Intellectuals Are the Shoeshine Boys of the Ruling Elite (No.666)

Bah humbug. The chattering classes are at it again: David Burchell in the pages of The Australian and James L Gelvin in the pages of the not-quite-as-popular journal Terrorism and Political Violence (tho’ I imagine Burchell expresses similar sentiments in his crackademic scribblings). So I’m gonna waste some more of my precious time on my way to an early grave by… er… let’s see.

One. Taking note of the fact that Paul Norton once penned a piece for Larvatus Prodeo asking the question ‘Is David Burchell brain-dead?’ (October 2, 2007). Burchell on 1968 and all that (May 28, 2008) tends to suggest that the answer remains a conditional ‘yes’. (Similarly craptastic ideas of Burchell’s are to be found in Stumbling in harmony with history, The Australian, December 29, 2008.)

Two. Re-publishing the debate on Gelvin’s thesis that, inre Al-Qaeda, ‘it was the anarchists what done it’… Or something.

Being un anarcholoco fuelled only by mountains of organic hummus and rivers of organic coffee, scarcely more than an adolescent, lacking all experience of real life, my mind confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of my everyday life, I make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgments, sinking to outright abuse, on my fellow-students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments, newspapers, academic journals and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, I do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution with “unlicensed pleasure” as its only goal.

I also already done published three essays from Terrorism and Political Violence, in seemingly random order.

Nineteenth Century Anarchist Terrorism: How Comparable to the Terrorism of al-Qaeda? by Richard Bach Jensen; Comments on James L. Gelvin’s ‘‘Al-Qaeda and Anarchism: A Historian’s Reply to Terrorology’’ by George Esenwein (author of the neat-o text Anarchist Ideology and the Spanish Working-class Movement, 1868-1898, Berkeley, 1989) and Al-Qaeda and Anarchism: A Historian’s Reply to Terrorology: Response to Commentaries by James L Gelvin.

Fittingly, I’ve yet to republish Gelvin’s original essay… which fact reminds me.

Three. Publish the other steenky essays.