Children of a Lesser Lessing

Campus Report ^ | November 5, 2007 | Malcolm Kline

[bs9021]

Children of a Lesser Lessing

by: Malcolm A. Kline, November 05, 2007

Believe it or not, the Nobel Prize authorities and the academic elite lionize a writer who denounces both communism and feminism. That’s because they honor her for the opinions that she held before she changed her mind.

It would be a little like the Conservative Political Action Conference honoring right-winger turned leftist David Brock for the books that he wrote 16 years ago. In recent autobiographies, former radical feminist Doris Lessing describes communism as a shameful failure” and communists as “murderers with a clear conscience” whose ideology “is the same as a passion for unhappiness.”

“The root of communism—a love of revolution—is, I believe, masochism, pleasure in pain,” she wrote in her memoirs. But these may not be the writings that prompted the Nobel Prize Committee’s description of her as “the epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

“The Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm traditionally does not quite get the hang of the writers it celebrates, and they have done it again,” David Pryce-Jones writes in National Review. “They did not reward Lessing for her journey of self-discovery,” he insists.

[steve8714]

They rewarded Lessing because she hates President Bush. Period.

[Lorianne]

Good article. Thanks for posting