
The Strange Politics of Gertrude Stein - seventyhorses
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/marchapril/feature/the-strange-politics-gertrude-stein
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claydavisss
The past needs to be judged in context.

Stein was the den mother of the Lost Generation, a group who had been
brutalized by the last gasp of the European monarchies in WW1. As an avant
garde movement, the Lost Generation embraced many new political philosophies.

WW2 had not yet been fought, you cannot judge the intellectual interests of
the Lost Generation based on what was learned at the Nuremberg Trials

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drewmassey
I compiled a works list of the composer Virgil Thomson, who wrote two operas
with texts by Stein. I don’t think it is that hard to understand the politics
of certain modernist artists given their impulses towards utopia, comparative
naïveté in geopolitics, and, as mentioned in other comments, the prevailing
structure of feeling at the time.

Yes, it would be strange to see a poet of Stein’s stature today staking out
the positions that she does, but artists such as Dalí were also doing
similarly puzzling political declarations at the time. That’s not an excuse
for any of them, but history does not get written (merely) for us to stand in
judgement of mistakes of the past.

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timwaagh
i never saw petain as such a bad guy. In ww1 he changed the French strategy to
something that wasn't batshit crazy and saved many lives. In ww2 he stopped a
fight the French could not win. Signed a deal. Did what he had to do. I don't
think supporting him is that strange at all.

Petain did bad things too but basically anyone who was with the nazis had to.
What matters is whose idea it was to slaughter Jews and other civilians and
also who forced who to do what.

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mncharity
> Did what he had to do.

I enjoyed _Paris at War: 1939-1944_ , by David Drake, for its description of
every-day living in Paris during the occupation. This paragraph[1] suggests an
alternate view exists.

Meta observation: So much information is lost when collapsing the complexity
of a person, government, subcultures, and historical movements, down to one-
liners, and thence to a 'bad guy? or not?' judgment, that it's not clear to me
the resulting signal is useful.

[1] p365, 2nd paragraph "Patain had a very different reception in the former
Unoccupied Zone. [...]":
[https://books.google.com/books?id=LCxUCwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...](https://books.google.com/books?id=LCxUCwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA365#v=onepage&q&f=false)

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dgut
At the time of writing, there are three humanities articles on the front-page
and they are the only articles that have 0 comments: this, Spinoza's Ethics,
and A Defence of Common Sense.

So why are people upvoting these entirely subjective articles (because I don't
see how they belong here)?

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smhost
I really despise this kind of extreme reductionist binary thinking. Not only
is it wrong, it makes tech people look like the intellectually empty
caricatures that the general public thinks we are.

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dgut
Except there is nothing intellectual about it. It's an article about what
somebody believes GS was doing/thinking during the World War II and a couple
of anecdotes. If you already know the premises (GS was a Jewish writer who
lived in Vichy France where she also worked as a propagandist) you end the
article like you started, knowing nothing more.

Besides, all "modernists" have done is produce __trash__ and it will be
remembered as such no matter how deeply the humanities try to paint it as
intellectual and deep, it will never reach the level of Caravaggio, Velazques,
Rubens, Cervantes and the like. Nope, it will be forgotten because it's
neither beautiful nor good in any objective sense.

It's not that tech/STEM people are intellectually empty, many people in STEM
simply don't buy the bullshit.

