Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Brainwashed in Denver


Twentieth century totalitarian Communism required rigorous thought reform. That is, brainwashing. Cadres and even everyday people were implored to engage in sessions of public self-criticism, the better to cleanse their minds of counterrevolutionary thoughts and feelings.

Comrade Lenin opened the box in 1920:

Frankly admitting a mistake, ascertaining the reasons for it, analysing the circumstances which gave rise to it, and thoroughly discussing the means of correcting it—that is the earmark of a serious party.

Lenin added this in 1922:

Revolutionaries "grew conceited, failed to see where their strength lay, and feared to speak of their weaknesses. But we shall not perish, for we do not fear to speak of our weaknesses and shall learn to overcome them".

Chairman Mao prescribed the “conscientious practice” of self-criticism. He says that”

…dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly, our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly. Our comrades' minds and our Party's work may also collect dust, and also need sweeping and washing.

You might have thought that this practice would have expired with Communism. You would have been wrong. Nowadays, idiot liberal Democratic women in Denver, CO are attending self-criticism dinners, at the cost of $2,500 a person, to learn to police their thought, to ferret out the least smidgen of racism and to admit it to their fellow idiot liberal Democratic women.

This, we read, in The Guardian:

 Freshly made pasta is drying on the wooden bannisters lining the hall of a beautiful home in Denver, Colorado. Fox-hunting photos decorate the walls in a room full of books. A fire is burning. And downstairs, a group of liberal white women have gathered around a long wooden table to admit how racist they are.

“Recently, I have been driving around, seeing a black person, and having an assumption that they are up to no good,” says Alison Gubser. “Immediately after I am like, that’s no good! This is a human, just doing their thing. Why do I think that?”

This is Race to Dinner. A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women – often strangers, perhaps acquaintances. (Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.) A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”

And also:

It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a dinner party in which they’d be asked, one by one, “What was a racist thing you did recently?” by two women of color, before appetizers are served. But Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019. So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US.

The women who sign up for these dinners are not who most would see as racist. They are well-read and well-meaning. They are mostly Democrats. Some have adopted black children, many have partners who are people of color, some have been doing work towards inclusivity and diversity for decades. But they acknowledge they also have unchecked biases. They are there because they “know [they] are part of the problem, and want to be part of the solution,” as host Jess Campbell-Swanson says before dinner starts.

As Shakespeare said: “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

It’s not just the school system. It’s not just the media. The notion that we ought to be living in a nation where we all think alike, and where onemindedness is achieved by warring against bigotry… one’s own and that of our fellow Americans, has taken root in America’s heartland.

One thing is clear: after they cleanse their souls of the last smidgen of racism, they are coming for you.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I am a 50 year old woman and dearly appreciate the right to vote and own land and have equal say in the courts, should I ever need to. But when I read stuff like this, I cringe. Men may do ridiculous things but they would never do something like this. Never. This is suicide. And it makes me sympathize with the men of long ago who warned about women holding too much power in the incorrect realms.

I just want to scream at them. For their stupidity. For the financial waste. For their betrayal of western culture. There is a difference between being kind to others and turning yourself and your culture into a door mat.

David Foster said...

"There is a difference between being kind to others and turning yourself and your culture into a door mat."

I doubt that this behavior has much to do with being kind, in most cases. It has a lot more to do with status-seeking among one's peers and exalting one's own ego. Also, with wanting to be on the perceived winning side.

The late Dr David Yeagley, a Comanche Indian ('Bad Eagle') described an incident in a class he was teaching at Oklahoma State.

“LOOK, DR. YEAGLEY, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.”

The girl was white. She was tall and pretty, with amber hair and brown eyes. For convenience’ sake, let’s call her “Rachel.”

I had been leading a class on social psychology, in which we discussed patriotism – what it means to be a people or a nation. The discussion had been quite lively. But when Rachel spoke, everyone fell silent.

“Look at your culture,” she said to me. “Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing.”

“You’re not proud to be American?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m happy to be American, but I’m not proud of how America came about.”

Her choice of words was telling. She was “happy” to be an American. But not “proud” of it.

On one level, I wasn’t surprised. I knew the head of our American History department at Oklahoma State University-OKC, and I recognized his hackneyed liberal jargon in Rachel’s words. She had taken one of his courses, with predictable results.

Yet, I was still stunned. Her words disturbed and offended me in a way that I could not quite enunciate."

and

"As I lay awake that night, I thought of an old story by Kay Boyle, written in 1941, called “Defeat.” It’s about the French women in the German-occupied village of Pontcharra. All the French men were away at war. It was the 14th of July, Bastille Day, when Frenchmen were usually proud to be French. The village women, however, chose that day to give in to the German men.

They did it innocently enough. The women just wanted to wear their fancy holiday dresses. They wanted to drink and dance. And the Germans were the only men around with whom they could do it. So they gave in.

The Cheyenne people have a saying: A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground."

and

"When Rachel denounced her people, she did it with the serene self-confidence of a High Priestess reciting a liturgy. She said it without fear of criticism or censure. And she received none. The other students listened in silence, their eyes moving timidly back and forth between me and Rachel, as if unsure which of us constituted a higher authority."

and

"By giving in to the German conquerors, those French women in the Kay Boyle story had betrayed their men. But it was an understandable betrayal. Their men were gone. The Germans were in command.

Who had conquered Rachel’s people? What had led her to disrespect them? Why did she behave like a woman of a defeated tribe?"

(The incident that Yeagley describes here took place about 20 years ago)

UbuMaccabee said...

David, self-loathing is an exquisitely decadent form of imaginary suffering. It's exactly what Nietzsche meant by passive nihilism. I saw the same on campus all the time; it's practically part-and-parcel of the institution at this point. Ithaca delenda est. Ithaca delenda est. Ithaca delenda est.

The only hope forward, culturally, is for the normals to create their own education system from the ground up, kindergarten to the university. The reason the Democratic Party went from liberal to insane is because the university has been indoctrinating insanity for decades. Now the lunacy finally shows up on the national radar and people are surprised? As you note in your account, this garbage has been ongoing, and it's just going to get worse. There is a whole new class of rot coming out every year. You cannot sail a boat that is filled with holes.

Ubu Scipio Africanus the Destroyer

Sam L. said...

Ubu has outstanding snark. Good Ubu!