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Political Pilgrims
Why did so many distinguished Western Intellectuals―from G.B. Shaw to J.P. Sartre, and. closer to home, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag― admire various communist systems, often in their most repressive historical phases? How could Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, or Castro's Cuba appear at one time as both successful modernizing societies and the fulfillments of the boldest dreams of social justice? Why, at the same time, had these intellectuals so mercilessly judged and rejected their own Western, liberal cultures? What Impulses and beliefs prompted them to seek the realization of their ideals in distant, poorly known lands? How do their journeys fit into long-standing Western traditions of looking for new meaning In the non-Western world? These are some of the questions Paul Hollander sought to answer In his massive study that covers much of our century. His success is attested by the fact that the phrase "political pilgrim" has become a part of intellectual discourse. Even in the post-communist era the questions raised by this book remain relevant as many Western, and especially American intellectuals seek to come to terms with a world which offers few models of secular fulfillment and has tarnished the reputation of political Utopias. His new and lengthy introduction updates the pilgrimages and examines current attempts to find substitutes for the emotional and political energy that used to be invested in them.
626 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 8, 2022
"well, this certainly shows Joe Stalin plays for keeps."---Alger Hiss, on the Moscow show trials
"I had better orgasms during my stay in Communist China."---Shirley MacLain, YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE
Of all the instruments invented by man the mirror may be the most dangerous. You not only see yourself in the reflection but everything in the world becomes a reflection of your own beliefs. Paul Hollander, a ferocious Hungarian-American right-winger, has written a brilliant and biting study of how Western intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1970s made pilgrimages to the holy lands of the Soviet Union, Cuba and China and came back with reports that the locals were happy as clams. (A confession: Hollander taught at a nearby college while I was teaching in Maine around the time this book was first published. We did not meet, but I did recommend his book to my colleagues. Sometimes you have to travel to the opposite side of the political shore for truth.) We all remember the prophecy of American journalist Lincoln Stephans on his first visit to Soviet Russia in 1921: "I have been over into the future, and it works". Lincoln was a bit premature. Later came H.G. Wells: "I am to the left of you, Mr. Stalin. I think the capitalist world is closer to collapse than you think." Alger Hiss was not alone in praising the Moscow trials. So did U.S. Ambassador Joseph Davies: "I was in the courtroom, and they seemed eminently fair to me." Eleanor Roosevelt even visited a GULAG prison camp and came away impressed! Khrushchev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalin, plus the Soviet invasion of Hungary that year forced Western intellectuals to find a New Jerusalem in Havana, post-1959. Susan Sontag penned a pro-Castro essay: "On Ways of Learning from The Cuban Revolution and Freaking Out", while Black militants such as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael lauded Cuba's eradication of racism---for a short while. After Nixon's visit to China in May of 1972 a whole gaggle of ingenuous pilgrims made their way to Mao's China, and many feminists, from MacLane to Germaine Greer, went gaga for the supposed sexual equality they found there. (I once had a friend who said, "Mao is right. "In China women hold up half the sky"---and then some!") All of this proves what George Orwell once wrote:" There are some ideas so crazy only an intellectual would believe them".
"I had better orgasms during my stay in Communist China."---Shirley MacLain, YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE
Of all the instruments invented by man the mirror may be the most dangerous. You not only see yourself in the reflection but everything in the world becomes a reflection of your own beliefs. Paul Hollander, a ferocious Hungarian-American right-winger, has written a brilliant and biting study of how Western intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1970s made pilgrimages to the holy lands of the Soviet Union, Cuba and China and came back with reports that the locals were happy as clams. (A confession: Hollander taught at a nearby college while I was teaching in Maine around the time this book was first published. We did not meet, but I did recommend his book to my colleagues. Sometimes you have to travel to the opposite side of the political shore for truth.) We all remember the prophecy of American journalist Lincoln Stephans on his first visit to Soviet Russia in 1921: "I have been over into the future, and it works". Lincoln was a bit premature. Later came H.G. Wells: "I am to the left of you, Mr. Stalin. I think the capitalist world is closer to collapse than you think." Alger Hiss was not alone in praising the Moscow trials. So did U.S. Ambassador Joseph Davies: "I was in the courtroom, and they seemed eminently fair to me." Eleanor Roosevelt even visited a GULAG prison camp and came away impressed! Khrushchev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalin, plus the Soviet invasion of Hungary that year forced Western intellectuals to find a New Jerusalem in Havana, post-1959. Susan Sontag penned a pro-Castro essay: "On Ways of Learning from The Cuban Revolution and Freaking Out", while Black militants such as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael lauded Cuba's eradication of racism---for a short while. After Nixon's visit to China in May of 1972 a whole gaggle of ingenuous pilgrims made their way to Mao's China, and many feminists, from MacLane to Germaine Greer, went gaga for the supposed sexual equality they found there. (I once had a friend who said, "Mao is right. "In China women hold up half the sky"---and then some!") All of this proves what George Orwell once wrote:" There are some ideas so crazy only an intellectual would believe them".
May 16, 2020
Political Pilgrims is a trove of information that perhaps would be good to give idealistic leftwing students to read. Hollander, who escaped communist Hungary in 1956, theorizes why Western intellectuals in the 20th century became disillusioned with their own societies and looked towards authoritarian socialist states for meaning. First, the very freedom of Western news media and its sensational critiques of society encouraged a negative viewpoint. In addition, since the late 19th century public intellectuals – formerly religious thinkers in the main – no longer had a clear role in secular society. With no paradise in the next world to look forward to, they found it in this life. Foreign dictators were attractive to intellectuals as philosopher kings, a perfect combination of the man of action and the intellectual.
Many intellectuals visiting socialist states missed or ignored things we now know about, such as show trials and famines. Part of this was because they didn’t want to give up their dream of socialist utopia; another factor is what Hollander calls the techniques of hospitality. These people were welcomed and guided – made to feel important by having access to leaders and academics. They were given good food and accommodation, and most importantly saw only what the government wanted them to.
Hollander had his sights firmly fixed on characters like Italian communist Maria Marocchi. Hollander includes a quote from her singing the praises of the Chinese for being well-washed with soap and water and completely without makeup; but she seems to miss the dire effects of the Cultural Revolution. Others like Han Suyin, Bernard Shaw, Andre Gide and Jean Paul Satre also come in for criticism for their vanity, blindness and faulty analytical powers.
These luminaries allowed themselves to be duped by Potemkin villages: show villages (or hospitals or prisons) that gave a positive impression of the USSR or China. In the late 18th century, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great went on a tour of the Crimea – the “New Russia” taken off the Ottomans – to see her new subjects. Her advisor, Potemkin, arranged for his men to travel ahead of Catherine, erecting temporary villages to impress her. The technique has since been used many times, with variations: with model work camp in the Soviet Union, and in China with show fields bursting with rice during the Great Leap Forward. One might argue the entire city of modern Pyongyang is a Potemkin village.
It’s all valid stuff but he doesn’t look at the Western intellectuals who became enamoured of fascism, this would have added a nice balance to the book. To fill out the picture "Travellers in the Third Reich" by Julia Boyd would be a good one to read.
Many intellectuals visiting socialist states missed or ignored things we now know about, such as show trials and famines. Part of this was because they didn’t want to give up their dream of socialist utopia; another factor is what Hollander calls the techniques of hospitality. These people were welcomed and guided – made to feel important by having access to leaders and academics. They were given good food and accommodation, and most importantly saw only what the government wanted them to.
Hollander had his sights firmly fixed on characters like Italian communist Maria Marocchi. Hollander includes a quote from her singing the praises of the Chinese for being well-washed with soap and water and completely without makeup; but she seems to miss the dire effects of the Cultural Revolution. Others like Han Suyin, Bernard Shaw, Andre Gide and Jean Paul Satre also come in for criticism for their vanity, blindness and faulty analytical powers.
These luminaries allowed themselves to be duped by Potemkin villages: show villages (or hospitals or prisons) that gave a positive impression of the USSR or China. In the late 18th century, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great went on a tour of the Crimea – the “New Russia” taken off the Ottomans – to see her new subjects. Her advisor, Potemkin, arranged for his men to travel ahead of Catherine, erecting temporary villages to impress her. The technique has since been used many times, with variations: with model work camp in the Soviet Union, and in China with show fields bursting with rice during the Great Leap Forward. One might argue the entire city of modern Pyongyang is a Potemkin village.
It’s all valid stuff but he doesn’t look at the Western intellectuals who became enamoured of fascism, this would have added a nice balance to the book. To fill out the picture "Travellers in the Third Reich" by Julia Boyd would be a good one to read.
June 13, 2021
A meticulous study of how and why leftist intellectuals idealized oppressive communist regimes from the 1930s to 1970s. The willful blindness to the atrocities committed in the name of Stalinism and Maoism is mind-blowing. Hollander examines this phenomenon from two angles: the "techniques of hospitality" utilized by communist countries, mainly the use of selective tours, fine meals and excessive flattery; and a generalized psychology of Leftist sympathizers, who were estranged from their own society and in search of personal meaning (and distinction.)
The whole phenomenon was wide-spread. Some of the intellectuals come off horrible and self-obsessed (Mary McCarthy), others just come off dopey (Theodore Dreiser) and others are a bit more thoughtful and sympathetic (Simone de Beauvoir). You can't attribute their idealism to ignorance, as many early dissenters were sounding the alarm bells.
There are issues with the book though. It is redundant so I skimmed a bit. There is also an annoyingly conservative slant. Hollander is vocal about some beliefs that I find incredibly wrong-headed: that the 1953 Iran coup was a good thing, and the draft is noble, among others. I could do without all that.
The whole phenomenon was wide-spread. Some of the intellectuals come off horrible and self-obsessed (Mary McCarthy), others just come off dopey (Theodore Dreiser) and others are a bit more thoughtful and sympathetic (Simone de Beauvoir). You can't attribute their idealism to ignorance, as many early dissenters were sounding the alarm bells.
There are issues with the book though. It is redundant so I skimmed a bit. There is also an annoyingly conservative slant. Hollander is vocal about some beliefs that I find incredibly wrong-headed: that the 1953 Iran coup was a good thing, and the draft is noble, among others. I could do without all that.
April 20, 2025
I am afraid that I couldn't read this book because I could not separate it presentation from from the ideological setting - the dawn of the Thatcher/Reagan roll back of the entire post-WWII consensus and the creation of a bold new world free of its compromises and fatuities. They laughed and poured scorn at the useful dupes who toadied at the courts of Stalin, Mao and Castro blind to their bloody excesses. They believed not in a workers paradise built on a foundation of Marxists dialectics but of the warnings contained in 'The Road to Serfdom' by Friedrich Hayek and admired the 'Chicago Boys' under Pinochet in Chile. Its intellectual pajandrums would go on to find 'freedom fighters' in the Taliban of Afghanistan and the 'Contras' in El Salvador.
When you look back at the two groups the Western intellectuals, like George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Mary McCarthy, Jean Paul Satre, Susan Sontag and Shirely MacLaine, who between 1928 and 1978 travelled about the place and wrote glowing tales of the heaven on earths that monsters were creating; and the economists and political ideologues who helped governments who armed and supported the Taliban and the Contras who really is the most shameful?
I grew up in a family for whom George Bernard Shaw was a secular saint when I read his asinine pronouncements I was deeply ashamed of my previous admiration. But ultimately he and all the other useful dupes were just that dupes. They were not even on the level of liars like Walter Duranty (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_...). Shaw and the others were stupid, arrogant, self obsessed, self aggrandising litterateurs, they were celebrities to devote nearly 500 pages to analysing why these powerless people thought and said such stupid things is an example of breaking 'a butterfly on a wheel' (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_bre.... to understand the context of that quote).
No matter their stellar reputations as writers or actresses none of them had the ability to put one gun in the hands of one freedom fighter/future terrorist. They may have turned a blind eye to horror but they didn't create any. What responsibility has the supporters of the Afghan Taliban 'freedom fighters' for deaths at American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the 2002 Bali bombings, and the 2002 Mombasa attacks and of course the attacks on 9/11. Compared to that roll call the murders of the Contras are positively forgettable because they didn't involve Americans, except for those four nuns, but it wasn't really the Contras, only the Salvadorian army, also supported by the USA. How do you balance the scales? On the one hand a mountain of forgotten panegyrics to loathsome regimes and on the other the dead directly caused by the supply of arms and finance.
When Mr. Hollander writes a book about the moral failures of those who directly supply arms, munitions, money, etc. to help murderers then I may reconsider and read in detail his denunciation of those who, often temporarily, formed part part of the chorus praising the unworthy.
When you look back at the two groups the Western intellectuals, like George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Mary McCarthy, Jean Paul Satre, Susan Sontag and Shirely MacLaine, who between 1928 and 1978 travelled about the place and wrote glowing tales of the heaven on earths that monsters were creating; and the economists and political ideologues who helped governments who armed and supported the Taliban and the Contras who really is the most shameful?
I grew up in a family for whom George Bernard Shaw was a secular saint when I read his asinine pronouncements I was deeply ashamed of my previous admiration. But ultimately he and all the other useful dupes were just that dupes. They were not even on the level of liars like Walter Duranty (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_...). Shaw and the others were stupid, arrogant, self obsessed, self aggrandising litterateurs, they were celebrities to devote nearly 500 pages to analysing why these powerless people thought and said such stupid things is an example of breaking 'a butterfly on a wheel' (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_bre.... to understand the context of that quote).
No matter their stellar reputations as writers or actresses none of them had the ability to put one gun in the hands of one freedom fighter/future terrorist. They may have turned a blind eye to horror but they didn't create any. What responsibility has the supporters of the Afghan Taliban 'freedom fighters' for deaths at American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the 2002 Bali bombings, and the 2002 Mombasa attacks and of course the attacks on 9/11. Compared to that roll call the murders of the Contras are positively forgettable because they didn't involve Americans, except for those four nuns, but it wasn't really the Contras, only the Salvadorian army, also supported by the USA. How do you balance the scales? On the one hand a mountain of forgotten panegyrics to loathsome regimes and on the other the dead directly caused by the supply of arms and finance.
When Mr. Hollander writes a book about the moral failures of those who directly supply arms, munitions, money, etc. to help murderers then I may reconsider and read in detail his denunciation of those who, often temporarily, formed part part of the chorus praising the unworthy.
January 18, 2016
Humbling, being smart is no guarantee against being fooled in profound ways...
February 18, 2016
How the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
How seemingly intelligent and worldly people can be fooled so easily.
How seemingly intelligent and worldly people can be fooled so easily.
June 3, 2024
Читала в русском переводе (Москва: Лань, 2000).
Хороший пример добротного исследования без архивов (в 1980, когда вышла книга, они были недоступны). Очень импонирует точка зрения о том, что техники гостеприимства - техниками гостеприимства, но наши собственные установки и "предрасположенности" значат куда больше.
Хороший пример добротного исследования без архивов (в 1980, когда вышла книга, они были недоступны). Очень импонирует точка зрения о том, что техники гостеприимства - техниками гостеприимства, но наши собственные установки и "предрасположенности" значат куда больше.
December 18, 2020
Be careful about what these “intellectuals” propose.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews