/lit/ - Literature

>>15803987
>>15804142
>>15804309
>>15804317
>>15804496
>>15805073
Anyone who calls "My Struggle" "Min Kamp" is being an asshole and trying to bait people into scanning it wrong.

>>15804309
It's funny, I am a very well read in political philosophy, and while I fucking hate Stalin and Mao (my grandparents were Trotskyists), both of them were obviously geniuses; they just valued power over attempting to build communism. Hence how they ended up at the top of the heap after their respective revolutions died down. Their genius (if you read the book left you will see that Stalin would be a conventional prodigy in the U.S., getting a full ride to Harvard or some shit) meant nothing once it wandered out of their areas of expertise: bureaucratic maneuvering and public opinion. It's almost comforting that the closest thing we've had to übermenschen were complete amateurs at other pursuits (e.g. Mao at economics), if they did not get millions of people fucking killed. It is also reassuring to know that the economic plans of almost every other Soviet and PRC communist seem extremely reasonable and like they would have worked, but then we have to ask ourselves: is it possible for a party able to win the revolution to then have the structure to allow power to dissipate back down? I don't think it is a coincidence that the more promising (AKA democratic) forms of revolutionary socialism have always been defeated by those more ruthless and with less regard for human life (e.g. Council Communism is Germany, the Workers Opposition in USSR, the Communards in France). In the end, it seems like the Social Democrats descended from late Kautsky and Hilferding have done more good than everyone else.

This is a long way of saying that Mao and Stalin were geniuses but that doesn't mean that they were good leaders. It's also why when libs (Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review! Chuck Schumer got a perfect SAT score! Mayo Pete can """speak""" 7 languages!) and right-wingers (Shapiro went to Harvard!) talk about how smart their guys are as though the sort of conventional academic brilliance means anything more than being good at school, we can safely tell them to go fuck themselves. It's almost as though some people are not really born better than others and we need to understand that everyone has value and talents, and no one person can rule society as a philosopher king. Who would have thunk.

>>15806239
Yeah it fucking rocks. No clue how he became a Nazi because it's one of the greatest books of all time. Really makes me wish he finished it when he still cared instead of getting bored. I was into Sartre and co. for awhile but once I read Heidegger I realized (besides de Beauvoir) they are literally all pseuds who added nothing except a sexy French translation. There's a normie book called Existentialist Café my gf read during this time and she seemed to follow 90% of what I was doing with 1/20th the effort; would definitely recommend newbies start there