Throwing Stones At The Man In The Glass House
[Guest Post by See-Dubya]
Ed Driscoll’s made a great ten-minute video about the trendy fascism and boutique socialism in the background of one of America’s elite architects, Philip Johnson.
Though he’s best known for ugly, brutal skyscrapers and Bauhaus modernism, Johnson’s own home, the Glass House, is famous for its transparency:
(photo from Wikipedia.)
But as Driscoll points out, transparency is something that was missing from Johnson’s own life. Johnson’s opinions in the thirties swung easily from a radical-right dalliance with Nazism back toward the radical left and back again. His tour of the radical -isms settled down after the war, and his new radical -isms were mostly architectural: modernism and, later, postmodernism. The switch seems to have maintained his reputation. Only a few critics like Anne Applebaum and Hilton Kramer ever got around to telling the truth about Johnson.
Meanwhile MSM figures like Susan Sontag and Charlie Rose weren’t interested in pulling back the curtains on Johnson’s Nazi dalliances, but were content to help him maintain his spot in the avant-garde. As with Robert “Sheets” Byrd, as with postmodernist Nazi Paul deMan, a flirtation with (or seduction by) evil can be overlooked by the Progressives…if they judge you’re now sufficiently useful to Progress.
Listen toward the end of the video for Johnson’s reply when asked in 1993 if he would have been willing to design buildings for Hitler. The irony of Johnson’s flirtation with Nazism is that Hitler hated modern architecture, and drove many famous modern architects out of Germany–like Johnson’s co-conspirators in the Bauhaus movement, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.
P.S. Gropius, like Johnson, was into glass and transparency in his designs, including the U.S. embassy in Athens–a fact exploited by Greek terrorists last year.
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we have let these people get away with rewriting, ignoring, and reinventing history for far too long.
i feel a change coming, and i love it.
long live the blogosphere.
I’m still waiting for someone to show me the long list of innocent government people McCarthy named as Communists.
It is horrifying the number of camels Progressives are willing to swallow in order to advance their position, and galling the number of minute gnats they strain if they can taint the GOP in the process.
And Henry Ford was a Nazi sympathizer. Doesn’t make his work towards revolutionizing American industry any less impressive.
A eulogy concerns the dignity that pertains to the man insofar as he is more than everything he does or creates. To recognize and celebrate this dignity is not the business of experts and colleagues in a profession; it is the public that must judge a life which has been exposed to the public view and proved itself in the public realm.
Rusty: There are some unmarked mass graves in Eastern Europe that says it does.
Even old bootlegger Joe Kennedy supported Hitler. Lots of the “enlightened” thought his policies were great. It shows that just because you’re successful at one thing, makes you no expert at everything. Take note, movie stars. Ego can hurt you.
And the woman who started Planned Parenthood (can’t remember her name right now) .. she hated blacks….
Sanger. She was into eugenics (but not Nazis). The Kennedy example was already used. Senator Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather, was linked to the Nazis as well.
These people are all on the wrong side of history. But that doesn’t make Johnson’s architecture any less remarkable.
And Al Gore Sr.? and Robert Byrd?
Western liberals in the 1930’s worshipped the great Soviet experiment and were willing to turn a blind eye to Stalin’s pogroms and “cleansing” of the Army’s officer corps (a move he later came to regret)and any other “necessity” of moving a society toward the utopian ideal. Even today the apologists for communism just cannot bring themselves to admit that a political movement that murdered 100MM of its own citizens is evil.
As for admirers and accomplices of fascism in the 1930’s you can include Lindburg, IBM, Ford, and General Motors among others. All of whom continued to interact and do business with Hitler after the war began in 1939. Some of the same fascist admirers agreed with Hilter’s racial purity programs - which were modeled after some eugenics programs run in the US during the 1920’s by states like Virginia.
Let’s just say that the 1930’s was not a time when everyone stood firmly for democratic principles.
I thought that Nazism was the radical LEFT, not right, of the time. They were the party of National Socialism.
Jonah Goldberg explains in Liberal Fascism that socialism is inherently left-wing, but that the Nazis and Italian Fascists were on the right-end of the socialist movement due to their nationalism. You’re essentially correct. Nazism was “right wing” from the far-far-left Communist point-of-view. Since the Communists vilified the Nazis so much, I have to wonder what they thought of conservatives?
Add Formula One’s Max Mosley to the list. He and his Nazi father’s past came out in spades this week in a video s&m orgy.
the political spectrum is not really a line.. more of a circle.. where someone can be so far right, be actually left..
Hitler.. the MSM calls him far right..( you’ll be hard put to find the MSM calling someone far left.. but that’s another post for another day ) but he pushed for nationalism and the whole racial cleansing thing.. as well as euthanasia for elderly people……. Anyhoo.. if you look and study groups like the nazis that encompass both extreme left AND right ideas, how else would you describe the spectrum unless it’s curved.. all the way into a circle..
If McCarthy was rooting out Nazis in the US in the 1930s with the same fervor he went after Commies in the 1950s, today McCarthyism would mean “when anyone ferrets out enemies of the state in a heroic way”.
Because Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer and Von Karajan was Hitler’s favorite conductor and Strauss was president of the Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Music Chamber) under Hitler there are those who firmly believe that we should not listen to ANYTHING they have done.
What say ye?
There were a few intellectuals who supported Hitler, a few authors, actors, architects, scientists, … . Today there are a few intellectuals who support Bush. About the same percentage. I’m not comparing Bush to Hitler, just saying that intellectuals are mostly but not always right.
There are no true intellectuals supporting either Clinton or Obama, only pseudo-intellectuals.
lgm - Oh, of course you arent…we would be morons to assume that from your post….(sarc/off).
Oy
Don’t use the bathroom in a glass house.