{"id":30031,"date":"2016-07-06T01:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-07-06T05:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30031"},"modified":"2018-09-18T15:11:54","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T19:11:54","slug":"qotd-the-treason-of-the-modern-intellectuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/07\/06\/qotd-the-treason-of-the-modern-intellectuals\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The treason of the modern intellectuals"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The longest-term stakes in the war against terror are not just human lives, but whether Western civilization will surrender to fundamentalist Islam and <em>shari\u2019a<\/em> law. More generally, the overt confrontation between Western civilization and Islamist barbarism that began on September 11th of 2001 has also made overt a fault line in Western civilization itself \u2014 a fault line that divides the intellectual defenders of our civilization from intellectuals whose desire is to surrender it to political or religious absolutism.<\/p>\n<p>This fault line was clearly limned in Julien Benda\u2019s 1927 essay <em>Le trahison des clercs<\/em>: English \u201cThe treason of the intellectuals\u201d. I couldn\u2019t find a copy of Benda\u2019s essay on the Web. but there is an excellent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newcriterion.com\/archive\/11\/dec92\/treason.htm\" target=\"_blank\">commentary<\/a> on it that repays reading. Ignore the reflexive endorsement of religious faith at the end; the source was a conservative Catholic magazine in which such gestures are obligatory. Benda\u2019s message, untainted by Catholic or Christian partisanship, is even more resonant today than it was in 1927.<\/p>\n<p>The first of the totalitarian genocides (the Soviet-engineered Ukrainian famine of 1922-1923, which killed around two million people) had already taken place. Hitler\u2019s \u201cFinal Solution\u201d was about fifteen years in the future. Neither atrocity became general knowledge until later, but Benda in 1927 would not have been surprised; he foresaw the horrors that would result when intellectuals abetted the rise of the vast tyrannizing ideologies of the 20th century,<\/p>\n<p>Changes in the transport, communications, and weapons technologies of the 20th century made the death camps and the gulags possible. But it was currents in human thought that made them fact \u2014 ideas that both motivated and rationalized the thuggery of the Hitlers and Stalins of the world.<\/p>\n<p>Eric S. Raymond, <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=82\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Today&#8217;s treason of the intellectuals&#8221;, <em>Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2002-11-28.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The longest-term stakes in the war against terror are not just human lives, but whether Western civilization will surrender to fundamentalist Islam and shari\u2019a law. More generally, the overt confrontation between Western civilization and Islamist barbarism that began on September 11th of 2001 has also made overt a fault line in Western civilization itself \u2014 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,53,41,11],"tags":[495,780,1235,1124,969,622,47,257],"class_list":["post-30031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-politics","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-civilization","tag-communism","tag-esr","tag-genocide","tag-hitler","tag-ideology","tag-islam","tag-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7On","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30031"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30032,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30031\/revisions\/30032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}