by Craig Murray, The Unz Review:
It is all a part of the same phenomenon.
Western governments actively assisting genocide in Gaza; attacks on benefits for the disabled; a deliberate official narrative of Russophobia; rampant Islamophobia boosting the rise of extreme right-wing parties and fueled by government anti-immigrant rhetoric; an incredible accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich; rampant erosion of freedoms of speech and expression.
It is not happenstance that all of this is happening at the same time. It represents a radical shift in Western philosophy.
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This shift is not simple to trace because anti-intellectualism is an essential part of the new philosophy. Therefore this philosophy does not really have its equivalent of Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, whose careful exposition of societal analysis and ideals, based on a comprehensive understanding of previous philosophical discourse, is being superseded.
If there is a current equivalent we may look at Bernard Henri Levy, whose rejection of collectivism and support of individual rights moved ever rightwards into support of raw capitalism, invasions of Muslim countries and now outspoken support for the genocide in Gaza.
The End of the Public Intellectual
If you want to find an embodiment of the shift in Western philosophy, it might be him. But few any longer pay attention to academic intellectuals sitting in their studies. The now-threadbare mantle of “public intellectual” in the West has passed to lightweight figures like Jordan Peterson and populist Islamophobes like Douglas Murray.
Part of this is institutional. In my youth, Bertrand Russell or AJP Taylor were quite likely to turn up giving serious talks on the BBC, and John Pilger was the most celebrated documentary maker in British media.
But now left-wing voices are effectively banned from mainstream media, whilst left-wing academics are most unlikely to progress in academia. Academia is itself now entirely run on a corporate model in the U.K. as throughout all the West.
A young Noam Chomsky would almost certainly be told by the university authorities to stick to linguistics and leave aside the philosophy and politics, or not get tenure. Chomsky was already a renowned linguist in 1967, when he published his breakthrough essay “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals.”
Essentially a call for academics to support the protest movement, a young professor who published it today would almost certainly get suspended if not sacked and even, in today’s climate, quite possibly arrested.
A Wave of Repression
The deportation efforts against students in the U.S. who have broken no law but protested against genocide; the fines there on universities for allowing free speech; the deportations of EU citizens from Germany for speaking out on Palestine; the police raid on the Quaker meeting house in London and the widespread “terrorism” charges against peaceful journalists — these are just examples of a wave of repression sweeping the major Western states.
They are all linked. It is a structural movement in government of the worst kind. It can only be compared to the wave of fascism that swept much of Europe in the 1930s.
The great irony of course is that it is the Western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Western destabilisation of Syria that led to the massive wave of immigration to Europe that caused the rise of the far right.
Over 1.5 million Syrian “refugees” were granted asylum in the EU, because they claimed to be on the anti-Assad side, which the West was supporting. AfD is very much a result of [Angela] Merkel’s decision to accept 600,000 Syrian refugees in Germany.
Fascinatingly, now their side has “won” and a Western-backed government been installed in Damascus, less than 1 percent of these refugees have returned to Syria.
