>and
>forgot to reply also to Chris Heyden who asked me to "elaborate" my idea
>of De Sade as politics.
>
>
>De Sade? He is an anarchist.
>
>Erminia
>
>Try as I might I can see no evidence that DeSade had any poltical
>philosophy other than that held by a member of the class of hereditary
>aristocrats; as such he undoubtedly belived in Divine Right of Kings. He
>might have been uncomfortable with the state of affairs in France in that
>he himself was not King, but he was certainly no anarchist. I don't see him
>representing anything more than a personal revolt against the rules and
>dictates of the Church, as a nobleman he probably was not subject to them
>anyway as long as he kept them within some limits--which he apparently
>couldn't.
He was a rapist, a torturer, possibly a murderer--to elevate his writings to
a poltical philosophy would be, as Orwell suggested in l984,to make the
symbol of government a boot grinding into a human face, or to suggest that
the greatest desire of the governed is to be physically and sexually abused
by the governors.
I hope not. As far as I can see, his philosophy seems to be a modification
of that of Anton LeVey; "Do What Thou Wilt"--as long as you have noble
blood.
Re the Nazis, (and Otto Strasser was kicked out of the party in 1930)
I think their vision of religion was like that of the ancient Romans:all
equally true, equally false and equally useful.
Though in Mein Kampf Hitler, nominally a Catholic, set out at length the
kind of German state he wished to create he made little mention of the place
religion was to have in it save to point out similarites between religious
faith and "Volkischness". National Socialism itself was little more than a
tool for Hitler to gain absolute power to wage a war of revenge against the
allies and "lebensraum" in the east and domination, extermination and
conquest against "untermenschen"--the Nazis used and jettisoned portions of
their program when they saw fit to gain these ends. I suppose the efforts
of Himmler, Boorman and Rosenberg to destroy Christianity in Germany set
up a National Riech Church bears out what you say about religion and
Nazism, if it could be called a religion.
>
What does this have to do with poetry? I'd say it it means we should not
read too much into a person's work, nor overlook the obvious in it. I think
Anarchists could find much better leaders/philosophers than DeSade >
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