@callier74 maybe this will help you understand a little of Marcuse's ideas as they are practiced in the real world. I'm not expecting an epiphany. But at least I gave you a chance to figure it out. The rest is dependent on your intellect.
Clickbait for Marxists
Just like Trump, the New York Times should condemn a hateful ideology.
James FreemanAug. 14, 2017 2:29 p.m. ET
On Thursday, visitors looked at white crosses installed at the former site of the Berlin Wall to honor those killed trying to escape communism. Photo: schlueter/European Pressphoto Agency
By
James Freeman
Sunday marked the anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961 by East Germany’s Communist government to prevent its captive citizenry from fleeing to the West. In 1989 Germans tore down the wall and then the regime. Germany was reunified in 1990 and in the years since its people have not forgotten the horrors of totalitarianism. On Friday German Chancellor Angela Merkel sought to honor the memory of communism’s victims with a visit to the former Hohenschoenhausen prison operated by East Germany’s Stasi secret police. The New York Times for its part chose to offer a different take on Saturday, publishing a piece arguing that women in the former East Germany had better sex than those in West Germany.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur offers some background on Hohenschoenhausen:
Opened in 1951, the prison provided the setting for the 2006 Academy-award winning drama “The Lives of Others” that documented the Stasi’s power and its callous intrusion into people’s lives.More than 11,000 prisoners were incarcerated at Hohenschoenhausen during its more than 40 years of operations. Those held at the prison faced physical torture and psychological abuse.Many were dissidents, while others were sent to the prison for the simple crime of trying to leave the communist country.Some of those who ended up in Hohenschoenhausen were critics of the communist regime who were kidnapped on the streets of West Berlin by East German secret service operatives.
But how was the sex? Veering again into self-parody with another in its series on the lighter side of an ideology that killed an estimated 100 million people, the Times has found another Ivy League professor willing to defend the indefensible. This time someone named Kristen Ghodsee from the University of Pennsylvania must surely be making Quaker alums proud with her argument that there were orgasms galore behind the Iron Curtain.
Ms. Ghodsee sees the Communists as pioneers of sexual equality and writes, “The Soviets extended full suffrage to women in 1917, three years before the United States did.” Having studied life under communism, can Ms. Ghodsee possibly believe this propaganda? A Penn website affirms that she is a professor in the university’s Department of Russian and East European Studies. Even the most cursory study of the Soviet Union would quickly confirm that neither male nor female citizens in Russia or any of the other captive nations of the empire enjoyed the right to choose their leaders.
Later in her piece, Ms. Ghodsee implies that she doesn’t actually believe that “full suffrage” existed in the Soviet empire when she contrasts the former Communist governments with the “now democratic” ones in Europe. But her admiration for the apparatchiks is clear:
Because they championed sexual equality — at work, at home and in the bedroom — and were willing to enforce it, Communist women who occupied positions in the state apparatus could be called cultural imperialists. But the liberation they imposed radically transformed millions of lives across the globe, including those of many women who still walk among us as the mothers and grandmothers of adults in the now democratic member states of the European Union. Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.
Heavy-handed is one way to describe the managers of the Soviet empire. They were willing to imprison women as well as men without due process. Just a year after the “full suffrage” celebrated by Ms. Ghodsee, the Soviets launched another innovation. According to a 2004 Pulitzer Prize citation:
The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country’s barely inhabitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union’s time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned.
Just as the President did today, the Times should explicitly and unequivocally condemn a hateful ideology.
***
Bottom Stories of the Day
We Blame George W. Bush
“Obama team was warned in 2014 about Russian interference,” Politico, August 14
But Who Will Pay Her Fee?
“Hillary Wants to Preach,” The Atlantic, August 6
Still No Tipping Point
“Guam’s tourism popularity unhurt by North Korea threats,” Associated Press, August 14
***
Hai Priestess Hillary
The would-be preacher
Was pre-impeached by her flock,
For they pastor up.
-- Myles C. Pollin
***
Follow James Freeman on Twitter.
Subscribe to the Best of the Web email with one click.
To suggest items, please email best@wsj.com.
(Carol Muller and Sophie Mann help compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Ethel Fenig, Tony Lima and Miguel Rakiewicz.)
Clickbait for Marxists
Just like Trump, the New York Times should condemn a hateful ideology.
James FreemanAug. 14, 2017 2:29 p.m. ET
On Thursday, visitors looked at white crosses installed at the former site of the Berlin Wall to honor those killed trying to escape communism. Photo: schlueter/European Pressphoto Agency
By
James Freeman
Sunday marked the anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961 by East Germany’s Communist government to prevent its captive citizenry from fleeing to the West. In 1989 Germans tore down the wall and then the regime. Germany was reunified in 1990 and in the years since its people have not forgotten the horrors of totalitarianism. On Friday German Chancellor Angela Merkel sought to honor the memory of communism’s victims with a visit to the former Hohenschoenhausen prison operated by East Germany’s Stasi secret police. The New York Times for its part chose to offer a different take on Saturday, publishing a piece arguing that women in the former East Germany had better sex than those in West Germany.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur offers some background on Hohenschoenhausen:
Opened in 1951, the prison provided the setting for the 2006 Academy-award winning drama “The Lives of Others” that documented the Stasi’s power and its callous intrusion into people’s lives.More than 11,000 prisoners were incarcerated at Hohenschoenhausen during its more than 40 years of operations. Those held at the prison faced physical torture and psychological abuse.Many were dissidents, while others were sent to the prison for the simple crime of trying to leave the communist country.Some of those who ended up in Hohenschoenhausen were critics of the communist regime who were kidnapped on the streets of West Berlin by East German secret service operatives.
But how was the sex? Veering again into self-parody with another in its series on the lighter side of an ideology that killed an estimated 100 million people, the Times has found another Ivy League professor willing to defend the indefensible. This time someone named Kristen Ghodsee from the University of Pennsylvania must surely be making Quaker alums proud with her argument that there were orgasms galore behind the Iron Curtain.
Ms. Ghodsee sees the Communists as pioneers of sexual equality and writes, “The Soviets extended full suffrage to women in 1917, three years before the United States did.” Having studied life under communism, can Ms. Ghodsee possibly believe this propaganda? A Penn website affirms that she is a professor in the university’s Department of Russian and East European Studies. Even the most cursory study of the Soviet Union would quickly confirm that neither male nor female citizens in Russia or any of the other captive nations of the empire enjoyed the right to choose their leaders.
Later in her piece, Ms. Ghodsee implies that she doesn’t actually believe that “full suffrage” existed in the Soviet empire when she contrasts the former Communist governments with the “now democratic” ones in Europe. But her admiration for the apparatchiks is clear:
Because they championed sexual equality — at work, at home and in the bedroom — and were willing to enforce it, Communist women who occupied positions in the state apparatus could be called cultural imperialists. But the liberation they imposed radically transformed millions of lives across the globe, including those of many women who still walk among us as the mothers and grandmothers of adults in the now democratic member states of the European Union. Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.
Heavy-handed is one way to describe the managers of the Soviet empire. They were willing to imprison women as well as men without due process. Just a year after the “full suffrage” celebrated by Ms. Ghodsee, the Soviets launched another innovation. According to a 2004 Pulitzer Prize citation:
The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country’s barely inhabitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union’s time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned.
Just as the President did today, the Times should explicitly and unequivocally condemn a hateful ideology.
***
Bottom Stories of the Day
We Blame George W. Bush
“Obama team was warned in 2014 about Russian interference,” Politico, August 14
But Who Will Pay Her Fee?
“Hillary Wants to Preach,” The Atlantic, August 6
Still No Tipping Point
“Guam’s tourism popularity unhurt by North Korea threats,” Associated Press, August 14
***
Hai Priestess Hillary
The would-be preacher
Was pre-impeached by her flock,
For they pastor up.
-- Myles C. Pollin
***
Follow James Freeman on Twitter.
Subscribe to the Best of the Web email with one click.
To suggest items, please email best@wsj.com.
(Carol Muller and Sophie Mann help compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Ethel Fenig, Tony Lima and Miguel Rakiewicz.)
