I mostly agree with this Peter. I think people tend to forget the mental demolishing that WW1 caused among intellectuals - and for every one that went one way (left) another went right. Despite my own lefty politics I have never gone in for black and white retrospective moralising.
Cheers
Tim
On 5 Mar 2018, at 01:07, Peter Riley wrote:
To put it as briefly as possible: a number of European intellectuals artists and writers engaged with fascism including anti-semitism in the 1920s and early 1930s. If you look at their birth dates and careers most of them had been directly involved in the 1914-18 war and had recognised it as the worst thing that had ever happened, and as a result of this unbelievable, soul-destroying experienced knew that it must never happen again. Lewis blamed the drift of European philosophy in the first decade of the century towards the validation of instinct (rather than either reason or emotion) for the 14-18 war. From the information received at the time German national socialism seemed like an offer of stability and an alternative to a mounting global instinctive primitivism and thus might assure peace. They were wrong, of course, as they mostly soon realised, and retracted and withdrew. To treat these errors as simply pieces of nastiness for which they must be for ever punished, is very unrealistic.