After the Second World War, left-wing intellectuals were consumed by guilt for the West's colonial past and present. They wholeheartedly embraced any theory or ideology that seemed to voice the putatively thwarted aspirations of the peoples of the Third World. Orientalism came at a time when anti--Western rhetoric was at its most shrill. Jean-Paul -Sartre preached that all white men were complicit in the exploitation of the Third World. Said went further: "It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric." Not only, for Said, is every European a racist, but he must necessarily be so.

Western civilisation has, in fact, been more willing to criticise itself than any other.These self-administered admonishments are, however, a far cry from Said's savage strictures. Yet they found a new generation ready to take them to heart. Blaming the West, a fashionable game in the 1960s and 1970s that impressionable youth took seriously, had the results we now see. The same generation -appears unwilling to defend its own civilisation against the greatest threat that it has faced since the Nazis.

Said's influence was a result of a conjunction of several intellectual and political fashions: post-French Algeria and post-Vietnam Third-Worldism, the politicisation of post-modernist English departments that had abandoned the very idea of objective truth, and the influence of Michel Foucault. In effect, Said used each of these trends to create a master fraud, which bound American academics and Middle Eastern tyrants in unstated bonds of anti-American complicity.