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Letters
Letters
Sartre Wars • Sceptical Inquiries • Don’t Believe This Letter • Secular Arguments • Miracle, Probability and Law • Race and Science • Missing Virtues • Load of Balls • B*llsh*t! • Let’s Get Physical
Sartre Wars
DEAR EDITOR: Thank you for the high entertainment value in the Sartre Bumper Issue. The two sparkling contributions on Sartre’s cack-handed politics from the UK Society for Sartre Studies included many bon-mots on Sartre’s status as a ‘critical traveling companion’ of Soviet Communism. Thus we have from Benedict O’Donohoe: “Sartre’s unshakeable commitment to freedom meant that he was always on the side of the oppressed and dispossessed”, and “Sartre denounced the Gulags … as early as 1950”. How impressed one is by an ‘early’ recognition of a systematic campaign of mass murder twenty five years after it began depends on whether you think Sartre can have somehow failed to notice such obscure and unreported events as: six million dead in the politically-engineered Ukrainian collectivization famine, the Soviet agitation against the Spanish Republic, the Nazi- Soviet pact, the fact that Stalin was Hitler’s ally when he occupied Paris, the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, etc etc. It is not as if there weren’t people on the progressive side of politics pointing out these facts (e.
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