SOME TERRORISTS
SKYJACK AIRLINERS. OTHERS
hijack the dictionary or hold classrooms of college students hostage
by threatening to blow up their A’s, B’s, or C’s unless they parrot
the propaganda forced down their throats.
Terrorists
target the terra incognita between your ears, sowing land
mines of fear in the mind. Those professors and activists who
use such intimidation tactics on university campuses deserve to
be called eyejackers or earjackers. They ought to be recognized
not only as allies but also as akin to the terrorists now making
war on America.
Is it fair
to compare academic Pomos (Post-Modernists) bent on "deconstructing"
patriotism with the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center?
In at least some senses, yes. Much of modern warfare is based
on psychoanalyzing and using techniques to demoralize, defuse,
or confuse an opponent.
Three decades
ago, the Department of Defense used computer gaming called NESS,
the National Entity Survival Studies, to zero in on what gave
various countries their "national cohesion," their cultural
unity and identity in the minds of their citizens.
The Left
on more than 150 college campuses and city "peace" demonstrations
is now busy trying to undermine American cohesion and resolve
in the global struggle now engaged.
For the past
century and more the Left has claimed to be for "peace"
even as it practices war. This is part of the DoubleSpeak George
Orwell wrote of in his prophetic novel 1984, where war
is peace and freedom is slavery.
But looking
at the array of Marxist
speakers at last weekend’s "peace" demonstration
in Washington, D.C., the hypocrisy of it all became overwhelming.
These people had come to the nation’s capital to protest against
a global economic meeting canceled in the wake of the September
11 terrorist attacks. These speakers were part of the same community
of protestors who smashed store windows during the same meetings
from Seattle to Switzerland.
And from
the smug arrogance on their faces, it was obvious that when these
Leftists first saw the images of the World Trade Center, symbol
of multinational capitalism, collapsing into a smoldering sandwich
of concrete dust, broken steel, and mangled human bodies, they
cheered. They high-fived one another and saluted one another with
Marxist clenched fists like the one Jesse Jackson raised next
to Castro in Havana as he shouted "Long live Fidel, Long
live Che!"
(For the
record, this columnist wants the Reverend Jackson to go to Afghanistan
– not to negotiate, but to offer himself as a Taliban hostage
taking the place of missionaries there imprisoned and threatened
with execution for practicing their Christian faith.)
Those Leftists
now leading campus "peace" rallies were thrilled when
terrorists murdered more than 6,000 men, women, and children on
September 11. In their Orwellian world, war is peace, killing
capitalists is "justice," and creating a new international
"court" of Muslims who would fear assassination if they
convicted Osama bin Laden is "our only ethical course of
action." This is what is meant by hijacking the dictionary.
Among the
Leftist groups blaming the West for such terrorism are those calling
themselves "Libertarian Socialists," thereby hoping
to seduce morons with this oxymoron. Libertarians favor economic
liberty, free markets, and voluntary exchange without government
interference. Socialists favor economic slavery, with the means
of "production" controlled and owned by the government.
To call oneself a "Libertarian Socialist," therefore,
makes as much social sense as being a Jewish Nazi; the
terms are contradictory.
(The narrow
exception might be utopian communes like Amana, Oneida, or – with
my French ancestors among them – Icarians who practiced voluntary
socialism among themselves without trying to force it on anybody
else. All such experiments disintegrated or metamorphosed into
profitable joint stock companies manufacturing silverware or microwave
ovens. The same inevitable transformation from utopian socialists
into capitalists is now happening on Israeli Kibbutzes. Socialism
is simply incompatible with the nature of most human beings.)
It has been
educational for Americans to see today’s college professors who
venture beyond the ivy walls of their intellectual prison camps
to profess on the Fox News Channel and other open news programs.
Almost without exception, what Americans have seen in such brief
exposures is an academic who is smug and self-satisfied, and who
is accustomed to bullying and talking down to anyone who dares
disagree with his America-is-always-wrong cant. Such scholars
become huffy and almost openly threatening when questioned by
a Bill O’Reilly or other interviewer.
The recent
wave of college newspaper ads by David Horowitz urging students
not to be herded like sheep into campus "peace" rallies
has again given Americans a glimpse of the totalitarian smog choking
off free speech and open discussion at many universities.
Such campuses,
it seems, are infected with Horophobia – an irrational and bigoted
prejudice against the heretic David Horowitz, who is now smeared
as an apostate from the Marxist faith so many college professors
now embrace and impose as dogma. Horophobia is at least as disreputable
as Homophobia, especially to those who know that the German roots
of David’s name could be taken to mean to hear common sense.
But if common
sense and America’s survival are what these campus Leftists are
against, what are they for?
They are
for protecting the Taliban, a fascist theocratic dictatorship
that imposes itself at gunpoint on the people of Afghanistan.
Under the Taliban, as even Leftist CNN has documented, women are
routinely tortured and may be killed for the crime of teaching
other women how to read. Women under this fanatic Muslim regime
have been reduced to near-chattel slavery. Homosexuals are murdered
outright for their sexual preference, much as has happened in
Fidel Castro’s "worker paradise" Cuba. Children are
now being conscripted into military service. The nation has been
reduced from prosperity before the Soviet invasion two decades
ago to such poverty and squalor that the World Bank does not even
bother guessing how much less than $100 per year the average Afghani
now earns. More than 800 people there die from starvation daily.
This, mind
you, is what these campus Leftists support – the dehumanizing
of women, routine killing of gays, religious dictatorship, and
starvation and enslavement of the peasants. Guess how long a "Godless"
Marxist professor would survive in a university in Taliban Afghanistan?
But the Taliban reign of terror is defended on American university
campuses as superior to America’s capitalist culture.
What if our
dictionaries were not controlled by a Leftist media and tilted
even farther `a gauche by Leftist academics and their ideological
bully boys? If the Stockholm Syndrome that leads some to kiss
up to terrorists vanished, and the dictionary were liberated from
its linguistic terrorist captors, what sudden new insights might
our no-longer-eyejacked eyes see? Consider one example among hundreds:
We have been
warned to expect a possible chemical weapon attack by terrorists.
But America and the West have been under chemical warfare attack
by the Taliban for years.
Under the
Taliban theocracy, Afghanistan has been growing and supplying
at least 75 percent of the world’s raw opium, from which comes
heroin. How much devastation has this illicit chemical caused
to poor blacks and other drug users in cities throughout the world?
How much economic damage has the world suffered because of their
addiction? How many have died young? How many potential Einsteins
have died with a needle of Taliban heroin in their arm?
Ask a Leftist
about the history of England foisting opium onto the Chinese a
century or more ago, and you will be told that this was among
history’s great atrocities – that it ravaged and enslaved China
and caused untold suffering. Ask that same Leftist about the Taliban
right now dumping their storehouses of opium onto global black
markets to raise quick cash, and you will be told that evil America
and evil Israel are to blame. In the black-white Manichean cosmology
of the Left, whoever opposes and attacks America and Israel is
presumed to be the good guy until shown otherwise.
(Ask the
Muslim Taliban and they will boast that they do not sell the stuff
to the Faithful, but only to Christians, Jews, and other infidels
who therefore deserve to be victimized by this self-administered
form of chemical warfare…. the kind where they pay to be
poisoned. But Allah made the opium poppies. Allah made the addicts.
It is God’s will. And please forget that Allah in the Koran declared
it a sin to make war on innocents, women, and children.)
The Leftist
Professors of terrorism promoting hatred for America on today’s
college campuses, however, are doing more than defending and encouraging
the enemies of Western libertarian civilization.
Those professing,
justifying, or rationalizing terrorism against America – and bullying
and brainwashing students into complicity or acquiescence with
their "peace" rallies – are also destroying our universities
as surely as if they crashed fuel-laden airliners into them. They
are turning what were supposed to be bastions of free thought,
open discussion, and diversity into Gulags of goose-stepping conformity
and mind control. Some campuses, as during the Gulf War a decade
ago, are even being turned into little foreign countries where
no American flag may be flown or patriotic decoration shown. It
is almost as if our universities have been turned into little
Marxist theocratic Talibandit Afghanistans.
And even
worse is the chemical warfare these academic Gulags impose on
the students these Leftist professors and bullies hold hostage.
As survivors of Nazi death camps can tell you, chemical warfare
comes not just with the Zyklon-B gas in the showers or the heroin-like
soma sprayed to pacify people in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World.
Terror, fear,
intimidation, and related methods of torture cause changes in
your internal body chemistry. Students under the self-righteous
bullying of a Leftist professor who could flunk them, or under
the peer pressure of Marxist activists with a hypnotized cultic
bin Laden-like glaze in their eyes, feel the constant adrenaline
and other stress chemicals of the fight-or-flight response. Then,
with surrender of their own will, judgment, and morality under
the constant pressure, they become biochemically depressed, dehumanized,
victimized.
This is a
calculated boot camp designed to break down freedom of thought,
individualism, independence – the qualities in people that have
built America. In their place the Left imposes conformity, self-hatred,
Marxist pseudo-religion, a sense of triumph every time the West
is attacked, and hatred for America and its allies. And it, too,
is a form of chemical warfare designed to permanently alter both
body and mind.
It should
come as no surprise that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis used exactly
the same techniques being employed by Leftists on American college
campuses today. (It can even be amusing, in a sick way, to read
to college students Hitler’s speeches denouncing capitalism and
supporting the working class, then watching these students cheer
– until they are told the source of the rhetoric they have been
brainwashed into swallowing mindlessly. Why the surprise? Socialism
is socialism, whether Hitlerian or Marxist.
As economists
who advocate Big Government are increasingly forced to acknowledge,
the main difference in practice between the economics of Karl
Marx and Adolf Hitler is that Hitler was smarter than Marx. Both
philosophies are monstrously evil and anti-human, of course, but
by using hyper-regulation rather than expropriation of the means
of production Hitler could collect property and income taxes from
the producers while Marx could not.
Why do so
many of today’s college professors embrace a Marxist view of the
world utterly discredited by history? And why are they holding
rallies to support a Medieval theocratic dictatorship in Afghanistan
that violates every Politically Correct value they demand on their
campuses – except, of course, hatred for America and the West,
their highest value?
Perhaps the
Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer was correct when he argued
that Leftists love the Middle Ages. It was the last time in the
West that intellectuals (as theologians) were considered part
of the ruling elite and given power to impose their values and
beliefs on everybody else. Perhaps today’s Leftists thus feel
a secret affection for the Medieval and evil Taliban. The pseudo-religion
of Marxism has given intellectuals a hope of regaining that long-lost
power, as they already have on many American university campuses.
These Leftists
are not only bringing the war to our campuses, as David Horowitz
rightly observes. They are also violating every ideal we used
to call "liberal" education and turning our colleges
and universities into intellectually-impoverished little Afghanistans,
with themselves as Marxist versions of the Taliban. A clear-eyed
society would recognize that this is insanity and immediately
cease funding it.
