Intellectuals Gone Bad!

[Thunderbird]

Here are some prominent intellectuals useful to dictators: film-makers, academics, philosophers, playwrights, journalists, novelists, activists, poets, artists all avid to serve autocrats. Some passed through despair on their way to subservience to some shouting “superman”. Many diminished man, abetting those who want to abolish rights. Most were anti-Christians/degenerates.

Nietzsche
Marx
Alfred Rosenberg – Nazi ideologue
Francis Galton – eugenicist
D.H. Lawrence – semi-Fascist
W.B. Yeats – enemy of democracy
Louis-Ferdinand Céline – Nazi collaborator
Tristan Tzara – Communist
Wyndham Lewis – admired Fascism
Sergei Eisenstein – Communist
Leni Riefenstahl – Nazi propagandist
F. T. Marinetti – Fascist
(Many Russian Communist artists were influenced by Marinetti, the Russian Futurists for example.)
Georges Sorel – glorified violence and inspired Fascists and Marxists
Walter Lippmann – elitist
Edward Bernays – propagandist
Freud – Man was diminished in the pseudo-scientific ravings of this pervert.
Joseph Goebbels – Nazi propagandist
H.G. Wells – authoritarian
Margaret Sanger – eugenicist
Frederick Lindemann – elitist who delighted in the deaths of civilians during WW II
Abba Ahimeir – a Zionist who praised Mussolini and Hitler
J.P. Sartre – served Stalin and Mao
N. Chomsky – apologist for genocidal Communist dictators
Martin Heidegger – Nazi
Lilian Hellmen – Communist
Bertolt Brecht – Communist tool
Harold Laski – apologist for Stalin
Walter Duranty – Stalinist tool
Ezra Pound – Fascist ally
Maxim Gorki – Communist lackey
Ernst Haeckel – prophet of scientific racism
Gustave Le Bon – manipulator of the mass mind
Pablo Picasso – Communist
Lincoln Steffens – praised the Soviet Union
H.L. Mencken – pro-Nazi
Beatrice and Sidney Webb – apologists for Stalin
G.B. Shaw – apologist for both Fascists and Communists
Paul deMan – Influential deconstructionist and Nazi supporter
Che Guevara – mass killer
Leon Trotsky – freedom-hating mass murderer

Check out these articles: Tyrant's Death Recalled

EUGENICS AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

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.

 

[Thunderbird]

Today many intellectuals embrace abortion and homosexual activists.

Just like the Nazis: As Many Abortions As Possible

Astonishing article: The Strange, Strange Story of the Gay Fascists

quote: The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was - including the gay-gassing, homo-cidal Third Reich. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay. It's time to admit something. Fascism isn't something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is - in part, at least - a gay thing, and it's time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.

 

[hoosier88]

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.

 

[Thunderbird]

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.

 

[Thunderbird]

When Intellectuals Attack

Here are some quotes from F. T. Marinetti's The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.

quote: We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

quote: We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

Marinetti's fellow atheist Nietzsche inspired Hitler. Here's Hitler admiring history's most famous atheist:

quote: Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man.

quote: Finally there was Nietzsche's prophecy of the coming elite who would rule the world and from whom the superman would spring. In The Will to Power he exclaims: "A daring and ruler race is building itself up.... The aim should be to prepare a transvaluation of values for a particularly strong kind of man, most highly gifted in intellect and will. This man and the elite around him will become the 'lords of the earth'." Such rantings from one of Germany's most original minds must have struck a responsive chord in Hitler's littered mind. At any rate he appropriated them for his own--not only the thoughts but the philosopher's penchant for grotesque exaggeration, and often his very words. "Lords of the Earth" is a familiar expression in Mein Kampf.

LINK

Too many intellectuals are united in their hatred of Christianity, their desire for absolute power, and their determination to exterminate the ”unfit”, the “inferior”.

 

[there4eyeM]

Nietzsche? Are you kidding? Intellectual gone bad? Why, because idiots detoured his work? If that were true, you'd have to put Jesus on the list.

 

[there4eyeM]

The link to Mencken also shows creative interpretation on the poster's part. I don't see anything at all the says he was pro-Nazi.

Pablo Picasso, too, just because he was 'a communist', but not Salvador Dali, who supported Franco (at least for a while)?

You seem to be getting a bit far-fetched with this line of reasoning. Clearly, 'intellectual' is a derogatory term in America, but there are limits.

 

[Unkotare]

. Clearly, 'intellectual' is a derogatory term in America.

Where did you get that idea?

 

[hoosier88]

. Clearly, 'intellectual' is a derogatory term in America.

Where did you get that idea?

Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Agnew, W, J. E. Hoover, Quayle, Reagan, anybody who ran against Nixon, anyone who Hoover smeared, watch a half-hour of TV @ random, listen to any of the last set of GOP Prexy candidate debates, ...

 

[mudwhistle]

 

[hoosier88]

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."

(My bold)

No - Mencken thought of himself perhaps as a student of English, a journalist, reviewer, critic. I don't think he would have claimed to have been an intellectual.

See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken]H. L. Mencken - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - He did admire Nietzche, but he thought Hitler & crew were mere thugs or Klu Kluxers. But read the article, worth the time.

 

[hoosier88]

Che Guevara - see his name under Wikipedia - was widely read. He served in a number of posts in the Cuban Fidel Castro gov. - but that doesn't make him an intellectual. Perhaps because he died @ age 39 - he might have become an intellectual - if he had lived to write/edit his diaries, develop his military theories/writing, reduce to writing his review of execution appeals, etc. for the Castro gov.

But of course, he didn't survive his last tour of Bolivia.

 

[Thunderbird]

Nietzsche? Are you kidding? Intellectual gone bad? Why, because idiots detoured his work?

If you'd read Nietzsche closely you would understand he was enamored of violence and cruelty.

Some quotes from Genealogy of Morals.

quote: The delicacy -- even more, the tartufferie -- of domestic animals like ourselves shrinks from imagining clearly to what extent cruelty constituted the collective delight of older mankind, how much it was an ingredient of all their joys, or how naïvely they manifested their cruelty, how they considered disinterested malevolence (Spinoza's sympathia malevolens) a normal trait, something to which one's conscience could assent heartily.... To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure

quote: They revert to the innocence of wild animals: we can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank convinced, moreover, that the poets for a long time to come will have something to sing about and to praise. Deep within all the noble races there lurks the [blond] beast of prey, bent on spoil and conquest. This hidden urge has to be satisfied from time to time, the beast let loose in the wilderness. This goes as well for the Roman, Arabian, German, Japanese nobility as for the Homeric heroes and the Scandinavian vikings. The noble races have everywhere left in their wake the catchword "barbarian." .....their utter indifference to safety and comfort, their terrible pleasure in destruction, their taste for cruelty -- all these traits are embodied by their victims in the image of the "barbarian," and "evil enemy," the Goth or the Vandal.

LINK

 

[Thunderbird]

The link to Mencken also shows creative interpretation on the poster's part. I don't see anything at all the says he was pro-Nazi.

I guess you missed this: "The previously secret diary of writer and social critic H. L. Mencken discloses virulent anti-Semitism, racism and pro-Nazi leanings, shocking even the sympathetic Mencken scholar who edited it."

From the link provided earlier.

Mencken was also a "scientific" racist.

quote: I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.

quote: . . .the negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as a race, in a condition of subservience; that he must remain the inferior of the stronger and more intelligent white man so long as he retains racial differentiation. Therefore, the effort to educate him has awakened in his mind ambitions and aspirations which, in the very nature of things, must go unrealized, and so, while gaining nothing whatever materially, he has lost all his old contentment, peace of mind and happiness.

LINK

By the way, Mencken was a Nietzsche enthusiast.

Pablo Picasso, too, just because he was 'a communist',

Just a Communist? People who support Communism should be condemned. Don't you agree?

The Black Book of Communism

Clearly, 'intellectual' is a derogatory term in America, but there are limits.

Don't be so boring. Americans are not all toothless hillbillies. The U.S. has some of the best universities in the world.

 

[Thunderbird]

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.

 

[there4eyeM]

Post 13
Nietzsche is talking about the world and its history, as did Machiavelli.

"The previously secret diary of writer and social critic H. L. Mencken discloses virulent anti-Semitism, racism and pro-Nazi leanings, shocking even the sympathetic Mencken scholar who edited it."
This is the word of a person 'describing' (inaccurately) the story about Mencken. Read M's words and it is not at all clear that he was anti-semitic or pro-Nazi. You may interpret it that way, but that is not the only way to interpret his few words quoted on the subject. In fact, he later criticized Roosevelt for not allowing more immigration of this oppressed minority of German 'Jews' (as decided often by Nazi parameters of being 'Jewish').
If he did not fully understand genetics at his epoch, who did? Eugenics, for example, was all the rage over a great part of the world at that time.

Getting to Picasso - no, it is not a crime of any kind, moral or legal, to be a 'communist'. Are you so sheltered and/or so paranoiac as to think the name is synonymous with 'Stalinism'? There are many forms of communism; monasteries, families, religious communities. Lighten up!

 

[Thunderbird]

Post 13
Nietzsche is talking about the world and its history, as did Machiavelli.

Nietzsche wasn't just describing brutality, he was advocating brutality.

Eugenics, for example, was all the rage over a great part of the world at that time.

Among elite racists mostly.

Getting to Picasso - no, it is not a crime of any kind, moral or legal, to be a 'communist'. Are you so sheltered and/or so paranoiac as to think the name is synonymous with 'Stalinism'? There are many forms of communism; monasteries, families, religious communities. Lighten up!

Picasso was a Marxist-Leninist Communist, he belonged to a movement responsible for more deaths than the Nazis.

 

[Decus]

Post 13
Nietzsche is talking about the world and its history, as did Machiavelli.

"The previously secret diary of writer and social critic H. L. Mencken discloses virulent anti-Semitism, racism and pro-Nazi leanings, shocking even the sympathetic Mencken scholar who edited it."
This is the word of a person 'describing' (inaccurately) the story about Mencken. Read M's words and it is not at all clear that he was anti-semitic or pro-Nazi. You may interpret it that way, but that is not the only way to interpret his few words quoted on the subject. In fact, he later criticized Roosevelt for not allowing more immigration of this oppressed minority of German 'Jews' (as decided often by Nazi parameters of being 'Jewish').
If he did not fully understand genetics at his epoch, who did? Eugenics, for example, was all the rage over a great part of the world at that time.

Getting to Picasso - no, it is not a crime of any kind, moral or legal, to be a 'communist'. Are you so sheltered and/or so paranoiac as to think the name is synonymous with 'Stalinism'? There are many forms of communism; monasteries, families, religious communities. Lighten up!

"Consequently, Machiavelli is led to conclude that fear is always preferable to affection in subjects, just as violence and deception are superior to legality in effectively controlling them. Machiavelli observes that “one can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit…. Love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes” "
Niccolò Machiavelli (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Machiavelli presents an amoral view in quite a bit of his writing. It is inaccurate to speak of him as you do.

 

[Thunderbird]

Machiavelli presents an amoral view in quite a bit of his writing. It is inaccurate to speak of him as you do.

I think you're right.

Other earlier intellectuals gone bad:

Thomas Carlyle - in love with "men on horseback"
Thomas Hobbes - advocate for autocracy
Rousseau - His concept of the "general will" was dangerous. He inspired Robespierre.
Voltaire - anti-Semite who happily served brutal monarchs
Julien Offray de La Mettrie - materialist
Jeremy Bentham - simple-minded utilitarian
Hegel - served the State

Some of their ideas could be described as proto-fascist.

 

[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.