Diane sent us a correction, as the other day when we were thinkng of a
literary critic who collaborated with the Nazis, said Derrida
when we were
thinking of Paul (you are not)Â De Man, who collaborated with the Nazis in
Holland. This
is from an interesting article in Living Marxism which examines why French
intellectuals are apologists for Martin Heidegger, who, as the article says,
renewed his Nazi party membership from 1933 right up until 1945.
A lot of this flies right over our heads, but the suggestion that Communism
would have worked had Lenin's internationalism not been replaced by Stalin's
national particularism doesn't: "In some scholarly circles in the West,
Stalin was seen as an 'aberration,' a tyrant who perverted Lenin's intentions at
the end of Lenin's life. But as more and more evidence of Lenin's cruelty
emerged from the archives, that notion of the "good Lenin" and the
"bad Stalin" became an academic joke. Very few of Stalin's policies
were without roots in Leninism: it was Lenin who built the first camps; Lenin
who set off artificial famine as a political weapon; Lenin who disbanded the
last vestige of democratic government, the Constituent Assembly, and devised the
Communist Party as the apex of a totalitarian structure; Lenin who first waged
war on the intelligentsia and on religious believers, wiping out any traces of
civil liberty and a free press." (link)
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