Interesting viewpoints/presumptions from a now conservative David Horowitz are:
- Humans are beastly and war is their natural state1
- The U.S. must be the most dominate state to defend freedom2
- Leftism is a utopian idea and thereby dangerous to its opponents once in power3
- U.S. and Israel are under attack from the international left4
Interesting term used: Islamofashist
PS: Also one has to be carful with Slavoj Zizek.
David Horowitz
David Joel Horowitz (born January 10, 1939) is an American conservative writer and activist. He is a founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC); editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine; and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. Horowitz also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.
Horowitz wrote several books with author Peter Collier, including four on prominent 20th-century American families. He and Collier have collaborated on books about cultural criticism. Horowitz worked as a columnist for Salon.
From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism. Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.
Definition from Wikipedia – David Horowitz
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek ( SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek, Slovene: [ˈsláːʋɔj ˈʒíːʒək]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual.
He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. He primarily works on continental philosophy (particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
Žižek is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group of Slovenian academics working on German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique, and media criticism. His breakthrough work was 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English, which was decisive in the introduction of the Ljubljana School's thought to English-speaking audiences. He has written over 50 books in multiple languages and speaks Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, English, German, and French. The idiosyncratic...
Definition from Wikipedia – Slavoj Žižek
- This assumption goes back to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes ↩
- This seems like a remnant of the cold war era and the second world wars… specially putting the U.S. in charge of this task. ↩
- I dislike the reductionism of Left and Right. In an interconnected world topics should be looked at individually. I agree on the notion that utopianism tends to be totalitarian as it’s an imagination of a better future omitting diversity and lacking complexity. I don’t condemn utopianism as it play an important role in the collective imagination to choose a future to aim at and select the one to avoid. The danger from utopies emerge from simplification by exaggeration as the world is and stays a complex matter thereby masking developments like the mass surveillance that seems to be more massive than described in the book. ↩
- To simple of a worldview. BTW this makes me think of the imagery used in Worldwar Z, again! ↩