Home - Politics - The modern left - The mind of the left

From bureaucrash.com (and search). Che Guevara was, of course, a fighter for tyranny, not freedom. He fought against human rights, not for them.

Postmodernism The left is racist The left's historical support for tyranny The left's modern support for Islamic Fascism The left is partly to blame for Islamic Fascism The Irish left

The mind of the left - The continued appeal of socialism and totalitarianism to the young

Stanley Kurtz describes the leftist mind I know so well in Ireland. Defending democracy and opposing tyranny "is just too obvious - too embarrassing" for the sophisticated modern mind. The young modern leftist prefers to feel that only he understands the true state of the world - that the rest of the population is too "stupid" to see it.

The ordinary people don't agree with him because they have their consent "manufactured" by the media - they do not think for themselves - but the leftist does. He can see beyond the propaganda and realise that the poverty, famine and tyranny in the world is caused by the West (rather than, for example, by the moronic ideas of the non-western world). Concepts like "The Free World" are the absurd and simple-minded propaganda of ignorant Americans who do not understand the world. The ordinary people deal in concepts like "good" and "evil". - Our leftist sophisticate understands how simplistic such ideas are, and how genocidal police states are just another culture, and not to be regarded simplistically as "inferior".

The leftist liberates himself from the ideas of the "stupid" people around him, and feels vastly superior to them. In the extreme case he will quite literally end up defending tyranny and opposing democracy.

The ordinary people have no irony. They just say flat out that America is "superior" to some illiterate Islamic theocracy, or some famine-wracked totalitarian gulag state. The leftist thinks they have never thought about it. In reality, they are grown-ups who understand all too well how the world works. The leftist understands nothing except the coffee-house world of safe, sheltered, protected, rich people.

• What Are Leftists? by John J. Ray - What is wrong with us that we are attracted to leftism when we are young?

• Ian Buruma has written some good stuff about the mind of the left:
  • Occidentalism by Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma - showing the common thread running through communism, German and Japanese fascism, Islamic fascism, anti-globalisation and all anti-west ideologies: "It is a peculiar trait of the bourgeoisie, perhaps the most successful class in history, .. to be hated so intensely by some of its most formidable sons and daughters, including Marx himself."
  • "This contempt can come from many sources, but it appeals to those who feel impotent, marginalized, excluded, or denigrated: the intellectual who feels unrecognized, the talentless art student in a city filled with brilliance, the time-serving everyman who disappears into any crowd, the young man from a third-world country who feels mocked by the indifference of a superior West; the list of possible recruits to a cult of death is potentially endless."
  • The Origins of Occidentalism by Ian Buruma.
  • Ian Buruma has written some interesting stuff. But he is still way too left for me. See Pascal Bruckner's review of Buruma's morally-weak book Murder in Amsterdam. And more. Bruckner has a withering criticism of Buruma's refusal to admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali's struggle against Islamism: "It is well known that in the struggle of the weak against the strong, it is easier to attack the former."

• Among the Bourgeoisophobes (and p.2) by David Brooks - "Hatred of the bourgeoisie .. is the major reactionary creed of our age." (or via here)

• The radical loser, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, casts a cold eye on the violent revolutionary - whether Lenin, Hitler, IRA or jihadi.
  • "Neither poverty nor the experience of political repression alone seem to provide a satisfactory explanation for why young people actively seek out death in a grand bloody finale and aim to take as many people with them as possible. Is there a phenotype that displays the same characteristics down the ages and across all classes and cultures?"
  • On self-appointed, unelected terrorists like the IRA, Shining Path, FSLN, FARC, ETA, PFLP, and so on: "Each of these armed rabbles calls itself an army, boasts of brigades and commandos, self-importantly issuing bureaucratic communiqués and boastful claims of responsibility, acting as if they were the representatives of "the masses"."

• 10 commandments of Multiculturalism tries to summarise the main problems in thinking on the left, including:
  1. Illiterate people from poor societies are superior to Americans.
  2. Differences between individuals or groups are unfair.
  3. For Designated Victim Groups, strong feelings excuse all behavior.
• See also 4 more commandments, including:
  1. We defend the right to free speech for ourselves, but anyone else whose speech hurts our feelings must be censored.
  2. In any conflict between a third-world nation and a first-world nation, the third-world nation is always right.
  3. All criticism or disagreement with any policy of a third-world nation, culture, or person is, by definition, racism.

• The left do not understand the poor, and they do not understand criminals, and they do not understand what life is like in unfree states.

• Victor Davis Hanson
  • "Bomb Texas": The psychological roots of anti-Americanism - Links the western left's incomprehension of criminals and unfree countries to their life of luxury. Insulated "from the age-old struggle to obtain food, shelter and physical security from enemies both natural and human", vast numbers of pampered people form their views in a nice, safe, coffee-house world, "without firsthand and daily exposure to backbreaking physical labor, unrepentant bullies or unapologetically violent criminals."
  • The Western Disease - "There is something terribly wrong, something terribly amoral with the Western intelligentsia ... thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world - the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest." They do not understand: (a) what it is like to live outside of their nice, safe, free world: "what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein", and: (b) they do not understand the awesomely brave military that protects the existence of their world: "how hard it is to go across the world to Tikrit and chain such a monster."
  • The postmodern left simply cannot handle good and evil. "Nuance is the essence of relativist interpretation. Manichean notions of barbarity and civilization, Western culture juxtaposed to eighth-century Islamic fascism, good versus evil - these "reductionist" and "simplistic" notions of the present Bushworld simply cannot stand. If such clear polarities were to be valid, the entire foundation of postmodern thinking would collapse"

• Face up to the truth, Nick Cohen, The Observer, July 10, 2005, on the mind of the left:
  • Leftists have not understood "that Islamism was a reactionary movement as great as fascism, which had claimed millions of mainly Muslim lives in the Sudan, Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan and is claiming thousands in Iraq. As with fascism, it takes a resolute dunderheadedness to put all the responsibility on democratic governments for its existence."
  • "I feel the appeal, believe me. You are exasperated with the manifold faults of Tony Blair and George W Bush. Fighting your government is what you know how to do and what you want to do, and when you are confronted with totalitarian forces which are far worse than your government, the easy solution is to blame your government for them."
  • "But it's a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West - and a racist one to boot. The unavoidable consequence is that you must refuse to support democrats, liberals, feminists and socialists in the Arab world and Iran who are the victims of Islamism in its Sunni and Shia guises because you are too compromised to condemn their persecutors."
  • "Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I'm afraid that's what the record shows."

• The Psychology of Bush Hatred (and followup) - Hatred of Bush (and indeed of America, the West, the police, your parents, etc.) is a classic example of displacement.

• The Selfish Teenagers of the Left - Scott Burgess, March 22, 2007, asks whether the left is really about concern for the world's oppressed (why so little concern for oppression that cannot be blamed on the West, such as oppression by Islam) or is it really for many leftists about personal identity and rebellion. Some good comments:
  • Comment: "It's not always clear that much besides role-play and appearance was ever a central motivation. And, as the imperatives of role-play change, so do the sympathies, or affected sympathies. This might explain why previously favoured victim groups - say, women and gay people - now find themselves sidelined in favour of certain religious groups, whose victimhood is considered much more deserving, regardless of its incongruity with earlier pet projects."
  • Comment: "It's very important to the "we are all Hezbollah" brigade, that they -- like teenagers -- target their rebellion against those who are least likely to physically damage them. Teenage rebellion, whilst dramatic, is perfectly safe because it is couched against those who love and protect the protester: i.e. their parents. Parents (by and large) are extremely tolerant of their children's rebellion, accepting enormous amounts of abuse and inconsiderate behaviour because, at the end of the day, they are far more mature and self-sacrificing than their children. The deluded left's rebellion is aimed, likewise, at completely safe targets. It's funny how the two biggest targets are the US and the UK; by any external measure two of the most enlightened and safe democracies in the entire world. ... It's easy to complain against the injustices of the United States and United Kingdom, because you can do it with a healthy moral glow of righteousness, and secure in the knowledge that you won't be dragged from your bed in the middle of the night and tortured to death. It's a win-win situation."

• Michelle Malkin's conservative commencement address:

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali v. Avi Lewis, June 2007.
  • This CBC interview sums up in a few minutes the sneering, cynical, and yet innocent, naive and adolescent world of much of the western left. Canadian left-wing nut Avi Lewis (married to the enemy of third-world prosperity Naomi Klein) comes up against the awesome atheist hero Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fights, as Lewis never has and never will, great evil at the risk of her life.
  • Ayaan never lived in a land of freedom before adulthood, and so cherishes it and endlessly praises it. Lewis has lived in pampered freedom since birth, and so endlessly whines about it. Smarmy, sneering, cynical, and yet deeply naive, Lewis stands for all the stupid ideas I thought were clever when I was young.
  • Lewis claims that: "North American Muslims really feel under siege these days" as America tries to stop Muslim terror attacks. Ayaan brilliantly answers: "I think that it is highly exaggerated that Muslims living in American and the West are under siege. If that were the case, we know of groups in history who were under siege, and what they usually do is they would leave. I don't see any American Muslim leaving and going back to any Muslim country."
  • Lewis sneers at America, and can't believe Ayaan's enthusiasm for it: "Is there a school where they teach you these American clichés?" Ayaan keeps her cool, and destroys him: "I read Alexis de Tocqueville, and I read about democracy, and I lived in countries that have no democracy, that have no founding fathers ... So I do not find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom."
  • Comments:
    • "Who is this funny little man reading bumper stickers eh?"
    • "This guy is a perfect example of what makes libs at once hilarious and infuriating. He really, really, thinks he’s smarter and better-informed than she is. He thinks he’s intellectually superior, what with his understanding of nuance and all, even as he spouts the most inane, cartoonish idiocies, and is condescending about it at the same time!"
    • "I for one admire her courage for going after radical Islam and for defending her new home here in America. Though she was not born here I think she is an American in heart, mind and soul."
    • Like me, I guess, and like millions more of us around the world. Because America is an idea - it is not an ethnicity.
  • Comments:
    • "I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: People like Ayaan Hirsi Ali define America - she represents why America was founded."
  • Avi Lewis fronts biased, anti-Israel propaganda on Al Jazeera, Apr 2008:

• Wafa Sultan, Nov 2007, also makes Ayaan's point: "I was born in hell and came to paradise. Americans are born in paradise and don’t know about hell."

Anti-Americanism

• The New Anti-Semitism? by Rob Foot - After losing the Cold War, a negative anti-Americanism has become the core value of the left, instead of something I could subscribe to, such as a positive liberal internationalism.
  • "The Twentieth Century was the site of the battleground of socialism and capitalism. Towards the end of the century, capitalism won. Its victory was unexpected, and unexpectedly swift, but near-total and unqualified." And the left has not been able to handle it. "The collapse of the Soviet empire, and the tearing-down of the Berlin Wall by its erstwhile prisoners, signalled the end of the socialist enterprise. Its story ended there and then, but it was a hard ending. ... This is the font and source of the Left's rage and hate."

• A genealogy of anti-Americanism by James W. Ceaser
• Why do people hate America? - Frontpage Symposium
• Anti-Americanism is sometimes pro-tyrant, pro-fascist, sometimes anti-fascist - It has no consistency. It does not stand for anything. It is "entirely inconsistent and unpredictable in its choice of friends and foes - except for one constant:" - Being anti-America.
• "The Real Axis Of Evil Is Pakistan - Saudi Arabia - Yemen", interview with Bernard-Henri Levy - "anti-Americanism is the most dangerous global ideology. Today all the totalitarianisms, the fundamentalisms, the anti-Semitisms hide behind the banner of the fight against the USA."
• The hatred of America is the socialism of fools by Michael Gove
• Anti-Americanism: The World's Most Dangerous Idea by Fareed Zakaria - "U.S. hegemony has its problems, but a world that reacts instinctively against the United States will be less peaceful, less cooperative, less prosperous, less open, and less stable."

• Hating America - Bruce Bawer on Anti-Americanism in Europe.
  • He notes that: "contrary to the notion that anti-Americanism is a reflection of opposition to Republican presidents and U.S.-led wars, French sympathy for the U.S. stood at 54% in 1988, during the Reagan administration, but dropped to 35% by 1996, when Clinton was in office. Why the decline? Simple: in 1988 the U.S. was a protector; in 1996, after the Berlin Wall fell, it was a resented "hyperpower""

• France
  • Europe's Anti-American Obsession by Jean-Francois Revel - on anti-Americanism in France. - "Why is the USA casually accused of "fascism," when it is a land that has never known a dictator over the course of two centuries, while Europe has been busy making troops of them?"
  • Anti-Americanism: An Introduction (and here) by Jean Francois Revel - "The Left saw clearly what was at issue: my book was less about America and anti-Americanism than about the epic twentieth-century struggle between socialism and liberal democracy, and they feared that chances for victory might be starting to lean in liberalism's favor. The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation."
• Germany
  • Experiencing European Anti-Americanism and Anti-Israelism: An Interview with Jeffrey Gedmin
• Greece
  • The Falseness of Anti-Americanism by Fouad Ajami (and shorter version) - on anti-Americanism in Greece, and Greek support for Serb genocide.
  • Greece, like Egypt and Iraq, is one of the birthplaces of civilization and, like those other two countries, it is sad to see how far it has fallen.
• Turkey
  • The Sick Man of Europe - Again: Islamism and leftism add up to anti-American madness in Turkey by Robert L. Pollock

  
  

• Anti-Americanism's sister hatred, modern anti-semitism.

• Americans: The Jews of the World by Daniel Jennings - The world is like old Europe before the Holocaust. Millions of people in the Middle East and Europe have their heads filled with irrational, illogical hate for Israel and America. Millions of people are ready and willing to repeat the Holocaust. If they ever get more power, a 21st century Holocaust against Israel and America could be coming.
• No one can relax as long as this hatred exists. Hatred leads to action if it gets the power. To end this illogical, hallucinatory hatred, America should not address it. Rather America should take the fight to its haters, in their home countries, and change their entire world against their will.

• The Paradox of Cruelty: The greater the hatred, the less the reason

Culture

• Non-left protests:
  • ProtestWarrior

• Photos of left-wing protests:
  • zombietime (USA)
  • moonbatmedia (UK)

• Those Shirts
• INDC
• CafePress
• Sacred Cow Burgers
• bureaucrash

• Cox and Forkum cartoons

• The Onion
• scrappleface
• The Daily Sedative

Postmodernism

• Alan Sokal's brilliant expose of postmodernist intellectual bankruptcy.
• Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt.
• The Flight from Science and Reason.
• Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. See info.

• Symposium on the Iraq War - The archetypal muddled postmodern leftist Stanley Aronowitz comes face-to-face with the crystal-clear defender of reason and the Enlightenment Victor Davis Hanson.

• Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest

• The Postmodernism Generator - Automatic generation of postmodernist papers.

• Meaningless business-speak and executive puffery is also ripe for scepticism. See Dilbert's hilarious Mission Statement generator.

• Part of the modern anti-intellectualism is that clarity is bad and obfuscation is good, and also that anyone who holds a position on anything is not open minded. Nicely summed up by Dawkins: "Just as anybody who writes exceptionally clearly is damned as 'simplistic', it is often assumed that anybody who feels exceptionally strongly about something must therefore be emotional or irrational, fanatical, rabid, or traumatised in childhood. .. Rather than psychoanalyse an author who feels passionately about something, why not look at his actual arguments and tell us what's wrong with them?"

• Politically-correct censorship on campus

"We must hope that the painful bolus of postmodernism will pass through the costive bowels of academic life sooner rather than later. Pass, of course, it will eventually."
- Gross and Levitt.

The left is racist

• The unfree world

  
  

• South Africa v. the rest of Africa
  • For example, the left (rightly) targeted apartheid South Africa. But now that apartheid is gone, we hear nothing about the rest of Africa, which remains largely a human-rights wilderness.
  • Today, if we look at the Freedom House world map of freedom, we can see that the South Africa area is now an oasis of freedom in Africa. Why is this? Are the natives in the south naturally more respectful of human rights than elsewhere in Africa? (Unlikely. See the figures for Angola, Swaziland and of course Zimbabwe.) Or is it actually the influence of the European population that has brought freedom to this part of Africa? Such an idea is heresy to the left, which will never criticise a black government, and to whom imperialism and colonisation is simply all bad.

• The left is racist.
  • What is the point? The point is that the left is racist. We must criticise abuses by non-whites with exactly the same vigour as abuses by whites. Otherwise we are not treating non-whites as adults, who are responsible for their own behaviour.

    Even worse, we are ignoring the suffering of non-whites simply because their oppressors are natives rather than imperialists. But the pain, suffering and death is just as real. If we really believed in the equality of distant non-white, non-western people, we would be outraged at their oppression no matter who their oppressor was.

    The left imagines itself to be the "modern" world view that has moved on from 19th century racism, but it is clear from its selective choice of campaigns (South Africa, Israel, Iraq) that it has moved on very little. The neo-conservatives, it seems to me, are the post-racists in this world - the people who have entered a new world where they are utterly indifferent to the colour of the oppressor and the oppressed - they are simply in favour of freedom and against tyranny. The left, it seems to me, are still in the racist world.

  • Peter Tatchell shows what a non-racist left would look like. He has all the trendy anti-Israel, anti-American politics, and I have no time for him on that. But in his campaign for gay rights he is not afraid to criticise blacks and Arabs - despite abuse from fellow leftists and even death threats. He doesn't care what is the colour of the skin of the bully and the victim. He just supports human rights, and doesn't think that as a white man he can only speak about white crimes. As Johann Hari says: "Tatchell is Britain's most eloquent campaigner against a new and lethal human rights Apartheid where only white people can condemn white butchers and only black people can condemn black murderers. He asks loudly: Is that progress? Is that anti-racism? Are we supposed to abandon Jamaica's gay people because they have the wrong colour skin?"

• More on Africa
  • The Racial Left's Double Standard for Africa by John Perazzo
  • Black people aren't animals by Andrew Kenny
  • A Continent Bleeds by Jonah Goldberg - Why can't we help Africa?

  • It was easy for the west to condemn South African whites and feel superior to them. But in a survey during apartheid, John J. Ray found that South African whites were no more racist than other whites in the west. In other words, apartheid was due to fear of what would happen under black majority rule, rather than pure racism. Such fears themselves can of course be seen as racist, though sadly Zimbabwe shows they were not entirely groundless. South Africa is going much better though, so far, and everyone must be glad that apartheid is gone. Despite an appalling crime problem, South Africa is the freest country on the entire African continent.

• African butchers:
  • The butchers of Sudan.

  • The butchers of Rwanda.

  • The Marxist genocidal monster Mengistu of Ethiopia.

  • The Christian mass murderer Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic.

  • The Islamic mass murderer Idi Amin of Uganda.
    • Rudolph J. Rummel estimates he murdered 300,000 people.
    • He lived out his life in peaceful retirement in the grossly immoral country of Saudi Arabia, one of the most immoral countries in the world.
    • No wonder this brute felt so at home with the Saudis by Stephen Pollard
    • Dead Cannibal by Michael Radu

    • After Idi Amin spoke to the UN General Assembly in 1975, the US ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan called him a "racist murderer". As Edward Hudgins notes: "U.N. diplomats were horrified that the American ambassador would be so undiplomatic as to say such a thing about Amin but were not particularly horrified that Amin was a racist murderer.".

  • The racist thug Mugabe of Zimbabwe

  • Killings in Nigeria.

  
  

• Israel v. the rest of the Middle East
  • The left has a similar blind spot with Israel. 90 percent of their energy should be spent criticising the appalling, oppressive, human-rights-abusing Islamic countries of the Middle East, and perhaps 10 percent criticising the only free country in the area, Israel. But the left are racists. The Arabs are excused as victims of history, or slaves to their culture, while only the Israelis are treated as adults capable of moral choices. I would treat them all as adults.

  • Why Israel and not Sudan, is singled out (or here) by Charles Jacobs, Boston Globe, 5 Oct 2002.
  • Slavery in modern Sudan doesn't bother the left. The perpetrators are not white, so the left isn't interested.
  • Why British academics are boycotting Israel - article by Theodore Dalrymple

Survey of human-rights criticisms by churches

Every leftist in the world should read this report, and read its recommendations. This report explains exactly the difference between my world view and the left-wing world view. It explains in a nutshell why I am not a leftist.

• The Institute on Religion and Democracy
• Human Rights Advocacy in the Mainline Protestant Churches (2000-2003): A Critical Analysis
• See summary of this survey.
• In summary, a survey of 199 human-rights criticisms by mainline churches and groups in the US found:
  • 36 percent of criticisms (72) were of Israel.
  • 32 percent of criticisms (63) were of America.

  • Only 20 percent of criticisms (39) were of the worst human rights abusers in the world - the countries listed as "Not Free" by Freedom House.
  • Only 8 percent of criticisms (15) were of countries listed as "Partly Free".
  • An incredible 73 percent of criticisms (145) were of the best countries - countries listed as "Free".

  • No criticisms were made of any country bordering Israel. That is, no criticisms were made of the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia.
  • No criticisms either were made of China, Yemen, Iran, Libya, Algeria, Belarus, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, or the worst human rights abuser on earth - North Korea.

The left is racist - It does not treat all races equally

Not criticising Arabs or Africans does not show how enlightened you are. It shows how racist you are.

• "Moynihan's Law" helps explain why the western left hates free countries like Israel and loves unfree countries like Cuba. It's basically down to ignorance:
  • Moynihan's Law - "The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country."
  • The quote - "If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people." - US Senator Daniel Moynihan
  • Moynihan's Law applied to Israel - "The degree of oppression of any people is an inverse function of the amount of cries of oppression one hears from them. The only government in the Middle East that does not indiscriminately shoot Arabs who criticize it is that of Israel."

• The Paradox of the Fisks: The most criticised societies in the world will be the least criminal societies

  
  

• Affirmative Action (also here) is of course racist. - It discriminates against people on grounds of race.
  • Socialism and anti-Semitism are closely related worldviews by Theodore Dalrymple. - "The liberal intellectual who laments the predominance of dead white males in the college syllabus or the lack of minority representation in the judiciary uses fundamentally the same argument as the anti-Semite who objects to the prominence of Jews in the arts, sciences, professions, and in commerce. They both assume that something must be amiss - a conspiracy - if any human group is over - or under - represented in any human activity, achievement, or institution."

• Capitalism magazine
  • Reason vs Racism . com
  • multiculturalism
  • racism

• Civilization and V. S. Naipaul, Bruce Bawer, The Hudson Review, Autumn 2002, sums up why I find the western left racist, and why I (in contrast to them) am not racist:
  • "Yet [Naipaul] is at the same time clear-sighted enough to recognize that in today's world, the most reprehensible injustices are perpetrated by powers aligned against the West, and that the West is now in fact the part of the world in which human rights are most thoroughly protected, human talents most consistently rewarded, human life most sincerely valued, and human potential most fully realized. It is in the West, in short, that men and women are most likely to enjoy the greatest gift of all, the chance really to live."
  • "Consequently Naipaul cherishes Western civilization and refuses to condescend to Third World peoples by using dishonest euphemisms to describe what he calls their "half-made" societies. He cares enough for them to admit that they deserve better - and what they deserve is Western civilization, which Naipaul, in a 1990 lecture, identified as "the universal civilization"."
  • "The universal civilization, Naipaul states in his lecture, "has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint"."

• I feel exactly the same. As an Irishman, I greatly admire 17th and 18th century England, and see in it the heroic beginnings of the modern scientific culture. And yet my Irish Catholic peasant ancestors could not participate in that culture. Only today does western culture finally deliver its fantastic universal promise. Now everyone can join in.