"Decolonization" is part of the intellectual sickness created by Marcuse and Zinn that pervades American higher eduction like a mestastatizing tumor and created little Gazas where faculty and students openly engage in anti Semitic rhetoric and physical harm against Jewish students.
The notion of 'decolonization' originated with Frantz Fanon, a Caribbean born Marxist
and Critical Theorist. He emphasized ultra-violence as a cathartic means of achieving 'liberation' - a quasi-religious act of blood sacrifice, possibly inspired by voodoo. His most famous book is #The Wretched Of the Earth.'
See James Lindsay's short video, Decolonization is Violence for a brief overview.
decolonization is actually a conservative idea: we need to break down and decentralize society -that is to decolonize it.
The approach of Rufo et al, towards CRT is completely off the mark: embrace & redefine CRT (agree and amplify i.e.) -->move to racial federalism = rights for whites and a western rebirth.
standing up for some arch-colonialist power -which is middle-eastern, it's not western, which represents military socialism not free-trade and property - (all while ignoring the western far-right mind you) is merely to act as the negative image of the same traitors and authoritarians who work at Harvard or the NYT.
CRT stands for elevating race over merit in all aspects of life and equity-the same result as opposed to the same opportunity. Israel is far more a home for free enterprise and start up capitalism than that of a state run economy and has no colonies but only a military that exercises in justifable self defense.
The jewish identity itself is just neurotic and dysfunctional; you're actually making them into a caricature by promoting it. De-cultify the jewish ID, make jews into judeans, help them assimilate into the greater body of the semitic/western world, and you'll be saving more lives than anyone.
If CRT partially applied, decreases merit, then CRT universally applied will negate that negation, and thus restore merit.
Sensible...I did always think Lucifer & Jesus the Jew were similar figures - both, we are told, begotten of the Abrahamic God, both bringers of knowledge to man - bringers of an expansion in human perspective - and both subjected to torture by the Abrahamic God, yet both, we're told, live eternally. They are as an angel and a demon on the Abrahamic God's shoulders, and man's in his image - and yet, just as our personal angels & demons are two sides of our single self, how can these emanations of Abrahamic God, one dark and one light, not be considered of a oneness with himself, emanated in turn at his pleasure? Or perhaps when his lordship begets another deic son, he flips a cosmic coin, to see whether he shall make his nature pure or the alternative.
The reason that Rufo et al don't take your approach is that they are Americans who believe in racial equality. They are not racialists like today's so-called progressives, yet nor they are racists like you.
They believe in the radical notion that people should be judged on the content of their character and the color of their skin - and as so-called progressives now consider themselves to have moved "past" such naive notions, genuine racial equality has fallen to conservatives to defend and uphold.
ironically I insist on the term "racialist" since "racist" denotes more of an idiot, knee-jerk reaction, narrow in its focus, and more or less self-centered in its aims, something much more typical of left-wing "racialists" as you term them.
I believe that apples should be judged as a class of foods, but I also understand we need to look at individual apples as a type of food too -individual apples could be spoiled despite the quality of the group -we should balance our perception with group averages and vice versa.
"Color-blindness" is like ignoring that apples even exist or that they might be different from oranges; a great way to ruin an apple orchard and a great way to get indigestion. I don't believe that color-blindness is genuinely anti-racist or egalitarian, quite the contrary, it's a disingenuous anti-racism, as the left's is, which leads to more inequality and competition, (actually it biases said competition in favor of one or another group) always aggravating the inborn differences between peoples.
So-called progressives have criticized mere "color blindness" as "not far enough" since, well, forever - at least since the 60s - so I'm really not sure why you think that's an attack on them. Rather, it is in fact my *issue* with them that they are hyperfocused on color & ethnicity, which I believe prevents such primitive associations from fading into the night of history.
Neither apples nor oranges give me indigestion - if one or the other is particularly unpleasant to your stomach I suggest that you see a doctor.
That aside, I certainly agree that the left's focus on race-based allocations according to "group need" - aka 'racialism' - is stupid and perpetuates racism. We may look at affirmative action for a simple example - it should be quite obvious, to any thinking person, that it's not good to create a situation where, at any given school, all the Asian students *really are* smarter & more qualified on average than the white students, and the white students likewise to the Hispanic students, and the Hispanic students likewise to the African-American students.
At NYU in particular they have reached a state where the Asian students & white students can't even take the same classes because the disparity in skill is too great - if you make the class easy enough for the white people to mostly pass, the Asians all get 100s and snooze through, while if you make the class hard enough to challenge the Asians, most of the whites fail.
In the face of such obvious inequality, it may seem foolish to assert color-blindness as a virtue, but I do so nonetheless - as an example of why, I do not think it would be good for white people to admit categorical inequality with Asian people in math skills, even if the tilt of the evidence is clear, and its weight strong. This, I assert, would cause many white people to give up on math entirely, believing it an ethnic weakness, resulting in a widening & self-perpetuating gap.
So I assert that color-blindness is in fact the only viable way to organize a democratic society - and if you are against a democratic society, get thee behind me - and I assert this for the same reasons that we tell even rather average children that they might be President someday, which is that nothing is more precious nor more powerful than hope-against-hope for a better future.
(We intellectuals, capable of discussing weakness without condemning it as evil, may have our beliefs about the strengths & weaknesses of the various races, but it is not for us to share such terrible knowledge with the proles, for they have not the leisure or wisdom for sufferance - they, as ever, will duly proceed to beating each other with sticks and other objects-to-hand, should their primitive animosities be fed rather than stifled - and you know what the guy in the hat said about a house divided, don't you?)
if you tried to make apple pie out of oranges it'd be pretty gross I think we can both agree? i.e. we shouldn't be neutral to basic differences between people, just as we wouldn't be neutral to differences between things; that doesn't mean we should discard individual differences either however.
You fear that people will go haywire if they knew about racial differences, that they'll bash each other's heads in and whatnot, but such is the world, that the right, should want to bring about: the return to "master morality", and the will-to-power of the individual, which is a nullity, a pure "slave morality" if there's no possibility for anyone to gain mastery. History shows that most people would reject prosperity, if it is boring, offering no advancement; if there's no "master-morality" in this prosperity, exchanging it for risk and danger, which at least brings possibilities with them. Competition: such brings about the only real equity between men.
It is the same old Marxist fairy tale, originated by Rousseau in his myth of the Noble Savage, to the effect that a perfect world is being prevented from emerging by a conspiracy of irredeemable bad guys, whether by Capitalists, Jews, Colonizers, the Patriarchy, etc.
It is cartoonish thinking, a facile mindset which most kids outgrow by the age of 8, but it infests the blithering midwit colonies of academia. As Orwell noted, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
Well obviously many countries did engage in colonialism and did bad things to native populations. Stole resources and land subjugated populations. But you can't turn back time so everyone just needs to move forward.
It is indeed the "old colonization," asserted to be mentally subjecting the once-colonized to this day - specifically those who didn't get the catharsis of a violent struggle for independence.
To quote from the article...
>Frantz Fanon, the latter of whom argued that “violence is a cleansing force” that “frees the native from his inferiority complex” and “restores his self-respect.”
Horrible, yet...one cannot deny a ring of truth, in just the same way that the mere performance of a duel, even one in which both parties shoot the ground, restores the feudal honor of both parties.
For a subject people, a successful fight for independence restores an equal status with the former overlord. Freedom merely given, rather than won, has a sickly sweet taste.
We see that the Vietnamese, after suffering most bloodily to win their independence from the French, and succeeding in that effort, bear the French little ill will - nor do they even particularly resent Americans, even though we were bombing their fathers and grandfathers and napalming their aunts and uncles. We brought to bear as much strength as the American public would permit, and it was not enough. They won, they beat us, we left. There is thus no shame in trading as equals.
The broad decolonization that happened in the 50s and 60s was partly a result of genuine moral feeling, and partly an effort to pre-empt communists by means of indigenous democratic governments - but it nonetheless left a lot of would-be revolutionaries with what we may call "dialectical blue balls." They didn't get to have a glorious struggle for independence - all they got was a note from Whitey saying "here's your country back." Not nearly as nice to hang on your wall as a bloody sword. So the argument that these academics are making is even stranger than you might expect...it's that European colonizers shouldn't have just given their subject nations freedom, they should've made them fight for it.
In other words, simply giving colonies independence was not, as you might have whitely thought, a long-overdue act of moral humanitarianism - in fact it was a final, supreme, and incontrovertible act of "Whiteness" that forever denied our former subjects equality with us. They instead remain forever our children, having merely been granted freedom, rather than earning it.
You may disagree with this analysis - certainly I think it is ridiculous to base future actions on it - but this is the logic they are following, and it is a good explanation for why these anti-colonial sentiments remain so strong, even in the absence of much real colonialism.
Yet their conclusion - "engage in now-pointless violence against former oppressors" - seems both lazy & rather unlikely to result in the equalization of socio-emotional status that they desire. To me it seems that such tantrums rather entrench the parent-childhood relationship further - they merely give us more excuses for that same unbearable, superior, parental White forbearance we have for those consider not-yet-civilized.
the 3rd world still has "warrior morality" if you will; the mentality of the strong and the free which is why the fanonian reasoning found such strength; in the end it was just the nietzschean "master morality" of the african. But all people want to be strong and free, it's a longing of all, which is why colonialism -the imposition of alien modes of feeling and acting - is so hateful & why receiving one's home back as if it were a gift will always be an outrage (tho hist. i don't think this is really how colonialism ended, nonetheless one could make a strong case that decolonization was intended to set up patron-client relationships between former colonizers and colonized).
It's also why left-wing politics is a real sham, a real neo-colonialism, b/c it also sees itself as ultimately a gift-giving, not a rendering back of land or hard assets out of necessity but a doling of patronage and largess - of gifts, tokens -out of "liberality" aka liberalism. It's a swindle which could only be rejected so long as we understand that the warrior mentality only exists if there are assets, substances, qualities, etc. in this world which really are inalienable.
I should also say that I think actual Africans are far less sensitive to this theoretical injustice than our American academics who claim to speak on their behalf.
Actual Africans have prosaic concerns like food, houses, cars, jobs, and roads, which American academics do not concern themselves with providing. Nor do they call for the provision thereof - in fact they would condemn such gifts as yet another attempt to set up the patron-client relationship that you describe.
We fiercely wrangle with our precious consciences - we ask ourselves, in desperation, is it crueler to help up a man we've knocked over & thus rub our victory in his face, or is it crueler to leave him in the dust to his own devices? O our tortured hearts!
In the meanwhile, serene Zhongguo lends a hand and a seed and a plow, and a car and a truck or two or three, and a brick or a thousand or a billion... and we have the gall, the absolute gall, to decry the Han for selfish action, for base commercial interest, as if these petty sins were at all comparable to our incessant arguing back and forth amongst ourselves while our victim lies still hungry & barefoot in the dust! How dare they help our victim! How dare they rob us of the chance to clear our conscience! Wait until we get our precious rectitude in order, please!
Forget the past - that it is Guangdong Foday, and not Ford or Chevrolet, which provides assembly kits at discount to Kantanka Auto is injustice enough. And that our so-called progressives would strenuously, viciously, venomously oppose such mutually beneficial interaction - on the basis of *purported love* of all things - is evidence enough of the white man's inherent & incurable evil - it seems that even our anti-racists still seek to keep the African in subjection, and merely for the salve of their own precious conscience! At least spices were tasty.
That's not only false but impossible, how could you be born Jewish, w Jewish parents and family, in a Jewish community, and have "zero connections to the Jewish community"?
Jews in the prophetic tradition who exchange their people and religion for abstractions like "Justice" and "Liberation" always create the golem that eventually tries to destroy their own people.
Happened to Trotsky and the Soviets (who were very Jewish) and is happening again with Social Justice, which is an outgrowth of the Frankfurt School.
the prophetic tradition (the preacher who travels the land denouncing the powerful for their crimes of oppression and corruption) is perhaps one of the greatest gifts the Jews have given humanity, but it always seems to end w Jews sawing off the branch they're sitting on.
think of men like Marcuse (History's least grateful refugee) or Zinn: America gave them wealth, fame, freedom and security (for them and their children) and they still couldn't help but denounce it and demand that it be radically transformed to atone for its historical sins.
You have to remember that in Czarist Russia, which was marked byr religious persecution and forced military service and the Czarist hope that Jews would either immigrate ,or assimilate, Marxism was very atractive to Jews because of its rhetoric about social justice . However, Stalin proved that Marxism in practice had no room for Trotsky and especially sought to suppress and eradicate Jewish observance and education and after 1948 was the Soviets were especially anti Israel
The Jewish Peop[e are the physical and spiritual descendants of the "Israelites' who are referred to in the Torah as the Children of Israel. Any student of the Bible knows that the same people who left Egypt and received the Torah built a Golden Calif for which they were forgiven and entered into a new covenant with God.
Whenever a civilization accumulates sufficient seed corn, you can be sure that people like these Marxcissists will scheme and scam their way into the storehouse and, once inside, gorge themselves until the seed corn is all gone. Before being granted access to seed corn, people must have skin in the game, long term, and be poised to suffer personal loss whenever they consume more than they create. If a system lacks the mechanisms to enforce such penalties, then this pattern is bound to be repeated wherever sufficient stores of seed corn exist.
Exactly. We will tolerate ourselves into slavery and oblivion. It's the built-in flaw of Liberalism. Practitioners and defenders of free thought/free speech absolutists need to start playing hardball and get serious about purging some of these radical elements, the Constitution be damned. Lincoln decreed an end to Habeas Corpus during the Civil War. Surely we can fight the radical left more effectively without such drastic centralized action, but some sort of offensive has to start, one that makes gains quickly and neutralizes individual leftists, both in their university hives and their metastasizing NGOs, in addition to the sort of long-haul reform Mr. Rufo is, to his credit, engaged in.
I'm open to any suggestions for short-term solutions. Now that the problem is clearly identified and defined, indignant venting has lost its usefulness as far as I'm concerned, though people new to the problem need to go through the same changes, probably.
Rather than "traditionalist" academics - since, if you recall, those august eminences were the academic parents & grandparents of our current rotten crop - and since I am extremely tired of Harold Bloom - you could also just appoint apolitical slates of Asian & Indian scientists, lawyers, doctors, & engineers. (And a few white ones, if you can find any willing to stand for science in this day and age.)
Task these homo-novi with doing the best research possible & with cutting out waste, protect them from any "progressive" recriminations that come their way, and you'll get the result you're after, lickety-split.
Moreover, I don't know where you purport to find all these "traditionalist academics" - we are in the situation we are in because white conservatives abandoned academia just as much as they were forced out. I mean, even Shakespeare-worshiping Howard Bloom apparently thinks the best thing written in the last century is The Road, so he's plainly retarded, and yet he's still the brightest of the bunch...
Thanks for your comments. You indeed make a couple of good points which deserve a response.
First, I don't think white conservatives abandoned the academic world so much as they were driven out by affirmative action which was used by leftist academics to actively discriminate against them in hiring, and career advancement. Not only did leftist academics actively seek women and minority applicants to hire, but they tailored the academic openings to fields most likely to appeal to the favored groups, i.e. black history, women's literature, LGBTQ+infinity, and excluded fields most likely to appeal to white men such as military and diplomatic history, European political history, European civilization, and literature, and economic history. Given shrinking budgets and a surfeit of applicants, it was easy to screen out the disfavored straight, white, non-Marxist, men.
Now that the Supreme Court has, at last struck down such policies in college admissions, if not in hiring, it should open the way to legal action that should, at least in theory, reduce these practices for the next generation of scholars.
If you want apolitical, that is honest, research these days, the best way to do that is to get the left wing politics out of budgets, grants, and awards. Insure that money does not flow disproportionately, or at all, to "climate change," "gender studies," and other agenda driven research fields. GOP control of the federal government should enable it to reduce if not eliminate such research.
State legislatures and governors regulate budgets. Red state governors should appoint academically neutral Boards of Regents that in turn should appoint University presidents and chancellors who supervise the curriculum at the college and even department level through supervisory committees. It is exactly such institutions that have created the leftist monopolies on university campuses. The ideological problems we face today are not natural developments like the movement of the tides. They are man made. They can be reversed by men and women who value honest scholarship over ideological indoctrination.
We can't expect conditions to change overnight. After all, it took two or more generations for them to reach the current pass. But much can be done with political will at the state level, given the political will. Private universities are another problem because they are insulated from much potential state action. But even here, over time, as the public begins to recognize the superiority of the state schools over even the vaunted the Ivy League schools, the competition can change the academic landscape. The current scandals at Harvard and Columbia, among others may already be starting to hasten such change.
The second the center-right realizes that it would need the help of the far-right to do anything substantial, it'll cower and bend the knee, as it always does.
The mentality of 'Progressive' demonization of Israel is beneath contemptible. It is not truly even primarily about a concern for the Palestinian people. The real driver is to signal that your privileged narcissistic little wonderful self is on the side of the 'oppressed'. To these people 'oppression' is a shallow abstraction that serves to inflate their personal vanity as one of the good guys. This poisonous vanity has been pouring out of Western academia for decades. I still remember the drug-addled anti-Zionist 'sit-in' at my UK university in 1972.
Absolutely on point. These kids are taught to find people’s worth on the oppression scale which negates personal agency in favor of blaming anyone more successful on that scale and calls for an overthrow of the more successful groups as a solution.
Oh I wouldn’t doubt that some of them wouldn’t want the same barbaric actions here as well.
I still can’t quite process how these “studies” want to destroy the foundations that enables their production in the first place. And then I remember it’s all about power. In a totalitarian regime, who needs a university? Dismal.
Sorry, but just because you and others are ignorant of int'll law doesn't change facts. The fact is that under international law Judea and Samaria are disputed territories not occupied, because they weren't taken from a sovereign entity as Jordan had illegally, BY INTERNATIONAL LAW, annexed the whole of the West Bank in 1948. As such, Israel has AT LEAST the same rights as do the Arabs on that land.
Regardless, this has never been about land, contrary to more than 50 years of propaganda and myth building by Arabs and the Jew hating factions of the west.
If this was truly about land and "Palestinian" sovereignty, a Palestinian State would have come into being at some point during the 19 years that Arabs had complete control over all of the areas that they demand now. For 19 years, '48-'67, what kept Arabs from creating a State that included all of the "west bank", including eastern Jerusalem, all of Gaza, and all of the Golan Heights? A capital in East Jerusalem and all of Gaza and the west bank. But they didn't, because that has NEVER been the goal. The goal is to slaughter Jews, and nothing could have illustrated that better than this last Sabbath.
love your independent work, thinking and writing. Keep sharing it - makes a tremendous difference in being able to sort through and articulate some of this twisted thinking from the "experts".
The objective of Marxism is to smash all hierarchies in society. Destroying institutions and culture do tend to lead to societal collapse and mass starvation. Yet the Marxist just keep on doing it, hoping it will work this time around.
Smashing hierarchies as they turn around and create their own “new” hierarchies, which of course benefit only themselves?! Marxism is the very thing it seeks to destroy it seems, a one-dimensional mind-f$$$?
Nikita Khrushchev brought his elderly mother from her dilapidated hovel to live with him in his luxury dacha. She looked around doubtfully at all the marble and gold, the chandeliers and priceless art, and said, "But Nikita, what if the Communists come back?"
It is the myth of the Noble Savage: once upon a time, all people were joyfully united in a collective 'Species Being,' until self awareness and greed shattered the primal innocence. This myth may gain its emotional power from being a reenactment of the infant's primal sense of unity with its mother which is catastrophically shattered by the necessity of growing up and taking responsibility. Leftists have a craving to crawl back to that infantile state. Evan Sayet calls it the "Kindergarten of Eden,"
Quite eye opening. These “professors” teach classes that tell students to eliminate the very institutions that they are teaching at and attending. How can the presidents/administrations at the universities not understand what’s going on? It’s like having a group of arsonists knocking on the front door, yelling that they are going to burn down the house, and the owner opens the door and welcomes them in. Stockholm syndrome anyone.
Maybe, just maybe, these “higher education” institutions staffed by supposedly the best and the brightest, are actually just a mirage, a house of cards with a great marketing department.
Look at the BIPOC woman President of Harvard and delve into her history, and how she smeared Roland Fryer for scholarly research that contradicted the Woke agenda, then you’ll understand why Harvard is the way it is.
But why were these barbarians allowed through the gates in the first place? The people in charge of universities have been bizarrely supine from the very start! That is something which is in dire need of explanation.
One of the most puzzling aspects of the “decolonization” mindset is their seeming inability to understand that the “colonizers” will fight back. It’s like the playground bullies who cry and run to tell teacher when one of their targets pops them in the nose. No sympathy here.
"One of the most puzzling aspects of the “decolonization” mindset is their seeming inability to understand that the 'colonizers' will fight back."
Other than the Israelis and their current campaign against Hamas in Gaza, I have seen very little of this. Besides, as Rufo's essay points out, the left has its own definition of "colonization/decolonization" that goes beyond the conventional definition involving military action, occupation, and economic exploitation. If you have white skin, your mind must be "decolonized" and occupied by, presumably, the correct opinions of your own whiteness. You must forever be on guard for the emergence of your inbred racism that is a necessary condition of your skin color.
The lack of meaningful resistance from the right has emboldened the most extreme fringe of the left while they have us cowed by bleating on forever about the nonexistent threat of "the radical right," a phantom as far as I can tell. All they need do is cry "racist!" or "homophobe, transphobe!" and the right circles the wagons and plays the left's evil little linguistic game, constantly denying, denying, denying while the leftist fringe grows more powerful by whipping ass with this colossal tar brush.
Of course, this is enabled by the corporate press which, as we have witnessed in real time, has exposed itself as nothing but propagandists for the left, as the social enforcers of their ideology.
Now more than ever, there’s an urgent need to preserve and restore in institutions of higher learning the classic values/studies of freedom, tolerance, diversity of thought and speech, scientific methods, Western and religious philosophies, history of Communism, Nazism and terrorism, economics...
After years of the "straight white male" stuff, it really is infuriating to see prominent Jews on the left whining about the consequences of envy-based identity politics.
Where, exactly, did they think this would end up? Why didn't they care when guys like me were in the role of oppressor, but expect me to care when they get roped into the super awesome and justicey reindeer games?
"Decolonization" is part of the intellectual sickness created by Marcuse and Zinn that pervades American higher eduction like a mestastatizing tumor and created little Gazas where faculty and students openly engage in anti Semitic rhetoric and physical harm against Jewish students.
Perfect metaphor. Is the university a terminal case? I'm beginning to think so.
The notion of 'decolonization' originated with Frantz Fanon, a Caribbean born Marxist
and Critical Theorist. He emphasized ultra-violence as a cathartic means of achieving 'liberation' - a quasi-religious act of blood sacrifice, possibly inspired by voodoo. His most famous book is #The Wretched Of the Earth.'
See James Lindsay's short video, Decolonization is Violence for a brief overview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kojhJo6QNVY
People can 'decolonize' by not using using anything made or invented by the 'bad' colonizers.
People can 'decolonize' by not using using anything made or invented by the 'bad' colonizers.
Why is my comment repeating?
I just added it once.
Sometimes comments get duplicated due to network problems. You can delete the others by clicking on the ... icon in the lower right.
Thank you.
Run that past me one more time?
DeColonize Europe. Turn it back on them.
decolonization is actually a conservative idea: we need to break down and decentralize society -that is to decolonize it.
The approach of Rufo et al, towards CRT is completely off the mark: embrace & redefine CRT (agree and amplify i.e.) -->move to racial federalism = rights for whites and a western rebirth.
standing up for some arch-colonialist power -which is middle-eastern, it's not western, which represents military socialism not free-trade and property - (all while ignoring the western far-right mind you) is merely to act as the negative image of the same traitors and authoritarians who work at Harvard or the NYT.
CRT stands for elevating race over merit in all aspects of life and equity-the same result as opposed to the same opportunity. Israel is far more a home for free enterprise and start up capitalism than that of a state run economy and has no colonies but only a military that exercises in justifable self defense.
The jewish identity itself is just neurotic and dysfunctional; you're actually making them into a caricature by promoting it. De-cultify the jewish ID, make jews into judeans, help them assimilate into the greater body of the semitic/western world, and you'll be saving more lives than anyone.
If CRT partially applied, decreases merit, then CRT universally applied will negate that negation, and thus restore merit.
Sensible...I did always think Lucifer & Jesus the Jew were similar figures - both, we are told, begotten of the Abrahamic God, both bringers of knowledge to man - bringers of an expansion in human perspective - and both subjected to torture by the Abrahamic God, yet both, we're told, live eternally. They are as an angel and a demon on the Abrahamic God's shoulders, and man's in his image - and yet, just as our personal angels & demons are two sides of our single self, how can these emanations of Abrahamic God, one dark and one light, not be considered of a oneness with himself, emanated in turn at his pleasure? Or perhaps when his lordship begets another deic son, he flips a cosmic coin, to see whether he shall make his nature pure or the alternative.
The reason that Rufo et al don't take your approach is that they are Americans who believe in racial equality. They are not racialists like today's so-called progressives, yet nor they are racists like you.
They believe in the radical notion that people should be judged on the content of their character and the color of their skin - and as so-called progressives now consider themselves to have moved "past" such naive notions, genuine racial equality has fallen to conservatives to defend and uphold.
ironically I insist on the term "racialist" since "racist" denotes more of an idiot, knee-jerk reaction, narrow in its focus, and more or less self-centered in its aims, something much more typical of left-wing "racialists" as you term them.
I believe that apples should be judged as a class of foods, but I also understand we need to look at individual apples as a type of food too -individual apples could be spoiled despite the quality of the group -we should balance our perception with group averages and vice versa.
"Color-blindness" is like ignoring that apples even exist or that they might be different from oranges; a great way to ruin an apple orchard and a great way to get indigestion. I don't believe that color-blindness is genuinely anti-racist or egalitarian, quite the contrary, it's a disingenuous anti-racism, as the left's is, which leads to more inequality and competition, (actually it biases said competition in favor of one or another group) always aggravating the inborn differences between peoples.
So-called progressives have criticized mere "color blindness" as "not far enough" since, well, forever - at least since the 60s - so I'm really not sure why you think that's an attack on them. Rather, it is in fact my *issue* with them that they are hyperfocused on color & ethnicity, which I believe prevents such primitive associations from fading into the night of history.
Neither apples nor oranges give me indigestion - if one or the other is particularly unpleasant to your stomach I suggest that you see a doctor.
That aside, I certainly agree that the left's focus on race-based allocations according to "group need" - aka 'racialism' - is stupid and perpetuates racism. We may look at affirmative action for a simple example - it should be quite obvious, to any thinking person, that it's not good to create a situation where, at any given school, all the Asian students *really are* smarter & more qualified on average than the white students, and the white students likewise to the Hispanic students, and the Hispanic students likewise to the African-American students.
At NYU in particular they have reached a state where the Asian students & white students can't even take the same classes because the disparity in skill is too great - if you make the class easy enough for the white people to mostly pass, the Asians all get 100s and snooze through, while if you make the class hard enough to challenge the Asians, most of the whites fail.
In the face of such obvious inequality, it may seem foolish to assert color-blindness as a virtue, but I do so nonetheless - as an example of why, I do not think it would be good for white people to admit categorical inequality with Asian people in math skills, even if the tilt of the evidence is clear, and its weight strong. This, I assert, would cause many white people to give up on math entirely, believing it an ethnic weakness, resulting in a widening & self-perpetuating gap.
So I assert that color-blindness is in fact the only viable way to organize a democratic society - and if you are against a democratic society, get thee behind me - and I assert this for the same reasons that we tell even rather average children that they might be President someday, which is that nothing is more precious nor more powerful than hope-against-hope for a better future.
(We intellectuals, capable of discussing weakness without condemning it as evil, may have our beliefs about the strengths & weaknesses of the various races, but it is not for us to share such terrible knowledge with the proles, for they have not the leisure or wisdom for sufferance - they, as ever, will duly proceed to beating each other with sticks and other objects-to-hand, should their primitive animosities be fed rather than stifled - and you know what the guy in the hat said about a house divided, don't you?)
if you tried to make apple pie out of oranges it'd be pretty gross I think we can both agree? i.e. we shouldn't be neutral to basic differences between people, just as we wouldn't be neutral to differences between things; that doesn't mean we should discard individual differences either however.
You fear that people will go haywire if they knew about racial differences, that they'll bash each other's heads in and whatnot, but such is the world, that the right, should want to bring about: the return to "master morality", and the will-to-power of the individual, which is a nullity, a pure "slave morality" if there's no possibility for anyone to gain mastery. History shows that most people would reject prosperity, if it is boring, offering no advancement; if there's no "master-morality" in this prosperity, exchanging it for risk and danger, which at least brings possibilities with them. Competition: such brings about the only real equity between men.
That would have been a great point if humans were fruit.
and what is ''colonization'' then?? and did it end a century or two ago, or is it still being pursued presently?
It is the same old Marxist fairy tale, originated by Rousseau in his myth of the Noble Savage, to the effect that a perfect world is being prevented from emerging by a conspiracy of irredeemable bad guys, whether by Capitalists, Jews, Colonizers, the Patriarchy, etc.
It is cartoonish thinking, a facile mindset which most kids outgrow by the age of 8, but it infests the blithering midwit colonies of academia. As Orwell noted, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
Well obviously many countries did engage in colonialism and did bad things to native populations. Stole resources and land subjugated populations. But you can't turn back time so everyone just needs to move forward.
very flattering.. thanks..
Islamic colonization will never stop
That's because their philosophy doesn't tell them to feel guilty about it.
Indeed, their philosophy demands colonization
Christianity is Abrahamic too.
It is indeed the "old colonization," asserted to be mentally subjecting the once-colonized to this day - specifically those who didn't get the catharsis of a violent struggle for independence.
To quote from the article...
>Frantz Fanon, the latter of whom argued that “violence is a cleansing force” that “frees the native from his inferiority complex” and “restores his self-respect.”
Horrible, yet...one cannot deny a ring of truth, in just the same way that the mere performance of a duel, even one in which both parties shoot the ground, restores the feudal honor of both parties.
For a subject people, a successful fight for independence restores an equal status with the former overlord. Freedom merely given, rather than won, has a sickly sweet taste.
We see that the Vietnamese, after suffering most bloodily to win their independence from the French, and succeeding in that effort, bear the French little ill will - nor do they even particularly resent Americans, even though we were bombing their fathers and grandfathers and napalming their aunts and uncles. We brought to bear as much strength as the American public would permit, and it was not enough. They won, they beat us, we left. There is thus no shame in trading as equals.
The broad decolonization that happened in the 50s and 60s was partly a result of genuine moral feeling, and partly an effort to pre-empt communists by means of indigenous democratic governments - but it nonetheless left a lot of would-be revolutionaries with what we may call "dialectical blue balls." They didn't get to have a glorious struggle for independence - all they got was a note from Whitey saying "here's your country back." Not nearly as nice to hang on your wall as a bloody sword. So the argument that these academics are making is even stranger than you might expect...it's that European colonizers shouldn't have just given their subject nations freedom, they should've made them fight for it.
In other words, simply giving colonies independence was not, as you might have whitely thought, a long-overdue act of moral humanitarianism - in fact it was a final, supreme, and incontrovertible act of "Whiteness" that forever denied our former subjects equality with us. They instead remain forever our children, having merely been granted freedom, rather than earning it.
You may disagree with this analysis - certainly I think it is ridiculous to base future actions on it - but this is the logic they are following, and it is a good explanation for why these anti-colonial sentiments remain so strong, even in the absence of much real colonialism.
Yet their conclusion - "engage in now-pointless violence against former oppressors" - seems both lazy & rather unlikely to result in the equalization of socio-emotional status that they desire. To me it seems that such tantrums rather entrench the parent-childhood relationship further - they merely give us more excuses for that same unbearable, superior, parental White forbearance we have for those consider not-yet-civilized.
the 3rd world still has "warrior morality" if you will; the mentality of the strong and the free which is why the fanonian reasoning found such strength; in the end it was just the nietzschean "master morality" of the african. But all people want to be strong and free, it's a longing of all, which is why colonialism -the imposition of alien modes of feeling and acting - is so hateful & why receiving one's home back as if it were a gift will always be an outrage (tho hist. i don't think this is really how colonialism ended, nonetheless one could make a strong case that decolonization was intended to set up patron-client relationships between former colonizers and colonized).
It's also why left-wing politics is a real sham, a real neo-colonialism, b/c it also sees itself as ultimately a gift-giving, not a rendering back of land or hard assets out of necessity but a doling of patronage and largess - of gifts, tokens -out of "liberality" aka liberalism. It's a swindle which could only be rejected so long as we understand that the warrior mentality only exists if there are assets, substances, qualities, etc. in this world which really are inalienable.
I should also say that I think actual Africans are far less sensitive to this theoretical injustice than our American academics who claim to speak on their behalf.
Actual Africans have prosaic concerns like food, houses, cars, jobs, and roads, which American academics do not concern themselves with providing. Nor do they call for the provision thereof - in fact they would condemn such gifts as yet another attempt to set up the patron-client relationship that you describe.
We fiercely wrangle with our precious consciences - we ask ourselves, in desperation, is it crueler to help up a man we've knocked over & thus rub our victory in his face, or is it crueler to leave him in the dust to his own devices? O our tortured hearts!
In the meanwhile, serene Zhongguo lends a hand and a seed and a plow, and a car and a truck or two or three, and a brick or a thousand or a billion... and we have the gall, the absolute gall, to decry the Han for selfish action, for base commercial interest, as if these petty sins were at all comparable to our incessant arguing back and forth amongst ourselves while our victim lies still hungry & barefoot in the dust! How dare they help our victim! How dare they rob us of the chance to clear our conscience! Wait until we get our precious rectitude in order, please!
Forget the past - that it is Guangdong Foday, and not Ford or Chevrolet, which provides assembly kits at discount to Kantanka Auto is injustice enough. And that our so-called progressives would strenuously, viciously, venomously oppose such mutually beneficial interaction - on the basis of *purported love* of all things - is evidence enough of the white man's inherent & incurable evil - it seems that even our anti-racists still seek to keep the African in subjection, and merely for the salve of their own precious conscience! At least spices were tasty.
You are a monster
They were far left and had zero connections to the Jewish community
That's not only false but impossible, how could you be born Jewish, w Jewish parents and family, in a Jewish community, and have "zero connections to the Jewish community"?
Jews in the prophetic tradition who exchange their people and religion for abstractions like "Justice" and "Liberation" always create the golem that eventually tries to destroy their own people.
Happened to Trotsky and the Soviets (who were very Jewish) and is happening again with Social Justice, which is an outgrowth of the Frankfurt School.
Jews who exchanged their identity for a belief in scial justice are worshipping a false god.
be that as it may, they're still deeply Jewish.
the prophetic tradition (the preacher who travels the land denouncing the powerful for their crimes of oppression and corruption) is perhaps one of the greatest gifts the Jews have given humanity, but it always seems to end w Jews sawing off the branch they're sitting on.
think of men like Marcuse (History's least grateful refugee) or Zinn: America gave them wealth, fame, freedom and security (for them and their children) and they still couldn't help but denounce it and demand that it be radically transformed to atone for its historical sins.
Having a sense of gratitute is a basic Jewish trait-Marcuse and Zinn both lacked that essential character trait
Ilhan Omar is the world's least grateful refugee.
They had the same lack of connection to the Israelite diaspora.
You have to remember that in Czarist Russia, which was marked byr religious persecution and forced military service and the Czarist hope that Jews would either immigrate ,or assimilate, Marxism was very atractive to Jews because of its rhetoric about social justice . However, Stalin proved that Marxism in practice had no room for Trotsky and especially sought to suppress and eradicate Jewish observance and education and after 1948 was the Soviets were especially anti Israel
I'm talking about Israelites, not Jews.
The Jewish Peop[e are the physical and spiritual descendants of the "Israelites' who are referred to in the Torah as the Children of Israel. Any student of the Bible knows that the same people who left Egypt and received the Torah built a Golden Calif for which they were forgiven and entered into a new covenant with God.
Marxists like Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg had zero affinity or sympathy for the travails of theJewish People in Russia or Germany.
Yes-far too many
Whenever a civilization accumulates sufficient seed corn, you can be sure that people like these Marxcissists will scheme and scam their way into the storehouse and, once inside, gorge themselves until the seed corn is all gone. Before being granted access to seed corn, people must have skin in the game, long term, and be poised to suffer personal loss whenever they consume more than they create. If a system lacks the mechanisms to enforce such penalties, then this pattern is bound to be repeated wherever sufficient stores of seed corn exist.
Exactly. We will tolerate ourselves into slavery and oblivion. It's the built-in flaw of Liberalism. Practitioners and defenders of free thought/free speech absolutists need to start playing hardball and get serious about purging some of these radical elements, the Constitution be damned. Lincoln decreed an end to Habeas Corpus during the Civil War. Surely we can fight the radical left more effectively without such drastic centralized action, but some sort of offensive has to start, one that makes gains quickly and neutralizes individual leftists, both in their university hives and their metastasizing NGOs, in addition to the sort of long-haul reform Mr. Rufo is, to his credit, engaged in.
I'm open to any suggestions for short-term solutions. Now that the problem is clearly identified and defined, indignant venting has lost its usefulness as far as I'm concerned, though people new to the problem need to go through the same changes, probably.
Here is how to start. Every red state governor and legislature should defund every radical department in the universities they support.
Appoint new chancellors and members to university boards. In short , pack them with traditionalists who support free speech and oppose indoctrination.
Rather than "traditionalist" academics - since, if you recall, those august eminences were the academic parents & grandparents of our current rotten crop - and since I am extremely tired of Harold Bloom - you could also just appoint apolitical slates of Asian & Indian scientists, lawyers, doctors, & engineers. (And a few white ones, if you can find any willing to stand for science in this day and age.)
Task these homo-novi with doing the best research possible & with cutting out waste, protect them from any "progressive" recriminations that come their way, and you'll get the result you're after, lickety-split.
Moreover, I don't know where you purport to find all these "traditionalist academics" - we are in the situation we are in because white conservatives abandoned academia just as much as they were forced out. I mean, even Shakespeare-worshiping Howard Bloom apparently thinks the best thing written in the last century is The Road, so he's plainly retarded, and yet he's still the brightest of the bunch...
Thanks for your comments. You indeed make a couple of good points which deserve a response.
First, I don't think white conservatives abandoned the academic world so much as they were driven out by affirmative action which was used by leftist academics to actively discriminate against them in hiring, and career advancement. Not only did leftist academics actively seek women and minority applicants to hire, but they tailored the academic openings to fields most likely to appeal to the favored groups, i.e. black history, women's literature, LGBTQ+infinity, and excluded fields most likely to appeal to white men such as military and diplomatic history, European political history, European civilization, and literature, and economic history. Given shrinking budgets and a surfeit of applicants, it was easy to screen out the disfavored straight, white, non-Marxist, men.
Now that the Supreme Court has, at last struck down such policies in college admissions, if not in hiring, it should open the way to legal action that should, at least in theory, reduce these practices for the next generation of scholars.
If you want apolitical, that is honest, research these days, the best way to do that is to get the left wing politics out of budgets, grants, and awards. Insure that money does not flow disproportionately, or at all, to "climate change," "gender studies," and other agenda driven research fields. GOP control of the federal government should enable it to reduce if not eliminate such research.
State legislatures and governors regulate budgets. Red state governors should appoint academically neutral Boards of Regents that in turn should appoint University presidents and chancellors who supervise the curriculum at the college and even department level through supervisory committees. It is exactly such institutions that have created the leftist monopolies on university campuses. The ideological problems we face today are not natural developments like the movement of the tides. They are man made. They can be reversed by men and women who value honest scholarship over ideological indoctrination.
We can't expect conditions to change overnight. After all, it took two or more generations for them to reach the current pass. But much can be done with political will at the state level, given the political will. Private universities are another problem because they are insulated from much potential state action. But even here, over time, as the public begins to recognize the superiority of the state schools over even the vaunted the Ivy League schools, the competition can change the academic landscape. The current scandals at Harvard and Columbia, among others may already be starting to hasten such change.
The second the center-right realizes that it would need the help of the far-right to do anything substantial, it'll cower and bend the knee, as it always does.
That's why they're occupying the center. No real conviction.
Like Rodents
The mentality of 'Progressive' demonization of Israel is beneath contemptible. It is not truly even primarily about a concern for the Palestinian people. The real driver is to signal that your privileged narcissistic little wonderful self is on the side of the 'oppressed'. To these people 'oppression' is a shallow abstraction that serves to inflate their personal vanity as one of the good guys. This poisonous vanity has been pouring out of Western academia for decades. I still remember the drug-addled anti-Zionist 'sit-in' at my UK university in 1972.
Absolutely on point. These kids are taught to find people’s worth on the oppression scale which negates personal agency in favor of blaming anyone more successful on that scale and calls for an overthrow of the more successful groups as a solution.
I try to find simple words to describe this insanity of identity politics, wokeism, praising victimhood. You really summed it up.
Harvard is actually teaching their students to hate.
Thank you. You might find this article of mine about the state of our universities of interest: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Oh I wouldn’t doubt that some of them wouldn’t want the same barbaric actions here as well.
I still can’t quite process how these “studies” want to destroy the foundations that enables their production in the first place. And then I remember it’s all about power. In a totalitarian regime, who needs a university? Dismal.
Sorry, but just because you and others are ignorant of int'll law doesn't change facts. The fact is that under international law Judea and Samaria are disputed territories not occupied, because they weren't taken from a sovereign entity as Jordan had illegally, BY INTERNATIONAL LAW, annexed the whole of the West Bank in 1948. As such, Israel has AT LEAST the same rights as do the Arabs on that land.
Regardless, this has never been about land, contrary to more than 50 years of propaganda and myth building by Arabs and the Jew hating factions of the west.
If this was truly about land and "Palestinian" sovereignty, a Palestinian State would have come into being at some point during the 19 years that Arabs had complete control over all of the areas that they demand now. For 19 years, '48-'67, what kept Arabs from creating a State that included all of the "west bank", including eastern Jerusalem, all of Gaza, and all of the Golan Heights? A capital in East Jerusalem and all of Gaza and the west bank. But they didn't, because that has NEVER been the goal. The goal is to slaughter Jews, and nothing could have illustrated that better than this last Sabbath.
exactly so.
This.
It’s Civilizational Suicide 101. Its prerequisites are Denial of Reality 101, Ignorance of History 101, and Virtue Signaling 101.
love your independent work, thinking and writing. Keep sharing it - makes a tremendous difference in being able to sort through and articulate some of this twisted thinking from the "experts".
In preaching that hate, Harvard should no longer be considered a non-profit entity.
How ironic that the students and faculty are so quick to label
people “Nazis“, yet they have no problem with innocent Jews being slaughtered in Israel.
Not ironic, consistent.
To the woke, if you don't want to slaughter the Jews, you are a Nazi.
The objective of Marxism is to smash all hierarchies in society. Destroying institutions and culture do tend to lead to societal collapse and mass starvation. Yet the Marxist just keep on doing it, hoping it will work this time around.
Smashing hierarchies as they turn around and create their own “new” hierarchies, which of course benefit only themselves?! Marxism is the very thing it seeks to destroy it seems, a one-dimensional mind-f$$$?
Nikita Khrushchev brought his elderly mother from her dilapidated hovel to live with him in his luxury dacha. She looked around doubtfully at all the marble and gold, the chandeliers and priceless art, and said, "But Nikita, what if the Communists come back?"
It is the myth of the Noble Savage: once upon a time, all people were joyfully united in a collective 'Species Being,' until self awareness and greed shattered the primal innocence. This myth may gain its emotional power from being a reenactment of the infant's primal sense of unity with its mother which is catastrophically shattered by the necessity of growing up and taking responsibility. Leftists have a craving to crawl back to that infantile state. Evan Sayet calls it the "Kindergarten of Eden,"
One of our best writers in this dark era of “ civilization “
Quite eye opening. These “professors” teach classes that tell students to eliminate the very institutions that they are teaching at and attending. How can the presidents/administrations at the universities not understand what’s going on? It’s like having a group of arsonists knocking on the front door, yelling that they are going to burn down the house, and the owner opens the door and welcomes them in. Stockholm syndrome anyone.
Maybe, just maybe, these “higher education” institutions staffed by supposedly the best and the brightest, are actually just a mirage, a house of cards with a great marketing department.
Look at the BIPOC woman President of Harvard and delve into her history, and how she smeared Roland Fryer for scholarly research that contradicted the Woke agenda, then you’ll understand why Harvard is the way it is.
But why were these barbarians allowed through the gates in the first place? The people in charge of universities have been bizarrely supine from the very start! That is something which is in dire need of explanation.
One of the most puzzling aspects of the “decolonization” mindset is their seeming inability to understand that the “colonizers” will fight back. It’s like the playground bullies who cry and run to tell teacher when one of their targets pops them in the nose. No sympathy here.
"One of the most puzzling aspects of the “decolonization” mindset is their seeming inability to understand that the 'colonizers' will fight back."
Other than the Israelis and their current campaign against Hamas in Gaza, I have seen very little of this. Besides, as Rufo's essay points out, the left has its own definition of "colonization/decolonization" that goes beyond the conventional definition involving military action, occupation, and economic exploitation. If you have white skin, your mind must be "decolonized" and occupied by, presumably, the correct opinions of your own whiteness. You must forever be on guard for the emergence of your inbred racism that is a necessary condition of your skin color.
The lack of meaningful resistance from the right has emboldened the most extreme fringe of the left while they have us cowed by bleating on forever about the nonexistent threat of "the radical right," a phantom as far as I can tell. All they need do is cry "racist!" or "homophobe, transphobe!" and the right circles the wagons and plays the left's evil little linguistic game, constantly denying, denying, denying while the leftist fringe grows more powerful by whipping ass with this colossal tar brush.
Of course, this is enabled by the corporate press which, as we have witnessed in real time, has exposed itself as nothing but propagandists for the left, as the social enforcers of their ideology.
Now more than ever, there’s an urgent need to preserve and restore in institutions of higher learning the classic values/studies of freedom, tolerance, diversity of thought and speech, scientific methods, Western and religious philosophies, history of Communism, Nazism and terrorism, economics...
After years of the "straight white male" stuff, it really is infuriating to see prominent Jews on the left whining about the consequences of envy-based identity politics.
Where, exactly, did they think this would end up? Why didn't they care when guys like me were in the role of oppressor, but expect me to care when they get roped into the super awesome and justicey reindeer games?
I care
When someone tells you they want to kill you and destroy your civilisation - you'd better believe them rather than hope for the best.
When they already own the education system, you are fighting for your life already.