You might be wondering, where does all this come from, can we blame those French thinkers? Is Foucault to blame? No, not really.
It’s the American University that has whipped up this dish, and it all really started to take shape and form in the early nineties, so about 40 years ago. The second generation “thinkers” then were building on Neo-Marxist and Post-Modern ideas sourced from the 60s and 70s, but those ideas would not have had the influence they have today without a second and third generation of thinkers and professors in American Universities that have ended up influencing a generation that has then gone out into the world and redesigned that world along those ideas. We are all paying the price today.
The right way to think about the American University as a generator and propagator of these ideas is the way that you already think about The Madras as a potentially indoctrinating breeding ground for Islamic Extremism.
There is no easy way to say this but Yale, Stanford Harvard and a long list of other “prestigious” universities have become (or at the most generous “include”) Madrassas of dangerous indoctrination pumping out brainwashed graduates that are disconnected from what is true and disconnected from reality…they have “their” reality, “their” truth.
Remember, what comes out of the American Madrassa gets exported to the rest of the world, with Australia (America-Lite) being a primary importer.
I thought that we are in 2024; if not, please consider correcting the date of this post.
The American University system has become a politico-cultural Chernobyl.
It always has been, to some degree.
For the longest time, the American University system was merely a way to bleed off the odd excess scion of the nation’s more successful commoner. It was not a path to unnatural ennoblement, the way it has become in the present day. As such, it kept the idjits out of trouble, serenely engaged in combing out the intellectual belly-lint of their day, untroubled and unruffled. Nobody really listened to them, either… That was for the people coming out of the real world school-of-hard-knocks, or the various agricultural colleges like Bowdoin and West Point. Alternatively, those who had influence gained it not via the sanctity of credentials, but through actual performance… Men like Chamberlain.
The really pernicious thing was when they started letting the ivy-leagued up arseholes off the reservation, about the time of Woodrow Wilson, may he rot in hell. The current mania for credentials, which I suspect may well have peaked given the performance of idjit-class morons like Pete Buttigieg, will undoubtedly wane as people grow increasingly aware of their eternal and inherent incompetence.
Failure gets routed around, in American culture. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will. Right now, people are still sufficiently awed and enamored of all this “ejumication”, but as the outcomes of listening to the idjit class become clearer and clearer, the less and less credibility they’ll have.
Europe, I fear, is different: At least, in the way people are used to listening to their “betters”. Here in the US, I fear that the only reason that they’ve been so successful is that people held education and self-betterment in high regard, so when someone supposedly shows that, they’re automatically listened to and deferred to. Until they fail, at which point the average Joe starts to question a lot of his basic premises… Like, whether that doctor who was telling him he needed to get the COVID vaccinations knew what the hell he was talking about, or if the asshole on the news was telling the truth.
The American elite has been engaged in a “pissing away the credibility” exercise for decades now. The reservoir of trust is nearly dry, the credibility accounts in the bank of public willingness to disbelieve is overdrawn, and the effects of all that are somewhere off in our likely near-term future. Might be mid-term, but… I don’t think so. This last little deal with “accidentally” cutting Trumps security to the bone? Yeah; try that again, martyr the man, and watch what happens. I wouldn’t want to be the fool displaying his impeccable Ivy-League sheepskin on his office wall, at that point. We might see a demonstration of another era of people saying “Ya know… That Pol Pot guy? He might have had the right damn idea…”
Our elite has been performing treason against those that set them in their places; that fact will become increasingly clear, and it will become increasingly hard for them to remain on top of the castle. Expect them to be thrown down, bodily… If not in actuality, then in the metaphoric sense. I don’t particularly like a lot of things I’m hearing out there, and I don’t discount the possibility that the next “January Sixth” deal might include actual violence, as in “line the streets with their bodies dangling from lampposts” violent.
Were I one of the “elite”, I’d be stepping veeeeeeery carefully, from here on out.
Being as I ain’t, I’ll just be sitting here over off on the side, eating popcorn and muttering “Toldja so, ya dumb bastids…”
Kirk – once American universities really were interested in learning, although it is true that going to a university was NOT an advantage in the American “job market” – and, of course, nor should it be. People should go to study because they love the subject and really admire the scholars at a particular place – NOT because it will be an advantage getting a “good job” in the government or Corporate bureaucracy.
But you are correct that American universities got taken over by the left a long time ago, much longer ago than most people believe – for example the main task of the Orwellian named Academic Freedom campaign created by Richard Ely (the mentor of both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) was to try and force out conservative academics – or prevent them being hired in the first place.
The left has never been interested in the truth or in winning intellectual debates – they are, and have always been, interested in power.
As W.H. Hutt put it when asked how the Keynesians “won the debate” in economics – “there was no debate, they would not allow debate – they just took over the appointment of academic staff and the setting and marking of examinations, and that-was-that”.
Marxism, and general leftism, is logically incompatible with Islam.
But the left have never allowed logic (reason) to get in the way of their desire (passion) for POWER – they see reason just in instrumental terms, reason being a tool to help them gain power, they do not care if their doctrines do not stand up to rational examination – truth (reason) has no MORAL importance to them. This is why, for example, leftist scientists happily distort, or just fake, data – the idea that science should be based on truthful data is a moral assumption, and they reject morality (including the moral importance of truth) in favour of power – their political and cultural agenda.
So if an alliance with Islam will, in their judgement, help them destroy the West, the left will push this idea.
And the left has mixed logically incompatible ideas before….
Cambridge (United Kingdom) had many academics who mixed Marxism and Keynesianism – both false doctrines, but also false in different ways. Keynesianism and Marxism can not be logically combined – so the academics illogically combined them (remember they hold that reason has no moral content – they do not love truth, indeed they hate truth).
This is not something lost in the past – back with Maurice Dobb, Piero Straffa and other evil figures of the 1940s….
For example. Donald J. Harris (yes the father of K. Harris – and still alive) has mixed Keynesianism and Marxism throughout his career – just as the late father of Barack Obama (“Dreams From My Father”) did. Again that these doctrines, whilst both utterly false, are not rationally compatible does not bother the left – they happily declare that incompatible things are compatible, because they do not care about truth – they care about POWER – their lust, passion, for unlimited power.
As for why so much of Corporate Big Business backs far left Collectivists such as Barack Obama or Kamala Harris – well that is interesting question, but I will NOT try and answer it just now.
Specifically on Islam.
Is it acceptable to argue that the doctrines of Islam are both false and morally wrong and that Muhammed, the founder of Islam, was a bad man?
In British society it is NOT acceptable to argue for these positions – presently there are severe social consequences for anyone who does argue for these positions, and it may soon be illegal (a crime under British law) to do so.
In the United States it is also unacceptable socially to argue for such positions – an academic, or non academic, who supported these positions would soon find his life made a living Hell. NOT really by Muslims (followers of Islam), but by the general leftist forces that control most universities and most other institutions – including Corporate Big Business.
If one can NOT argue that claims of Islam are false and its doctrines morally wrong, and one can not argue that Muhammed taught morally wrong things and did morally wrong things – then the situation is already lost. For example, a section of the training of a Roman Catholic priest used to be arguments against Islam – which tried to show that both the doctrine and its founder (Muhammed) were false and morally bad, but this training stopped a very long time ago (I believe it ended in the 1960s) – so modern Roman Catholic priests, and Protestant ministers (and so on) are not trained to intellectually oppose Islam.
Please note I have NOT, in this comment, expressed any support for such arguments myself – so this comment should not be used as justification for any social or legal punishment of me.
Paul,
You are incorrect. If you were to state that Muhhammed was a bad man because he tortured, murdered and raped you would face much more than “severe social consequences”. If you were to back your assertions up with quotes from the Qu’ran, Sunna and Hadiths you’d, to quote from the “Life of Brian” stoning scene, “Only be making it worse for yourself”. And yes, it would be atheist “liberals” who would be casting the first stones.. A huge ammount of lefties are engaged in a bizarre game of how many mutually self-contradictory things they can believe before breakfast. And it can’t be argued with because the moment you do they play their ace in the hole – race. It is an interesting to contemplate, “But what if the founder of Islam was from Saxony”? Would Islam be defended as much by white “liberals”? I am sick to the back teeth of being accussed of being a neo-colonialist by people who, pathetically, are actually perpetrating what is essentially some sort of Noble Savage concept without knowing they are even doing it.
NickM – as you know Muhammed was known as a pale man, by all accounts he was the same “race” (if race is defined by skin tone) as ourselves – remember the African slave trade was much less advanced then than it later became (black people were still a “novelty” – Muhammed himself claimed mocked their appearance, for some reason this does not get this historical figure “cancelled”).
But the left have never let moral reason get in the way of their passion for power – so they would smear as a “racist” anyone who opposed Muhammed or Islam, and establishment “Conservatives” would do the same – yapping like loyal lapdogs at the heels of the left.
“You are bringing the party into disrepute” would say the people responsible for the worst defeat in 200 years.
As for my own opinion – I respect Islam and Muhammed vastly more than I do the people who control the modern West.