Conservative intellectuals didn't distinguish sharply between liberal and socialist values, which they saw as bastard twins of the Enlightenment, each subscribing in their own way to the principles of secularism and democracy which were in conflict with those of Throne and Alter favoured by the right.
In any event, it was not the liberal parties whom conservatives feared, but the socialist ones. The liberal bourgeoisie had progressively aligned itself the conservative landed classes against the growing socialist working class movement as far back as 1848. Despite initial widespread nationalist support for the First World War within the working class of each of the belligerent countries, by 1917, European shop floors and trenches were in turmoil, and the revolutionary left was on the rise everywhere, leading strikes and mutinies, a process which was to culminate in the Russian Revolution and the establishment of strong Communist parties in Italy, Germany, France and elsewhere. The presence of these mass Marxist and social democratic workers parties, and the advent of the world wide Depression which seemed to confirm their analyses, dominated the cultural life of the interwar period, and forced intellectuals to take sides in the open class warfare. The Fascists were the shock troops of the ruling class right and the Communists
were the shock troops of the working class left. The liberal centre, no less than the old conservative ruling parties, did not hold.
Of course, we know in which army Pound and Heidegger were enrolled.
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As for Heidegger, he remained an unapologetic Hitlerite to the end and was buried as a Catholic.
Gertrude Stein is another interesting case:
Stein's seemingly paradoxical views about Hitler and fascism have never been a secret. As early as 1934, she told a reporter that Hitler should be awarded the Nobel peace prize. "I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace ... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany" (New York Times Magazine, May 6, 1934).
As astonishing at it may seem today, in 1938 many credited Hitler for his numerous efforts to secure lasting peace in Europe on the basis of equal rights of nations. After assuming power in 1933, he succeeded in quickly establishing friendly relations with Poland, Italy, Hungary and several other European nations. Among his numerous initiatives to lessen tensions in Europe, the German leader offered detailed proposals for mutual reductions of armaments by the major powers.
In a 1940 essay, Stein wrote positively of the appointment of "collaborationist" Henri Philippe Petain as France's Chief of State, comparing him to George Washington. As late as 1941, she was urging the Atlantic Monthly to publish speeches by Marshal Petain, which she had translated into English. In spite of her background, Stein continued to live and write in France during the years of German occupation (1940-1944).
She also maintained a friendship with Bernard Fay, who headed France's national library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, during the Petain era. According to a new biography of Stein, Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family, by Linda Wagner-Martin, Fay and Stein often discussed "the Führer's qualities of greatness" in the years before the outbreak of war in 1939. Even after the war, when he was convicted as a collaborationist, Stein and her close companion Alice Toklas remained good friends with Fay and lobbied to free him from prison.
Conflicted Sense of Jewishness Like many of this century's Jewish American intellectuals, Stein's relationship to her own Jewishness was complex and conflicted. She was sensitive to anti-Jewish sentiment, and sometimes expressed criticism of Hitler. In 1936 she wrote: "There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody now-a-days is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Trotzky ..."
full: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n5p22_Weber.html
Mike B)
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