Who’s the pseudo intellectual?

Matt Hartley’s jeremiad against ‘latte leftists’ in last week’s Byron Shire Echo was a curious piece.

If you missed it, Matt identified the key faults of the political left. This group with ‘sad, twisted little hearts [who] never understood the beauty of life’ apparently deride ‘average people’ – those seeking a quarter-acre block with chooks and veggies. A life of cars, boats, weekend sports and family holidays. The left it would seem, opposes the great Australian dream.

Furthermore, the ‘pseudo intellectuals’ who once supported Marxism, are now ‘Islamist’. Matt doesn’t actually mean ‘Islamist’ but is just pointing out that this imagined leftist thought collective refuses to be anti-Islam.

And while they never really cared about Marx’s – or rather Stalin’s – victims caught behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, leftists apparently don’t care about the ‘victims of Islam’ today.

Two aspects of this letter were particularly striking. Its timing – it was printed the day following the Brussels bombings. And also, the return of the specter of Marx.

When the Berlin Wall fell nearly three decades ago it symbolised the death of state socialism. Despite the passage of time, and the current preponderance of free market liberalism, Marx looms large in conservative thought.

In recent weeks Senator Cory Bernadi even suggested the federal government’s Safe Schools Program, was a plot to ‘indoctrinate children into a Marxist agenda of cultural relativism’.

When Marx is invoked to discredit both Islam and homosexuality, then we do indeed live in interesting times.

Dave Lisle, Mullumbimby