Except neither the Pope nor Lech Walesa were “ordinary Poles”, and Poles were not dumb, despised, second-rate people except in dumb second-rate jokes, and trying to reduce historical events to points scoring based on dumb jokes is, well, dumb.

There you go, a non-overthought response to a non-overthought remark.

It’s just ridiculous to picture the role of the Polish Pope in the collapse of communism as one of ordinary people rebelling against intellectuals or supermen. Not just because Wojtyla was an intellectual and in a political super-role himself. Even Solidarnosch didn’t go “boo! you’re dead!” all of their own. What about that little race to arms that also led Soviet economy to collapse from within? It was a matter of strategies between superpowers. With the Pope and the Vatican a superpower of their own, even if not a military one.

It’s funny, decades after even the few remaining hardcore communists have stopped deluding themselves that the rise of a communist regime was a revolution starting from the little people, we get that marxist reading applied to its collapse.

Okay, first off, the big clue is that I said “20th century.” Sorry, but I don’t think Jurgen Habermas is a big enough thinker to count as a dominant 20th century figure. (At least suggest Wittgenstein or somebody!) We’re talking giant forces here, folks. So: that would be Nazism, fascism, totalitarianism (German intellectual behind it being, I suppose, Nietzsche) and Marxism (intellects behind it being Marx, plus Hegel, whoever). About 1940, it sure looked like the century of German intellectual movements writ large and in blood.

By the end of the century, of course, both turned out to be about as vital as cultural forces as Pat Boone. Now, were ordinary Poles responsible for that? In one case, yes—Poles, the quintessential despised Slavs, the dumb Polacks of jokes current in my childhood, one of the world’s second-rate peoples, said “Boo!” and the great Soviet threat scattered like a family of cockroaches.

But Nazism? This is the part where pithiness trumps strict historical accuracy, I suppose. Obviously they were small players in WWII, though c’mon, let’s remember who first cracked Enigma, and every American platoon had a Koslowski to go with Goldberg, Tex and O’Leary. Take ordinary Poles as the representatives of all the ordinary men of today who defeated the supermen of tomorrow (as Norman Corwin put it). Slow and steady wins the race. Congratulations, Poland, the giant-slayer.

They fragmented severely over a couple of things – some academic, there is the Early Husserl and the Later Husserl followers who both call themselves “phenomenologists,” and also IRL over the issue of Patriotism and Duty and looking back at the Just Cause of WWI and daring to question it, and over the coming “traditional moral values” and “law and order” movements.

After the War the survivors went on in various ways, some of which ended up directly influencing me, and the circles of conservative Catholic academics I was brought up in, where anecdotes about Heidegger’s shames and Max Scheler’s eccentricity were well known. The idea that there ever was some sort of monolithic “German Intellectual” to be against, is patently absurd.

What exactly is it that Instapunk does, anyway? Obviously it doesn’t involve anything to do with research, since he doesn’t seem to know the most basic thing about JPII, which is that he wrote a lot of philosophy books even before he was elected pope, and just asking so what was all that about? would give the bare sketches of his associates and academic lineage and degrees and all…

maybe it’s Heinrich Boll and Gunther Grass.

You guys sure know how to grab a little joke by the throat, beat it to a pulp for a couple of hours, and hold a symposium on the corpse….

My point was not that Reynolds is particularly pernicious, but rather that he’s particularly empty. I used to read Instapundit occasionally (admittedly largely out of a desire to know what the other side was thinking), but I found that I was learning next to nothing. So I stopped. Reynolds’ emptiness is punctuated every once in awhile by something humorously stupid (like the post that’s being discussed here), and (less frequently) by the occasional post in which he winds up saying something actually reasonable (you know what they say about stopped clocks).

But I’m entirely with you on not turning him into a bete noire, though perhaps for different reasons. IMO, he’s simply not worth the effort.

(Of course by replying, I’m disobeying my own advice above.)

Heh. Indeed.

ps, From the first paragraph of Einstein’s German World, by Fritz Stern, “It was in April 1979 in West Berlin. Raymond Aron and I were … passing bombed-out squares and half-decrepit mansions of a once proud capital … when Aron suddenly stopped at a crossing, turned to me, and said, ‘It could have been Germany’s Century.’”

I think that’s misguided. Reynolds is not a Republican. He’s been bashing religious conservatives over the Teri Schiavo circus and over bankruptcy reform, to name two recent examples. Bush was roundly criticized by those on the left for the ‘if your not with us you’re against us’ bit—but I see far too much of that on left-leaning blogs. It’s just dumb to turn Reynolds into Crooked Timber’s pet bete noire given that he lines up on the same side on a lot issues that matter.

Has there really been a pattern of Reynolds making ‘anti-intellectual’ statements? Or was this just an isolated ‘gotcha’ opportunity?

The involuntary irony could only have been more striking if the face above the t-shirt had been that of Ali Agca…

Bizarre comment. I think Poles, throughout history and including WWII, have shown themselves willing to fight even when a neutral observor would describe that willingness as irrational (given the likelihood that the Poles would lose). Poland was the first country which stood up to Nazi Germany – preferring destruction to dishonor.