"Gauchiste Intellectuals"
The British can be a pain in the ass. Especially those who cling to the comments section on the "Guardian" and "Independent" Web sites. Combative and elitist at the same time, they out-Chomsky Chomsky. They don't want to open your mind. They don't want to enlighten you. If you were worth anything, you'd already be on board their intellectual yacht. And they'll track you down and knock on your door just to tell you so.
Did you ever men a Chomskyite, or a Guardian commentator, with a pleasant attitude and a persuasive argument, who talked to you like a human being even if you quibbled with him, not like something he wanted to scrape off his shoe? If you did, I didn't. The cold shower of their commissar prose did more than anything, after Sept. 11, to wake me out of my reflexive political stupor.
That said, I still am an Anglophile. Give me a pint of Whitbread, a slice of Stilton, and a "Palgrave's Golden Treasury" any day. And high on my list of British pleasures are Oliver Kamm's observations.
Maybe because he's so good at skewering that other class of Britons, described above. Today, however, he points to this letter from Clive James, the wittiest of living critics, to the "London Review of Books," criticizing a piece "Telling us how ‘the “pure” liberal attitude’ of finding Fascism and Communism ‘both bad’ is ‘a priori false’ "
James writes:
Did you ever men a Chomskyite, or a Guardian commentator, with a pleasant attitude and a persuasive argument, who talked to you like a human being even if you quibbled with him, not like something he wanted to scrape off his shoe? If you did, I didn't. The cold shower of their commissar prose did more than anything, after Sept. 11, to wake me out of my reflexive political stupor.
That said, I still am an Anglophile. Give me a pint of Whitbread, a slice of Stilton, and a "Palgrave's Golden Treasury" any day. And high on my list of British pleasures are Oliver Kamm's observations.
Maybe because he's so good at skewering that other class of Britons, described above. Today, however, he points to this letter from Clive James, the wittiest of living critics, to the "London Review of Books," criticizing a piece "Telling us how ‘the “pure” liberal attitude’ of finding Fascism and Communism ‘both bad’ is ‘a priori false’ "
James writes:
No kind of liberal, whether pure or impure, needs to waste time deciding which had the harder surface, the hammer or the anvil. As the German Social Democrats of the 1930s discovered when they were caught between them, all that mattered was the impact. Those who survived gave much of the impetus to the ‘postwar European identity’ that Zizek touchingly believes is based solely on ‘anti-Fascist unity.’ So that’s what the Bundeswehr was doing: warding off the return of the Nazis.
... The disturbing thing for liberals now is that there are still so many gauchiste intellectuals who persist in believing that the roots of injustice might be found in liberal democracy itself, and the roots of justice in some version of unlimited, self-perpetuating power. Generously ready to concede that the second thing might sometimes go wrong, they nevertheless earn their living from reminding the first thing that freedom is an illusion. They are free to do so, and will never be short of evidence; but their position is false, and their marks of falsification are the tip-off.
