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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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I would like to cross post this excerpt about the mathematician Imre Lakatos, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

In Nagyvárad Lakatos restarted his Marxist group. The co-leader was his then-girlfriend and subsequent wife, Éva Révész. In May, the group was joined by Éva Izsák, a 19-year-old Jewish antifascist activist who needed lodgings with a non-Jewish family. Lakatos decided that there was a risk that she would be captured and forced to betray them, hence her duty, both to the group and to the cause, was to commit suicide. A member of the group took her across country to Debrecen and gave her cyanide (Congden 1997, Long 2002, Bandy 2009, ch. 5). To lovers of Russian literature, the episode recalls Dostoevsky’s The Possessed/Demons (based in part on the real-life Nechaev affair). In Dostoevsky’s novel the anti-Tsarist revolutionary, Pyotr Verkhovensky, posing as the representative of a large revolutionary organization, tries to solidify the provincial cell of which he is the chief by getting the rest of group to share in the murder of a dissident member who supposedly poses a threat to the group. (It does not work for the fictional Pytor Verkhovensky and it did work for the real-life Sergei Nechaev.) Hence the title of Congden’s 1997 exposé: “Possessed: Imre Lakatos’s Road to 1956”. But to communists or former communists of Lakatos’s generation, it recalled a different book: Chocolate, by the Bolshevik writer Aleksandr Tarasov-Rodianov. This is a stirring tale of revolutionary self-sacrifice in which the hero is the chief of the local Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB). Popular in Hungary, it encouraged a romantic cult of revolutionary ruthlessness and sacrifice in its (mostly) youthful readers. As one of Lakatos’s contemporaries, György Magosh put it,

How that book inspired us. How we longed to be professional revolutionaries who could be hanged several times a day in the interest of the working class and of the great Soviet Union (Bandy 2009: 31).

It was in that spirit, that the ardent young Marxist, Éva Izsák, could be persuaded that it was her duty to kill herself for the sake of the cause.

Though his research program is interesting and in spite of previously defending art by question artists, I now fear such ideas as memetic viruses cast evil people. How can we verify a communist correctly described the sky as blue, might it not be grey or beautiful and pink? I marvel at just how much we should throw out.

It was in that spirit, that the ardent young Marxist, Éva Izsák, could be persuaded that it was her duty to kill herself for the sake of the cause.

Grim story. Now, let me add the necessary context to understand it, and it would be time and place where it happened.

It was late 1944 in Nazi occupied Hungary.

In this context, choosing to join underground resistance group was choosing to die for the cause, soon and often in rather unpleasant way, and it was clear to everyone.

Nothing "marxist" or "materialist" about this particular case, staunch Christian anticommunist Polish resistance would also execute their members at the slight suspicion they are compromised and endanger the group as a whole. These are rules of actual guerilla resistance against serious and determined enemy.

According to an article published in an 1998 issue of a Hungarian periodical of social sciences, reproduced online in .txt format, the young Jewish woman in question was carrying forged papers and hiding in a safehouse which she had to leave because it got compromised, and no replacement could be found. Fearing that her likely capture will compromise them all, the cell members (including her partner/lover) all unanimously voted to force her to commit suicide. In 1950, party organs investigated the matter and concluded that Lakatos formed the underground cell without permission from above and was the main culprit in this suicide, was expelled from the party as a consequence and was sent to a notorious forced labor camp (interned, technically speaking, although in retrospect it’s impossible to confirm what further considerations, if any, were decisive in that). According to his social circle he was pretty much a Dostoevsky character.

In this context, choosing to join underground resistance group was choosing to die for the cause, soon and often in rather unpleasant way, and it was clear to everyone.

Why would it be clear to everyone? It's clearly false: the war ended within a year, with their team winning. In fact, this resistance leader himself survived the war.

I'm not saying there aren't people with a martyrdom fetish, but that's their problem, not an objective analysis of the situation or even a coherent strategy. In the words of one of the generals on the winning team: "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."

"Accepting the risk of death" is probably a more accurate description than "choosing to die for the cause" in this context.

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