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Donal Moloney's avatar

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.

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Vicky Cohn's avatar

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!!!!!!

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Nathan Woodard's avatar

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 were regarded as their birthright.

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