Posted on 06/24/2004 2:49:54 PM PDT by NZerFromHK
GERMAINE Greer this week went on BBC television and appealed for help.
"It's about time, I reckon, we resuscitated the Communist Party." No one on the panel with her blinked at this evil idea -- although whether because they agreed with it or thought Greer was crazy and best ignored, I can't tell.
I'd understand if some thought the latter. On the same show, Greer, famed for leading the feminist revolution with her The Female Eunuch, offered a nutty excuse for Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving cars.
"I get a bit worried about certain heavily veiled ladies driving because they have no peripheral vision at all," she said. "You can understand why in some countries they are not allowed to drive."
Oh, so that's why. And women are beheaded there because . . .?
But is Greer really just a look-at-me loud mouth, or another disaffected intellectual making excuses for totalitarians, and calling for the return of a creed responsible for 100 million deaths?
It's true she'll tell noisy untruths, and revel in the fuss. There was her claim that she'd never return to Australia until the Government said sorry to Aborigines, and her boast of being an "honorary Aborigine".
But Greer does show which way the intellectual wind blows. She does, after all, like applause, and consider: she is a university lecturer, and was a guest at Melbourne's Writers Festival, where she condemned the war to free Iraq. She was also asked to write for the "prestigious" Quarterly Essay, published by Melbourne's Black Ink.
Her essay, republished in Britain last week, was typically hostile to Western civilisation and an even more typically grovel to primitive autocracies, free of freedom.
In it, Greer suggested we become an "Aboriginal republic" and a "hunter-gatherer nation", guided by a "council of elders".
This racist dreaming of a lost Eden fitted in with Quarterly Essay's earlier offerings, such as Robert Manne's "proof " there was a "stolen generation" and fellow academic Amanda Lohrey's hymn to the Greens.
Just why intellectuals such as Greer should worship the idea of the noble savage needs a book to tell.
Blame the lack of faith of so many, perhaps, and their quest for a heaven on earth. In earth.
For instance, Greer's latest gardening column savages the Australia exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show, and praises New Zealand's so: "It was dominated by tall tree-ferns brought all the way from Mt Ngoggotaha in the central North Island, a place sacred to the patupaiarehe, divine guardians of nature. Elders of the Ngati Whakane, traditional custodians of the mountain, had selected the ferns and blessed them . . ."
Scary, because we now know the step from adoring Mother Earth to worshipping a Fatherland, or some other totalitarian god, is small. Most members of Germany's main green groups -- and many intellectuals -- joined the Nazis by 1939, far more enthusiastically than did, say, lawyers.
There's just something in the totalitarian causes that intellectuals like. Maybe it's the on-paper perfection of grand plans. Maybe the headiness of a cause. Maybe the kicking over of old restraints and traditions.
AND, as Greer shows, intellectuals seem very keen to believe lies which suit their theories.
Malcolm Muggeridge said that as a reporter in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s, he was stunned by the intellectuals "who flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca".
He said foreign journalists there would compete to tell them the most "outrageous fantasy" about the joys of life under Stalin, and scored a point if their dupes wrote up their lies as true.
He himself won "considerable acclaim" for his own whopper: "That the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organising a queue for them to stay in.
"I laugh at it all now, but . . . you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which even a half-witted boy would see through in an instant."
"Credulous fools," Muggeridge called them then.
And hearing Greer, the "honorary Aborigine", call for the return of the communists, we're reminded there's still an awful lot of them around today.
I speak American, not English, and definitely NOT Aussie or KIWI..can anyone please translate that headline?
I'm not a native speaker either, but I guess the title would be something like this in international English:
The kook, communist, feminist, and environmentalist show off
It's awfully easy to be a hardcore Leftist when one is protected by the US nuclear shield, isn't it?
That's why Greer lives in Europe instead of Australia. Europe has this shield, but more importantly, rank-and-file Australians are far too pro-US to her tastes! (She once described that she is ashamed of Australia that she won't return to the country of her birth.)
IMHO Greer is the Australian equivalent of an intellectual class Michael Moore. She is on the far-left fringe of Australian political spectrum (although by Canadian standards, she is a standard centre-left ;-))
Thanks..great link..or, I could just but a case of Foster's...
"I speak American, not English, and definitely NOT Aussie or KIWI..can anyone please translate that headline?"
Yes. "Koori" is an aboriginal (equivalent to our American use of "aborigine"). The rest of the title is American enough, language-wise.
What a lot of more effeminate men and feminist women don't like to understand is that feminism is communist, anti-American, anti-British, anti-Australian, anti-New Zealand, anti-family, anti-free-market and pro-terrorist. But feminists do lurk in conservative fora to try to mislead. They pretend to be babes to idiots, but they are often hideous in appearance and humorless in demeanor. Men who crawl and lech after them are often those who are hideously effeminate and cannot get a heterosexual date with any healthy, truly conservative (and therefore, absolutely anti-feminist) woman.
We should send all the Western "elite" windbags to the Middle East and let them have a go at creating paradise.
"...intellectuals....to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which even a half-witted boy would see through in an instant."
The Truth which this half-witted boy can see is that they are not taken in at all. This is the world-system they desire, whereby the "intellectual elite" can rule the "masses." It's the old "I'm better than you are," power trip.
It's about time, I reckon, we resuscitated the Communist Party."
We already did here! It's called the DNC & the democrat party.
Sounds like Michael Moore or Chomsky. Every country has their kooks.
You have said it all!
The atheists are aboriginal fundamentalists now! (But don't only "indigenous peoples" have the right to be "hunters???")
I can't wait until us rednecks and our "primitive" religion becomes a leftist cause celebre! Hey, Black Baptists get away with it!
Germaine Greer a Stalinist..? Who woulda thunk?
A rat is a dog is a pig is a feminist (with profound apologies to rats, dogs and pigs...).
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