

The Marxists Who Explained the Nazis to Washington - antman
http://m.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139466/william-e-scheuerman/the-frankfurt-school-at-war?page=show

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duopixel
I've kept an eye on continental social science since leaving university, and I
must say that—for most practical reasons— it's useless. It is not, however,
worthless (quite the opposite).

You might be familiar with Feynman's story about how he was trying to decipher
a social science paper, starting sentence by sentence, he encountered
something like

    
    
        The individual member of the social community 
        often receives his information via visual, 
        symbolic channels
    

Which he translated as "people read". He then continued "translating" the
paper and figured out there was not much to it.

Having been exposed (unwillingly) to many of these kind of papers, I've come
to understand that they are abstractions. It's not just reading, it's how you
receive all kinds of information through your eyes. You "read" people when you
make judgements of how they dress, talk and act, you "read" objects in a store
and decide if you want to buy them, and so forth.

Critical theory authors are trained to understand that all interpretation
comes from a culture. In understanding a foreign situation (say, the Syrian
civil war) you must be conscious that you are looking at the problem through
western eyes. These theorists tend to over-analyze things (they are the very
embodiment of analysis paralysis) but they make an interesting read when you
are familiar with the problem. It makes you feel like you've seen all the
possible angles of a specific event. This is why I'm not surprised Washington
would make use of them.

If you'd like a gentle introduction to this kind of writing, I'd recommend
Tzvetan Todorov. He exposes really complex ideas without the mumbo jumbo. You
can make a fair judgement if it's horseshit or not (as it's clear he's not
hiding behind obfuscated writing).

~~~
tehwalrus
Can you recommend a particular book by Todorov? being a philosopher he has
written a fair number, and I'd hate to start with his worst (sods law).

~~~
duopixel
I've read and throughly enjoyed "The Conquest of America" and "The Defense of
Enlightenment", but these are topics I already liked. Todorov goes really deep
into the topics he's writing about, so I'd chose something I'm familiar with.
It remains accessible, but he is obsessive towards comparing how different
parties perceive the same event and it could get tiresome if you chose
unwisely

"Facing The Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps" is still on my
reading list, but I suspect it might be his most accessible book. This
reviewer explains Todorov better than I ever could:

[http://www.amazon.com/review/R25MOQCFS574VO/](http://www.amazon.com/review/R25MOQCFS574VO/)

------
CleanedStar
> Relying on Neumanns Behemoth, which depicted modern capitalism as Nazisms
> main basis, they argued that the revitalization of German democracy depended
> on a socialist overhaul of the countrys economy, failing to anticipate the
> possibility of a fresh recalibration of capitalism with liberal democracy,
> along the lines that emerged after the war in the Federal Republic of
> Germany...

Huh? First off, Germany was divided in two after WWII, something almost no one
anticipated. There was no German renewal because there was no Germany.

As far as the FRG being capitalism with liberal democracy...capitalism - the
FRG was dominated by works councils, Mitbestimmungsgesetz and the like since
World War II, and to some extent still is. How the economy worked in the FRG
after World War II is closer to how it worked in Yugoslavia than how it worked
in the United States. Although even in the US how the US economy ran under the
New Deal/Square Deal/Great Society into the 1960s is different than how it is
now.

As far as liberal democracy...the FRG reinstated the Nazi ban on voting for
the communist party...some democracy - you're OK, as long as you vote for a
pro-capitalist party. This was a time when French and Italian workers almost
voted in communist governments, something American's today tend to forget. The
FRG's federal Intelligence service was run by Reinhard Gehlen and his crew,
the Confederation of German Employers' Associations and Confederation of
German Employers' Association were run by former SS officer Hanns-Martin
Schleyer (later kidnapped and killed by the Red Army Faction). Not all that
much changed in western Germany after 1945.

~~~
Kudzu_Bob
> Germany was divided in two after WWII, something almost no one anticipated.

Nonsense. Haven't you heard of the Society for the Prevention of World War
III, not to mention the Morgenthau Plan, both of which advocated the
dismemberment of Germany well in advance of Berlin's fall? The real surprise
is that any Germans whatsoever managed to survive the post-war forced
expulsions and near-genocidal 1,200 calorie per day rations.

~~~
cafard
"The real surprise is that any Germans whatsoever managed to survive the post-
war forced expulsions and near-genocidal 1,200 calorie per day rations."

And yet they did, there's a bunch of them last time I looked. The expulsions
were in the east, chiefly East Prussia and Silesia, or of Volksdeutsch from
the former Hapsburg lands.

