[MD] Freewill

[david buchanan]

Another point on this topic....

dmb said to MRB:
If the bombastic titles of books by conservatives are any indication, conservatives think that liberals are just plain evil.


MRB replied:
Again, we are in the area of "Frenchmen like to eat X." Generic labels rarely cover what they're boomed as covering.



dmb says:
Ethnic stereotypes are hardly comparable to ideological profiles. The latter would refer to a set of commonly held beliefs and attitudes while the former would refer to things like traditional musical styles, cuisine and such. I mean, to say that Frenchman like French food doesn't mean much, especially since French fascists and French communists probably both like French food and wear French clothes. It's apples and L'oranges, you know? 
In the West, at least, beliefs systems like philosophies, religions and political ideologies extend across national borders, language groups, ethnicities and even historical eras. You can see the similarities across time and space and from this we can make some reasonable generalizations about who is who and what is what in the conflict of rival worldviews. I wonder, for example, if you see any resemblance between the conservative base of today's Republican Party and the sentiments expressed in the following concrete example of an actual right-winger who is trying to get published these days. This guy sure seems to me like one of those folks who thinks liberalism is an evil thing that has to be stopped. Check it out and then tell me how sympathetic you might be to his cause....

Oddly, this writer thinks "literary festivals" would be a good place to confront what he sees as dangerous intellectuals.

He writes: “This is where many cultural Marxist/PC authors (the disgusting cultural Marxist and traitorous bourgeois elite – the Marxist-Leninists’ of the 68 generation (or sympathisers of this group) meet and socialise. Prioritised target groups make out the bulk of the participants who attend certain  literature conferences and festivals: Writers (90%+ of these individuals support multiculturalism and usually portray their world view through their works),  editors and journalists in cultural Marxist/multiculturalist publications, [and] a majority of individuals related to various “cultural Marxist/politically correct” cultural settings and organisations.”
He also criticized the connection between academia in a piece titled “Political Correctness: Deconstruction and Literature.” His manifesto spent pages attacking a number of “Cultural Marxist” intellectuals, including Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. He blamed these two groups for spreading political correctness and multiculturalism:

He writes: “The thing is that many of our political and cultural elites, including politicians, NGO leaders, university professors/lecturers, writers, journalists and editors – the individuals making up the majority of the so called category A and B traitors, knows exactly what they are doing. They know that they are contributing to a process of indirect cultural and demographical genocide and they need to be held accountable for their actions.”

He also rails against college reading lists: “Unfortunately, that has not stopped the cultural critics from indoctrinating this new generation in feminist interpretation, Marxist philosophy and so-called ‘queer theory.’ Requirements for reading Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and other dead white males are disappearing, to be replaced by options to take studies in ‘The Roles of Women in the Renaissance’ (an excuse to lament the sexism of the past) or ‘The Bible as Literature’ (a course designed to denigrate the Bible as cleverly crafted fiction instead of God’s truth). The reliable saviour of the intelligentsia is the common man and his common sense.”


This sort of thing is going to sound pretty sweet to the ears of American conservatives, don't you think? Of course when they find out that these are the words come from the 1500 page manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian man accused of killing 76 liberal Norwegians they suddenly find they aren't so sympathetic after all.