The Revolt of the Pendulum Read Online Free PDF

that
low.’
    In exile, before he committed suicide, Tucholsky was heard to wonder whether being satirical about the Weimar Republic had ever been a particularly good idea, in view of what was coming next.
But even the brightest people – in fact especially them, and especially those who were Jews – had been slow to form a view of what was coming next until it actually came. Even then,
some of them still couldn’t believe it. Rational people expect rational outcomes. In exile in London, Freud said in a letter that there was still a chance the Catholic Church would straighten
the Nazis out. Not long ago I heard that letter read aloud, at a literary soire´e in his Hampstead house. If one of the great analysts of the human mind was capable of that degree of wishful
thinking, we can only imagine what drove him to it. But imagining that, of course, is still the hardest thing.
    The First World War had confirmed Kraus in his pacifism, but by the time he died he knew that peace, in the face of Hitler, had ceased to be credible as a principle, and could be espoused merely
as a desirable state of affairs. He had been blind-sided by events, but at least he changed his mind. Many of his admirers were to prove less flexible. Kraus preceded Orwell in the notion that the
lying language of capitalist imperialism was the cause of all the world’s evils. Orwell also was obliged to change his mind in the light of events, but once again there were epigones who
never gave up on the idea: it was too attractive as a catch-all explanation. And there is something to it, after all. But the idea has an imperialism of its own, which we can now see most clearly
expressed in the patronising assumption that nobody would behave irrationally unless driven to it by the dominant West, with America to the forefront. In its extreme form, this mass delusion of the
intellect comes up with brain-waves like the one about President Bush having arranged the attack on the World Trade Centre. Since it was always clear that President Bush was barely capable of
arranging to recite his own name with the words in the right order, it seems a bizarre notion.
    It is quite possible to imagine Kraus having a fun time with Bush’s use of language, although first it would have to be translated into German, and before that it would have to be
translated into English. Commentators who amuse themselves today with the verbal output of Bush are following Kraus. If Kraus were here, he might point out that their target is a sitting duck.
Kraus, before Orwell and even before H. L. Mencken, was the ancestor of many of our best sceptics, and almost all of our best bloggers. (The blogger technique of glossing some absurdity highlighted
in a mainstream publication was what Kraus did in every issue of Die Fackel and even in his enormous play The Last Days of Mankind , which consisted almost entirely of citations from
newspapers and periodicals.) But his biographer, who has gained a dangerous authority by the sheer magnitude of his labours, takes a lot on himself when he assumes that Kraus would have been
against armed intervention in the Middle East as an example of our being led into folly by ‘propaganda for war’.
    The phrase is of Timms’s coinage, and rings like pewter. By the time Kraus died, he knew that there could be an even bigger danger in propaganda for peace. Some of the brightest people in
Europe, up to and including Bertrand Russell, preached non-violence up to and beyond the day Hitler invaded Poland. The British Labour Party, sitting in opposition to the Conservatives, denounced
fascism but also denounced any proposed armed opposition to it as warmongering. In service to the great analyst of cliche´, Timms is hampered not only by his Cultural Studies jargon (the
leaden word ‘discourse’ riddles the text) but by an untoward propensity for not spotting what a current cliche´ is. The two drawbacks are connected, by his tin ear. Kraus, whom
Timms