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Blaming whitey
National Post ^ | Barbara Kay

Posted on 09/13/2006 3:09:53 AM PDT by Clive

In his Sept. 2 National Post column, George Jonas noted that if universities had been eliminated around 1900, we'd have been spared the devastating effects of many toxic ideologies, which needed mass production and distribution vehicles -- those vulnerable empty vessels known as students -- to sow their ruinous messages amongst the general population.

He cited, amongst others, the scourges of anti-Semitism (in the guise today of anti-Zionism), Communism, National-Socialism, eco-fascism and militant feminism, all of which have depended on universities for transmuting ideology into laws, social policy, foreign relations, and cultural identity.

I'm inclined to agree with Jonas; but I wouldn't go back to 1900 for their putative elimination, only to the 1970s. For while some intellectual hogwash has always been perpetrated in universities, it is only since the last century's counter-culture that the negative influences in university culture began actively to outweigh the benefits of a liberal education.

The university used to be a free market of ideas, bad and good. For the past generation or more, though, the near-monopoly of Marxist ideologues over curricula and new hirings has ensured that instead of harvesting annual crops of free-ranging and fearlessly curious minds, their cold-taloned grip on arts, social sciences, cultural studies and law faculties churns out anxious, cud-chewing PC-niks. Students graduate knowing exactly what they stand against -- racism, male privilege, homophobia, cultural and territorial imperialism -- but have been trained to repress their curiosity about what they stand for.

A case of academic decadence in point is "Whiteness Studies" (WS), only 10 years ago a fringe campus fad, now a vigorously promoted branch of critical race theory in 30 American teaching institutions. WS also boasts its own think tank, the Center for the Study of White American Culture (CSWAC). I'm predicting that because of its extremely anti-American orientation, WS will soon find a berth in certain avant-garde Canadian campus' sociology departments.

Unlike other special-interest disciplines, such as Women's, Queer or Islamic Studies, which celebrate their subjects' achievements while mourning their victimization at the hands of men/homophobes/Israel, WS cuts to the chase: It is all, and only, about white self-hate. According to CSWAC co-founder and executive director Jeff Hitchcock: "There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of colour ... We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today ... which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it."

WS teaches that if you are white, you are branded, literally in the flesh, with evidence of a kind of original sin. You can try to mitigate your evilness, but you can't eradicate it. The goal of WS is to entrench permanent race consciousness in everyone -- eternal victimhood for nonwhites, eternal guilt for whites -- and was most famously framed by WS chief guru, Noel Ignatiev, former professor at Harvard University, now teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art: "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race -- in other words, to abolish the privileges of the white skin."

A normal person wouldn't even know where to start in arguing against this and the entire farrago of absurdities generated under the WS rubric. Debating Ignatiev about the inherent sins of American whiteness is the equivalent of showing Iran's President Ahmadinejad evidence of the Holocaust. Neither party really wants to know, and treating such pathological hate-mongers with rationality is demeaning to white people and Jews alike.

That elite universities where WS is taught, such as Princeton and UCLA, tolerate their students' being indoctrinated with Ignatiev and company's pernicious race theories points to a new low in moral vacuity and civilizational self-loathing.

The old adage holds: Who stands for nothing will fall for anything. WS is a particularly far out example of academic pusillanimity. Yet tonally it is the logical extension of a gathering pattern. One could say with justice that the 19 al-Qaeda terrorists who obliterated almost 3,000 individuals in the trade towers were only acting out the anti-Western hatred their ivory tower "colleagues" have been incubating amongst their flocks for nigh on 40 years.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: moralabsolutes; phd; piledhigheranddeeper
Here is the FR posting of the George Jonas column:

On hate and drills

1 posted on 09/13/2006 3:09:54 AM PDT by Clive
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To: Alberta's Child; albertabound; AntiKev; backhoe; Byron_the_Aussie; Cannoneer No. 4; ...

-


2 posted on 09/13/2006 3:10:11 AM PDT by Clive
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To: Clive
The goal of WS is to entrench permanent race consciousness white hate in everyone...
3 posted on 09/13/2006 3:40:35 AM PDT by libertylover (If it's good and decent, you can be sure the Democrat Party leaders are against it.)
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To: Clive

"I'm inclined to agree with Jonas; but I wouldn't go back to 1900 for their putative elimination, only to the 1970s."

In the mid 1950's would be the best bet.


4 posted on 09/13/2006 3:49:53 AM PDT by Inge_CAV
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To: Clive
Universities are the only places where you can find people who have so much education but "know" nothing. Many of the "smartest" people (i.e. most educated) I ever met in college, were dumber that a box of rocks, and wouldn't know to come in out of the rain.

There's a hugh difference between education and intelligence: You can be intelligent, but uneducated, and you can get education. But, to quote Ron White, "You Can't Fix Stupid."

Mark

5 posted on 09/13/2006 3:51:10 AM PDT by MarkL (When Kaylee says "No power in the `verse can stop me," it's cute. When River says it, it's scary!)
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To: Clive

6 posted on 09/13/2006 4:02:17 AM PDT by Vaquero ("An armed society is a polite society" Robert A. Heinlein)
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To: MarkL

Something I've always believed:

A wise man can learn

A learned man doesn't (necessarily) act wisely.


7 posted on 09/13/2006 4:05:23 AM PDT by RangerM
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To: Clive; Inge_CAV
 
 
"I'm inclined to agree with Jonas; but I wouldn't go back to 1900 for their putative elimination, only to the 1970s."
In the mid 1950's would be the best bet.
 
Actually, Jonas was closer to the mark, though this secular humanist marxist group-think crappo in education started well back before 1900. Beg, borrow or steal a copy of Bending the Twig, The Revolution in Education and Its Effect on Our Children, by Augustin G. Rudd, ISBN 57-9376, though it could be a challenge since it had a limited copy run. It's a sobering report on how we got to where we are now with education. There was a supplement to that, written in 1972, but I have never seen a copy of it.
 
 
Works by others -
 
Conquest of the American Mind by Dr. Wittmer
Collectivism on the Campus and Brain Washing in the High Schools by Dr. E. Merril Root
 
 

8 posted on 09/13/2006 4:37:34 AM PDT by lapsus calami (What's that stink? Code Pink ! ! And their buddy Murtha, too! http://www.dianairey.com)
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To: lapsus calami

Thanks!


9 posted on 09/13/2006 4:41:56 AM PDT by Inge_CAV
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To: Clive
This would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

There is no "white" race anyway. There are a myriad of shifting definitions of what "white" is anyway, which in some universities includes those of Oriental descent (to successful to be a minority).
10 posted on 09/13/2006 4:46:05 AM PDT by redgolum ("God is dead" -- Nietzsche. "Nietzsche is dead" -- God.)
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To: Vaquero
A local Indian reservation used to sell those where I grew up. But the state mascot of the University of Nebraska is a big corn fed farmer, so it didn't quite catch on.
11 posted on 09/13/2006 4:47:44 AM PDT by redgolum ("God is dead" -- Nietzsche. "Nietzsche is dead" -- God.)
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To: Clive; GMMAC; Pikamax; Former Proud Canadian; Great Dane; Alberta's Child; headsonpikes; Ryle; ...
Canada ping.

Please send me a FReepmail to get on or off this Canada ping list.

12 posted on 09/13/2006 4:50:53 AM PDT by fanfan (Trust everybody, but cut the cards yourself.)
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To: Vaquero
"Everything's going to be all white!"

I still have my shirt!

13 posted on 09/13/2006 5:18:08 AM PDT by Jimmy Valentine (DemocRATS - when they speak, they lie; when they are silent, they are stealing the American Dream)
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To: Vaquero
"Where are the white weeman at?"

Blazing Saddles

14 posted on 09/13/2006 9:43:21 AM PDT by norraad ("What light!">Blues Brothers)
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To: redgolum
Actually, this is the acid test. If you look as though you could be related to Paul Harvey, you're white. The closer you are to this, the whiter you are:


15 posted on 09/13/2006 9:50:36 AM PDT by Oberon (What does it take to make government shrink?)
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To: wagglebee; Calpernia

List?

Cal - thought this might interest you.


16 posted on 09/13/2006 9:58:19 AM PDT by little jeremiah
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To: little jeremiah; Calpernia
Cal - thought this might interest you.

Calpernia is still holding out for "Blonde Studies"

:-)

17 posted on 09/13/2006 10:00:39 AM PDT by wagglebee ("We are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." -- President Bush, 1/20/05)
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To: 69ConvertibleFirebird; Alexander Rubin; An American In Dairyland; Antoninus; Aquinasfan; BIRDS; ...
Moral Absolutes Ping!

Freepmail wagglebee or little jeremiah to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.

FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
[ Add keyword moral absolutes to flag FR articles to this ping list ]


18 posted on 09/13/2006 10:02:38 AM PDT by wagglebee ("We are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." -- President Bush, 1/20/05)
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To: wagglebee

They don't have them??


19 posted on 09/13/2006 11:01:49 AM PDT by little jeremiah
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