The kind of person who makes you loathe conservative sites

[fpb]

Frontpage Magazine - now don't laugh, inverarity68 - had a very interesting review of a book that detailed the curiously pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist attitude taken by the leading American colleges before the war; something of which I had vaguely heard, but which I do not think had ever been treated in depth. (The author makes the point that the universities were far out of step with the mood of the American people at large. Every new Nazi enormity provoked large displays of anger and hostility. He reports a wonderful placard from the Undertakers' Union: "We Want Hitler".)

However, one brief passage got me to comment. The reviewer mentioned one unnamed member of the Romanian Fascist party, the Iron Guard, who was hired by the University of Chicago after the war. I said:

Just one minute. I am sure this all happened and that it was as disgraceful as you say. But if by "a member of Antonescu's Iron Guard" being hired by Chicago after the war, you mean Mircea Eliade, may I make the point that Eliade was one of the greatest scholars in his field (comparative religion) that there have ever been, that any university in their senses would have snapped him up, and that under his leadership the School of Divinity of Chicago became the greatest centre for research into comparative religion outside France? And he was not the only instance. A number of musicians, scientists, and even writers and philosophers, were essentially forgiven their collaboration with Nazism on the grounds of their brilliance, from Herbert von Karajan to Wernher von Braun. And while one must take into consideration individual situations (did the individual concerned have a choice, did he or she commit crimes in person or closely support criminals in their work, etc?), I think that on the whole civilization gained more than it lost by not confining such men to jail or obscurity. Which, in the case of really brilliant people, was anyway apt not to work. One of the few people who were really effectively boycotted, film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, built herself up a whole new career as a photographer. You cannot keep such people permanently in the shadows.

Someone promptly responded with a note that opened as follows:
comparative religion? With a straight face you think of this as a creditable field?
The rest of the note clearly showed that he regarded lynching as a creditable activity.

What could I do? I posted a brief response that began:
Someone ignorant enough to post the opening sentence above probably thinks that auto shop is the height of human endeavour.

I had stayed away from that site for a while, and I had come back because a couple of articles looked interesting. I guess they won't be seeing me for a while again. There are people one is better off without.

Comments

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Classic projection. Yes, the Nazis had some support in the U.S. before the war, but it was from the Right, not the Left.

In case you're not aware of this, to modern American conservatives, "university" is a code word, like "Hollywood"; synonymous with "liberal."

So the essay's unstated but easily understood thesis is just another variation of the message that liberals are and always have been anti-American; in this case, claiming that liberals supported Hitler.

That essay, of course, ignores the fact that the character of American universities was profoundly changed by the G.I. Bill after the war, which allowed millions of working class Americans to attend college. Before that, universities were the bastion of the elite (and, of course, quite conservative). No coincidence that conservatives opposed the G.I. Bill.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The fact is that I already knew that Nazism really did have considerable support in Harvard and elsewhere - not from students, but from the President and staff. So I'm afraid your party-political, contemporary-minded reading of this essay does not impress me. The American university system was enormously indebted to the massive German intellectual immigration of the nineteenth century, and stuffed to the brim with eugenicists, race supremacists and cultural supremacists. Indeed, to an Italian, the race supremacism of the educated East Coast is easily perceptible as far back as Thoreau and Emerson; go read what they had to say about Italy and the other Latin and Catholic countries.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

In fact, if you actually read the essay without making assumptions, you will find that nowhere is it said that the universities at the time were "left-wing". To the contrary, it becomes pretty clear that whatever was left-wing in America at the time was to the same extent anti-Nazi. The connection made with the present, in so far as it is made at all, is about the self-regard of intellectual elites, which is certainly a component of what is today peddled as the left (and the reason why people like me refuse to recognize themselves in it), and a societal and psychological, rather than political, point of contact with the historical right. And that was not what sickened me. What sickened me was the presence of a man who despised the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and who thought persecution a meritorious enterprise. It was the comments page that made me sick, not the essay. And that is a frequent feature. One can actually read certain websites with interest; but as soon as one goes within their comments page, one finds himself clogged up with the tar of humanity - to be polite.