[lbo-talk] Grass on the new totalitarianism

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Fri May 13 12:06:04 PDT 2005


--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> [I meant to post this the other day - quite
> surprising to see this on the op-ed page of the
> NYT. Since Grass is a European and a novelist, he
> probably enjoys a double exemption from the
> ideological filters. It really pissed off Brad
> DeLong, who at least has withdrawn his initial
> characterization of GG as "crypto-nazi scum"
>

I particularly liked the line:

"Chancellor Schroeder is working for the interests of the German people as he sees them..."

So was Hitler.

This is even better:

"It is ugly. It is an absence: Grass writes 2191 words. Not one of them contains the syllable "Jew." That cannot be an accident."

Yes, that's right. The author of The Tin Drum is a Nazi. Personally, I think Brad de Long is a supporter of the Khmer Rouge. My evidence is that the last time he wrote one of his ringing denuncitions of totalitarianism he forgot to mention Pol Pot. It cannot be an accident.

The anti-Semitism of the Nazis was part of but conceptually distinct from their totalitarianism. BTW Brad the German word for Jew contains two syllables, unless Grass wrote this in English which I seriously doubt.

Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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