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Home » The crime of walking while Jewish on campus (and some history regarding campus unrest)

The crime of walking while Jewish on campus (and some history regarding campus unrest)

The New Neo Posted on by

Can’t have this sort of brazen “walking while Jewish.” Might upset the violent Islamicists and their leftist fellow travelers who seem to be proliferating in the West lately:

The Metropolitan Police in London face accusations that they capitulated to radical pro-Hamas activists last weekend by threatening to arrest a British Jew because his presence was deemed provocative to a mob of anti-Israel protesters.

A shocking video published by the British Campaign Against Antisemitism from the pro-Hamas and anti-Israel march shows a Metropolitan Police officer ordering Gideon Falter, the CEO of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, not to cross a street because of his “openly Jewish” appearance. Falter was returning from a Saturday synagogue service and was wearing a kippah, or skullcap.

This reminds me of accusing a woman wearing a short skirt of provoking a rapist into action – come to think of it, isn’t that what the burka is all about?

The officials in London are afraid of the protesters and would rather Jews not wave red flags in front of those particular bulls by walking around with Jewish garments on. But it’s not just London; this is what’s happening on so many campuses today.

If you want a roundup of the latest anti-Semitic campus happenings and various responses to it, please go here, here, here, here, here, and here. There’s plenty more out there, too.

Here’s a tweet from a Columbia assistant professor who is an Israeli:

Note also the responses to what Davidai wrote. Many of them say the restriction is justified because he’s been videoing pro-Hamas student demonstrators and exposing who they are. Why is it not okay to identify them? Are they guaranteed anonymity? Aren’t they in a public place? Isn’t this what the left has been doing for ages?

The current turmoil on campus as well as the reaction of college administrators brings to mind the late 60s and what happened at Cornell. I’ve written about that many times before, mostly quoting the work of Thomas Sowell and Allan Bloom. Bloom included a long section about the subject in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Please note the book’s subtitle: “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” It’s only gotten worse since then, but the trends were already well established.

I’ve got plenty of posts on the subject of what happened at Cornell. But I think for now I’ll just link to and quote from this article written in 2009 by Tevi Troy. A few excerpts:

The student protests of four decades ago were not, of course, limited to Cornell. Outbreaks no less serious (and in several cases far more so) occurred at many other elite universities. A similar story line can be discerned in each case: student radicalism, often with racial overtones, spills into violence and tests the resolve of the university’s administrators, who quickly fail the test, cave to pressure to change the curriculum or other practices, and set a lasting precedent for the subordination of academic freedom to an extreme political agenda. In each case, too, the error was only exacerbated with time, with both the students’ violence and the administrations’ weakness now celebrated in ways that continue to harm the American academy.

The basic elements were there: threats and violence from a protected identity group, and the collusion and/or cowardice of faculty and administrators. It’s gotten worse, but it was bad enough then and it was over fifty years ago. The administrators and professors who were caving back then were not baby boomers or younger; they were of previous generations. For example, James A. Perkins, who was president of Cornell at the time, had been born in 1911. No boomer he.

So, why did they cave? Let’s look again at Perkins as well as the faculty of Cornell [emphasis mine]:

The number of black students at Cornell had been steadily growing during the 1960s, thanks in particular to the efforts of the university’s administration. When James A. Perkins became Cornell’s president in 1963, only about 25 of the school’s 11,000 students were black. Perkins, a Quaker who had been chairman of the board of the United Negro College Fund, solicited a $250,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to help bring in promising black students. After the program proved successful, Perkins established the Committee on Special Education Projects to further intensify recruiting. By 1969, Cornell had 250 black students in a student body that, because of the baby boom, had reached 14,000.

But despite the efforts of the president and faculty to attract and integrate them, many black students at Cornell felt alienated from the student body and hostile to the administration. In 1966, a group of black students created the Afro-American Society. Strongly influenced by the national Black Power movement, the AAS sought to increase black students’ autonomy and change Cornell’s curriculum to suit its views, rather than pursue integration. …

In 1968, a group of AAS members disrupted the class of Father Michael McPhelin, a visiting economics professor from the Philippines who had criticized the economic-development policies of a number of African nations. Without addressing McPhelin’s criticism on the merits, the AAS tried to intimidate him into recanting. The students first tried to read a letter criticizing him in class—without showing it to him first—but he refused to allow it. Then they attempted to take over the class, and he resisted. McPhelin complained to the chairman of the economics department, who, instead of punishing the offending students, praised them for their activism. By the end of the year, McPhelin had left Cornell and, as Tarcov saw it, a pattern had been established: “The disruption of a class, seizure of a department office and chairman, and the threatened and actual use of force had gone unpunished and had even received the sympathy and admiration of liberals and administrators for the moral convictions manifested.”

Here’s what happened to Sowell:

Similarly, in the summer of 1968, Thomas Sowell, a black economics professor in his first academic position, tried to eject a disruptive black student from his course, only to find his decision overruled by the same chairman who had undercut McPhelin. In his memoir recounting his time at Cornell, Sowell reports that he was called a “man from Mars” for refusing to join any of the mass discussions or small-group intrigues that dominated the campus. Unhappy at Cornell, Sowell tendered his resignation.

And then:

In December 1968, black students demanding a separate curriculum turned over vending machines, brandished fake guns on campus, and marched on the tables of a student dining hall during a meal. The administration’s weak response to these disruptions invited greater ones.

Sure enough, these began in the winter of 1969. In February, a symposium about South Africa took place on campus. President Perkins agreed to appear and discuss the university’s investments in that country, of which many student activists disapproved. While Perkins was speaking, a black sophomore named Gary Patton climbed on stage and grabbed him by the collar. The crowd of 800 students let out a collective gasp as Perkins whispered ineffectually to Patton, “You better let go of me!” Ex-student Larry Dickson then pointed a large wooden plank at the head of Lowell George, Cornell’s supervisor of public safety, who had moved to defend Perkins. AAS members in the audience beat bongo drums as Patton continued to hold and threaten Perkins. After a few moments, Patton let go and Perkins rushed off the stage, but the New York Times ran a front-page story on the incident, and it was soon clear that Cornell was on the verge of an explosion.

I could keep quoting the article, but suffice to say the situation just got worse and worse. You also can read the relevant part of Allan Bloom’s book, or Sowell’s own account.

We can see how these events and attitudes have come to fruition now in the reaction of the universities to the Jew-haters on their campuses. They are protected groups, much like the violent black students of yesteryear, and the Jews are not. The current university presidents are selected for cowardice, compliance, wokeness, and the ability to spout lawyerly apparatchik lingo that carefully refuses to condemn even the worst excesses.

Comments

The crime of walking while Jewish on campus (and some history regarding campus unrest) — 55 Comments

  1. As I said a few days ago on another post, every college administrator I’ve know is a coward and only interested in preserving their job. Add to that they secretly actually side with the protestors, and you get what we see. It’s just worse now for all the reasons we’ve listed many times before.

    The upside is that American Jews may finally have the scales removed from their eyes as to the nature of the Democrats and the rot that is higher ed

  2. When I attended Columbia, the student body was about 30% Jewish. It took some work to make it what it is today, and I don’t exempt the Jews from taking part in that work. Misguided, sure, but tyranny wasn’t an inadvertent byproduct, it was always a left wing goal.

    “Once the rockets are up,
    Who cares where they come down?
    That’s not my department,”
    Says Wernher von Braun.

  4. David Foster:

    Also foreign professors, especially in Middle Eastern departments. I have a draft on that which I need to work on some more.

  5. I guess the next “logical” step for “Biden” would be to fast-track all those wonderful foreign students for US citizenship and/or give them the right to vote.

    Remember: Gotta admire their ENTHUSIASM and ENERGY!

  6. … and the collusion and/or cowardice of faculty

    Yes, this is entirely about leadership, and this is all the inevitable consequence of having protected, i.e., unequal, groups in the first place.

  7. Mike Plaise

    This is about money. Colleges, in general, would throw Jews into the ovens for money.

  8. “…this is entirely about leadership…”

    Actually, might one wonder if “…this is entirely about…” the curious effects of KARMA WRT almost WALL-TO-WALL LIBERAL POLITICAL DEMONIZATION…of someone whose name happens to be Donald Trump…and those who DARE support him?

    (Cf. The history of France in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair….)

  9. Richard F. Cook:

    Money is part of it, but only part. The roots go way back before it was about money at all.

  10. Neo-

    When the leftists began the long march through the institutions is what kicked it off.

  11. Related…?
    “Strolling While Jewish”—
    https://www.steynonline.com/14221/strolling-while-jewish

    +Bonus:
    “Groupthink chorus emerges at Trump trial”—
    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/2975683/groupthink-chorus-emerges-trump-trial/
    H/T Powerline blog (for both).
    Key grafs:

    …[W]e might be heading into another “collusion” cycle, referring to the time in 2017-2018 in which some of these same news organizations devoted thousands of hours to discussing allegations that Trump conspired with Russia to fix the 2016 election. In the end, a special counsel spent two years investigating the charge and could not determine that collusion even happened, much less who might have participated in it.

    If you’re following the [latest NY Trump] trial, you might notice that a lot of the commentary sounds alike. Many of the people who talked their way through the collusion cycle have jumped on to the false bookkeeping “election interference” train and tend to say the same things that their colleagues are saying. There’s a reason for some of that uniformity….

    …Every Friday, they meet on Zoom to hash out the latest twists and turns in the Trump legal saga — and intellectually stress-test the arguments facing Trump on his journey through the American legal system.”

    The key phrase is “anti-Trump.” When group members stress-test arguments, they’re trying to find the arguments that will be most effective in bringing down Trump. That’s what it is about.

    The group includes names you will recognize if you watch CNN or MSNBC a lot: Andrew Weissmann, George Conway, Bill Kristol, Norm Eisen, Laurence Tribe, Barbara McQuade, Joyce White Vance, Jennifer Rubin, Mary McCord, Harry Litman, Elliot Williams, Asha Rangappa, Norm Ornstein, Renato Mariotti, Shan Wu, Ryan Goodman, Karen Agnifilo, Jeffrey Toobin, and more….

  12. This reminds me of accusing a woman wearing a short skirt of provoking a rapist into action – come to think of it, isn’t that what the burka is all about?
    – – – – – –
    Many of them say the restriction is justified because he’s been videoing pro-Hamas student demonstrators and exposing who they are. Why is it not okay to identify them? Are they guaranteed anonymity? Aren’t they in a public place?

    Great writing …, spam bots be damned.

    I saw a video today of a pro-Hamas supporter shouting at the top of her lungs. A young white woman (of course), who was completely wrapped in a white and black scarf, Arafat style, with only her eyes showing. Afraid to show her face.

    It is so duplicitous and mind boggling to me that these burka demanding fundamentalists, who are the most primitive and barbaric and socially regressive people imaginable, are the ones that American leftists wish to defend.

  14. In my experience the roots go back to my college days in the late sixties-early seventies, when I attended 3 colleges in 3 states in 6 six years and violent protest was endemic on those campuses. Again, in my experience, the violence was always fomented by radical leftist student organizations, including, but not limited to student governments, student newspapers, and related entities either explicitly or implicitly approved of by the universities when they weren’t financed outright by tuition fees. The professoriate also generally approved of their shenanigans, and were not loath to express their approval in the classroom and the “kinetic” demonstrations in which they took part. I had only two openly conservative professors in those 6 years: the noted anthropologist John Greenway and accomplished political science scholar Theodor Roszak. Both were relentlessly hounded by the radicals in the student body and the administration. This was at the University of Colorado, which even then was a virtual garbage dump of Marxist scholars.

  15. The crime of BEING Donald Trump….
    “Law professor Jonathan Turley slams opening of Trump hush money trial: ‘This is an embarrassment’;
    “Prosecutors have claimed that Trump conspired to influence the 2016 election by hiding the payments and covering up the alleged affair, which could have potentially been damaging to his campaign.”—
    https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/law-professor-jonathan-turley-slams-alvin-bragg-hush-money-opening
    Key graf (RTWT):

    …“What is clear is in this case, Trump is right,” Turley told Fox News. “I mean, this is an embarrassment. I mean, the fact that we are actually talking about this case being presented in a New York courtroom leaves me in utter disbelief. I mean, the arguments today did in fact capture all the problems here. …

    +Bonus: Dershowitz chimes in…
    “Dershowitz Says New York Prosecutors Are Violating Voters’ Rights With Trump Trial;
    “The law is being ‘abused for partisan political purposes and to constitute election interference,’ Mr. Dershowitz alleged.”—
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/dershowitz-says-new-york-prosecutors-are-violating-voters-rights-with-trump-trial-5634962

    The question is, of course:
    How many hundreds, or thousands—or millions—of times does one have to shout, “TRUMP IS GUILTY” before Trump becomes, in fact, guilty?
    (Sorry, Joseph Goebbels is unavailable for comment…Hold on: Actually, HE IS….)

  18. American leftists wish to defend “these burka demanding fundamentalists, who are the most primitive and barbaric and socially regressive people imaginable” because they are viewed by leftists as useful ‘shock troops’.

    American leftists are ideological fanatics. The “burka demanding fundamentalists” are theological fanatics. A theology that promises entrance into ‘paradise’ for its ‘martyrs’. Today’s Leftist snowflakes don’t really believe in an afterlife, and deep down, see this life as ‘it’. So they have no incentive for dying for the cause.

    In a contest between the two, Mark Twain’s observation would apply; “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog.”

    Leftists in the West deserve the fate they are courting.

  19. Its the journolist double jeopardy
    edition

    Yes that was chris cuomo who actually engaged in said therapies

    I guess grayson kirk who faced off would be tania bernadine dohrn and mark rudd had a similar cv as shafik but decidedly different views

  21. I had only two openly conservative professors in those 6 years: the noted anthropologist John Greenway and accomplished political science scholar Theodor Roszak

    IrishOtter49:

    I’m surprised to hear that. Many years ago I read Roszak’s “The Making of a Counterculture” (1969). Roszak claims to have coined the term counterculture. He seemed to be on board, if not storming the barricades, with the youth movement.

    Here’s a 2001 article he wrote, looking back on the counterculture, and he still seems sympathetic:

    –Roszak, “When the counterculture counted”
    https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/when-the-counterculture-counted-2835958.php

  22. At a glance it sometimes seems self evident (and as Neo has suspected some non Jews may think) that it has been progressive “Jews” themselves who have through generations of sustained and ideologically directed effort succeded in preparing the ground that now threatens to envelop them.

    “Well you pulled the temple of moral tradition, stare decisis, and strict construction law down on your own head. How do you like them apples, now that historic moral restraints and inhibitions have been abandoned so completely that they are not even honored in the breach?”

    One might be tempted to say that they have become victims of “their” own success in advancing a form of secular no limits universalism, quite compatible with the totalitarian impulse.

    But assuming that progressive “Jews” of the modern era have in fact been significant or even the primary ideological contributors [ in the U.S. at least] to the very same lunatic left crazies now joining in openly calling for their condemnation if not eradication, are they the cause?

    Nah. Jew hatred has been around a long time. And elements of totalitarianism and tyranny have existed just as long and in cultures that were about as homogeneous as can be. Including the England of the Tudors, or the Glorious Revolution, for that matter.

    “Pogroms” or similar, and deliberate genocides are as old as history. We think of it with special reference to the Jews because 1., it is nearest to our time, was in our civilization, was programmatic and ideologically dressed up, and it seemed to have an almost metaphysical dimension in its scope and determination; and 2., because they have survived as a self identifying people (however defined) able to memoralize, object, resist and fight back.

    The irony, if there is one, is that there is some truth to the observation that leftists seeking universalism in order to guard against discrimination and repression, included some Jews who fabricated a new secular and non supernatural religion out of their religious heritage in order to ensure, so they hoped, that society would become structurally incapable of “othering” them.

    And that simply ain’t gonna work.

    My personal opinion is that the Jewish people, insofar as they can be considered a people and wish to remain a distinct people, better dump this secular conscience of, and mission to the world crap, er, business, and focus on their survival as more or less normal human beings with the standard complement of rights and duties; no more, no less, and no compromise.

    People seem to think it is Netanyahu who is partly at fault for the current situation. I think on the contrary, that he is the best and most admirable man Israeli politics has produced in recent history and that Israel could use a dozen more no bull shit men like him. He fights back. I like that.

  23. huxley:

    My bad. Wrong Roszak. I was in fact referring to Edward Rozek. He was born in Poland and served in the Polish armored division that fought in France in 1944. He was badly wounded and highly decorated in the course of the war, after which he came to America. He was a staunch anti-communist and thus hated by the Communist and Marxists who dominated the University of Colorado’s humanities departments when I attended that school. He was a great guy, a real mensch, and I liked him a lot.

    See: https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2009/06/01/buff-tribute-edward-rozek-1918-2009

  24. IrishOtter49:

    That sounds more like it! Interesting fellow:
    _______________________________

    “[Rozek] took great delight in engaging with people who would debate with him – especially those who disagreed with him,” said Brown, who now teaches in the same department where Rozek taught. “People who did that would often get the best grades in the class.”
    _______________________________

    Old school.

  25. DNW:

    I agree that Jew-hatred is ancient and also protean in its nature. Jews are hated for just about everything, including contradictory things: too rich, too poor, too self-righteous, too crooked, too involved, too stand-offish, too religious, too secular, too leftist, too capitalist. It goes on and on.

    As far as their influence in universities goes, I don’t think there was a single Jewish president of a major university back then (60s, 70s). I certainly could be wrong, but I’m not aware of any except at a Jewish-affiliated school such as Brandeis. Cornell’s Perkins was certainly ethnically typical of the presidents of universities at that time, and he most definitely was not Jewish.

    Nor were Jews especially involved in post-modernism or critical legal thinking or critical race theory. Post-modernism was a European import and the only ethnic Jew I’m aware of who was connected with it was Derrida, an Algerian Jew.

    As far as the university goes, some of the more prominent people trying to sound the alarm were Jewish. Allan Bloom was Jewish, of course. And John Silber, one of the last and most famous of the conservative heads of a major university, was half-Jewish (father’s side) although he didn’t know that until he was an adult. Larry Summers, first Jewish president of Harvard, was too conservative for the school’s tastes (although a Democrat, as far as I know).

  26. FWIW, my cocktail napkin summary of anti-Semitism is the same as anti-Americanism.

    Who wants to compete with the Jews?
    Who wants to compete with the Americans?

    I make no claim to truth.

  28. Whatever trying to label this matter, the facts are that there are Jewish students and other religious/ ethnic groups who joined the eruption in the universities, and at the same time, there are a few supporters of Isreal on the Gaza war Jewish groups “Zionists” who demonstrate also in many university campuses.
    So there a broad differences and colours of this demonstration rather than being labelled as “Islamicists and their leftist fellow”

    Let’s look at history:

    The day after the assassination, Columbia president Grayson Kirk ’53HON sent a telegram to Coretta Scott King, which read, “On behalf of the trustees, faculty, and students of Columbia University, I send to you and your children our condolences and deepest sympathy in this hour of personal grief for all Americans. I hope that in the time to come you can gain some measure of comfort in the knowledge that Dr. King’s life and ideals have becomes part of the heritage of all his countrymen.”

    The University announced a memorial service on April 9, with an early closure of the University at 3pm. Kirk then received a letter from a group called Concerned Black Students, demanding that the University shut down for the entire day. “We feel that the crisis in America is an imperative for such action,” the letter said. “[W]e would consider anything less than a complete shutdown of the University as an obvious affront to the memory of Dr. King and the principles that he stood for.”

    With campus tensions already at the breaking point over the University’s involvement in weapons research for the war in Vietnam and its plan to build a private gymnasium in Morningside Park with limited access and a separate entrance for Harlem residents, Kirk cancelled classes on April 9.

    Columbia Magazine

  29. What I saw in thew 1960s was authorities (College administrators and campus police) allowing student protestors to violate our (Navy recruiters) civil rights and property.

    Among other things, they would form a ring around our recruiting setup. (A table with recruiting brochures, and three or four chairs.) They prevented interested students from getting to our materials or from talking to us. They spent hours shouting slogans, and on occasion, they would grab our brochures and burn them. We had a Van painted with Navy symbols that was parked nearby. They vandalized the van by painting antiwar slogans on it.

    My blood was boiling. We were under orders to not get aggressive. Just smile and take it. That was hard.

    We complained to the college administrators to no avail. We asked for campus police protection to no avail.

    We started setting up on the edge of some campuses where the city police would send a patrolman to keep an eye on things and protect our property. That helped, but it was only available at a few schools.

    I wanted to take shore patrolmen with us, but my boss was opposed. He kept reminding me and the crew that the students’ parents paid the taxes that paid our salaries. We worked for them. We had to be stoic, he said.

    Frankly, looking back, I wish the Navy brass had made a big deal about what was happening. When protestors interfere with the rights of other citizens, they are no longer protesting peacefully and lawfully. That should be an iron clad principle. But it has been ignored, and now the example of violating other people’s civil rights with impunity has become normalized.

    Reagan, if he were here, could make a speech that would delineate those ideas and get the ball rolling. It takes persuasion and back bone to change what has been going on. The Gipper had both.

    I know Trump’s in the camp that wants to preserve public order and force protestors to keep their protests under control such that they don’t interfere with other peoples’ civil liberties. Just another reason to support him. Something must be done about this.

  30. Someone I run into on X/Twitter (she conforms to the AWFL stereotype) had this to say about reports that police had just broken up the “pro-Palestinian” encampment at the University of Minnesota and arrested all the students there:

    You know, I camped out [there] as a high school kid in the 70’s. They didn’t arrest anyone until many days had passed, and people had both torn down the fences around ROTC and occupied the president’s office. Admins have become aggressive.

    Unbelievable. Then again, I guess not.

  31. Seemed like good news:

    The Columbia University Administration has given a Midnight Deadline for Pro-Hamas and Palestinian Demonstrators to Voluntarily Leave the School Ground before they are Removed, with well over a Hundred Riot Officers with the New York City Police Department currently preparing to enter the Encampment.

    But then:

    Local Media is reporting that the Columbia University Administration has now Extended the Deadline from Midnight to 8am for the Pro-Hamas and Palestinian Supporters to Disperse from their Encampment on Campus Grounds.

    https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1782980131939647841?t=a7OLi1Y_EIc3fyr2zSXe1g&s=19

  32. Neo,

    You make good points, but all the Communists I’ve known were Jewish. As an Israeli pointed out, after I mentioned that Jews were also over-represented in the early Italian Fascist party, Jews were/are over-represented in most of the political movements of the last century. I assure you that the students occupying the buildings on the Columbia campus, waving red flags and Mao’s Little Red Book included many Jews. It was the Jewish population of Columbia that gave it its radical flavor, in contrast to, say, the staid Harvard of that time.

    Most students were just ordinary students, not radicals, but it only takes a minority of motivated people to make a difference, I would guess 10-20% is all it takes when there is no organized resistance. And the change that followed after the 60’s was not top down, but bottom up. I think we can ignore university presidents as irrelevant to the process, the current bunch are products, not producers.

    I would pin the beginning of the change in the political climate as the moment that social spending became more important than NASA, which was in the early 70’s. And that grew out of the Civil Rights movement, which became left in the mid 60’s. We didn’t go back to the Moon, and the SSC died in the early 90’s. It’s like WWII finally ended, and the national energy and ambition it spawned died out.

  33. Chuck:

    The fact that all the Communists you know are Jews is irrelevant. It would also be irrelevant if NONE of the Communists you know are Jews. Neither tells you anything about Jews and Communism – or Jews and how we got to our present state in colleges.

    However, here’s an entire post I wrote on the subject of Jews and Communism. Please read it.

    And university presidents were EXTREMELY relevant to the process of getting the university to the present leftist identity-politics state, as the story of Cornell in the 1960s makes very very clear. It was the presidents who could have nipped the whole thing in the bud back then and did not. And back then there wasn’t a Jew among them, except at places like Brandeis.

    You might want to look at my post about a relevant poem by the brilliant Robert Frost. This post about Frost and education is relevant as well. These movements started well before the 1960s, and back then had little to nothing to do with the influence of Jews.

  34. Hey now Hurin3! I too am glad there’s another Deadhead reading and commenting here.

  35. “there are a few supporters of Isreal on the Gaza war Jewish groups “Zionists” who demonstrate also in many university campuses”

    How many of them threaten more 10/7-style massacres? How many Arab professors have been driven off campus for their “safety”?

  37. There was a similar dynamic in cuba in the 40s and 50s a grayson kirk type grau san martin has come to power the students who had been involved in the previous revolution in 33 had autonomy the army didnt intervene this is where fidel the original og
    came from

    In the midst of the depression a popular front type govt had arisen this is where the fabled 1940 came from as ridiculous as the green nude eek

  38. There is a bright side here.
    The left wing haters are just getting warmed up for the summer rioting season- Columbia, et. al., is spring training for them. Preparations are being made for the summer, especially for the playoffs and the championship game- the Dem convention in Chicago, BHO’s hometown.
    There will be multiple teams competing for the trophy. The Hamasniks, the various LBGTQs, including the trannies and the TERFs, who will not play nice with each other. The Antifas will be there in strength, and the BLMs, who are in a slump but have drafted well and may be competitive.
    The refs (Chicago Police Dept) are all disciples of the school of Angel Hernandez, and the Commissioner of the league (BHO) and the team owners (rich Jews) will not get along.
    There may be some spirited disagreements in the streets, all in 4K color.
    Meanwhile, the customers (American citizens and voters) will be watching and many of them will be glad that they had the foresight to purchase protective gear.

  39. It was in closing that i first heard of the frankfurt school and other ephemera from weimar like kurt weill and mack the knife

  41. “I would pin the beginning of the change in the political climate as the moment that social spending became more important than NASA, which was in the early 70’s. And that grew out of the Civil Rights movement, which became left in the mid 60’s. We didn’t go back to the Moon, and the SSC died in the early 90’s. It’s like WWII finally ended, and the national energy and ambition it spawned died out.”

    Good observation.

  42. Just to add a bit to my Columbia experience.

    1) The occupation of the buildings was a complete surprise to me. My first reaction was: where did all these people come from? Which brings up …

    2) Joiners. Once these things get started, all sorts of people join up, and for various reasons. I recall a march through Harlem that brought back hundreds of young participants, who then just milled about looking for something to do. Ended up just breaking a few street lights, but it could have been worse. Why where they there? I doubt it was politics, rather just something to do on a spring night. Such tinder is always available.

    3) The news about events was manufactured. Watching the coverage, and the media using Low Library for a broadcast backdrop was a revelation. I recall an event where Mark Rudd was going to talk at the Sundial. Almost the entirety of the audience were news photographers, who just stood around looking bored through the preliminaries, then, when Rudd showed up, took a couple of photos and left.

    3) Grayson Kirk was not considered an enabler, indeed, he brought in the police to clear the buildings. One could argue that he should have acted sooner, but the Columbia occupation was a first, and, I would argue, unexpected.

    4) The Teachers College was more radical than the rest of the campus. That was a harbinger of the future that slipped by with little notice. I didn’t attach any special importance to the observation.

    5) Old lefties showed their support for the uprising, but really didn’t fit in. The old left and the new left were very different beasts with different concerns. It was kind of sad, Sunset Boulevard in it’s own small way. A similar transition is probably taking place today.

    6) Pretty much everyone in the class of 68 graduated, myself included. There is more than one way to clean house.

    7) The big picture is seldom evident to those at the bottom. IIRC, Bradley comments in the preface of “A Soldier’s Story” that one of reasons for writing the book is to explain to the soldiers who did the fighting what the big picture was. I can’t check that, the dog literally ate that book.

  43. Speaking of Cornell;

    If I recall correctly, not that long ago – about 5 or so years ago – the Black Student United organization at Cornell;

    “prompted public debate …. after releasing a statement arguing that the definition of “underrepresented black students” should apply only to those whose families have been in the United States for more than two generations. It also argued that the black student population at Cornell disproportionately represented African and Caribbean international students.”

    Apparently for this black student organization, I guess composed entirely of “African Americans, ” they just can’t win for losing.

  44. the Vietnam war happened which tarnished anything associated with anything military, for good or ill, then you have the leading evangelist, for space exploration, Von Braun and his associates deeds at Dora Nordhausen, catch up with him, Michener sort of soft pedals the events in his magnus opus, throwing in the more psychedelic elements and evangelism,

    Columbia was targeted for reasons so was Cornell so was Harvard in France which had the 10th year of DeGaulle it was other things, in Germany it was the shooting of a protester by a Stasi agent, the issue was the pretext for revolution,

  45. neo said: “The fact that all the Communists you know are Jews is irrelevant.”

    Almost, but not quite. Again I would quote Timothy Synder (Bloodlands) on a related issue: “Most Jews,” he wrote, “were not Bolsheviks, but many Bolsheviks were Jews.” These are historical facts and should not be glossed over — even as too much should not be made of them. Snyder goes on to say, correctly, that the two are entirely different propositions and that it is very, very important to understand the difference. Relatedly, in my experience Jews were disproportionately represented in the radical leftist student groups of the 60s and 70s. Emphasis on disproportionately, There is indeed relevance to this: but mainly it is, or should be, relevant to Jews only, the same as Jews crying out for Christ’s crucifixion at his public trial should be relevant to Jews only, and then only in very limited sense, to a very limited extent. Which is to say, basically, not at all. As for me: I don’t care. It’s really irrelevant in my view. I stand with Jews, and with Israel. I always have. I want to see the IDF erase Hamas from the face of the earth, from the Book of Life.

    I’m done with discussing this issue. There’s no more to say on it, no more worth saying.

    Hamas and antisemitism delenda est.

  46. West Tx, I’d correct your summertime prediction in only one respect. Chicago is Obama’s alleged hometown. He lived there for a few years, and once he was elected president, he shook the Chicago dust from his feet. Post-presidency, he lives two miles from the White House, in Martha’s Vineyard, and in Hawai’i, and hasn’t been back to stay in Chicago. His only connection to the area now is his attempt to wreck a beautiful public park on the south side lake shore.

  47. I don’t actually see a direct conflict between the views of Chuck and Irish otter on the one hand and Neo’s on the other. It is a matter of emphasis and weighting rather than fact.

    My view:

    Fact that: Jewish [ of the specific variety we are referencing here] moral and social sensibilities were secularized and transformed by the Reform movement. As with the American Congregationalists who degenerated into Unitarian Universalists and morphed into Social Gospel “Christians”, the effect was that generations of collective-morals secularists Jew and nonJew wended their ideologically inspired way through the sinecured niches and benefices provided by our social institutions whether they were secular or religious, private or state. ****

    Fact that: Jew hatred is old and in its essence is deeper than any annoyance at a subset of pushy loud and forward know-it-alls who make a secular tikkun olam religion out of hectoring others who just want to live in peace.

    Fact that: although Jewish leftists are not the proximate “cause” of the open expressions of Jew hatred we are witnessing coursing through our public institutions, nor even the instigators of it; they (or more properly, their progenitors) assiduously prepared the permissive environment for it with what they consciously intended as socially subversive if ultimately self-protective and humanity benefiting, activities.

    Just as a sample of this phenomenon, I would suggest a quick glance at the background and activities of two modern philosophers 1, Richard Rorty, whose background I knew; and 2, Hilary Putnam whose history [ as opposed to philosophy] I just today became aware of after mentioning him in another context elswhere.

    ****
    See tangentially, Henry Olsen, Claremont Review of Books, Fall, 2017

    ‘ Working-class Americans reject what Williams calls the professional class’s “work devotion.” Professional elites, she argues, place great emphasis on work as a source of happiness and accord high priority to it. They readily uproot—and in the worst cases, abandon—their families in pursuit of better work opportunities. Working-class whites see work as a means to life, but professional classes see it as “a vocation, a calling, a métier,” as David Brooks wrote in Bobos in Paradise (2000).

    This “work devotion” leads professionals to interact with other people in ways that working-class whites see as suspect. Professionals’ status and success depends as much on whom they know as on what they actually do. Thus, they network and use their interactions with others for professional purposes, not solely or even primarily to form real relationships. “This peculiar combination of the personal and the strategic strikes the working class as insincere,” Williams writes. This leads to a belief in plain speech as a moral virtue for the working class.”

  48. DNW:

    What some individual Jewish intellectuals did or said is not what JEWS do or say. Would you speak of “what Italians do” because of Gramsci? Or “what French do” because of Foucault?

    As I’ve written before, Jews are often prominent in the fields in which they enter. They are also over-represented in many fields. Jews completely dominated the American musical theater during its golden years, for example.

    There are plenty of non-Jewish leftists who were very very influential. Why care so much about the Jewish ones, or the half-Jewish ones, or the quarter-Jewish ones – by ethnicity rather than by having any sort of Jewish upbringing?

    As for Rorty, I’ve heard very bad things about Rorty from several people who studied under him, although I fortunately never encountered his work in school. But I am puzzled as to why you bring him up. You write that you know “his background,” but he certainly wasn’t Jewish. Are you talking about this sort of thing?

    Basically, I have no idea what you’re trying to say – except that Jewish leftists are leftists, and leftists have had a bad effect on institutions and culture. Agreed.

  49. IrishOtter:

    I didn’t say that the percentage of Jewish Communists is irrelevant (I think I made that clear in the post I wrote on the subject, that I linked in my comment). I said that the fact that all the Communists Chuck knows are Jewish is irrelevant. The sample is way too small.

  50. Hi.

    With regard to the precursor or even catalysts of the dynamic we are witnessing now played out, I brought up Rorty as a “Christian” social parallel to those progressive “Jews” who have been under discussion.

    Inasmuch as there is as you have mentioned, no pope of the Jews nor any obvious way to tell who is “a true Scotsman” or not in the case of Jews, and because the context of American Reform leftism was already established, I didn’t bother placing quotation marks around the term as I was carefully doing before.

  52. So to amplify, now having glanced at your Amazon link. Interesting, but no, I was not referring to that.

    To put it in coarse terms, I was saying that there was a parallel to the fake nonsupernaturalist leftist Jews in the fake nonsupernaturalist progressive Christians. They both function in society in somewhat similar ways, taking their deracinated religious principles and leveraging them against traditionally formed moralities harkening back to metaphysical principles. They are both atheists in search of the secular eschaton; though Rorty’s version is by his own stipulation relativistic and based merely on preferences or subjective evaluation.

    I was actually unaware that he was engaging with a stream of Jewish thought which took its own supernaturalistic historical premises seriously.

    However, that should come as no surprise, as he was determine to displace any metaphysical foundations from an analysis of moral groundings altogther.

    The progressive Jews simply ignore that aspect.

    Their attitude is well represented by that joke you – I think – told, about the Jewish kid who goes to school and on returning home informs his father he was taught about the Trinity that day.

  53. DNW:

    No, I’m not familiar with that joke.

    I’m still not sure what you’re trying to say, though, although I’ll leave it be after this. It seems to me you’re saying that progressive secular Jews and progressive secular Christians have many things in common. I don’t know why that would be surprising or even worthy of note. Progressivism is their new replacement for religion, whether they see it that way or not.

  54. I

    t seems to me you’re saying that progressive secular Jews and progressive secular Christians have many things in common. I don’t know why that would be surprising or even worthy of note. Progressivism is their new replacement for religion, whether they see it that way or not.”

    Yes and they are both being bitten in the ass by the environment they worked incessantly and with religious fervor, and by virtually any means necessary, to create.

    Ah the joke. The Jewish kid comes home from school and tells his dad he was taught about the Trnity. The dad is upset and says that that is what Christians believe, not us. “We are Jews. There is only one God, and we don’t believe in Him!”

    Might have been in one of those limks to Haaretz or something.

  55. Progressivism is their new replacement for religion

    The first essay I wrote in college argued that there was need for a new religion, as the traditional ones were in decay, leaving a vacuum. I based the argument on the rise of various ersatz replacements, including comic books.

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