Abstract: Asked why she worked for the Nazi radio-Vichy, in 1944, De Beauvoir meekly claimed she needed a job (she had been fired as a teacher after an underage lesbian affair with a student of hers). No different morality from that of the average viper. Vipers can, indeed, educate us. Yes I know, this is going to be a long and venomous essay… It’s about poisoning of the youth…
Once I went climbing somewhere. The equipment was heavy, the rope cumbersome, the slope steep. On the side of that upward struggle, a foot away, a boulder with a flat top, pretty crystalline colors. It invited me to put my hand on it, for a welcome rest. As I engaged the motion, some engine of systematic suspicion inside my brain addled by the effort, had an automatic, and, it turned out, life saving, second look. A magnificent viper was coiled on the colored rock, its pretty camouflage perfectly adapted. It puffed, ready to strike when I jerked back. As we will see, human vipers, are also perfectly adapted, perfectly camouflaged, and that’s what makes them so pretty.
It’s not because an ideology sounds good, and looks pretty, that it is. Baits look good, and that’s why fishes bite them (experienced fishes do not bite baits, they know the difference). So beware of all too seductive ideologies… All the more as plutocratic propaganda finds alluring all and any ideology which serves it, and has the means to finance it, beyond your wildest dreams. In France, in the 1950s, more than 50 major opinion makers were on the CIA roll. Surely, would the naive say, not icons such as Sartre and De Beauvoir? Well, for those, the situation was even worse.
Yes, I know, top philosophers have always been iconoclastic. Top philosophers break icons. Nothing that is viewed favorably in this celebrity worshipping, thus superficiality craving, age of the greedy critters.
Why do you think the Swedes, who helped Hitler so much until it became clear he was not winning the war, gave in 1946 the Nobel Prize to the German Herman Hesse? Because Hesse helped to defeat Nazism? The naive will say, because Hesse was such a good novelist. The iconoclast will point out that Hesse helped the fascist aggressors in 1914 (he volunteered to enroll in the human rights violating Kaiserreich invasion army)… And, when the Nazi came Hesse was deliberately very non anti-Nazi (“detached“, like most German fellow travellers of Nazism).
And one obviously true and delicious ideology can hide the poisonous nature of a much deeper ideology it smuggles in. Hesse recommended to stay superficially detached, aloof, when confronted to the abomination of Nazism (similarly to Heidegger or Heisenberg). .
Similarly, De Beauvoir’s position on sexism, her anti-sexist pose, is pretty much unassailable. That makes it good, alluring, attractive, irresistible… However anti-sexism is self-obvious: sexual diffeomorphism is kept to a minimum in the human species, once the necessity of reproduction is kept into account.
One correct ideology can hide another, most vicious: De Beauvoir hides the fakeness of her convoluted “Existentialism” behind the trite truth of anti-sexism.
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Should we respect an ideology because the same author also proffered another one, most respectable? The example of Carter and Afghanistan:
I am getting a bit impatient with extending respect to second, if not third, or fourth, order thinking. Nowadays, people go around saying that the president of the USA (Trump) is an unbalanced idiot, and what they should truly mean, deep inside their subconscious, is that the president before that, and his six predecessors, were idiots, because they were. What was Jimmy Carter thinking of, as US president, attacking Afghanistan?
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/usa-attack-against-afghanistan/
How can Carter look himself in a mirror? What are those admiring Carter still thinking? That they never heard of Afghanistan, Carter’s war? Do they really think? Shouldn’t they be thinking that they are, themselves, Trump? Without the money?
The diseases, the various diseases of the mind which misled humanity, are much older than those recent US presidents. In truth, evil conditions of ancient history put civilization on rails. Example: the true story of the causes, not just of Nazism, but of the First World War, was never told by classical historians. Consider this instead:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/real-history-world-war-one-inception/
And it has very practical consequence: the worst of what Trumpism is alleged to be, started much more than a century ago, it has been the bread and butter of America (and not that it needed to be!)
Ruinous ideologies are devastating the planet. One of them is what passes for the study of economics: actually it is just what one needs to believe to serve plutocracy, as even banks, which create nearly all the money, are excluded from the study of economics.
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Existentialism as a cancer of the spirit:
An example of a ruinous ideology has been so-called “Existentialism”, a nebulous “philosophy” preoccupied with the self, which played a crucial role in deploying, and justifying Lenino-Stalinism, Nazism, “Maoim”,the “American Century”, also known as “neo-liberalism”…
Existentialism gave a justification, if not inception to the “Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi” (me, me, me) philosophy, which brought us, in turn, both the cult of wealth supreme (“neo-liberalism”, “inequality”) and “communitarianism” (my community is all I need to enjoy and know, by birthright; in particular Islamism, but it could be Buddhism in Burma… or sexism).
“Neo-liberalism” is neither: neither “liberal”, nor new in any sense.
Existentialism was founded by Kierkegaard, and can be viewed as a form of nihilism, or, more exactly selfishness using nihilism to thrive. Fundamental to “Existentialism” has been the personality cult of De Beauvoir and Sartre (to be skewered and slowly roasted below). Personality-cultism is, per se, an ideology, a meta-ideology: it pervades philosophy, politics, history, science, religions, etc., replacing the debate, and landscape of ideas, with childish obsessions for particular dolls.
So here we will apply a remedy, demolishing the founders of “Existentialism” by showing they were anything but wise. Or showing existentialism for what it was: selfishness covered-up by big words obscurantism. Not to say all what Sartre and De Beauvoir said, and did, was idiotic, worthless, and misleading. Far from it. But from their worst errors, and the follies of their blind admirers, we can learn more than from any of their mellifluous dissemblance.
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Here is a true, top notch, break-through feminist, the real thing, the major plutocrat, Queen Marguerite de Valois. She was known for her great beauty, towering wits, extreme erudition (she was a polyglot mastering Latin, Greek and several European languages), countless lovers, extreme courage and humanism during the religious wars, and scandalous feminism. She started also several fashions, doing away with enormous collars, instead putting to advantage her colossal chest all the way to he nipples, and launching a new colors mixing red and orange. Her robes, often with gold thread, could cost the equivalent of millions of dollars today. Daughter, sister, and wife of French and Navarre monarchs, she played several important philosophical roles. An author herself, and a historian, her provocative feminism knew no bounds. She goaded Montaigne in writing his essays, using the basest flattery to urge him on back to work. She chose, and imposed a child-bearing wife for her husband, King Henri IV, another Medici (like her own mom). She died in her sixties, in 1614, a queen, and celebrated throughout Europe. Breakthrough thinkers are conditions sine qua non of humanity’s progress, and I have to recognize that, often, they emanate from plutocracy…
Being Nazis, as Sartre and De Beauvoir were, is different from being forced to collaborate with Nazis:
When the Nazis imposed their ideology, Nazism, on a French Republic which they occupied with two million (deep-down, in truth, below the sheen of correction) blood thirsty soldiers, De Beauvoir and Sartre used Nazism for their enjoyment and aggrandizement: among other crimes, Sartre stole his employment from a Jew, De Beauvoir worked as a Nazi propagandist. No wonder they thereafter posed as Stalinists (actually, Stalin was allied with German fascist for 25 years, so the contradiction is shallower than it sounds), or as freedom fighters for those who set bombs in Algiers (in the guise of progress, and justice).
Here is the meat of the matter: most individuals in occupied Europe, even Jews condemned to death, had to collaborate with the Nazis, whether they wanted it or not (when not engaging in actual lethal combat with said Nazis). Sartre and De Beauvoir were different: they were among those few who met, engaged, helped, and were helped, when not outright employed, by Nazis at the highest level. This is what “Existenz” meant. This is what “absurd” meant.
For mongrels with intellectual pretense not to have noticed this is telling. Not to say absurd. If they get kicked around, one should welcome their yelping.
If one votes for “the lesser of two evils”, one votes for evil. Doing this repeatedly makes one a source of evil. This is how “representative democracy” generates the power of evil (Pluto-kratos), election after election.
Thus some, such as Céline, advocated, even before WWII not to vote: “I have never voted in my life… I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline
But the evils of everyday life don’t stop there. One can vote at the ballot box. One can also vote with one’s mind. Or can vote with one’s culture.
De Beauvoir’s nude pictures are many, thus implying that she had nothing to hide. Actually, she fiercely lied about her sexual ways massively, all her life, as countless letters revealed after her death.
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Is France’s Encroaching Mental Retardation, A Result of too Much Embracing Existentialism?
In the 1950s, all too many people, in a leading intellectual country like France, having just escaped from her mortal combat with Nazism, voted for so-called “Existentialism”. In practice it seems to have meant, take care of oneself, and roll over all ethics, and others. It was revealed, after their deaths, and more is coming, so far hidden from view, as it is so shameful, that Sartre and De Beauvoir were obsessive sexual predators… for decades. Virgins preferred. De Beauvoir lost her teaching credentials for statutory rape. One second sex too far….
Most of those with intellectual pretense adopted “Existentialism”, not knowing what it was that they were truly swallowing… Nazism (or Stalinism, or Maoism, not as bad as Nazism, agreed, but Nazism arguably got completely insane after the French war declaration condemned it to death).
After two generations of “Existentialism”, Muslim nihilism has been embraced as… anti-racism (!), and, not surprisingly, French intellectual leadership long assumed, 16 centuries and counting, has been in clear recess. Among 65 tested nations, only the Netherlands and France have deteriorated in students’ ability since 2001. In the latest TIMMS test, evaluating science and math, France tested below the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.Not to insinuate, as Trump may say, that these are “shithole countries”, but certainly, France, by her own ancient standards, is heading there!
I will suggest, indeed, that so-called “Existentialism” in general, and the sort of fake intellectuality De Beauvoir and Sartre incarnated, (partly) originated this degradation. Because it was fundamentally a collaboration with the powers that be: Nazism before 1945, the USSR and the USA afterwards. For the existentialist, the starting point is “the existential attitude“, a sense of disorientation, confusion, or dread in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world (all feelings fundamentally alien to prehistoric man). Indeed, if one has been Nazis, as Sartre and De Beauvoir were, and one suddenly is depicted as great resistance figure, disorientation will ensue, a feeling of absurdity will creep in. “Existentialism” makes absurdity, confusion, disorientation, the new religions.
Existentialism’s exemplary struggles were for “Algerian Independence”, anti-colonialism, and Stalinism. 70 years later, we observe that the anti-colonialist struggle was a “trompe l’oeil”. It was greatly make-belief. In 2017, there was officially 97,000 refugees admitted to France (and much more in truth), all coming from ex-colonized countries (if one let them all come in, without drowning, or being reduced to slavery in Libya, and by hyenas in the Sahara, it would be millions).
Tiny French philosophers meet with gigantic Dr. Lynch (the real name of the one with nom de guerre: Che Guevara). This is not meant as an approbation of the assassination of the Che by the CIA. However, the alacrity with whom Beauvoir and Sartre embraced dictatorships is to be noticed: more of the same always. As US extremism fighting dictators depended upon those dictators being dictatorial, this sort of silly embrace actually advanced the US empire, while feigning to fight it.
The rage of “Existentialism” against the European empires was make-belief, it was accompanied by great effective friendliness towards these mightier empires, Stalinism, Sovietism, Americanism, and, or, deep down inside in all cases, global plutocracy. Just obeying greater gods! (Those preoccupied by the self first, will make their morality slave to their creatures comfort.)
Arguably many of the “decolonized” countries were, and are, more exploited afterwards than they were under colonial administration (and would have been a fortiori if the colonial model had been replaced by more advanced civilization); that’s roughly obvious for the entire Sahelian zone, from Senegal to Somalia. Under the French empire, the fisheries had not been nearly extinguished by powers foreign to Africa, so people could eat. Algeria is a FNL dictatorship, ever since “independence”. Tunisia is on the verge of civil war, one-third of the economy depending on olive oil paid to the locals, one cent per liter… Morocco is one man show plutocracy, and so on…
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Sex Crazed Maniacs Exists, The Existentialist Way, Prior to Any morality whatsoever:
Sartre claimed that a central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence. This can be variously interpreted in diverse, sometimes quite opposite, ways (the usual interpretation is that what one does precedes one’s morality). Apparently, looking at Sartre’s life, it meant having sex with as many young girls (procured by De Beauvoir) as possible. When asked by Camus what the problem was with all the crazed sleeping around with youth, Sartre retorted that he was uglier than a toad (paraphrasing), and thus he had to reassure himself all day long, with young, fresh female flesh. Surely, Sartre couldn’t be that infantile. So the more natural explanation is that he was just a sadistic conqueror. Sartre had sex with De Beauvoir’s students, who were teenage girls. OK, maybe it could be sincere and happen once, understandable, however, this was systematic, industrial. In 1943, the parents of a minor sued, and De Beauvoir was thrown out of the public school system. The Harry Weinstein of philosophy. Is that the top philosopher of the Twentieth century.
Or is it what Sartre looked like, namely a half crushed toad, with accompanying half smashed brain??
In “Being and Nothingness”, Sartre attracts attention to the hypocrisy, the fakeness of the “Garçons de Café”. Right, it takes one to know one. Except Sartre was Garçon de Café to the top German Nazi censor in France (who later revealed Sartre to be a hypocrite; and we know he was a hypocrite in independent ways).
Sartre’s lifelong (APPARENT) commitment to socialism, anti-fascism and anti-imperialism still resonate. The problem is that as with Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Nixon, Carter, Clinton, or Obama, appearances are there to deceive (not to say that the insignificant Obama was as nasty as Lenin, on a personal basis; but the missed opportunity may have been greater).
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I am, therefore let me Nazi splurge:
Sartre: “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards”
Long after World War Two, Sartre is a rare introspective, yet FAKE contrition claimed that: ““the whole country both resisted and collaborated. Everything we did was equivocal; we never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong; a subtle poison corrupted even our best actions.” That was a positive interpretation of what he wanted us to believe he did. In truth, thousands of French intellectuals resisted for real, and were tortured and assassinated by the Nazis, as early as 1942 (when seven intellectuals of the Museum of Man in Paris were executed for resistance, inter alia).
The problem with Sartre and company is that the Devil is in the details. Sartre and company had a very comfortable Second World War. Sartre and De Beauvoir met with Nazi operatives, at the highest level, and it was not because they were double agents. It was because they were ingratiating themselves with the power that be. Sartre was brought out of his war prisoner status, probably because of the intervention of some high level Vichy gangster. Sartre even took the position of a professor who had been deprived of his job for being a “Jew” (you are welcome to imagine Sartre as a vulture with Swastika ornamented wings, devouring the corpse of a dying Jew)..
Power corrupts, and apocalyptic power corrupts apocalyptically. When Sartre was sitting in the office of the main Nazi censor in France, chewing the fat, it was all about power. By honoring top occupiers by his presence, and singing the praises of German culture, Sartre was encouraging the executioners of civilization to go with their grisly task. The average Frenchman, at the time, was just ignoring German soldiers when crossing them in the streets.
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US Thinking: What Philosophically Matters Is Accusing The Victims One Made Of Collaboration:
When Philosophy Matters (which has nearly 30,000 followers) thought smart to wish “Happy Birthday, Simone de Beauvoir !”, 9 Jan 2018. I discerned there immediately the uncritical agenda of the personality cult and collaborationist bend: start with blind love for Simone, end by blind love for Maréchal Pétain (as will be shown below, a Philosophy Matters promotes the fascist lie that “France collaborated”, something as perverse as saying someone being executed “collaborated” with the executioner; so, indeed, “Philosophy Matters” ended and revealed itself to be of the exact “Maréchal Nous Voila!” school of politics as Simone herself….). Make no mistake: I have quoted Simone de Beauvoir approvingly. However, of the galaxy of people I have quoted, most I have quoted approvingly. Even Muhammad, FDR, Jesus and Adolf have said something I agreed with at some point. What I discerned there was personality cult. De Beauvoir was a feminist, true, and so I am, and so have been most women. However, there has been feminists in France for more than 14 centuries, and feminists of 14 centuries ago in France were much more important than the relatively insignificant Simone: some of those now forgotten feminists were heads of state, no less, and one of them abrogated slavery.
Cats pounce when they smell a rat, I replied:
“Simone De Beauvoir was employed as a Vichy history propagandist. It’s unlikely someone as misdirected, racist, arriviste, Nazi, criminally vicious ever said something philosophically valuable. Simone De Beauvoir worked for the Nazis as late as 1944: she was an imbecile too!”
(By 1944, it was clear that the Nazis would lose and that they were all criminally insane maniacs. Their collaborators had become fair game for the resistance in France. A collabo like De Beauvoir could expect the well-justified death she deserved at any moment (as Sartre hypocritically, but correctly insisted Brasillach deserved later). Let me say slowly: had I been behind De Beauvoir with a loaded gun in 1944, I would have shot her, as I would have any talking head on Radio Vichy. That was the correct thing to do.
Would we have been deprived of a great feminist? Probably not. What I meant by this is that De Beauvoir sucked up her feminism right and left. After all, the last of the Valois of France, Queen marguerite de Valois, known also as “Margot” wrote a much inflammatory book on the subject, more than four centuries before.
Predictably, Philosophy Matters gulped down the poisoned bait, and retorted with what passes as smart over the Internet: “Tyranosopher, You will have to prove and not merely assert such claims.”
On the Internet, if you assert that 1 + 1 = 2, smart asses without any education whatsoever, come around and ask you to not merely assert, but prove such a claim. This is what happens when instruction and education have been replaced by coding. Anybody with a modicum of education in philosophical matters should know that the child molesting De Beauvoir worked as a propagandist for Radio Vichy, and that Sartre, inter alia, stole the job of a “Jewish” professor.
On the Internet, if one is an idiot similar to all other idiots, one has to prove nothing: it’s all about galloping in the same manner to the same music, the orgasm of the stampeding herd down well-known avenues of what passes for thinking. I replied in a deliberately provocative fashion, a cat playing with a mouse: Advanced wisdom doesn’t “have to prove” anything basic to the grossly ignorant. Knowing fascism thoroughly should be essential for those who pretend to love wisdom. BTW, Sartre was such a notorious lover of fascism, he embraced at least three sorts thereof (contrarily to Camus!)
But that mouse, I guessed, was up to no good Philosophy Matters inner Trump got revealed when it replied with fake opinion and real insult:
“Philosophy Matters:
“You are delusional. If you cannot support your outlandish claims with anything resembling fact then please stop making them.” (Latter on Philosophy Matters would assert it knew what I talked about all along; by then it was all upset and making plenty of spelling mistakes.)
Patrice: Calling me delusional is an insult. 😉 I express a judgement about historical figures, I get insulted. Typical Internet, ad hominem violence. Sartre and de Beauvoir didn’t just collaborate, they WERE Nazis. It is a matter of historical record, not opinion. Philosophy Matters didn’t bother to check. Instead, it calls me outlandish. This is a compounding error. In English: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2008/04/blood-on-their-hands/ …
Notice here that I introduced a new notion. Some non Germans, even some Frenchmen, were not just “collaborators”. Collaborators means co-working. Instead, some went beyond forced collaboration, and, instead, espoused Nazism itself. This is what Sartre and De Beauvoir did. And I am saying this is intrinsic to the “Existentialist” attitude: their existence is more important than our morality. The morality of us, humanity, our nature provided ethology extends to us (Sartre made that point again and again, by claiming that he, Sartre, was free whatever he wanted, and it didn’t matter what Spinoza thought about it.
When the Nazis occupied countries, people in authority were forced to collaborate with them. The occupied part of France, in particular, consisted of half of the metropolitan French territory. France was occupied in 1940 by two million German soldiers. Some government officials tried to resist orders, right away. An example is Jean Moulin, who was a prefect, and refused to obey strictly orders by the Nazi occupiers. He was immediately arrested and tortured so extensively, that he tried to commit suicide by cutting his own throat (that’s why later Jean Moulin always wore a scarf and had a scratchy voice). Then Jean Moulin switched to apparent obedience, while starting contacts with all the resistance networks. Arrested as head of the resistance, Moulin was tortured to death, over several days, by the future CIA employee, Klaus barbie (who tortured to death personally another 5,000 people, Barbie himself declared: he finished his life, decades later, in a French prison).
Replying to “Philosophy Matters’ claim that Patrice was “outlandish”:
“Books (en français) were written about De Beauvoir and Sartre’s Nazism. You apparently do not even know that they exist. BTW, I am from a hard-core resistance family, on all sides, which was personally hunted by the Gestapo. Family members were injured & killed fighting fascism!”
In one of these supposedly smart pirouette the Internet is famous for, Philosophy Matters, opting for a majestic plural, admitted that what it just described as my “outlandish claims” was actually well-known:
“We are very familiar with that book, and several others, and the kinds of claims you are making are simply not supported by it. They [Sartre and De Beauvoir] may not have been heroes of the resistance, but they were by no means nazis or collaborators. Try reading it instead if reviews of it.”
(Notice the spelling mistakes: apparently Philosophy matters less than agitation and lack of correct logic: “if” is not “of”. It turns out I am much more familiar with the subject than “Philosophy Matters”)
Patrice: “De Beauvoir was talking head for Radio Vichy. Her own program was sandwiched between horrendous 100% criminally insane, racially maniacal propaganda programs. She was socializing with those insane criminals off the mike. Philosophically Matters claims that being a propagandist on the radio between mass murderous ultra-racist programs is not collaboration? Sartre got approbation from Goebbels. According to Philosophy Matters, getting Goebbels’ personal approval isn’t collaboration? Sartre waxed, lyrical, about the corrections of Nazi officers, throughout the war. Writing praises of the Nazis, according to Sartre’s admirers, is not Nazism? I read thousands of pages on this, much directly from Sartre. His tunnel vision was fascinating. Is that a philosopher?” http://www.lescrutateur.com/article-le-vrai-visage-de-jean-paul-sartre-par-edouard-boulogne-76118361.html …
“Philosophy Matters” didn’t quit while it was already losing badly, and started to reveal its true colors, its true fascist colors, as I had guessed all along:
“This is sort of our aos, so yes, we are familiar with them. We are also quite familiar with the ongoing mythology proferred by the likes of lepen and melenchon that france didnt collaborate. Which is nonsense” [Original spelling, full of mistakes, which shows PM was losing its cool, as its bearings were threatened.]
Here “Philosophy Matters” reveals the fundamental anti-French, Francophobic, so pro-Roosevelt, pro-plutocratic, pro-US imperialism position that “France” was a major collaborator. This is a level of hatred and lying unequaled even by the worst allegations made against Trump, by a very long shot. However, ask the average pseudo-cultivated person in the average US street, and that person will utter the same lie from US Big Brother: France did collaborate with Hitler. And by “collaborate” they don’t mean obeying two million guns pointed at French necks. No, they mean killing Jews and the like.
That “France collaborated” was a semantically outrageous lie promoted by right-wing, more or less corrupt French president Chirac, and his corrupt family, who presided over the latest decay of France, and was great friend of the ideology of harasser and plutophile B. Clinton (although he resisted invader W. Bush). it was in complete contradiction with historical evidence and the position of preceding French governments in the 50 years prior.
However, France WWII bashing is fundamental to the present worldwide plutocracy. Because worldwide plutocracy was behind Nazism, and never forgave France to have spoiled the party, and nearly pulled of the stunt of turning fascism itself against the plutocracy which had engineered it.
I tried to educate “Philosophy Matters” with the most basic notion of that subject: “France declared war to Hitler, September 3, 1939: that’s not collaboration. The USA, headed by plutocrat president Roosevelt DID collaborate with Hitler, and throughout the war (Hitler declared war TO the USA, December 11, 1941). Start by reading Black’s “IBM and the Holocaust”.
The point here is this: it’s the truth. It’s not fake history, nor fake thinking. France plotted, conspired and finally attacked Hitler. The USA did the exact opposite. In complete contrast, the collaboration of the USA with Nazism was more than deliberate, more than enabling. It was causative. Causative of Nazism. Roosevelt knew of this collaboration of the USA with Nazism so well that when his own ambassador, the historian Dodd, told him, in 1937, that the USA should stop Nazism, whatever it took, Roosevelt replaced Dodd by a pro-Nazi ambassador. FDR did the same in London.
(One can read the book “The Garden of the Beasts” as a reference. Dodd was great friend with the French ambassador, Francois-Poncet, they would meet in Berlin Tier Garten (beast garden, the Berlin zoo), to avoid being recorded; hence the name of the book.)
Roosevelt didn’t just betray France, Europe, civilization, and, ultimately, the Germans themselves, or the US middle class. FDR was instrumental in the Holocaust. Even covering it up, when various governments in exile, including the French government, informed him of it. FDR hated the French even more, as a result: FDR was furious the French were going around, claiming millions were assassinated by the Nazis, when FDR’s grand plan was NOT to go to war with Germany in 1942 (the Japs and Nazis decided otherwise, because they were already losing the war, so had nothing more to lose… Except for a sense of vengeance!)
So who was collaborating? France, attacking Hitler, and thus US plutocracy, firmly entrenched in Spain, Italy and Germany? Or the dual use US government, entangled with the global plutocracy it had set-up, and which originated in Washington and Wall Street?
The assumptions made by Philosophy Matters about yours truly, are funny: try reading? I have read thousands of pages of Sartre, books and interviews, in French, over the last few decades. Sartre and De Beauvoir’s Nazism (implicitly recognized) are actually fascinating & help us understand better their “existentialism”….
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Nothing to see, they were all Nazis, say those who side with the elite:
Mussolini, Hitler (and to some extent Stalin) were US plutocrats’ pawns. That’s why Mussolini was hung from a US gas station in Milan. The Italian resistance knew about the connection between Mussolini and Standard Oil. Today’s US citizens have no idea, whatsoever, of the role the USA played in the rise of fascism. It was fundamental.
The pattern displayed above is familiar, it’s always the same trick: first claim that some of the most important collaborators of Nazism were not Nazis in any sense. Secondly, insist that their pro-Nazi behavior was not pro-Nazi, but just something that happened to exist (get it? Like existence-tialism). A major instance of that is so-called “American Isolationism”. It was actually a pro-Nazi policy, which was both necessary and sufficient to make Nazism and its monstrous policies possible.
Thirdly, one turns around and claim everybody collaborated with the Nazis. Proof? France, which declared war to Nazism, and thus initiated its destruction sequence, was actually a collaborator.
And this is the ultimate trick: this way, nobody is responsible of Nazism. Thus no ideology, no way of practicing business, no plutocratic system, no ideology is the cause of Nazism: nothing to see, just circulate.
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Shithole Ideologies:
Shithole ideologies are all over. Ask a Euro-US philosopher about ethics, and there is a high probability that it will start evoking Kant. Kant was a moralist of slavery (he was for it), and Nazism (at least so the Nazis thought, and evoked Kant each time they were perplexed, or on trial: Kant had said morality consisted in obeying the powers that be; Kant guided them in their obedience to the “Guide“).
Why is it that there are so many shithole ideologies, and nobody condemns them? Because corrupt elites are sustained by them. 52 African countries screamed against Trump for (allegedly, Trump denies it) evoking the concept of “shithole countries”. This is not a concept I agree with, prima facie, but, certainly, “shithole ideologies”, just good for excretion, exist. Africa has a long and rich history, mastering many elements of civilization already 7,000 years ago. Why Africa didn’t take off is because of erroneous, or, more exactly, shithole ideologies.
A case in point is Egypt: several of the mightiest pharaohs, over several millennia, were women. Egypt partook in the invention of the alphabet, originated basic mathematics and geometry, even the steam engine (in its simplest form). Now, though, Egypt is crushed by Islamist ideology, a primitivism on steroids, and Egypt, because of this, is not at the forefront of civilization (it was, until the rabid Christians and their Muslim parrots cultivated the habit of burning libraries, intellectuals, and any critical thinking…)
“Neo-Liberalism” is a case in point, as a shithole ideology, so is today’s “Economics”. Putinism gets criticized, but that’s easy, being Russian (thus alien, special, antique, something about brutal souls deep in the forest).
Existentialism is not just a shithole ideology, it is the master shithole ideology. It was intimately connected to a whole succession of disastrous “isms”. And Political Correctness, which is the institutionalization of dissemblance, lying and hypocrisy.
Existentialism boils down to “me, driven by the lowest instincts, no questions asked, I am free, absolutely”. When Sartre chewed the fat with top German Nazis & fascists, he advanced his career, not minding for a second how many innocent victims the Nazi machine killed per second.
The essence of Sartre’s “existence precedes essence” means that the selfish subject “existence” is a more important motor of behavior than morality and the like, what Sartre called “essence”.
To Sartre, “existence precedes essence” means that a personality is not built over a previously designed model or a precise purpose, because it is the human being who chooses to engage in such enterprise. While not denying the constraining conditions of human existence, he answers to Spinoza who affirmed the obvious fact that man is determined by what surrounds him. Therefore, to Sartre an oppressive situation is not intolerable in itself, but once regarded as such by those who feel oppressed the situation becomes intolerable (this explains why Sartre made his accommodation with the Nazis). So by projecting my intentions onto my present condition, “It is I who freely transform it into action… the world is a mirror of my freedom”, meaning he was free to leverage himself from Nazism, and, later, Stalinism and Maoism, so he did! The world obliged us to react, to overtake ourselves, he admits. It is this overtaking of a present constraining situation by a project to come that Sartre names transcendence. He added that “we are condemned to be free“.
Same with De Beauvoir and Radio Vichy (she was a successful novelist, and, considering she was pretty good-looking, she could have supported herself as a prostitute, even a prostitute for Nazi officers… which would have been infinitely better than being a Nazi propagandist… as she insisted she had to do).
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Should we avoid De Beauvoir and Sartre?
No! Be it only because they are excellent, smart lab rats, and, considering how malevolent they turned out to be, in some ways, we can have no qualms about trashing them around, as deserved. Most people are much more stupid and uninteresting than De Beauvoir and Sartre, so I recommend their company (Montaigne and many others are to be preferred, though).
I also esteem Simone and the big feminist horse she hypocritically straddled, much more than I do Jean-Paul (readers nearly escaped the famous photograph of Simone naked, from fear of US censorship, led by smart idiots such as Mr. Z).
Simone had the courage to ask some courageous questions, even though she answered them in a conservative manner: “Faut-il bruler Sade?” (Must one burn Sade?) She got carried over, in the Second Sex (good title!) when she said one weren’t born a woman, one became one. Carried over, because there are real differences between men and women. Jokes aside, and even if male and female brains are just the same genetico-physiologically (something that may well be true), they aren’t the same in every day physiology. As they bath in different neurohormones. Nothing very mysterious here: one of my long snow mountain runs went wrong recently, and I really had to fight, survival in balance. I can guarantee you that my brain, then, was in another universe. It was flooded my different neurohormones. In cases like that I get the impression to be on the deck of a starship, cooling giving orders to the crew.
De Beauvoir and Sartre never got there, in full contact with the universe, because all they knew was the garçon de café and sex-love-seduction-statutory rape games frenzy they pathologically thrived in, destroying all hearts in their wakes. How more artificial can one be? (Foucault himself said his philosophical drive was all about seducing “pretty boys”, roughly the only thing he has in common with Socrates… I am skeptical of philosophers driven monopolistically by sex mania…)
Well, one can have trained by living in Bad Faith during all of World War Two, and afterwards too, as Sartre and De Beauvoir did. People tend to speak a lot, of what they know all too well. Shithole existentialism was the metaphysics of shithole plutocracy, and attacks against “bad faith” were a vaccination against noticing this.
Concepts such as “conservatives” and “progressives” aren’t appropriate anymore. One can be very progressive in some ways, precisely because one is extremely conservative. Ecology is an example: the drive is to conserve, the tool is to legislatively progress. The difference is information and reflection, thinking power… While being honest in, and with, one’s true logic. Maximally informed and subtle good faith, not ready-made jerkiness.
Other concepts still apply. De Beauvoir and Sartre were treasonous, self-obsessed, partook into the commission of crimes against humanity at the highest level, and then covered the whole thing up with absurd mumbo-jumbo (“Absolute Freedom! People always essentially free! En-soi! Pour-soi!”). Pour-soi ou pourceau? That is the true question! Even an official, major card-carrying Nazi such as Heidegger, who took command of his university, in Nazi uniform, and expelled the “Jews” (although his thesis adviser had been a “Jew”) was disgusted. Sartre was going around, saying he was absoltely free, while, in truth he was prisoner of his glands, and, as he admitted to Camus, the obsession of proving to himself he was worthy, when what he viewed as his disjointed toad face (what else?) showed him, in the mirror, the exact opposite. And the lower he went, the worse he felt, so the more he had to compensate. Instead of going from Charybdis to Scylla, he went from Hitler, to Stalin, to Che, to Mao…
Sartre and De Beauvoir went around, insisting, implicitly, like Nixon, that they were not crooks.
Intellectuals such as De Beauvoir and Sartre played a major role in the Twentieth Century: they influenced other intellectuals and writers, who in turn influenced professors, who taught students at major universities, who became opinion makers, etc. what came out was an inability to think disguised as “Political Correctness”, so acute that now a whole class of young people can’t even see the interest of debate, let alone have the capacity to carry it. A characteristic is to emphasize the crimes of some, while ignoring the much larger crimes of others, who brought the first as a reaction to the latter (for example the silly crimes of the British in India are blown out of proportion, whereas those which brought the partition of India, and Islamism in Pakistan, are overlooked…).
To be fully human, one has sometimes to do not what one wants, but what one has to do. Homo is the metaphysical animal. Existence is all what matters, driving what we do, but it’s not just existence as we used to know it, in the absent remembrance of times passed away. Existence is nothing if not kneaded with the hopes of better futures to come, smartly informed by the past.
Who knows what to do correctly in life, who doesn’t love life?
One can’t tell all & sundry, life is absurd (“Existentialism”), or unlovable (“Christianism, Islamism, Buddhism”), then switch around, been good, well-meaning, giving.
One may not get back all the love one gives to life, but one has to: others will, that’s how humanity is. How humanity became possible.
Patrice Aymé
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