Whodunnit? wrote:.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_SartreIn his essay "Paris under the Occupation", Sartre wrote that the "correct" behaviour of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisians into complicity with the occupation, accepting what was unnatural as natural:
The Germans did not stride, revolver in hand, through the streets. They did not force civilians to make way for them on the pavement. They would offer seats to old ladies on the Metro. They showed great fondness for children and would pat them on the cheek. They had been told to behave correctly and being well-disciplined, they tried shyly and conscientiously to do so. Some of them even displayed a naive kindness which could find no practical expression.
Sartre noted when Wehrmacht soldiers asked Parisians politely in their German-accented French for directions, people usually felt embarrassed and ashamed as they tried their best to help out the Wehrmacht which led Sartre to remark "We could not be natural". French was a language widely taught in German schools and most Germans could speak at least some French. Sartre himself always found it difficult when a Wehrmacht soldier asked him for directions, usually saying he did not know where it was that the soldier wanted to go, but still felt uncomfortable as the very act of speaking to the Wehrmacht meant he had been complicit in the Occupation. Ousby wrote: "But, in however humble a fashion, everyone still had to decide how they were going to cope with life in a fragmenting society ... So Sartre's worries ... about how to react when a German soldier stopped him in the street and asked politely for directions were not as fussily inconsequential as they might sound at first. They were emblematic of how the dilemmas of the Occupation presented themselves in daily life". Sartre wrote the very "correctness" of the Germans caused moral corruption in many people who used the "correct" behavior of the Germans as an excuse for passivity, and the very act of simply trying to live one's day-to-day existence without challenging the occupation aided the "New Order in Europe", which depended upon the passivity of ordinary people to accomplish its goals.
Sartre being of course and 'existentialist' and well Marxist, too.
His work after Stalin's death, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), appeared in 1960 (a second volume appearing posthumously). In the Critique Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity was fallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with a leading leftist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx. In the late 1950s, Sartre began to argue that the European working classes were too apolitical to carry out the revolution predicated by Marx, and influenced by Frantz Fanon started to argue it was the impoverished masses of the Third World, the "real damned of the earth", who would carry out the revolution.[72] A major theme of Sartre's political essays in the 1960s was of his disgust with the "Americanization" of the French working class who would much rather watch American TV shows dubbed into French than agitate for a revolution.[53]
Sartre went to Cuba in the 1960s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age"[73] and the "era's most perfect man".[74] Sartre would also compliment Guevara by professing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel".[75] However he stood against the persecution of gays by Castro's government, which he compared to Nazi persecution of the Jews, and said: "In Cuba there are no Jews, but there are homosexuals".[76]
This Marxian/existentialist cross was typical for many in the intelligentsia during the era immediately after the war. It reflected in the fashion, architecture as well. Sartre may have been a bit between the chairs there. He was reading Marin Heidegger (a National Socialist) in captivity and that was indeed high brow philosophy compared to the vulgar philosophizing of Marx and Engels. So naturally he had to compensate for this by disparaging the Germans... that actually treated him rather well.
Whodunnit? wrote:Oy vey, let's pull out some BS-psychoanalysis to explain why the French weren't keen on dying and killing for something which was not in their interest. So a if an occupation army (which occupied the country that declared war on them) acts "morally correct" and polite, it causes moral corruption in the people of the occupied country. Think about how completely backwards this is.
Most French weren't keen on war with Germany (or for that matter, war with anyone else). But they were pushed into it by their elites that were committed by grandstanding and probably had a dislike for the Germans due to them performing better in industries, arts and sciences at that stage.
So yes, Sartre can't say that of course rather 'psychoanalyze" people, which is basically interpreting something into people's behavior, something which is essentially made up. Sartre lets it sound plausible, too. And I guess the 'correct' behavior of the Germans is what he and many other French people did experience during the occupation. For some that seems to have caused some cognitive dissonance indeed. And that may also explain why the French left went ape-shit over "Nazi atrocities".
Whodunnit? wrote:Reality is: the "french resistance" was a relatively small group of communists, jews and british spies that did not have the support of the population. In other western European countries resistance was almost non-existent. Even in "Bohemia and Moravia" all partisan groups were parachuted in by Britain and the USSR. I am not exaggerating. There was no noteworthy organic resistance movement in "Czechoslovakia".
Indeed, they were not the 'grass roots movements' they were made to appear. Although there were frequent broadcasts inciting the people to engage in partisan warfare. The vast majority of people did not want to do this, though. If partisan/resistance grops were perhaps a couple of thousand per country than this is a lot. There were plenty more people volunteering for the Waffen-SS.
And yes, the partisans had to be supplied from outside and this even massively. It was the partisan warfare that was unlawful not the German/Axis attempts to suppress it.
And again that's a reason to play stuff up so you can distract from the matter by muddying the waters.
