
Thomas Mann's War Against Hitler - samclemens
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/thomas-manns-war-against-hitler-73561
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emmelaich
This (pre volte face) description and quote from Mann is fascinating. Echoes
of the current China?

"He declared that the country’s essential mission was battling the decadent
Western democracies. Mann, who believed France and England were intent upon
foisting doctrines that were “foreign and poisonous to the German character,”
held that the profundity of its culture meant that the German nation was
itself fated to transcend mere politics. Mann went to town:"

> _I myself confess that I am deeply convinced that the German people will
> never be able to love political democracy simply because they cannot love
> politics itself, and that the much decried ‘authoritarian state’ is and
> remains the one that is proper and becoming to the German people, and the
> one they basically want._

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serioussecurity
This piece is a bit unsettling, most notably for it's being being barely
coherent in structure, picking out seemingly random observations and facts.

The observations and facts all would fit nicely into an effort to cast Mann's
intellectual mission in a negative light. Tying him to russia as the closing
paragraph for no discernable reason? Suggesting his ideas were self-
aggrandizing? Suggesting that he was trying to induce a system of false-belief
through myth-matking? They're all observations thrown together without comment
or an assertion of a common thread, and represent a remarkably cherry picked
subsample from the book that supposedly forms the core of the article.

It feels like an opening salvo in an ad hominem attempt to dismantle a core
figure in anti-Nazi thought? Coming from a journal intimately tied up with the
neoconservative movement.

(Yeah, that's also an ad hominem, but the point about the article stands: it's
barely coherent and the things it's suggesting form the start of an unsettling
attempt to frame a narrative.)

~~~
mkl
I think you're misreading it. The article doesn't tie him to Russia, it states
that some Americans at the time tried to (as they did with a great many
people). The article says that his behaviour and the ways he chose to be
portrayed changed, to be self-promotional, yes, but so that he became well-
known and well looked upon so people would listen to his message, his war of
words against Hitler; he was doing all he could to convince the American
public to both support the war effort, and to view fascism as the enemy, not
the German people. It also doesn't seem to say he was trying to promote myth-
making, but that he recognised the some story tropes held particular interest
for German culture, and so were inevitably going to be written, so responsible
authors should preemptively use those tropes to promote people and culture,
not fascism.

This article taught me basically all I know of Mann, so I really am
interpreting the article and not my prior knowledge; I got quite a positive
view of him from it.

