Britannia Radio

British Foreign Secretary Justifies Terrorism

From the desk of A. Millar on Tue, 2009-08-18 18:23

“But there is no freedom to cry fire in a crowded theatre,” asserted Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband a few months back. That was when he was justifying the ban on Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders entering Britain – supposedly a danger to social cohesion. Wilders had done the unthinkable, of course, by acknowledging that Muslim terrorists use passages from the Koran as justification for their acts of terror

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Snapshots Of The Continent Entre Deux Guerres: Keyserling’s Europe (1928)

 And Spengler’s Hour Of Decision (1934)

From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Tue, 2009-08-18 16:33

Swiftly on beginning my graduate-student career in 1984 I observed that people calling themselves intellectuals – the kind of people whom one met in those days as fellows in graduate humanities programs – tended to be obsessed with topicality and immediacy.  Some adhered explicitly to one or another ideology of the a-historical, identifying so strongly with a perceived avant-garde or “cutting edge” that yesterday struck them as contemptible, a thing to be denounced so as to make way for the reformation of existence.  But the majority were (and I suppose are) conformists looking for cues about what effective poses they might strike or words employ to signify their being “with it.”  To be “with it” in a comparative literature program in California in the mid-1980s meant to be conversant with “theory,” and “theory” in turn meant the latest oracular pronouncement by the Francophone philosophe du jour, as issued almost before the writer wrote it by the those beacons of scholastic responsibility, the university presses.  First it was Michel Foucault, then Jacques Derrida, and then Jean-Michel Lyotard.  As tomorrow swiftly became yesterday, one sensed a panic to keep up with the horizonless succession of “with-it” gurus in fear that one might appear to others, better informed, as clownishly derrière-garde.

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