Free Republic

Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality. With gratitude to the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper and his important 1970 essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power” for the term and idea, we can refer to these alternative realities as ideological pseudo-realities. Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or...

Almost without exception, the architects of the Sexual Revolution have proven to be reckless hedonists and, in many cases, sex criminals who took their theories of pelvic liberation to horrifying but logical conclusions. It is long past time that we re-examined the history of our cultural transformation in light of these facts. Alfred Kinsey was a voracious sado-masochistic bisexual who shot illegal porn movies in his attic. Marriage-hopping Margaret Mead also had an affair with a female colleague. Hugh Hefner was a notorious pervert with an alleged fascination with bestiality. And it has been long known that Michel Foucault, the...

Camille Paglia is one of the most interesting and explosive thinkers of our time. She transgresses academic boundaries and blows up media forms. She’s brilliant on politics, art, literature, philosophy, and the culture wars. She’s also very keen on the email Q and A format for interviews. So, after reading her new collection of essays, Provocations, Spectator USA sent her some questions. You’ve been a sharp political prognosticator over the years. So can I start by asking for a prediction. What will happen in 2020 in America? Will Hillary Clinton run again? If the economy continues strong, Trump will be...

Two students at the University of California, Berkeley are calling for students to “Occupy the syllabus,” or consider dropping a course if it only includes the works of white men as class material. Students Rodrigo Kazuo and Margaret “Meg” Perret wrote an op-ed in The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper, titled “Occupy the syllabus” where they called for a student-wide occupation of all social science and humanities classes after they found their upper-division course on classical social theory lacked the works of women, trans people, and people of color. “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that...

The talking heads continue to yap about the source of the savagery driving Jared Lee Loughner. Many on the left have tried, and failed, to pin the blame for the Tucson massacre on the Tea Parties or, just as ridiculous, on Sarah Palin. Meanwhile, the 900-pound gorilla in the interrogation room remains unquestioned and unchallenged. Its name is "deconstructionism." Deconstructionism is historical relativism on crack cocaine. The "theory" is being freely and openly distributed to almost every college student in America. Courses in most of the humanities typically include the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In fact, it...

There is an old Pennsylvania Dutch proverb that goes, “We grow too soon old and too late smart.” Some colleges still have a youthful outlook. “In the last few years, however, a cottage industry has sprouted up in academe to measure whether students are actually learning and to reform classes that don’t deliver,” Robin Wilson wrote in the September 10, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Accreditors now press colleges to show that they are teaching what students need to know.” It’s an uphill battle. “Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning,”...

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Iran, by Danny PostelIn Persian there is a piece of proverbial wisdom that praises a statement, a report, an analysis, or even a book, for being brief—and thereby beneficial.  To a person who is not getting to the point, Iranians politely plead to be “brief and beneficial.”  Danny Postel’s book, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, does a good deal of justice to this Persian wisdom by succinctly broaching very important issues about the current political struggle in Iran and the attitude of western progressive forces to it. At the very outset Postel’s book poses four essential...

"As an Islamic movement it can set the entire region afire, overturn the most unstable regimes, and disturb the most solid," Foucault wrote enthusiastically. "Islam — which is not simply a religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a civilization — has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men"

FEBRUARY 2004 MARKED THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the Iranian Revolution. From September 1978 to February 1979, in the course of a massive urban revolution with millions of participants, the Iranian people toppled the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941-1979), which had pursued a highly authoritarian program of economic and cultural modernization. By late 1978, the Islamist faction led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had come to dominate the antiregime uprising, in which secular nationalists, democrats, and leftists also participated. The Islamists controlled the slogans and the organization of the protests, which meant that many secular women protesters were pressured into...

The Philosopher as Dangerous Liar (and Infantile Leftism exemplified by M. Moore) Patrick West Monday 28th June 2004 Michel Foucault taught that might is right, truth is relative, and history just an interesting narrative. Why do we still lionise the French philosopher? Upon Michel Foucault's death, 20 years ago this month, the historian Paul Veyne wrote in Le Monde that the philosopher's work was "the most important event of thought in our century". The rest of the world was all too ready to agree, and Foucault has become one of the most celebrated philosophers of our times, lauded as the...

THE POST-MODERNIST FOOLS AMONG US -- Falstaffs At The Gates... A grand new production of Henry IV parts 1 and 2 has come to New York. Condensed into one four-hour performance, it has been received with favorable reviews, and Kevin Kline's performance as Sir John Falstaff is itself worth the price of admission: (On the battlefield of Shrewsbury) PRINCE HAL: Why, thou owest God a death. (exits) FALSTAFF: 'Tis not due yet, I would be loath to pay him before his day -what need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter, honour...

These days conservative writers come in all stripes. And one of the most profound -- if somewhat esoteric -- is English author Roger Scruton. Unfortunately, for those with a somewhat practical perspective, most of Roger Scruton's writings are about as far away as you can get from the lively fusillades of practical wit and outraged innuendo regularly unleashed on the liberal-conservative battlefield by the likes of Ann Coulter, David Horowitz and William Grim. However, a recent essay by Scruton in the New Criterion, titled Why I became a conservative, is still well worth reading. Unfortunately, for the uninitiated, Roger Scruton...

We wake up in the morning, and our evil deeds begin before we have time to curse the alarm. As we slept, our refrigerators were hard at work giving Chileans skin cancer. We turn on the air conditioner, and amphibians grow extra limbs. We breathe and contribute to global warming. We put on our clothes and cover the world with sweatshops. We slip on our athletic shoes and tie children to workbenches with the laces. We poison the soil by eating breakfast. We drive to work and drown Pacific Islanders. We go to the doctor and kill animals. We devastate...

A Ph.D. doesn’t guarantee a conscience. In “The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics,” University of Chicago professor Mark Lilla examines the defense of totalitarianism by what he calls “the philotyrannical intellectual.” One of his subjects is the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), who taught at the Collège de France and the University of California at Berkeley. Foucault was a member of the Communist Party from 1950 to 1953 and later associated with Maoist groups. In September 1978, he went to Iran to report on the uprising against Shah Reza Pahlavi. Foucault defended the Shah’s theocratic opponents as part of a...

The most famous exports of France have always been cheese, wine, and ideas. The cheese is excellent, the wine has good and bad years, and the illustrious ideas are consistently dreadful. Today, in universities across the West, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) exemplifies the bad French idea at its most brilliant and its most poisonous. Foucault spent his life proving that the institutions of modern civilization do nothing but disguise one essential truth: the powerful oppress everyone, always. He yearned for revolution, the bloodier the better. In 1971 he said that when the workers take power, they may create a murderous dictatorship:...

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following: We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale,...