A Quote by Ben Domenech
To think that the heritage of the West, including post-war liberalism, was a selfish, secular, practical arrangement of politics is a fiction.
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I think it is fair, in a way, to describe certain forms of Marxism, for instance, as the secular equivalent of a religion. But, I think the same is true, to a certain extent, of secular liberalism as well.
My objection to Liberalism is this that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind namely, politics of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.
The bloody years of war and all the atrocities in European history have taught the Europeans that secular politics free of religious hatred is mainly a question of peace. This concept is not anchored in the same way in the consciousness of Turks, which has to do with the fact that the secular was forced upon us by the army.
Don't be 'practical' in politics. To be practical in that sense means that you have schooled yourself to think along the lines, and in the grooves that those who rob you would desire you to think.
During the cold war, West Berlin was an exclave - a tiny outpost of liberalism surrounded by people who want to crush it. It was like Austin, Texas.
I've always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish.
That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.
To the extent that the West is to blame at all for the ills of the Third World it is to the extent that the West created Marx and his successors, among whom must be numbered many of those who advised the Third World leaders in post-war years.
I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
I think democracy is on the decline in the West. Ruling parties are the same: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad.
We have a sufficient political class, and the military doesn't have to get involved in high national office. The days of doing that, post-Civil War and post-World War II, are gone.
I write some art criticism, and one thing that's clear to me is that politics is fashionable in the American art world in a way it maybe isn't in American fiction. Your work of art becomes fashionable the moment it has some kind of political commentary. I think this has its dangers - the equation between fashion, politics, and art is problematic for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, the notion of politics as being de rigueur in the world of fiction is almost unthinkable. In fiction in America at the moment, the escape into whimsy is far more prevalent than the political.
My mother and father come from that post-Depression, middle-of-World-War -I kind of thinking that says, 'Find a practical job. You know what I mean, Mr. Big Shot? So, you can sing a song ...'
Ultimately, Boris Johnson and the political and financial support behind his Brexit project are probably the biggest threat to both British democracy and the post-war welfare state settlement we've faced in the post-war period.
For decades, since the mid-twentieth century, the nationalist movement, and Fatah in particular, has dominated the political scene. Palestinian politics were primarily nationalistic, secular. Now, suddenly we are seeing the election of a religious party with extreme political ideologies and with a social agenda that seems inconsistent with the cultural heritage of the Palestinian people.
'Collaborator' is a hostage tragicomedy, but it's also, kind of, everything I know about post-war America. Well, not everything, but it does reference a lot of the post-war period.
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