#lincoln steffens

[macrolit]

Literary history that happened on 6 April

[gettothedancing]

“The paintings were not there because Jordan had any totalitarian sympathies, but because he wanted to remind himself of something he knew he and everyone else would rather forget: that over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia,” Doidge writes.

It’s easy to forget that people like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao were not actually monsters. They were simply people who did monstrous things in their quest to build utopias.

“Our policy was to provide an affluent life for the people,” Pol Pot once explained in a famous 1979 interview with The Guardian. “There were mistakes made in carrying it out.”

It was the great lie that bewitched so many in the 20th century—the idea that a more perfect world could be built through collectivism and coercion. And it was one that consumed many people, not just the devils of history.

“I have seen the future and it works,” the American investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens once observed after visiting Stalin’s Soviet Union.

It seems absurd to think anyone could possibly forget that a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia—until you realize many of us have. The horrors of collective power seem mostly a distant memory, especially among intellectuals. There was a time when many intellectual giants—Aldous Huxely, George Orwell, and J.R.R. Tolkien, among them—saw concentrated government power as perhaps the greatest threat to humanity.

“It’s probable that all the world’s governments will be more or less completely totalitarian even before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain,” Huxley observed not long after the conclusion of the Second World War. “Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism.”

[oldshowbiz]

Marilyn Monroe loved the work of anti-imperialist, anti-big-oil, anti-war muckraker Lincoln Steffens. Marilyn said:

“The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. It was the first book I'd read that seemed to tell the truth about people and life. It was bitter but strong. It didn't just echo the half lies I'd always heard about how people loved each other and how justice always triumphed and how the important people of the nation always did the right thing for their country. 

“Lincoln Steffens knew all about poor people and about injustice. He knew about the lies people used to get ahead, and how smug rich people sometimes were. It was almost as if he'd lived the hard way I'd lived. I loved his book. “Mr. Mankiewicz asked me one day what was the book I was reading on the set. I told him it was the Steffens autobiography and I started raving about it. Mr. Mankiewicz took me aside and gave me a quiet lecture. ‘I wouldn't go around raving about Lincoln Steffens,’ he said. ‘It's certain to get you into trouble. People will begin to talk of you as a radical.’ ‘A radical what?’ I asked. ‘A political radical,’ “I couldn't imagine anybody picking on me because I admired Lincoln Steffens. ... A few days later the publicity department asked me to write out a list of the ten greatest men in the world. I wrote the name Lincoln Steffens down first ... I continued to read the second volume secretly and kept both volumes hidden under my bed. Hiding Lincoln Steffens under my bed was the first underhanded thing I'd ever done.”

[lanaturnerhascollapsed]

The New Movie, March 1933

[dmarchesiart]

[keithanime]

It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.

Lincoln Steffens

[newdejima]

Lincoln Steffens: Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization

[sublimequotesilove]

Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.

Lincoln Steffens.