Everyone who has read Stapledon know he is not an orthodox Marxist, meaning Benford's introduction is not a historical or critical introduction. (Critical does not merely mean negative or pejorative, it means to place into context, to take as objective a view as possible. The negativity is a by product of the way so many works benefit more from an uncritical appreciation.)
If Benford had been writing a critical foreword, he might have noted that playing around with tropes about national character sort of assumes that such a concept as national character is meaningful, which it is not. He could have concluded that all that stuff was outdated and vacuous. And he might have added that it is another way Stapledon departs from Marxism, were he actually interested in Stapledon's thinking.
Instead, making an issue of Stapledon's alleged anti-Americanism is meant to inflame the reader, however little.
If Benford had been writing a critical foreword, he might have noted that playing around with tropes about national character sort of assumes that such a concept as national character is meaningful, which it is not. He could have concluded that all that stuff was outdated and vacuous. And he might have added that it is another way Stapledon departs from Marxism, were he actually interested in Stapledon's thinking.
Instead, making an issue of Stapledon's alleged anti-Americanism is meant to inflame the reader, however little.
