[lbo-talk] "four walls are three too many"

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Oct 14 08:47:58 PDT 2005



> >It seems that few of the famous apothegms attributed to Stalin have been
> >sourced with any certainty, including "the death of one man is a
> >tragedy; the death a million men is a statistic" and "the Pope? How
> >many divisions does he have?" Too bad: I hate using slogans I can't
> >cite with confidence, and I really want to use this one in a bit I'm
> >writing. Damn.
>
> Harold Bloom once wrote somewhere, "as Shelley should have said..."
>
> Doug

Does it make any difference who said it? It has a nice twist into it - just like the "Wenn Ich Kultur hoere, entsichere Ich meinen Browning" or "It's I who decides who's a Jew" - both attributed to Hermann Goering even though they were actually said by someone else.

Does the fact that that a saying was or was not uttered by a reprehensible monster make any difference? What does the Stalin's persona add to the realization that, after all, for some people four walls are indeed a waste of valuable real estate space. Or that what passes for "Kultur" is often a bunch of hogwash? Or that identity politics is but a shell game?

Wojtek



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