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Samizdata quote of the day

· Slogans & Quotations

I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.

– Oriana Fallaci

October 6th, 2006 |

6 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • guy herbert
    October 7, 2006 at 6:17 am

    How did she know what the Pope was thinking?

  • Perry de Havilland
    October 7, 2006 at 11:04 am

    How did she know what the Pope was thinking?

    By meeting him and talking to him.

  • James
    October 7, 2006 at 5:47 pm

    An excellent quote.

  • Nigel Sedgwick
    October 8, 2006 at 2:21 pm

    Oriana Fallaci said, in the interview I linked to above:

    I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.

    However, what does this mean? I think it quite likely that most pairs of humans, of similar Western educated background have an overlap of agreement on their common knowledge of well into the 90% region.

    So, in search of the meaning of her quote, and looking further in the article, the key bit strikes me as being:

    The scant hopes that she has for the West she rests on his successor. As a cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI wrote frequently on the European (and the Western) condition. Last year, he wrote an essay titled “If Europe Hates Itself,” from which Ms. Fallaci reads this to me: “The West reveals . . . a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . . . no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.”

    Well, I’m not convinced that this westerner hates his wider society, though I do have many concerns about it’s level of degeneration towards the unimportant or peripheral.

    I also not that the article has ellipses (…) in place of key text (presumably further clarification or caveats).

    Can anyone provide further clarification, or must I conclude that this brilliant quotation must be interpreted on the basis of an incompletion; thus it may well mean not what we want it to mean?

    Best regards

  • Paul Marks
    October 9, 2006 at 8:37 pm

    The elite (who control much of the legal and administrative structure, the media, and the “educational system” in many Western nations) hate western civilization and seek to pass on this hatred to the general population.

    If anyone is considered a threat by the “liberal” elite they take action against them. For example, the lady was threatened with jail for “insulting Islam” (the elite could not give a toss about Islam, but will side with anything that is an enemy of the West – thus forgetting what the followers of Islam would do them if these followers gained power), and the Pope was recently smeared (by the B.B.C.) as someone who covered up child abuse by priests.

    The long march through the institutions (seeking to gain control of cultural institutions and use them to undermine the very culture that produce them) was supported by the Italian thinker Gramsci. His idea was to control ideas (the “cultural superstructure”) – so that even people who (for example) had been educated in private schools and had worked in private business all their lives would still have a leftist view of the world (because they would have never come upon any other view).

    The idea of creating of targeting the best educated and turning them into an alienated mass of people who had “turned on, tuned in and dropped out” was supported by the German-American thinker Herbert Marcuse (part of the Frankfurt school). The “rainbow” alliance idea (of getting all “out” groups from welfare dependents, to government welfare state workers, to feminists, to homosexual activists, to ethnic or religious minorities [regardless of the conflicts between these groups] in a broad “anti capitalist movement”) also came from Marcuse. Although the rainbow was a sign of the anababtists (who taught hostility to private property) in the 16th century (just as the Red Flag has been a sign of evil for centuries, for example at sea it meant “no prisoners” – total plunder and extermination).

    Both Gramsci and Marcuse thought of themselves as Marxists – but they differ from Marx (and from each other) in key respects.

    The idea of using Western insitutions to undermine the West is older than either thinker – for example it is a the base of the Fabian society (founded in 1883).

    Over time the “left” (for want of a better term) has moved further and further away from wanting to build a better society of its own (which as the aim, for example, of the “Christian Socialists” of the 19th century), to just an obsessive hatred of the present society and a desire to destroy it (at all costs).

    For this purpose they will even ally with the forces of Islam – which would have astonished leftists of the past.

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