[The Unhappy World
At
The Free Press's weekly TGIF roundup, Nellie Bowles writes of happenings at her alma mater, Columbia:
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[T]he students are literally leading cheers in favor of Hamas and the October 7 attack, like: "It was the Al-Aqsa Flood that put the global Intifada back on the table again. And it is the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian freedom fighters that will guide every struggle on every corner of the earth to victory." Students holler with excitement; clearly all this a metaphor for peace and love and liberation. Visibly Jewish students who haven't been vetted as good Jews are pushed out of the center of campus by protesters, who keep their faces fully covered as they link hands and repeat: "We have Zionists who have entered the camp." (To be fair, that's also what I say when Bar comes home too late and I'm annoyed.) One student leader of the protests released a video saying: "Zionists don't deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don't deserve to live, the same way we're very comfortable accepting that Nazis don't deserve to live, fascists don't deserve to live, racists don't deserve to live."
Or, as one prominent NBC News reporter put it: "I didn't see a single instance of violence or aggression on the lawn or at the student encampment. The student-led protest was peaceful and often very quiet."
I wonder what these kids would do if America suffered another 9/11 attack. Actually, I really don't wonder. I'm pretty sure I know what they would do.
Do any of you have even the slightest doubt that if MAGA types were massing on campuses to celebrate anti-black atrocities (though there is nothing in our era that remotely compares to what Hamas did to Jews on October 7), and telling LGBT students they aren't welcome on campus, that the entire Cathedral (to use the neo-reactionary term for journalism + academia) would come down on them with asteroidal force? You
know they would; observe how they all handle these demos, and learn about who holds power in this country, and how they use it.
(By the way, the NYPost
reports that George Soros and the Rockefellers have been subsidizing some of these protest organizers.)
I am tempted to think that police should let these campus thugs do their thing. Let the faculty and administrators who seeded the minds of these students with their sicko radicalism deal with the monsters they created. What we are seeing now is a revelation on so many fronts.
I have so much fear and loathing of mobs. It goes so far that I even resist large crowds gathered to protest for causes in which I believe. It 100 percent goes back to being bullied in high school, and watching how the adults in charge allowed the bullies to get away with it because they did not want to stand up to the cool kids.
The late, great Australian poet Les Murray was a lummoxy fat kid who was on the autism spectrum, and who was mercilessly teased as a boy. It marked him. Here is a poem he wrote against demonstrations:
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Demo
by Les Murray
No. Not from me. Never.
Not a step in your march.
not a vowel in your unison,
bray that shifts to bay.
Banners sailing a street river,
power in advance of a vote,
go choke on these quatrain tablets.
I grant you no claim ever,
not if you pushed the Christ Child
as President of Rock Candy Mountain
or yowled for the found Elixir
would your caste expectations snare me.
Superhuman with accusation,
you would conscript me to a world
of people spat on, people hiding
ahead of oncoming poetry.
Whatever class is your screen
I'm from several lower,
To your rigged fashions, I'm pariah.
Nothing a mob does is clean,
not at first, not when slowed to a media,
not when police. The first demos I saw,
before placards, were against me,
alone, for two years, with chants,
every day, with half-conciliatory
needling in between, and aloof
moral cowardice holding skirts away.
I learned your world order then.
Murray's point is not that all demonstrations are bad. It's that even when they have a point, the act of forming a political crowd tends to mobilize and legitimize cruelty. "Superhuman with accusation" the sense that pointing out the sins or crimes of others makes you forget your own fallibility, your own humanity. "You would conscript me to a world" force an individual to hate others as the price of membership in the mob. "Nothing a mob does is clean" meaning that even a righteous mob has dirtied itself somehow in the execution of its will, no doubt because it has dehumanized others.
Hear me clearly:
I do not say that all demonstrations are bad. I would join one if I believed in the cause. But again, I have a deep suspicion of the crowd, because of how being part of one makes you feel. Read Bill Buford's brilliant book
Among The Thugs to get a sense of it. Buford, an educated literary man, embedded himself for a while with English soccer hooligans, to see what it was like from the inside. He writes about the sense of
power one feels as part of a mob and how exhilarating it feels to exercise one's will as a member of a mob, no matter how destructive it might be. You know, that sense of peace and strength I felt the other day, standing there in the room with fellow Christians worshiping, was not something I could have experienced alone. It was a huge gift to me! But you know, I can see how a far more intense version of that could easily go bad.
Murray writes as one educated by bullying, and understanding what it means to be accused by the mob, and threatened by it. You might not grasp the connection between school bullying and a political protest. Seems to me that the Jewish students at Columbia and elsewhere are learning it directly these days.
Get this and
click here to watch the video:This lunatic said some of this stuff in front of Columbia administrators, who apparently just shrugged...
I don't want to hear another damn thing about January 6. I don't want to hear another word about "safe spaces". Not one word of complaint from these people, and their double standards. We saw this in action in the summer of 2020, when like magic, medical professionals said that Covid transmission protocols were suspended for the sake of protesting against white supremacy. If Khymani James were named Patrick O'Leary, and said that BLM supporters don't deserve to live, Columbia would have expelled him in two shakes of a lamb's tail. And they should have done, because a student who articulates a desire to murder fellow students over their politics has no business on campus (and note well that Khymani James didn't just make an offhand remark; he ranted for a long time).
This is the world that the faculty and administrations of America's elite universities have brought into being. Again, I don't care what happens to them now. I only regret that working-class cops are going to have to go in and risk their safety to save these rotten universities from themselves.
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And that helps us understand the look of absolute despondency on Columbia President Minouche Shafik's face throughout her congressional hearing this week. She, and many of her peers at other institutions, are facing two problems. The first is the violence and harassment targeting visibly Jewish students. Contrary to various media figures' attempts to spin recent events, this is absolutely taking place on campus and these violations absolutely are being committed by students. They are also, however, taking place outside of campus as part of the same demonstrations a few feet away. It's not either/or. The campus-organized protests are spreading and so is the violence they incite.
The second problem is the ideological fuel for the violence, which is being pumped from the colleges themselves. It is much easier to increase the police presence on campus than it is to change a culture cultivated purposely and with great enthusiasm over the course of decades. These schools are churning out people who have extraordinarily sick and violent beliefs...
My guess is that a lot of conservative Americans are now being hardened in their right-wing views by all this a move that entails losing even more respect for the status quo Republicans. Do keep in mind that the Khymani Jameses of the world will graduate from their fancy schools and enter into the professional world to help run institutions. James will probably be working in DEI at a major corporation within the next few years. Ivy Leaguer James will well and truly join the Ruling Class....
Imagine the kind of society we would have if these protesters got their way. Take a look at
this essay by the late Roger Scruton, explaining how being present for the 1968 student riots in Paris made him a conservative. Here he is recalling his questioning of a French student friend:
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What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this "bourgeoisie" whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously pompous: but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people I knew.
She replied with a book: Foucault's Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the "discourses" of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argueby the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Liesthat "truth" requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the "episteme," imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.
Plus a change…, as they say. The more things change… . What Scruton writes about is a people who have forgotten God, in the sense that Solzhenitsyn meant. You will recall Solzhenitsyn saying that when he was younger, the old people said that the Bolshevik catastrophe had befallen Russia because Russia had forgotten God. He thought that was silly. But then, after the gulag, he realized that this was true. The last time I heard this phrase used in public was when Iain McGilchrist said it at Oxford in February, in his lecture, trying to account for the nihilistic madness that has overtaken the West.
I don't think McGilchrist was making a point about piety, or at least that piety wasn't his main point. What he was talking about is in
this fantastic First Things essay by Gary Saul Morson, who teaches Russian literature in Chicago. He's writing about Russian literature and faith. (Thank you, Eric Mader, for bringing it to my attention.)
Morson writes that Russians are given to extremes, which is helpful to us, because they show what can happen when ideas are taken to their logical conclusions. Soviet totalitarianism is what happens when a society is controlled by atheist materialism. If God doesn't exist, all things are permitted. Morson:
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If there is no absolute right and wrong, and if all moral norms are mere conventions, then there is no limit to what people are morally permitted to doand once they fully grasp this conclusion, there is no limit to what they will do. Cruelty is sure to become boundless, Dostoevsky's characters predict, and events proved them right.
Excerpts:
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The word "conscience" disappeared from Soviet discourse and was replaced with "consciousness," meaning the class consciousness that recognized morality as one thing only: whatever served the interests of the Party (a doctrine known as partiinost' or "Party-mindedness"). In her memoirs, Evgeniya Ginzburg recounts how an interrogator tried to persuade her to denounce others who, he said, had already denounced her. When she answered, "That's between them and their consciences," the interrogator demanded: "What are you, a Gospel Christian or something?" When she answered, "Just honest," he gave her a lecture on the Marxist-Leninist view of ethics, according to which "honest" means "useful to the Party." As a good Leninist herselfshe questioned only StalinGinzburg had to agree. Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled that "kindness" was regarded as old-fashioned, and its proponents were considered as extinct as the mammoth.
Is it any wonder, then, that once the implications of materialism and atheism became clear, some writers came to profess absolute morality, the soul, individual responsibility, Christian virtues, and even belief in God? Even those who remained atheists, like Ginzburg, could not help noticing that Communists who found themselves in prison were the first to betray others. After all, if there is no non-class morality, why not? As Varlam Shalamov noted in his Kolyma TalesKolyma was where the worst camps of the frozen north were locatedin camp "the intellectual becomes a coward and his own brain provides a justification for his own actions. He can persuade himself of anything, attach himself to either side in a quarrel," as interest dictates. The people least likely to behave this way, Ginzburg concedes, were believers. What kind of believers they were, or to which religion they belonged, did not seem to matter so long as they believed in God.
When Ginzburg fell into despair, she recalls, she was comforted by a woman she describes as "a fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist," a German woman who showed "extraordinary human kindness" and the pity rejected by Marxist-Leninist ethics. The German believer quoted from the Book of Job, and "this broke the spell." Ginzburg "fell to sobbing in the arms of this strange woman, from a world unknown to me. She stroked my hair and said, again and again in German, 'God protects the fatherless. God is on their side.'"
Like other memoirists, Ginzburg was impressed that some believers simply would not do what was wrong. She recounts how, in one frozen Gulag labor camp, some semi-literate believers refused to work on Easter. They were made to stand barefoot on the ice as other prisoners watched. They kept on praying together. "I don't recall how long the torture, physical for the believers, moral for us, lasted," Ginzburg explained, but the rest could not help asking themselves: "Was this fanaticism, or fortitude in defense of the rights of conscience? Were we to admire them or regard them as mad? And most troubling of all, should we have had the courage to act as they did?"
More:
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In longstanding Russian fashion, Bolsheviks drew the ultimate conclusions. They entirely rejected the idea of human dignityneurons have no more dignity than acidsas well as what Trotsky sneeringly called "the sanctity of human life." Although "bourgeois" thinkers claim that there is an objective morality, Lenin explained, there is only the morality of one or another class. Bolsheviks, he asserted, reject "any morality based on extra-human or extra-class concepts . . . there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud." Other radicals maintained that it is acceptable to kill people if you have to, but Lenin found even this position too humanitarian. He called it "moralizing vomit." The qualifier "if you have to" concedes the sanctity of human life. If you care about human life at all, Lenin and Trotsky held, you are a religious believer. Or at least a Kantian, which in the last analysis amounts to the same thing.
If God doesn't exist, and if the observable world is not grounded in a transcendent moral order, then we can and will do monstrous things. We will slaughter over 1,000 Jewish civilians and even rape their corpses … or we will participate in public demonstrations that valorize those evil deeds. We will convince female children to cut their breasts off, for example, and declare themselves to be male, because reality has only the meaning we project onto it.
Morson quotes this brilliant and terrible paragraph from Solzhenitsyn, talking about the speed with which terror overcame Russia:
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[Solzhenitsyn writes:] If the intellectuals in Chekhov's plays who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal ("the secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
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Solzhenitsyn realized that he had not understood his life. He had mistaken evil for good and the meaningless for the meaningful. He also recognized something about evil that I wish more educated people today would learn:
In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel . . . In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties [nor between groups of any sort]but right through every human heart.
This is what religion teaches and what revolutions deny. Without prison, Solzhenitsyn realizes, he would not have learned all this, and so "I say without hesitation: 'Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!'"
Those campus mobs are filled with young people who have been taught that the line between good and evil passes not down the middle of their own hearts, but between the Oppressed and the Oppressors. They will justify any violence, in the end, for the sake of Justice. Read histories of the Bolshevik Revolution. We either stop this now, or they will create hell on earth]
