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

[Mark Bennett]

Wojtek Sokolowski

> >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







___________________________________

Nothing so complicated as all that.  I intend to use it in a piece in
which I take someone to task for basing an argument on a spurious
quotation from a spurious text by a spurious author.  I don't want to
expose myself to similar reprobation by using a spurious quote to
illustrate a point.