Word: dogma
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Finnish war, after Marshal Tukachevsky and 213 other officers had been liquidated, showed that they were right. Commissars were dismissed and the Soviet Army organ, Red Star, declared: "War does not tolerate dilettantism. . . . The great Stalin urges us to face reality and not lock ourselves in shells of ossified dogma. . . . The discipline of the Red Army must be stronger, sterner, and more exacting." Marshal Timoshenko told his officers: "Teach your troops only what is necessary for war and only in the way it is done...
Girded like Siegfrieds, rabid Nazis had labeled evolution a British-Plutocratic-Jewish-Materialist theory. They abused it as "the theory of universal racelessness," a standing menace to Nazi racial dogma (Rasselehre). In Natur & Kultur, one Otto Muck recognized what democratic scientists had long pointed out, that "racial theory and evolutionary theory are incompatible and bluntly contradictory." So the Nazis "plugged" a different theory-a theory of creation, according to which man developed suddenly during some splendid Wagnerian cataclysm which thrust lower organisms into a new environment where only those creatures survived who modified themselves through sheer force of will power...
...doing this, Author Barzun believes, "the dogma and the confusion have plunged us into a state of scientific piety where we dare not call our soul our own." For this Barzun has some antidotes: 1) he would send science back to the field of technology where it belongs; 2) he would rescue purpose from the debris of late 19th-Century materialism. He thinks it was left to our century to do this job. He is not too sure it will succeed: "the possibilities which Henry Adams foresaw seem likely to come true all at once; cynical pessimism among the leaders...
...will hear about it from the pulpit for years to come. Whether he will be moved by what he hears is another question, for Dr. Niebuhr belligerently repudiates liberalism's "pathetic eagerness" to justify itself to the modern mind. He foresees the unpopularity of his dogma, concedes that little short of world catastrophe can make Babbitt think of himself as a sinner or worry about the problem...
...execution of the King, and Danton out of the way, Robespierre began to suffer from the dictators' disease-the belief that he was an indispensable man. "His respect for the people-his belief that the voice of the people is the Voice of God-has hardened into a dogma, which in his heart, he no longer believes. What he believes is that Virtue was always in the minority.' " The next step would be a police state to enforce the virtuous minority's will oh the unvirtuous majority...