Palestinian-American Edward Said tried to create, out of thin air, an Arab equivalent to antisemitism. His book has been studied across the West for decades, even though it is complete rubbish.
The thing is, Kipling's view of the world is broader than Said's or Foucault's. His soul is more capacious. His work is richer, his vision keener. His prose is a million times more refined. There are complexities in his work that resist any critical discourse analysis. His understanding of Indian life is incomplete and biased but alive and nuanced. This contrasts sharply with Said's and Foucault's flat, soulless third-worldism. And it goes without saying that Kipling's personal conduct never plumbed the depths of Foucault's sexual exploitation of children.
You missed the point!!! Arab Islam is highly racist, supremacist and colonial!!!! They are using Goebbels' tactics: ''Accuse the other what you are guilty of''! That is their whole shtick and this is something that must be clearly stated to understand their evil game!!!!!!
Based on earlier writings, I think the author already grasps this. It seems this essay is not aimed at the propaganda you rightly identify and justly condemn (strong emphasis on rightly and justly), but rather serves as a pointed critique of a pseudo-intellectual movement that arose and gained traction within our own Western academic cohort. The accusation here is that certain Western academics turned our finest habits—particularly our propensity for self-critique and moral self-examination—against us, in a reductionist tour-de-force of motivated reasoning. The result, as this essay suggests, helps explain why Said’s work became such an effective gateway drug for under-educated Western students seeking simple answers amid a late-adolescent scramble to claim the moral and intellectual high ground they regarded as their birthright.
Thank you, Tobias Gisle for this invaluable piece ripping to shreds Edward Said’s ridiculous theory of Orientalism! Edward Said and Michael Foucault shouldn’t be so celebrated in academia as they are and their works shouldn’t be read. Said blames colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and exploitation for all the Middle East’s problems. He completely ignores Islamism, Arab Socialism, brutal and oppressive Monarchies, the oppression of Jews and women, the Holocaust in the Middle East, the Arab Slave Trade, anti-blackness in the Arab World, the oppression of ethnic, racial and religious minorities by Arabs, Arab conquest around the world, and the problems with Islam itself. ALL these things matter in the story of the Middle East and why it came to be the way it is today. Said avoids anything that gives Arabs self-agency, shows that they can be just as oppressive and bigoted as their European counterparts and that Jews were uniquely targeted in the Middle East. The European view of the Middle East is incomplete and biased, yes. But it was also nuanced, rigorous, and insightful. These European scientists, historians and scholars really did see Middle Eastern cultures, languages and history as valuable and worth preserving. He takes many things they say out of context as well and impugns on them bad and sinister motives.
He reduces the Europeans to caricatures of mustache twirling evil villains just out to murder, plunder and exploit brown people. He flattens them into two-dimensional cartoon characters. He also slaps the ahistorical labels of colonizers and racist on all western leaders and officials even though they are not prejudice and had nothing to do with colonialism. Western leaders like Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Charles de Gaulle, JFK, LBJ, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger dealt with Middle Eastern leaders as equals, treated them with respect and dealt with Arab nations and Iran based not on racism but on what was best for their countries’ national interest like they would any other country in any other part of the world. You can’t see all western leaders and every western interaction with the Orient as being tainted by prejudice and bigotry.
Said ironically, while accusing the West of generalizing about the Middle East, generalizes about the West. Furthermore, he fails to mention all the benefits that European colonialism brought to the peoples of the Middle East. Did European colonialism in the Middle East come with racism, atrocities, injustices, corruption, plundering, and exploitation? Indeed it did. But the Europeans also brought to the Middle East: liberal democracy, free-market capitalism, free trade, higher living standards, higher rates of literacy, widened employment opportunities, expanded education, improved public health, advanced technology, improved administration, the abolition of slavery, the creation of basic infrastructure, female rights, the enfranchisement of marginalized or historically excluded communities, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, and national identity formation.
Nowhere in Said’s work will you ever hear names like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez Al-Assad, King Hussein II, the Saud Dynasty in Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, The Muslim Brotherhood, The Assassins, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Hussieni, or Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Nor did Said ever talk about or condemn Osama Bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Ramzy Yousef during his lifetime. Nor did he care at all about the Jewish experience in the Middle East. That Jews were dhimmis or second-class citizens in the Arab World is never mentioned. The Assyrian and Babylonian Exiles are never mentioned. The many, many pogroms against the Jews of the holy land by the local Arabs and the Druze are never mentioned by him. The Holocaust in North Africa and Arab collaboration with the Nazis and their Italian and Vichy French allies is never mentioned.
The Arab conquest of Spain, Armenia, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, North Africa, Iran, and India? Nah, it’s all good! Nothing to see here! It’s not like they went around Arabizing and Islamizing the indigenous peoples of the Middle East at all! The Moors taking white Spaniards as slaves? No big whoop! Not worth mentioning! The Arabs were purely victims and the Jews weren’t special. Look, did western colonialism, imperialism and failed military interventions have adverse effects on the Middle East? Of course. Did Arabs legitimately suffer and were mistreated as a result of these things? Yes. But it was the Jews who the Arabs and others persecuted, discriminated against, made to wear distinctive clothing so they could be told apart from the rest of the population, made to live in segregated neighborhoods, chased out, exiled, raped, murdered, had their property stolen, vilified, and their holy sites built on. As to Foucault, I think we all know about the havoc post-modernism wrought on western civilization and the great harm his ideas have done to millions in the West.
But we aren’t racist (Ras El Abed). Great article and takedown of the man who became famous (and probably wealthy) for spewing nonsense. I find it rich that Foucault stopped talking about the Iranian revolution once all his Persian cronies were dead.
Oh, I always thought Edward Said was a preening antisemite.
My English teacher colleagues, the ones with brains (but not, it seems, rationality), loved him -- I never understood it. In later decades, my younger colleagues never read anything, so at least I was spared the Edward Said worship.
I remember when he was hurling rocks at the IDF guarding the border with Lebanon. Pure performance art.
Yes. Plenty. Columbia made its bed with said and Massad. I am sure they have many smart professors and students. Long on credentials. Short on virtue and values. Mandani thus the perfect elected leader for a city that proved it lacks virtue ( there are exceptions but obviously not enough). And college educated white ladies led the way.
Ah, Clarity, while there were an astonishing number of white women, young and old, wearing keffiyehs and screaming during the pro-Hamas riots, they were led by bearded men in balaclavas. They are sheep following their rams.
The non-New Yorker vote that elected Mamdani -- college students from away, "creatives" who'll also go back home in a few years, and older new arrivals here 15-20 years who always sell their Flatbush Victorians when the going gets tough and move up to Westchester and the Hudson Valley -- was only a million in a city of over eight millions.
The people who didn't vote, the luke-warm, the fence sitters, occupy a rung in the Inferno. It's very possible they've enabled a hell here.
I am not American. My activist time was in Sweden. So I don't recognise this crazy "call and repeat" thing the American activists do. But my word, sheep is the only way to describe it.
Call and repeat or wash and repeat? The latter is a phrase borrowed from washing hair or other items that sort of means just keep doing the same thing over and over again. Hope this helps
No. I mean specifically the where one demonstrator shouts out something. Like "we support our martyrs", and then the whole crowd repeats the sentence like sheep, zombies, or people in a cult, murmuring "we support our martyrs". If you haven't seen it you should be glad.
Substack made it impossible. Your points are all accurate especially regarding the ever changing demographics ( the less than five-year residents was very telling). I stuck w the AWFLs for two reasons: 1) I love the acronym ,and 2) one who lashes out at angry white gals can't be called a racist
Excellent essay, thanks! Thanks also to the Israeli peace activist who made you all the wiser, however, the credit is still yours for acknowledging it. As Winston Churchill said (paraphrasing): "a man will occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of the time he will just pick gimself up and continue walking"
Let's also not forget Foucault's disastrous take on the Iranian Revolution:
"With respect to liberties, they will be respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others...WRONG
minorities will be protected and free to live as they please on the condition that they do not harm the majority...WRONG
between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference, since there is natural difference.....WRONG
With respect to politics, decisions should be made by the majority, the leaders should be responsible to the people, and each person, as it is laid out in the Quran, should be able to stand up and hold accountable he who governs." VERY WRONG
He sure doesn't sound like a famous "philosopher", he sounds more like another Marxist commissar, happy to experiment with other people's lives while knowing he will never suffer the consequences or face any responsibility, as he could always retreat behind a cloud of obscurantist jargon.
Foucault not only supported the Ayatollah Khomeini, even when the Ayatollah’s fundamentalist cadres set about murdering thousands of Iranian citizens, he also championed various extreme forms of Marxism, including Maoism. In 1978, looking back to the postwar period, he asked: “What could politics mean when it was a question of choosing between Stalin’s USSR and Truman’s America?” And this during Stalin's purges and mass murders!
But I don't know who to blame here, the con man or the marks. How did someone this brazenly dishonest become the leading intellectual of 21st-century America? How did the radical pose, where you never met a revolution you didn't like, especially since the blood flowed elsewhere while you lived a safe, prosperous Western life, become the new must-have item for the aspiring academic?
Foucault and Said were both charlatans but they knew one simple fact that they based their careers on: that bourgeois Westerners and their children were desperate for meaning and purpose and absolution and would pay top dollar to whoever could make them feel these things, esp if they could serve as both careers and a way to socially signal your moral superiority. The fact that we've allowed them to own and operate at least 2 generations of young brains is our shame not theirs.
I think the marks are to blame as well as the schools and the professors who failed to teach real history, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. Perhaps a lot of young college students and recent college grads are haunted by a gnawing sense of emptiness where actual knowledge should be, and the faux knowledge of Foucault is a shortcut to feeling both knowledgeable and morally elevated. Imagine reading a proper journal if one still existed, and just having no idea what all this writing is about....then you read 200 pages of Foucault and maybe 200 from Chomsky and now when you read The Economist you can sneer down at it from your perch of newfound moral and intellectual superiority. It's a quick fix for those with Ivy League degrees and zero knowledge or understanding? Not sure....but this is one model I find myself toying with.
That's a very good point. And very prescient as the west shifts from a justifiable backlash of conservative populism towards the much more problematic upward ratcheting of dueling populisms. Looking back at western history scenarios of this sort tend to end very badly.
Honestly I had not connected the dots between the quick fix and formation of elite leftist populism....but you are absolutely right. thanks!
Yes they are very similar. Europe in the interwar years is the absolute rock bottom example. Yet you see it elsewhere too. I am no expert on Latin America but this is how it looks to have worked from the outside for decades, with left and right wing versions of populism rocking the continent back and forth with no one providing very good results.
Man you are SO right. All these people who scream "fascism" are doing untold damage to our society because this low-information lie prevents a truthful conversation about the reality--which is populism, not fascism--and prevents the initial populist backlash from serving the corrective role that it otherwise would in a healthy democracy. ( For the sake of attribution I am drawing on a stolen Kotkin thesis in which he elucidates the ways in which healthy democratic populism responds to elite overreach and forces corrective action in the form of "political entrepreneurialism" .)
I attempted to read Orientalism to better understand the enemy. It was an unreadable poncy babble of intellectual rambling to no reasonable or rational understanding. No matter the weaknesses in Muslim, so called "Arab" societies, they use Western Imperialism as the every ready target to blame. The "Arabs" had to invent themselves in the 20th century as did the "Turks." The Jews came to their conclusion about their identity some 3 or 4K years ago. The Mid East studies are entirely propagandistic with no "DIVERSITY" of thought...even TA University apparently. Just now I looked at NY Times of Nov. 7, '25 which reprints a map of USA compared to "Mandate Palestine" as examples of the loss of indigenous land to settler colonialism. The article's point it the Trump administration is stifling intellectual and accurate history in education! All Hail Said. All Hail Mamdani. UGH
I used Foucault's Critical Discourse theory in my Masters but in another field - the environment, so I have exposure to his ideas.
I've never read Said, but thank you for making the link between him and Foucault- of course Foucault was there hovering in the background, but not noticeable until pointed out.
I wonder what the new intellectualism is about the ME?
I don't think you need a unified theory of the Middle East as a whole, just like you don't need a unified theory of Europe as a whole. Like Europe there are things that are similar about the countries and things that were specific for each country. There are many good books written about the history of the ME as a whole and good scholars who look at individual countries.
Of course. I want my story to be known. Not least because so many people have had the same experience as I have coming from Western Europe. I am happy to say that the largest daily newspaper in Sweden, DN, published a slightly shorter version of the piece.
@Tobias, thank you for sharing your knowledge. Amazing how the constant mention of the name Edward Said, in supposed literary and educated circles, conveys an element of supposed brilliance and insight, when in fact, it can be ‘called out’ as anything but.
In much the same way that the parroting of lies, for years, by so many people, becomes believed as truth.
Thank you! Yes repetition can be awfully effective. The flip side is that it is very hard to be constantly on guard from bad ideas, specially if they come from people you trust. And why not trust professors in the university?
Forget all the word games in writings. The actions of the Islamics are the reason for their low reputations, plain and simple. From the Barbary pirates on down their murderous activities speak for themselves. Please inform me of an Islamic Holocaust similiar to that which occurred during the Nazi regime in the modern era.
The thing is, Kipling's view of the world is broader than Said's or Foucault's. His soul is more capacious. His work is richer, his vision keener. His prose is a million times more refined. There are complexities in his work that resist any critical discourse analysis. His understanding of Indian life is incomplete and biased but alive and nuanced. This contrasts sharply with Said's and Foucault's flat, soulless third-worldism. And it goes without saying that Kipling's personal conduct never plumbed the depths of Foucault's sexual exploitation of children.
You missed the point!!! Arab Islam is highly racist, supremacist and colonial!!!! They are using Goebbels' tactics: ''Accuse the other what you are guilty of''! That is their whole shtick and this is something that must be clearly stated to understand their evil game!!!!!!
Based on earlier writings, I think the author already grasps this. It seems this essay is not aimed at the propaganda you rightly identify and justly condemn (strong emphasis on rightly and justly), but rather serves as a pointed critique of a pseudo-intellectual movement that arose and gained traction within our own Western academic cohort. The accusation here is that certain Western academics turned our finest habits—particularly our propensity for self-critique and moral self-examination—against us, in a reductionist tour-de-force of motivated reasoning. The result, as this essay suggests, helps explain why Said’s work became such an effective gateway drug for under-educated Western students seeking simple answers amid a late-adolescent scramble to claim the moral and intellectual high ground they regarded as their birthright.
yes but if this would be taught what Islam is really about that Said BS wouldn't fly anymore!!!!
Thank you, Tobias Gisle for this invaluable piece ripping to shreds Edward Said’s ridiculous theory of Orientalism! Edward Said and Michael Foucault shouldn’t be so celebrated in academia as they are and their works shouldn’t be read. Said blames colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and exploitation for all the Middle East’s problems. He completely ignores Islamism, Arab Socialism, brutal and oppressive Monarchies, the oppression of Jews and women, the Holocaust in the Middle East, the Arab Slave Trade, anti-blackness in the Arab World, the oppression of ethnic, racial and religious minorities by Arabs, Arab conquest around the world, and the problems with Islam itself. ALL these things matter in the story of the Middle East and why it came to be the way it is today. Said avoids anything that gives Arabs self-agency, shows that they can be just as oppressive and bigoted as their European counterparts and that Jews were uniquely targeted in the Middle East. The European view of the Middle East is incomplete and biased, yes. But it was also nuanced, rigorous, and insightful. These European scientists, historians and scholars really did see Middle Eastern cultures, languages and history as valuable and worth preserving. He takes many things they say out of context as well and impugns on them bad and sinister motives.
He reduces the Europeans to caricatures of mustache twirling evil villains just out to murder, plunder and exploit brown people. He flattens them into two-dimensional cartoon characters. He also slaps the ahistorical labels of colonizers and racist on all western leaders and officials even though they are not prejudice and had nothing to do with colonialism. Western leaders like Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Charles de Gaulle, JFK, LBJ, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger dealt with Middle Eastern leaders as equals, treated them with respect and dealt with Arab nations and Iran based not on racism but on what was best for their countries’ national interest like they would any other country in any other part of the world. You can’t see all western leaders and every western interaction with the Orient as being tainted by prejudice and bigotry.
Said ironically, while accusing the West of generalizing about the Middle East, generalizes about the West. Furthermore, he fails to mention all the benefits that European colonialism brought to the peoples of the Middle East. Did European colonialism in the Middle East come with racism, atrocities, injustices, corruption, plundering, and exploitation? Indeed it did. But the Europeans also brought to the Middle East: liberal democracy, free-market capitalism, free trade, higher living standards, higher rates of literacy, widened employment opportunities, expanded education, improved public health, advanced technology, improved administration, the abolition of slavery, the creation of basic infrastructure, female rights, the enfranchisement of marginalized or historically excluded communities, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, and national identity formation.
Nowhere in Said’s work will you ever hear names like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez Al-Assad, King Hussein II, the Saud Dynasty in Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, The Muslim Brotherhood, The Assassins, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Hussieni, or Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Nor did Said ever talk about or condemn Osama Bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Ramzy Yousef during his lifetime. Nor did he care at all about the Jewish experience in the Middle East. That Jews were dhimmis or second-class citizens in the Arab World is never mentioned. The Assyrian and Babylonian Exiles are never mentioned. The many, many pogroms against the Jews of the holy land by the local Arabs and the Druze are never mentioned by him. The Holocaust in North Africa and Arab collaboration with the Nazis and their Italian and Vichy French allies is never mentioned.
The Arab conquest of Spain, Armenia, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, North Africa, Iran, and India? Nah, it’s all good! Nothing to see here! It’s not like they went around Arabizing and Islamizing the indigenous peoples of the Middle East at all! The Moors taking white Spaniards as slaves? No big whoop! Not worth mentioning! The Arabs were purely victims and the Jews weren’t special. Look, did western colonialism, imperialism and failed military interventions have adverse effects on the Middle East? Of course. Did Arabs legitimately suffer and were mistreated as a result of these things? Yes. But it was the Jews who the Arabs and others persecuted, discriminated against, made to wear distinctive clothing so they could be told apart from the rest of the population, made to live in segregated neighborhoods, chased out, exiled, raped, murdered, had their property stolen, vilified, and their holy sites built on. As to Foucault, I think we all know about the havoc post-modernism wrought on western civilization and the great harm his ideas have done to millions in the West.
But we aren’t racist (Ras El Abed). Great article and takedown of the man who became famous (and probably wealthy) for spewing nonsense. I find it rich that Foucault stopped talking about the Iranian revolution once all his Persian cronies were dead.
Thanks.
Oh, I always thought Edward Said was a preening antisemite.
My English teacher colleagues, the ones with brains (but not, it seems, rationality), loved him -- I never understood it. In later decades, my younger colleagues never read anything, so at least I was spared the Edward Said worship.
I remember when he was hurling rocks at the IDF guarding the border with Lebanon. Pure performance art.
Others have taken his place, though.
Yes. Plenty. Columbia made its bed with said and Massad. I am sure they have many smart professors and students. Long on credentials. Short on virtue and values. Mandani thus the perfect elected leader for a city that proved it lacks virtue ( there are exceptions but obviously not enough). And college educated white ladies led the way.
Ah, Clarity, while there were an astonishing number of white women, young and old, wearing keffiyehs and screaming during the pro-Hamas riots, they were led by bearded men in balaclavas. They are sheep following their rams.
The non-New Yorker vote that elected Mamdani -- college students from away, "creatives" who'll also go back home in a few years, and older new arrivals here 15-20 years who always sell their Flatbush Victorians when the going gets tough and move up to Westchester and the Hudson Valley -- was only a million in a city of over eight millions.
The people who didn't vote, the luke-warm, the fence sitters, occupy a rung in the Inferno. It's very possible they've enabled a hell here.
I am not American. My activist time was in Sweden. So I don't recognise this crazy "call and repeat" thing the American activists do. But my word, sheep is the only way to describe it.
Do you know where it comes from?
Call and repeat or wash and repeat? The latter is a phrase borrowed from washing hair or other items that sort of means just keep doing the same thing over and over again. Hope this helps
I think it goes back to religions whose adherents are illiterate, so call and repeat is a way of teaching them. I guess it's energizing.
No. I mean specifically the where one demonstrator shouts out something. Like "we support our martyrs", and then the whole crowd repeats the sentence like sheep, zombies, or people in a cult, murmuring "we support our martyrs". If you haven't seen it you should be glad.
Haven't! Too nauseated to watch.
Very glad!
Tried to respond yesterday but a
Substack made it impossible. Your points are all accurate especially regarding the ever changing demographics ( the less than five-year residents was very telling). I stuck w the AWFLs for two reasons: 1) I love the acronym ,and 2) one who lashes out at angry white gals can't be called a racist
Excellent essay, thanks! Thanks also to the Israeli peace activist who made you all the wiser, however, the credit is still yours for acknowledging it. As Winston Churchill said (paraphrasing): "a man will occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of the time he will just pick gimself up and continue walking"
Excellent essay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Let's also not forget Foucault's disastrous take on the Iranian Revolution:
"With respect to liberties, they will be respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others...WRONG
minorities will be protected and free to live as they please on the condition that they do not harm the majority...WRONG
between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference, since there is natural difference.....WRONG
With respect to politics, decisions should be made by the majority, the leaders should be responsible to the people, and each person, as it is laid out in the Quran, should be able to stand up and hold accountable he who governs." VERY WRONG
He sure doesn't sound like a famous "philosopher", he sounds more like another Marxist commissar, happy to experiment with other people's lives while knowing he will never suffer the consequences or face any responsibility, as he could always retreat behind a cloud of obscurantist jargon.
Foucault not only supported the Ayatollah Khomeini, even when the Ayatollah’s fundamentalist cadres set about murdering thousands of Iranian citizens, he also championed various extreme forms of Marxism, including Maoism. In 1978, looking back to the postwar period, he asked: “What could politics mean when it was a question of choosing between Stalin’s USSR and Truman’s America?” And this during Stalin's purges and mass murders!
But I don't know who to blame here, the con man or the marks. How did someone this brazenly dishonest become the leading intellectual of 21st-century America? How did the radical pose, where you never met a revolution you didn't like, especially since the blood flowed elsewhere while you lived a safe, prosperous Western life, become the new must-have item for the aspiring academic?
Foucault and Said were both charlatans but they knew one simple fact that they based their careers on: that bourgeois Westerners and their children were desperate for meaning and purpose and absolution and would pay top dollar to whoever could make them feel these things, esp if they could serve as both careers and a way to socially signal your moral superiority. The fact that we've allowed them to own and operate at least 2 generations of young brains is our shame not theirs.
I think the marks are to blame as well as the schools and the professors who failed to teach real history, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. Perhaps a lot of young college students and recent college grads are haunted by a gnawing sense of emptiness where actual knowledge should be, and the faux knowledge of Foucault is a shortcut to feeling both knowledgeable and morally elevated. Imagine reading a proper journal if one still existed, and just having no idea what all this writing is about....then you read 200 pages of Foucault and maybe 200 from Chomsky and now when you read The Economist you can sneer down at it from your perch of newfound moral and intellectual superiority. It's a quick fix for those with Ivy League degrees and zero knowledge or understanding? Not sure....but this is one model I find myself toying with.
True. This is how populism works. Looking down on real knowledge because "you know best" because you have read some of this stuff.
That's a very good point. And very prescient as the west shifts from a justifiable backlash of conservative populism towards the much more problematic upward ratcheting of dueling populisms. Looking back at western history scenarios of this sort tend to end very badly.
Honestly I had not connected the dots between the quick fix and formation of elite leftist populism....but you are absolutely right. thanks!
Yes they are very similar. Europe in the interwar years is the absolute rock bottom example. Yet you see it elsewhere too. I am no expert on Latin America but this is how it looks to have worked from the outside for decades, with left and right wing versions of populism rocking the continent back and forth with no one providing very good results.
Man you are SO right. All these people who scream "fascism" are doing untold damage to our society because this low-information lie prevents a truthful conversation about the reality--which is populism, not fascism--and prevents the initial populist backlash from serving the corrective role that it otherwise would in a healthy democracy. ( For the sake of attribution I am drawing on a stolen Kotkin thesis in which he elucidates the ways in which healthy democratic populism responds to elite overreach and forces corrective action in the form of "political entrepreneurialism" .)
Kotkin is great. Such an educator.
Bravo! Spot on!
Great article
I attempted to read Orientalism to better understand the enemy. It was an unreadable poncy babble of intellectual rambling to no reasonable or rational understanding. No matter the weaknesses in Muslim, so called "Arab" societies, they use Western Imperialism as the every ready target to blame. The "Arabs" had to invent themselves in the 20th century as did the "Turks." The Jews came to their conclusion about their identity some 3 or 4K years ago. The Mid East studies are entirely propagandistic with no "DIVERSITY" of thought...even TA University apparently. Just now I looked at NY Times of Nov. 7, '25 which reprints a map of USA compared to "Mandate Palestine" as examples of the loss of indigenous land to settler colonialism. The article's point it the Trump administration is stifling intellectual and accurate history in education! All Hail Said. All Hail Mamdani. UGH
Thank you for your explanation, much appreciated.
I used Foucault's Critical Discourse theory in my Masters but in another field - the environment, so I have exposure to his ideas.
I've never read Said, but thank you for making the link between him and Foucault- of course Foucault was there hovering in the background, but not noticeable until pointed out.
I wonder what the new intellectualism is about the ME?
Sorry you have to explain the question a little more. New intellectualism?
Hi there -
I guess what I'm saying, is are there new Academics who can explain the "Middle East" in a better way than Said can?
I don't think you need a unified theory of the Middle East as a whole, just like you don't need a unified theory of Europe as a whole. Like Europe there are things that are similar about the countries and things that were specific for each country. There are many good books written about the history of the ME as a whole and good scholars who look at individual countries.
Tobias, having read this insightful piece, I did a quick look on the net, and found the piece you wrote for Times of Israel in July.
Thank you for another great piece which I am sharing here .. I hope that is ok.
The ToI article needs to find its way to mainstream media, so that your coherent writing and beliefs get traction.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/i-was-a-swedish-leftist-now-i-stand-with-israel/
Of course. I want my story to be known. Not least because so many people have had the same experience as I have coming from Western Europe. I am happy to say that the largest daily newspaper in Sweden, DN, published a slightly shorter version of the piece.
@Tobias, thank you for sharing your knowledge. Amazing how the constant mention of the name Edward Said, in supposed literary and educated circles, conveys an element of supposed brilliance and insight, when in fact, it can be ‘called out’ as anything but.
In much the same way that the parroting of lies, for years, by so many people, becomes believed as truth.
Thank you! Yes repetition can be awfully effective. The flip side is that it is very hard to be constantly on guard from bad ideas, specially if they come from people you trust. And why not trust professors in the university?
Of course, the Arab-muslims are themselves imperialists and colonialists, the most successful in world history.
Forget all the word games in writings. The actions of the Islamics are the reason for their low reputations, plain and simple. From the Barbary pirates on down their murderous activities speak for themselves. Please inform me of an Islamic Holocaust similiar to that which occurred during the Nazi regime in the modern era.