Nurture vs. nature
I already mentioned the foreword to Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy's Peter I, but to my surprise I haven't written here on my blog what I've marveled about many times on my walks, when I felt like amusing myself.
In the foreword to Peter I Tolstoy talks about his childhood, that, although he was from a noble family, he always played with common children, for instance during the winter, throwing snowballs at one another. This serves him as a philosophical argument stressing the importance of national bonds, which the genius of Stalin understood, but the narrow-mindedness of Trotskyites simply can't understand, for which reason he, as an author exploring these bonds, had always been maligned by Soviet literary critics, until Stalin finally killed them all and he, Tolstoy, eventually got the recognition that he'd always deserved.
Now, that the war had broken out, it had become a demonstrable truth that he and Stalin had been right all along, for never would the Soviet peoples have fought the Germans, if the war would have been about the political system and not, thanks to the genius of Stalin, about the defense of Russian lives and belongings.
The foreword, written in 1941 or 1942, is most entertaining in itself, for how often were authors able to unashamedly express gratitude over the execution of all the people who ever criticised them?, but what makes the whole affair almost mind bogglingly absurd is a speech that Heinrich Himmler gave in 1943 to officers of the SS, in which he stated that it is quite unconceivable that the Russians would fight the Germans, if they only fought for their lives and belongings and not for a greater idea, like national socialism was for the Germans, and communism for the Russians. In order to prove his point he mentioned a Soviet pilot who used his plane for a suicide attack. From there he went on to call the siege of Leningrad a vitally important psychological attack on the Soviet Union, because it purportedly showed the vulnerability of communism.
How on earth? How on earth could Himmler say that the war was about an idea, when Soviet propaganda called it the Great Patriotic War? How could it possibly be about an idea, when the idea was being publicly pushed into the backseat and Stalin's claim to authority lay with that? It doesn't compute in a natural mind. So Himmler had no natural mind, i.e. he must have been brainwashed, must have been trained to think always along certain lines and ignore everything else, probably under the pretense of some secret political science.
And Trotsky probably thought just like that in terms of outlandishness. At least his criticisms of Stalin point in that direction, in particular his idea that Hitler would be overthrown, if only Stalin wouldn't prepare for war, because Hitler possessed no ideology that could bind the German people to him on its own strength. So... Himmler was in the pursuit of a ghost there, an antagonist that was stolen from him. I think it's a highly instructive warning tale about political training.
In the foreword to Peter I Tolstoy talks about his childhood, that, although he was from a noble family, he always played with common children, for instance during the winter, throwing snowballs at one another. This serves him as a philosophical argument stressing the importance of national bonds, which the genius of Stalin understood, but the narrow-mindedness of Trotskyites simply can't understand, for which reason he, as an author exploring these bonds, had always been maligned by Soviet literary critics, until Stalin finally killed them all and he, Tolstoy, eventually got the recognition that he'd always deserved.
Now, that the war had broken out, it had become a demonstrable truth that he and Stalin had been right all along, for never would the Soviet peoples have fought the Germans, if the war would have been about the political system and not, thanks to the genius of Stalin, about the defense of Russian lives and belongings.
The foreword, written in 1941 or 1942, is most entertaining in itself, for how often were authors able to unashamedly express gratitude over the execution of all the people who ever criticised them?, but what makes the whole affair almost mind bogglingly absurd is a speech that Heinrich Himmler gave in 1943 to officers of the SS, in which he stated that it is quite unconceivable that the Russians would fight the Germans, if they only fought for their lives and belongings and not for a greater idea, like national socialism was for the Germans, and communism for the Russians. In order to prove his point he mentioned a Soviet pilot who used his plane for a suicide attack. From there he went on to call the siege of Leningrad a vitally important psychological attack on the Soviet Union, because it purportedly showed the vulnerability of communism.
How on earth? How on earth could Himmler say that the war was about an idea, when Soviet propaganda called it the Great Patriotic War? How could it possibly be about an idea, when the idea was being publicly pushed into the backseat and Stalin's claim to authority lay with that? It doesn't compute in a natural mind. So Himmler had no natural mind, i.e. he must have been brainwashed, must have been trained to think always along certain lines and ignore everything else, probably under the pretense of some secret political science.
And Trotsky probably thought just like that in terms of outlandishness. At least his criticisms of Stalin point in that direction, in particular his idea that Hitler would be overthrown, if only Stalin wouldn't prepare for war, because Hitler possessed no ideology that could bind the German people to him on its own strength. So... Himmler was in the pursuit of a ghost there, an antagonist that was stolen from him. I think it's a highly instructive warning tale about political training.
Labels: 24, geschichte, institutionen, rezension, wahrnehmungen, ἰδέα, φιλοσοφία
Eingetragen Am/um
19:48
