You never know what not to believe anymore. We are now told by the internet that one of the great wisecracks of the 20th century was post-fabricated. Apparently, Ghandi was never asked what he thought of Western civilization, and didn’t answer “it would be a good idea.” That the quote might have been faked — AI magistrates can’t say for sure what wasn’t said over 80 years ago — turns out lucky for Darializa Avila Chevalier’s college hate klan, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD. That’s because their original mission statement claimed they were Westerners fighting “for the total eradication of Western civilization.” The poor things would have to choke on their own venom with no Western civilization to eradicate.
Mahatma is one of the very few guys they’d let off any of the hooks they want patriarchy hanging from. Other male authority figures they’d approve, Mao, Uncle Joe, Pol Pot, Fidel … actually hung people from hooks.
What CUAD, socialists, Islam, and the legions of like-thinking organizations are really interested in is eradicating human volition.
Now that Chevalier is just about certain to be U.S. representative from New York’s 13th District, we’d better start taking college crank-tanks more seriously. Columbia University, known as King’s College when Alexander Hamilton was an undergrad, shines oppressively from the Western firmament. Whether the school is an instrument of eradication or a target of it keeps everyone guessing. Culturally wary people haven’t ruled out the possibility that the north Manhattan institution has been out to get us all since roughly the end of World War II.
Is there any doubt what part of the curriculum comes first on the CUAD “hit” list in higher education? It isn’t physics, chemistry, engineering, biology or social science. Classical and traditional literature festers in the aggrieved brain like a pus oozing wound. They can’t stand Homer, Dante, or the Bard and have even less use for the Jew, Leopold Bloom. The neo-enlightenment sees only two hostile sides. It puts all stories either on one or the other.
As matriculated chapters of the woke movement — is there a better label? — have it, the so-called “Western canon” is one big oppressive testament to subordinate everyone without European ancestors. If books are anything to go by, a lot more stories come from west of the Urals and north of the Tropic of Cancer than the rest of the planet combined. Wresting control of the “narrative” is a high priority in West-phobic Ivory Towers. Fanon’s wretched of the Earth don’t have the literary output to meet that demand. That’s why lefties find cancellation and censorship more efficient than the effort producing worthwhile prose entails. Declining literacy rates do no harm to the cause either.
Are civilizations and cultures zero sum games with opponents out to suppress and dominate each other? It’s not historically unknown but finding it universal to the human experience is pathological. Seeing things that way is no way to run an academy.
In the meantime, it’s from such professorial camps that we hear all the bitching about the disproportionate distribution of resources. The ones that they disproportionately consume never seem to count. It’s the brainchild’s burden. Whether or not the social justice cult produces any resources of value is debatable. How seriously can we take the West’s avowed enemies, who dwell so lushly in its abundance?
Capitalism and Christianity are the primary institutions that the ultra-conscientious cannot abide. Avila Chevalier is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and has converted to Islam. Knowing that is no reason for Americans to let their guards down. Both of the entities the lady identifies with would use powers of the state to limit the latitude of action available to citizens now.
However unpleasant you may find your present boss to be, socialism can only be inflicted by bosses you can’t wholly quit. The capitalist society plaguing Elysian visionaries overwhelms a victim with choices. It doesn’t matter if she’s choosing her words, holding the clicker in front of the tube, surfing content on a laptop, picking dinner or looking for a job. Those who’d do your thinking for you want these options cut down to less oppressive size. But once bureaucrats have seized American options, any effort to regain lost rights is labeled “fascism.”
The Deconstructionists, who tell us that all verbal communication is loaded and oppressive, share a lot of common ground with CUAD and kindred. The Decons spill out unwieldy tomes wordily explaining that language itself is tainted. The “F” word, according to those isms however, always rests on literal bedrock.
While it’s true that what goes dubiously under the nominative “capitalism” isn’t wholly on the up and up these days, any confidence in the pols planning to fix it all for us is hard to muster. Most of the parasitism bleeding us now is due to governing entanglement in “capitalism.” Rather than closing the most beaten path in the world, the artery linking Washington D.C. and South Manhattan, they’ll demand — with a Billy Idolesque rebel yell — “more, more, more.”
Brad Lander, who was once in the DSA himself, beat Dan Goldman in the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th district which includes Wall Street. Henry Fielding wrote about the difference between a country boy and a city boy in Joseph Andrews nearly three hundred years ago. The city boy is more inclined to kiss an arse than to kick it. Any 10th district voter who expects no accommodation with the NYSE from their rep in 2027 is in for a rude awokening. That’s socialism for you; their talons usually come out swooping down on prey with less than 10,000 employees.
Now, if highfalutin social engineers are intent on ruling over peasant fate, can the supposed post-feudal era get more dismal? What do you expect more Islam on Capitol Hill will do for democracy?
Is there any point to playing the game of debate with Islamists? We can cite European stats on rape and other crimes or which demographic plunders the continent’s public dole until the crescent moon of Sha’ban is sighted. What can stand no level of examination is the ideology itself. Every prominent “intellectual” of the Islamic faith denies anyone the option of opting out. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim today or a target of jihad.
These are the words of Mohamed Iqbal, who is widely perceived as the most enlightened Muslim thinker of recent times:
The truth is that Islam is not a Church. It is a state conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing, and animated by an ethical ideal which regards man not as an earth-rooted creature, defined by this or that portion of the earth, but as a spiritual being understood in terms of a social mechanism, and possessing rights and duties as a living factor in that mechanism.
“[A] State conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing.” Did you get that? You didn’t get to just say no to Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Third Reich, or Mao’s People’s Republic. Iqbal gets more specific. Here he describes why, by his lights, the West doesn’t work:
The universal ethics of Jesus is displaced by national systems of ethics and polity. The conclusion to which Europe is consequently driven is that religion is a private affair of the individual and has nothing to do with what is called man’s temporal life.
Man is not a citizen of a profane world that must be renounced in favor of a purely spiritual realm. In Islam, matter is spirit realizing itself in space and time. Europe, probably under the influence of Manichaean thought, accepted the dualism of spirit and matter with little critical reflection. Although many of Europe’s finest thinkers now recognize this foundational error, its statesmen continue to impose it on the world as unquestionable truth. The resulting separation of the spiritual from the temporal has profoundly shaped European religious and political thought, effectively excluding Christianity from the public life of European states.
The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.
Islam as a living force for freeing the outlook of man from its geographical limitations, and teaches that religion is a power of the utmost importance in the life of individuals as well as states. Islam is itself Destiny and will not suffer a destiny.
What is called “Islamophobia” cannot be literally distinguished from fear of theocracy. How much more does anyone need to know about a religion that turns to Sayyid Qutb for understanding of “peace”? On a site unwittingly titled: Overcoming Violence in Islamic Ethics: Ṭāhā ʿAbd Al-Raḥmān’s Dialogism and Moral Responsibility, we are treated to this enlightened view:
Quṭb asserts that in Islam, peace is the rule and conflict is inevitable. Until the divine order on earth is realized, there must be perpetual struggle and people must serve only God as their master…. According to Quṭb, in order to defeat non-Muslim hostility against Islam, war is to be anticipated. He also contends that daʿwa, or call to Islam, is universal and must be permitted to fulfill its purpose. Any action taken to stop it must be viewed as a battle against Islam. When opponents obstruct the call to Islam, as the tribe of Quraysh did with Muḥammad, war must be conducted.
Qutbists don’t bother to consider that killing your way to conversion might be what creates the hostility. Lenin and Stalin defined “peace” similarly, it’s when their opponents give up and are ruled by their demands. The above citation came from the second hit Googling “Islamic intellectuals who oppose coercion.” Rule by the sword is as close as they can get.
You may have a good neighbor, physician, local merchant, or professional of any kind who is Muslim in your midst. He or she may be a better local citizen than you are. But as long as every commanding ideological voice of this theocratic system requires worldwide “submission,” seeing that faith as other than bellicose and threatening is beyond naïve.
Whatever Churchill, FDR, Cecil Rhodes, JFK, Ronald Reagan or the gamut of our philosophers from Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke, Franklin, or Eric Hoffer ever got wrong, none ever came close to suggesting, much less demanding, that the whole world come around to their metaphysical convictions.
The demand that “Islam will enter every home” is not a secret. The list of public pronouncements can go on for pages. Major media however, from the NYT, CNN, liberal websites, and the networks, persistently fails to find these ultimatums fit to print or air.
Islam is a religion pieced together from in the 7th century from a shallow interpretation of Christianity, Judaism, classical history, and fragments of the polytheistic traditions preceding it. When years of preaching failed to collect a flock, Mohamed turned to violence and larceny. The promise of loot and female flesh, rather than tenets, logic or humane principles, is what it took to spark the craze. Relying on such motives to gather a congregation is the same kind of appeal a pirate captain uses to muster a crew. Remaining mum about these realities to evade offense is no different than accommodation of any other totalitarian ideology.
There’s no doubt our economy is riven by parasites who consume without creating value. Socialists and Muslims are far from unknown in that mix. The socialists would limit market alternatives the way Islam does spiritual and literary ones. What do you expect when these misanthropies team up? What CUAD, socialists, Islam, and the legions of like-thinking organizations are really interested in is eradicating human volition.
READ MORE from Tim Hartnett:
The Manufacture of Moral Outrage
Statists Hate Christian Schools
The Populists Were Not Always Wrong
