Intellectuals Gone Bad!

[Thunderbird]

Noting that GOD IS DEAD or that MIGHT MAKES RIGHT in this world of ours, does that necessarily mean that the person noting that state of affairs is happy about that state of affairs

ARe unhappy-truth tellers evil? Maybe, maybe not. Depends entirely on what else the person says about those circumstances.

Recognizing that there is evil in the world, and pointing out that evil, is NOT the same thing as supporting that evil.

I see your point. I think it is clear that Nietzsche wasn't just describing violence and cruelty, he was advocating violence and cruelty.

 

[Thunderbird]

Some more Fascist intellectuals: Gabriele d'Annunzio and Margherita Sarfatti

I was surprised to learn that Gertrude Stein was pro-Petain.

The Strange Politics of Gertrude Stein

 

[hoosier88]

He did admire Nietzche, but he thought Hitler & crew were mere thugs or Klu Kluxers.

I don't think that's quite right.

Here's what Mencken wrote: "You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist."

Mencken's point isn't that Hitler was a KKK member or that Mussolini was a philanthropist.

Even IF your list of bad intellects is right, What do you suggest as a solution? Close all the universities? Burn all the books? Abandon the LHC? Do you have a litmus test for which intellectuals will go "bad"?

Or should we merely be on the lookout for your notion of bad intellectuals? Have bad intellectuals done more damage to humanity than government, or religion, or racism, or tribalism, or plain ol' ignorance? Would you really rather live in a cave up until your teeth fall out, & then die because you can't chew your food properly?

 

[Thunderbird]

Even IF your list of bad intellects is right, What do you suggest as a solution? Close all the universities? Burn all the books? Abandon the LHC? Do you have a litmus test for which intellectuals will go "bad"?

No. Of course genuine scholarship is valuable.

Would you really rather live in a cave up until your teeth fall out, & then die because you can't chew your food properly?

What?! lol

 

[hoosier88]

Even IF your list of bad intellects is right, What do you suggest as a solution? Close all the universities? Burn all the books? Abandon the LHC? Do you have a litmus test for which intellectuals will go "bad"?

No. Of course genuine scholarship is valuable.

Would you really rather live in a cave up until your teeth fall out, & then die because you can't chew your food properly?

What?! lol

(My bold)

Good, excellent. & how do you distinguish between "genuine scholarship" & otherwise? Please share with us, & then we can all help watch out for the bad scholarship.

 

[Thunderbird]

how do you distinguish between "genuine scholarship" & otherwise?

Some intellectuals engage in self-worship. Some intellectuals try to create Utopia and when the real world resists they turn to violence.

Intellectuals may lie. They may promote Communism or cruelty or eugenics.

 

[Political Junky]

Cons' quest to keep America dumb.

 

[Thunderbird]

Cons' quest to keep America dumb.

If liberals are so clever why do they think Obama is a peacemaker who loves freedom and fights corporate dominance?

 

[editec]

N. Chomsky – apologist for genocidal Communist dictators

Clearly you don't know what on earth your talking about as it pertains to Noam Chomsky.

Read a book, dude.

Educate yourself.

 

[Thunderbird]

Clearly you don't know what on earth your talking about as it pertains to Noam Chomsky.

Read a book, dude.

Here's some reading material: The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky

quote: For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese communist state. Chomsky told a forum in New York in December, 1967 that in China “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” He believed the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles:

"China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step."

When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society,” Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history. He did not know, because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total death toll of thirty million people.

Nonetheless, if he was as genuinely aloof from totalitarianism as his political principles proclaimed, the track record of communism in the USSR—which was by then widely known to have faked its statistics of agricultural and industrial output in the 1930s when its own population was also suffering crop failures and famine—should have left this anarchist a little more skeptical about the claims of the Russians’ counterparts in China.

In fact, Chomsky was well aware of the degree of violence that communist regimes had routinely directed at the people of their own countries. At the 1967 New York forum he acknowledged both “the mass slaughter of landlords in China” and “the slaughter of landlords in North Vietnam” that had taken place once the communists came to power. His main objective, however, was to provide a rationalization for this violence, especially that of the National Liberation Front then trying to take control of South Vietnam. Chomsky revealed he was no pacifist.

"I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified."

It was not only Chomsky who was sucked into supporting the maelstrom of violence that characterized the communist takeovers in South-East Asia. Almost the whole of the 1960s New Left followed. They opposed the American side and turned Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong into romantic heroes.

When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 both Chomsky and the New Left welcomed it. And when news emerged of the extraordinary event that immediately followed, the complete evacuation of the capital Phnom Penh accompanied by reports of widespread killings, Chomsky offered a rationalization similar to those he had provided for the terror in China and Vietnam: there might have been some violence, but this was understandable under conditions of regime change and social revolution.

Although information was hard to come by, Chomsky suggested in an article in 1977 that post-war Cambodia was probably similar to France after liberation at the end of World War II when thousands of enemy collaborators were massacred within a few months. This was to be expected, he said, and was a small price to pay for the positive outcomes of the new government of Pol Pot. Chomsky cited a book by two American left-wing authors, Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, who had “presented a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies.”

By this time, however, there were two other books published on Cambodia that took a very different line. The American authors John Barron and Anthony Paul called their work Murder of a Gentle Land and accused the Pol Pot regime of mass killings that amounted to genocide. François Ponchaud’s Cambodia Year Zero repeated the charge.

Chomsky reviewed both books, together with a number of press articles, in The Nation in June 1977. He accused them of publishing little more than anti-communist propaganda. Articles in The New York Times Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor suggested that the death toll was between one and two million people out of a total population of 7.8 million. Chomsky mocked their total and picked at their sources, showing some were dubious and that a famous photograph of forced labor in the Cambodian countryside was actually a fake.

He dismissed the Barron and Paul book partly because it had been published by Reader’s Digest and publicized on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, both of them notorious anti-communist publications, and partly because they had omitted to report the views of journalists who had been to Cambodia but not witnessed any executions.

Ponchaud’s book was harder to ignore. It was based on the author’s personal experience in Cambodia from 1965 until the capture of Phnom Penh, extensive interviews with refugees and reports from Cambodian radio. Moreover, it had been favorably reviewed by a left-wing author in The New York Review of Books, a publication for which Chomsky himself had often written. Chomsky’s strategy was to undermine Ponchaud’s book by questioning the credibility of his refugee testimony. Acknowledging that Ponchaud “gives a grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge,” Chomsky said we should be wary of “the extreme unreliability of refugee reports”:

"Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account."

In 1980, Chomsky expanded this critique into the book After the Cataclysm, co-authored with his long-time collaborator Edward S. Herman. Ostensibly about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the great majority of its content was a defense of the position Chomsky took on the Pol Pot regime. By this time, Chomsky was well aware that something terrible had happened: “The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome,” he wrote. “There can be little doubt that the war was followed by an outbreak of violence, massacre and repression.” He mocked the suggestion, however, that the death toll might have reached more than a million and attacked Senator George McGovern’s call for military intervention to halt what McGovern called “a clear case of genocide.”

Instead, Chomsky commended authors who apologized for the Pol Pot regime. He approvingly cited their analyses that the forced march of the population out of Phnom Penh was probably necessitated by the failure of the 1976 rice crop. If this was true, Chomsky wrote, “the evacuation of Phnom Penh, widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives.” Chomsky rejected the charge of genocide, suggesting that

"the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state but rather attributable in large measure to peasant revenge, undisciplined military units out of government control, starvation and disease that are direct consequences of the US war, or other such factors."

After the Cataclysm also presented a much more extended critique of refugee testimony. Chomsky revealed his original 1977 source for this had been Ben Kiernan, at the time an Australian graduate student and apologist for the Pol Pot regime, who wrote in the Maoist-inspired Melbourne Journal of Politics. What Chomsky avoided telling his readers, however, was that well before 1980, the year After the Cataclysm was published, Kiernan himself had recanted his position.

Kiernan had spent much of 1978 and 1979 interviewing five hundred Cambodian refugees in camps inside Thailand. They persuaded him they were actually telling the truth. He also gained a mass of evidence from the new Vietnamese-installed regime. This led him to write a mea culpa in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1979. This was a left-wing journal frequently cited by Chomsky, so he must have been aware that Kiernan wrote: “There can be no doubting that the evidence also points clearly to a systematic use of violence against the population by that chauvinist section of the revolutionary movement that was led by Pol Pot.” Yet in After the Cataclysm, Chomsky does not acknowledge this at all.

Kiernan later went on to write The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge 1975–79, a book now widely regarded as the definitive analysis of one of the most appalling episodes in recorded history. In the evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975, tens of thousands of people died. Almost the entire middle class was deliberately targeted and killed, including civil servants, teachers, intellectuals, and artists. No fewer than 68,000 Buddhist monks out of a total of 70,000 were executed. Fifty percent of urban Chinese were murdered.

Kiernan argues for a total death toll between April 1975 and January 1979, when the Vietnamese invasion put an end to the regime, of 1.67 million out of 7.89 million, or 21 percent of the entire population. This is proportionally the greatest mass killing ever inflicted by a government on its own population in modern times, probably in all history.

Chomsky was this regime’s most prestigious and most persistent Western apologist. Even as late as 1988, when they were forced to admit in their book Manufacturing Consent that Pol Pot had committed genocide against his own people, Chomsky and Herman still insisted they had been right to reject the journalists and authors who had initially reported the story. The evidence that became available after the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, they maintained, did not retrospectively justify the reports they had criticized in 1977.

 

[hoosier88]

how do you distinguish between "genuine scholarship" & otherwise?

Some intellectuals engage in self-worship. Some intellectuals try to create Utopia and when the real world resists they turn to violence.

Intellectuals may lie. They may promote Communism or cruelty or eugenics.

I see conclusions in your response. I don't see any methodology for distinguishing between "genuine scholarship" & "false".

Is there some test we can apply, so that we can tell the difference?

 

[rightwinger]

Makes me want to burn some books!

 

[Thunderbird]

Intellectuals can be an even worse disaster when they themselves are the rulers.

Consider Robespierre

And Lenin

And Woodrow Wilson. Wilson foolishly involved the U.S. in WW I. He used the crisis to centralize power in Washington. The Federal Reserve he set up helped cause the Great Depression. Even Bernanke has admitted the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression!

 

[Thunderbird]

J.S. Mill, though widely praised, was an apologist for imperialism.

He thought the natives of India were inflicted with "a general disposition to deceit and perfidy".

He claimed: "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion."

And check out the article: John Stuart Mill and Liberal Imperialism

 

[Esmeralda]

Makes me want to burn some books!

lol

 

[editec]

Noting that GOD IS DEAD or that MIGHT MAKES RIGHT in this world of ours, does that necessarily mean that the person noting that state of affairs is happy about that state of affairs

ARe unhappy-truth tellers evil? Maybe, maybe not. Depends entirely on what else the person says about those circumstances.

Recognizing that there is evil in the world, and pointing out that evil, is NOT the same thing as supporting that evil.

I see your point. I think it is clear that Nietzsche wasn't just describing violence and cruelty, he was advocating violence and cruelty.

I think in Nietzsche's case you are right.

Of course I have not read much Nietzsche, (I'd rather stab myself in the eyes than read that loser's thoughts on greatness) but what little I have read, and the many references to him I have read from other philosophers supports you assertion.

Neitzsche seems like the father of Libertarianism.

Ayn Rand is but a pale shadow compared to his thoughts on the subject of society and the individudal.

In fact I think that woman basically stole his philosophy dressed it up in 20th century rhetorical garb and called it her own.

 

[konradv]

Noting that GOD IS DEAD or that MIGHT MAKES RIGHT in this world of ours, does that necessarily mean that the person noting that state of affairs is happy about that state of affairs

ARe unhappy-truth tellers evil? Maybe, maybe not. Depends entirely on what else the person says about those circumstances.

Recognizing that there is evil in the world, and pointing out that evil, is NOT the same thing as supporting that evil.

I see your point. I think it is clear that Nietzsche wasn't just describing violence and cruelty, he was advocating violence and cruelty.

I think in Nietzsche's case you are right.

Of course I have not read much Nietzsche, (I'd rather stab myself in the eyes than read that loser's thoughts on greatness) but what little I have read, and the many references to him I have read from other philosophers supports you assertion.

Neitzsche seems like the father of Libertarianism.

Ayn Rand is but a pale shadow compared to his thoughts on the subject of society and the individudal.

In fact I think that woman basically stole his philosophy dressed it up in 20th century rhetorical garb and called it her own.

Nietzsche often gets a bad rap through no fault of his own. Some of his works were edited posthumously by his sister, who overlaid them with themes of ultra-nationalism and anti-semitism, neither of which he espoused.

Friedrich Nietzsche - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Wry Catcher]

Was Mencken an intellectual? Was Guevara? I'll have to take a look. Mencken was a journalist & columnist. Guevara was pre-med.

I don't know that that alone makes them intellectuals.

I think both men were devoted to ideas and can be considered intellectuals. Guevara sort of a half-baked one. And dull.

One thing for sure, you aren't an intellectual; posting calumny does not make you anti-intellectual, but it is reprehensible.

 

[whitehall]

Hollywood was caught in a bind when they fired their own screen writers. They couldn't blame themselves or Harry Truman or the democrat administration so they decided on a propaganda blitz. It was simple really. Together with the willing liberal accomplices in the mainstream media they would blame a single republican for all the discomfort the poor communists had to endure. HUAC'ism was too awkward anyway. Why not call it McCarthyism?

 

[American76Pride]

There was a time after WW I when you could be a modernist intellectual, a Fascist, and a Communist all at the same time. And why not? The three are triplets, part of the same family.

>There was a time after WW I when you could be a modernist intellectual, a Fascist, and a Communist all at the same time.
>Fascist, and a Communist all at the same time.
>Fascist and Communist
>at the same time

I feel bad for the human race. Being a fascist myself, you cannot be a Fascist and a Communist at the same time. Communism is completely different from Fascism. Communism wants anarchy, a stateless and classless society. Communists also have a desire for equality for all people. Fascists, on the contrary, want the opposite. They want a strong autocratic state, and believe that rampant inequality is natural, and that we should acknowledge this inequality and realize there are superior and inferior individuals, and that the superior (intelligent people concerned with the welfare of the nation) should rule rather than the inferiors (the masses who are too stupid to realize what is right.) Liberal democracy has destroyed our nation, given idiots the right to vote, and corrupt our country with their unintelligent and unqualified decisions which affect all of us.

I think you need to read up on fascism and communism. They are mutually exclusive. Very. Mutually. Exclusive.