How Some Intellectuals Can Be Such Idiots Generation After Generation

Last night's truncated brawl with Simps included him claiming or bragging or something that he had read Romain Rolland's fictitious biography of a great German composer which is long.   I've never been all that impressed with Rolland who I've read a bit of in the original French and, though I'm sure I looked at the book at one time or another, it's not something I read.  As I said last night, I prefer biographies to be about actual people.   I also pointed out that Rolland's biography of Beethoven isn't something which I ever heard another musician refer to or recall anyone citing as a scholarly work.  I vaguely recalled something I'd read about Rolland's conception of Beethoven and remembered a paper by Michael David-Fox which  I read a while back, Origins of the Stalinist Superiority Complex:  Western Intellectuals Inside The USSR.

Rolland illustrates certain kinds of connections to the USSR that contrast with the distance of both Dreiser and the Arplan rightists: Rolland had been steeped in a non-denominational socialism since the turn of the century. He thought his study of the French Revolution and his leadership in European anti-fascist culture gave him special insight into the Soviet Union, and he had extensive links to the Soviet Union through key intermediaries, including his Russian wife, Mariia Kudasheva, and his correspondent of 20 years, Maxim Gorky, who was arguably the most influential architect of Stalinist culture. Culturally, the 1930s Soviet repudiation of the avant-garde and Socialist Realism’s embrace of classical high culture and didactic mass enlightenment appealed to Rolland, and for a time his own hero-worship of revolutionary men of action was directed toward Stalin. When he met Stalin in person in 1935 Rolland compared him to Beethoven as the creator of a new humanism.

Which, said, in 1935, well into the widely reported starvation campaign against the Ukranians, well into the purges and show trials, well into Stalin showing Hitler how mass murder could be done, marks Romain Rolland as a monumental meat head.  Anyone who could think that the man who suffered such a drastic disillusionment when Napoleon had himself made emperor would welcome being compared to Stalin obviously knows nothing about Beethoven.  It is the kind of idiotic thing that a literary man will say about a musician, confirming Aaron Copland's generous estimate that half of what a literary man says about music will be wrong.  Rolland as well as the other 1930s admirers of Stalin were both epically stupid and morally defective.   That's something which could also be said for most of the atheist-left in the West of the time and continuing to today with such useful idiots as Katrina Vanden-Heuvel and her husband, Stephen Cohen.  Which is why I'm writing this.

Also in the paper is this interesting passage, interesting for what we can see about the current, definitely non-Marxist Billionaire Mafia State Russian effort to promote fascism and neo-Naxism and doing, through our own billionaire mafia class and its kept mass media, what Stalin could only aspire to do.

In this case, archives reveal a lengthy, year-long battle over whether to extend Soviet financial support and political energy to an organization that included fascist intellectuals.  The biggest Soviet supporter of Arplan was a diplomat and VOKS representative in Berlin by the name of Aleksandr Girshfeld. Despite his positions as a diplomat involved with cultural diplomacy, it appears he was specially empowered by the Soviet leadership and secret police to rcruit German rightist intellectuals. He thus felt free to act independently and he repeatedly rebuffed VOKS and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, which were both very suspicious about the rightists in Arplan.

Girshfeld’s relish for courting fascists reveals yet another motivation behind Soviet interaction with Western intellectuals: espionage. There is documentary evidence that Girshfeld had ties to the secret police, for whom he later recruited at least one rightist Arplan member.  In 1932, Girshfeld wrote that the current Soviet “cultural-political line” lay in “deeply penetrating radical…right-oppositionist circles of the intelligentsia, who have political weight, widening sources for our influence and information…”

Which makes the contemporary devotion of Western Stalinists especially disgusting and pathetically stupid, something which American and British Communists proved in their U-turn on Nazism that came with the Hitler-Stain pact of August 1939, the month before Hitler and Stalin started to try to carve up Poland, setting off WWII.   Up to that point Western Communists of the Stalinist denomination could be thought naive, after that they were scum. 

The current rump effort on the journalistic-academic left that claims we can do business with Putin does lead me to something more than mere disgust at the serial chumping of the atheist-left by such creeps, it adds confidence to my belief that materialism and atheism is inevitably damaging to egalitarian democracy, to justice, to equality.  On the basis of snobbery, alone, they'll sell those out without so much as a doubt, doing so in the weird parody of virtue that also comes with that.  The "enlightenment" has made that mix of snobbery and idiocy a continuing feature of human culture, only adding the pretense that they've left that behind because "science" because "reason" because because.