THE VIOLENCE . . . exploding across the country now has almost nothing to do with the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white policeman. That was merely the catalyst for a process that has deep roots in American culture.
The moral is: ideas matter. For decades now, our colleges and universities (and increasingly our [grade] schools) have been preaching . . .
. . . a gospel of cultural self-hatred. America, according to this gospel, is evil. The country is inexplicably racist and beholden to an irredeemably racist and beholden to an irredemibly exploitative economic system.
The latest retelling of this creation myth is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning '1619 Project' whose fundamental message is that America was started as a 'slavocracy.' According to this malignant fantasy, the Revolutionary War was fought primarily 'to protect the institution of slavery.' At last count, elements of this disgusting bit of historical revisionism were being adopted in the curricula of some 4,000 school districts.
They are also working themselves out [on] the streets of our cities. One contingent is made up of ordinary or garden variety hooligans, young men and women . . . who are out to loot and smash up whatever they can.
More dangerous is the other contingent, the 'intellectuals' -- pajama-boy, Soros-subsidized thugs who have been taught to hate their country and now have a chance to express that hatred unfettered by civil order. '
After the Vietnam War,' wrote one academic radical, 'a lot of us didn't just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while -- to the unobservant -- that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.'
[Unca D doubts whether the writer was an academic radical. I think the writer, who I believe is a Christian apologist, is taking the voice of a radical to illustrate a point. Whatever the provenance of the writer, however, the point is correct.]
Not all of them are on the street, like the Ivy-[League]-educated lawyer Colinford Mattis and fellow attorney Urooj Rahman, who [have been charged with tossing] a Molotov cocktail into a New York police vehicle on Saturday.
Some are living vicariously, like Sarah Parcak, an Egyptologist at the University of Alabama, who took to Twitter as rioters beset Washington, [D.C.], to advise others on how to topple obelisks: 'Just keep pulling till there's good rocking, there will be more and more tilting, you have to wait more for the obelisk to rock back and time to pull when it's coming to you. Don't worry you're close!'
Was dispensing such wisdom a good idea? She must have worried about that, because she later wrote 'PLEASE DO NOT PULL DOWN WASHINGTON MONUMENT.' But her intentions were clear: an obelisk, she noted, 'might be masquerading as a racist monument.'
She later confessed that archeology and Etyptolosy have 'deeply racist, colonialist, and nationalist roots. . . It is a field that has caused and continues to cause enormous harm (see DNA research).'
It wasn't long ago that we were assured that the 'end of history' was nigh: that Western-style liberalism was on the verge of establishing itself the world over and that peace an amity were breaking out everywhere. But instead of that attractive version of the end of history, we are now witnessing something like the retribalization of the world: a violent turn against Western liberalism and its tradition of rationality, respect for individual rights, and recognition of a common good that transcends the accidents of ethnic and racial identity.
Given this situation, it is all the more imperative that we educate our students in the Western tradition, that we teach them about the virtues of our society and its democratic institutions. Such education is the staunchest bulwark against the forces of disintegration we are facing.
The multiculturalists rant on about the repressive, inequitable nature of [U.S.] society. Antifa and [its] allies do their best to bring it about. The spectacle of violence on the streets and unbearable posturing by the media and our elites -- we're all racists; we're all guilty! -- reminds us that the real choice facing us today is not between a 'repressive' Western culture and a multicultural paradise, but between culture and barbarism.
Civilization is not a gift; it is an achievement -- a fragile achievement that needs constantly to be shored up and defended from besiegers inside and out. These are facts that do not easily penetrate the cozy and coddled purlieus of the academy, to say nothing of the guttural ravings of the mob. But they are part of the permanent challenge . . . any civilization must face.
This is something . . . Evelyn Waugh understood with exceptional clarity. 'Barbarism,' he wrote in a somber moment in 1938, 'is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy.
'Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficient. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. There is no more agreeable position that that of dissident from a stable society. Theirs are all the solid advantages of other people's creation and preservation, and all the fun of detecting hypocrisies and inconsistencies.
'There are times when dissidents are not only enviable but valuable. The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.'
[Unca D: "A time like the present" refers to 1938, the year the great barbarian Hitler cowed civilized Great Britain and France into surrendering the Sudetenland.]
The tragedy that engulfed George Floyd should not distract us from this exigent truth.
(Roger Kimball, "How to destroy civilization: Thanks to tenured radicals, we are witnessing the retribalization of the world," Spectator USA (spectator.us), June __, 2020 (abridged, lightly edited))
Unca Darrell: The radicals have already won. The cohort who understand what Mr. Kimball is saying, and agree, will soon die away. Their children and grandchildren are, in the main, the intellectual spawn of radicals who already rule the commanding heights. The cheering we hear is for the full victory of the barbarians.
The thing now is to fight back. Even if we cannot win, we can delay the inevitable for as long as possible. Pray, pray, and pray again. Vote for our deeply flawed champion, Mr. Trump. Send him money. Don't send money to intellectually and morally corrupt newspapers and universities. Speak out: All lives do matter; free speech matters; the rule of law matters; civilization matters. Rioters and their enablers have no intellectual or moral claim on our sympathies, our patience, or our money.
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