While the current upheaval on America’s college campuses is
not precisely the same as Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution or the pogroms committed by Ernst Rohm’s Brown Shirted SA members the parallels are
eerily disturbing.
Obviously, Maoism and Nazism count among the great pogroms
of our time. Their purpose was to identify, isolate and rid the culture of
alien modes of thinking. Among their enemies: the practice of freedom. I
explained it in my book The Last
Psychoanalyst.
For another take on Heidegger’s influence, see William Kristol’s column: “The Self-Destruction of the American University.”
When today’s American university professors launch pogroms
against the great books of Western civilization they say that they are
practicing deconstruction.
The term comes from the German concept of “Destruktion”
which was invented by Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, a man who thrilled to
the actions of the Brown Shirts and became disillusioned with Nazism after the
group was liquidated in the Night of the Long Knives. One remarks that Herr
Heidegger, a heroic genius to many of today’s empty-headed professors, never
brought himself to recant his adherence to Nazism. He thought that it was a
great idea that had not yet realized itself fully.
One notes that within a month of Heidegger’s joining the
Nazi party in 1933 the Party organized book burnings targeting the works of
Jewish authors. Heidegger was unmoved. Then again, as we know from recent
publication of his notebooks, he was an anti-Semite and an enemy of the Western
civilization that Judeo-Christianity had spawned.
Pogroms led by the SA were morphed into the final solution,
which lacked the theatrics that Heidegger liked so much, but which was far more
lethal in its effect.
Both Nazism and the Cultural Revolution were reactions to
failure. Nazism grew out of the failure of Weimar Germany and the ignominious
defeat that Germany had suffered in the Great War. Mao’s Cultural Revolution
was a crackdown on those members of the Communist Party who wanted to hold Mao
accountable for the Great Famine of the early 1960s, and to institute free
market reforms.
They had good reason for trying to supplant the Great
Helmsman. Following Mao’s policy agenda,
the Great Leap Forward, China suffered a famine killed over 30 million people.
In its wake two men, in particular, Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping tried to wrest control over the party and the government from Mao.
They lost out when Mao proclaimed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966.
He empowered the student radicals called the Red Guards, purged Liu and Deng and
handed control over the culture to his wife, the actress Jiang Qing.
Through her aegis all books were banned, with the sole
exception of the little red book of Mao’s writings. Artifacts of Confucianism
and capitalism were destroyed and all cultural productions were forced to
become propaganda. One notes in passing that Mao was a major philanderer,
making Bill Clinton look like a rank amateur. See Harrison Salisbury’s book The New Emperors.
During the Cultural Revolution students ran wild, humiliating their teachers, at times murdering them and even, cannibalizing their remains.
Millions of people were killed, among them Liu Shaoqi. Deng Xiaoping survived
because he was protected by friends in the military. During the Cultural
Revolution the two had been branded the No. 1 and No. 2 capitalist roaders.
As I have often noted, the results of Maoism were so
horrific that in 1980, four years after Mao’s death, the extreme poverty rate
in China was still around 82%. That means that 82% of the population was living
on less than $1.25 a day.
The Cultural Revolution ended when its leaders, led by Madame Mao were arrested and imprisoned in the months after Mao's death in 1976.
These facts will provide some context for Roger Simon’s
description:
This
massive national crusade, instigated by Chairman Mao Zedong, was intended to
create a pure communist man and woman, devoid of the constraints of materialism
and personal ambition.
It
started with the closing of the schools and the re-education of intellectuals
and the bourgeoisie and ended up with years of incredible violence, taking
millions of lives. The actual statistics are still a state secret, but a recent biography of Mao states “at least 3
million people died violent deaths and post-Mao leaders acknowledged that 100
million people, one-ninth of the entire population, suffered in one way or
another.”
I got a
personal look at the remnants of the Cultural Revolution in 1979 when on an
“activist’s” tour of China. The country was still extraordinarily impoverished
and primitive. Propagandistic thought control was everywhere, broadcast on loudspeakers
and splayed out on ubiquitous billboards urging the masses to “Criticize Lin
Biao and Confucius” (Lin Biao was a former ally, then competitor, of Mao’s who
died in a mysterious plane crash) or “Smash the Gang of Four,” one of whom was
Mao’s wife, then in disrepute. Whenever you asked a question of your
interpreters, even a bland one, you got a rote response. Everyone was too timid
to say anything the slightest bit controversial. Newspeak reigned. It was like
living in Orwell’s 1984 five
years early.
Amazingly, in 1979 the remnants of the Cultural Revolution
had not yet been wiped out, because posters denouncing Confucius stood side by
side with posters against the Gang of Four. More than a few years were needed to roll back Maoism and the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was not a spontaneous uprising of
disenchanted youth. It was an effort to relieve Mao of all responsibility for
the horrific consequences of his political and economic program. It was a
massive exercise in shifting the blame to those who were among the most able
leaders that China had, men who did try, after the Great Famine to steer China
toward free enterprise.
How much are the events on today’s American college campuses
analogous to what happened in China? How much does it echo the days of the
Brown Shirts in Nazi Germany? That is the question.
At the least, the current wave of student protest seems
designed, as I have often suggested, to relieve Barack Obama of responsibility for
his failures as president. That is the larger narrative. Their purpose, I have
noted, is to blame the failures of Obama presidency on the Bush administration,
the Republican Party and the Jews.
The notion that blacks, having been an oppressed group, can
do no wrong hangs over the student protests. When the nation was debating black
crime, Obama supporters were following the president’s lead and saying that
black on black crime was for nothing compared with the dereliction of white
police officers. It was all the fault of white people, the bearers of white
privilege.
For the past seven years we have had a rogue president who
does what he pleases, when he pleases. Clearly, he has managed to beat down the
balance of powers and neuter the American Congress. Some people blame the
political class for the debacle, but in truth, the system only works when leaders
act with decorum. It only works when the president sets an example of judicious
and prudent behavior. It can put a brake on reckless and lawless actions, but
it needs to do so politically, and thus slowly.
Those who think that they can counteract the ill effects of
the Obama administration by putting a bigger bully in the White House are not
thinking. The man who saved China from Maoism was Deng Xiaoping. Surely he was not a
weak leader, but Deng did not speechify or did not bluster on the stage.
Even before the most recent events in Missouri and New Haven
a fascist hate group called Students for Justice in Palestine has been
functioning more openly and loudly on America’s campuses. The group was formed
during the Bush administration but it has been empowered by the Obama
administration’s constant criticism and vilification of the leaders of the
Jewish state. It harasses Jewish students and tries to prevent Jewish speakers from
speaking on campuses. It seeks to destroy Israel, first through boycotts and
divestment, but eventually by allowing a “right of return” that would spell the
end of that nation.
In New York yesterday the SJP joined a rally yesterday and
injected anti-Semitism into the current turmoil. They did it to be sure that
you could not fail to recognize the connection to the Brown Shirts of Ernst
Rohm. This group has been doing this for some time now. Administrators seem too
cowardly to say or to do anything to stop it. Yesterday, Hunter College administrators
offered a weak-kneed response.
The New York Post
editorialized:
But the
rally here at CUNY’s Hunter College came with an added, ugly twist, thanks to
the NYC Students for Justice in Palestine.
In a
Facebook post, NYC-SJP added an anti-Semitic spin. It blamed tuition costs on
CUNY’s “Zionist administration” which “invests in Israeli companies, companies
that support the Israeli occupation . . . and reproduces settler-colonial ideology
throughout CUNY through Zionist content of education.”
Thought
tuition was just about paying for a world-class education? Nope. It’s all part
of a Zionist plot.
Yet
CUNY’s leaders barely issued a peep. The university merely released a long
can’t-we-all-get-along statement by the vice-chancellor of student affairs:
“Students
should also be cognizant of the efforts of a few to distract attention from
important issues in higher education . . . by invoking discriminatory language
reeking of thinly veiled bigotry, prejudice, anti-Semitism or other behavior
inconsistent with our educational mission.”
Roger Simon explained the further correlation between what
is happening on America’s college campuses and the work of the Red Guards:
Recent
events at the University of Missouri and Yale (where I attended graduate
school), plus now other institutions, have only increased my apprehension. It’s
not at the level of the Cultural Revolution — professors haven’t been
asked to wear dunce caps yet and no one (to my knowledge) has been killed — but
the portents are not reassuring.
Mob
rule, not anything close to democracy, is at play. The so-called SJWs (Social
Justice Warriors) seem to be functioning as early avatars of the infamous Red
Guard, bullying and then threatening violence to anyone whose thoughts run
outside what is deemed to be correct.
College
professors and administrators quiver in their path. In the case of Mizzou, the
president resigned before any
concrete evidence of racism was made manifest. It still hasn’t been days later.
At dear old Yale, it’s even more bizarre because there were no imputations of
racism in the first place, only that there might have been or might be. Forget
Bull Connor and the KKK, inappropriate Halloween costumes were the new danger.
It was all about having a “safe space” so feelings wouldn’t be hurt, as if the
world could be perfect and the human species remade for an extraordinarily
fragile generation of coddled students.
4 comments:
We're agreed mob mentality filled with self-righteous fear and hatred can do terrible things, especially when lead by brutal leaders whose intention are to cause violence.
But calling out blacks victim mentality as a step towards fascism seems rather paranoid to me. Blacks KNOW in their hearts there are people who don't see them as human beings and are just looking for excuses to execute them. That's not theory. That's a fact.
If we ignore police action, we can look at arson and murder and threats of murder:
(1) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34790285 Online threats against black students rattle Missouri campus
(2) http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/st-louis-black-church-arson/411673/ Who's Burning Black Churches in St. Louis?
(3) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/us/church-attacked-in-charleston-south-carolina.html Nine Killed in Shooting at Black Church in Charleston
If we discover that its actually Obama or some deraged black leaders who are leading this persecution of black churches, then we'll have a different narrative.
If blacks are paranoid about violence against them, they have good reason.
And anyone who denies this, anyone who tries to say this violence is all political, trying to distract black people from their own culpability, such voices are clearly a part of the problem.
I don't know how to help lift the spell of victim-status, but I don't think dismissing legitimate facts behind that status is going to help dig us all out.
If blacks were 90% of the population, I'd be a lot more worried that blacks were about to lead a revolution to enslave or murder all the whites. Until then, the narrative is as laughably manipulative as it claims Obama is doing.
Some people blame Heidegger, some blame Marx and Marcuse, some blame boomer counterculture, some people blame Edward Said, some blame Malcolm X, some blame feminism, some blame etc, etc.
But that is giving too much intellectual credit.
What we are seeing is just rampant stupidity of a generation that was pampered from cradle and feel self-righteous about everything and butt-hurt about anything.
Another take on the machinations of academe; http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427015/what-if-lefts-campus-meltdown-reflects-their-sense-doom-jim-geraghty
It also might reflect the fact that the Left has spent so much time trying to muzzle anyone who may disagree with them that they have lost the ability to intelligently debate their ideas. If one has the intellectual high ground then one does not need to rail agains't free speech or other ideas expressed by others.
This always seemed to me an admission that the Left lacks the ability to present a well reasoned argumentation for their positions. This really is the Left destroying itself just as most of the "ism" are doing.
I wonder if the Mizzou students will conduct protests about the macroaggressions against France. -$$$
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