Cobalt, You might find this interesting.
policyreview.org
Charmed by Tyranny
By Steven Menashi
MARK LILLA.
The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics.
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. 230 PAGES.
$24.95
UPON HIS liberation from Auschwitz and
Dachau after World War II, the Polish writer
Tadeusz Borowski set about recording the realities
of life in the concentration camp, producing such
important works as This Way to the Gas, Ladies and
Gentlemen, and Other Stories and We Were in
Auschwitz. His literary ambitions led him back to
Poland, where pursuing a literary career meant
submission to official communist orthodoxy.
Because of his great talent, the party embraced the
young writer, who soon became a famous and
prolific journalist. But Borowski’s journalistic work
increasingly lacked the artistry of his earlier prose.
He produced flat propaganda articles for the
Communist Party until, at the age of 29, Borowski
killed himself in his home. “His mind, like that of so
many Eastern intellectuals,” the poet Czeslaw
Milosz wrote of Borowski, “was impelled toward
self-annihilation.”
Borowski is one of four intellectuals profiled by
Milosz in his 1953 work, The Captive Mind, which
chronicles the debilitating impact of the official
Stalinist doctrines of dialectical materialism and
socialist realism on the minds of his countrymen.
Mark Lilla offers his latest book, The Reckless Mind:
Intellectuals in Politics, as “a modest companion” to
Milosz’s work. But The Reckless Mind turns out to
be not so modest at all, for Lilla takes as his subject
a question even more vexing than Milosz’s. We may
understand why intellectuals living under tyranny,
jaded by the degradations of war and intimidated by
a totalitarian state, would submit to regnant
orthodoxy. But what accounts for tyranny’s
apologists in free societies? Why would an
intellectual, unthreatened by censorship or official
coercion, seek to justify repressive, dictatorial
regimes “or, as was more common,” Lilla writes, “to
deny any essential difference between tyranny and
the free societies of the West?” Lilla seeks to
answer the question, as Milosz did, through a series
of profiles of modern intellectuals.
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