Saturday, July 17, 2010
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Lee Smith: Hollow Men - Why Israel's enemies will always be the darlings of Western intellectuals - '...this attraction of the intellectuals to the flame of the resistance is not simply based on eros alone. There is also the aspect of thanatos, the death instinct. The sad reality is that all organisms--men and the nations they populate--carry within them the seeds of their own end. While the normal run of men unwittingly nurture their demise through the wrong that has become habit and custom, the suicide overruns all limits. In reality, it is not Israel that our intellectuals despise, for that hatred is simply the latest pattern in a long century that the West's self-loathing has taken. It is ourselves that we cannot abide.'
Bingo!
Western intellectionists would be the better, the more applicable term, rather than "intellectuals," at least so if the latter term is intended to convey coherence, cogency, responsibly and commensurately weighted analyses, etc.
By contrast, the former term can serve to denote little or nothing more than knee-jerk reactions, ad hoc obfuscations, temporizing and would-be ex cathedra pronouncements, tendentious casuistries, proleptic certitudes, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.