Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="QuentinGeorge" data-source="post: 8582526" data-attributes="member: 20990">A few pages back there were a few posters expressing disbelief that Barker could hold these beliefs while being an educated and intelligent man, with a lot of exposure and interest in foreign cultures.Please don't fall into the trap and think that believing in terrible things is incompatible with being an educated, intelligent cosmopolitan. Its a comforting delusion, sustained by the belief "if they educate themselves, they'll see the truth."Sure, you can have the uneducated thug, but you also have people like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an educated polyglot who was a member of the British Liberal party but nevertheless eventually laid the ideological foundation for Nazi theory.Intelligent and educated extremists can be more dangerous since they are capable of intellectually justifying the things they believe (even if they didn't come to those beliefs originally in such a way). There were countless smart and educated people who really came to believe in Stalinism and continued to justify it well after the point that its cruelty had become clear.</blockquote>