Friday, July 14, 2006

Around the Web on Bastille Day

July 14, 1789 is Bastille Day, the traditional beginning of the French Revolution.

There are some interesting links on the web that demonstrate that America needs another Revolution, this time against our self-loathing "elites." Thomas Sowell has an excellent piece on how the Lamestream media is doing all they can to smear American soldiers in combat, "Presumed Guilty: How Biased Reporters 'Honor Our Troops.'" Of course the media's real purpose is to dishonor the troops and consequently undermine the war effort:


None of the brutal beheadings of innocent hostages taken by terrorists in Iraq -- and videotaped for distribution throughout the Middle East -- has aroused half the outrage in the mainstream media as unsubstantiated charges made by terrorists imprisoned in Guantanamo.

We all need to understand the fraudulence of the claim that these media liberals who have been against the military for decades and who have missed no opportunity to smear the military in Iraq are now in the forefront of "honoring" our troops by rubbing our noses in their deaths, day in and day out.

This sort of thing isn't limited to just America. In a reprehensible exercise in moral equivalence, Israel is under attack for using "disproportionate" force in time of war. For "liberals" war is about fairness, not winning. Jason Pappas has a few words for such persons:

On one side we have savage Islamic societies were people are destitute and oppressed by fascist regimes. These regimes are backed by envious scheming second-rate powers that seek to bleed us and our allies. On the other side is a progressive stable and pluralistic democracy—the only one in the region—that is the best hope for liberty in that part of the world. This fact—the nature of the characters involved—is the main fact that explains all the rest.

At Frontpagemag, Phil Orenstein has an great article on a too long forgotten cause of Nazism and what in means for us today:

Far too little attention has been paid to addressing the fundamental role that ideological indoctrination in classrooms and lecture halls has played in delivering the atrocities of Nazism to the world. The German university was the ideological originator of Nazism, turning romantic racial myths and superstitions about Germany and the Jews into a systematic “scientific” body of knowledge that gave rise to Nazi racial policy and justified the horrors of the Nazi atrocities. Professors and academics with multiple Ph.D.s eagerly collaborated with the Nazi leadership and selected who was to be sterilized and who lived or died for the glory of the Volk, advocated which races were to be exterminated and which nations were to be invaded and conquered for lebensraum.

After the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, academic institutions vied with tne another to curry favor with the Nazis by swiftly enacting racial quotas, expelling Jewish teachers and banning Jewish students. Schools and universities quickly became Nazi indoctrination centers, suppressing freedom of expression, free inquiry, independent research and all objectivity. They became the training grounds for the intellectual troops dedicated to serving the German Volk and Hitler. The last vestiges of academic freedom, scholarly autonomy, and freedom of research and teaching were stamped out. Professors were told by the new Nazi minister: “From now on, it will not be your job to determine whether something is true, but whether it is in the spirit of National Socialist revolution.” (71)


Read the whole thing and then dwell on the fact that American universities welcome hate mongers and conspiracy kooks to teach your children.

Crossposted at The Dougout

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

“From now on, it will not be your job to determine whether something is true, but whether it is in the spirit of National Socialist revolution.”

A similar process has occurred in Western universities under the the influence of 'post-modernism', where there is no longer any pursuit of truth because there is no longer any truth to pursue. One group's 'narrative' is just as valid as another's, maybe more so if that group suffers from victimhood (or even better, can intimidate its opponents with the prospect of real physical victimhood).

I'm sure there is a close connection between the orthodoxy of post modernism (as lampooned in the Sokal hoax) and the easy acceptance of Islam within universities.

If Islam were to be subject to the traditional rigours of academic critique, it would clearly and swiftly be revealed as the irrational tribalist mumbo-jumbo that it is. But because it is the 'narrative' of an oppressed group, it must not be challenged.

Anonymous said...

BTW, if anyone is in doubt by what I mean by postmodernism, try this site:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo

You may have to wait a little while and then scroll down, but there it is - your very own personalised postmodernist essay that any moonbat would feel proud to submit for publication.