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Karl Popper Saw it Coming
Gary Johns wrote a lucid and compelling book to support the resistance to The Voice (The Burden of Culture, which can be ordered here.) He pointed out that the demand went far beyond fixing obvious problems to something very different – the demand for self-determinism for a particular ethnic and racial group.
Popper sounded an alarm about this movement in the Sixth Eleanor Rathbone Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Bristol in 1956. Eleanor Rathbone was a British MP and a stalwart campaigner on issues including female circumcision in Africa, child marriage in India and forced marriage in Palestine. The theme of his lecture was “an optimist’s view of modern history.”
At the time Popper considered the optimist’s view had considerable rarity value because “the wailings of the pessimists have become somewhat monotonous”. Responding to the progressive intelligentsia who gave the impression that the world was a vale of tears, even before radical…
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