By 1978, Marxist class war was largely passé, and was in the process of being replaced by ethnic- and gender-based hostility to the established order. Although this hostility differed from Marxism in its arguments, it shared Marxism’s hatred of Western values and, like it, aimed at their destruction. Said’s post-colonialist theory was closely allied to other postmodernist and “post-structuralist” critiques, sharing their rhetorical claptrap and their common aim at ideological destruction. Said’s post-colonialist views had the additional merit in that probably 98 per cent of its Western advocates had no direct personal knowledge of “the Orient”, the subject they were writing about. The success of Orientalism was immediate and international, making Said one of the best-known and most influential public intellectuals in the world. The many ironies embedded in Said’s own limited engagement with Middle Eastern culture and society were only pointed out by critics much later.

Said’s contention is that Islam and its societies are portrayed inaccurately in the Western media. He is quite correct: the Islamic world is arguably a dozen times worse than it is depicted, especially by the politically correct Western Left. To take just one aspect of the effects of its culture, consider the inability of the Islamic world to produce top scientists or significant scientific research. There are 1.6 billion Muslims alive today; exactly three Muslim scientists have won Nobel Prizes in science, compared with, for instance, eleven winners who were born, educated or worked in Australia (population 25 million today), and fifty-seven who were educated or taught at Columbia University in New York, where Said taught. This paucity of top-flight scientific talent in the Muslim world has occurred despite the fact that there are no fewer than 1800 colleges and universities in the forty-six countries with Muslim majority populations. If the Islamic world did indeed see a scientific golden age when Europe was in darkness, this has now vanished without trace. According to Hillel Ofek:
Today the spirit of science in the Muslim world is as dry as the desert … Forty-six Muslim countries combined contribute just 1 per cent of the world’s scientific literature; Spain and India each contribute more of the world’s scientific literature than those countries taken together … Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg has observed “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading” …

A study in 1989 found that in one year the United States published 10,481 scientific papers that were frequently cited, while the entire Arab world published only four. This may sound like the punch line of a bad joke, but when Nature magazine published a sketch of science in the Arab world in 2002, its reporter identified just three scientific areas in which the Islamic world excelled: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction.


https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/anti-semitism/the-middle-eastern-fantasies-of-e...

Bobby. wrote on Mar 4^th, 2026 at 4:31pm:


Quote:


Taxes are as common in capitalism as in any other ism ?

At the moment the undisputed world leader in Tarrifs (that extreme tax ragime) is that awful communist Donald Trump.

Dnarever wrote on Mar 4^th, 2026 at 8:39pm:



Under communism you can't own property.

Most of your rates and now new land taxes effectively mean that
you pay the Govt. to rent your own property.
It means you no longer own your property so -
it's a form of communism or Marxism by stealth.

Dnarever wrote on Mar 15^th, 2026 at 8:08pm:



The commies run every council and every Govt.
Taxes will always increase.

I know one man who had to sell his house because he couldn't pay the rates.

Dnarever wrote on Mar 15^th, 2026 at 9:24pm:



We have a Uniparty - they're all commies at heart.

Dnarever wrote on Mar 16^th, 2026 at 9:28am:

This was a tired, lame 'joke' even when you were toddler

Marxism is alive and kicking ESPECIALLY among 'cultural workers'.

Frank wrote on Mar 15^th, 2026 at 7:33pm:



What the 1960s unleashed was a reversion to the permanently adolescent self, craving recognition rather than truth, for whom life is a theatre and to live is to be applauded.

Social media’s echo chamber universalised that condition and gave it political form. Surrounded only by reflections of itself, the self no longer encounters the otherness that alone can discipline its demands, train its impulses and instil what Tocqueville called democracy’s “habits of the heart”. Without them, what follows is antinomianism: the narcissistic refusal of any authority that does not mirror the untamed self’s own convictions. The psychological conditions for submitting to the force of the better argument are no longer being reproduced.

The result is what we see on our streets, in universities and cultural institutions: the “neo-idiocy” of the highly instructed but semi-educated Adorno had diagnosed in 1967. And it is what Habermas sensed returning, with a vengeance, after October 7, 2023, when he condemned the wave of antisemitism he regarded as a sure sign of democratic collapse.

Worse still, philosophy itself was providing neo-idiocy with a fraudulent conceptual justification. Postmodernism was, for Habermas, nihilism’s latest incarnation. His answer to it was “communicative reason”: the proposition that it is analytically and practically impossible to make sense of knowledge without reference to an objective world, against which claims to truth can be cooperatively and rigorously tested.

Abandon those suppositions and you destroy the conditions for rational criticism. Terrifyingly, it reminded Habermas of Heidegger and his acolytes, who had lent their talent to Germany’s descent into the abyss – which is why he attacked postmodernism with such vehemence that Derrida accused him of adopting “a warrior tone”. Post-modernism’s epigones, and we have many, he dismissed as wanting the glory of intellect without its hard labour.

Habermas offered no truly credible solutions. He believed regulation could force platforms to change.

But you cannot pass a law restoring people’s willingness to be wrong. Nor can you fine your way to intellectual seriousness. And regulation cannot recreate what has been lost: the patience to follow a complex argument, the basic trust that the other side is not simply your enemy.

From birth to death, Habermas was a man of the left. More often than not, I found his politics wrongheaded. But there is a world of difference between disagreeing with a thinker and watching his tradition die. His vast erudition, the astonishing breadth, depth and subtlety of his arguments, his insistence on taking every objection seriously – these were the fruits of a left formed by centuries of the Western intellectual tradition. “We have to stand by our traditions,” he insisted, “if we do not want to disavow ourselves.”

Look at what has replaced it. Derrida was personally harmless, his weapons footnotes and impenetrable jargon. Those Habermas called “red fascists” are not harmless: contemptuous of argument, quick to reach for intimidation, egged on by postmodern academics who preach rather than teach.

With Habermas, a whole culture of the serious left draws to a close. Those of us who spent decades grappling with it are the losers too. The greatest curse, Mill warned, is stupid opponents: ones who never force you to sharpen your wits. Habermas, ever faithful to Kant’s motto – “Dare to Know!” – always did. May he rest in peace.