Why it's us parents are to blame for the age of the narcissists

Ever since I was at school, I’ve been fascinated by the strange tale of the Children’s Crusade. It began in the year 1212, with a boy wandering across France and Germany.

As the boy told vast crowds of wide-eyed admirers, he had been chosen by Jesus to lead a crusade of children to the Holy Land and convert the Muslims to Christianity.

In an age of intense religious faith, obsessed with saints and heretics, the boy’s message struck a powerful chord.

Soon he had amassed tens of thousands of young followers, who airily dismissed their parents’ tearful protests and joined the boy on his long march south.

For weeks they walked, weathering storms and sunshine, towards the very edge of Europe. And then — well, I’ll come to that later.

Today, when we live in an age of children’s crusades, this story feels unsettlingly resonant. We, too, are fixated with saints, such as the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, and heretics, such as the novelist J.K. Rowling.

Thanks to her harangues about climate change, Miss Thunberg has even landed her own BBC TV natural history series, which, according to the press release, ‘will follow Greta’s international crusade’.

Yet she is not a politician, and still less a scientist. She is, quite literally, a child.

Why do we abase ourselves before her adolescent hectoring? And why do we indulge so many other teenagers and twentysomethings, from the woke warriors who want us to tear down our statues to the student mobs who want to rewrite the entire university curriculum?

With admirable timing, one of Britain’s most influential academics has just produced an answer. In his new book Why Borders Matter, the sociologist Frank Furedi suggests that parents themselves are to blame, having failed to set proper rules and boundaries, spoiled their children and raised a generation of infantilised, entitled narcissists.

Professor Furedi’s book has other provocative things to say, too. But given the past few weeks’ disturbing scenes of screaming mobs and Twitter tantrums, it’s his thesis on parents and children that is most striking.

As he points out, the dividing line between generations is probably more blurred today than it has ever been. Parents and children play together — including on video games — in ways that would have been unthinkable even in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up.

They share similar enthusiasms, watch the same films, listen to the same music.

And they even dress the same, with fathers and sons in identical combinations of jeans and T-shirts, or mothers taking fashion tips from their daughters. That certainly wasn’t the case for most of the last century.

In many ways, this unprecedented closeness is worth celebrating. Parents are probably kinder than ever before. The old rule that children should be seen and not heard has virtually disappeared.

Physical violence has become very rare, and children can talk more freely to their parents (even if they don’t want to).

But two other aspects of this story are rather less edifying.

First, most children are becoming adults later and later. Many millennials — born approximately between 1981 and 1996, so now in their mid-to-late 20s and 30s — are still living like teenagers.

They drift from one temporary job to another. They marry later, and have children later — if at all. They spend their money on rent and entertainment, rather than on a mortgage and family.

They are, in fact, literally irresponsible — which I mean not as an insult, but as a statement of fact.

Is this their own fault? No: far from it. And in fairness, the process has deep roots.

My own family history tells the story. More than a century ago, my grandfather left school at 14 to become an office boy.

By the time he reached his early 20s, he was leading what we would consider a fully adult life, with a wife, a steady office job and regular financial obligations.

His childhood pleasures were fully behind him, and the behaviour of today’s twentysomethings would have struck him as the stuff of some mad fantasy.

Yet today, the world my grandfather took for granted has simply ceased to exist.

For young men and women, steady, stable jobs are much harder to find, which explains why so many stay in education for longer.

The days when you joined a firm as an office boy and retired as a member of the board have gone for good: on average, most people tend to change jobs every five years, with rates even higher among the young.

As for perhaps the ultimate symbol of adult responsibility, home ownership, it has become more elusive than ever. More than half of the baby-boom generation owned their own home by the time they were 30.

By contrast, the proportion among millennials has fallen to less than a third, and is even lower in London and the South-East.

According to some housing experts, perhaps one in three millennials will never own their own home, while half will rent well into their 40s.

In other words, the system might have been designed to prevent young people from taking on responsibilities, as their parents and grandparents did at the same age.

Why does this matter? If you don’t give people a stake in the system, a steady job and their own home, you can hardly expect them to defend it when it comes under attack.

And if you treat people like children, then they’ll act like them — as we’re now finding out, both online and in our city centres.

The most pernicious development of all, though, is surely the exaggerated appeasement of youth, epitomised by the Thun-berg cult.

As Professor Furedi argues, this has been coming for a long time. Ever since the late 1960s, when the liberal media fawned before such titanic thinkers as John Lennon and Mick Jagger, there has been a sense the only opinions that matter are those of the very young.

During the Brexit debate, for instance, I lost count of the number of times I heard ultra-Remainers complaining that older voters had ‘betrayed’ their children’s future, or rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of elderly Leave voters’ impending deaths.

As Professor Furedi points out, one People’s Vote placard read: ‘Adults Ruin Everything. Stop Brexit.’ But what sane person sides with an unseasoned teenager over an experienced adult?

During the recent Black Lives Matter protests, too, it has been blindingly obvious that there is one rule for the young and another for everybody else.

So although mass gatherings are banned during the pandemic, the police actively aided and abetted mass gatherings of youngsters shrieking about the supposed racism of their elders.

Even the BBC — or rather, especially the BBC — worships at the cult of youth. In recent months, its programming has become ever more slavishly directed at teenagers and 20-somethings, while staff are now expected to declare their ‘preferred pronouns’ in their emails, as demanded by a handful of militant transgender activists.

Yet at the same time, the corporation has just ditched the Andrew Neil Show, despite the fact that the 71-year-old veteran is by far its best political interviewer.

And to cap it all, the BBC has scrapped free TV licences for the over-75s, whose opinions and values are routinely dismissed as reactionary relics.

Other societies, especially in Asia, respect the wisdom of their elders. We don’t. We pack our senior citizens off to care homes, out of sight, out of mind and prey to the coronavirus. No wonder the future belongs to China!

So is this all the fault of the parents, as Professor Furedi argues? Well, I certainly don’t think they — or rather, we — are blameless.

Adults, after all, are often just as irresponsible as their offspring. You have merely to read the gossip columns to know that self-indulgent sexual misbehaviour is certainly not confined to teenagers and millennials.

Indeed, if you were drawing up a charge sheet against my own generation, Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, it would be hard to know where to stop.

We’re probably the laziest, most gluttonous, most obese and most self-indulgent generation in history, from our obsession with fast food to our enthusiasm for cheap flights. (And no, I’m no saint, before you ask.)

Even our political life betrays the same fundamental irresponsibility. What other generation would have indulged the self-aggrandising showmanship of Nigel Farage, or the risible sub-student-union posturing of Jeremy Corbyn?

So it’s not surprising that our parenting style is not exactly a model of discipline and seriousness.

Too many parents refuse to set rules and boundaries, from screen time (now at least four hours a day on average) to bedtime. And far too many treat their children as sages, role models or even moral guides.

Parents need to stand up to their children. They should teach the time-honoured values of discipline and self-restraint, as well as the trendier ones of creativity and self-expression.

And instead of hammering into their children how ‘special’ they are, parents would surely do better to teach their offspring a little humility.

After all, in a world in which more than 100 billion people have lived throughout history, how many children are truly special, except to their parents?

Still, parents aren’t solely to blame. Many institutions seem determined to grovel before the cult of the young.

I think, for example, of the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, which recently scrapped a subsidised ticket scheme sponsored by the oil giant BP.

The scheme had allowed the RSC to offer cheap £5 tickets to local youngsters — a generous and laudable gesture, you might think.

But when a handful of politically-engaged schoolchildren complained about the link with BP, the theatre bosses meekly agreed to ditch it. You could hardly find a better example of self- defeating cowardice.

Some of the worst examples, inevitably, are our universities, whose well-paid bosses are never happier than when pandering to a tiny minority of entitled activists.

My blood still boils when I think of the spineless foolishness of the University of Liverpool, which recently renamed a hall associated with the reforming Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, because his father once owned slaves.

But the issue goes deeper than statues or buildings. It never ceases to amaze me that many university lecturers annually genuflect before their students, asking them if they would like the classes to be a little easier, or the marks a little higher; and whether they would like them to teach something different instead.

Who cares what the little sods think? You’re the experts, aren’t you?

I don’t deny that it’s natural and healthy for teenagers and for 20-somethings to demand change, from Miss Thunberg at the UN to the anti-racism activists in our city streets.

But it’s equally healthy for their elders, sometimes, to say no. A decent society depends upon a balance between young and old, novelty and tradition. When that balance tips too far, as it has, then something has gone badly wrong.

That brings me back to the Children’s Crusade — perhaps the greatest indictment of juvenile folly in history.

According to the legend, the children got to the shores of the Mediterranean, where a couple of merchants offered them safe passage to the Holy Land.

You can guess the rest. The children arrived, not in Jerusalem, but in the slave markets of North Africa. There was no escape. Their parents never heard from them again.

For those who think that young people have all the answers, there’s surely a lesson there.

The young are not always more virtuous, and they’re certainly not always wiser. And often they need to pipe down and grow up. Because as any parent surely knows, even the brightest child is often totally, utterly, irredeemably wrong.

SOURCE





Violence to History the Mob Will Love

The inescapable problem of “period pieces,” i.e. movies set in the past, is that much of the past has been lost. History is incomplete and some of it is highly debated. So, there will likely be a fair amount of invention in your average period piece. Certainly, the dialog between historical persons is apt to be invented, created out of whole cloth. Given that, the trick in a period piece would seem to be in balancing the demands of ticket buyers who want an engaging drama with the imperative to not inflict violence on known history.

On the cable recently, I screened the 2018 movie Mary Queen of Scots. This flick would surely qualify as a period piece, a biopic. It’s about the woman who may have had a stronger claim to the English throne than did Elizabeth I. But the film makes so many errors in history that it may make hardcore history buffs highly irritated.

In your average historical drama, this viewer can forgive certain inventions and even some departures from what is known as long as we have a compelling story. But this Mary flick features one deviation from history that is so blatant and so unnecessary that it may make one want to relegate the film to the dustbin of, well, history. That error is in casting.

The film’s casting decisions don’t merely fill in the blanks for facts which have been lost; they are deliberate choices to rewrite history, and they make what could have been an enjoyable drama into some multicultural propaganda piece.

The main miscast roles were for Lord Thomas Randolph, Bess of Hardwick, and David Rizzio. These were all white folks, kids, yet were played by non-whites. In addition, a number of supernumerary roles were played by non-whites.

Our Mary here was directed by one Josie Rourke in her film debut. Ms. Rourke’s other directing has been for the theatre, for which she has an impressive number of credits. Since Rourke was new to cinema, much of the blame for the miscasting in her film debut must be directed at the studio execs that allowed her to pull such a stunt.

On December 10, 2018, Refinery29 ran “Why Mary Queen Of Scots Isn't Another All-White Biopic” by Rebecca Farley (brackets in the original):

“We know that the characters that Gemma and Adrian and Ismael Cruz Cordova [play] were white,” Rourke told Refinery29. “So those are people of color playing those who were historically not people of color.”

Rourke added, “That is very influenced by my theater background, where that sort of thing is done. When I sat down with [the studio] early, before we got down to a lot of stuff, I said to them, ‘Just so you know, I’m not going to direct an all-white period drama. That’s not something I’m going to do.’ And they were really hugely supportive of that.”

So, it turns out the studio execs were to blame for loosing this ahistorical period piece on an unsuspecting public. If the top studio negotiator had had any judgment, he’d have put on his best John Wayne voice and told Josie: Seems to me you don’t want to work with us, little missy.

When Laurence Olivier played Othello in 1965, he took pains to look the part. Lord Larry also smeared himself with dark makeup for Khartoum, in which he played the Mahdi. The same was true for Jon Vickers when he sang Verdi’s Otello at the Met, which included a big afro. But no concessions to verisimilitude are demanded by director Rourke; her actors don’t apply pancake and narrow noses to look like the people they play. (Rather than Olivier and Vickers’ honoring of Othello’s black countenance, maybe Rourke thinks them guilty of blackface.)

Like Olivier, Orson Welles in 1951 also played the Moor on film and made an effort to look the part, although not with the same zeal as Olivier. Moreover, in 1936 Welles staged “the Scottish play” with an all-black cast. The production acquired the nickname “The Voodoo Macbeth.” That’s because Welles switched the setting from Scotland to the Caribbean. (Click on the Voodoo link to discover how the federal government was involved with Welles’ production.)

Imagine how black folks would feel were some “creative” Hollywood director to cast a white boy as MLK or Nelson Mandela. They’d be miffed, to say the least. But even if a white actor took pains to look the part, some blacks would still disapprove; they’d want a black to play a black. If, however, all the historical blacks in such a film were played by whites and all the historical whites were played by blacks, then we might have something no one could object to.

Rourke said of her film that it is “absolutely a restorative piece… the past becomes the present.” Sheer cant! Of what, exactly, is this film “restorative”? This movie lover actually feels sorry for Rourke’s minority actors; she’s seems to be using them to further some pet idea about equality or inclusion or diversity. But Rourke is also “using” history. It’s doubtful that many African-Americans would plunk down good Yankee dollars just to see folks who look like them in the Court of Queen Elizabeth I.

It’s a pity that the studio didn’t rein in Rourke’s excesses, because some aspects of the film are not without merit. She might have created a fine film, even with the ahistorical business of the meeting between Elizabeth and Mary. Actually, more than 200 years ago Friedrich Schiller incorporated such a meeting between the two monarchs into his play Mary Stuart. And that play formed the basis for Donizetti’s opera Maria Stuarda, which retained the meeting. But again, there seems to be no evidence that such a meeting occurred.

One aspect of the times that Rourke does well is the friction between Mary and John Knox. The Calvinist clergyman believed women particularly sinful and comes off as quite the misogynist. The film’s beginning, which is of Mary’s beheading, is also done quite nicely. When she goes to the chopping block, her attendants yank off her cloak to reveal Mary all dressed up for her last moments on Earth in a vivid red gown. (I’m a sucker for such dramatic touches.)

Why is this casting of minority actors, including very dark ones, such a big mistake? It’s because it’s jarring. It’s distracting. It puts the audience off the scent of the real issues Mary was facing. Had the studio any sense, they would have informed their fledgling director that what works in the theatre often doesn’t translate to the silver screen: (We do cinema here, Josie, not live theatre. Movies last forever, whereas live plays are quickly lost in the mists of time. So, kiddo, we need to give these roles to white actors. But we do think you’re on to something. So here’s the drill: let’s cast only Mary as a black. We think we can get Whoopi Goldberg to play this Mary Queen of the Scots gal, or maybe even Oprah.)

Would the casting of an all-white cast to play white historical characters have been so monstrous, so “racist”? Of course, it would; just about everything is racist nowadays. The only Americans who aren’t racist are the “woke” mobs tearing down statues of abolitionists.

Aren’t we all getting a little tired of hearing about race all the time? Frankly, m’dear, I’m sick to death of race. Maybe Josie should have pulled an Orson: made the entire cast black and set her film in the Caribbean. Or maybe she could have tried to work up a little reverence for the past.

SOURCE





How to Teach Americans to Hate Their Own Country -- And How Not To

What has inspired young Americans to rage against monuments to people who fought and died for justice and equality?

In recent days, America has produced an astounding spectacle. Americans desecrated and demanded removal of their own statues to their own heroes, including African Americans who fought for the Union; Hans Christian Heg, a Norwegian immigrant and dedicated abolitionist who modeled courage and gave his life in the Civil War; Taduesz Kosciuszko, the Polish-born designer of West Point who left money in his will to purchase freedom for American slaves; the World War II Memorial to the men and women who actually did fight fascism; and the Emancipation Memorial, a monument paid for by freed slaves, dedicated in a speech by Frederick Douglass, and the first American monument to feature an African American. In Iran, mullahs gloated that Americans themselves were now chanting "Death to America."

Black Lives Matter proponents claimed, "It's just property, easily replaced." No one said "It's just property, easily replaced" when arsonists burned black churches, and no one would say that had vandals spray painted a pig and the f-word, not on a statue to Kosciuszko, but on the MLK monument. Clearly, the vandals knew that they were, piece by piece, no less than Chinese communists bulldozing Tibetan monasteries or Nazis dynamiting synagogues, engaging in acts of anti-American cultural genocide.

What inspired young Americans to go on this feverish rampage against the people who lived for, fought for, and died for the justice and equality that rioters claimed to support? Many blamed American education. I could relate.

Years ago, I was a new PhD looking for a job. I received rejection letters mentioning hundreds of qualified applicants. I was desperate. A very kind department chair offered me a part-time assignment.

I received the class textbook: Race, Class, and Gender in the United States by Paula S. Rothenberg. The book is "required reading at over 1,000 colleges." Rothenberg's "publisher estimates that her books have reached well over half a million students." I couldn't wait to plunge into its almost 700 influential pages, and to map out how I'd communicate its hefty contents to my students.

I began to experience a nameless discomfort immediately upon reading the preface to the anthology. Rothenberg talks about events, persons, and trends that any intelligent person might recognize as unconnected. These include environmentalism, Nelson Mandela serving time in prison, smoking on airplanes, and surgeries intended to "reassign" gender. I wondered what scholarly discipline qualified Rothenberg to expatiate on these diverse topics.

Rothenberg anoints herself with the authority to bring these diverse puzzle pieces together. Her unifying thread is the destructive privilege enjoyed by white, heterosexual, Christian, American men. Her authority is derived from her virtuous desire to overturn these men's hegemony, and to free the oppressed from their chains.

A blue-collar child of immigrants, I had learned in academia, from Alan Dundes, my mentor, that scholarship requires disciplined focus, a proven set of topic-specific research tools, and certified membership in a community. Any average Joe might have an opinion about, say, virus replication, but unless you've spent your life studying virus replication, unless you are using the tried-and-true tools for analysis of virus replication, and unless you've been admitted to the community of others engaged in the same study, your opinion about virus replication really doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

Dundes demanded that his scholars master at least two languages. If you are going to make sweeping generalizations about the human condition, you require intimate knowledge of at least one other, non-American culture. A true scholar never falls into the error, Dundes pointed out, of saying something like, "The folktale Cinderella proves that Americans … " Cinderella is an international folktale, told from ninth-century China to Medieval Italy to Walt Disney. If you want to use Cinderella to make a point about America or Americans, you must find what feature is unique in American tellings of the tale.

Paula Rothenberg never received a PhD, as she recounts in her memoir, Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender. She worked for a while on a dissertation addressing Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of truth. Rothenberg was studying philosophy, not sociology, anthropology, history, or statistics. I could find no theory, and no academic bona fides, that qualified Rothenberg to make the sweeping generalizations she makes about America or Americans.

Though on different topics, many of the otherwise disjointed works in the Rothenberg anthology feature a protagonist obsessed with personal unhappiness, and locating the source of that unhappiness in malicious, heterosexual, white, American men. Maz Jobrani could not find work in Hollywood. Clearly, this was because white men would not allow a Muslim to thrive as an actor. Noy Thrupkaew insists that white men conspire to oppress poor Asian-Americans by praising the academic successes of well-off Asian Americans. Male-to-female transgender person Susan Stryker rages against "hegemonic" words like "man" and "woman." Stryker chafes to "pull down the patriarchy." Stryker's life is full of pain: "To the extent that I am perceived as a woman … I experience the same misogyny as other women, and to the extent that I am perceived as a man … I experience the homophobia directed toward gay men." Sharlene Hesse-Biber attributed a student's bulimia to the fact that "Guys don't like fat girls." Fat girls, poor Asian-Americans, transgender persons, Muslim actors, all are in pain because of oppressive white men.

Patriarchy or patriarchal are mentioned 36 times in the book, white supremacy or supremacist, 29 times, white privilege, 55 times, racism or racist 506 times, variations of oppression 233 times. The phrase white men appears 31 times. White men "have control;" they constitute "the ruling group." White men never "do dirty work." White men never feel "haunting fears" or "deep shame." Rather, white men enjoy "the manhood of racism, sexism, and homophobia."

Rothenberg's anthology, she tells us, "views the problems facing our country and our communities as structural, and seeks to contribute to the conversation about fairness and justice." What is that structure that, as she puts it, is "destroying lives and families"? Rothenberg's answer: "patriarchy and white privilege." Her job is to "explore the interlocking nature of these systems of oppression as they work in combination and impact virtually every aspect of life in U.S. society today." "Intersectionality," she says, is a term that "captures the complexity of multiple and simultaneous forms of oppression." All the previously mentioned bad things, from Mandela's prison term to smoking on airplanes, have been "hierarchically constructed" to advantage white, heterosexual men.

When addressing the success of Asians in America, Rothenberg makes clear that that success, like everything else in America, has been manipulated by the unseen hand of white, heterosexual, American men. Asians have not succeeded; rather, the all-powerful white man has "racially positioned" Asians differently than how he has "racially positioned" African Americans. Similarly, the white man manipulates media to "stereotype" Muslims as terrorists. There is no real Muslim terrorist; there are no victims to jihad terror. There is only the white man manipulating media to harm Muslims.

Every student at the university must take this class, because white men's privilege has blinded us all, and without the class, we would go through life metaphorically walking into walls. Rothenberg reassures the reader, "It is impossible to make sense out of either the past or the present without using race, class, gender, and sexuality … Much of what passes for a neutral perspective across the disciplines and in cultural life smuggles in elements of class, race, and gender bias and distortion. Because the so-called neutral point of view is so pervasive, it is often difficult to identify … Learning to identify and employ race, class, and gender as fundamental categories of description and analysis is essential if we wish to understand our own lives and the lives of others."

We can't go through life seeing people as just people. We must see them as representatives of their skin color and other identities. Rothenberg will instruct us. "We should never lose sight of the fact that any particular individual has an ethnic background, a class location, an age, a sexual orientation, a religious orientation, a gender, and that all these characteristics are inseparable from the person."

We must never fool ourselves into thinking that we are aware of reality. In fact, Rothenberg will tell us what reality is. What we had thought of as "reality," she puts in scare quotes. Her opinions expressed in her book actually are reality, without quotation marks. "Racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism operate on a basic level to structure what we come to think of as 'reality' … Differences may appear to be 'natural' or given in nature, they are in fact socially constructed" to form "systems of oppression." We must jettison the idea that the "United States extends liberty and justice and equal opportunity for all." What will disabuse us of this foolish notion? "The reality presented in these pages." Note the lack of quotation marks around that use of the word reality.

Losing faith in America might depress some students, Rothenberg acknowledges. Never fear! Rothenberg is also Glinda, the Good Witch. She presents the reader with "examples of people working together to bring about social change. The task is enormous, time is short, and our collective future is at stake."

Rothenberg's story, from the bad old days when white, heterosexual, Christian, American men screwed over everyone else on the planet, to the bright future where people work together to bring about social change, is told in the language of progress. She uses terms like "still." People still oppose gay marriage! People still smoke on airplanes! But humanity is marching towards an inevitable progress. Every day, in every way, humanity is getting better and better. We've had a black president! We almost had a woman president! Progress is to be measured by how far away we get from white men, and how close we come to their opposite number: people of color, women, and handicapped and transgendered people.

The degree to which such ideas now dominate education cannot be underestimated. Douglas Murray wrote in 2019 that identity politics have penetrated even into the hard sciences as taught in elementary school. He cites Seattle Public Schools K-12 Math Studies Framework which includes the following, "Power and oppression … are the ways in which individuals and groups define mathematical knowledge so as to see 'Western' mathematics as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence. This definition of legitimacy is then used to disenfranchise people and communities of color. This erases the historical contributions of people and communities of color." Yes, this is woke math instruction for kindergartners through twelfth graders.

How do students react to this kind of education? On social media, I came across a group of recent college graduates discussing their experience of the class I had been hired to teach. With their permission, I repost their conversation here.

"The class was the single biggest load of crap ever. I found it extremely offensive to all ethnic groups. The class did however teach me the most important skill in life, just say what people want to hear at all times, contain all actual feelings, and you will be fine. 'Know your audience.'"

The message of the class, he said, was, "If you aren't white, you suck at life and should basically kill yourself because there is nothing you can do in life to improve tomorrow. If you are white, go kill yourself you dirty capitalist pig Nazi and try not to rape any women before you do it."

A second person posted: "That class was the biggest waste of time, energy and paper … Trees did not deserve to die for this class to exist."

A third poster: "I was kicked out of that class once, and for no reason either."

The first poster asked, "Did you try to express your opinion?"

"Yeah," he replied. "I shared an experience I had."

Another asked, "Was it a story of you experiencing racism? If so, that's probably why. White people never experience any type of racism of any kind. As a Jewish kid, when I saw a swastika drawn on my locker, you know what I did? Nothing, because I had a feeling there was no point."

Though Rothenberg's books enjoy many positive reviews on Amazon, her negative Amazon reviews echo the impression shared by the young men quoted above. One Amazon reviewer writes, "White people are demonized. Males are emasculated and belittled. The word 'normal' is used, quotations included, as an actual insult. To be an upstanding member of society who happens to be White, male or Christian is, according to Rothenberg, a very real crime, worthy of very real punishment … this book should be treated not only as a piece of blatant propaganda that would make the Führer blush, but as a warning: Americans, if you're 'normal,' if you're self-respecting and decent in any way, but you just so happen to be male, Christian or especially White, they ARE coming for you."

Another reviewer writes, "Purely a Marxist totalitarian charade with extremely one-sided analogies. To Paula Rothenberg; if you hate the U.S.A. and freedom, then leave it for a communist country!"

And another, universities "force this bias down the throats of the unknowing students who are only reading the book to pass the class. The articles within this book are ONLY focused on the leftist views of race, class, and gender … If I have to read this book (which I did), I'd like to see some rebuttals, or some OTHER viewpoints."

Her fellow scholars have also taken issue with Rothenberg's book. Professor Julius G. Getman is a noted labor historian and attorney. In his 2011 University of Texas Press book, In the Company of Scholars, Getman points out that the materials Rothenberg chose for her anthology "present a single point of view: women and people of color as innocent victims, white males as oppressors." Rothenberg's definition of racism, that makes it impossible for anyone who is not white to be a racist, is "elitist," "patronizing," "racist," and "factually in error." Getman says, though, that "A good course can be taught using a slanted text so long as the slanting is recognized and compensated for by the instructor."

It wasn't just the book's slant that discomfited me. I deeply value separation of church and state and the sanctity of the individual conscience. I didn't want anyone telling me what to believe, and for me it would be a sin to use my paltry power as a professor to impose my ethics on my students. I cherished my ideal of the Ivory Tower: The Ivory Tower was for discovering objective truths. The Church guided me on the moral way to handle those truths, but it was not for me to force anyone into my church.

Rothenberg's book contains the word "should" 180 times. "Asian Americans should participate in racial justice struggles." "We should never lose sight of the ethnic background" of people we meet. We "should" describe ourselves as experiencing "internalized sexism." The word "black" "should be capitalized."

This book was not empowering students with neutral knowledge obtained and arranged in a scholarly manner that they could choose to use to build the lives they wanted. This book, rather, was the scripture of a religion, that was indoctrinating students in how they should live their lives. If they did not mouth, however insincerely, Rothenberg's shahada, they would not pass, and they would not acquire the degrees for which they were paying.

That professors teach this book in a manipulative and coercive way is demonstrated on the web. One syllabus requires that students give the teacher a detailed autobiography. In subsequent assignments, students are to self-identify as "how you fit into both oppressor and oppressed group." Many such online assignments sound like "struggle sessions," where students are required to share intimate details of their private lives, only for those details to be used later to categorize them as oppressors or the oppressed, whether they wanted to be so categorized or not. Struggle sessions are tools of psychological manipulation, not scholarship.

Not just the book's slant, nor its moral coercion, concerned me. I was also gravely troubled by the vacuum into which its contents were to be injected. My students had not been prepared by grammar school, high school, or other college classes to assess the book's assertions. They lacked training in scholarly skills, and they lacked raw knowledge of basic facts. My students thought that the Atlantic Slave Trade was the only slave trade that had ever existed. They thought they knew everything about the Crusades, to wit: Christian Europeans during the Middle Ages decided to invade Muslim lands and force Muslims to become Christian. They believed that contemporary terror attacks, like 9-11, were somehow justified revenge for the Crusades.

Students had no knowledge, at all, that the Crusades were preceded by hundreds of years of warfare by Muslims against Christian populations in the Middle East and Europe. They became astounded if I shared with them the information in Dr Bill Warner's dynamic battle map showing the hundreds of battles and slave raids jihadis prosecuted against formerly Christian lands like Syria, Egypt, and Turkey, as well as Spain, Italy, and France. They were shocked when I told them that Muslims lived under Christian rulers in the Middle East and often were not pressured to convert to Christianity.

They had no idea that anyone, anywhere, had ever died in the introduction of communism. Once I told them that, yes, people died, I invited them to guess numbers. When I told them that one good estimate was 100 million, they were floored. They would often say, "Why hasn't anyone ever told us this?"

I would ask my students, "What group of people did the Nazis, as part of an organized program, mass murder first and last?"

Students would always guess "Jews."

When I told them that the first and last group that Nazis murdered as part of an organized program were handicapped people, they were uncomprehending. They thought that Nazis mass murdering Jews was an expression of Christian anti-Semitism. They had no real understanding of Nazism.

I faced a quandary. I needed the job. I genuinely loved my boss and wanted to please her. I also did not want to undermine the university's intentions with the course. I was being paid to teach X. So I decided to teach X. I assigned works from Rothenberg's anthology. I made a few adjustments, though.

I told my students that they were permitted, indeed, expected, to express any opinion they wanted in class, as long as they did so in an academically respectable way. Name-calling and other incivility would not be allowed. I assured my students that their grades would have nothing to do with their opinions. I told them that truth is the north star, and that real scholarship provides tools for them to get as close to truth as possible.

The student reaction to this policy both touched and saddened me. Students told me that my class was special and unique because they were allowed to say what they thought. They told me of being ejected from, harassed in, or failing, other classes because they expressed their opinion.

I told them that a major component of the class would be a research paper, and that we would work together using time-tested methods of academic research. I created a guide, "How to Write a Research Paper." They would pick the topic, and they could reach any conclusion that the evidence they unearthed suggested to them.

Many students had no idea how to conduct academic research. No idea how to formulate a question, how to access peer-reviewed sources, or even what peer-reviewed sources were, or how to differentiate between fact and opinion. Their initial attempts were often impassioned screeds emphatically stating their opinion, and advocating what other people should do. I told them that it wasn't their job, as scholars, to write rabble-rousing purple prose, or to preach a sermon telling other people what they should do. I said it was their job to discover, synthesize, and report, in clear prose, objective facts. They said they'd always gotten good grades on such papers in the past.

Not a few students told me that this class feature was one of their favorite assignments in their college career. They had the opportunity to discover more about something that mattered to them.

One student, an African American woman named "Angie," told me she wanted to write a paper proving that the use of Ebonics in academic settings helps black students. Over the weeks of the project, as she performed her research, I could see her mind challenged by what she was discovering. For her original research, she wrote two job application letters, one in Ebonics, and one in standard English. She showed the letters to potential employers. The employers told her that they would prefer to hire the author of the letters written in Standard English. Angie's confrontation with objective facts changed her mind about the topic. She sent me an email years after having been my student, thanking me for the impact my teaching had on her life.

In addition to the above class policies, I did the following.

I told my students about Polish Haitians. Napoleon brought Poles to Haiti to suppress the world's first successful slave uprising that resulted in a new country controlled by former slaves. Most of the Poles died of yellow fever. Of those that survived, many, true to the Polish tradition of "For Your Freedom and Ours," fought beside the slaves for their freedom. Their descendants, many of them blue-eyed, survive in Haiti to this day.

I told them about William Wilberforce, John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, all influential opponents of slavery. I told them about Ben Franklin's co-founding of an anti-slavery society before America was even a country. I told them about Levi and Catherine Coffin, two of the hundreds of Americans who created and maintained the Underground Railroad. I quoted from the letters of average Union soldiers who fought and died to end slavery. For example, "citizen soldier" Alvin Coe Voris wrote, "God's terrible wrath must be visited upon the authors of the abominable crime of American slavery." I told them about the unbroken chain of inspiration stretching from Henry David Thoreau to Leo Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King.

I told them about Julius Rosenwald, a child of Jewish immigrants who worked in the rag trade from the time he was 16. He made a fortune and dedicated that fortune to the uplift of African Americans. He funded Booker T. Washington, enabling his career. He underwrote more than five thousand schools, shops, and teacher homes for African Americans.

A diehard Jersey girl, I told them, of course, about Frank Sinatra, and his public and private activism to end Jim Crow. Nelson Rockefeller funded Martin Luther King, once handing his aide, Clarence Jones, a suitcase jammed with $100,000 in cash. White Americans didn't just give money to the Civil Rights Movement. Viola Liuzzo, a dirt-poor coal-miner's daughter and married mother of five, gave her life; she was shot to death for her activism. The Rev. James Reeb was clubbed to death. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were two more white Civil Rights martyrs. My students had never heard of them, nor had they ever heard of any of the people or movements mentioned above. What they had read about, in their anthology, was whites as oppressive racists.

We talked about the Muslim Slave Trade. According to Prof. John Azumah,

"While the mortality rate of the slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as 10%, the percentage of the slaves dying in transit in the Tran-Saharan and East African slave market was a staggering 80 to 90%. While almost all the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were for agricultural work, most of the slaves destined for the Muslim Middle East were for sexual exploitation as concubines in harems and for military service. While many children were born to the slaves in the Americas, the millions of their descendants are citizens in Brazil and the United States today. Very few descendants of the slaves who ended up in the Middle East survived. While most slaves who went to the Americas could marry and have families, most of the male slaves destined for the Middle East were castrated, and most of the children born to the women were killed at birth." While about 388,000 enslaved Africans were brought to the US, "a minimum of 28 million Africans were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East. Since at least 80% of those captured by the Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave markets, it is believed that the death toll from 1,400 years of Arab and Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been as high as 112 million."

We talked about some other difficult topics. The Armenian Genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, and the Rwandan Genocide. We talked about Darfur, Biafra, and China's occupation of Tibet. They had thought that "genocide" was something that white people do. Turkey, they learned, has yet to acknowledge that the Armenian Genocide ever happened, and it charged its Nobel-Prize-winning novelist, Orhan Pamuk, with a crime for so much as mentioning it. We talked, briefly and not in detail, about Imperial Japan's unspeakable war crimes. Scholar Brian Victoria showed that Imperial Japan used Zen Buddhism to justify its crimes. They had thought that only white Christians capture, torture, and perform obscene medical experiments on helpless victims.

We talked about Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the ironically named "Minister for Family Welfare and the Advancement of Women." She was the first woman to be charged with "genocidal rape." She ordered her Rwandan troops, "before you kill the women, you need to rape them." Spiked plants were used.

I introduced my students, albeit briefly, to this dark material for a scholarly reason. The Rothenberg approach castigates America for having had slavery. Rothenberg breaks Alan Dundes' simple rule of scholarship. You can't use Cinderella to make a sweeping generalization about America, because Cinderella is told around the world. If you want to use that tale, or any cultural product, to make a statement about a culture, you must determine what differentiates the American expression of Cinderella, or any other cultural product from other, international versions.

Rothenberg refuses to take the simple scholarly step of asking, What makes America's slavery history unique? White Americans are the only people who could have owned slaves who fought a bloody, devastating war to end slavery and to free their enslaved brothers and sisters, and they did so with Christian and American ideals as their inspiration. In contrast, Slavery is still practiced around the world. It was outlawed in Saudi Arabia only in 1962, and in Muslim Mauritania only in 2007. In June, 2020, an anti-slavery activist told the BBC that slavery is still widespread in Mauritania.

In Rothenberg's text, only whites hate, and whites only ever hate, and never help, and non-whites are only, ever, powerless victims. By introducing students to the above facts, I hoped that they would realize that the story is not "Whitie must be erased for the good of mankind," but rather an older story, the problem of evil that exists in every heart, behind every skin tone, in every era. In wrestling with the problem of evil myself, I found my solution in Christ. I hoped that they would find their own solution.

Black Lives Matter rioters tearing down statues and their media allies are acting out the selective outrage that Rothenberg inscribed and modeled in her text. In Rothenberg's book, and in modern liberal media, only whites hate, whites only hate, and never help, and non-whites are only, ever, powerless victims. Truth is that which serves the party. Neither Rothenberg nor National Public Radio penetrate Islam's many and canonical supports for still-extant slavery. Scholar David Wood has thoroughly exposed the anti-black racism and its support for slavery, including sex slavery, inscribed in Islam from its earliest and most sacred texts. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here … and too many others to mention. NPR produced, on July 1, 2020, a broadcast linking white supremacy to Christianity. In leftist media and academia, it is always, only, white, Christian Americans who do bad things. There is no universal problem of evil that we must all confront and deal with, regardless of our skin color or gender. Thus, no universal solution must be sought. Humiliating, disempowering, or getting rid of whitie is enough. "White lives don't matter … Abolish whiteness," said Cambridge professor Priyamvada Gopal. After which, she was immediately promoted.

"Say his name! George Floyd!" BLM orders us. BLM also orders us to flush down the memory hole names like Justine Ruszczyk, Genesis Rincon, Jazmine Barnes, Brandon Hendricks, or Amaria Jones. Victims of black shooters must be erased, along with statues to Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

This isn't just about fairness or patriotism. It's about scholarship. To focus on slavery in America and to leave students, who have spent an entire semester and a lot of cash to take a class completely unaware of the much larger Muslim slave trade, is to trash any concept of scholarship.

Like Rothenberg, I did not want to leave my students depressed. I told them that I had the solutions to all the dark material we were plowing through. I said I had it right on my desk, and if they'd close their eyes for a moment, I would lift it up and show it to them. They closed their eyes, and I lifted the solution for them to see. I was, of course, holding up a mirror.

I told them that no matter what world problem perturbed them, there were others out there working on it. I listed a few such organizations on the blackboard, including those fighting slavery, female infanticide, illiteracy, and environmental degradation. I told them that when I feel sad about the state of the world, I donate some money.

I offered a quote, "The love of a single heart can make a world of difference." The author of this quote is Immaculée Ilibagiza. During the Rwandan genocide, she had to hide in a three foot by four foot bathroom for three months with seven other women. Ilibagiza is a devout Catholic. I did not mention her Catholicism to my students. I did not want to proselytize them, only to let them know something. I wanted my students to know that some who have been through the darkest night have managed to survive, thrive, and share their light with others. I wanted my students to know that that kind of personal power is rooted not in self-pity, not in resentment, not in rage or vengeance or the rush to destroy, or self-definition as a perpetual victim. I wanted my students to know that that power is rooted in forgiveness, hope, love, and the drive to nurture and create. And I wanted them to know that that was a choice open to them.

SOURCE






Opinions divided on whether Australia could effectively ban extremist far-right organisations

It's good that such bans are only talk at this stage. The big issue is in defining who is "extremist far-right". In America, conservative family-oriented organizations are sometimes branded as "white supremacist" or the like simply because they are conservative. One man's moderate can be another man's extremist.

To me all American Leftists are racist extremists because of their support for "affirmative action". So any bans should be founded on a very clear definition of "far right" and "extremist" that is widely agreed on both sides of the political spectrum.

To me the only justifiable bans, if any, are on people who actually practice violence. Big talk is common but it is mostly just hot air. And where do we find any Australian Rightists practicing violence, let alone ones who are members of a violent group? The repeated acts of violence by Muslims surely make them a group of political extremists but that seems to be OK somehow.

The only Australian "Far Rightist" who actually attacked and killed people as far as I can remember was Brenton Tarrant and he was very much a lone wolf. And he was as much a Greenie as a Rightist. And he didn't even carry out his attacks in Australia, sadly for New Zealanders.

So there are undoubtedly some Australians with views that could be described as "far Right" but what harm have they done? They don't seem capable of energizing even one-another into violence, let alone people in the population at large.

Neo Nazis are undoubtedly extremists with some views that identify them as Rightist so what harm have they done in Australia? I did a close-up study of them some years ago (See here and here) and found not even advocacy of violence among them. They would say "I wish.." for violence against someone but showed not the slightest disposion to do anything about it personally.

So if even Australian neo-Nazis are non-violent in practice where are the "extremist far-right" organizations that need to be banned?


Terror analysts say there is growing pressure on Australia to ban extremist far-right organisations as other nations take decisive action on the issue.

Labor's home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally this week called on the Morrison government to send a signal that extremist views won’t be tolerated by officially listing and banning right-wing organisations.

The United Kingdom, the United States and Canada have all moved to ban extremist right-wing groups in their jurisdictions.

Deakin University counter-terrorism expert Professor Greg Barton said Western democracies around the world are increasingly being forced to consider taking stronger against the extreme far-right.

“There certainly is increasing pressure from Western democracies to ban right-wing extremist groups both in the political realm and the social media realm,” he told SBS News.

“(But) this is the very challenging area, we don’t have such clear egregious examples that we can easily move – often I think in practice this will apply to individuals not organisations.”

Currently, there are no such groups on Australia’s banned terrorist organisation list.

There are currently 26 groups on the Australian list - 25 of those are Islamist organisations and the other is the Kurdistan Worker's Party.

ASIO has warned that right-wing extremism poses an increasing threat in Australia as groups become more organised.

Counter-terrorism expert Leanne Close from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute told SBS News there were at least a dozen right-wing groups emerging in Australia.

She said they can be defined by a nationalistic and anti-Islamic approach, a focus on cultural superiority and behaviour that trends towards violence.

“I know ASIO will always be keeping an eye on whether these groups are moving to a call to action,” she said.

“(But) the situation in Australia at the moment is... not as dire as places like the US and the experience that possibly the UK is having in relation to right-wing extremism.”

Earlier this week, the British home secretary Priti Patel moved to outlaw the far-right terror group Feuerkrieg Division, which has advocated the use of violence and mass murder as part of an apocalyptic race war.

In February, the United Kingdom also formally banned extremist right group the Sonnenkrieg Division and recognised the System Resistance Network as an alias of National Action – another right-wing group on the list.

In April this year the United States designated the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group, as global terrorists.

Canada has itself listed right wing extremist groups Blood and Honour and Combat 18 as terrorist groups.

Senator Keneally said the time has come for Australia to take stronger action against those that posed a right wing-extremist threat.

"The proscription of a right-wing organisation - international or domestic - would send a powerful message that these extremist views will not be tolerated,"" she wrote in an article for ASPI's The Strategist.

The coronavirus pandemic has also fuelled the spread of extremist messages.

Counter-terrorism analyst Professor Clive Williams has warned against specific bans on targeted groups.

“I don’t think it is a good idea to ban right wing groups because once you ban them it drives them underground and makes them much more cautious about their communication,” he told SBS News.

“The threat really from right-wing groups can be monitored fairly well because at the moment they are not particularly security conscience and they are relatively easy to infiltrate.“

Under Australia's national security laws, before an organisation is listed, the home affairs minister must be satisfied on reasonable grounds that it "is directly or indirectly engaged in preparing, planning, assisting or fostering the doing of a terrorist act, or advocates the doing of a terrorist act".

Mr Barton said the splintered nature of right-wing extremist groups means authorities in Australia remained more likely target the behaviour of individuals rather than implement targeted bans.

“Most of this is not going to be about banning a group … it’s going to be working out the individual behavioural level and communications,” he said.

“There does seem to be an awareness we are going to have to do something.”

SOURCE

********************************

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.
`
************************************