Modern Literati

I was introduced to the idea of Orientalism five years ago. Since then, I have read a few times of this book and most recently last month. Orientalism refers to discourses that construct fixed and unchanging characteristics, most typically those interpreted as backward, childlike, and illogical, to the East to justify their domination by British colonizers. It was a revolutionary idea introduced by the famous post-colonialism scholar Edward Said who was a Palestinian American and a professor of literature at Colombia University.

The first thing that comes to mind usually when we talk about the Nazi regime is their brutal treatment of the Jewish people in Europe during their reign in Germany. We know so much about the infamous concentration camps in Dachau and Auschwitz, the mass extermination in Treblinka, and the cyanide gas chamber as the final solution to the “Jewish Problem.”

Anarchism for me seems to be an extreme and radical form of government. I am interested in reading what is it all about only because Noam Chomsky, being called an anarchist, is everything but radical. That makes anarchism interesting to me in the first place. By reading his book, or by understanding what is anarchism, I learned the most not about anarchism, but what is really democracy and socialism.