The Price of Self-Delusion
the-american-interest.com
the-american-interest.com
TL;DR:
African-American prodigy learns racism not a thing in Stalin's USSR, sings his and communism's praises. Stalin rewards him for his continuous loyalty. After Stalin's death and horrors are revealed, he attempts suicide and is emotionally broken, but never recants. Today, his alma mater is celebrating his impressive accomplishments but ignoring his history with communism and Stalin.
Simultaneously, USSR was enforcing its own brand of Russian nationalism in the outer republics. But the asymmetry in media freedom between East and West made this non-obvious as it was happening.
What checkered legacy? That the country he was born in was so broken he was willing to give up everything and go to a foreign land in hope of a better life?
> Can a man endowed with genius squander it through extreme political blindness
How did he squander it? He was met with racism every step of the way until he said 'fuck it' and left. I'd hardly call that squandering.
This writer has a stick up his ass. Regular people just want to lead a regular life. I'm an immigrant, living in a foreign land - my parents didn't immigrate because of political beliefs. People leave because their everyday life could be vastly improved. Everyday life has nothing to do with political beliefs, because most people are a-political, as are most things we do everyday.
This guy was a football player, actor and singer, not an intellectual who read Marx and Adam Smith.
This story is a tragedy and an embarrassment of USA's history of slavery and racism that drove a capable citizen to abandon his country, only to find a different can of worms across the globe, not 'self-delusion'.
"A few days later Robeson explained to his [11 year old] son that “sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.” Robeson was talking about the murder of a poet friend in one of Stalin's purges, but the generalization is horrific.
Ouch.
There ought to be many real-life example of the trolley problem.
Nobody is going to admit to thinking that way, but there is pretty overwhelming evidence that most people do. History is replete with genocides and selective memories. The cynic in me notes that by not acknowledging the threat they pose, majorities free themselves of the need to limit their own power in the name of decency and giving others a fair go.
Blacks/LGTB/Jews? Not many people would consider it.
White supremacists/Nazis/Islamic Fundamentalist? It's already mainstream.
We certainly aren’t going around killing them in purges...
What I'm getting at is that the OP statement can be bent to fit whatever ideology you want, and with that be able to get widespread support to "repress" minorities.
It's not only "evil" people the ones repressing others.
Killing the children of Islamic fundamentalists in drone strikes. Holding them for years without any trial or recourse in gitmo. Torture. I'm sure there are other things.
More precisely, we are talking about the people targeted or captured during the 'war on terror'.
The pertinent category here is "whoever is considered an 'enemy' in 'war'" - they will get their rights trampled.
"Some Jews get killed so everyone else can have Great Justice" is the modal case of Jew-hatred. Remember, Hitler thought he was the good guy.
All I'm saying is that it's quite easy to fall into a mental pattern where oppression becomes acceptable. Most people in Germany during WWII were not Nazis, and yet many of them happily accepted the status quo that made what happened possible.
Some people still think drone strikes that kill innocent children are worthwhile, so long as they also take out the bad guy.
"The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot."
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/may/18/politicaltheat...
There was also Michael Ignatieff's infamous interview of Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian and Communist Party member, who argued that even if he knew that Stalin would murder 15 million people ahead of time, it would still have been worth it. Hobsbawm's reasoning is familiar (see 10:56 into the interview):
Ignatieff: At about this period '33-'34, the Kulak class is being liquidated and millions of peasants are dying, being starved, or being deported by Stalin [...] If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that point? To your commitment to being a communist?
Hobsbawm: [...] If I were to give you a retrospective answer, the answer of a historian, I would have said 'Probably not'.
Ignatieff: Why?
Hobsbawm: Because in a period of mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing. Now looking back as a historian, I'd say that the sacrifices of the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnd2Pu9NNPw
People forget how intransigent the western intellectuals were to news of mass murder coming from Stalin's Russia.
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...
It seems like basic logic would suggest the opposite, right?
Why shouldn't we dismiss your comment as some weak Wuddaboutism?
Because that implies they are equally bad when that's very unlikely. It is giving undue weight to the less bad which makes the more bad side look better than it is.
The article doesn’t advance substantive values to take fault with. It doesn’t levy much criticism against Stalin, allowing existing American culture to do the heavy lifting. The climax of the article is the man confiding to his son that he believes Stalin’s deeds are justified. Robeson is dead and not quite the “towering social figure” the author says he was; at least not anymore, and likely not to most people reading the article. The intended communication must be the paradox of a man committed to social justice who supported a mass-killing cult figure. This is a claim of hypocrisy very comparable to claims that people levy against the US daily. However, in attempting to critique Kissinger or Abrams, I hope to critique the imperialist nature of American culture and particularly our sense of nation that is blindingly obvious since the wall fell, my entire life.
Meanwhile the USSR is long gone; what is the end the authors hope for? If we applied the same standard to the kinds of people American politicians openly associate with at public social functions, half of congress would be “canceled” for idly chatting over champagne with war criminals, let alone confiding their support in private to a child. Hell, most Americans are complicit in American crimes by the logic illustrated in the article. I’m fine with a high standard, but that’s not what they were trying to imply.
This is an attempt to frame contemporary political movements on the left that are ostensibly domestic and material as national security concerns, even if only in the back of your head. I’m open to other interpretations.