| Chess One 2006-08-23, 7:37 pm |
|
<parrthenon@cs.com> wrote in message
news:1156306137.445710.77770@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
quote:
> DOUBLETHINK
>
> <We don't need translations of plain facts from Mr
> Kingston who talks about the most cynical empire
> in the world as it were Disneyland, and these
> surface impressions all there was to know - this
> particular surface is >covered with scum.> -- Phil Innes
>
> Dear Phil,
>
> When discussing subjects Soviet with NMnot
> Taylor Kingston, you are dealing with someone who is
> still largely virgo intacta intellectually.
Its a sort of Virgo-Californiensis, isn't it?
quote:
> He gives
> evidence of trying to learn more, and he quotes from a
> work by Ronald Hingley.
>
> We have to be pateint with NMnot. He is trying to learn.
>
> Now, then, Hingley's point about the Stalinist
> regard for truth is that the reputed failures in the
> Purge Trial frame-ups (physical impossibilities are
> imputed to defendants) were actually successes in
> terms of totalitarian theory. Getting people to
> accept lies as truth -- even as they understand that
> the statements are lies -- is inculcating doublethink,
> which Orwell defined as believing two contradictory
> statements can be true at the same time.
Yes - I remember we rehearsed this topic on Laski. To be fair to late- or
slight-readers, such attitudes were widespread.
quote:
> Hingley owes this insight to Hannah Arendt's The
> Origins of Totalitarianism, who undoubtedly read
> Lionel Trilling's Middle of the Journey during her
> writing of The Origins. That is a volume featuring
> the dramatic conflict between John Laskell, a
> middle-age liberal, and Nancy and Arthur Croom, two
> fellow-travellers. You have Laskell trying to escape
> the phenomenon of doublethinking, especially in his
> attitudes to Gifford Maxim, a Communist agent who has
> just defected. (Maxim was based on Whitaker
> Chambers.)
>
> Double-thinking undoubtedly existed among Western
> intellectuals, who often swallowed mutually exclusive
> beliefs about the Stalin regime. But I have often
> wondered what the average Soviet city dweller of the
> 1930s thought?
I can tell you that my friend from Petersburg met 2 American business men in
a bar in Switzerland, and he was aghast by their ideas of 'socialism', which
maybe would have been okay if they hadn't based them on the failed Russian
experiment. He had difficulty convincing them that even if you could resist
the Tyrant from taking power, obscene burocracies gobbled up, not the
results of the spoils, but the energy to produce spoils in the first place.
Russia, a massive nation, had the same GNP as New Jersey.
quote:
> Anna Akhmatova once noted the dumb belief inside
> many Soviet citizens of the mid-1930s, which indicates
> a simpler intellectual process at work than
> doublethinking. To wit: simple belief that a lie is true.
Yes - Russian wit is good at negotiating that 'complex'. I think she also
noted that to large degree any thinking was given up, and people were
reduced to mute suffering. I'll find that poem.
quote:
> Actual Soviet propaganda of the period was
> remarkably homely in its claims. Trotskyite and
> Bukharinist "spies, wreckers and traitors" were said
> to be tossing sand into factory machinery, a kind of
> sabotage used to explain the failures of the
> centralized Soviet economy, especially during the 1st
> Five Year Plan. My point is that the actual claims
> were believable in purely physical terms. They were
> meant to convince the average citizen.
>
> Stalin did not expect ordinary factory workers to
> perform the mental gyrations that intellectuals were
> required to accomplish.
He was no great intellectual himself, eh? A cunning peasant. I wonder if
anyone here read Laurens van der Post's /Journey into Russia/? Lvd P was a
friend of Jung [wrote bio of him too] and it is sober reading, a very heavy
journey of the spirit. After a few hundred pages of that you did not need
him to elaborate on one of his final comments in the book, you felt it too -
on flying out he said he felt as if a massive weight had been removed from
his chest - from over his heart, as it were.
I met him in Scotland. Laurens had also been incarcerated by the Japanese in
Burma [they made a good film of it with Tom Conti and David Bowie], but he
said this Russian experience was a far heavier thing to bear.
quote:
> On rgcp, we have, then, NMnot Taylor Kingston
> claiming to be a man with "standards," even as he
> writes anonymous messages in praise of himself (for
> Pete's sake!) as Paulie Graf and Xylothist. Does our
> NMnot believe himself to be honest and
> straightforward, a boyo with "standards"?
>
> If he does so believe, then we have a classic
> case of doublethinking, do we not?
I don't think so. There are two main sorts of schizoid, there is the usual
business of emotional inflexability to an extreme that it blends not with
other aspects of the self, hence a seeming inner plurality, to which
everyone knows something of the clinical side from its [over] use.
But also the intellectualised person so divorced from honoring his feelings
and spiritual life, that he is unaware of acting from them; that it is as if
two people existed together as strangers.
Taimanov said me that while chess allowed him an intellectual life of the
mind, what music provided him was access to his emotions and a spiritual
life. He also told me that he regretted that even these days very smart kids
from the provinces excelled at chess, and were able to move to Petersburg or
Moscow and make a living from it.
He did not envy these people -'it is all they have' - and he thought it
dangerous and brittle, and even I think, somewhat irresponsible.
So when I encounter some of these difficulties as with Mr. Kingston, I
recognise someone who has not been in the swim of people who suffered
anything much, and someone too full of ideas from the head, unbalanced by
'ideas' from the heart.
I would characterise it less as double-thinking, but in Taimanov's sense,
[or Heideggers sense of 'pathic'] as a form of poverty.
Cordially, Phil Innes
quote:
>
> Chess One wrote:
>
|