Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: The Origins of the Pod People Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_origins_of_the_pod_people#9332 Post contents: Mr Ross, you're a hell of a writer and I envy your youthful high-octane prose style, the kind of which I'm no longer capable as margins of grey begin to grow near my ears. You are EXACTLY right about "intellectuals". The notion of "intellectuals" constituting an elite social class of opinion (which is not the same thing as being intelligent) was imported to America after around 1880, mostly by emigrants from the Russian empire. Most of them were Jews, but that is (or should be) beside the point; the point is that the very word "intelligentsia" is originally Russian, very alien to America's older traditions of letters and scholarship, not to mention of qualification for political leadership. (George Washington never went to university.) Just a few quibbles. Although many of Stalin's fellow travelers in the West were internationalists, Stalin was not. He was a nationalist, and his Western acolytes (I don't mean his allies Churchill and FDR, I mean stupid Western socialists like the Webbs) were fools to think otherwise - and behind the scenes, Stalin laughed at them for their naivety. Lenin was no statesman and no nationalist, but Stalin was a very adept one, the opposite of Lenin and Trotsky in many ways. As Trotsky the internationalist was exiled and murdered while Stalin the nationalist became a Modern Age Tsar of a vast Russian empire, this should tell us something about the comparative powers, and dangers, of internationalism versus nationalism; nationalism is immensely more powerful. But about Ahmadinejad, well, saying "more power to him" is going too far. Recently he hosted a conference for Holocaust-deniers, including some from Western countries such as the loathsome insects from the Institute for Historical Review - not just people who oppose the AIPAC lobby etc, but hard-core neo-Nazis who deny the Holocaust. To hell with them and to hell with Ahmadinejad. But saying "to hell with them" isn't the same thing as advocating an illegal, stupid war against Iran. Sent at: 2008 11 22