The Strange Politics of Gertrude Stein | Hacker News Reader

The Strange Politics of Gertrude Stein

neh.gov

39 pointsseventyhorses10 comments

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

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.

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.

> What matters is whose idea it was to slaughter Jews and other civilians and also who forced who to do what.

Committing genocide is always just an idea, until you leverage the state to make it happen. That takes complicity, not coercion.

> 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...

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)?

Such articles are welcome and have been part of HN from the beginning. If people don't comment when they have nothing to say, so much the better. Would that were the case with every thread!

Part of the DNA of Hacker News is a polymathic sensibility. That comes from pg, who's interested in a lot of things. Diversifying the subject matter here is why Hacker News exists, as you can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. That's the origin of the phrase "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", which became the mandate of this site.

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.

We probably have a similar view, but please don't call names or post so uncharitably. It only makes things worse.

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.

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