"Sayed And de Man At Yale"

John Fund has really owned the story of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban spokesman attending Yale–to the point where Fund’s critics accuse him of “launching a vendetta against the school”–simply for pointing out the utter absurdity of an American school of higher learning gleefully admitting a terrorist to its ranks.

But then, as Fund notes in his latest piece, they’ve also had a pair of Nazis teaching there, as well.

One of whom was Paul de Man, whom Fund describes as “the leading guru of deconstructionism”, who turned out to be a Nazi collaborator in his native France. As Dave Kopel noted a few years ago, it’s no coincidence that movements such as deconstructionism and postmodernism have a shared past with totalitarianism.

Update: Roger L. Simon adds:

Fund raises the spectre of Paul de Man, the famous leader of deconstructionism, who rose to prominence on the Ivy League faculty while hiding his Nazi past. Ironically, the cultural relativisim behind that theory is the very idea that has so permeated the academy that all world views, including the Taliban’s extremist Islam, are welcome.

Or as “Penraker” noted in his exceptional post today, “They have been taught to have extreme anger over trivial things, while letting large, evil things sit right down next to them in the lunch hall”.