Posted on 05/16/2024 4:23:40 AM PDT by MtnClimber
It’s been a long and disgraceful road to the propaganda factories American universities have become.
Forty-nine years ago, a kind of ideological “Fifth Column” comprising members of America’s “New Left” hailed the triumph of their comrades in Hanoi over the embattled Republic of [South] Vietnam. After over a half a century of agitation and propaganda, they lauded a communist conquest logistically enabled by the Soviet Union and Communist China, achieved by conventional military means and effected through a blitzkrieg involving half a million men and several hundred tanks, as an achievement on behalf of peace.
In similar terms, at once pacifist, humanitarian, and false, they would have us believe, and perhaps believe themselves, that a totalitarian communist victory was the just and necessary end of nearly twenty-five years of bloody conflict in the former states of Indochina. Had the radical activists of the New Left been willing to learn from history, had they been willing merely to consider the historically verifiable effects of Marxist theory translated into democidal practice, then they might have foreseen that the decade of “peace” that followed the fall of Saigon would build up more misery and death in Indochina than the previous quarter-century of war. Perhaps they did not care, or perhaps they were too busily engaged in restructuring the academic values of the universities from whence they came. Whatever the cause of their selective, intellectual blindness to historical reality, any earnestly objective historical assessment must surely number the American “peace” activist among the victors of the Second Indochina War. And in America no less than in silenced and subjugated Indochina, history is the prized and zealously defended possession of the victorious, who portray themselves as the heroes of that masterfully misrepresented war.
Perhaps, most ominously of all, the victors have been ensconced for decades...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Maybe when companies stop hiring students from the worst offenders there will be changes. I think universities funded with taxpayer money should be prohibited from political activity as well. It really bothers me that my taxes go toward marxist indoctrination.
I agree!! If churches are prohibited from participating in the political discourse, why the hell should taxpayer funded universities, (and for that matter public schools) be state sanctioned propaganda centers.
BTTT
He brings up a good pint. Academics are the classic example of being eaten by the monster they created. It’s happened many times.
I recall reading about the Castro Marxist revolution. Havana University was the Oldest college in the Western Hemisphere. Almost a half millennium old. They had survived pirates, diseases, Hurricanes wars and conquest. Castro kept them closed THREE years while he weeded out anti-revolutionary “elements”…probably shot by Che.
Despite many ivory tower leftist types who taught there, praised him/revolution and talked about the oppressed peoples etc etc.
The fall of universities started way WAY before Vietnam.
One can trace it back to the mid to early 1900’s, with various “philanthropic” organizations grants. Follow the money. I forget the details (look at this a few years ago), but I recollect there were congressional hearings, before WW2, that delved into banking and foundation influences into universities. I think this is DSC stuff, part of the Swamp.
Once they had the PHDs, over decades they wormed their way into professors, then students who became professors, then high schools, etc.
A political/educational Cancer.
“I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of Workers!”
The Vietnam War and less often the Korean War have been lumped together with modern endless neocon wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Ukraine as a part of the military industrial complex get rich operation.
The military industrial complex may have been a part of the mix in the Vietnam War, but a greater component was the fight against communism. Patton knew the USSR was evil, had he been turned lose today’s issues with Red China and our own internal communist problems would not exist. The same applies to MacArthur in the Korean war.
The Vietnam War was also to fight communism. The anti war effort mentioned in the article played a major effort in turning Americans against the war as well as continued propaganda through the years getting people to believe it was both an unjust war and militarily lost.
It was not militarily lost, rather militarily successful enough to get the Paris Peace Accord (treaty) that ended the war. The North disregarded the treaty and invaded the South again. The war was lost when Ted Kennedy led the effort to defund the South and the South literally ran out of gas and bullets and had to surrender.
That was our last effort to end communism. To the contrary we let it flourish in our universities as well as send most of our manufacturing abilities to Red China, our sworn enemy, so we could buy all their goods so they could upgrade their military to a modern communist threat all over the world.
On the other hand (in regards to my compliment to the author) he makes a childish wishful statement:
“ Albeit late in the day, educative institutions must return their educators to their academic role and recognize that the “scholar-activist” is an oxymoronic contradiction in terms — and particularly so when the scholars’ intellectual honesty is compromised by their activist conceit. ”
Why in the world would they do that? they ARE the poisonous snake den. They will have to be regulated and or purged by either government or military. Mass firing of every single, literally every Professor of any non-technical field and ALL administrators (as well as selective firing of professors of tech fields like the fake genius Neil Degrasse Tyson).
Otherwise the sickness/cancer will just start spreading again.
While the patriots went off to fight communism, the weak men who stayed behind embraced communism as a rationale and reason for their refusal to fight. Embedded in the safe enclaves of academia, they proliferated and hired their own kind until it became the dominant point of view. And now the patriots are the ones run off of campus as the extremists.
I was an electrical engineering student at the University of Wisconsin - Madison from January 1966 through graduation June 1970. I was also an Army National Guardsman during the same period, called up to fight riots in the last four years.
The animals who rioted during that time and celebrated the Fall of Saigon are the same animals who have dragged a once great institution into the proverbial toilet. They used their student deferments to avoid the draft and service to their country, choosing rather to serve the international communist movement which allowed them the comfort of free sex and drug access.
Now, those same animals are actively applying their tried and true methods used to destroy South Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos to destroy this country…to foul their own nest so to speak.
I am 77 years old and hopefully will not see the final result, but I fear for my son and my grandchildren.
The Deep State controls the universities.
You get to be a professor by bringing in grant money. Control who gets government grants and you control the faculty.
Just as they will not allow Netanyahu to totally decimate Hamas.
They need these pockets of evil to justify the trillions they are skimming from taxpayers.
Correct. Observers who didn’t live through it have no perspective on the importance of the Cold War. It is routinely ignored by latter day intellectuals, even though it was the defining foreign policy context for almost fifty years. Nothing which happened on the international stage from 1945 to 1992 can be fully understood without the Cold War lens. The fight for the universities, part of Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions,” was a battle of the Cold War— one which we lost.
I remember California University students having pro-North Vietnam candle light marches when Vietnam and Cambodia fell to the commies. Then the Killing Fields began.
***
Reminds me of the old Li’l Abner comic strip from 1968 in which the Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything (S.W.I.N.E.) take over the campus.
The terrified University Regents decide to sell the University! The only buyers were the Mafia who brings in the mob enforcers.
Here come the SWINE protesting!
I still get a thrill remembering how the leader of the S.W.I.N.E. used his front teeth to assault the brass knuckles of the mob enforcers. Who says brass won’t make a spark! These did. Big ones at that!
Anyone else remember that old comic strip? Could easily be reprinted today with no changes.
Yep. In the 60s when I was in college the “professor” of my poli sci class was a card carrying communist. He and I argued constantly as I was a YAF member.
Communist revolutions start when some jackass wants to live in the palace and ride in the government limousines and airplanes and have lots of “swimmer Girls” but doesn’t see how he can have that under the present system.
He doesn’t give a damn about the people.
He just needs the people to kill and die for him.
He just wants that good life.
And millions of people do kill and die for him.
These are not "our" universities and never were. With we deplorables gaining access to colleges and universities starting in the 1940s and 1950s, especially with the surge due to the GI Bill, we mistakenly thought going to university was for our benefit, completely unware that the university curriculum for peasants was solely for the benefit of korporations and corrupt governments.
You've been lied to about everything. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannnot unlearn the many lies they've been taught to believe.
I had a college deferment (II-S) for four years from 1968-1972, and it’s my opinion that the existence of those draft deferments was the worst policy decision of the whole Vietnam era (and the competition is stiff).
Read the last clause of the Declaration of War on the Empire of Japan: “...to bring the conflict to a successful termination, all the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States”.
Congress failed to declare war on North Vietnam, failed to impeach and remove Lyndon Johnson and Robert MacNamara for illicit exercise of the War Power, sheltered their own children and their friends from the consequences of allowing war without proper authority, and then claimed the right to bitch about it incessantly.
Bill Buckley wrote “God and Man at Yale” in 1951. The poison was already in total control by then.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.