Friday, September 29, 2017



How a Radical Left-Wing Historian Birthed the Anti-Columbus Crusade

Confederate statues aren’t the only ones to come under siege from protesters. Christopher Columbus, the Spanish-backed Italian explorer who discovered the Americas, is also being attacked on a wide scale.

Activists and cities around the country are now working to change the holiday made in his name and are working to remove monuments in his likeness.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has even called for a commission that will review potentially removing the over 70-foot-tall column dedicated to Columbus that currently stands in Columbus Circle.

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And Portland, Maine’s City Council recently designated the second Monday of October “Indigenous People’s Day” and has elected to stop celebrating Columbus Day.

This is quite a turnaround from when Columbus was almost universally admired.

Ronald Reagan once said of the famed explorer:

    He is justly admired as a brilliant navigator, a fearless man of action, a visionary who opened the eyes of an older world to an entirely new one. Above all, he personifies a view of the world that many see as quintessentially American: not merely optimistic, but scornful of the very notion of despair.

So, why is this once uniting figure who stood for the New World and immigrants suddenly under attack?

Sadly, much of the modern hostility to Columbus can be traced to the work of a far-left historian, Howard Zinn, whose book, “A People’s History of the United States,” has left an oversized mark on American K-12 and college students.

However, Zinn claimed to turn the pro-Columbus narrative on its head, writing that Columbus was essentially a genocidal monster who paved the way for greedy, profit-seeking capitalists from the Old World to destroy and pillage the peaceful indigenous people of the New World.

“Behind the English invasion of North America,” Zinn wrote, “behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private profit.”

One doesn’t have to embrace all of the Italian explorer’s actions to appreciate what he accomplished and how it transformed the world for good.

Historians have certainly pushed back on Zinn’s caricature.

Professor Carol Delaney of Stanford University has criticized Zinn’s history and defended Columbus as devoutly religious, and not simply a man committed to pillaging and plunder.

She said:

    His relations with the natives tended to be benign. He liked the natives and found them to be very intelligent … Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect. There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there.  

But Zinn goes even further.

His narrative is based on the idea that not only was Columbus a villain, but the product of his discovery was also an evil. His book follows this in maligning the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and America’s role in World War II, among numerous other individuals and events in our history.

Of the Founding Fathers, Zinn wrote:

    They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.

Notions of liberty and timeless principles were dismissed by Zinn as simply the tools of tyrants, which is, of course, the point of his book.

It is a tale of oppressors and oppressed, wrapped in Marxist historical theories.

“A People’s History” is filled with half-truths, ideological distortions, and outright fabrications, yet it is still widely used in American schools.

This is a shame, as he is misleading future generations through his deceiving, but influential work.

Even the far-left magazine, New Republic, conceded that Zinn was a poor historian who did a disservice to his readers, saying:

    In writing as or about radicals, historians owe it to their readers to include the bad with the good, the ignoble with the noble—not in the service of ‘balance’ but in the pursuit of intellectual honesty. The most regrettable aspect of Howard Zinn’s full and lusty life is not that he chose to ignore this responsibility. It is that he never seemed aware of it in the first place.

“A People’s History” is terrible history, but it is effective ideological propaganda. And when it’s the only thing students are reading, there’s no wonder that activists are taking to the streets to attack American figures of the past.

SOURCE







The weed who threw a flare into cop car during protests gets 5 years



A 23-year-old man who threw burning flares into a Portland police cruiser and the downtown Target store during May 1 protests that overran downtown Portland admitted guilt Monday and will be sentenced to five years in prison.

A local TV station aired live footage of Damion Zachary Feller hurling a flare through a shattered picture window at Target, prompting employees to run with fire extinguishers to put out a burning section of carpet. TV and cellphone cameras also caught Feller throwing a flare through the shattered window of a battered police SUV parked across the street from Target, at Southwest 10th Avenue and Morrison.

Other people clad all in black or wearing masks can be seen on the videos kicking or whacking windows of the police car seconds before Feller swoops in with the flares.

Police identified Feller as among a group of about 20 anarchists who descended on downtown as peaceful May Day protesters spoke about a variety of social issues. Officers arrested 25 people that day for vandalizing property, setting fires, throwing rocks and other violence.

Feller wasn’t arrested until two days later after officers who recognized his image from the videos spotted him on the streets of downtown.

Detectives showed him a photograph of the person who threw one of the flares and he replied: “I saw that online, and I knew I was (expletive),” according to a probable cause affidavit.

Feller admitted he was guilty and told detectives that he became part of the “mob mentality,” according to the affidavit.

On Monday, Feller offered no statements in Multnomah County Circuit Court. He wore a blue jail uniform as he stood beside his public defender, DeAnna Horne.

Feller pleaded guilty to first-degree arson, second-degree arson, riot and first-degree criminal mischief. He is scheduled to be sentenced to five years in prison during an October hearing.

He also was charged in federal court for his crimes. But as part of his plea deal, he won't be sentenced to any additional prison time.

Feller will be eligible for release from prison after four years, if he gets time off for good behavior.

Shortly after his arrest, Feller told authorities that he doesn’t talk to his family, which includes his grandmother in Longview and his parents in Colorado. He said he’d been homeless for the past year, been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and smoked marijuana daily.

He said he’s unemployed, although he occasionally picks up odd jobs through the temporary job service Labor Ready.

Feller had no history of criminal convictions, although court records show he previously had been arrested five times in Oregon, Colorado and Texas on allegations of committing nonviolent crimes or failing to appear in court. He still faces pending charges of theft and criminal trespass in Umatilla County.

SOURCE





'In other faiths we call it paedophilia': Peta Credlin slams 'feminist warriors' for failing to stand up for Muslim girls forced into arranged marriages

[Australian] Media commentator Peta Credlin has slammed feminists for failing to speak up about a Muslim man in his mid-thirties marrying a 14-year-old girl.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott's chief-of-staff is outraged at the political left's silence on child brides, less than a week after a refugee was sentenced to one year in jail for taking part in the Melbourne mosque wedding last year.

'In other faiths we call it paedophilia but not when it comes to Islam,'  she told Sky News on Tuesday night.

'Their failure to speak up for these girls is because the left's silence on the crimes of Islam trumps any voice for the victim.'

Ms Credlin's impassioned critique of left-wing feminists comes six days after Rohingya refugee Mohammad Shakir, 35, was formally jailed for one year for marrying the 14-year-old girl at the Noble Park mosque, in south-east Melbourne, on September 29, 2016.

'We shouldn't even call it child brides. These young girls are being raped by much older men under the cover of a religious ceremony against Australian law and against Australian values,' she said.

Shakir had pleaded guilty to going through with the ceremony and tearfully told the County Court of Victoria he thought he was 'rescuing' the child bride.

The criminal, who will be returned to immigration detention after his sentence, was the first man to appear before an Australian court prosecuted with marrying a child, an offence that carries a maximum penalty of five years.

Ms Credlin said it appeared the feminists, the political left and Muslim groups were more obsessed with 'so-called Islamophobia' than speaking up for child brides.

'They don't like it and they won't admit it,' she said.

'Quiet too are the many Islamic organisations that are quick to attack so-called Islamophobia but are silent non the rights of young, Muslim girls.'

Former Muslim imam Ibrahim Omerdic was spared jail last month after being found guilty of unlawfully solemnising the marriage.  He was sentenced to two months' prison, but immediately placed on a two-year recognisance release order, meaning he won't serve time in jail.

Omerdic was an imam of the Bosnian Islamic Society and Noble Park Mosque but was later sacked and had his celebrant licence revoked after his arrest last year.

SOURCE






On Political Correctness

By William Deresiewicz

I recently spent a semester at Scripps, a selective women’s college in Southern California. I had one student, from a Chinese-American family, who informed me that the first thing she learned when she got to college was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her non-feminist views about marriage. I had another student, a self-described “strong feminist,” who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might say something that you’re not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”

I also heard that the director of the writing center, a specialist in disability studies, was informing people that they couldn’t use expressions like “that’s a crazy idea” because they stigmatize the mentally ill. I heard a young woman tell me that she had been criticized by a fellow student for wearing moccasins—an act, she was informed, of cultural appropriation. I heard an adjunct instructor describe how a routine pedagogical conflict over something he had said in class had turned, when the student in question claimed to have felt “triggered,” into, in his words, a bureaucratic “dumpster fire.” He was careful now, he added, to avoid saying anything, or teaching anything, that might conceivably lead to trouble.

I listened to students—young women, again, who considered themselves strong feminists—talk about how they were afraid to speak freely among their peers, and how despite its notoriety as a platform for cyberbullying, they were grateful for YikYak, the social media app, because it allowed them to say anonymously what they couldn’t say in their own name. Above all, I heard my students tell me that while they generally identified with the sentiments and norms that travel under the name of political correctness, they thought that it had simply gone too far—way too far. Everybody felt oppressed, as they put it, by the “PC police”—everybody, that is, except for those whom everybody else regarded as members of the PC police.

I heard all this, and a good bit more, while teaching one class, for 12 students, during one semester, at one college. And I have no reason to believe that circumstances are substantially different at other elite private institutions, and plenty of reasons not to believe it: from conversations with individuals at many schools, from my broader experience in higher education, from what I’ve read not only in the mainstream media but also in the higher education press. The situation is undoubtedly better at some places than others, undoubtedly worse at the liberal arts colleges as a whole than at the universities as a whole, but broadly similar across the board.

So this is how I’ve come to understand the situation. Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

I should mention that when I was speaking about these issues last fall with a group of students at Whitman College, a selective school in Washington State, that idea, that elite private colleges are religious institutions, is the one that resonated with them most. I should also mention that I received an email recently from a student who had transferred from Oral Roberts, the evangelical Christian university in Tulsa, to Columbia, my alma mater. The latter, he found to his surprise, is also a religious school, only there, he said, the faith is the religion of success. The religion of success is not the same as political correctness, but as I will presently explain, the two go hand in hand.

Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color—two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base. As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics. Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). If you want to find the counterculture on today’s elite college campuses, you need to look for the conservative students.

Which brings us to another thing that comes with dogma: heresy. Heresy means those beliefs that undermine the orthodox consensus, so it must be eradicated: by education, by reeducation—if necessary, by censorship. It makes a perfect, dreary sense that there are speech codes, or the desire for speech codes, at selective private colleges. The irony is that conservatives don’t actually care if progressives disapprove of them, with the result that political correctness generally amounts to internecine warfare on the left: radical feminists excoriating other radical feminists for saying “vagina” instead of “front hole,” students denouncing the director of Boys Don’t Cry as a transphobic “cis white bitch” (as recently happened at Reed College), and so forth.

But the most effective form of censorship, of course, is self-censorship—which, in the intimate environment of a residential college, young adults are very quick to learn. One of the students at Whitman mentioned that he’s careful, when questioning consensus beliefs, to phrase his opinion in terms of “Explain to me why I’m wrong.” Other students— at Bard College, at the Claremont Colleges—have explained that any challenge to the hegemony of identity politics will get you branded as a racist (as in, “Don’t talk to that guy, he’s a racist”). Campus protesters, their frequent rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, are not the ones being silenced: they are, after all, not being silent. They are in the middle of the quad, speaking their minds. The ones being silenced are the ones like my students at Scripps, like the students at Whitman, like many students, no doubt, at many places, who are keeping their mouths shut. “The religion of humanity,” as David Bromwich recently wrote, “may turn out to be as dangerous as all the other religions.” .....

But so much of political correctness is not about justice or creating a safe environment; it is about power. And so much of what is taking place at colleges today reflects the way that relations of power have been reconfigured in contemporary higher education. Campus activists are taking advantage of the fact (and I suspect that a lot of them understand this intuitively, if not explicitly) that students have a lot more power than they used to. The change is the result not only of the rise of the customer-service mentality in academia, but also of the proletarianization of the faculty. Students have risen; instructors have fallen. Where once administrations worked in alliance with the faculty, were indeed largely composed of faculty, now they work against the faculty in alliance with students, a separate managerial stratum more interested in the satisfaction of its customers than the well-being of its employees.

Progressive faculty and students at selective private colleges will often say that they want to dismantle the hierarchies of power that persist in society at large. Their actions often suggest that in fact they would like to invert them. All groups are equal, but some are more equal than others.

There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize—that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. And the exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group.

We don’t acknowledge class, so there are few affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous.

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

And here we come to the connection between the religion of success and the religion of political correctness. Political correctness is a fig leaf for the competitive individualism of meritocratic neoliberalism, with its worship of success above all. It provides a moral cover beneath which undergraduates can prosecute their careerist projects undisturbed. Student existence may be understood as largely separated into two non-communicating realms: campus social life (including the classroom understood as a collective space), where the enforcement of political correctness is designed to create an emotionally unthreatening environment; and the individual pursuit of personal advancement, the real business going forward. The moral commitments of the first (which are often transient in any case) are safely isolated from the second.

Political correctness and rational discourse are incompatible ideals. Forget “civility,” the quality that college deans and presidents inevitably put forth as that which needs to “balance” free expression. The call for civility is nothing more than a management tool for nervous bureaucrats, a way of splitting every difference and puréeing them into a pablum of deanly mush. Free expression is an absolute; to balance it is to destroy it.

True diversity means true disagreement. Political correctness exists at public institutions, but it doesn’t dominate them. A friend of mine who went to Columbia and Yale now teaches at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. “When you meet someone at Hunter,” she told me, “you can’t assume they see the world the same way you do.” That’s about as pithy an expression of the problem at selective private colleges as I can imagine. When you meet someone at Columbia or Yale or Scripps or Whitman or any of scores of other institutions, you absolutely can assume they see the world the same way you do. And anyone who threatens to disrupt that cozy situation must be disinvited, reeducated, or silenced. It’s no surprise that the large majority of high-profile PC absurdities take place at elite private schools like Emory or Oberlin or Northwestern.

Selective private colleges need to decide what kind of places they want to be. Do they want to be socialization machines for the upper-middle class, ideological enforcers of progressive dogma? Or do they want to be educational institutions in the only sense that really matters: places of free, frank, and fearless inquiry? When we talk about political correctness and its many florid manifestations, so much in the news of late, we are talking not only about racial injustice and other forms of systemic oppression, or about the coddling of privileged youth, though both are certainly at play. We are also talking, or rather not talking, about the pathologies of the American class system. And those are also what we need to deal with.

More HERE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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