to launch himself into politics. His confident manner and matchless oratory marked him as a natural leader.

1914 and World War I found him in the key position of First Lord of the Admiralty where he did much to modernize Britain’s navy. In 1915, Churchill thought he could bring a speedy end to the war by opening a new front in Turkey, which he perceived as the weak link in the German alliance against the allies.

This led to the infamous Gallipoli campaign.

Badly underestimating the fighting strength of the Turks, thousands of British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers were killed in battles that proved to be every bit as indecisive and bloody as the campaigns on Europe’s Western front.

Churchill took the blame.

This was perhaps the low point of his life. Dismissed from the war cabinet, five months later he enlisted in the army, where he saw action in France.

He rose again in British politics throughout the 1920s, making money — as he always did — through his writing and speaking. As Adolph Hitler took power in Germany in the 1930s, Churchill was one of the first and certainly the loudest voice in England sounding the alarm. But it was an alarm few in England wanted to hear.

The English had been traumatized, as had all of Europe, by the shocking amount of death and destruction of the First World War. No one wanted to face the possibility that it could happen again.

Churchill, however, saw that a new confrontation with Germany was inevitable. And when the inevitable arrived with the stunning German attack on France in May 1940, a desperate nation turned to him. He was ready.

His weapons were his pen, his voice and his words. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” he told the House of Commons in his first speech as Prime Minister.

Things quickly turned from bad to worse. France collapsed, Belgium surrendered, and a quarter of a million British soldiers barely managed to escape from Dunkirk. Even as the war news moved from dangerous to desperate to disastrous, Churchill never wavered. In speech after speech, he infused the British with the spirit to fight on against Hitler’s monstrous tyranny.

“We shall not flag or fail,” he said after Dunkirk. “We shall go on to the end. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be…we shall never surrender.”

For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/churchill-man-who-saved-free-world

February 5, 2018

QotD: The Age of Hypocrisy

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Hitler (one cannot mention him without the subliterates mouthing, “Reductio ad Hitlerum!” — not realizing that they are quoting Leo Strauss) was the great enabler. He gave cover to all lesser evils, including the greater of the lesser ones; and thereby retired all the prattling politicians from the Age of Hypocrisy, which he closed. Now all the baddies seemed good, by comparison, and everyone needed a baddie of his own, or they would get one assigned from Berlin.

The Age of Hypocrisy re-opened, of course, with Hitler’s death, when political discourse again softened. (Hypocrisy is the padding on the madhouse walls.) But for a twelve-year run in Germany, and shorter periods wherever their shadow fell, Hitler’s Nazis erased hypocrisy.

This is what Karl Kraus meant, when he said that the Nazis had left him speechless. For decades he had exposed the lies and deceitful posturing not only of politicians in the German-speaking world, but among their immense supporting cast of journalists and fashion-seeking intellectuals. He was the greater-than-Orwell who strode to the defence of the German language, when it was wickedly abused. He identified the new “smelly little orthodoxies” as they crawled from under the rocks of Western Civ — the squalid, unexamined premisses that led by increments to the slaughterhouse of Total War. He was not, even slightly, a revolutionist; he had no argument against anyone’s wealth or status, even his own. Rather, through savage satirical humour, with language untranslatably precise, impinging constantly upon the poetic, he undressed the false.

He had seen the First World War coming, in the malice spreading through the language; in the smugness that fogged perception; in the lies that people told each other, to preserve their amour-propre; in the jingo that lurked beneath the genteel. After, he saw worse.

David Warren, “The decline of requirements”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-06-07.

January 29, 2018

QotD: Churchill’s drinking habits

Filed under: Books, Britain, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the not so distant past around the sodden precincts of Westminster you were as likely to spot a yeti as a sober politician. The level of drinking that went on among MPs and their leeches for most of the last century was prodigious and was by and large expected. It was, as Ben Wright describes in his breezy, anecdote-rich and instructive survey of booze and politics, part of a culture which was tolerated and, to a degree, encouraged.

It was not without justification, for instance, that Adolf Hitler, who might have been a nicer fellow had he not been a teetotaller, described Winston Churchill as an “insane drunkard”, a “garrulous drunkard”, and “whisky-happy”.

If Order, Order! has a star it is undoubtedly Churchill who rarely let a day go by able to pass a breathalyser test. On occasion he would have a glass of wine at breakfast followed by a liquid lunch which invariably included Champagne and brandy. At tea-time he would progress to whisky. Then he would wash down dinner with more Champagne and brandy after which he had at least another whisky. According to one loyal aide who may have been sight impaired he was never the worse for wear for this intake and he “never felt the slightest ill-effects in the morning”.

Alan Taylor, “Lush tales of our political classes’ drinking exploits”, The National, 2016-06-20.

December 25, 2017

Filling Trenches – General PoWs – Blindness I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 23 Dec 2017

Ask your questions: http://outofthetrenches.thegreatwar.tv

August 18, 2017

QotD: “Justifying” the Holocaust

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… that underlying tone of “Of course what Hitler and the Nazis did was unjustifiable, they were wrong about what was going on around them” whenever the topic of the Holocaust is discussed implies that, if they had been right, what they did would have been, at least, justifiable. In other words, there’s an acceptance of the underlying logic of collective justice going on there, and when you put adjectives in front of justice, you almost never get justice.

Which brings us to the current brawl in SF/F and the wider culture. There’s a very large swathe, of Western society that has regressed, though they call it progress, to the idea that one should deliberately punish all members of a group for the actions, real or imagined, of a few members, and to the idea that because members of a group are over-represented in a particular area that it is a deliberate choice on the part of the group, rather than an accident of history.

You see it nearly everywhere. The idea that SF was somehow filled with racist, sexist hatemongers until … well, as near as I can tell, around five years ago is ludicrous when you have H. Beam Piper writing stories where racial intermarriage has turned almost all of humanity a nice shade of brown and there are heroic characters with names like Themistocles M’Zangwe. But, even if that were true — what, we should stop reading (and buying books from) straight white male authors for an entire year? Because a bunch of people they never even met were theoretically jerks?

Sarah Hoyt, “Social Injustice – 60 Guilders”, According to Hoyt, 2015-07-31.

July 22, 2017

Dunkirk Myth vs. Reality – Operation Dynamo

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 7 Jul 2017

The evacuation of British, Belgian, and French troops at Dunkirk – Operation Dynamo – was a crucial event in the early stages of the Second World War. Although the Allies were ultimately severely beaten in the Battle of France, the events at Dunkirk were mostly portrayed and perceived as a victory for the British. Quite naturally various myths surround this event.

» SOURCES «

Palmer, Alice: Dunkirk: The Defeat That Inspired a Nation
http://repository.wellesley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=library_awards

Alexander, Martin S.: French grand strategy and defence preparations. In: Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume I
Frieser, Karl-Heinz: The war in the West, 1939-1940: an unplanned Blitzkrieg. In: Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume I
Amazon.com link (affiliate): http://amzn.to/2tuFtuM

Gardner, W.J.R. Gardner: The Evacuation from Dunkirk: ‘Operation Dynamo’, 26 May-June 1940 (Naval Staff Histories)
Amazon.com link (affiliate): http://amzn.to/2uoqMFV

History of The Association of Dunkirk Little Ships
http://www.adls.org.uk/t1/content/history-association-dunkirk-little-ships

Mrs. Miniver
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Miniver

July 14, 2017

QotD: Did the Holocaust Undermine the German War Effort?

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the great paradoxes of the Second World War is that while German troops on the Eastern Front were starving and freezing to death for lack of supplies, the rail transport of Jews to the death camps proceeded with uninterrupted Teutonic efficiency. The explanation is found in a profound insight by the historian Gerhard Weinberg (born 1928); that for the Nazis the extermination of Europe’s Jews was the purpose of the war, not a distraction or a side show. A complication was that this “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was a state secret, even though it might have been the worst-kept secret in history.

Yaron Pasher is a young Israeli historian who studied under Weinberg. In this book he sets out to explore how the implementation of the Holocaust fatally undermined the German war effort between 1941 and the final collapse in May 1945. Unfortunately Pasher is simply out of his depth trying to write military history from the perspective of logistics (admittedly, one of the hardest things that any historian can attempt!).

Much of the text is a mish-mash of rehashed secondary sources about the course of operations on the Eastern and Western fronts. The reader bogs down, like a Panzer division in the Spring thaw, in a welter of inconsistently transliterated Slavic place names. The narrative is interspersed with glimpses of the progress of the Final Solution repeatedly hammering home the same assertion: if all those trains that carried Jews to the death camps had been used to carry supplies and reinforcements to the Front, the Wehrmacht might have performed better against the Russians.

Yaron Pasher, “Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler’s “Final Solution” Undermined the German War Effort”, Strategy Page, 2015-09-02.

June 15, 2017

Why is Rommel so complicated? – Erwin Rommel vs. Desert Fox

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 17 May 2017

This video takes a look at why Erwin Rommel often called the “Desert Fox” is so complicated due to the various interest groups and his complex situation in World War 2.

April 16, 2017

QotD: The fascination of Hitler and Nazi Germany

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This morning I read Marina Fontaine’s review of Downfall (http://marinafontaine.blogspot.com/2017/03/netflix-review-downfall.html), yes, including mention of that scene, the one that’s been recaptioned several gazillion times, some with more humor than others. In the review, she asks why the fascination? What is it with the Nazis and Hitler?

I have a theory. It is purely mine, based on reading a metric crap-ton about all manner of things (and don’t ask me for cites because this stuff has stewed so long in the back of my head I no longer remember where I originally read whatever triggered any particular piece. You can get most of the raw facts off Wikipedia). It is also a very broad generalization. Coming years will determine whether or not it is correct in the big picture. I’m not optimistic (I hope I’ve got this horribly wrong. I fear I haven’t).

Okay. So.

The ongoing fascination with Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Simply put, it’s the most well-documented and acknowledged demonstration of the allure of evil and how easy it is for a more or less civilized people to descend into utter brutality. As such, it holds an unclean fascination not helped by uniforms that were designed to look good as well as be practical (or by the simple fact that evil, when done effectively, is sexy. Because it is invariably power, and untrammeled power at that. We’re human. Power attracts and corrupts us. The wiser among us acknowledge this so we can fight the effect).

The various Communist regimes can be dismissed as “not counting” because to the minds of those who do the dismissing, Russia, China, North Korea, and Eastern Europe “weren’t civilized”, and so Communism/Socialism would work just fine implemented by civilized people (they usually point to one of the Nordic nations when they do this). These same people are a big part of why the wrong lesson keeps being drawn from Nazi Germany.

The problem was not nationalism. It was not even the disgusting racial laws. Those laws could never have been passed, much less enforced, without the one big thing Socialism, Communism, and yes, Nazism have in common.

The supremacy of the state.

[…]

That bare listing of facts accounts for the rise of Hitler, but not the continuing notion that the Nazis were conservative (only if you define ‘conservative’ as ‘nationalist’). That one comes from two sources. One was Soviet propaganda aimed at making Communist and Nazi ideologies seem much more distinct than they actually were. The other was Allied propaganda aimed at much the same thing. It wouldn’t do, after all, to have people realize they were allied with a dictator every bit as vile as Hitler.

So in American and British media, the evil of the Nazis was played up, while the evil of the Communists was minimized where it couldn’t be silenced altogether. The Communist plants and fellow-travelers in both nations helped.

They were – and are – almost the same. Both demand an all-powerful state. The state determines who is deserving and provides for the deserving. The state dehumanizes the undeserving prior to eliminating them. The state determines the direction of industry (in the case of the Nazis, by requiring business owners to support the regime where the Communists took over the businesses). The state cares for you – but if you’re no use to the state, your care will be an unmarked grave in a prison camp/work camp/concentration camp/gulag. All hail the state.

Kate Paulk, “The Ease of Evil”, guest-posting at According to Hoyt, 2017-03-21.

January 22, 2017

The media’s Great Depression nostalgia

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed Driscoll on the recurring media nostalgia for a long-ago, much-worse-than-today time:

The month after Obama won the election in 2008, Virginia Postrel noted that a lot of journalists (read: Democrat operatives with bylines) had heavily invested in the notion that it was the 1930s all over again, and had a major case of what Virginia dubbed “Depression Lust,” and were busy cranking out “Depression Porn” in service to the Office of the President-Elect. Not least of which was Time magazine’s infamous cover of Obama Photoshopped into the second coming of FDR and the headline “The New, New Deal,” thinking it was a compliment, and not an ominous prediction of an economy as similarly atrophied as Roosevelt’s. Pretending that Trump is Hitler allows you, oh brave foot-soldier in the DNC-MSM, to pose as the new Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It’s simply the funhouse mirror image version of the same sclerotic meme.

For the modern left, if the economy is relatively good*, and the incoming president has a (D) after his name, he’s the second coming of JFK (see: Clinton, Bill); if the economy is bad, and he has a (D) after his name, he’s FDR — and no matter what the shape of the economy, if the president has an (R) after his name, he’s Hitler (QED: Nixon, Reagan, Bush #43, and Trump).

* And it was, despite Clinton’s rhetoric. Would Time magazine lie to you? Well yes, of course. But look what they admitted in December of 1992.

January 2, 2017

QotD: A key to Hitler’s early success

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Hitler] grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

George Orwell, “Review of Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler”, 1940.

December 16, 2016

ESR on the “Trump is Hitler!” meme

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

He posted this the other day on Google+:

Reading this [link] put me in mind of a slightly different scenario. So I’m throwing this gauntlet down to anyone who has ever said the “Trump is Hitler” thing.

There are only two possibilities.

One is that you believe what you’re saying. in which case you have a moral duty to find Trump and kill him. With a scoped rifle. With a suicide vest. With hands and teeth. With anything.

The other is that you don’t actually believe Trump is Hitler, but find it advantageous to say so, posturing for demagogic political gain.

If you’re not a liar and a demagogue, why are you not strapping on weapons right now? Put the fuck up or shut the fuck up

November 30, 2016

QotD: Napoleon’s misogynistic views

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… “What do most ladies have to complain of? Don’t we acknowledge they have souls … They demand equality! Pure madness! Woman is our property … just as the fruit tree belongs to the gardener.” Only inadequate education could make a wife think she was on the same level as her husband. Convinced of “the weakness of the female intellect”, he considered his brother Joseph extraordinary in enjoying the other sex’s company as well as their bodies — “He’s forever shut away with some woman reading Torquato Tasso and Aretino.”

However gracefully phrased, his opinion of adultery revealed utter cynicism. In the end it is “a joke behind a mask … not by any means a rare phenomenon but a very ordinary occurrence on the sofa”. He had surprisingly modern views on women as soldiers. “They are brave, incredibly enthusiastic and capable of the most frightful atrocities … In a real war between men and women the only thing which would handicap women would be pregnancy, since the women of the people are just as strong as most men.” (In this he was far more progressive than the Führer.)

Desmond Seward, Napoleon and Hitler: A comparative biography, 1988.

July 6, 2016

QotD: The treason of the modern intellectuals

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The longest-term stakes in the war against terror are not just human lives, but whether Western civilization will surrender to fundamentalist Islam and shari’a law. More generally, the overt confrontation between Western civilization and Islamist barbarism that began on September 11th of 2001 has also made overt a fault line in Western civilization itself — a fault line that divides the intellectual defenders of our civilization from intellectuals whose desire is to surrender it to political or religious absolutism.

This fault line was clearly limned in Julien Benda’s 1927 essay Le trahison des clercs: English “The treason of the intellectuals”. I couldn’t find a copy of Benda’s essay on the Web. but there is an excellent commentary on it that repays reading. Ignore the reflexive endorsement of religious faith at the end; the source was a conservative Catholic magazine in which such gestures are obligatory. Benda’s message, untainted by Catholic or Christian partisanship, is even more resonant today than it was in 1927.

The first of the totalitarian genocides (the Soviet-engineered Ukrainian famine of 1922-1923, which killed around two million people) had already taken place. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was about fifteen years in the future. Neither atrocity became general knowledge until later, but Benda in 1927 would not have been surprised; he foresaw the horrors that would result when intellectuals abetted the rise of the vast tyrannizing ideologies of the 20th century,

Changes in the transport, communications, and weapons technologies of the 20th century made the death camps and the gulags possible. But it was currents in human thought that made them fact — ideas that both motivated and rationalized the thuggery of the Hitlers and Stalins of the world.

Eric S. Raymond, “Today’s treason of the intellectuals”, Armed and Dangerous, 2002-11-28.

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