Acad. Quest. (2020) 33:159–165 DOI 10.1007/s12129-019-09864-8 IN MEMORIAM Paul Hollander: A Personal Appreciation David Gordon Published online: 27 January 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Paul Hollander, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Associate at Harvard’s Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, died on April 19, 2019. His passing is a tragic loss for America. Although a professor of political sociology, this Hungarian born scholar might best be styled one of our country’s most important unofficial psychiatrists. Professor Hollander devoted his long and distinguished career to exploring the central delusion of so many intellectuals on the left, their unassailable belief in the superiority of Communist dictatorships over democratic capitalist nations, and in particular over the United States. His own life history had prepared him for a study of extremism. Born in 1932 into an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family, he was twelve years old when the Horthy regime, in enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis, deported more than 600,000 Jews to Auschwitz. Having escaped that horror, he began postwar life under Communism. He remembered until the end of his days being forced in high school to sign petitions demanding the harshest treatment for defendants in the Hungarian purge trials. The turn of Hollander’s own family came soon after. He was only nineteen when they were moved from Budapest to an “enforced settlement village.” A grandparent’s successful pre-war business had been enough to taint them as “socially unreliable and politically suspect.” He escaped in 1956, and spent three years in England before coming to the United States. Having received a Ph.D. from Princeton in sociology “because it seemed interesting,” he soon found a permanent and agreeable position at Amherst. Hollander came to the job with lessons learned through hardships entirely foreign to most Americans—that dictatorships can affect people’s lives disastrously; that individuals can wear a mask of conformity to hide their dissatisfaction and hostility; and, most pointedly, that in Hungary, as in so many communist countries, peasants and workers, supposedly the beneficiaries of the system, were in fact its most 160 D. Gordon embittered victims and adversaries. Much of Hollander’s life work was to impress these facts upon his readers, and to refute the obtuse pronouncement of western intellectuals apparently without any real life experience of totalitarianism. His twelve books assiduously probe the Western mind and are, among other things, a remarkable catalogue of intellectual fatuousness. Hollander had a lot to be angry about. He meticulously chronicled the curious spectacle of Western intellectuals worshipping at the shrine of Soviet Communism beginning almost immediately after the Russian revolution. The devotees included Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Anatole France, Romain Rolland, André Maurois, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, and George/György Lukács. For these and many others, the Soviet experiment seemed new and exciting. “A socialism of deeds and not of words,” Lincoln Steffens proclaimed, adding, “Nobody in the world proposes anything basic and real except the Communists.” H. G Wells assured his readers that “the red terror, though fanatical, was honest and apart from individual atrocities did not on the whole kill except for a reason and to an end.” This was doubtless reassuring to everyone but its victims. The end of course was a new world of equality and social justice. It may be that Lenin did not call such as these useful idiots, but idiots they were. This infatuation lasted well into the 1930s and beyond. Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and the remarkably unobservant American ambassador Joseph Davies were among those who stoutly defended the purge trials. The latter even appeared in the prologue to MissiontoMoscow(1941), a pro-Stalinist film (made at FDR’s request) that remains an embarrassment even today. Professor Corliss Lamont (son of Thomas Lamont, senior partner at the Morgan bank) could write in 1933, in the midst of the Ukrainian famine, that “the many stresses and strains still existent in Russia are justified in the light of the great goal ahead. The masses of people are making what may be called constructive sacrifices, with a splendid purpose . This makes all the difference in the world. For purposeful giving of all that is in you may lead to happiness not only in the future but also in the present. And consequently we believe there is a great deal of happiness in Russia today. The constructive sacrifice of five to seven million Soviet citizens was death by starvation. It is impossible to estimate how many of these were children. Despite all this, Hollander treats these early enthusiasts with some charity in his first big book Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba (1981). He understands that they went in search of inspiration, but also for specific answers to economic problems in the Paul Hollander: A Personal Appreciation 161 depressed 1930s that seemed insoluble in their own societies. He also notes that this enthusiasm frequently died within a few years. Yet charity has its limits, and there was never any question where his own sympathies lay. He quotes Malcolm Muggeridge’s own memories of the period approvingly Writing of these “pilgrims,” Muggeridge remembered. They (were) unquestionably one of the wonders of the age, and I shall treasure . the spectacle of them travelling with radiant optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about squalid, over- crowded towns. Listening with unshakable faith to the fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating like school children … the bogus statistics and mindless slogans endlessly intoned to them … The almost unbelievable credulity of these mostly university-educated tourists astonished even the Soviet officials used to handling foreign visitors. Hollander has more difficulty explaining why it was that, though the objects of credulous devotion changed over the decades, devotion itself never wavered. There was a remarkable inability to learn from experience. By the 1960s Mao’s China had become the new hope of the far Left. One visitor to the People’s Republic might warn that “we should (not) cling to the Chinese experience as blindlyaswedidtothatoftheUSSR...ortransfertoChinathehopesplaced earlier in the Soviet Union. One historical error cannot be redeemed with another,” but then promptly proceeded to do just that. Worse still was John K. Fairbanks, who in 1972 claimed “thepeopleseemhealthy(and)wellfed...the change in the countryside is miraculous . the Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that happened to the Chinese people in centuries.” Collectivization a decade earlier had killed 20 million people. Cuba, being only 90 miles away from the United States, was specially admired by American intellectuals. Professor Saul Landau, journalist and film maker, observed that “Cuba is the first purposeful society that we have had in the western Hemisphere for many years . it’sthefirst society where human beings are treated as human beings, (and) where men have a certain dignity.” But it was the very unpopular war in Vietnam that elicited the most vitriolic and hysterical denunciations of America. Susan Sontag could always be counted on to be among the most extreme. She wrote that “if America is the culmination of Western white civilization, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization . the white race is the cancer of human history.” There were many others like her. 162 D. Gordon Hollander’s erudite explanation of why there was so much disaffection among Western intellectuals, especially after his and others’ first-hand experience with Communist brutality and terror, was even more important than his recording of the political follies and indecencies of Marxist fantasists. This remains his greatest contribution. It was also the most controversial part of his work. Hollander himself noted that while critics of Political Pilgrims were willing to accept his description of the foolishness of visitors to Communist countries, many could not agree that the politics of intellectuals were so profoundly influenced by feelings of alienation from their own societies. Hollander divides the question into two parts. First, he asks why are intellectuals alienated; and second, why does this lead them to support Marxist dictatorships. The two do not necessarily follow. He began by observing that it used to be widely assumed that the key, defining characteristic of intellectuals is a generally (rather than selectively) critical, questioning, and skeptical mindset that is not confined to the critiques of particular, predetermined trends, policies, institutions or social-political phenomena. Nor is such an attitude compatible with the trusting acceptance of assertions (of) political systems that institutionalize the suppression of free expression. The “true intellectual” is supposed to eschew rhetorical excess and should be capable of making well-grounded, sober distinctions between different social-political phenomena and different kinds of human folly and misconduct. Alienation began, he found, with intellectuals feeling aggrieved. He observes that “within the West in particular, leading intellectuals for more than a century have conceived of themselves