What Is the Answer? In That Case, What Is the Question?
Well, except for Ezra Pound. And H.G. Wells thought they were pretty groovy…
By 1932, a frustrated Wells found his superior wisdom bypassed time and again by the superior mass appeal of fascism and Communism. In a talk at Oxford provocatively titled “Liberal Fascism,” he called for liberalism to be “born again.” After his customary denunciation of parliamentary politics as an anachronism, he let out his frustrations, calling for fascist means to serve liberal ends by way of a liberal elite as “conceited” and as power-hungry as its rivals. “I suggest that you study the reinvigoration of Catholicism by Loyola,” Wells said. “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti.” It was also to Communism that “we shall have to turn—we outsiders, that is, the young people with foresight for enlightened Nazis; I am proposing that you consider the formation for a greater Communist Party; a western response to Russia.”
…So much so that George Orwell wrote in 1941, “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.”
And then there was Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born pioneering modern architect who adopted France as his country of residence, so much so that during the 20th century, he was the very definition of a French modernist. Corbusier built an early iconic modernist house in 1927 in the suburbs of Paris for Gertrude Stein’s brother. And Corbu himself was also pretty cool with Vichy and their ultimate boss:
Letters published in a 2008 biography of the seminal 20th century modern master, Architect and Painter suggest that the radical urban planner was a Nazi sympathizer whose Fascist thinking went above and beyond previously documented perceptions. In one letter written shortly after Hitler conquered France and much of Western Europe, the Swiss-born architect expresses clear enthusiasm for his intervention. In a letter written to his Mother Corbusier wrote, “If he is serious in his declarations, Hitler can crown his life with a magnificent work: the remaking of Europe.” This is not entirely surprising in light that Le Corbusier aligned himself with the French far-right in the 1930s and accepted a post as a city planner for the Vichy regime that ruled France and collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.
At the start of the 1930s, Corbu had submitted designs for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, as a reminder that he didn’t much care if his totalitarian socialism was national or international in flavor. Construction began in the late 1930s, from another architect’s design, but was never completed, due to World War II. It was to have been built on the site of Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which the Soviets demolished to make way for the new building, in a potent act of symbolism.
Philip Johnson, the mercurial founder of the Museum of Modern Art’s architectural department in the early 1930s, helped to put Corbusier and other European modernists on the map in America during that decade. Concurrently, he was also eager to get involved with leftwing politics, working for Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and ultimately, also rather dug the fellows in the dark uniforms in Germany:
I was lucky enough to get to be a correspondent so that I could go to the front when I wanted to and so it was that I came again to the country that we had motored through, the towns north of Warsaw. . . . The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.
Given that numerous modernists were very much taken in by the totalitarian temptation of both international and national socialism, is it possible that the above definitions of “reactionary” and “far-right” might just be slightly off?
Well, one thing for sure, the woman doesn’t like commas.
Would anyone care to argue seriously that that is not where we are heading with this Administration? The power hunger, elitist ideology, crony capitalism, and Jew hatred are all right there for all to see. Yep, the National Socialist Democratic Action Party is alive and well right here.
“What’s old is new again.”
– it was a good book, but not a great book and then laughed.
And Pablo laughed.
And F. Scott laughed.
And Driscoll punched Hemingway in the mouth.
Heh. I’m rarely confused with Alvy Singer.
Gertrude probably figured that if collaboration with fascism was good enough for Ezra Pound,it was good enough for her
Any port in a storm…
Ezra Pound used to brag that he was able to prove he was sane. He had his discharge papers from St Elizabeths Hospital after a stint to recover his sanity.
The religion of the intellectuals is pure power-worship.
What a striking insight. (Sorry, Ed. With one blow comes Enlightenment.)
I’ve never heard it put better.
That’s why they strive so.
Not to be the monarch, but to be his chamberlain.
Since Plato and Alcibiades has been that way
A book that I had gotten from … I think it was one of those overstock book catalogues … was Paris in the Third Reich. It doesn’t have many good reviews at this link -
http://www.amazon.com/Paris-Third-Reich-Occupation-1940-1944/dp/0002166453/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330824387&sr=1-1
… but it did cement in me a dislike for certain French intellectuals who sat out the war and the German occupation, not doing very much at all save for being their own precious and unique snowflake selves. But then they spent the following decades lecturing the rest of us on the high moral principles that ought to be lived up to in hard times.
Yes, Occupied France was a hard and difficult place, for a moral human being to sort out what to do in the face of a brutal occupation. Individuals did what they thought best. Not everyone was cut out to be a resistant, and it took a selfessly brave person to do so. But many did – and most of them weren’t anointed intellectuals.
But still – I would have expected better from those who set themselves up as our moral and intellectual guides.
Ezra Pound I can forgive on the strength of one quote: “What, gentle reader, is a bureaucrat? A hired janitor who thinks he owns the building.”
Both sides of political spectrum suffer from a collective amnesia about collectivism. Mussolini was the frist Progressive hero. Progressives barely noticed Lenin and the Soviets until the mid 1920s. While a majority of America’s Progressives became enfatuated with Communism the still did not reject Fascism until the Spanish Civil War. Of course, On August 23, 1939 Fascism became Progressive again until magicly banished to the netherworld by some forgotton event on June 22, 1941.
With varying degrees of success, I try to be as charitable as possible to our ancestors because you never can quite put yourself in their shoes, and even if you could and then be really sure of what you’d have done.
In that vein, I remember this line from the remake of Shadowlands, the movie about C.S. Lewis’s marriage to Joy Davidman. At one point, Joy, speaking of the naivete of her youth, says, “Well, I mean, back in the thirties it seemed to me there was only two choices … either you were a fascist and you conquered the world … or you were a Communist and you saved it.”
Looks naive now, didn’t then. When it comes to the future, we ride with our backs to the engine. In a fog.
I like to play a game where I look as the most “progessive” people I know and try to figure out what role they would have had in Nazi Germany. SS Stormtrooper? Gestapo agent? Party Member? Concentration camp guard? The guy who turned Anne Frank’s family in?
I see underlying characteristics in most progressives that would bloom under the proper facist regime. I can always seeing how easy it would be for the US to go Nazi in a very short time. The main players are always waiting in the wings, and all we need is a new Mein Fuhrer. Then again, maybe he’s aleady he…..
You were hardly the first:
http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/0020122
Who Goes Nazi?
“There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.” — Samuel Johnson
Hundreds of Americans were killed week in and week out in the Vietnam war. On the news every day the body counts. You could forgive people for thinking that something wasn’t quite right.
So dumbass kids proclaimed they were communists. At my school some idiots formed the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigades and tried to organize the black population on the east side of town. Luckily the police were on hand to rescue them from the ungrateful proletariat.
Also kids one knew in high school went overseas and got killed.
Long rambling post. Those were the days. Hopefully we’ll not see their like again. Unless we keep dragging up video from the 60′s.
Those were the days. Hopefully we’ll not see their like again. Unless we keep dragging up video from the 60′s.
As long as we have former Hippie Radicals as many of our politicians and media figures, you can count on it.
I was not surprised to read yesterday that Obama’s TSA has grown from a modest 16,000 to over 51,000 employees in a very short time. The TSA’s duties have also “grown” to included inspections of vehicles, boats, etc and the individuals driving them, they perform duties that ordinarily belong to trained cops. My point is this; Obama once announced that a domestic “police” force was needed; their boss being hisself in the WH. Now THAT is a scary idea to me and speaks directly to Ed’s piece. Notice how the “under the rada” stealth TSA has grown and continues to grow without a word from the MSM – this is one of the most outrageous developments and fits perfectly into the totalitarian nature of this administration … their little tentacles are appearing in every aspect of our lives with very little resistance. Breitbart was spot-on when he described these bozos as THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT … radical SOB’s power-grabbing our country … look no further than Holder for a classic example of pure lawlessness.
G.Stein had this long time friendship , since 1926 ,with Bernard Fay a prominent Vichy official head of the national library in Paris, this was an ” friendly ” complicity on a personnal level; Fay did provided protection to G.Stein & Alice Toklas , both jewess, who could pass through the nazi ordeal unscathed, and Fay kept their appartment and their painting collection intact.In a litterary ” scratch my back – I will scratch yours ” G.Stein started a translation of Marshall Petain speeches and declared he was a kind of G.Washington paternalistic figure.Bernard Fay was condemned after the liberation and stayed 6 years in jail then escaped to Switzerland , where he was helped financially by Ms Toklas.Fay was a strange personality, monarchist, anti-republican and anti-freemasonry, and was also homosexual. So altogether it was a matter of private survival between two intellectuals Stein & Fay.This does not absolve G.Stein of her superiority complex and her estrangement towards the surrounding period , the mass murders, the deportations, etc..but it was a murky period and she was too estranged from the whole society to cling to a monolithic refusal which could have come out of natural hostility towards the fascists of WW II.Stein died in 1946.
The French in the middle of the 20th century had a very complex, confused, and twisted view of themselves, and their actions during the era were almost always either morally compromised, corrupt, or cowardly, at least in general. The army collapsed in record time (for a variety of reasons, technological, tactical, operational, and morale) and once it did, the country tried to flee en masse to escape the Nazis. My favorite vignette of the flight of the elite was the one guy whose mistress brought along so much luggage that it had to be piled high in the back of their convertible: when the car suddenly stopped, some of it fell forward, hit her in the back of the head, and broke her neck.
During the occupation, many Frenchmen collaborated with the Nazis. Jews were deported to Germany, workers were sent as “guest workers” (mostly for slave labor), and soldiers even fought, at times, for the Nazis. The SS recruited formations in France, and some of the individuals were very devoted in their Nazism: some of the last defenders of Berlin were French SS troops.
When the liberation happened in 1944, the partisans were often startled by French army officers who showed up to command them, having never been seen before. The partisans referred to them by a French word which means “mothballs” because their army uniforms had been in storage since 1940 (and they’d been nowhere near the fighting as long as the partisans were outgunned by the Nazis) and held them in considerable contempt. De Gaulle famously tried to write out of the history books several British officers who assisted the Maquis (partisans) if those Maquis weren’t affiliated with him; the French Communists famously collaborated with the Nazis until Hitler invaded the U.S.S.R., and then tried to rewrite history to show they’d always hated the Nazis. Back in the ’80s, when I was in France and went to a military museum, the main display devoted to the liberation in 1944 showed the invasion on the Riviera, where the majority of the troops involved were French; it left out all mention of Normandy and tried to make it look as if the French had liberated themselves. Unless you were an expert you wouldn’t have recognized that all the tanks were American-made.
So, the French back then were morally bankrupt and inevitably self-serving. Stein was at least living in France, and as a result compromised herself, apparently at least in part as an act of self-preservation. Frankly, given that she was a two-fer as far as the Nazis were concerned (Jewish *and* lesbian) I don’t really blame her for this. Her sympathizing with the Nazis only went so far as some writings, which were never published; she did nothing (as far as we know) which actually harmed anyone. So her “crime” seems rather trivial to me; her writing is atrocious, but that’s a subjective thing, and others may differ.
So what?,Soros was a collaborator of nazis.
Sartre was also a collaborator
The best writters of the time were part of Vichy, nazis or fascists:Celine, Driu,Junger,Malaparte.Or communists most of the rest including Koestler, Serge, Gide, Hemingway ( The Robles affair), Dos Passos.Grossman, Malaparte.Brecth( who funraised for Hitler)
And many sold their souls to survive: Gorky,Pasternak.
A few left both ideologies
And I forgot the one mentioned up: the rose of Rome
An quoting Tacitus ( or whoever write the work on oratory) : “those who survived must be ashamed” .
But nobody knows what they will do to survive
“But nobody knows what they will do to survive.”
True. We all like to think the best of ourselves, that we will act bravely when the time comes, but we never actually know until the time comes.