Melbourne philosopher Frank Knopfelmacher was a world-class critic of totalitarianism who watched the left turn on Israel.
Australia has been home, in my view, to one political philosopher-analyst of the first rank. A big call, yes, for the esteemed company he kept includes Arthur Koestler, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt. Frank Knopfelmacher’s thought has just become available to the wider public in, edited by his son Andrew, the book launched wonderfully well a month ago by Peter Costello, who was, in turn, introduced to a packed gathering by Geoffrey Blainey.
“The change in Jewish political alignments is inevitable. In losing their status as victims, as objects of patronising generosity, the Jews will lose their status as pets of the left and of the liberals. In the eyes of the masochistic left they have, furthermore, also committed the most unpardonable of crimes: they have won, and they have sent the New Emergent Forces packing. It would be wrong to assume the change in Jewish political alignments will be rapid.
This derivativeness was aggravated on the left by the fact that the socialist movement, with its ideals of universal brotherhood and equality, from Karl Marx onwards, was largely driven by European Jews – there were times in the 20th century when the membership of Western communist parties was 90 per cent Jewish.
We can assume that Israel will recover from its intelligence and military failures, learning from mistakes. It was a good sign that hundreds of thousands of young Israelis living away from the country flooded back after October 7 to join the armed forces. Moreover, I expect damaged public relations across the Western world that are generating a lot of heat will pass, if only to recur in diminished cycles from time to time.
More generally, he predicted there will be running crises in Western universities. These institutions, which he portrayed as ill-administered monopolies, are collapsing. This is most palpably true today in humanities/arts faculties.In their dynamic years, they generated the cultural self-hatred which then percolated out through schools, arts bodies, the media and now the business elites.
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