I shall not stop listening to Herbert von Karajan because he was a - TopicsExpress

I shall not stop listening to Herbert von Karajan because he was a member of the Nazi Party and Hitlers favourite conductor. I shall not stop listening to Wagner because he hated Jews. I do not call for De Man and Heidegger and Schmitt and Marx to be purged from the academy, but rather for their arguments to be defeated empirically, in the best Enlightenment tradition. My understanding (and since I have friends who run opera companies, they can correct me if Im wrong) is that an opera singers main duty is to be good at singing opera. Politics doesnt come into it. Be careful, progressives, with this endless recourse to the secondary boycott. It operates in a legal grey area (unions and business cannot do it). At the moment you can, but the statutory carve-out you enjoy in many jurisdictions is, I submit, vulnerable in the extreme.