I’m almost hesitant to do this because it seems cruel, but wade through the awkward prose of this piece on tyranny and idiocy if you’ve the stomach.
It’s got all the makings of an undergraduate essay: politics filtered through poets (bonus points for non-Anglo-Americans), tangential connections and sweeping generalizations, poor grasp of grammar and syntax, a fiercely leftist and delusional moral message … I thought I was reading Judith Butler for a minute there.
But there really is an odd sort of delight in watching Syed Fattahul Alim clomp along from his patron poets fighting tyranny and fascism with all their attendant idiocy to this:
Of late tyranny has changed its form and so also has idiocy. Tyranny is now dished out in democratic garb, while idiocy through a new brand of terrorism. And what is the dominant discourse of power? It is the discourse of democratic universal market-globalisation, which is bent on bulldozing the entire world into a global monoculture of conformity.
Democracy is the new tyranny! Freedom is oppression! C’mon, guys! It’s just not their way.
That’s not a new idea to the left, which for years has thought (in its subtly racist way) that democracy is merely a ‘western’ notion not to ‘imposed’ on people who are much more entertaining in colorful rags and exotic brands of dictatorship.
But we have finally found in Mr. Alim the poet of our age who might speak out eloquently against democracy and terrorism which are, afterall, virtually the same (remember: democracy = oppression now):
Cruelty or oppression and idiocy are nothing but different sides of the same coin.
Now, I probably shouldn’t be so critical of the piece. Afterall, it does appear in the Financial Express of Bangladesh. According to its About Us page,
The Financial Express and its team are applauded by all.
I certainly wouldn’t want to make liars of them. I too hope “there will be knowledge-based society.”
Comments
10 responses to “Democracy = Terrorism”
And there I went thinking Jeff Daniels was the sidekick in “Dumb & Dumber,” when it was Syed Fattahul Alim all along!
That has to be one of the most cliched and ineffectual bits of “reality-based” thinking I’ve read.
Did you happen to catch his handle on the Democratic Underground
Ain’t you guys read your Marcuse?
Despite the appearance of my being able
to do or say almost anything I want
(except smoke in Golden Gate Park, feed
my dog in a tippable water bowl, or use
ephedra-based supplements wisely), I
am actually in bondage. Repressive
tolerance! Get with it. You have no choice.
Changing idiocy is something I’ve never heard of.
Herbert Marcuse (the intellectual father of Political Correctness) in a nutshell: “Freedom is Slavery”
And, with that, the converse: “Slavery is Freedom”
I remember sitting through a fairly small chat
session with La Marcuse back in 1970 at
Columbia. What did I know then? Now I’ve
figured out that he was part of a big shift
in the Left. When capitalism provided the
workers with everything that socialism promised
but could not deliver, all those things became
bad…because they made the workers not want
socialism. Go figya!
I think James Bovard was on to democracy with his two wolves and sheep comment.
Billy-Jay:
I agree with that. The United States of America was founded to be a Constitutional republic (individual rights protected by limited government), not a democracy (majority rule). That’s what we should be promoting abroad as well as restoring here at home.
Re: Bovard
That’s a cute quote, but it doesn’t hold. Two wolves and a sheep are not a deme.
Simply put, democracy only exists when the government is (essentially or actually) the people as a whole. Factions acting against the interests of other factions destroy its very spirit, and hence mob rule is anything but democracy.
America, though, is still a democracy and is in no real danger of becoming anything else. There are stark differences among utopias, dystopias, and the real world.
I see that you are parotting David Horowitz. I always regret visiting this site. You make me want to fucking puke.
Instahomophobe,
I’m not even sure who David Horowitz is, so ‘parotting’ [sic] isn’t possible.