Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-1978

Rating:
Summary: As pertinent today as it was 25 years ago...
Review: 25 years ago, "Political Pilgrims" documented beyond any doubt the willing self-deception of intellectuals in love with the totalitarian regimes in Cuba, China, the Soviet Union and East Germany. The debate no longer rages over whether these countries were "freer" than their counterparts in the West. They aren't. What hasn't changed, however, is the continued willingness of intellectuals to find paradise anywhere but in the US.

Paul Hollander brings his trademark meticulousness to the study of Intellectuals who travel to what used to be referred to as Worker's Paradises. Using mountains of evidence, one cannot help but be persuaded that Western Intellectuals experience such a depth of alienation from their cultural birthplace, that they become morally blind to the abuses of its antagonists.

What's truly remarkable, is that none of this has changed. One merely needs to point to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and it's grotesque representation of Hussein's Iraq as an innocently peaceful place of playful children and mothers. At no point in that execrable movie does he mention the mass graves or torture chambers.

Michael, post your wish list on Amazon and I'll send you this book. Promise.

Rating:
Summary: A horribly funny chronicle of extreme gullibility
Review: Hollander has written a remarkable work of cultural history, documenting western misperceptions of revolutionary societies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has observed, it is one of the characteristics of a liberal democracy that it is politically unexciting compared with the messianic political creeds. Hollander substantiates this truth with a depressingly predictable, horrifying, but still grimly funny catalogue of intellectual gullibility concerning the supposed virtues of a succession of Communist despotisms, from the early Bolshevik state to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. It is perplexing that this type of support for totalitarianism of the Left has not always - or even often - destroyed the reputation of the 'intellectual' professing it. One has only to think of the deserved obloquy heaped upon supporters of the equivalent monstrous tyrannies of the Right - Ezra Pound's sympathy with Fascist Italy, Heidegger's support for Nazism - to note an unwarranted inconsistency here. The preposterous encomium "Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation" (thus titled in its second edition, without a question mark), defending Stalin and the Moscow trials, has done little to dent the reputation of Sidney and Beatrice Webb as reforming advocates of Fabian socialism, while Noam Chomsky's repulsive polemics denying the extent of Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia are apparently not to be mentioned in polite company. Hollander dredges all this up, with useful annotation on just why these illusions persist. My one main criticism of this seminal book is its loose definition of the term 'intellectual'. Figures such as H.G.Wells or Bernard Shaw are indeed exemplars of the higher stupidity whereby intelligent men may take leave of all critical faculties when it comes to Left-wing tyranny. It is stretching that definition somewhat when Hollander refers also to intellectual lightweights like Jane Fonda.

Rating:
Summary: Take me by the hand and let's go strolling in wonderland
Review: Hollander puts the selective moral outrage and selective acceptance of evidence of the Left on parade as he follows these blinkered one's through the various Potemkin Villages of the Totalitarians, from the October revolution forward into most of the 20th century. Smug arrogance knows no political party or religious faith, no gender, race or sexual preference, it seems to be evenly spread among us. In this instance the highly developed capacity for self-deception of the Left is on trial and an amusing trial at that. Their tortured explanations of the intellectually unexplainable are a fictive of mankind's marvelous ability "to transform things to the liking of his desires".

Like all those who are "blowin' in the wind", these intellectual hard heads do not seek truth, but instead to validate their worldview. This book is a study of intellectuals, estrangement and its consequences.

Rating:
Summary: Left-Wing Hypocrisy Exposed Brilliantly and Humorously!
Review: In this fascinating book, Paul Hollander exposes the self deception of 19th and 20th century intellectuals. In their search for the perfect society, they wander from Revolutionary Russia to modern-day Cuba.

In spite of massive evidence of human rights abuse, including genocide, false imprisonments, and confiscation of private property, the political pilgrims never waver in their loyalty to failed, left-wing ideals. They journey onward after each "socialist" failure, with the fervor of religious converts.

This book is meticulously documented and easy to read. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: The disaffected. secular, leftist intellectual
Review: or, possibly more correctly, the adolescent who sometimes never grows up. We all want Heaven on Earth, don't we? Too bad it's not possible. Unfortunately, the attempt to create Heaven on Earth only creates a Hell. In this important but not terribly well-known known book, Paul Hollander traces the journeys of Western leftist intellectuals as they, blinded by self-deception, journey to the hellholes of the Soviet Union, China and China, and pronounce them wonderful societies. The obvious question: why? Estranged from their own societies, they seek meaning and community elsewhere. We all need it, and we all want it, to the point where some of us imagine it when it's not there. For the leftist, their gods have evaporated, leaving them in a vacuum. They seek religious certainty, meaning and comfort in trying to create a heaven right here. But the gods of leftism have turned out to be demons. Instead of trying to change the world, they should tend to their own gardens first.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent diagnosis of campus nonsense
Review: Paul Hollander is one of our best critics of the kind of foolishness that motivates intellectuals today and has done so for centuries. This book is well worth reading. It demonstrates most amply Hollander's contention that intellectuals are not characterized solely by their critical abilities and habits. Rather, as Hollander points out time and again, they are also characterized by their opportunistic use of these abilities, and by their incredible credulity. Sartre is only one case in point: his fabulous skepticism is employed to prevent himself from coming face to face with the fact that Stalin was a monster and that Marxism could neither save a nation nor prevent mass murder. Our hyper-politicized faculty on Kampus today employ the same kinds of denial and opportunistic critique to save thier silly beliefs in the beneficence of multiculturalism, in the existence of patriarchy and in the explanatory power of cultural critique. Hollander's book is a must read for anyone who needs distance from the nonsense of our postmodernists, deconstructionists and other allegedly radical dogmas of the aging flower children. All of them practice selective attention to their critical principles, scepticism for their enemies, and utter credultiy for their pals.

Rating:
Summary: Peace, peace, when there is no peace.
Review: Political Pilgrims is the amazing story of how Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. The book relates how cultural and religious leaders from the West, including familiar names, visited the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist countries, and told the most appalling lies to flatter their hosts and express their contempt for Western society. It is quite an education, as another reviewer put it. Marx's revolutionary myth dominated history for the better part of the 20th Century, and if we are serious about not repeating the errors of that period, this book should be a part of our education. The short story Buddha's Smile in Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece, The First Circle, brilliantly tells the same story, from the point of view of Soviet prisoners. Lewis Feuer's Marx and the Intellectuals compares Marx and Engels themselves with the kind of people Hollander is describing. I also recommend the writings of the Rumanian philosopher, pastor, and former prisoner, Richard Wurmbrand.

Hollander retells George Keenan's story of a Norwegian radical who, when asked what country he most admired, said, "Albania." Keenan noted that the student obviously knew nothing of Albania, but chose that country "simply because it seems to be a club with a particularly sharp nail at the end of it with which to beat one's own society."

The same reactionary psychology has, it seems to me, been transferred in our day to an uncritical and naive attraction towards what is (simplistically) called "eastern religion." One could write an even longer book about how Westerners project their fantasies on monist ideologies: people like Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong "explaining" human sacrifice, the Theosophical Society standing up for caste, Arthur C. Clarke (Did he know much more of Asian history than the Albanian radical knew of Albania?) describing Buddhism as "the only faith that never became stained with blood." Even Hollander allowed that, "While the suspension of disbelief has its place in human life, it belongs more to the religious (or asthetic) than the political realm." But his book should be read, in my opinion, as a warning against all forms of ideological naivite. A love of truth, and a determination to tell it no matter how out of fashion it may seem, is essential to integrity in all walks of life. Political Pilgrims vividly illustrates, in the political realm, the evil that can be done when honesty plays second fiddle to fashion.....