Rich Grave wrote in article
> [email protected]
<[email protected]>…
> —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
>
> | “…truth is far more fragile than fiction
> | …reason alone cannot protect it.”
> |
> | Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust
>
> I should probably just go and read Lipstadt’s book to find the context for
> this quote, but since my efforts to disengage and read some relevant books
> have been frustrated by, well, interesting things that keep on happening
> (OK, I have managed to get almost half way through _Eichmann in Jerusalem_
> – — in three weeks), I was wondering if you (Nizkor) folks could explain to
> me what the above means to you. The obvious (mis?)interpretation is that
> force or censorship needs to be used against the Nazi apologists and fans,
> but this interpretation is in conflict with Nizkor’s stated objectives,
> https://nizkor.org/objectives.html. Broken link Is this quote an artifact of Ken’s
> initial investigations of the subject, before he was convinced how well
> free speech works?
>
> I gotta ask, because I can hear the bad guys snickering.
Professor Lipstadt often speaks of reason’s alleged fragility (eg. 28, 182,
207); it’s almost the subtext of her book. Although she explicitly rejects
censorship, it’s difficult to see why. She couldn’t offer a principled defence
of her position, of the sort you often make, given her (false)
presuppositions.
A similar quotation appears in the concluding chapter: “if Holocaust denial
has demonstrated anything, it is the fragility of memory, truth, reason, and
history. The deniers’ campaign has been carefully designed to take advantage
of those vulnerabilities” (216). Lipstadt, as the larger argument of her book
indicates, is suggesting here that the prevailing currents of modern
intellectual life, specifically relativism and free-speech absolutism, along
with the perennial mythic allure of the irrational, have partially disarmed
the latter three of their ability to defend the former. (She consistently
confuses different varieties of relativism, and apparently doesn’t understand
the differences, but that’s another issue.)
In fact, both the quote and its context are nonsense. Occasionally we should
all accept the obvious: the number of intelligent people likely to be
convinced by holocaust revisionism is very small, and I doubt it will
ever grow much larger, even in the absence of the efforts of our resident
netwarriors. For good or ill, we live in an age of photographs and film
footage, and the vivid evidence they provide, along with voluminous
documentary corroboration to keep historians occupied, renders the holocaust
permanently immune from any successful revisionist debunking. There is a
pretty large Rubicon between revising errors in the historical record and
abolishing it altogether, and I do not claim any special clairvoyance in
predicting that no revisionist will ever drag us all across it.
Since facts are in this case secure, we can speculate on what the holocaust is
coming to mean in the hands of those who seek to protect memory, but don’t
have too much faith in truth, reason, and history. If the holocaust is ever
“debunked,” its debunking will not be on the basis of esoteric arguments about
the chemical properties of Zyklon-B, but by the irritation its growing misuse
provokes. At least two major irritants come to mind.
Holocaust Deformation I: the holocaust as a justification for censorship and
suppression of dissent. On this, I suspect, only a few diehards in this
newsgroup would disagree. Faurisson is ejected from his university position
and subjected to an apparently endless series of judicial persecutions, not to
mention a few beatings; Roques and Staeglich are deprived of their doctorates,
Germar Rudolf won’t ever be allowed to receive his; Irving is banned from a
half dozen otherwise democratic countries; books (like Zuendel’s house) are
literally burned and anti-revisionist laws in Europe ensure the suppression of
even more–all this makes it difficult not to notice that some weak-minded
defenders of memory consider “holocaust denial” a dangerous blaspheming of a
quasi-theological Truth, rather than a feeble assault against an easily
defended fact. If the holocaust becomes the “best argument” against civil
liberties, then those who prefer to keep theirs may soon have cause to dislike
the holocaust.
Holocaust Deformation II: the holocaust as the crown jewel of the “anti-racist
movement” or, to quote Lucy Dawidowicz, “the Jewish branch of oppression
studies” (Commentary, December 1990, p. 25). If the holocaust becomes a
pedagogical club to knock sexism, homophobia, eurocentrism, and ableism out
>from between our ears, what Ken McVay calls “unlearning” our prejudices, we
may come to dislike the club, not the “anti-racist educators” who wield it.
The holocaust is, indeed, often improperly relativized, that is, placed for
comparative purposes in the company of dissimilar events, but those who have
accommodated it to the “anti-racist movement” have already tacitly conceded
such false comparisons, so they are hardly in a position to object. And
deforming the holocaust into a weapon against “eurocentrism” is a sure-fire
method for recruiting revisionists, perhaps even more effective than Bernie
Farber’s unceasing efforts to irritate civil libertarians.
From [email protected] Wed Aug 14 12:11:53 PDT 1996
Article: 52066 of alt.discrimination
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.flame,alt.revisionism,soc.history,alt.discrimination
Subject: Re: Christina Jeffrey Attacks Top Anti-Racists
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 01:29:59 -0500
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 94
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References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
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> [email protected] (william c anderson) wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> It probably is stupid enough to merit firing, especially since the
> nazi and Klan “point of view” were thoroughly represented in the
> curriculum, by way of primary source material. Dr. Jeffrey did what
> she was hired to do, which was a hatchet job on the proposed
> curriculum; that, in itself, is enough to put her credentials as a
> disinterested scholar seriously in doubt–and one would think that
> not letting one’s political agenda interfere with one’s scholarship
> would be a valid requirement for the job.
Lucy Dawidowicz also did a hatchet job on the curriculum, if by “hatchet job”
you mean criticism of left-wing politics masquerading as history, treating
holocaust education as an empty vessel into which the left can then pour all
its discontents. A few excerpts from her article on the subject:
“During the ensuing controversy [over *Facing History and Ourselves*], in
which charges of right-wing conspiracy and anti-Semitic intent were hurled at
the Department of Education [for which Professor Jeffrey had been an external
reviewer], the editor of an educational newsletter invited me to write a piece
defending *Facing History*. I never did so, for my own reading of the
curriculum persuaded me that the Department of Education had ample reason to
turn down the grant application. Putatively a curriculum to teach the
Holocaust, *Facing History* was also a vehicle for instructing thirteen-year
olds in civil disobedience and indoctrinating them with propoganda for nuclear
disarmament.”
“The [various holocaust] curricula . . . resort to the concept of prejudice, a
generic term for hostile prejudgments of people and groups. Some curricula,
determined to teach the irrationality of prejudice, even invent the notion of
arbitrary prejudice, directed, for example, against left-handed or red-haired
people. A common classroom activity involves singling out children with
specific characteristics like blue eyes or long hair and then having the whole
class act out nasty forms of prejudiced behavior against them.”
[This kind of virtuous savagery has, of course, been a standard piece of
anti-racist pedagogy since the 1960s, pitting blue-eyed against brown-eyed
school kids in the most famous case. Its inventor, Jane Eliot, a former
third-grade teacher in Iowa, now hires herself out to various government
bodies in the U.S., so she can now torment adults out of their racism, for a
fee.]
“A few curricula offer exercises in outright political indoctrination in
currently fashionable causes. Thus, the New Jersey *Student Anthology*
ingeniously applies the history of the Holocaust to ‘the American civil-rights
movement and other social-action groups,’ and, going even further afield, to
‘the experiences of Maryknolls in El Salvador,’ all of which ‘raise old
questions about how we should respond to new oppression.’ Needless to say, the
curriculum does not spell out just how the history of the Holocaust applies to
these movements.”
“In the Pennsylvania/Grobman curriculum, a lesson entitled ‘Nazi Fascism and
the Modern Totalitarian State’ assigns students to ‘research the value of war
toys sold annually in the United States’ and to ‘discuss if this says anything
about our culture.’ [I suspect we can all guess the required answer.] Another
activity in the same lesson asks students to find out if there are local
facilities ‘which provide land for war games.’ These classroom activities
reflect the influence of the ‘peace-education’ movement which successfully
penetrated the school cirriculum in the 1980s.
The most blatant example of that influence appears in *Facing History*’s last
chapter, ‘Facing Today and the Future.’ Claiming that ‘continued adult denial
of the information regarding potential nuclear annihilation is harmful to our
students,’ *Facing History* finds a parallel between the Holocaust and a
‘potential nuclear holocaust’ in that ‘the explanations educators give for
perpetuating the silence about nuclear issues are the same as those given for
avoiding a confrontation with the Holocaust.’ At chapter’s end, the authors
disclose their activist agenda by offering to make available to teachers and
students a list of groups dealing with ‘issues of the nuclear world
today.'”(Excerpted from “How They Teach the Holocaust,” *Commentary*, December
1990.)
Regarding the Jeffrey incident itself, Professor Jeffrey was actually saying
(if memory serves) not that Nazi views should be included in a holocaust
curriculum, but that, if all perspectives of are of equal significance, an
idiocy which is a staple in today’s progressive, multiculturalist education,
then the views of Naziis and Klansmen logically ought to be included as well.
She was, in other words, engaged in a reductio ad absurdum, which in the
hysterically race-obsessed climate of contemporary politics ended up costing
her both her reputation and her new job as House historian. Shumer and Frank
accused her of having Nazi sympathies, Gingrich beat a cowardly retreat, as
you describe, and she’s now, thankfully, suing all three. Let’s hope she
wins.
The entire episode reveals the ease with which “progressives” now toss around
the term nazi. If there are a dozen nazi-sympathizing academics in the entire
United States I’d be amazed, but Shumer and Frank, ever vigilant against an
expected resurgence of Hitlerism, were quite willing to believe that Gingrich
had just nominated one.
From [email protected] Wed Aug 14 12:16:10 PDT 1996
Article: 57292 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.flame,alt.revisionism,soc.history,alt.discrimination
Subject: Re: Christina Jeffrey Attacks Top Anti-Racists
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 01:29:59 -0500
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 94
Message-ID: <01bb89bd.1424c940$abb75ccf@default>
References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: trt-on8-43.netcom.ca
X-NETCOM-Date: Wed Aug 14 3:52:41 AM EDT 1996
X-Newsreader: Microsoft Internet News 4.70.1085
Xref: nizkor.almanac.bc.ca alt.flame:21891 alt.revisionism:57292
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> [email protected] (william c anderson) wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> It probably is stupid enough to merit firing, especially since the
> nazi and Klan “point of view” were thoroughly represented in the
> curriculum, by way of primary source material. Dr. Jeffrey did what
> she was hired to do, which was a hatchet job on the proposed
> curriculum; that, in itself, is enough to put her credentials as a
> disinterested scholar seriously in doubt–and one would think that
> not letting one’s political agenda interfere with one’s scholarship
> would be a valid requirement for the job.
Lucy Dawidowicz also did a hatchet job on the curriculum, if by “hatchet job”
you mean criticism of left-wing politics masquerading as history, treating
holocaust education as an empty vessel into which the left can then pour all
its discontents. A few excerpts from her article on the subject:
“During the ensuing controversy [over *Facing History and Ourselves*], in
which charges of right-wing conspiracy and anti-Semitic intent were hurled at
the Department of Education [for which Professor Jeffrey had been an external
reviewer], the editor of an educational newsletter invited me to write a piece
defending *Facing History*. I never did so, for my own reading of the
curriculum persuaded me that the Department of Education had ample reason to
turn down the grant application. Putatively a curriculum to teach the
Holocaust, *Facing History* was also a vehicle for instructing thirteen-year
olds in civil disobedience and indoctrinating them with propoganda for nuclear
disarmament.”
“The [various holocaust] curricula . . . resort to the concept of prejudice, a
generic term for hostile prejudgments of people and groups. Some curricula,
determined to teach the irrationality of prejudice, even invent the notion of
arbitrary prejudice, directed, for example, against left-handed or red-haired
people. A common classroom activity involves singling out children with
specific characteristics like blue eyes or long hair and then having the whole
class act out nasty forms of prejudiced behavior against them.”
[This kind of virtuous savagery has, of course, been a standard piece of
anti-racist pedagogy since the 1960s, pitting blue-eyed against brown-eyed
school kids in the most famous case. Its inventor, Jane Eliot, a former
third-grade teacher in Iowa, now hires herself out to various government
bodies in the U.S., so she can now torment adults out of their racism, for a
fee.]
“A few curricula offer exercises in outright political indoctrination in
currently fashionable causes. Thus, the New Jersey *Student Anthology*
ingeniously applies the history of the Holocaust to ‘the American civil-rights
movement and other social-action groups,’ and, going even further afield, to
‘the experiences of Maryknolls in El Salvador,’ all of which ‘raise old
questions about how we should respond to new oppression.’ Needless to say, the
curriculum does not spell out just how the history of the Holocaust applies to
these movements.”
“In the Pennsylvania/Grobman curriculum, a lesson entitled ‘Nazi Fascism and
the Modern Totalitarian State’ assigns students to ‘research the value of war
toys sold annually in the United States’ and to ‘discuss if this says anything
about our culture.’ [I suspect we can all guess the required answer.] Another
activity in the same lesson asks students to find out if there are local
facilities ‘which provide land for war games.’ These classroom activities
reflect the influence of the ‘peace-education’ movement which successfully
penetrated the school cirriculum in the 1980s.
The most blatant example of that influence appears in *Facing History*’s last
chapter, ‘Facing Today and the Future.’ Claiming that ‘continued adult denial
of the information regarding potential nuclear annihilation is harmful to our
students,’ *Facing History* finds a parallel between the Holocaust and a
‘potential nuclear holocaust’ in that ‘the explanations educators give for
perpetuating the silence about nuclear issues are the same as those given for
avoiding a confrontation with the Holocaust.’ At chapter’s end, the authors
disclose their activist agenda by offering to make available to teachers and
students a list of groups dealing with ‘issues of the nuclear world
today.'”(Excerpted from “How They Teach the Holocaust,” *Commentary*, December
1990.)
Regarding the Jeffrey incident itself, Professor Jeffrey was actually saying
(if memory serves) not that Nazi views should be included in a holocaust
curriculum, but that, if all perspectives of are of equal significance, an
idiocy which is a staple in today’s progressive, multiculturalist education,
then the views of Naziis and Klansmen logically ought to be included as well.
She was, in other words, engaged in a reductio ad absurdum, which in the
hysterically race-obsessed climate of contemporary politics ended up costing
her both her reputation and her new job as House historian. Shumer and Frank
accused her of having Nazi sympathies, Gingrich beat a cowardly retreat, as
you describe, and she’s now, thankfully, suing all three. Let’s hope she
wins.
The entire episode reveals the ease with which “progressives” now toss around
the term nazi. If there are a dozen nazi-sympathizing academics in the entire
United States I’d be amazed, but Shumer and Frank, ever vigilant against an
expected resurgence of Hitlerism, were quite willing to believe that Gingrich
had just nominated one.
From [email protected] Wed Aug 14 13:39:03 PDT 1996
Article: 57314 of alt.revisionism
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news
From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.flame,alt.disasters.aviation,alt.revisionism,
alt.politics.white-power,can.politics
Subject: Re: Toronto, Canada, Funds Terrorist Organizations
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 09:15:35 -0500
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 65
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References: <014308Z[email protected]> <[email protected]>
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Of course Nizkor considers this deranged gang of thugs an “anti-racist
resource.”
We better all get used to them, however, because they are about to embark on
their own long march through the institutions, just like their more genteel
predecessors a quarter century ago. The government grants are the first
portent of our unpleasant future.
> Jim Vassallo <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> Let me tell you about the MF’s at ARA. You want to learn about racism? You
want to
> learn about hate? You want to learn about vulgarity? You want to learn how
to use the
> word fascist incorrectly? Go to their web page. In the ultimate ironic twist
the
> so-called “anti-racist’s” web page is more hitleresque than the maniacal
Fuhreur every
> was! This is a group of people who think anyone right of Fred and Karl are
fascists.
> These are the same people who think both Mike Harris and Jean Chretien are
> fascists, despite their obvious political difference, and, beyond that, they
actually
> believe it.
>
> These are the same people who ripped apart and torched Ernst Zundel’s house.
Did he
> deserve it? Probably. But these militant little fucks do not have the right
to take the
> law into their hands. They are terrorists, and they’re as bad as the
racists.
>
> Now, I should note I wrote them a very polite letter addressing my concerns
within
> their organization. I listed several points that I told them were
counter-productive to
> the fight against racism. When you spread hate to fight hate you get
nowhere. But not a
> word. No justification for what they do. No explanation. No “you bring up
some
> interesting points,” or “thank you for you crticism.” Nothing. So yes, I’m
now upset.
> So I urge you to take a look at this group, read what you can. Listen to
their words
> and their message. It’s quite clear that this group is one we can do
without. It’s
> quite clear that this is a group of half-brained Che Guevara wannabe’s who
are helping
> to precipitate much of the racism that exists in our society.
>
> Oh, BTW, I snipped it, but the article later tells of how they are know
getting $8,000
> in government funding. (Municipal) That’s tax dollars from those boys and
girls in TO.
> If my money was going to a group of lunatic left-wingers, especially when
considering
> that transfers have been cut to municipalities who have, in turn, had to cut
services,
> I’d be pissed. And I am.
>
> Jim
>
> P.S. There’s no point in fighting racism, if anti-racism brings out the
worst in us…
>
From [email protected] Wed Aug 14 21:43:12 PDT 1996
Article: 57403 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.flame,alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: Anti-Racists Mutilate Baby
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 04:14:13 -0500
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 20
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It’s a joke, I think. I suspect it goes something like this: if a series of
church fires, during a period in which church arsons are actually declining,
constitutes a racist conspiracy, despite the complete absence of any proof,
then a child’s loss of her ear in a hospital can, with pretty much the same
level of evidence, be ascribed to the machinations of anti-racists. In other
words, if anti-racists are allowed to attribute, say, the temperature on the
moon to the plots of racists, then a self-confessed racist like Vyshinsky can,
by the same illogic and satisfying the same burden of proof, blame
anti-racists for any instance of child mutilation he comes across in the
paper.
> [email protected] (william c anderson) wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> <spam trimmed in followups>
>
> Great story, Skippy. One thing, though–where does it mention
> “anti-racists”?
>
> Bill
>
From [email protected] Thu Aug 15 07:49:52 PDT 1996
Article: 57460 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: can.politics,alt.revisionism
Subject: 11-year old sets Canada’s Internet Policy
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 22:45:45 -0500
Organization: Netcom Canada
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The following is Ian Harvey’s “Connect” column in the Toronto *Sun* of 14
August:
“Monkeying with the Net”
It’s baaaaak.
This time it’s not sex on the Net, but hate literature and do-it-yourself
bomb-making which has politicians on both sides of the border flustered and
demanding controls on cyberspace.
Yesterday, the Canadian Human Rights Commission confirmed it will pursue a
complaint by the Toronto Mayor’s Task force on Race Relations against
hatemonger Ernst Zundel.
However Zundel’s infamous website is not in Toronto–or Canada–but in
California and is often “mirrored” (that is duplicated) in other locations
around the world, making jurisdiction almost impossible to establish. That
will be the first hurdle, admit officials.
Meanwhile, the attorney-general in British Columbia has been battling a
15-year old boy who “mirrored” another Toronto-based racist’s site when it was
threatened with legal action–not because he agreed with the message but
because he felt Net freedom was more important.
Last week it was Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International
Trade, who emerged from a G-7 meeting in Paris, France crying alarm over the
Net.
“My 11-year-old gets plugged into the computer and hits a few keys and all
kinds of things show up,” he said. “What scares the bejabers out of me is the
kind of fanaticism coming out of some of the white supremacist groups in
Canada on the Net and worldwide.”
More scary, he said, was the proliferation of bomb recipes on the Internet–a
position echoed by G-7 leaders and U.S. President Bill Clinton, whose
anti-terrorism package in the wake of the Atlanta bombings also includes Net
controls.
It’s a dichotomy. The right to bear arms [in the U.S] is sacrosanct but the
right to learn how to make things go boom–or to blow oneself up in the
process–is somehow decidedly un-American.
“Strange,” says David Jones of the Canadian Electronic Frontier, a group
dedicated to keeping the Internet free from censorship. “The same recipes are
available in the *Anarchist Cookbook* which is sold [in downtown Toronto] at
the World’s Biggest Bookstore.”
“Real terrorists don’t need the Net for this material,” notes John Thompson of
the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto centre for the study of terrorism. “As a
Net cruiser myself I’d rather leave it untouched. At least you can see what’s
being discussed rather than drive it underground.”
Still, what the most powerful nation in the world failed to do under the guise
of morality–stamping out smut on the Internet through the overreaching
Communications Decency Act–others are now prepared to try using terrorism and
hate as the rationale.
But what’s really at play here? Nature abhors a vacuum and government, it
appears, abhors anything it cannot control.
“It frightens me,” admits Axworthy, “there is a generation growing up with
this new tool, a powerful, powerful tool of communication. Perhaps one of the
most powerful we have ever known and we haven’t really looked at it yet to see
what its implications are.”
Jones shakes his head.
“Why doesn’t he talk to his colleague (Industry Minister) John Manley who has
been studying the Internet for two years or more?” he says. “The depth of
analysis here is very thin. I find it somewhat disconcerting that Canada’s
representative to the G-7 seems to be relying on his 11-year-old son as his
source of expertise on Internet technology.”
Still, the issue of censoring the Net seems to find new pivot points on a
weekly basis.
Two months ago it was iStar, one of Canada’s biggest Internet Service
Providers, which unilaterally pulled the plug on newsgroups such as
alt.sex.bondage on the grounds that they might be held criminally liable
should the police decide to prosecute.
Margo Langford of iStar said the move came after an RCMP officer dropped by
for a “chat” about what was available on the Net and suggested companies like
iStar could be in legal difficulty.
While no company in Canada has yet been charged, Langford was determined iStar
wasn’t going to be a test case.
“We couldn’t stand up in court and say we didn’t know because we select those
newsgroups to carry on our servers, we don’t carry all the 16, 000 plus
newsgroups, so we had to know,” she says.
Meanwhile, a coalition of 25 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have rallied
together as the Canadian Association of Internet Providers and are working to
produce guidelines about how far they should go in censoring questionable
material on the Net and where their legal liability lies.
The problem, of course, is the amorphous nature of the Net. While ISPs might
block newsgroups, blocking websites is almost impossible. Besides, says Jones,
censorship is a slippery slope.
“iStar started by blocking sexual material in newsgroups, but they’re not
doing anything about hate literature.”
From [email protected] Fri Aug 16 07:51:31 PDT 1996
Article: 57646 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: Christina Jeffrey Attacks Newt Gingrich,
who fired her for poor scholarship
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 08:10:21 -0500
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 32
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<[email protected]>
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> [email protected] (Rich Graves) wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> Her job was to review the curriculum, not to score cheap political points
> like the bullshit above. (And I think the man that fired her was Newt
> Gingrich says a lot. If she couldn’t meet his standards…) There are
> plenty of people out there, in the National Association of Scholars for
> example, who can disagree with the excesses of multicultural education
> without being quite so sophomoric and disrespectful.
>
> I’m not a big fan of Charles Bloom or Dinesh D’Souza (indeed, I could
> rattle off a litany of clear distortions and wild inaccuracies in the
> stories they tell about Stanford University), but they are scholars, and
> they would never stoop to Christina Jeffrey’s level.
>
A collection of documents on the Jeffrey’s case can be found at
www.operation-integrity.org/cjwhy. She clearly didn’t deserve the shabby
treatment she received, and Abraham Foxman now agrees. She also doesn’t
deserve your silly, obviously uninformed comments.
I’m not certain whether I’m the sophomoric bullshitter or Lucy Dawidowicz is,
but since neither of us believes anti-nuclear propaganda and anti-racist role
playing should be included in a holocaust curriculum, perhaps you could
provide a mature, nonbullshitting explanation for why they should.
Or perhaps the cheap political point was my objection to the claim that all
perspectives are of equal validity. You might care to enlighten us with your
own perspective on that subject.
From [email protected] Mon Aug 19 16:03:18 PDT 1996
Article: 58090 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: <Seufze> Wieder mit dem “Ausrottung” Wahnsinn.
Date: 18 Aug 1996 10:17:01 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 61
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References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
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Ehrlich may be right about English *exterminate* as a translation for
*ausrotten,* but for the wrong reason. The etymological meaning of the former,
now obsolete, is to expel from defined borders, but for most of the word’s
history it has indeed carried the sense of destruction of persons, races,
animals, (abstractly) ideas, etc. The more specific contemporary sense of
killing vermin is, however, actually quite recent and certainly wasn’t
prevalent before the latter part of this century. The OED doesn’t record any
appearances of the word in this modern sense, but today *exterminate* surely
has as its primary meaning “kill vermin, especially insects,” and the horrific
transferred sense, which we hear so clearly in an English translation of
Himmler’s speech, “kill people as though they were vermin.”
Such a meaning would be consistent with Nazi race theory, of which Himmler and
his SS audience were of course notable enthusiasts, but I’m not sure that even
a racist German of the 1940s would have heard it. Though Ausrottung/ausrotten
must, especially in the war-time context of the Posen speech, have “extirpate
by killing” as its most obvious meaning, did it carry the modern English
transferred sense of exterminate/extermination? Someone who knows the semantic
subtleties of German better than I do could perhaps tell us whether the
connotation “biological eradication of a people,” a mass killing of humans
analogous to an exterminator’s killing of insects, would have been available in
the 1940s, as it obviously is in Lauck’s English remarks today. Cassell’s
pre-war edition of their German-English dictionary reads, “Ausrott–en, v.a.
extirpate, exterminate, root out. –er, m. Extirpator. –ung, f. extirpation.
Comp. –ungs-krieg, m. war of extermination,” which is essentially the same
range of meanings provided in the 1991 Collins German-English dictionary. None,
as far as I can see, carries the connotations of contemporary English
*exterminate.*
I would, unless everything above is nonsense, propose “extirpate” or simply
“destroy” as a better English translation, though the standard “exterminate”
does, paradoxically, best capture the actual biological theory behind the
genocidal practice.
Ken McVay OBC <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected]
(Ehrlich606) wrote:
>
> >OK, then give me some ways in which you use the word, or have heard it
> >used, outside of the limits I just mentioned above. I honestly can’t
> >think of any that I have heard. You call the exterminator over to your
> >house. That’s it.
>
> As noted earlier, Gerhard Lauck said “exterminate them” when
> asked about non-white immigrants, and how the nsdap-ao would
> deal with them. It was his “third option.”
>
> The first two were “deport them,” and “put them in concentration camps.”
>
> When he said “exterminate them,” the meaning was crystal clear, and had
> absolutely nothing to do is insect exterminators.
>
> “Exterminate them.”
>
> —
> Nizkor Canada | https://nizkor.org
> ———————–| Remember John Hron
> |————————————–
> https://nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hron-john/ Broken link
>
From [email protected] Mon Aug 19 16:03:19 PDT 1996
Article: 58195 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Beaulieu’s Translation of Himmler’s Posen Speech
Date: 19 Aug 1996 01:59:23 GMT
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Jean-Francois Beaulieu wrote (in a post I can’t rediscover):
[major cuts]
Just to double check myself I am using my German language dictionary
“Das Deutsche Wort” by Richard Pekrun, Georg Dollheimer Verlag,
Leipzig, 1934 (writing project completed Jan 1, 1933 per the author) I
will primarily be drawing my multiple definitions from this source,
for obvious reasons. I will confess, that I used my Oxford
German-English Dictionary a bit as well.
Repeating what I _hope_ is an accurate German transcription from
Jeremy (again capitalization was my doing):
> Ich meine jetzt die Judenevakuierung, die AUSROTTUNG* des juedischen
> VOLKES*. Es gehoert zu den Dingen, die man leicht ausspricht. – “Das
> juedische VOLK* wird AUSGEROTTET*”, sagt ein jeder Parteigenosse,
> “ganz klar, steht in unserem Programm, AUSSCHALTUNG* der Juden,
> AUSROTTUNG*, machen wir.”
I refer now to the evacuation of the Jews, the ROOTING OUT (1) of
the Jewish PEOPLE (2) as an ETHNIC NATION. This is one of those
things that is easily said: “the Jewish NATION is being ROOTED
OUT*,” says every Party comrade, “it’s quite clear (3), it’s in our
program, SHUTTING the Jews DOWN and OUT (4), ROOTING them OUT,
that’s what we’re doing.”
This is a far cry from THEIR translation don’t you think? Consider
these definitions:
(1) ausrotten = ausreuten (mit der Wurzel, ganz tilgen oder
herausstechen), vertilgen (mit der Wurzel beseitigen,
wegschaffen oder vernichten) [chiefly agricultural and
figurative] (-ung = -tion)
(out-rooten) = root out, remove root and all, dig out, uproot and
discard, weed out, eliminate, exterminate
(2) Volk (n.) = Gesamtheit Stamm – und sprachverwandter Menschen
= people, nation, tribe, ethnic population (culturally
and or racially distinguishable population)
(3) ganz klar = quite clear; completely clear; understood, crystal
clear; of course. (expression)
(4) ausschalten = ausschliessen (durch schliessen loesen, befreien:
durch schliessen fernhalten), unterbrechen, abstellen
(out-switch) = cut off, shut out, switch off, turn out, shut down,
dispose of, lock out, throw out, correct, exclude,
interupt.
As you can see the definitions used in THEIR translation were neither
the most appropriate for the piece, nor did they reflect the most
comon interpretation of the day. They are clearly little more than the
most negative definitions imaginable. But, did anyone really ever
think that such a translation would be objective. Consider the source.
Now you might begin to understand why revisionists are having such a
field day with the so-called proof that the Holocaust promotion lobby
is providing for their spiel! They seem to be totally unable to shoot
straight. Now they couldn’t be trying to hide something could they?
My comments:
I’m not sure whether I’m the first to notice, but there may be an overlooked
term in this discussion, namely the seemingly uncomplicated “Programm.”
Revisionists might make a plausible case if they could demonstrate that in the
Nazi language of the 1940s *Programm* meant Hitler and Drexler’s 1920 party
programme, supposedly unalterable, of which articles 4 through 8 in effect call
for the uprooting (rather than the physical extermination) of Jews from the
German Reich, eg. the deportation of post-1914 immigrants and the destruction
of Jewish rights as German citizens. If in English I speak of the Liberal
programme or the Republican platform, I mean some particular text or set of
texts in which the objectives of the party are specified. Would a Nazi in the
1940s use the term *Programm* in this sense? Himmler’s reference to what
“every party member says” makes NSDAP usage in this context potentially
significant, especially since an SS audience could reasonably be expected to
know their party’s official programme, and “every party member” could not have
known of a secret plan of extermination.
Imagine, as a philologist studying an archaic text might, that *Ausrottung* is
hapax and we don’t have the slightest notion of its meaning. Whatever
*Ausrottung* means here, we do know it “steht in unserem Programm,” with the
latter thus providing a parenthetical gloss on the former. In short, instead of
interpreting “Judenevakuierung” with “Ausrottung”–or, as M. Beaulieu does, the
latter with the former–both are instead interpreted by the normal Nazi sense
of *Programm.* And of course the party programme didn’t call for mass murder.
I think this is the only plausible way for revisionists to turn *ausrotten*
into “abstract destruction by means of concrete evacuation,” which their
argument requires. *Ausrotten* did have, all denials to the contrary, a
principally physical sense in the period in question, so for the revisionist
case to succeed *Ausrottung,* despite the literal, flesh-and-blood murder its
context specifies, must be somehow transformed into a metaphor for a more
abstract socio-political destruction or rooting out; that is, the principal
meaning “physical destruction” must be plausibly interpreted as a logical
metaphorical extension of official Nazi anti-semitic policy, with the killing
Himmler bluntly speaks of (in the rest of his speech) an expected effect of the
policy rather than its primary objective.
Or did *Programm* simply (and less specifically) denote “our current agenda,
what we’re doing now”? Should that be the case–as the standard interpretation
(I think) demands–then that usage would appear elsewhere. Someone familiar
with innocuous Nazi-era documents might be able to demonstrate that the term
was normally used in this generalized sense, eg. “our current programme for
constructing music halls” rather than “the article in our party programme that
calls for land reform.” Hence the obvious question, at least to my untutored
eye: was the Wannsee Protocol ever called a programme?
The Nazi programme might, incidentally, be a useful addition to Nizkor’s FTP
archive. I had to rely on a translation, and hence I’m not even entirely
certain if *Programm* appears in (what the translation calls) “the Programme of
the German Worker s Party.” Since the term covers the same range of meanings in
German as it does in English, I have assumed it does, and I do know that Hitler
used the term in this sense at least on the occasion of its first public
proclamation..
I must admit I’m breaking a self-imposed policy of never commenting on the
principal subject of this conference, in this case turning the incontrovertible
fact of mass murder into a matter of textual analysis, but Himmler’s apparent
reference to a party programme of extermination, a programme which every party
member is assumed to be familiar with, seems odd to me; it’s obviously
inconsistent with secrecy. On the other hand, not even a magician could extract
mass-murder from the Posen speech, so there must be some contextual explanation
I can’t see. Perhaps Himmler means complete physical destruction and refers to
the party programme in order to cast biological extermination as a logical
evolution from an earlier, much different party position.
As with my previous post on this topic, I candidly leave open the real
possibility of having written irrelevant nonsense.
From [email protected] Mon Aug 19 21:09:54 PDT 1996
Article: 58314 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.politics.white-power,can.politics
Subject: Re: Toronto, Canada, Funds Terrorist Organizations
Date: 20 Aug 1996 01:30:34 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 43
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References: <014308Z[email protected]> <[email protected]>
<[email protected]> <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> [Referring to the Youth Against Hate conference]
>
> No, sorry, they’ve got leftists, rightists, and moderates. Opposition to
> Nazism is hardly a controversial proposition. Some of the organizers of
> the conference, which I am told went quite well, strike me as
> disrespectful morons incapable of carrying on a civilized conversation,
> but I do not find that their malady is peculiar to the left.
>
It depends on how you define your terms. No-one on the “respectable right” in
this country would even consider supporting a group that slit a man’s throat at
a subway station, that throws human excrement at its opponents, that circulates
instructions for Molotov cocktails, that routinely disrupts political meetings
with violence, and that, as you yourself concede, may (at the very least) have
incited the burning of Zuendel’s house.
It would be unthinkable for the Tories or the Reform Party to support, say, the
Heritage Front, and in fact the latter have quite properly ejected every member
who had any ties to it, but the “respectable left” on Toronto City Council,
vowing (as “respectable” leftist Howard Moscoe put it) to oppose violence with
violence, overwhelmingly voted to hand out taxpayer dollars to this fanatical
gang of fascistic thugs. Nizkor even calls them an “anti-racist resource.”
No-one on the respectable right has any reflexive sympathy whatever for
political violence and fanaticism, but the respectable left plainly does.
Imagine, to put it in American terms, Bill Buckley supporting funding for nazi
skinheads, while voicing some mild concern about their tactics, and you’d have
a pretty accurate equivalent of what the City Council here just did.
Here’s my confident prediction: you can’t, your claim above notwithstanding,
name a single “rightest” (ie. conservative) who participated along with ARA in
this bizarre “anti-racist” PC-fest. But I could name quite a few respectable
leftists, B’nai Brith director Karen Mock most notably, who support ARA and
were willing to participate in a conference at which it was a participant.
To say that “some” of this gang are merely “disrespectful morons” is to pay
them an enormous compliment; they are violent fanatics, and no respectable
person should express any hint of sympathy for them.
From [email protected] Tue Aug 20 07:25:24 PDT 1996
Article: 58385 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 01: Sadism as Virtue
Date: 20 Aug 1996 09:37:33 GMT
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Anti-Racist Sensitivity Training
“Let’s have the men stand here and the women over there,” said Edwin J.
Nicholas, a black male of late middle age who is touted by some university
administrators as one of the best sensitivity trainers in the business. “I want
you to stand and tell everyone where you earned your B.A.”
Some of the 3000 or so academics at the University of Cincinnati may have felt
a little silly but they all dutifully complied with the order. This was a
mandatory workshop, after all. Nicholas then told all those who had received
their degrees from any but the most prestigious private schools to sit. After
this, he told everyone to sit except those with Master’s degrees, then those
with Ph.Ds. Finally, only one person was left standing, an attractive blonde
who had earned three degrees from three prestigious private schools.
“Here we have a member of the privileged white elite,” Nicholas told the
audience, as people craned their necks to stare at the humiliated woman, who
had only been at the school for three weeks. She thought her ordeal was over,
but after the lunch break, the sensitivity trainer returned to the subject. “I
want to hold a beauty contest,” he said, but then shook his head. “No, I don’t
think we have to hold a beauty contest. We all know who the most beautiful
woman in the room is, or who we’re supposed to think it is. It’s the woman with
the three private degrees and the blonde hair and the blue eyes. Let’s have her
stand up so everybody can look at her. Look at the pearls she’s wearing, her
clothes, her shoes. This is our ideal of beauty and success. Let’s have her
stand up so everybody can look at her.”
A silence fell over the group and heads craned toward the woman, who remained
in her seat shaking and sobbing.
. . .
“Without these courses, how can we prepare people to live in a multicultural
society? argues [sensitivity consultant] Ted Kochmann. “If they were voluntary,
who would attend?” Those who avoid these programs, Kochmann says, are abusing
their freedom.
Like his colleagues in this business, Kochmann has a whole set of racial
theories. He says that “Anglos” are “textual” people whereas blacks are not.
The low-key style of resolving conflict is also “Anglo.” As one critic of
sensitivity training has said, “It is no exaggeration to say that there has not
been another movement since the heydey of Social Darwinism that has been so
eager to link certain intellectual habits with certain races unless it is
National Socialism.”
>From *Surviving the PC University,* ed. Peter Collier and David Horowitz,
(Studio City: Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 1993), 80-82
From [email protected] Tue Aug 20 07:25:25 PDT 1996
Article: 58389 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 03: Sensitivity Police
Date: 20 Aug 1996 09:57:14 GMT
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Sensitivity Police
SNITCHCRAFT IN MINNESOTA: At the University of Minnesota, the Affirmative
Action and Equal Opportunity department has designed a new method for
monitoring appropriate levels of sensitivity in their classrooms. Their new
“Classroom Climate Advisors” will be on call for students who feel that a
“classroom discussion about race or gender was disrespectful or demeaning” . .
. It is also on call for teachers who feel that “some students are having
trouble distinguishing between theories they have to teach and their personal
beliefs about controversial matters in the area of diversity.” Brought on by a
classroom discussion about Columbus that was deemed too crude, the “Climate
Advisors” program was meant to help students “design a strategy” to deal with
offenders against sensitivity. If “Climate Advisors” don’t do the job,
architects of the plan point out, more “formal” options can be pursued.
*Heterodoxy*, November 1993
From [email protected] Tue Aug 20 07:25:26 PDT 1996
Article: 58398 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 02: The Lighter Side of PC
Date: 20 Aug 1996 09:47:12 GMT
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The Anti-Racist Canon: The Lighter Side of PC
But first, an introductory tour. The New Canon makes its presence felt
immediately, in freshman orientation. At my college [Williams] this mandatory
ritual consists of, among other things, a “Feel-What-It-Is-Like-To-Be-Gay”
meeting. Our Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Union representatives tour the freshman
dorms and require *each* student to declare, “Hello, my name is (freshman
inserts his/her name here) and I’m gay!”
Next comes the National Community Building Workshop (NCBW), a day-long program
in which each freshman is required to join a group and compose a list of
insults he or she does not want to be called, as in “I’m a woman–don’t call me
a chick!” or “I’m Hispanic–don’t call me a Spic!” At my NCBW I humbly offered
“conservative” as my preferred group, and for my insult, “Don’t call me a
free-market apologist!” There was considerable uncertainty about whether this
counted.
One student tried unsuccessfully to pretend he was not in his room when it came
time to round us all up for NCBW. The rest of us nervously huddled in the
hallway while our advisers banged on his door. “We all know you’re in there!”
Then, at a higher pitch: “You’re not going to get out of this! We’re just going
to wait and wait until you come out!” When this, too, failed to entice, the
tone shifted again: C’mon, . . . National Community Building is FUN!” You know,
that very special kind of fun which requires banging down your door to escort
you to it.
Later that week, at a session on “Race, Gender, Identity and Community,” all
the students in my freshman class were herded into a darkened auditorium. There
we were asked to keep our eyes closed while various slurs were hurled at us
>from all directions. This marked the conclusion of “diversity sensitivity,” and
rounded out our freshman orientation.
Wendy Shallit, “A Ladies Room of One s Own,” *Commentary,* August 1995
From [email protected] Wed Aug 21 07:07:05 PDT 1996
Article: 58633 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,can.politics
Subject: Re: Anti-Racist Education 01: Sadism as Virtue
Date: 21 Aug 1996 07:02:49 GMT
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<[email protected]>
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If I have a choice between an account by Horowitz and a denial by a
sensitivity consultant, I’ll trust the former, absent evidence to the
contrary.
Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]> writes:
> >Anti-Racist Sensitivity Training
> >
> >“Let’s have the men stand here and the women over there,” said Edwin
J.
> >Nicholas, a black male of late middle age who is touted by some
university
> >administrators as one of the best sensitivity trainers in the
business.
>
> …and who denies the fantastic tales told about him by Collier &
> Horowitz. Please cite a reliable primary source next time.
>
> -rich
>
From [email protected] Wed Aug 21 07:07:06 PDT 1996
Article: 58634 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 03: Mao’s Disciples
Date: 21 Aug 1996 06:19:38 GMT
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Anti-Racist Thought Reform: Mao’s Disciples
Ever willing to try harder, [University of Washington President William]
Gerbeding agreed to apologize [for a racial joke], now for the third time,
at a public forum to be held in the aptly named Red Square in the center of
the campus. He also consented to participate in a seminar especially
designed for administrators found to be inadequately endowed with “ethnic
and racial sensitivity.” But if Gerberding thought that confessing to
racism and agreeing to reeducation had opened the way to absolution, he was
soon to be disillusioned. The 200 students (out of 34,000) who assembled to
pass judgement on him were in no mood to be merciful.
Gerberding recited nearly all the banalities his tormentors wanted to hear.
He announced that the university’s true purpose is “the celebration of
diversity,” which he defined (just as his audience does) entirely in racial
terms: “Diversity includes all of you folks out in front of me, white,
black, all in betweens.” Like them, he took it as self-evident truth that
mind is a function of physiology, that the apparent fruits of intellect
actually originate in genetics, and that all people belonging to a
particular group either are, or should be, of one mind and will. Therefore,
if you want intellectual diversity, you need a racial recipe that mixes
“white, black and all in betweens” in exact proportion to their presence in
the general population.
Meanwhile, the assembled embodiments and celebrants of diversity were
alternately heckling and chanting, in metronomically monotonous unison, the
inspiring verses: “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Racism has got to go!” Their
collective tooth-baring, their will to offend, to bully, to humiliate,
comported oddly with the image of victim they so passionately claimed for
themselves. Furthermore, however pleased the demonstrators might have been
by Gerberding’s instinctive compliance with the psychology of abdication,
they wanted something tangible. As one smarmy, self-righteous lout at the
front of the mob put it: “Since you can publicly admit your insensitivities
and shortcomings toward people of color and racial issues, we expect your
support of the Ethnic Studies Requirement as a sign of your new awareness
of our needs.” Campus bullies, like Middle Eastern terrorists, hold to the
conviction that no bad deed of theirs should go unrewarded.
(From Edward Alexander, “Race Fever,” *Commentary*, November 1990.)
From [email protected] Wed Aug 21 07:07:07 PDT 1996
Article: 58657 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 05: Semiotics of the Mac
Date: 21 Aug 1996 06:55:37 GMT
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Anti-Racist Educators Uncover the Mac’s Secret Agenda
Built into computer interfaces are also a series of semiotic messages
that support this alignment along the axes of class, race, and gender.
The white pointer hand, for example, ubiquitous in the Macintosh
primary interface, is one such gesture, as are the menu items of the
Appleshare server tray and hand, calculator, the moving van (for the
font DA mover), the suitcase, and the desk calendar. Other
images–those included in the HyperCard interface commercial clip art
collections, and in the Apple systems documentation–include a
preponderance of white people and icons of middle- and upper-class
white culture and professional, office-oriented computer use. These
images signal–to users of color, to users who come from a non-English
language background, to users from low socio-economic backgrounds–that
entering the virtual world of interfaces also means, at least in part
at some level, entering a world constituted around the lives and values
of white, male, middle- and upper-class professionals. Users of color,
users from non-English language background, users from a low
socio-economic class who view this map of reality, submit–if only
partially and momentarily–to an interested version of reality
represented in terms of both language and image.
(Richard and Cynthia Selfe writing in the *Journal of the Conference on
College Composition and Communication*, December 1994; cited in
*American Spectator* February 1995.)
From [email protected] Wed Aug 21 11:38:46 PDT 1996
Article: 58733 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 04: the Jewish Question
Date: 21 Aug 1996 06:43:07 GMT
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Anti-Racist Educators Deliberate the Jewish Question
For a year, a faculty-student Task Force on Ethnicity had been
assessing a proposal that would compel every student at the University
of Washington to devote one-quarter of the Humanities and Social
Science credits required for a bachelor’s degree to Ethnic Studies
courses. The ideal (if not the actual) purpose of such courses would be
to “sensitize” the American majority toward this country’s minority
groups and to build a curricular bulwark against the omnipresent evil
of racism . . .
Whether it was by accident or by the intervention of invisible powers,
I entered the spectators’ gallery of the crucial meeting just as the
committee, which had already been in session for an hour, began to
consider the Jewish question. Other “white”groups, such as Italian and
Irish Americans, had, I learned, been denied most-favored-minority
status at an earlier stage of the committee’s deliberations. Now it was
the turn of the Jews to be measured. Are the Jews a minority in this
country? Is anti-Semitism a form of racism? Hardly abstruse questions,
one might suppose; and yet they aroused intense debate. The students,
representing African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and
Chicano/Latino Americans–otherwise known as the “major”
minorities–unanimously opposed the inclusion of Jews and anti-Semitism
in the Ethnic Studies curriculum. They seemed genuinely bemused that
people not in their political party should have the temerity to invade
their turf and poach on the (very considerable) spoils of their
anticipated victory. Their recommended solution–eventually approved by
the committee–was to substitute the term “people of color” for the
term “minorities” wherever it appeared in the committee documents.
The prize for semantic juggling was won not by the students, however,
but by the two professorial representatives of the Ethnic Studies
program itself, both of whom have also presided over Afro-American
Studies. Professor Joseph Scott could not assent to the inclusion of
Jews and anti-Semitism in the proposed scheme of courses unless other
“Semitic” peoples, most particularly the Palestinian Arabs, were also
included. Professor Johnella Butler also opposed inclusion of Jews
because Jewish persons are not necessarily of “Semitic descent” and
“anti-Semitism is not institutionalized in the country.”
These remarks brought a raising of the collective eyebrow and even some
tittering. For it appeared that of the 37, 000 who teach and learn at
the University of Washington, the only ones ignorant of the fact that
anti-Semites hate Jews and not “Semites” were the professors of Ethnic
Studies, the officially designated historians and exorcists of racism.
Some uncharitable observers, to be sure, suspected that if you touched
the delicate, exotic fruit of this professorial ignorance, it would
quickly lose its bloom and turn out to be not so much ignorance of the
history as guilt of the sin of racism.
(From Edward Alexander, “Race Fever,” *Commentary*, November 1990.)
From [email protected] Wed Aug 21 17:13:07 PDT 1996
Article: 58805 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: Re: Anti-Racist Education 05: Semiotics of the Mac
Date: 21 Aug 1996 18:10:35 GMT
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Loren Petrich <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
>
> Are you *sure* this isn’t some sort of satire? Or even a hoax
> like Sokal’s hoax in _Social Text_?
Pretty sure. Sokal was able to have his hoax published because, sadly, this
type of writing isn’t that unusual among “cutting edge” leftist academics.
From [email protected] Thu Aug 22 06:45:11 PDT 1996
Article: 58886 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 06: A New American Export
Date: 22 Aug 1996 05:28:43 GMT
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Anti-Racist Tolerance: America Spreads its Sickness Abroad
The name of Jeanne Cannizzo came up again Saturday, when the Society for
Academic Freedom and Scholarship held a conference at the University of
Toronto. Jeanne Cannizzo is a spectre haunting the Canadian academic world.
Four years ago she became the first major victim of the new forms of
censorship that have blighted university teaching in the 1990s. In any
discussion of political pressures on universities, it’s impossible to avoid
thinking about her.
She was teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto in 1989-90 when
she organized Into the Heart of Africa, a Royal Ontario Museum exhibition
about African art and Canadian missionaries. A few black leaders called her
exhibition racist, which it clearly wasn’t. They denounced it and picketed
it for months. They also destroyed Cannizzo’s career in Canada. Enemies of
her exhibition wrote racist graffiti on her house, invaded her classroom
[actually, chased her out of it], shouted her down, and threatened physical
harm. She withdrew from teaching and fell silent. “Cannizzo and her husband
have left Canada and I fear will not return,” [historian] Jack Granatstein
of York University said during his speech to the conference. (They now live
in Edinburgh.) “They are the equivalent of the exiles who fled the
witch-hunting McCarthyites of the 1950s United States.”
A horrible thought, but justified. Zealots anxious to impose harassment
codes and other forms of thought control have eroded academic freedom
across the continent and put teachers on the defensive. In 1987 American
professors formed a protective alliance, the National Association of
Scholars, which has 3,200 members and publishes a journal, Academic
Questions. In the current issue an article says that the left-wing
political agenda in the universities consists of no more than “pale sparks
thrown up as scholarship’s flaming brand sinks, hissing, into an
all-engulfing sea of mediocrity.”
In 1990 Canadian professors set up a similar group, the Society for
Academic Freedom and Scholarship, which has 300 members. On Saturday a few
dozen of them exchanged horror stories, gossiped about shifting
allegiances, and spoke of future struggles. Over lunch someone said, “I
thought G. was on our side,” referring to a prominent American academic.
“He *was* on our side,” someone else said, “but he had to change his views
to get the chairmanship of his department.” Newspapers run stories about
resistance to the new repression, but fresh waves of intolerance continue
to sweep across academe. “It’s coming to the hard sciences,” someone
predicted. “They think they’re immune. They’re going to be blindsided. It
will question their projects, erode their functions.”
There was talk of strategy and recruitment. The members know their
organization is thought to be conservative, and they wondered aloud why
it’s so hard to attract liberals and leftists. After all, left-wing
teachers suffer from the new censorship as much as anyone. Those familiar
with Jeanne Cannizzo’s work knew that she was on the political left, and
the catalogue of Into the Heart of Africa reflected her opinions.
>From Robert Fulford, “The Ongoing Assault on Academic Freedom,” *Globe and
Mail* 6 May 1994
Anti-Racists Dump Tinkerbell
This Christmas season, says the *Daily Telegraph*, children in Holy Trinity
Primary School in Halstead, Essex, will sit on Mother Christmas’s knee
(“It’s about time Mother Christmas got a word in,” said Margaret Ruggi,
infant co-ordinator), Tinkerbell will be dropped from a production of Peter
Pan in Islington (to avoid references to fairies), Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs will appear in Hull (although some officials thought it
irresponsible “to put on a show with a name which could cause offence to
people who suffer a disease which restricts their growth,” according to
councillor Andrew Meadowcroft) and New College, Oxford, has dropped its
usual Christmas tree and changed “Happy Christmas” to “Happy Winter.”
From [email protected] Thu Aug 22 06:45:11 PDT 1996
Article: 58887 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 08: Frito Bandito Syndrome
Date: 22 Aug 1996 05:59:12 GMT
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Stranger than Fiction: Anti-Racist Sociology
The somewhat ringing tone of the [Multicultural] Task Force’s
recommendations was derived from an even brassier set of background
resource papers, one prepared by a professor of African Studies at the City
College of New York [Leonard Jeffries, of “ice people ” fame], one by a
professor of the Centro de Estudious Puertorriquenos of Hunter College, one
by a representative of New York’s Native American (ie. American Indian)
community, and one by an associate in the Department of Educational
Foundations at Hunter College claiming to speak for Asians. Hardly
surprisingly, each of these resource people concluded that while New York
had already made a commendable effort to cover minority experiences in its
social-studies curricula, the current situation was unacceptable. At its
best, they found, existing text material was multicultural in only a formal
sense. In reality, the minority groups were still, they said, the objects
of hurtful stereotyping, the kind of stereotyping that led inexorably to a
series of “syndromes”: for blacks, the “Tarzan Syndrome” or “Amos and Andy
Syndrome”; for Asians, the “Charlie Chan Syndrome”; for Hispanics (your
eyes do not deceive), the “Frito Bandito Syndrome”; and for Native
Americans, the “Lone Ranger and Tonto Syndrome.”
>From Midge Decter, +E Pluribus Nihil,+ *Commentary+, September 1991
From [email protected] Thu Aug 22 11:43:05 PDT 1996
Article: 58922 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 07: Better Off Dead
Date: 22 Aug 1996 05:40:04 GMT
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Dead Father–Good Riddance, says Anti-Racist Educator
Are these [racial sensitivy] programs effective? Testimonials abound, but
there is little systematic evidence that the policies produce long-term
benefits.On the contrary, a recent UC Irvine survey of Orange County firms
that tried diversity training found that it *increased* conflicts among
employees. The field is rife with stories of “blow-ups”–as occurred when
several senior executives at a California utility stormed out of a
simulation exercise after being told to sit on the floor as members of an
“oppressed group.” There can also be incredible abuses. *Campus* magazine
recently reported that a University of Cincinnati trainer persistently
badgered a white male graduate student, impugning the student’s family and
stating that the recent death of his father “removed one more racist
influence” from his life.
>From Frederick Lynch, “Workforce Diversity,” *National Review*, 21 February
1994
From [email protected] Thu Aug 22 16:19:13 PDT 1996
Article: 66351 of can.politics
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 07: Better Off Dead
Date: 22 Aug 1996 05:40:04 GMT
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Dead Father–Good Riddance, says Anti-Racist Educator
Are these [racial sensitivy] programs effective? Testimonials abound, but
there is little systematic evidence that the policies produce long-term
benefits.On the contrary, a recent UC Irvine survey of Orange County firms
that tried diversity training found that it *increased* conflicts among
employees. The field is rife with stories of “blow-ups”–as occurred when
several senior executives at a California utility stormed out of a
simulation exercise after being told to sit on the floor as members of an
“oppressed group.” There can also be incredible abuses. *Campus* magazine
recently reported that a University of Cincinnati trainer persistently
badgered a white male graduate student, impugning the student’s family and
stating that the recent death of his father “removed one more racist
influence” from his life.
>From Frederick Lynch, “Workforce Diversity,” *National Review*, 21 February
1994
From [email protected] Fri Aug 23 06:27:14 PDT 1996
Article: 59036 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 10: Reducing Spirit to Matter
Date: 23 Aug 1996 05:05:01 GMT
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Reducing Spirit to Matter
The collapse of the Marxist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, the
embarrassing fact that the first truly working-class revolution in history
has been made (by Solidarity) against a *socialist* government, may have
dulled the luster of economic determinism; but they have not extinguished
the deep-seated modern desire to reduce human spirit and culture to matter.
“Drive out nature with a fork,” says Horace, “nevertheless she will
continually return.” With a little job retraining, yesterday’s economic
determinist becomes today’s race (and “gender”) determinist, seeking in
physical origin and genes the key to mind, and excoriating colleagues who,
in the already immortal words of Harvard’s Derrick Bell, “look black and
think white.”
It has become a sorry irony that “celebration of diversity” has become the
slogan of self-proclaimed reformers of an institution whose origin and
ideal meaning suggest the many parts have been “turned into
one”–*universum*. If, as we still have good reason to believe, humanity is
an infinitely varied repetition, then people of many groups, of diverse
backgrounds, of a thousand dispositions can, if they practice tolerance and
self-restraint, communicate with each other through the vehicle of mind.
The university, in its ideal character, is predicated on the assumption
that values which originate in the self or the group or the nation can be
extradited and made available to those who share with the originators
nothing except human status. It aspires to Matthew Arnold’s ideal of
disinterestedness, the free play of the mind, unhampered by sect or party,
over “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”
That our universities have failed to achieve the perfection of this nobly
inclusive ideal, no one should deny. But will turning it on its head in
favor of the superstition that members of particular groups have one mind
and live solely for a political purpose really extend cultural choice and
individual rights? Do we really want our universities to become training
schools for prigs and Pecksniffs who pride themselves on the ability to
spot racism at a distance of twenty miles, who choose their professional
“role models” according to race, and who scan their reading lists for
proportional representation by race, gender, and class, but who can no
longer fathom the meaning and implication of Wordsworth’s definition of the
poet as “a man speaking to men”?
>From Edward Alexander, “Race Fever,” *Commentary*, November 1990
From [email protected] Fri Aug 23 06:27:15 PDT 1996
Article: 59037 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 09: Pedagogy of Porn
Date: 23 Aug 1996 04:54:50 GMT
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Anti-Racist Educators Discover a New Weapon in the Struggle
But [Cornell student] Tim Gregory needed the job [as a resident advisor in
an undergraduate dormitory], and so he generally kept his mouth shut [about
the excesses of the required anti-racist sensitivity training]. Or tried
to, anyway. “Once during the Issues of Oppression workshop,” writes Mr.
Bernstein [in *Dictatorship of Virtue*], “a fellow trainee asserted that
white men have life handed to them on a silver platter.” This proved to be
to much for Tim, and he imprudently responded to it. He did not mean to
downplay the disadvantages of people of color, he said, but he came from a
rural part of Pennsylvania where many white people lived lives of dire
poverty, so it did not seem to him that all whites automatically have lives
of great privilege and ease.
For this infraction of the rules, he was branded a racist by the other RAs,
and later the same day he was required to explain his “offensive comment.”
At this session, moreover, the officials in charge of the New York City St
Patrick s Parade were denounced as “just a bunch of drunken Irish” for
excluding gays from the parade. Tim Gregory is, of course, of Irish
descent.
It got worse. “On the first Sunday of the [sensitivity] training program
Tim told his group leaders he wanted to go to Mass,” Mr Bernstein writes.
But that wasn t allowed. This is now Tim Gregory speaking: “That day was
gay day, and they brought in members of ZAP, which is the gay, lesbian, and
bisexual group . . . they showed us explicit sex movies, first one of
lesbians and then one about gay men. The gay movie was really triple X.”
Thus, instead of going to church, Tim Gregory was compelled, as he said,
“to watch a movie that is against my religion.”
>From Hilton Kramer, “How Democracy Perishes,” *National Review*, 19
December 1994; rev. of Richard Bernstein, *Dictatorship of Virtue*
From [email protected] Fri Aug 23 06:27:16 PDT 1996
Article: 59038 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 11: Ethnic Art
Date: 23 Aug 1996 05:18:41 GMT
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Early Anti-Racist Art Criticism: It’s a German Thing, You Wouldn’t
Understand
At all democratic gatherings today one hears proclaimed the doctrine that
art and science are international. The bereft of spirit, whose alienation
>from life and raceless values brought into disrepute the nineteenth
century, can naturally not now be enlightened concerning the limitations of
such cosmopolitanism. But a younger generation which is beginning to turn
its back on this hothouse creation will discover, after an unbiased study
of the variety of the world, that “art for art’s sake” does not exist,
never has existed, and never will exist. Art is always the creation of a
specific blood and the form-linked nature of an art will be only truly
comprehensible to those of the same blood. To others it will say little or
nothing at all. Science . . . is also a product of the blood.
Alfred Rosenberg, *The Myth of the Twentieth Century* (1931; Newport Beach,
CA: Noontide Press, 1982), 69
Here the influence of the Jews was paramount . . . [Under their influence]
Art was [wrongly] said to be “an international experience,” and thus all
comprehension of its intimate association with a people was stifled: it was
said that there was no such thing as the art of a people or, better, of a
race: there was only the art of a certain period. Thus it was not the
Greeks who created the art of Greece, Romans the Art of Rome, etc–a
particular period had found in each art its expression.
Adolf Hitler, Speaking at the Opening of the House of German Art, 18 July
1937
From [email protected] Fri Aug 23 11:33:30 PDT 1996
Article: 52343 of alt.discrimination
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 07: Better Off Dead
Date: 22 Aug 1996 05:40:04 GMT
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Dead Father–Good Riddance, says Anti-Racist Educator
Are these [racial sensitivy] programs effective? Testimonials abound, but
there is little systematic evidence that the policies produce long-term
benefits.On the contrary, a recent UC Irvine survey of Orange County firms
that tried diversity training found that it *increased* conflicts among
employees. The field is rife with stories of “blow-ups”–as occurred when
several senior executives at a California utility stormed out of a
simulation exercise after being told to sit on the floor as members of an
“oppressed group.” There can also be incredible abuses. *Campus* magazine
recently reported that a University of Cincinnati trainer persistently
badgered a white male graduate student, impugning the student’s family and
stating that the recent death of his father “removed one more racist
influence” from his life.
>From Frederick Lynch, “Workforce Diversity,” *National Review*, 21 February
1994
From [email protected] Sat Aug 24 08:18:05 PDT 1996
Article: 59315 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 12: Loyalty Oaths
Date: 24 Aug 1996 06:09:54 GMT
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Swear Your Allegiance to Diversity
LOYALTY OATHS: The following was distributed to students at the University of
Minnesota Law School in response to “offensive racist graffiti” found on
lavatory walls. The pledge was to be signed in front of a witness and returned
to school administrators:
“As a member of the University of Minnesota Law School community, I, by my
signature, state my commitment to tolerance of those with a viewpoint,
lifestyle, or heritage different from my own. In an intellectually vibrant
community, the exchange of differing ideas is challenging and important.
However, I do not condone acts and expressions of bigotry and hatred. I fully
realize that if I do not take leadership in promulgating these values on
campus, I will diminish the benefits of my education and severely restrict my
personal, professional, civic and social growth and achievement. I take
responsibility for educating myself about others different from me and
enhancing my awareness and understanding of the impact of racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other forms of intolerance, on society and on me.”
(*Heterodoxy,* May-June 1993)
From [email protected] Sat Aug 24 08:18:06 PDT 1996
Article: 59316 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 13: Post Modernism’s Fascist Antecedents
Date: 24 Aug 1996 06:27:03 GMT
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Origins of Anti-Racist Post-Modernism
Since the publication of *The Closing of the American Mind*, fortuitously there
has been fresh attention to the Nazism of Heidegger, more and more widely
recognized as the most intelligent figure contributing to the post-modernist
movement. At the same time the late Paul de Man, who as a professor at Yale
introduced deconstructionism into the U.S., was revealed to have written, as a
young man in his native Belgium, pro-Nazi articles for a collaborationist
newspaper. In reading these articles I was struck by the fact that if one
suppresses the references to Hitler and Hitlerism, much of it sounds like what
one reads in advanced literary reviews today.
The lively debate around these issues has not been very helpful, for it focuses
more on questions of personal guilt than on the possible relation of
Heidegger’s or de Man’s thought to the foulest political extremism. The fact
that de Man had become a leftist after settling in America proves not a thing.
He never seems to have passed through a stage where he was attracted to reason
or liberal democracy. Those who chose culture over civilization, the real
opposition, which we have forgotten, were forced to a position beyond good and
evil, for to them good and evil were products of cultures.
>From Alan Bloom, “Western Civ–And Me,” *Commentary* August 1990
An Early Publication by a Leading Anti-Racist
Vulgar anti-Semitism readily considers postwar cultural phenomena (after the
war of 1914-1918) as degenerate and decadent because Judaized [enjuive].
Literature hasn’t escaped this lapidary judgement: it is enough to have
discovered several Jewish writers under Latinized pseudonyms for all
contemporary production to be considered polluted and harmful. This conception
entails some rather dangerous consequences. In the first place, it condemns a
priori an entire literature that in no way deserves this fate. Moreover, from
the moment one agrees to assign some merit to the literature of our day, it
would be an unflattering estimation of Western writers to reduce them to being
mere imitators of a Jewish culture that is foreign to them.
The Jews themselves have contributed to this myth. Often, they have glorified
themselves as leaders of the literary movements that characterize our era. But
the mistake has, in reality, a deeper cause. The very prevalent opinion,
according to which modern poetry and the modern novel were only monstrous
outgrowths of the world war, is at the root of the thesis of a Jewish takeover.
Since the Jews have, in fact, played an important role in the phoney and
disordered existence of Europe since 1920, a novel born in that atmosphere
would deserve, up to a certain point, the description *enjuive*.
. . . . .
We could not have much hope for the future of our civilization if it had let
itself be invaded, without resistance, by a foreign force. In keeping its
originality and its character intact, despite Semitic interference in all
aspects of European life, our civilization has shown that its fundamental
nature is healthy. What’s more, one can thus see that a solution to the Jewish
problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe
[ie. the Madagascar Plan] would not have, for the literary life of the West,
regrettable consequences. It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre
worth and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its higher
laws of evolution.
>From Paul De Man, “Jews in Contemporary Literature,” *Le Soir* 4 March 1941;
translated in David Lehman, *Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of
Paul de Man* (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 269-71
.
From [email protected] Sat Aug 24 08:18:07 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.fan.howard-stern,
alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 15: Far Worse than David Duke
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Worse than David Duke
The Task Force [on Cultural Diversity] issued a proposal for Louisiana’s
colleges which included mandatory retreats on “diversity awareness” for college
administrators, sensitivity workshops, affirmative action recruitment to
promote ethnic and gender diversity, and restructuring of the core curriculum
to emphasize diversity and the institution of affirmative action hiring and
recruitment procedures.
The publication of the report polarized students on campus. Supporters of the
Task Force recommendations formed the Committe for Social and Cultural
Diversity, while opponents mobilized as Students for Free Thought . . . The
press had a field day with racy anecdotes of political correctness. One English
professor was described as having told students “If you think David Duke is a
racist, you should read Shakespeare.” English professor Emily Toth, a
biographer of Kate Chopin, was reported to have handed out a questionnaire in
an Honors Literature class that asked, “If you’ve ever slept with a person of
the same sex and enjoyed it, is it possible that all you need is a good gay
lover?” The questionnaire was defended by Michelle Masse, Director of Women s
and Gender Studies as “a teaching tool” intended to “sensitize” students to
gays.
Collier and Horowitz, *Surviving the PC University* (Studio City: Center for
the Study of Popular Culture, 1993), 155
But Newton was Even Worse, Anti-Racist Academic Declaims
According to [Sandra] Harding, the currently correct formulation of the Science
Question in feminism is this: “How a science apparently so deeply involved in
distinctively masculine projects can possibly be used for emancipatory ends?”
>From the radical feminist vantage, science like every other cultural
institution and artifact is epistemologically “androcentric” and socially
“regressive.” Biology, physics, chemistry are “not only sexist, but also
racist, classist and culturally coercive.” Harding doesn’t provide systematic
evidence or examples . . . She is miffed that male historians do not take
seriously feminist charges of “rape themes” rampant in the work, say, of Sir
Isaac Newton, while they do take seriously Newton’s metaphors regarding nature
as a machine. “Why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s
laws as Newton’s Rape Manual,” asks Harding, “as it is to call them Newton’s
Mechanics?”
*Surviving the PC University*, 143
From [email protected] Sat Aug 24 12:14:34 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.politics.white-power,
alt.politics.nationalism.white
Subject: Re: Racist Education 1: Your English is Excellent!
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> [Since I’m not a racist troller like Duncan, I don’t feel the need to ape
> his “style” *perfectly*, so unlike him, I’ll add some personal comments
> and participate in followup discussion in appropriate groups (followups
> set). My grandmother’s family immigrated, illegally, from Italy to Canada
> in 1913, 33 years after Takaki’s reached these shores, and then to San
> Francisco in 1923. My family’s right to be here has never been questioned.
> My first serious girlfriend in college was from New York. Her family had
> been in the United States for three hundred years. Some idiot called me a
> nigger-lover, which I suppose I was. My last serious girlfriend immigrated
> from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1980. She became a naturalized
> citizen in 1994. Her right to be here has never been questioned. With her
> accent mostly gone now, everybody just assumes she’s an American.]
I won’t bother with your libel, other than to say that you understand nothing
whatever about my beliefs or background, and the comically unmerited insult
reveals a (hopefully temporary) mental poverty. I will respond as though we
were still on the comparatively friendly terms of our previous interchanges.
The story Professor Takaki tells is obviously unfortunate. But let’s imagine
the predictable consequences of the solutions he and other multiculturalist
diversity advocates are currently practising.
Tell Americans of European descent that Western culture and history are
distinctively “white,” and tainted thereby; imply that they are somehow, by
virtue of blood, complicit in crimes, fictitious or otherwise, of their
ancestors; organize university admissions and employment opportunities by race,
and then lie about it; turn race into a marker of identity and articulate a
view of American society according to which it is a collection of distinctive
cultures, each with a particular set of ethnic mores and race-based visions of
the world, the various American peoples rather than people; subject whites to
sensitivity workshops in which they are to be purged of the racial animus that
supposedly lies buried beneath their superficial mask of tolerance–and you
will provoke, not old-style bigotry, but an informed racial resistance, what
Thomas Sowell calls the new racism, if only through sheer irritation. You will
produce, or at the very least risk producing, a “Euro-American,” and that
Euro-American professional and student associations are now springing up should
not really be surprising. The danger is not the race-baiting, Tom Metzger-style
hatred of ADL fantasy, Naziism being effectively discredited even on most of
the American far-right, nor an upwelling of some submerged, unconscious racism
that self-interrogation and sensitivity training could exorcise, but a
predictable response to the burdens diversity has been artificially *made* to
impose. You can’t force too many people to sit on the floor, in order to sample
the lot of the oppressed, without convincing at least some that the supposed
benefits of the exercise are not worth the trouble.
To the accusation that whites today bear some racial guilt for slavery, the
contemporary white nationalist will defend himself, not on the basis of some
fantastical claim of Aryan racial prerogative, but by pointing out that for the
most part Africans sold other Africans into bondage. American whites, in other
words, are gradually arming themselves intellectually in face of the charges
made against them: arming themselves, as ideas and pieces of ammunition
formerly on the extreme become normalized near the centre, with black crime
statistics, differential incarceration rates, statistics of out-of-wedlock
births, race differences in IQ scores, and so forth. Such facts are
increasingly common knowledge, if still often expressed sotto voce, and they
provide the subtext of your debates on welfare reform and crime. Everyone
knows, to take the obvious issue, which group sends the largest proportion of
its population to prison, so that crime is ceasing to be perceived as an
American problem, even though the political establishment still officially
proclaims it so, and tacitly becoming understood as a problem that black
misbehaviour imposes upon whites.
Societies evolve almost inevitably from their own self-conceptions. If America
deems itself multicultural, then white racial self-consciousness is a
predictable effect. A white “nationalism” of some sort is logic’s revenge on
the theoretical presuppositions and actual practices of “anti-racist” diversity
programmes. If minority racial groups are encouraged to celebrate their racial
heritage as though it conferred an identity, if indeed the institutions of the
larger society explicitly say they ought to do exactly that, then it is
illogical to demand that whites not reciprocate by self-identifying themselves
racially. These authentically racist notions have now percolated down to the
Jerry Springer stratum of American society, so that in the almost monthly
television appearances of real-live white racists no-one, least of all dear
Jerry or Geraldo, can sensibly respond to their now standard claim that, all
appearances to the contrary, they are merely seeking to celebrate their racial
heritage, and what on earth could be wrong with that? Multiculturalism, that
is, mainstreams racist principles, even though its obstensible purpose is to
combat them. The conventional response, that somehow their celebration of
European racial identity is ethically wrong, but all other such celebrations
are noble and indeed obligatory, is likely to have a brief shelf life, since on
its face it is illogical and inconsistent; but it is the only response an
American multiculturalist now has available, because he has misguidedly
accepted the principle that race and culture are in some sense destiny, and
that one’s self-esteem resides in the cultivation of ethnic roots and racial
identity. The new white nationalism is effectively a species of
multiculturalism, and in some form or another, likely a kind of hard-edged Rush
Limbaughism, it will prosper to the degree that multicultural ideas spread.
The correct response is that race is a relatively ephemeral human phenomenon,
that we more naturally associate by ideas, interests, and common emotions than
by physical characteristics, and that there is no intrinsically white identity
or black identiy or oriental identity or aboriginal identity; but in your
country that formerly “enlightened” liberal view is now often called racist,
even a politely genocidal subterfuge to absorb minorites into the folkways of
mainstream “white” society. The transformation of colour-blindness into a
disguised vehicle for white supremacism is an especially bizarre consequence of
“anti-racist” hysteria, and I would argue that for over two decades the
political left in the United States has been busily emptying the resevoir of
good will that Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement built up.
Arguably Western civilization has proven itself superior in most respects to
its rivals, past and present. That observation (right or wrong) is innocuous if
questions of racial identity are elided; it becomes hypothetically a “white”
weapon against attack with sufficient provocation. Thirty years ago no
enlightened person would have suggested that Shakespeare was in any meaningful
sense a “white” author, or that the Western intellectual tradition of
scientific/philosophic rationalism was somehow the expression of a “white
culture” with consequent “white” characteristics. That claim, whose previous
appearance in our history was relatively brief, had been definitively (or so it
seemed) resolved by the Second World War. It is now a mainstream view, however,
to suggest precisely that, to say that the ideals of our civilization are in
some important respect actually white, and hence in need of reform for the sake
of “diversity.” The danger is significant because, of course, if one divides
the world and its history by biological categories, Shakespeare was indeed
white, and the scientific and rational tradition of the West was indeed the
product of “white minds,” even though few of the minds in question would have
ever so identified themselves. If human history is to be turned into a racial
foot race, then a fairly compelling case can be made that whites came in first,
Afrocentric fantasies notwithstanding.
So I would say to Professor Takaki that he has a choice: he can endure the
occasional racial faux pas of the sort he described, which given American
demographics are pretty much inevitable, or, seeking to coerce them out of
existence, he can risk turning the cab driver’s son or daughter into an actual
enemy, someone who, with some justification and on the basis of a coherent if
misguided view of the world, considers people who look like him a source of
unpleasant consequences.
There is, though, an oddity in the meanings Takaki invests in such unfortunate
racial misunderstandings. Intermarriage rates are by far the most reliable
index of a society’s racial attitudes, vastly more reliable than the propaganda
about the deep-seated racism that still, allegedly, systemically afflicts
American society. Something like 1 in 5 white marriages in the United States
are (I believe) now interracial, and well over half of Japanese-Americans now
intermarry with members of different ethnic groups, normally whites. Whites do
not, contrary to “anti-racist” propaganda, see an image of the master race in
the mirror every morning, nor for the most part do they harbour the residual
hatreds that senstivity trainers seek to expunge; the proof is in their choice
of life partners. It is difficult to make the argument that the larger “white”
society fails to accept a group with whom it is willing to intermarry. So in
fact Professor Takaki, as a Japanese American, has already been accepted into
the mainstream, but he doesn’t yet recognize it, and he has constructed an
identity-based grievance on the basis of a serious misapprehension.
As a Canadian, I should point out, all this is none of my business, except for
the fact that we lamentably seem to import failed American ideas about a decade
or so after their palpable failure. Hence “employment equity” is our
affirmative action, “anti-racist education” a Canadian version of your
“diversity”– both skilful lexical changes designed to deflect criticism, since
the virtue of equity is difficult to challenge, and who but a racist could
oppose anti-racism?
The underlying philosophy of the postmodernist diversity/anti-racist movement
is, however, demonstrably fascist in its intellectual antecedents, and my
subsequent posts/trolls will, along with more “anti-racist” horror stories,
continue to provide the requisite demonstration, regardless of any offence it
may cause your refined sense of net propriety.
I’ve discovered that being misunderstood is the price of participation in this
newsgroup–Rajiv Gandhi has just accused me of being rblackmore–but if you
choose to respond, please take what I’ve said at face value. Address the
arguments, right or wrong, silly or brilliant, and resist the temptation to
uncover some secret, sinister agenda you imagine lurks beneath the surface.
I, incidentally, am not white,at least according to the Klansman’s view of the
world that “anti-racism” presupposes. So, having revealed my (unmetaphorically)
dark secret, I now ask: can only a white person, and a racist one at that, be
expected to think that standing a woman up in a crowded room and publicly
insulting her blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin, and educational
accomplishments, or that telling a man that the death of his father helpfully
rid his life of a racist influence, is wrong?
From [email protected] Sat Aug 24 12:29:56 PDT 1996
Article: 59444 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: “Those Sensitive Nazis.”
Date: 19 Aug 1996 02:15:52 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
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References: <4v845[email protected]> <[email protected]>
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X-Newsreader: Microsoft Internet News 4.70.1155
Daniel Keren <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> According to various sources, including Ohlendorf, there
> were soldiers who found it difficult to shoot point blank
> at women and children. No one’s saying all Germans were
> animals. I’m just saying all you nazi-boys are animals,
> because you live in a society which guides you in the
> correct direction, and you chose to follow evil nontheless.
>
I don’t think I’ve seen it put just that way before. I would replace “society”
with “civilization,” but I must say that for some reason I find this a very
moving expression of our collective understanding, how the past has been
collectively (for the most part) internalized.
From [email protected] Sat Aug 24 12:29:57 PDT 1996
Article: 59481 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.politics.white-power,
alt.politics.nationalism.white
Subject: Re: Racist Education 1: Your English is Excellent!
Date: 24 Aug 1996 05:27:12 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> [Since I’m not a racist troller like Duncan, I don’t feel the need to ape
> his “style” *perfectly*, so unlike him, I’ll add some personal comments
> and participate in followup discussion in appropriate groups (followups
> set). My grandmother’s family immigrated, illegally, from Italy to Canada
> in 1913, 33 years after Takaki’s reached these shores, and then to San
> Francisco in 1923. My family’s right to be here has never been questioned.
> My first serious girlfriend in college was from New York. Her family had
> been in the United States for three hundred years. Some idiot called me a
> nigger-lover, which I suppose I was. My last serious girlfriend immigrated
> from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1980. She became a naturalized
> citizen in 1994. Her right to be here has never been questioned. With her
> accent mostly gone now, everybody just assumes she’s an American.]
I won’t bother with your libel, other than to say that you understand nothing
whatever about my beliefs or background, and the comically unmerited insult
reveals a (hopefully temporary) mental poverty. I will respond as though we
were still on the comparatively friendly terms of our previous interchanges.
The story Professor Takaki tells is obviously unfortunate. But let’s imagine
the predictable consequences of the solutions he and other multiculturalist
diversity advocates are currently practising.
Tell Americans of European descent that Western culture and history are
distinctively “white,” and tainted thereby; imply that they are somehow, by
virtue of blood, complicit in crimes, fictitious or otherwise, of their
ancestors; organize university admissions and employment opportunities by race,
and then lie about it; turn race into a marker of identity and articulate a
view of American society according to which it is a collection of distinctive
cultures, each with a particular set of ethnic mores and race-based visions of
the world, the various American peoples rather than people; subject whites to
sensitivity workshops in which they are to be purged of the racial animus that
supposedly lies buried beneath their superficial mask of tolerance–and you
will provoke, not old-style bigotry, but an informed racial resistance, what
Thomas Sowell calls the new racism, if only through sheer irritation. You will
produce, or at the very least risk producing, a “Euro-American,” and that
Euro-American professional and student associations are now springing up should
not really be surprising. The danger is not the race-baiting, Tom Metzger-style
hatred of ADL fantasy, Naziism being effectively discredited even on most of
the American far-right, nor an upwelling of some submerged, unconscious racism
that self-interrogation and sensitivity training could exorcise, but a
predictable response to the burdens diversity has been artificially *made* to
impose. You can’t force too many people to sit on the floor, in order to sample
the lot of the oppressed, without convincing at least some that the supposed
benefits of the exercise are not worth the trouble.
To the accusation that whites today bear some racial guilt for slavery, the
contemporary white nationalist will defend himself, not on the basis of some
fantastical claim of Aryan racial prerogative, but by pointing out that for the
most part Africans sold other Africans into bondage. American whites, in other
words, are gradually arming themselves intellectually in face of the charges
made against them: arming themselves, as ideas and pieces of ammunition
formerly on the extreme become normalized near the centre, with black crime
statistics, differential incarceration rates, statistics of out-of-wedlock
births, race differences in IQ scores, and so forth. Such facts are
increasingly common knowledge, if still often expressed sotto voce, and they
provide the subtext of your debates on welfare reform and crime. Everyone
knows, to take the obvious issue, which group sends the largest proportion of
its population to prison, so that crime is ceasing to be perceived as an
American problem, even though the political establishment still officially
proclaims it so, and tacitly becoming understood as a problem that black
misbehaviour imposes upon whites.
Societies evolve almost inevitably from their own self-conceptions. If America
deems itself multicultural, then white racial self-consciousness is a
predictable effect. A white “nationalism” of some sort is logic’s revenge on
the theoretical presuppositions and actual practices of “anti-racist” diversity
programmes. If minority racial groups are encouraged to celebrate their racial
heritage as though it conferred an identity, if indeed the institutions of the
larger society explicitly say they ought to do exactly that, then it is
illogical to demand that whites not reciprocate by self-identifying themselves
racially. These authentically racist notions have now percolated down to the
Jerry Springer stratum of American society, so that in the almost monthly
television appearances of real-live white racists no-one, least of all dear
Jerry or Geraldo, can sensibly respond to their now standard claim that, all
appearances to the contrary, they are merely seeking to celebrate their racial
heritage, and what on earth could be wrong with that? Multiculturalism, that
is, mainstreams racist principles, even though its obstensible purpose is to
combat them. The conventional response, that somehow their celebration of
European racial identity is ethically wrong, but all other such celebrations
are noble and indeed obligatory, is likely to have a brief shelf life, since on
its face it is illogical and inconsistent; but it is the only response an
American multiculturalist now has available, because he has misguidedly
accepted the principle that race and culture are in some sense destiny, and
that one’s self-esteem resides in the cultivation of ethnic roots and racial
identity. The new white nationalism is effectively a species of
multiculturalism, and in some form or another, likely a kind of hard-edged Rush
Limbaughism, it will prosper to the degree that multicultural ideas spread.
The correct response is that race is a relatively ephemeral human phenomenon,
that we more naturally associate by ideas, interests, and common emotions than
by physical characteristics, and that there is no intrinsically white identity
or black identiy or oriental identity or aboriginal identity; but in your
country that formerly “enlightened” liberal view is now often called racist,
even a politely genocidal subterfuge to absorb minorites into the folkways of
mainstream “white” society. The transformation of colour-blindness into a
disguised vehicle for white supremacism is an especially bizarre consequence of
“anti-racist” hysteria, and I would argue that for over two decades the
political left in the United States has been busily emptying the resevoir of
good will that Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement built up.
Arguably Western civilization has proven itself superior in most respects to
its rivals, past and present. That observation (right or wrong) is innocuous if
questions of racial identity are elided; it becomes hypothetically a “white”
weapon against attack with sufficient provocation. Thirty years ago no
enlightened person would have suggested that Shakespeare was in any meaningful
sense a “white” author, or that the Western intellectual tradition of
scientific/philosophic rationalism was somehow the expression of a “white
culture” with consequent “white” characteristics. That claim, whose previous
appearance in our history was relatively brief, had been definitively (or so it
seemed) resolved by the Second World War. It is now a mainstream view, however,
to suggest precisely that, to say that the ideals of our civilization are in
some important respect actually white, and hence in need of reform for the sake
of “diversity.” The danger is significant because, of course, if one divides
the world and its history by biological categories, Shakespeare was indeed
white, and the scientific and rational tradition of the West was indeed the
product of “white minds,” even though few of the minds in question would have
ever so identified themselves. If human history is to be turned into a racial
foot race, then a fairly compelling case can be made that whites came in first,
Afrocentric fantasies notwithstanding.
So I would say to Professor Takaki that he has a choice: he can endure the
occasional racial faux pas of the sort he described, which given American
demographics are pretty much inevitable, or, seeking to coerce them out of
existence, he can risk turning the cab driver’s son or daughter into an actual
enemy, someone who, with some justification and on the basis of a coherent if
misguided view of the world, considers people who look like him a source of
unpleasant consequences.
There is, though, an oddity in the meanings Takaki invests in such unfortunate
racial misunderstandings. Intermarriage rates are by far the most reliable
index of a society’s racial attitudes, vastly more reliable than the propaganda
about the deep-seated racism that still, allegedly, systemically afflicts
American society. Something like 1 in 5 white marriages in the United States
are (I believe) now interracial, and well over half of Japanese-Americans now
intermarry with members of different ethnic groups, normally whites. Whites do
not, contrary to “anti-racist” propaganda, see an image of the master race in
the mirror every morning, nor for the most part do they harbour the residual
hatreds that senstivity trainers seek to expunge; the proof is in their choice
of life partners. It is difficult to make the argument that the larger “white”
society fails to accept a group with whom it is willing to intermarry. So in
fact Professor Takaki, as a Japanese American, has already been accepted into
the mainstream, but he doesn’t yet recognize it, and he has constructed an
identity-based grievance on the basis of a serious misapprehension.
As a Canadian, I should point out, all this is none of my business, except for
the fact that we lamentably seem to import failed American ideas about a decade
or so after their palpable failure. Hence “employment equity” is our
affirmative action, “anti-racist education” a Canadian version of your
“diversity”– both skilful lexical changes designed to deflect criticism, since
the virtue of equity is difficult to challenge, and who but a racist could
oppose anti-racism?
The underlying philosophy of the postmodernist diversity/anti-racist movement
is, however, demonstrably fascist in its intellectual antecedents, and my
subsequent posts/trolls will, along with more “anti-racist” horror stories,
continue to provide the requisite demonstration, regardless of any offence it
may cause your refined sense of net propriety.
I’ve discovered that being misunderstood is the price of participation in this
newsgroup–Rajiv Gandhi has just accused me of being rblackmore–but if you
choose to respond, please take what I’ve said at face value. Address the
arguments, right or wrong, silly or brilliant, and resist the temptation to
uncover some secret, sinister agenda you imagine lurks beneath the surface.
I, incidentally, am not white,at least according to the Klansman’s view of the
world that “anti-racism” presupposes. So, having revealed my (unmetaphorically)
dark secret, I now ask: can only a white person, and a racist one at that, be
expected to think that standing a woman up in a crowded room and publicly
insulting her blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin, and educational
accomplishments, or that telling a man that the death of his father helpfully
rid his life of a racist influence, is wrong?
From [email protected] Sun Aug 25 09:51:40 PDT 1996
Article: 59682 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 15: Perpetual Treatment
Date: 25 Aug 1996 06:35:40 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 26
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When Will it End? Not Soon, Sensitivity Trainer Declares
Cambridge-based Visions Inc., founded in 1984, has conducted [sensitivity
training] workshops at many high schools and corporations across the country,
and at universities such as Harvard, Virginia Commonwealth and the University
of North Carolina. According to Visions’ Angela Bryant, a lawyer, fees begin at
$1,000 per consultant per day and work on a “sliding scale” according to what
the market will bear.
Visions’ materials define racism as “the systematic oppression of people of
color.” Racism, in Visions’ lexicon, means “white racism,” and not just the
overt variety practiced by the KKK and Aryan Brothers. Intent may be a defense
in the world of law, but it is irrelevant in the world of the sensitivity
trainer. Whites are being racist, says Bryant, “by getting up every morning and
supporting the status quo.”
How will the approach that believes all whites are guilty help solve the
problem of racism on campus? “It’s not about solving it right now,” another
Visions staffer says, “It’s a very long process. Racism has been there for
hundreds of years and it’s going to take hundreds of years to work through it.”
As in Marx’s vision of the classless society, the sensitivity utopia exists
well down at the end of time, leaving plenty of room for historically
inevitable seminars and workshops.
Collier and Horowitz, *Surviving the PC University*, 83
From [email protected] Sun Aug 25 09:51:42 PDT 1996
Article: 59691 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 16: Intellectual Terrorism
Date: 25 Aug 1996 07:02:42 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 34
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A Cliff’s Notes Version of Anti-Racist Post Modernism
[Deconstructionist Jacques] Derrida’s breathtaking equation (in an interview
with *Le Nouvel Observateur*) of Western “liberty of the spirit” with “all
Nazisms” is made even more baldly by one of his eager young followers,
Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who criticizes Heidegger for not going far enough:
he never realized that “Naziism is a humanism.”
Mark Lilla, “What Heidegger Wrought,” *Commentary*, January 1990
We must return to the idea of “genealogy” and consider its effects. If one
considers all discourse to be a symptom of a deeper unconscious (psychological,
social, even ontological), one will be less concerned with assessing the truth
of what is said than in making out the identity of the “hidden” spokesman. In
short, it will be less important to pay attention to *what* someone says than
to determine *who* he is, in order to know what he is really saying. One can
imagine what strange idea of intellectual debate flows from this
presupposition. The content of the speech will be replaced by the person
speaking and the determination of “where he’s coming from.” Once the “real
motives,” unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable by the speaker, have been
uncovered, the genealogy then threatens to legitimize a disturbing brand of
intellectual terrorism. As [post-structuralist philosopher Michel] Foucault
himself did not hesitate to acknowledge, “From now on interpretation will
always be interpretation by means of the question, *who*? One will not ask what
there is in the thing signified, but essentially one will ask: who has put the
interpretation forward?” This is a detective’s conception of dialogue that
becomes an interrogation, whose aim is not to discuss a topic, but to grill an
author in order to know with whom one is dealing.
>From Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, “The Philosophies of ’68,” *Partisan Review*
56 (1989)
From [email protected] Sun Aug 25 09:51:43 PDT 1996
Article: 59693 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 14: A Novel Solution
Date: 25 Aug 1996 06:50:48 GMT
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Lunch Partners Cure Racism, Anti-Racist Educators Proclaim
At the end of half-time in a hockey game, three white students, dressed in
American Indian regalia, skated out onto the ice–to the cheers of the
Dartmouth [College] crowd, which rose to sing the Alma Mater. As soon as the
students’ identities became known, they were abruptly suspended from the
college. Their crime was ideological. Their actions implicitly challenged the
politically correct view that Dartmouth’s long tradition of calling its
athletic teams “Indians” was wrong and racist. Although the team name had been
changed, the hockey crowd’s emotional response provoked an angry reaction in
the Dartmouth administration and among the politically activist elements on
campus. All classes were cancelled, being replaced by campus speeches and
declarations against “racism” and other related and unrelated topics of an
ideological nature.
[The students] were suspended, with just one week left in the term–which meant
that they received no credit for all their academic work that term and received
no refund for their tuition. Only after outcries from alumni, some of whom
began raising money to finance a lawsuit against the college, did the
administration relent. The new punishment, according to one of the students,
was: “I have been ordered to conduct public seminars, whenever I can get
students to listen, about the evil of the Indian symbol. In addition, I’ve been
commanded to take an Indian to lunch once a week for a year.” (Incidentally, no
one considers it racist that Notre Dame’s athletic teams are called “the
fighting Irish” or that Hope College’s teams are called “Dutchmen.”)
Thomas Sowell, *Inside American Education* (New York: Free Press, 1993),
189-90.
From [email protected] Sun Aug 25 13:11:10 PDT 1996
Article: 27761 of alt.politics.nationalism.white
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.politics.white-power,
alt.politics.nationalism.white
Subject: Re: Racist Education 4: White Man’s Long Struggle Not To Be Laughed At
Date: 24 Aug 1996 05:50:12 GMT
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> Orwell: Shooting an Elephant [1936]
> [Duncan, I’ll stop this silly trolling if you will. Followups set
> appropriately.]
>
Sorry, Rich. I’m valiantly trying to elevate the tone of this group, to prevent
it from appearing like a gang of disgruntled astronomers invading a convention
of the Flat Earth Society.
Your counterposts are excellent; I encourage you to keep them coming. But you
better have plenty of material. Anti-Racist Education 25 is already on disc and
just raring to meet the world.
My series, though, has an underlying thesis which it will cumulatively
demonstrate to anyone who cares to pay attention, so I prefer it to yours.
From [email protected] Sun Aug 25 15:57:10 PDT 1996
Article: 135578 of control
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
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From [email protected] Sun Aug 25 22:29:13 PDT 1996
Article: 59940 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: <Seufze> Wieder mit dem “Ausrottung” Wahnsinn.
Date: 22 Aug 1996 13:03:40 GMT
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[email protected] wrote in article <[email protected]>…
> In article <01bb8cf6$81c78280$86cfd3c6@default> Duncan Coons,
> [email protected] writes:
> > ….. Cassell’s
> >pre-war edition of their German-English dictionary reads,
> “Ausrott–en, v.a.
> >extirpate, exterminate, root out. –er, m. Extirpator. –ung, f.
> extirpation.
> >Comp. –ungs-krieg, m. war of extermination,” which is essentially
> the same
> >range of meanings provided in the 1991 Collins German-English
> dictionary. None,
> >as far as I can see, carries the connotations of contemporary
> English *exterminate.*
> Perhaps you should look again at the fourth line of
> the above quotation from your last posting to this
> thread. “war of extermination”. Let me repeat
> “E X T E R M I N A T I O N”. Yet, according to your
> next sentence, this does not carry the connotation
> of contemporary English “exterminate”.
>
> I realise that the fact that I learnt English as a
> second language may put me at a disadvantage when
> it comes to subtleties, so I hope you will assist
> me by explaining how the explicit translation as
> “extermination” fails to carry the connotation of
> “exterminate”.
>
Elsewhere in this thread you claim to have exposed my “denier” trickery. I
suggest you re-read the message to which you were purportedly responding
and see if that characterization was justified. I realize it is difficult
to work in another language, and you do it far better than I could, but
someone who writes in English as well as you do should surely have been
able to understand my meaning.
My point concerned the connotations of English *extermination*, the normal
translation for “Ausrottung” in Himmler’s Posen speech. Ehrlich argued that
the term *in English* suggests killing vermin, and I concluded that he had
stumbled onto an interesting point. Not a material issue, but an
interesting observation about English and about the English translation of
the speech. Contemporary English *extermination*, I submit, does indeed
suggest killing vermin, especially insects; one doesn’t even require
context to understand what an *exterminator* exterminates. That, as I
explained, is a relatively recent meaning, the connotations of the word
having shifted over time. The denotation has not changed, but the
connotations have. The English phrase “exterminate the enemy” around, say,
1920 would carry a different implication from what it carries today;
specifically, it would not so powerfully suggest a biological
interpretation of the verb’s object. And four centuries ago that
connotation was entirely unavailable: Shakespeare, for example, could speak
of “exterminating (ie.eliminating, putting an end to) grief,” a phrase that
would sound in very odd in contemporary English.
When I hear (English) “extermination” in a translation of the Posen speech,
or in the Lauck remarks that Mr McVay cited, I hear very clearly the
transferred sense “kill people as though they were vermin.” I assume most
English-speakers do as well. That, of course, is substantively what Himmler
described and historically its intellectual justification, but I question
whether that connotation was/is available in German *Ausrottung.* I may, of
course, be wrong–I have no feeling whatever for German nuances and must
struggle through everything I read–but I don’t see it in either the
pre-war Cassells or the recent Collins German-English dictionaries. You
perhaps can tell me: when you hear *Ausrottung/ausrotten* you understand
“destroy, annihilate etc,” but do the German words (to your mind) carry the
connotations I have described? To use your example, does “die
Urbevoelkerung des Landes wurde ausgerottet” suggest that the “natives”
were killed/annihilated as though they were vermin? If it does, then I was
likely wrong, unless Nazi genocidal practices have changed German
connotations. They have certainly had an effect on English *exterminate*,
in addition to the semantic shift I referred to earlier. Hence *liquidate*
suggests Marxist, specifically Stalinist mass murder, *exterminate* its
Nazi counterpart and the latter’s attendant racial ideology.
None of this speculation (idle or otherwise) changes the fact that
“Ausrottung/ausrotten” in the Posen speech and “exterminate” in English
both denote *destroy.* Nor does it change the fact that the killing itself
presupposed exactly the view of the victims that contemporary English
*exterminate* conveys. It is merely to suggest, rightly or wrongly, that in
strict accuracy the normal English translation may now carry a transferred
sense that the German words did not.
A short illustration, in case your ear doesn’t yet pick up English nuances:
the sentences “destroy the enemy” and “exterminate the enemy” carry exactly
the same denotation, but an English speaker today will hear in the latter
an implicit racial interpretation of the enemy’s “biological worth.” The
same is likely true of the Conrad line you cite elsewhere, though even
there that sense is more specifically racial now than it was around the
turn of the century.
> >
> >I would, unless everything above is nonsense, propose “extirpate”
> or simply
> >”destroy” as a better English translation, though the standard
> “exterminate”
> >does, paradoxically, best capture the actual biological theory
> behind the
> >genocidal practice.
To repeat, I don’t see how you could have read this sentence and still
concluded that I was attempting any “denier” obfuscations of the passage in
question. Everything I said may have been nonsense, but no-one could
reasonably infer here an ill-informed attempt to evade the plain meaning of
the word, nor a sinister motive for such an evasion.
From [email protected] Sun Aug 25 22:29:14 PDT 1996
Article: 59944 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 17: Permanent Treatment
Date: 26 Aug 1996 03:08:03 GMT
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When Will it End? Not Soon, Sensitivity Trainer Declares
Cambridge-based Visions Inc., founded in 1984, has conducted [sensitivity
training] workshops at many high schools and corporations across the country,
and at universities such as Harvard, Virginia Commonwealth and the University
of North Carolina. According to Visions’ Angela Bryant, a lawyer, fees begin
at $1,000 per consultant per day and work on a “sliding scale” according to
what the market will bear.
Visions’ materials define racism as “the systematic oppression of people of
color.” Racism, in Visions’ lexicon, means “white racism,” and not just the
overt variety practiced by the KKK and Aryan Brothers. Intent may be a defense
in the world of law, but it is irrelevant in the world of the sensitivity
trainer. Whites are being racist, says Bryant, “by getting up every morning and
supporting the status quo.”
How will the approach that believes all whites are guilty help solve the
problem of racism on campus? “It’s not about solving it right now,” another
Visions staffer says, “It’s a very long process. Racism has been there for
hundreds of years and it’s going to take hundreds of years to work through it.”
As in Marx’s vision of the classless society, the sensitivity utopia exists
well down at the end of time, leaving plenty of room for historically
inevitable seminars and workshops.
Collier and Horowitz, *Surviving the PC University*, 83
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 07:21:55 PDT 1996
Article: 59995 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 18: Debating Techniques
Date: 26 Aug 1996 06:29:44 GMT
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How to Win Arguments and Influence People in America
On May 4, 1994, approximately 40 students invaded Academic Provost Maryann
Swain’s seventh-floor office in the Cooper Administration Building at New
York’s Binghamton University and declared a take-over. Another 40 supporters,
including a few faculty members, camped out in the lobby of the building. They
were protesting the democratic proceedings of the Harpur College Council [HCC],
which had voted 22 to 21 to amend a proposal submitted by Maria Lagones,
professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies, which would have politicized
Harpur’s current [diversity] requirement by insisting that diversity courses
focus on “structures of oppression, asymmetries of power, and resistance to the
center/margin relation.” By the time their occupation was dispersed 32 hours
later, the school was in chaos, the racial, ethnic, and gender groups were at
each others’ throats, and the administration was in hiding.
The words that marked the beginning of what Binghamton students would later
refer to as “people of color terrorism” were “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
They were spoken by Maria Lagones to her clique of supporters after the April
27th vote on harsher diversity requirements didn’t go her way. Lagones and the
small group of radicals who constantly accompany her . . . declared this
“silencing” of her “expertise” an act of war.
Several days later, Lagones and her “Diversity Task Force,” along with 80 of
its supporters, burst into the Wedensday afternoon meeting of the Harpur
College Council, chanting the battle cry from the Los Angeles riots, “No
justice, no peace!” Armed with megaphones, bongo drums, and other noise-making
devices, the mob piled into the room and began to circle the table where
administrators were seated. Within minutes, Dean Brehm and other officials who
were part of the college’s council fled in fear.
“To the administration building!” one of the demonstrators cried. Then they
began a march toward the eight story tower of administrative offices. Across
the Peace Quad tromped the protesters of democracy, with [assorted professors]
in their ranks. After entering Cooper Administration Building, the throng
packed themselves into elevators and forged up the staircase, heading for
Provost Maryann Swain’s seventh-floor office . . .
Jumping up and down, stomping on the floor, and banging on walls, they demanded
that Swain come out. A group of them remained in the lobby, reading poetry
prepared for the occasion and making impromptu speeches with megaphones. One
well-prepared trespasser had even brought along a Bob Marley tape and boom box
to provide ambiance. They swore that they were prepared to stay for as long as
it took to win their “voices” back, by which they meant until they got the new
diversity requirement.
. . . . .
Last November, the student supporters of radical feminist professors Carol
Boyce-Davies and Juanita Diaz invited members of the Trotskyist group, the
National Women’s Right Organizing Committee to the Binghamton campus for a
professional disruption. Although the administration building wasn’t invaded
during this action, the mixture of Binghamton students and Trotskyists that
burst into two HCC meetings and stood on top of the dean’s desk while
intimidating and cursing the council was potent enough to elicit the demons of
liberal white guilt. HCC granted the demand of Boyce-Davies and Diaz that the
diversity requirement be redesigned by “people of color” and homosexuals. Maria
Lagones . . . was deputized to head the new Ad Hoc Diversity Task Force.
Lagones’ proposal read:
“Harpur College requires that all students take two diversity courses to ensure
that students encounter and understand the social construction of human
diversity and the consequences of that construction. ‘Human diversity’ refers
to the differences which have been hitherto underrepresented in the traditional
U.S. curriculum: that is, differences conventionally expressed by such
categories as race, gender, religion, nationality, sexuality, class and culture
as well as their interrelations and intersections. Not only do these courses
consider as central to the social construction of human diversity the
asymmetries of power in structures of oppression, but also resistances to the
hierarchical relations of dominance.”
*Opaque*, *academic jargon*, and *post-Marxist garble* were the words HCC
faculty used to describe the Lagones proposal. Even professors sympathetic to
the theories Lagones and her crew supported conceded that mandating such
politically slanted courses at a state institution of higher learning was
probably unconstitutional.
The diversity task force was enraged by this skeptical response from HCC, and
fired back that all course material in mainstream academia is biased in that it
embodies Western patriarchal culture. The Lagones proposal should be viewed as
an attempt at equal time, not a coup d’etat, her supporters insisted.
. . . . . .
Groups with race- and gender-related agenda at Binghamton University continue
to manipulate administrators and faculty by claims of victimization. The
occupants of Provost Maryann Swain’s office presented her with a list of
unconditional demands that included immediate passage of the Lagones proposal,
an increase in the number of people of color on HCC and other academic bodies,
and more money and respect given to programs like African American, Women’s,
and Gay and Lesbian Studies.
The trespassers vacated the administration building after they felt that the
local media was sufficiently convinced that Binghamton University “silenced”
and “disrespected” minorities by denying them a benign request for diversity.
That took only a day and a half. As Binghamton’s latest Munich ended, Provost
Swain promised to look into things next semester, Dean Brehm promised to
investigate the bylaws of the “anachronistic” HCC, and President DeFleur
remained her usual invisible self.
>From Bernadette Malone, “Terrorism at Binghamton,” *Heterodoxy* May/June 1994
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 07:21:55 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 19: Curing Effects With Causes
Date: 26 Aug 1996 06:44:44 GMT
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How to Cure the Effects of Anti-Racist Education? More of the Same, of Course
Those who are most vocal on campus racial issues depict the new racism as
growing out of the new conservative mood in general or the Reagan
Administration’s philosophy in particular. However, neither the regional
pattern of campus racial incidents nor the ideological character of the
institutions affected fits this vision. Last March the National Institute
Against Prejudice and Violence published a list of 105 incidents of “campus
ethnoviolence.” Only seven of these occurred in the South. More than that
occurred in Massachusetts alone–and Massachusetts has never been Reagan
country. On the contrary, vicious racial incidents have been most prominent
where the prevailing liberal (or radical) racial vision has been most
prominent. This new racism is not a vestige [of the old] but a backlash.
This backlash has developed on campuses that already have all the things that
are supposed to cure it–campuses dominated by racial “representation” or
body-count thinking, campuses awash in affirmative action officers, associate
deans for minority affairs, ethnic studies faculty, and ethnic student
organizations, centers, and even separate residences. These things have not
been a solution but an essential part of the problem. However, it is hardly
surprising that existing ethnic establishments should use racial incidents as a
reason for expansion of their roles and their turf. Indeed, the whole pattern
that has emerged over the past 20 years has been quite predictable.
Twenty years ago, I was shocked to learn that half the black students at
Cornell University were on some form of academic probation. Yet when I checked
into their test scores, I discovered that the average black student at Cornell
at that time had higher scores than three-quarters of all American college
students. Why was there a problem then? Because black students at the 75th
percentile were competing with white Cornell students who were at the 99th
percentile. Minority students with every prospect of achieving success were
artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with an institution
preoccupied with its minority body count.
The same pattern continues to this day at many institutions across the country.
The issue is not whether minority students are “qualified” to attend college
but whether they are *mismatched*. A recent study showed that the average black
student at MIT had math scores in the top 10% of all American students–but
these same scores were in the *bottom* 10% among the extraordinary students at
MIT. Almost one-fourth of the black students at MIT failed to graduate, and
those who did had significantly lower grades than their classmates. Once more,
failures were artificially created by [affirmative action] preferences.
At the University of California at Berkeley, the attrition rate among black
students has exceeded 70%. The black students at Berkeley score above the
national average on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), but not as far above as
other students at Berkeley. This massive attrition is once again due to a
mismatch. Yet, at Berkeley as elsewhere, the demand is for still more
preferential admissions.
. . . . .
Among the top engineering schools and departments, there are a dozen or so
where the average math SAT score alone is over 700 (out of a possible 800). As
of 1988, fewer than 800 black, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and American
Indian students–put together–scored that high. By contrast, there were more
than 6,400 Asian Americans who scored in the 700s on the math SAT. Yet minority
representation discussions go on in utter disregard of the academic differences
in the respective pools of students. Some critics have even singled out
engineering schools as especially “racist” because of their
“underrepresentation” of minority students other than Asians.
Given these bitter but inescapable facts, lofty talk about statistical
representation of minority students at the most demanding colleges,
universities, and engineering schools means grossly mismatching students and
institutions. Moreover, the mismatching does not stop at the top-tier schools.
When the most demanding institutions siphon off minority students whose
qualifications match the standards of the second-tier and third-tier
institutions, these latter colleges, universities, and engineering schools
proceed to siphon off minority students who would normally go to institutions
whose admissions standards are lower. The net result is an artificially created
problem. Even though minority students’ qualifications cover a wide range, they
are not matched with the institutions across that range but instead are
systematically mismatched. The bad academic consequences of this situation have
led to worse social consequences, among minority and majority students alike.
The only large group of white students who have a long history of being
admitted to leading colleges and universities without meeting the normal
admissions standards are big-time varsity athletes. They too have a long
history of taking Mickey Mouse courses, receiving grades that they haven’t
earned–and of failing to graduate nevertheless. Why should anyone be surprised
when such patterns have also emerged under [affirmative action] preferential
admissions for minority students? Why should anyone be surprised that the “dumb
jock” stereotype that has followed college athletes for decades under these
conditions should now have a racial counterpart, after similar conditions have
been created for minority students?
What of the minority students themselves–and the minority faculty, often
recruited with the same headlong rush for body count? In both cases, they are
faced with two choices; (1) accept the prevailing standards and lose their own
self-respect or (2) retain their self-respect by continually attacking,
undermining, and trying to discredit the standards that they do not meet,
scavenging for grievances and issuing a never-ending stream of demands and
manifestoes. Given the alternatives, it is hardly surprising that so many
choose the second.
>From Thomas Sowell, “The New Racism on Campus,” *Fortune*, 13 February 1989
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 07:21:56 PDT 1996
Article: 60002 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 20: Racial Knowledge
Date: 26 Aug 1996 06:59:36 GMT
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Unto Each Race a Textbook
The importance of the French Revolution for black people, says the author of a
new government-funded history textbook for black children in Ontario schools,
is that it set off a successful rebellion of slaves in Haiti.
And that’s the way it should be taught to black students. It’s an instructive
example, and if it were unique to this textbook author it wouldn’t matter much.
But it isn’t. It is typical of the new orthodoxy in public school education.
There must not, that is, be such a thing as “the history of Canada” or “the
history of the modern world.” There must be a history for black Canadians, a
history for white Canadians, a history for native Canadians, and so on. This
way, we are given to understand, we will teach tolerance and end racism . . .
Besides producing a tolerant and unbiased populace, this approach will have the
additional advantage of providing an infinity of work for textbook authors,
specialized teachers and bureaucrats. And Canada, which already runs the most
expensive education system in the world, and one of the least effective when in
comes to teaching antiquated things like mathematics and reading, will also
have one of the most multicultural.
>From Ted Byfield, “Textbooks for Black Students Fragment our Society,”
*Financial Post* 14 January 1995
Racist Categories Assume Anti-Racist Forms
Racialist ideology is also evident in the basic premise of Afrocentrism. What,
after all, do the various tribal peoples in Africa, who have historically
identified themselves as Wolof, Ibo, and so on, have in common? The color of
their skin. What do African American children from Chicago share with
contemporary or ancient Africans? The color of their skin. Thus a central
principle of Afrocentrism is that biology is destiny, and that the color of
your skin determines the content of your character. “Afrocentrism,” argues
African scholar Anthony Appiah, “shares the presuppositions of Victorian racial
ideology against which it is reacting. Basically, knowledge is viewed as a
racial possession.”
Dinesh D’Souza, *The End of Racism* (New York: Free Press, 1995), 380
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 07:21:57 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: Jewish Ritual Murder
Date: 26 Aug 1996 13:07:32 GMT
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tmw <[email protected]> wrote in article <[email protected]>…
The blood libel hardly, of course, needs to be refuted, but it’s worth pointing
out that the medieval Church often did so quite forcefully. In the passages
that appear below one may observe that the Popes seem to understand the charge
as primarily a pretext for theft. Hence the reference to “proper recompense” at
the conclusion of the first passage.
Gregory X writing in 1271:
“It sometimes happens that certain Christians lose their Christian children.
The charge is then made against the Jews by their enemies that they have stolen
and slain these children in secret, and that they have sacrificed the heart and
the blood. The fathers of the said children, or other Christians who are
envious of the Jews, even hide their children in order to have a pretext to
molest the Jews, and to extort money from them so as to pay their dues. They
assert thereupon, most falsely, that the Jews have taken away these children
and slain them, and have sacrificed the heart and the blood. Yet their Law
expressly forbids the Jews to sacrifice or to eat or to drink blood: even
though it be of animals which have the hoof cloven. This has been confirmed in
our *curia* on many occasions by Jews converted to the Christian faith. None
the less, on this pretext many Jews have frequently been seized and detained,
against all justice.
. . . ..
We decree that no Christian shall stir up anything new against [the Jews].
Moreover, if any one, after having known the content of this decree,
should–which we hope will not happen–attempt audaciously to act contrary to
it, then let him suffer punishment in his rank and position, or let him be
punished by the penalty of excommunication, unless he makes amends for his
boldness by proper recompense.”
Innocent IV writing to the German Church in 1247:
We have received a mournful complaint from the Jews of Germany, telling how
some princes, both ecclesiastical and lay, together with other nobles and
powerful persons in your cities and dioceses, devise evil plans against them
and invent various pretexts in order to rob them unjustly of their goods, and
gain possesion thereof. This they do without stopping to consider prudently
that it is from the archives of the Jews, so to speak, that the testimonies of
the Christian faith come forth . . . [The Jews] are falsely accused that at
[Passover] they make communion with the heart of a slain child. This is
alleged to be enjoined by the Law, whereas in fact such an act is manifestly
contrary to it. Moverover, if the body of a dead man is by chance found
anywhere, they maliciously ascribe the cause of death to the action of the
Jews. On this, and many other fictitious pretexts, they rage against the Jews
and despoil them of their possessions, against God and Justice and the
privileges mercifully granted to them by the Holy See.”
Cited in *Chaucer Criticism: The Canterbury Tales*, ed. Richard Schoeck and
Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960, 251-52, 257
n.7.
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 08:43:53 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 18: Debating Techniques
Date: 26 Aug 1996 06:29:44 GMT
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How to Win Arguments and Influence People in America
On May 4, 1994, approximately 40 students invaded Academic Provost Maryann
Swain’s seventh-floor office in the Cooper Administration Building at New
York’s Binghamton University and declared a take-over. Another 40 supporters,
including a few faculty members, camped out in the lobby of the building. They
were protesting the democratic proceedings of the Harpur College Council [HCC],
which had voted 22 to 21 to amend a proposal submitted by Maria Lagones,
professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies, which would have politicized
Harpur’s current [diversity] requirement by insisting that diversity courses
focus on “structures of oppression, asymmetries of power, and resistance to the
center/margin relation.” By the time their occupation was dispersed 32 hours
later, the school was in chaos, the racial, ethnic, and gender groups were at
each others’ throats, and the administration was in hiding.
The words that marked the beginning of what Binghamton students would later
refer to as “people of color terrorism” were “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
They were spoken by Maria Lagones to her clique of supporters after the April
27th vote on harsher diversity requirements didn’t go her way. Lagones and the
small group of radicals who constantly accompany her . . . declared this
“silencing” of her “expertise” an act of war.
Several days later, Lagones and her “Diversity Task Force,” along with 80 of
its supporters, burst into the Wedensday afternoon meeting of the Harpur
College Council, chanting the battle cry from the Los Angeles riots, “No
justice, no peace!” Armed with megaphones, bongo drums, and other noise-making
devices, the mob piled into the room and began to circle the table where
administrators were seated. Within minutes, Dean Brehm and other officials who
were part of the college’s council fled in fear.
“To the administration building!” one of the demonstrators cried. Then they
began a march toward the eight story tower of administrative offices. Across
the Peace Quad tromped the protesters of democracy, with [assorted professors]
in their ranks. After entering Cooper Administration Building, the throng
packed themselves into elevators and forged up the staircase, heading for
Provost Maryann Swain’s seventh-floor office . . .
Jumping up and down, stomping on the floor, and banging on walls, they demanded
that Swain come out. A group of them remained in the lobby, reading poetry
prepared for the occasion and making impromptu speeches with megaphones. One
well-prepared trespasser had even brought along a Bob Marley tape and boom box
to provide ambiance. They swore that they were prepared to stay for as long as
it took to win their “voices” back, by which they meant until they got the new
diversity requirement.
. . . . .
Last November, the student supporters of radical feminist professors Carol
Boyce-Davies and Juanita Diaz invited members of the Trotskyist group, the
National Women’s Right Organizing Committee to the Binghamton campus for a
professional disruption. Although the administration building wasn’t invaded
during this action, the mixture of Binghamton students and Trotskyists that
burst into two HCC meetings and stood on top of the dean’s desk while
intimidating and cursing the council was potent enough to elicit the demons of
liberal white guilt. HCC granted the demand of Boyce-Davies and Diaz that the
diversity requirement be redesigned by “people of color” and homosexuals. Maria
Lagones . . . was deputized to head the new Ad Hoc Diversity Task Force.
Lagones’ proposal read:
“Harpur College requires that all students take two diversity courses to ensure
that students encounter and understand the social construction of human
diversity and the consequences of that construction. ‘Human diversity’ refers
to the differences which have been hitherto underrepresented in the traditional
U.S. curriculum: that is, differences conventionally expressed by such
categories as race, gender, religion, nationality, sexuality, class and culture
as well as their interrelations and intersections. Not only do these courses
consider as central to the social construction of human diversity the
asymmetries of power in structures of oppression, but also resistances to the
hierarchical relations of dominance.”
*Opaque*, *academic jargon*, and *post-Marxist garble* were the words HCC
faculty used to describe the Lagones proposal. Even professors sympathetic to
the theories Lagones and her crew supported conceded that mandating such
politically slanted courses at a state institution of higher learning was
probably unconstitutional.
The diversity task force was enraged by this skeptical response from HCC, and
fired back that all course material in mainstream academia is biased in that it
embodies Western patriarchal culture. The Lagones proposal should be viewed as
an attempt at equal time, not a coup d’etat, her supporters insisted.
. . . . . .
Groups with race- and gender-related agenda at Binghamton University continue
to manipulate administrators and faculty by claims of victimization. The
occupants of Provost Maryann Swain’s office presented her with a list of
unconditional demands that included immediate passage of the Lagones proposal,
an increase in the number of people of color on HCC and other academic bodies,
and more money and respect given to programs like African American, Women’s,
and Gay and Lesbian Studies.
The trespassers vacated the administration building after they felt that the
local media was sufficiently convinced that Binghamton University “silenced”
and “disrespected” minorities by denying them a benign request for diversity.
That took only a day and a half. As Binghamton’s latest Munich ended, Provost
Swain promised to look into things next semester, Dean Brehm promised to
investigate the bylaws of the “anachronistic” HCC, and President DeFleur
remained her usual invisible self.
>From Bernadette Malone, “Terrorism at Binghamton,” *Heterodoxy* May/June 1994
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 08:43:53 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 19: Curing Effects With Causes
Date: 26 Aug 1996 06:44:44 GMT
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How to Cure the Effects of Anti-Racist Education? More of the Same, of Course
Those who are most vocal on campus racial issues depict the new racism as
growing out of the new conservative mood in general or the Reagan
Administration’s philosophy in particular. However, neither the regional
pattern of campus racial incidents nor the ideological character of the
institutions affected fits this vision. Last March the National Institute
Against Prejudice and Violence published a list of 105 incidents of “campus
ethnoviolence.” Only seven of these occurred in the South. More than that
occurred in Massachusetts alone–and Massachusetts has never been Reagan
country. On the contrary, vicious racial incidents have been most prominent
where the prevailing liberal (or radical) racial vision has been most
prominent. This new racism is not a vestige [of the old] but a backlash.
This backlash has developed on campuses that already have all the things that
are supposed to cure it–campuses dominated by racial “representation” or
body-count thinking, campuses awash in affirmative action officers, associate
deans for minority affairs, ethnic studies faculty, and ethnic student
organizations, centers, and even separate residences. These things have not
been a solution but an essential part of the problem. However, it is hardly
surprising that existing ethnic establishments should use racial incidents as a
reason for expansion of their roles and their turf. Indeed, the whole pattern
that has emerged over the past 20 years has been quite predictable.
Twenty years ago, I was shocked to learn that half the black students at
Cornell University were on some form of academic probation. Yet when I checked
into their test scores, I discovered that the average black student at Cornell
at that time had higher scores than three-quarters of all American college
students. Why was there a problem then? Because black students at the 75th
percentile were competing with white Cornell students who were at the 99th
percentile. Minority students with every prospect of achieving success were
artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with an institution
preoccupied with its minority body count.
The same pattern continues to this day at many institutions across the country.
The issue is not whether minority students are “qualified” to attend college
but whether they are *mismatched*. A recent study showed that the average black
student at MIT had math scores in the top 10% of all American students–but
these same scores were in the *bottom* 10% among the extraordinary students at
MIT. Almost one-fourth of the black students at MIT failed to graduate, and
those who did had significantly lower grades than their classmates. Once more,
failures were artificially created by [affirmative action] preferences.
At the University of California at Berkeley, the attrition rate among black
students has exceeded 70%. The black students at Berkeley score above the
national average on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), but not as far above as
other students at Berkeley. This massive attrition is once again due to a
mismatch. Yet, at Berkeley as elsewhere, the demand is for still more
preferential admissions.
. . . . .
Among the top engineering schools and departments, there are a dozen or so
where the average math SAT score alone is over 700 (out of a possible 800). As
of 1988, fewer than 800 black, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and American
Indian students–put together–scored that high. By contrast, there were more
than 6,400 Asian Americans who scored in the 700s on the math SAT. Yet minority
representation discussions go on in utter disregard of the academic differences
in the respective pools of students. Some critics have even singled out
engineering schools as especially “racist” because of their
“underrepresentation” of minority students other than Asians.
Given these bitter but inescapable facts, lofty talk about statistical
representation of minority students at the most demanding colleges,
universities, and engineering schools means grossly mismatching students and
institutions. Moreover, the mismatching does not stop at the top-tier schools.
When the most demanding institutions siphon off minority students whose
qualifications match the standards of the second-tier and third-tier
institutions, these latter colleges, universities, and engineering schools
proceed to siphon off minority students who would normally go to institutions
whose admissions standards are lower. The net result is an artificially created
problem. Even though minority students’ qualifications cover a wide range, they
are not matched with the institutions across that range but instead are
systematically mismatched. The bad academic consequences of this situation have
led to worse social consequences, among minority and majority students alike.
The only large group of white students who have a long history of being
admitted to leading colleges and universities without meeting the normal
admissions standards are big-time varsity athletes. They too have a long
history of taking Mickey Mouse courses, receiving grades that they haven’t
earned–and of failing to graduate nevertheless. Why should anyone be surprised
when such patterns have also emerged under [affirmative action] preferential
admissions for minority students? Why should anyone be surprised that the “dumb
jock” stereotype that has followed college athletes for decades under these
conditions should now have a racial counterpart, after similar conditions have
been created for minority students?
What of the minority students themselves–and the minority faculty, often
recruited with the same headlong rush for body count? In both cases, they are
faced with two choices; (1) accept the prevailing standards and lose their own
self-respect or (2) retain their self-respect by continually attacking,
undermining, and trying to discredit the standards that they do not meet,
scavenging for grievances and issuing a never-ending stream of demands and
manifestoes. Given the alternatives, it is hardly surprising that so many
choose the second.
>From Thomas Sowell, “The New Racism on Campus,” *Fortune*, 13 February 1989
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 08:43:54 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 20: Racial Knowledge
Date: 26 Aug 1996 06:59:36 GMT
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Unto Each Race a Textbook
The importance of the French Revolution for black people, says the author of a
new government-funded history textbook for black children in Ontario schools,
is that it set off a successful rebellion of slaves in Haiti.
And that’s the way it should be taught to black students. It’s an instructive
example, and if it were unique to this textbook author it wouldn’t matter much.
But it isn’t. It is typical of the new orthodoxy in public school education.
There must not, that is, be such a thing as “the history of Canada” or “the
history of the modern world.” There must be a history for black Canadians, a
history for white Canadians, a history for native Canadians, and so on. This
way, we are given to understand, we will teach tolerance and end racism . . .
Besides producing a tolerant and unbiased populace, this approach will have the
additional advantage of providing an infinity of work for textbook authors,
specialized teachers and bureaucrats. And Canada, which already runs the most
expensive education system in the world, and one of the least effective when in
comes to teaching antiquated things like mathematics and reading, will also
have one of the most multicultural.
>From Ted Byfield, “Textbooks for Black Students Fragment our Society,”
*Financial Post* 14 January 1995
Racist Categories Assume Anti-Racist Forms
Racialist ideology is also evident in the basic premise of Afrocentrism. What,
after all, do the various tribal peoples in Africa, who have historically
identified themselves as Wolof, Ibo, and so on, have in common? The color of
their skin. What do African American children from Chicago share with
contemporary or ancient Africans? The color of their skin. Thus a central
principle of Afrocentrism is that biology is destiny, and that the color of
your skin determines the content of your character. “Afrocentrism,” argues
African scholar Anthony Appiah, “shares the presuppositions of Victorian racial
ideology against which it is reacting. Basically, knowledge is viewed as a
racial possession.”
Dinesh D’Souza, *The End of Racism* (New York: Free Press, 1995), 380
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 08:43:55 PDT 1996
Article: 60060 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: Jewish Ritual Murder
Date: 26 Aug 1996 13:07:32 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
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tmw <[email protected]> wrote in article <[email protected]>…
The blood libel hardly, of course, needs to be refuted, but it’s worth pointing
out that the medieval Church often did so quite forcefully. In the passages
that appear below one may observe that the Popes seem to understand the charge
as primarily a pretext for theft. Hence the reference to “proper recompense” at
the conclusion of the first passage.
Gregory X writing in 1271:
“It sometimes happens that certain Christians lose their Christian children.
The charge is then made against the Jews by their enemies that they have stolen
and slain these children in secret, and that they have sacrificed the heart and
the blood. The fathers of the said children, or other Christians who are
envious of the Jews, even hide their children in order to have a pretext to
molest the Jews, and to extort money from them so as to pay their dues. They
assert thereupon, most falsely, that the Jews have taken away these children
and slain them, and have sacrificed the heart and the blood. Yet their Law
expressly forbids the Jews to sacrifice or to eat or to drink blood: even
though it be of animals which have the hoof cloven. This has been confirmed in
our *curia* on many occasions by Jews converted to the Christian faith. None
the less, on this pretext many Jews have frequently been seized and detained,
against all justice.
. .
We decree that no Christian shall stir up anything new against [the Jews].
Moreover, if any one, after having known the content of this decree,
should–which we hope will not happen–attempt audaciously to act contrary to
it, then let him suffer punishment in his rank and position, or let him be
punished by the penalty of excommunication, unless he makes amends for his
boldness by proper recompense.”
Innocent IV writing to the German Church in 1247:
We have received a mournful complaint from the Jews of Germany, telling how
some princes, both ecclesiastical and lay, together with other nobles and
powerful persons in your cities and dioceses, devise evil plans against them
and invent various pretexts in order to rob them unjustly of their goods, and
gain possesion thereof. This they do without stopping to consider prudently
that it is from the archives of the Jews, so to speak, that the testimonies of
the Christian faith come forth . . . [The Jews] are falsely accused that at
[Passover] they make communion with the heart of a slain child. This is
alleged to be enjoined by the Law, whereas in fact such an act is manifestly
contrary to it. Moverover, if the body of a dead man is by chance found
anywhere, they maliciously ascribe the cause of death to the action of the
Jews. On this, and many other fictitious pretexts, they rage against the Jews
and despoil them of their possessions, against God and Justice and the
privileges mercifully granted to them by the Holy See.”
Cited in *Chaucer Criticism: The Canterbury Tales*, ed. Richard Schoeck and
Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960, 251-52, 257
n.7.
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 09:21:49 PDT 1996
Article: 67177 of can.politics
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 17: Permanent Treatment
Date: 26 Aug 1996 03:08:03 GMT
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When Will it End? Not Soon, Sensitivity Trainer Declares
Cambridge-based Visions Inc., founded in 1984, has conducted [sensitivity
training] workshops at many high schools and corporations across the country,
and at universities such as Harvard, Virginia Commonwealth and the University
of North Carolina. According to Visions’ Angela Bryant, a lawyer, fees begin
at $1,000 per consultant per day and work on a “sliding scale” according to
what the market will bear.
Visions’ materials define racism as “the systematic oppression of people of
color.” Racism, in Visions’ lexicon, means “white racism,” and not just the
overt variety practiced by the KKK and Aryan Brothers. Intent may be a defense
in the world of law, but it is irrelevant in the world of the sensitivity
trainer. Whites are being racist, says Bryant, “by getting up every morning and
supporting the status quo.”
How will the approach that believes all whites are guilty help solve the
problem of racism on campus? “It’s not about solving it right now,” another
Visions staffer says, “It’s a very long process. Racism has been there for
hundreds of years and it’s going to take hundreds of years to work through it.”
As in Marx’s vision of the classless society, the sensitivity utopia exists
well down at the end of time, leaving plenty of room for historically
inevitable seminars and workshops.
Collier and Horowitz, *Surviving the PC University*, 83
From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 14:57:55 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
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From [email protected] Mon Aug 26 16:27:28 PDT 1996
Article: 52544 of alt.discrimination
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 17: Permanent Treatment
Date: 26 Aug 1996 03:08:03 GMT
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When Will it End? Not Soon, Sensitivity Trainer Declares
Cambridge-based Visions Inc., founded in 1984, has conducted [sensitivity
training] workshops at many high schools and corporations across the country,
and at universities such as Harvard, Virginia Commonwealth and the University
of North Carolina. According to Visions’ Angela Bryant, a lawyer, fees begin
at $1,000 per consultant per day and work on a “sliding scale” according to
what the market will bear.
Visions’ materials define racism as “the systematic oppression of people of
color.” Racism, in Visions’ lexicon, means “white racism,” and not just the
overt variety practiced by the KKK and Aryan Brothers. Intent may be a defense
in the world of law, but it is irrelevant in the world of the sensitivity
trainer. Whites are being racist, says Bryant, “by getting up every morning and
supporting the status quo.”
How will the approach that believes all whites are guilty help solve the
problem of racism on campus? “It’s not about solving it right now,” another
Visions staffer says, “It’s a very long process. Racism has been there for
hundreds of years and it’s going to take hundreds of years to work through it.”
As in Marx’s vision of the classless society, the sensitivity utopia exists
well down at the end of time, leaving plenty of room for historically
inevitable seminars and workshops.
Collier and Horowitz, *Surviving the PC University*, 83
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 07:31:32 PDT 1996
Article: 60256 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 21: Eurocentrism Illustrated
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:04:57 GMT
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An Anti Anti-Racist Explains Eurocentrism
This openness dogma was epitomized by one intellectual who, unencumbered by
acquaintance with my book [*The Closing of the American Mind*], ridiculed me
for not simply accepting that all cultures are equal. He said that this opinion
must be standard equipment for all those who expect to cope with “the century
of the Pacific” which is upon us.
His formulation set my imagination in motion. I decided it might be interesting
to experience a Gulliver’s travel to Japan to see whether we really want to set
our bark on the great Pacific with a relativist compass and without a
“Eurocentric” life jacket. We can weigh anchor at the new, new Standford, whose
slogan has in effect become “Join Stanford and see the world.” When we arrive
in Japan we shall see a thriving nation. Its success clearly has something to
do with its society, which asks much of itself and gets it. It is a real
community; its members have roots. Japanese society is often compared to a
family . . . But the family in general is exclusive. There is an iron wall
separating insiders from outsiders, and its members feel contrary sentiments
toward the two . . . To put it brutally, the Japanese seem to be racists. They
consider themselves superior; they firmly resist immigration; they exclude even
the Koreans who have lived for generations among them. They have difficulty
restraining cabinet officers from explaining that America’s economic failings
are due to blacks.
Should we open ourselves up to this new culture? Sympathize with its tastes?
Should we aim for restrictiveness rather than diversity? Should we experiment
with a more effective racism? All these things could be understood as part of
our interest in keeping up with the Japanese economic miracle. Or they could,
in a tonier vein, help us in our search for community and roots.
Of course, we recoil in horror at even having such thoughts. But how can we
legitimate our horror? It is only the result of our acculturation, excess
baggage brought with us on such voyages of discovery. If there are no
transcultural values, our reaction is Eurocentric. And the one thing we know
absolutely is that Eurocentrism is bad. So we have painted ourselves into a
corner.
. . . . .
This process has been nicely illustrated in recent times by the case of Salman
Rushdie, author of the novel *The Satanic Verses*, which insulted the Muslim
faith and occasioned the Ayatollah Khomeini’s command to have Rushdie killed.
There was general shock throughout the Western world at this, and writers,
whose ox was being gored, rushed before the TV cameras to denounce so blatant
an attack on the inviolable principle of freedom of speech. All well and good.
But the kicker was that most of these very same writers had for many years been
teaching that we must respect the integrity of other cultures and that it was
arrogant Eurocentrism to judge other cultures according to our standards,
themselves merely products of our culture. In this case, however, all such
reasonings were forgotten, and the Eurocentric principle of freedom of speech
was treated as though its claims to transcultural status, its claims to be
valid everywhere and always, were true. A few days earlier such claims had been
treated as instruments of American imperialism; miraculously they were
transformed into absolutes. By now, however, one can see a softening on the
question of Rushdie’s innocence among the more modish radical intellectuals.
>From Alan Bloom, “Western Civ–and Me,” *Commentary*, August 1990
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 07:31:33 PDT 1996
Article: 60273 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 23: Inspiring Oratory
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:31:11 GMT
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An Inspiring Piece of Anti-Racist Oratory at Kean College
Brothers and sisters, the so-called Jew, and I must say so-called Jew, because
you’re not a true Jew. You are [a] Johnny-come-lately Jew who just crawled out
of the caves and hills of Europe just a little over 4,000 years ago. You’re not
>from the original people. You are a European strain of people who crawled
around on your all fours in the caves and hills of Europe, eating juniper roots
and eating each other. You know nothing about fire. You know nothing about
funeral science or nothing about embalming. You left your dead right in the
caves with you and you slept with your dead for 2,000 years, smelling the
stench coming up from the decomposing body. You know nothing about bathrooms
and toilets and restrooms and sanitation systems. You did your No. 1 and your
No.2, your pee-pee and your doo-doo, which should be a don’t-don’t, right in
the caves and hills of Europe. You slept in your urination and your defecation,
generation after generation, for 2,000 years.
>From “Hate Speech Defined: The Ravings of Dr Khalid Mohammad,” *Heterodoxy*,
February 1994.
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 07:31:34 PDT 1996
Article: 60274 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 22: Then and Now
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:20:46 GMT
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Bernadine Dohrn Confesses Her Sins: Early Sensitivity Training
A faction coached by their erstwhile tutor [Marxist Clayton] Van Lydegraf
presented itself as a “Revolutionary Committee” that would judge them. Using as
their operating manual the purge of Communist Party leader Earl Browder in the
late forties, Van Lydegraf and his proteges put Bernadine, Ayers, Jones and the
rest [ie. the Weather Underground leadership] on trial, accusing them of
promoting a “white and male chauvinist line” and of committing “crimes against
national liberation struggles, women and the anti-imperialist left.”
. . . . .
Finally, the Central Committee members were brought individually into a room to
face their inquisition. Catechized by the Revolutionary Committee, they all
confessed to their own misdeeds and betrayed one another. Lydegraf’s greatest
coup was “turning” Bernadine, who admitted her “crimes” in a self-abasing tape:
“This is Bernadine Dohrn. I am making this tape to acknowledge, repudiate, and
denounce the counterrevolutionary politics and direction of the Weather
Underground Organization.” Referring to a communique the Central Committee had
issued on the occasion of the Vietnamese cease-fire that failed to mention
“imperialist attacks” on the Black Liberation Army, she said of her omissions:
“These are crimes–they are naked white supremacy, white superiority, and
chauvinist arrogance.” Sins against the women’s movement followed: “For seven
years I have upheld a politics which is male supremacist and opposed to the
struggle of women for liberation . . . I have been a token woman, part of the
structure of women’s leadership which actually served male supremacy.”
When she tried to offer an explanation for her crimes, Bernadine was at a loss:
“Why did we do this? I don’t really know. We followed the classic path of
so-called revolutionaries who sold out the revolution. For me to understand
this requires much more study and struggle. What I do know is that by standing
on my anti-imperialist record in a self-satisfied and self-justifying way, by
assuming that I was beyond white privilege or allying with male privilege
because I understood it, I prepared and led the way for a totally opportunistic
direction which infected all our work and betrayed revolutionary principles.”
Collier and Horowitz, *Destructive Generation* (New York: Summit, 1989),
114-15.
The Onion Theory Today
At Harvard, the minority affairs dean handpicked and assigned “designated race
relations tutors” to each house to “monitor the racial atmosphere,” report
“violations of community,” and “raise consciousness” among the students. She
also engaged an outside “facilitator company” to conduct “house workshops” on
racism. Among the material used in this consciousness-raising operation was a
pamphlet which presumed students guilty of racism a priori. The pamphlet urged
students to “accept the onion theory, that they will continue to peel away
layers of their own racism for the rest of their lives.” Even a “Back to the
Fifties” party by dining-hall employees was denounced as “racism” by the
minority affairs dean, on the grounds that the 1950s were a racist decade.
Thomas Sowell, *Inside American Education* (New York: Free Press, 1993), 197-98
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 07:31:35 PDT 1996
Article: 60278 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Sues Anti-Racists: Trouble in Paradise
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:45:12 GMT
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A Horrible, Unthinkable Thought: Are Anti-Racists Actually Racist?
Ontario’s Human Rights Commission is embroiled in a $5.5 million lawsuit over
allegations of racism and conspiracy within its ranks.
A black manager, fired for mismanagement and discrimination against non-blacks,
claims other commission employees “fabricated” charges against him.
Glen Morrison also maintains he was fired for complaining to superiors about
investigators’ “poor performance and lack of investigative skills” after he was
promoted to clean up the agency’s racially troubled Mississauga office.
Morrison, a former Metro Police officer, has lost his home, health and
reputation since being fired, his lawyer, Ernest Guiste, told the *Sunday Sun*.
“It looks like a number of individuals decided they were going to get rid of
this fellow,” Guiste said.
. . . . .
Morrison complained several times about his staff problems and says his
complaints were first ignored and later provoked a “campaign of confrontation,
criticism . . . (and) continual harassment” by his white boss, Marty Schreiter.
Schreiter denied the allegation yesterday and said he left the commission well
before Morrison was fired.
“Obviously I have a different view, one which I feel sufficient to justify my
actions as a director,” Schreiter said.
During the same period, one of Morrison’s employees filed complaints alleging
discrimination on the grounds of race.
Cora Tayag stated in an April 1993 human rights complaint that because she was
Filipino she had been passed over for jobs then given to less qualified blacks.
Her complaint is still pending.
However, the commission ordered an internal review of the charges, and in July
1994 government investigator Mark Jackson concluded Morrison had not
discriminated against Tayag during the job-hiring process. However, Jackson
said Morrison did discriminate against Tayag and other non-black staff at work
and that a “poisoned environment based on race” pervaded the office.
Among the complaints made by non-black staff detailed in the report were
allegations that:
* Morrison gave preferential treatment to blacks, particularly Jamaicans, when
he hired and pursued cases. “I feel as though I have no future because I am
white,” one staff member said.
* Morrison shouted at, belittled and condescended to non-black staff. “He seems
to feel that all whites and non-blacks are racist,” a staffer said.
“Conversations were held among the office staff about racism in the office in
which it was felt that unless you were black, you were not going to be treated
fairly,” another said.
* Morrison called East Indians “liars” and told staff to put complaints from
two East Indians on the “bottom of the pile because you know what they’re like;
they will complain about nothing.”
Black staff had no such complaints but non-blacks felt “threatened and even
terrorized” by Morrison, the investigator concluded, a perception existed he
was “untouchable because of his connections within the OHRC.” Acting on the
report, commission executive director Remy Beauregard removed Morrison from his
position as regional manager on Dec. 1, 1994.
Morrison denies the allegations in the investigator’s report. “There s no truth
to or basis to the allegations that he discriminated against the defendant
Tayag or any other member of his staff,” his statement of claim says. “The
defendants have fabricated this particular allegation against him in an attempt
to fabricate legal cause for his dismissal.”
Tayag insisted yesterday that Morrison is the one doing the fabricating.
“All the things he said in that statement of claim were fabricated,” she said.
“He’s a very vicious person.”
>From James Wallace, “Rights Agency Sued for $5.5M: Fired Manager Claims
Racism,” Toronto *Sunday Sun* 25 August 1996
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 07:31:36 PDT 1996
Article: 60281 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Re: Anti-Racist Education 18: Debating Techniques
Date: 27 Aug 1996 07:25:35 GMT
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<[email protected]>
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
>
> So, were you going to say something about anti-racists? Or are you just
> going to blather on about a “small group of radicals” whom everyone
> recognizes as racists of a different color, and represent only “a small
> group of radicals”?
>
Of course you should have grasped by now that by “anti-racism” I don’t mean
opposed to racism, but obsessed with race. That the majority of those opposed
to racism are not obsessed with race is well and good; that a growing number
are so obsessed, to the point of imitating what they ostensibly seek to
eliminate, is a development that ought, surely, to concern us. And that decent
people who oppose racism often fail to stand up to “anti-racists” is
frightening, at least to me.
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 09:17:14 PDT 1996
Article: 67457 of can.politics
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 21: Eurocentrism Illustrated
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:04:57 GMT
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An Anti Anti-Racist Explains Eurocentrism
This openness dogma was epitomized by one intellectual who, unencumbered by
acquaintance with my book [*The Closing of the American Mind*], ridiculed me
for not simply accepting that all cultures are equal. He said that this opinion
must be standard equipment for all those who expect to cope with “the century
of the Pacific” which is upon us.
His formulation set my imagination in motion. I decided it might be interesting
to experience a Gulliver’s travel to Japan to see whether we really want to set
our bark on the great Pacific with a relativist compass and without a
“Eurocentric” life jacket. We can weigh anchor at the new, new Standford, whose
slogan has in effect become “Join Stanford and see the world.” When we arrive
in Japan we shall see a thriving nation. Its success clearly has something to
do with its society, which asks much of itself and gets it. It is a real
community; its members have roots. Japanese society is often compared to a
family . . . But the family in general is exclusive. There is an iron wall
separating insiders from outsiders, and its members feel contrary sentiments
toward the two . . . To put it brutally, the Japanese seem to be racists. They
consider themselves superior; they firmly resist immigration; they exclude even
the Koreans who have lived for generations among them. They have difficulty
restraining cabinet officers from explaining that America’s economic failings
are due to blacks.
Should we open ourselves up to this new culture? Sympathize with its tastes?
Should we aim for restrictiveness rather than diversity? Should we experiment
with a more effective racism? All these things could be understood as part of
our interest in keeping up with the Japanese economic miracle. Or they could,
in a tonier vein, help us in our search for community and roots.
Of course, we recoil in horror at even having such thoughts. But how can we
legitimate our horror? It is only the result of our acculturation, excess
baggage brought with us on such voyages of discovery. If there are no
transcultural values, our reaction is Eurocentric. And the one thing we know
absolutely is that Eurocentrism is bad. So we have painted ourselves into a
corner.
. . . . .
This process has been nicely illustrated in recent times by the case of Salman
Rushdie, author of the novel *The Satanic Verses*, which insulted the Muslim
faith and occasioned the Ayatollah Khomeini’s command to have Rushdie killed.
There was general shock throughout the Western world at this, and writers,
whose ox was being gored, rushed before the TV cameras to denounce so blatant
an attack on the inviolable principle of freedom of speech. All well and good.
But the kicker was that most of these very same writers had for many years been
teaching that we must respect the integrity of other cultures and that it was
arrogant Eurocentrism to judge other cultures according to our standards,
themselves merely products of our culture. In this case, however, all such
reasonings were forgotten, and the Eurocentric principle of freedom of speech
was treated as though its claims to transcultural status, its claims to be
valid everywhere and always, were true. A few days earlier such claims had been
treated as instruments of American imperialism; miraculously they were
transformed into absolutes. By now, however, one can see a softening on the
question of Rushdie’s innocence among the more modish radical intellectuals.
>From Alan Bloom, “Western Civ–and Me,” *Commentary*, August 1990
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 09:17:16 PDT 1996
Article: 67466 of can.politics
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 23: Inspiring Oratory
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:31:11 GMT
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An Inspiring Piece of Anti-Racist Oratory at Kean College
Brothers and sisters, the so-called Jew, and I must say so-called Jew, because
you’re not a true Jew. You are [a] Johnny-come-lately Jew who just crawled out
of the caves and hills of Europe just a little over 4,000 years ago. You’re not
>from the original people. You are a European strain of people who crawled
around on your all fours in the caves and hills of Europe, eating juniper roots
and eating each other. You know nothing about fire. You know nothing about
funeral science or nothing about embalming. You left your dead right in the
caves with you and you slept with your dead for 2,000 years, smelling the
stench coming up from the decomposing body. You know nothing about bathrooms
and toilets and restrooms and sanitation systems. You did your No. 1 and your
No.2, your pee-pee and your doo-doo, which should be a don’t-don’t, right in
the caves and hills of Europe. You slept in your urination and your defecation,
generation after generation, for 2,000 years.
>From “Hate Speech Defined: The Ravings of Dr Khalid Mohammad,” *Heterodoxy*,
February 1994.
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 09:17:17 PDT 1996
Article: 67467 of can.politics
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 22: Then and Now
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:20:46 GMT
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Bernadine Dohrn Confesses Her Sins: Early Sensitivity Training
A faction coached by their erstwhile tutor [Marxist Clayton] Van Lydegraf
presented itself as a “Revolutionary Committee” that would judge them. Using as
their operating manual the purge of Communist Party leader Earl Browder in the
late forties, Van Lydegraf and his proteges put Bernadine, Ayers, Jones and the
rest [ie. the Weather Underground leadership] on trial, accusing them of
promoting a “white and male chauvinist line” and of committing “crimes against
national liberation struggles, women and the anti-imperialist left.”
. . . . .
Finally, the Central Committee members were brought individually into a room to
face their inquisition. Catechized by the Revolutionary Committee, they all
confessed to their own misdeeds and betrayed one another. Lydegraf’s greatest
coup was “turning” Bernadine, who admitted her “crimes” in a self-abasing tape:
“This is Bernadine Dohrn. I am making this tape to acknowledge, repudiate, and
denounce the counterrevolutionary politics and direction of the Weather
Underground Organization.” Referring to a communique the Central Committee had
issued on the occasion of the Vietnamese cease-fire that failed to mention
“imperialist attacks” on the Black Liberation Army, she said of her omissions:
“These are crimes–they are naked white supremacy, white superiority, and
chauvinist arrogance.” Sins against the women’s movement followed: “For seven
years I have upheld a politics which is male supremacist and opposed to the
struggle of women for liberation . . . I have been a token woman, part of the
structure of women’s leadership which actually served male supremacy.”
When she tried to offer an explanation for her crimes, Bernadine was at a loss:
“Why did we do this? I don’t really know. We followed the classic path of
so-called revolutionaries who sold out the revolution. For me to understand
this requires much more study and struggle. What I do know is that by standing
on my anti-imperialist record in a self-satisfied and self-justifying way, by
assuming that I was beyond white privilege or allying with male privilege
because I understood it, I prepared and led the way for a totally opportunistic
direction which infected all our work and betrayed revolutionary principles.”
Collier and Horowitz, *Destructive Generation* (New York: Summit, 1989),
114-15.
The Onion Theory Today
At Harvard, the minority affairs dean handpicked and assigned “designated race
relations tutors” to each house to “monitor the racial atmosphere,” report
“violations of community,” and “raise consciousness” among the students. She
also engaged an outside “facilitator company” to conduct “house workshops” on
racism. Among the material used in this consciousness-raising operation was a
pamphlet which presumed students guilty of racism a priori. The pamphlet urged
students to “accept the onion theory, that they will continue to peel away
layers of their own racism for the rest of their lives.” Even a “Back to the
Fifties” party by dining-hall employees was denounced as “racism” by the
minority affairs dean, on the grounds that the 1950s were a racist decade.
Thomas Sowell, *Inside American Education* (New York: Free Press, 1993), 197-98
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 09:17:18 PDT 1996
Article: 67470 of can.politics
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Sues Anti-Racists: Trouble in Paradise
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:45:12 GMT
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A Horrible, Unthinkable Thought: Are Anti-Racists Actually Racist?
Ontario’s Human Rights Commission is embroiled in a $5.5 million lawsuit over
allegations of racism and conspiracy within its ranks.
A black manager, fired for mismanagement and discrimination against non-blacks,
claims other commission employees “fabricated” charges against him.
Glen Morrison also maintains he was fired for complaining to superiors about
investigators’ “poor performance and lack of investigative skills” after he was
promoted to clean up the agency’s racially troubled Mississauga office.
Morrison, a former Metro Police officer, has lost his home, health and
reputation since being fired, his lawyer, Ernest Guiste, told the *Sunday Sun*.
“It looks like a number of individuals decided they were going to get rid of
this fellow,” Guiste said.
. . . . .
Morrison complained several times about his staff problems and says his
complaints were first ignored and later provoked a “campaign of confrontation,
criticism . . . (and) continual harassment” by his white boss, Marty Schreiter.
Schreiter denied the allegation yesterday and said he left the commission well
before Morrison was fired.
“Obviously I have a different view, one which I feel sufficient to justify my
actions as a director,” Schreiter said.
During the same period, one of Morrison’s employees filed complaints alleging
discrimination on the grounds of race.
Cora Tayag stated in an April 1993 human rights complaint that because she was
Filipino she had been passed over for jobs then given to less qualified blacks.
Her complaint is still pending.
However, the commission ordered an internal review of the charges, and in July
1994 government investigator Mark Jackson concluded Morrison had not
discriminated against Tayag during the job-hiring process. However, Jackson
said Morrison did discriminate against Tayag and other non-black staff at work
and that a “poisoned environment based on race” pervaded the office.
Among the complaints made by non-black staff detailed in the report were
allegations that:
* Morrison gave preferential treatment to blacks, particularly Jamaicans, when
he hired and pursued cases. “I feel as though I have no future because I am
white,” one staff member said.
* Morrison shouted at, belittled and condescended to non-black staff. “He seems
to feel that all whites and non-blacks are racist,” a staffer said.
“Conversations were held among the office staff about racism in the office in
which it was felt that unless you were black, you were not going to be treated
fairly,” another said.
* Morrison called East Indians “liars” and told staff to put complaints from
two East Indians on the “bottom of the pile because you know what they’re like;
they will complain about nothing.”
Black staff had no such complaints but non-blacks felt “threatened and even
terrorized” by Morrison, the investigator concluded, a perception existed he
was “untouchable because of his connections within the OHRC.” Acting on the
report, commission executive director Remy Beauregard removed Morrison from his
position as regional manager on Dec. 1, 1994.
Morrison denies the allegations in the investigator’s report. “There s no truth
to or basis to the allegations that he discriminated against the defendant
Tayag or any other member of his staff,” his statement of claim says. “The
defendants have fabricated this particular allegation against him in an attempt
to fabricate legal cause for his dismissal.”
Tayag insisted yesterday that Morrison is the one doing the fabricating.
“All the things he said in that statement of claim were fabricated,” she said.
“He’s a very vicious person.”
>From James Wallace, “Rights Agency Sued for $5.5M: Fired Manager Claims
Racism,” Toronto *Sunday Sun* 25 August 1996
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 09:17:19 PDT 1996
Article: 67475 of can.politics
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Re: Anti-Racist Education 18: Debating Techniques
Date: 27 Aug 1996 07:25:35 GMT
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<[email protected]>
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
>
> So, were you going to say something about anti-racists? Or are you just
> going to blather on about a “small group of radicals” whom everyone
> recognizes as racists of a different color, and represent only “a small
> group of radicals”?
>
Of course you should have grasped by now that by “anti-racism” I don’t mean
opposed to racism, but obsessed with race. That the majority of those opposed
to racism are not obsessed with race is well and good; that a growing number
are so obsessed, to the point of imitating what they ostensibly seek to
eliminate, is a development that ought, surely, to concern us. And that decent
people who oppose racism often fail to stand up to “anti-racists” is
frightening, at least to me.
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 12:48:01 PDT 1996
Article: 52591 of alt.discrimination
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 21: Eurocentrism Illustrated
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:04:57 GMT
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An Anti Anti-Racist Explains Eurocentrism
This openness dogma was epitomized by one intellectual who, unencumbered by
acquaintance with my book [*The Closing of the American Mind*], ridiculed me
for not simply accepting that all cultures are equal. He said that this opinion
must be standard equipment for all those who expect to cope with “the century
of the Pacific” which is upon us.
His formulation set my imagination in motion. I decided it might be interesting
to experience a Gulliver’s travel to Japan to see whether we really want to set
our bark on the great Pacific with a relativist compass and without a
“Eurocentric” life jacket. We can weigh anchor at the new, new Standford, whose
slogan has in effect become “Join Stanford and see the world.” When we arrive
in Japan we shall see a thriving nation. Its success clearly has something to
do with its society, which asks much of itself and gets it. It is a real
community; its members have roots. Japanese society is often compared to a
family . . . But the family in general is exclusive. There is an iron wall
separating insiders from outsiders, and its members feel contrary sentiments
toward the two . . . To put it brutally, the Japanese seem to be racists. They
consider themselves superior; they firmly resist immigration; they exclude even
the Koreans who have lived for generations among them. They have difficulty
restraining cabinet officers from explaining that America’s economic failings
are due to blacks.
Should we open ourselves up to this new culture? Sympathize with its tastes?
Should we aim for restrictiveness rather than diversity? Should we experiment
with a more effective racism? All these things could be understood as part of
our interest in keeping up with the Japanese economic miracle. Or they could,
in a tonier vein, help us in our search for community and roots.
Of course, we recoil in horror at even having such thoughts. But how can we
legitimate our horror? It is only the result of our acculturation, excess
baggage brought with us on such voyages of discovery. If there are no
transcultural values, our reaction is Eurocentric. And the one thing we know
absolutely is that Eurocentrism is bad. So we have painted ourselves into a
corner.
. . . . .
This process has been nicely illustrated in recent times by the case of Salman
Rushdie, author of the novel *The Satanic Verses*, which insulted the Muslim
faith and occasioned the Ayatollah Khomeini’s command to have Rushdie killed.
There was general shock throughout the Western world at this, and writers,
whose ox was being gored, rushed before the TV cameras to denounce so blatant
an attack on the inviolable principle of freedom of speech. All well and good.
But the kicker was that most of these very same writers had for many years been
teaching that we must respect the integrity of other cultures and that it was
arrogant Eurocentrism to judge other cultures according to our standards,
themselves merely products of our culture. In this case, however, all such
reasonings were forgotten, and the Eurocentric principle of freedom of speech
was treated as though its claims to transcultural status, its claims to be
valid everywhere and always, were true. A few days earlier such claims had been
treated as instruments of American imperialism; miraculously they were
transformed into absolutes. By now, however, one can see a softening on the
question of Rushdie’s innocence among the more modish radical intellectuals.
>From Alan Bloom, “Western Civ–and Me,” *Commentary*, August 1990
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 12:48:02 PDT 1996
Article: 52595 of alt.discrimination
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 23: Inspiring Oratory
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:31:11 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
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An Inspiring Piece of Anti-Racist Oratory at Kean College
Brothers and sisters, the so-called Jew, and I must say so-called Jew, because
you’re not a true Jew. You are [a] Johnny-come-lately Jew who just crawled out
of the caves and hills of Europe just a little over 4,000 years ago. You’re not
>from the original people. You are a European strain of people who crawled
around on your all fours in the caves and hills of Europe, eating juniper roots
and eating each other. You know nothing about fire. You know nothing about
funeral science or nothing about embalming. You left your dead right in the
caves with you and you slept with your dead for 2,000 years, smelling the
stench coming up from the decomposing body. You know nothing about bathrooms
and toilets and restrooms and sanitation systems. You did your No. 1 and your
No.2, your pee-pee and your doo-doo, which should be a don’t-don’t, right in
the caves and hills of Europe. You slept in your urination and your defecation,
generation after generation, for 2,000 years.
>From “Hate Speech Defined: The Ravings of Dr Khalid Mohammad,” *Heterodoxy*,
February 1994.
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 12:48:03 PDT 1996
Article: 52596 of alt.discrimination
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 22: Then and Now
Date: 27 Aug 1996 06:20:46 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
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Bernadine Dohrn Confesses Her Sins: Early Sensitivity Training
A faction coached by their erstwhile tutor [Marxist Clayton] Van Lydegraf
presented itself as a “Revolutionary Committee” that would judge them. Using as
their operating manual the purge of Communist Party leader Earl Browder in the
late forties, Van Lydegraf and his proteges put Bernadine, Ayers, Jones and the
rest [ie. the Weather Underground leadership] on trial, accusing them of
promoting a “white and male chauvinist line” and of committing “crimes against
national liberation struggles, women and the anti-imperialist left.”
. . . . .
Finally, the Central Committee members were brought individually into a room to
face their inquisition. Catechized by the Revolutionary Committee, they all
confessed to their own misdeeds and betrayed one another. Lydegraf’s greatest
coup was “turning” Bernadine, who admitted her “crimes” in a self-abasing tape:
“This is Bernadine Dohrn. I am making this tape to acknowledge, repudiate, and
denounce the counterrevolutionary politics and direction of the Weather
Underground Organization.” Referring to a communique the Central Committee had
issued on the occasion of the Vietnamese cease-fire that failed to mention
“imperialist attacks” on the Black Liberation Army, she said of her omissions:
“These are crimes–they are naked white supremacy, white superiority, and
chauvinist arrogance.” Sins against the women’s movement followed: “For seven
years I have upheld a politics which is male supremacist and opposed to the
struggle of women for liberation . . . I have been a token woman, part of the
structure of women’s leadership which actually served male supremacy.”
When she tried to offer an explanation for her crimes, Bernadine was at a loss:
“Why did we do this? I don’t really know. We followed the classic path of
so-called revolutionaries who sold out the revolution. For me to understand
this requires much more study and struggle. What I do know is that by standing
on my anti-imperialist record in a self-satisfied and self-justifying way, by
assuming that I was beyond white privilege or allying with male privilege
because I understood it, I prepared and led the way for a totally opportunistic
direction which infected all our work and betrayed revolutionary principles.”
Collier and Horowitz, *Destructive Generation* (New York: Summit, 1989),
114-15.
The Onion Theory Today
At Harvard, the minority affairs dean handpicked and assigned “designated race
relations tutors” to each house to “monitor the racial atmosphere,” report
“violations of community,” and “raise consciousness” among the students. She
also engaged an outside “facilitator company” to conduct “house workshops” on
racism. Among the material used in this consciousness-raising operation was a
pamphlet which presumed students guilty of racism a priori. The pamphlet urged
students to “accept the onion theory, that they will continue to peel away
layers of their own racism for the rest of their lives.” Even a “Back to the
Fifties” party by dining-hall employees was denounced as “racism” by the
minority affairs dean, on the grounds that the 1950s were a racist decade.
Thomas Sowell, *Inside American Education* (New York: Free Press, 1993), 197-98
From [email protected] Tue Aug 27 12:48:04 PDT 1996
Article: 52599 of alt.discrimination
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Re: Anti-Racist Education 18: Debating Techniques
Date: 27 Aug 1996 07:25:35 GMT
Organization: Netcom Canada
Lines: 22
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
>
> So, were you going to say something about anti-racists? Or are you just
> going to blather on about a “small group of radicals” whom everyone
> recognizes as racists of a different color, and represent only “a small
> group of radicals”?
>
Of course you should have grasped by now that by “anti-racism” I don’t mean
opposed to racism, but obsessed with race. That the majority of those opposed
to racism are not obsessed with race is well and good; that a growing number
are so obsessed, to the point of imitating what they ostensibly seek to
eliminate, is a development that ought, surely, to concern us. And that decent
people who oppose racism often fail to stand up to “anti-racists” is
frightening, at least to me.
From [email protected] Wed Aug 28 07:32:06 PDT 1996
Article: 60481 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 24: A New Apartheid
Date: 28 Aug 1996 08:48:57 GMT
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Anti-Racist Examinations: Apartheid with a Human Face
The University of Ottawa Law School would like to be fair to racial minority
students and single-parents. It has drawn up guidelines to assist in
“accommodating” them. It succeeds only in stigmatizing them.
“The Education Equity Programme,” say the guidelines, “offers all students who
feel that traditional examination arrangements are prejudicial to their optimum
performance the opportunity to apply for exam accommodation.” Why? “The
examination process with its systemic components may disadvantage some
persons.” This makes for nervous reading, but we continue on, trying to keep an
open mind
. . . Further into the guidelines, however, the discomfort level suddenly
rises. Among the grounds for “accommodation” are “barriers related to race and
culture” and “family responsibility.” What does this mean? The rules are vague,
but why worry? This is a law school. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, as part-time professor Alan Kaufman found out. Last December, five
of his 54 students were given double the usual time–six hours instead of
three–to write their exam. They even sat their tests in a different room. This
privilege has apparently been extended to a large number of students over the
past two and a half years, and it is believed that a good number of those
receiving this dispensation had no legitimate need for it.
The university does not like to discuss specific cases, but it appears that
some students have been given this privilege not for reasons of physical
disability, but because of “barriers related to race and culture”–which
apparently means nothing more than that their skin has more melanin than
average–or those nebulous “family responsibilities.”
Mr. Kaufman, apparently the only academic brave enough to speak out against
this nonsense, wonders about the fairness of such exceptions. “Half my class at
any one time had part-time jobs, or family at home or all sorts of other
problems,” he noted. Are they entitled to special treatment as well? Should the
length of stay in the examination room be based on their
racial/gender/socio-economic profile?
The law school says it is reviewing the policy, and expects to introduce new
guidelines in the coming weeks. Having already shown itself to be disadvantaged
when it comes to common sense, the university might want to take a little more
time than average to produce these new rules.
“Examination by Disadvantage,” Toronto *Globe and Mail* Editorial, 19 February
1994
A Room of One’s Own
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. The University of Guelph has a room. King’s
dream was that one day all men and women would be judged not by the colour of
their skin, but by the content of their character.
But at the Clarence Mumford Centre at Guelph . . . some members of the student
collective which runs the place apparently had a different dream. It was that
no whites should be allowed in a portion of the room so that students of colour
would have a “safe space” away from the systemic racism of whites.
In a joint statement issued this week after the controversy hit the media, the
university administration and the student collective said the lounge was in
fact open to everyone, and there was no policy banning whites.
Still, to learn where such strange ideas come from, you need look no further
than a major paper released this summer called “The Final Report of the
President’s Task Force on Anti-Racism and Race Relations.” The university chose
the task force which reported to its president, now Mordechai Rozanski. Listen
to some of the wording in this lengthy document which also contains numerous
recommendations for establishing a so-called “anti-racist” environment at
Guelph.
And ask yourself whether it’s the kind of rhetoric that would tend to encourage
a climate of harmony and civility among white and non-white students.
>From the preamble: “In our society, the main racial strife pits white people
against people of colour and aboriginal peoples principally because of the
history, practices and attitudes of the collective white majority.”
“Racism occurs when members of one race with power oppress those of another
race who have less power and are often fewer in number. Racism infringes on the
human rights of people of colour and aboriginal peoples. They are its victims
of choice . . . Our home-grown Canadian racism is known for one important
assumption, usually unspoken, that white people must have the upper hand if the
cultural and social values of western civilization are to be preserved.”
“Racism affects not only its targets. It also has a negative effect on white
people who, wittingly or unwittingly, keep racism alive in this country. For
generations social privilege has been connected with white racial identity . .
. The task force contends that racism is interwoven in the culture of
Eurocentric civilization . . . Racism appears to be a permanent feature of
white western civilization.”
The report goes on (and on and on) in this vein, but you get the idea. Now, if
some students of colour at Guelph University think our society is just so awful
and racist that they need a “safe place” away from it, wouldn’t you have to say
that at least they came by it honestly?
>From Lorrie Goldstein, “No Room for Racism,” Toronto *Sun*, 27 January 1995
From [email protected] Wed Aug 28 07:32:07 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 25: Eye of the Beholder
Date: 28 Aug 1996 09:00:13 GMT
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Strange Hearing Loss, Medical Science Baffled
That brisk morning of April 19, 1969, is part of legend now at Cornell
University. It was the day that several dozen black students stormed Willard
Straight Hall, the student-union building, and proceeded to expel dozens of
parents who were visiting for Parents Weekend. Upset by the university’s
supposed mistreatment of black students, the malcontents refused to evacuate
the building and declared, “Cornell has three hours to live . . . In the past
it has been all the black people who have done all the dying. Now the time has
come when the pigs are going to die, too.”
. . . . .
Tom Jones, one of the 1969 leaders [of the take over] and now the president of
the world’s largest pension-fund company, expressed remorse over his actions
[twenty-five years earlier] and called for racial reconciliation. “Students
should build a society that respects and celebrates diversity but also affirms
a greater sense of community, transcends our diversity, and unites us as one
people despite our various colors and cultures and creeds,” he said. “People
are retreating into racial and ethnic enclaves all around the world. It is a
virulent disease reminiscent of the era of tribalism which preceded the
formation of nation states. But tribalism will not create a better future for
our children.”
. . . . .
The most controversial aspect of the anniversary celebration was a
university-sponsored rally where contemporary Cornell student speakers used the
occasion to unleash a fury of virulent anti-white speeches. Hakhi Alakhun, a
student from nearby Syracuse University, spouted a profanity and hate-filled
speech reminiscent of Khalid Muhammed. “The filthy, diseased white man is
[responsible] for the way we are treated,” he said, continuing the harangue by
telling white students to “take a look at the mirror and see your ugly face.”
Alakhun then chastised blacks who associated with other races and lambasted
interracial dating, goading black males to “return to your black women.”
Predictably, the Cornell *Daily Sun*, the school paper, neglected to mention
Alakhun’s speech in the next day’s edition and reported on the milder speeches.
And although administration officials were present at the rally, none bothered
to condemn his hateful speech. “I would rather not characterize that speech one
way or another,” said Dean [of Students John] Ford. He instead said the true
meaning of the speech depended on the “eye of the beholder.”
>From Ken Lee, “Still Under Seige,” *Heterodoxy*, May-June 1994
From [email protected] Wed Aug 28 07:32:08 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 26: Antecedents
Date: 28 Aug 1996 09:09:50 GMT
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An Early Anti Anti-Racist Describes the Origins of Multiculturalism
Polylogism [ie. anti-racist multiculturalism] and irrationalism attack
praxeology [ie. the science of human action] and economics. Although they
formulate their statements in a general way to refer to all branches of
knowledge, it is the sciences of human action that they really have in view.
They say that it is an illusion to believe that scientific research can achieve
results valid for people of all eras, races, social classes, and they take
pleasure in disparaging certain physical and biological theories as bourgeois
or Western. But if the solution of practical problems requires the application
of their stigmatized doctrines, they forget their criticism. The technology of
Soviet Russia utilizes without scruple the results of bourgeois physics,
chemistry, and biology just as if they were valid for all classes. The Nazi
engineers and physicians did not disdain to utilize the theories, discoveries,
and inventions of people of “inferior” races and nations. The behavior of
people of all races, nations, religions, linguistic groups, and social classes
clearly proves that they do not endorse the doctrines of polylogism and
irrationalism as far as logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences are
concerned.
Ludwig Von Mises, *Human Action* (1949; rpt Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1966),
5-6.
The Academic Left’s Nihilist Roots
Historians of the future will, in fact, wonder in amazement at the domination
of academic thinking in the post-Cold War America by ideas that were first made
fashionable by Nazis and Communists and their intellectual teachers. What do
Heidegger, Foucault, DeMan, Althusser, Gramsci, Nietzsche and Marx have in
common but their popularity among American academics and their place in an
intellectual tradition that gave rise to Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and
Hitler?
Of course, the academic Left, which everywhere else insists on the connection
between theory and praxis, in this case can find no connection between the
anti-liberal and nihilist agendas to which it pays intellectual homage, and the
dreadful acts committed by the Communists and fascists who were actually guided
by them. “Is it possible,” asks David Hirsch, an eloquent critic of the
academic Left, “that there should be no connection between the Nazis’ efforts
to murder God in Auschwitz and Heidegger’s attempt to deconstruct the
metaphysical tradition in Western philosophy, which is to say his attempt to
destroy the fusion of Hellenism and Hebraism which is Christianity? In fact,
are we not bound in all honesty to say that the real-world endpoint of the
deconstruction of the logocentric tradition is precisely Auschwitz?”
But why stop at Auschwitz? Aren’t the theories that underpin the flights of
Frederic Jameson, Houston Baker, Terry Eagleton and other stars of the academic
Left precisely the ideas that led to the creation of the Soviet gulag with its
tens of millions of victims, whose only crime was to be politically incorrect?
>From David Horowitz, “The Decline of Academic Discourse,” *Heterodoxy*, January
1994.
From [email protected] Wed Aug 28 07:32:08 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
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alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 27: PC Potpourri
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Anti-Racist Film Review
AGONIZING REAPPRAISALS: On May 19, the Goethe-Institut in Atlanta presented a
screening and discussion of Stanley Kubrick’s *The Shining.* The pamphlet
advertising the event said of *The Shining*: “Widely misread as a conventional
horror film when released, this adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel is in
fact a scathing symbolic commentary on the history of white male America’s
brutal rejection of culture, race, and gender difference.”
(*Heterodoxy,* May-June 1993)
Diversity Activism: Unsatirizable
PC TOILETS: In the latest battle for gender equality, UC Santa Cruz student,
Kanya Dorland, is fighting with the university over campus bathroom signs.
Dorland says that the signs perpetuate sexist stereotypes by showing a “petite,
passive woman in a dress, and an aggressive, broad shouldered man in pants.” If
the university does not change the signs, Dorland suggests that the women of
UCSC “empower themselves” by tearing them off the doors. This has caused a stir
with the administration, as each of the signs costs $15 to produce, and with
400 bathrooms on campus, this would ring up quite a bill.
(*Heterodoxy,* May-June 1993)
Revisionist Discoveries by Anti-Racist Historians
[Baba Kak] Kondo [history professor at Bowie State University in Maryland]
holds [in the *Black Student’s Guide to Positive Education*, a “diversity” text
endorsed by the Maryland state multicultural program] that black Afrikans . . .
were the first humans, the first Europeans, the inhabitants of Sumer, the
original Egyptians, the original Jews, the original Greeks, and the original
Italians. Moreover, Beethoven was Afrikan, along with Alexander Hamilton,
Pushkin, Robert Browning, Saint Jerome, and the prophet Muhammad’s maternal
grandmother. Afrikans discovered farming, invented literacy, created at Luxor
the world’s first university . . . Indeed, Afrika was the “epitome of
civilizations” in times when “western Europe lived in a state of savagery and
barbarity featuring filth, sexual disease, incest, homosexuality, bestiality,
and anarchy” . . . [*African-American Baseline Essays*], a source for writers
like Kondo, holds that most of the significant accomplishments of early man
originated in black Africa. Black Africans in ancient times pioneered the
science of electrical engineering, developed gliders or “sailplanes,” and
developed the first steam engine in the second century BC.
One influential collection of essays, *Infusion of African and African American
Content in the School Curriculum* opens with an essay by Ivan van Sertima,
founding editor of the *Journal of African Civilization*, which holds that
Africans were among the original inhabitants of pre-Roman Britain, among the
Vikings who discovered the New World, among the ancient Chinese (“the first
emperor of China was a black man”), and even among the Japanese samurai. White
Europeans came into being when the black Africans who first explored the region
were caught in the ice during the Ice Age and lost the melanin in their skin
pigments due to the glare of the sun.
*Heterodoxy,* September 1993.
Re-Educating Bus Drivers
Multiculturalists themselves are quite clear that they do not see their
philosophy as just one of many philosophies that different people may
entertain, or as something to be optional in some parts of the school
curriculum. “Multicultural perspectives should *infuse the entire curriculum,
prekindergarten through grade 12* (emphasis in original), according to the
official report to the New York state Commissioner of Education. Because this
report considered “*commitment* to multicultural social studies education” to
be crucial, it called for “*extensive staff development*” which would “address
attitudes”–ie., indoctrination–and which would extend even to the schools’
clerical staffs and bus drivers. In short, the call for cultural “diversity” is
a call for ideological conformity.
Thomas Sowell, *Inside American Education* (New York: Free Press, 1993), 73.
While some individuals receive favorable treatment on college and university
campuses because of their race or sex, it is not simply the biological category
to which one belongs but the ideological category that is crucial. An Asian
American woman at the University of Connecticut, for example, was severely
punished for violating an ideological taboo. A sign on the door to her
dormitory room listed “people who are shot on sight,” including “preppies,”
“bimbos,” and “homos.” After gay rights activists complained, she was ordered
to move out of the dormitory and off campus, and was forbidden to set foot in
any dormitory or college cafeteria–in other words, she was sentenced to
virtually total social isolation. Only under threat of a federal lawsuit did
the university later allow her to move back on campus.
Sowell, *Inside American Education*, 193-94
Enemies Within
Marilyn Schuster, Chairperson of the Department of Literature and Susan Van
Dyne, Director of Women s Studies–both of Smith College–have a dog and pony
show that shows up at places like Ohio State University. It is called “Race and
Gender in the Curriculum: Stages in the Process” and the subtile is obviously
more important than the title. Schuster and Van Dyne hold an “interactive
session” for professors in which they explore six stages of curriculum
transformation. They concentrate on “incentives that can motivate faculty to
rethink courses.” But the focus of their effort is as follows: “By exploring
issues of power in the classroom, they will assist participants in identifying
typical sources of resistance within themselves, their students and their
disciplines.” When will the Ford Foundation get around to funding the next step
in the “process”: sending those professors off to the countryside to work with
the crops while they contemplate the need for personal and curricular
transformation?
Collier and Horowitz, *Surviving the PC University*, 341
Only in America–But on its Way North
A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT IN MINNESOTA: In late May, a Christian fundamentalist
preacher named Paul Stamm was delivering an impromptu sermon on the campus of
the University of Minnesota. He happened to be referring to the National
Organization of Women as the National Organization of Witches when Andrea
Jepsen, a junior at the university, came by. Deciding that the preacher had
interfered with her “ability to use University facilities comfortably,” she
called in the university police. Knowing a hostile environment when they saw
one, officers arrested Stamm. Jepsen later said that she knew the preacher’s
rights might have been violated, but she insisted that Stamm had “stepped over
the line.” The rest, as Hamlet once said, was silence.
*Heterodoxy* May-June 1994
Interesting Title from an Honest Anti-Racist
Stanley Fish, *There s No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . And It s a Good
Thing, Too.*
Clarity Itself
In Ontario’s *Framework Regarding Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination
in Ontario Universities,* harassment is defined as “one or a series of
vexatious comments or conduct related to one or more of the prohibited grounds
that is known or might reasonably be known to be unwelcome/unwanted, offensive,
intimidating, hostile, or inappropriate”; examples are specified to include
“gestures, remarks, jokes, taunting, innuendo, display of offensive materials,
offensive graffiti, threats, verbal or physical assault, imposition of academic
penalties, hazing, stalking, shunning or exclusion related to the prohibited
grounds.”
Cited in John Fraser, “The Mark of Zero,” *Saturday Night*, April 1994
From [email protected] Wed Aug 28 07:32:09 PDT 1996
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Anti-Racist Education 28: Revisionism and the Deconstruction of Logic
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At its deepest level, multiculturalism represents the denial of all Western
claims to truth. Stanley Fish denies the very possibility of transcultural
standards of evaluation. “What are these truths and by whom are they to be
identified?” In Fish’s view, “The truths any of us find compelling will all be
partial, which is to say they will all be political.” Barbara Johnson
identifies the multicultural project with “the deconstruction of the
foundational ideals of Western civilization.” Renato Rosaldo urges the
rejection of “timeless universals” and Richard Rorty declares the following
mission: “to abandon traditional notions of rationality, objectivity, method
and truth.” The multicultural project is cogently summarized by philosopher
John Searle: “Religion, history, tradition, and morality have always been
subjected to searching criticism in the name of rationality, truth, evidence,
reason, and logic. Now reason, truth, rationality and logic are themselves
subject to these criticisms. The idea is that they’re as much part of the
dogmatic, superstitious, mystical, power-laden tradition as anything that they
were used to attack.”
Dinesh D’Souza, *The End of Racism* (New York: Free Press, 1995), 344
The deniers are plying their trade at a time when much of history seems to be
up for grabs and attacks on the Western rationalist tradition have become
commonplace. This tendency can be traced, at least in part, to intellectual
currents that began to emerge in the late 1960s. Various scholars began to
argue that texts had no fixed meaning. The reader’s interpretation, not the
author’s intention, determined meaning. Duke University professor Stanley Fish
is most closely associated with this approach in the literary field. It became
more difficult to talk about the objective truth of a text, legal concept, or
even an event. In academic circles some scholars spoke of relative truths,
rejecting the notion that there was one version of the world that was
necessarily right while another was wrong . . . [Critics] worried that [this
relativism] opened the doors of the academy, and of society at large, to an
array of farfetched notions that could no longer be dismissed out of hand
simply because they were absurd.
. . . . .
Reasoned dialogue, particularly as it applies to the understanding of history,
is rooted in the notion that there exists a historical reality that–though it
may be subjected by the historian to a multiplicity of interpretations–is
ultimately found and not made. The historian does not create, the historian
uncovers.
Deborah Lipstadt, *Denying the Holocaust* (New York: Plume, 1994), 17-18, 25
From [email protected] Wed Aug 28 07:32:10 PDT 1996
Article: 60528 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Re: Left Wing Radicals Obsessed with Race
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<[email protected]>
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> Was there a point to this story?
>
The point is obvious to anyone not committed to excusing fanaticism and
defending the indefensible, and you would easily grasp it if you were not so
determined to deny the reality of left-wing race obsession (“anti-racism”) and
to ignore frequent liberal moral cowardice in the face of it. I suspect you
were blinded by seeing your own admired projects mirrored in the preceding
posts.
You’ll be saddened to learn, though, that AR Education 28 is the last in the
series and will mark my (perhaps temporary) retirement from alt.revisionism.
Your irritation has been intriguing. You’ve accused Midge Decter and David
Horowitz of manufacturing quotes, Alan Bloom of dishonestly manufacturing an
opponent, Ed Alexander of inventing a meeting he actually attended, and Thomas
Sowell of inventing statistics. (Sowell, of course, has never abandoned his
irrefutable argument about mismatching, despite the fact that as a black
scholar it must cause him personal distress, and American universities do
indeed conceal their racially sensitive statistics, as Timothy Maguire revealed
and Ward Connerly recently discovered.) You have in addition dismissed a host
of eye-witness accounts, and you have studiously picked out the most irrelevant
features from each case I presented to criticize. See ER 04 for an egregious
example.
My personal favourite was your “Bullshit, never happened,” followed closely by
your inability to even understand, let alone respond to, Bloom’s simple but
compelling comments on the De Man affair. If every detail D’Souza wrote about
your alma mater is false, your ignorance of an elementary “Western”
intellectual distinction (“meaningless sociological mumbo-jumbo,” you called
it) demonstrates that he was in essence correct. You don’t have to agree with
Bloom, but you should at least be able to comprehend his clear meaning.
I see a pattern. If Stalag Stanford ever conducts a purge of free-speech
activists, I would advise a second career as a revisionist historian. You’ve
mastered the method, and I would take some pride in having given you an
opportunity to hone your skills.
From [email protected] Wed Aug 28 11:22:12 PDT 1996
Article: 52676 of alt.discrimination
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Re: Left-Wing Radicals Obsessed with Race 21
Date: 28 Aug 1996 13:19:25 GMT
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]> writes:
> >An Anti Anti-Racist Explains Eurocentrism
>
> >transformed into absolutes. By now, however, one can see a softening on the
> >question of Rushdie’s innocence among the more modish radical intellectuals.
>
> Name two, with verifiable references. You can’t? Why am I not surprised.
>
> -rich
I believe Bloom was referring to a counter reaction in the U.K. by a number of
multiculturalist leftists. I concede I don’t recall their names, but it
undoubtedly occurred. If memory serves, there was talk among those on the Left
who sided with the Muslim protesters to amend the blasphemy laws to include
anti-Islamic, as well as anti-Christian, blasphemy, in order that Rushdie could
be charged. I used to have a series of clippings from the *Manchester Guardian*
on the subject, but I’ve misplaced them. Someone from Britain may recall the
details more accurately than I do. In fairness I should point out that a
similar counter reaction occurred on the Right in the United States, notably
with Patrick Buchanan.
For a certifiably leftist criticism of Rushdie see
http://www.indiastar.com/jsamuel.html, (Page doesn`t exist) and for a discussion (in German) of the
debate over Dr Annemarie Schimmel, the Orientalist academic whose (perhaps less
certifiably) leftist remarks on the subject aroused controversy, see
http://www.sonntagsblatt.de/1995/ds/41/achim.htm. (Page doesn`t exist) In any case, Bloom was not
lying, as I assume you were suggesting.
From [email protected] Wed Aug 28 11:24:32 PDT 1996
Article: 60586 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Re: Left-Wing Radicals Obsessed with Race 21
Date: 28 Aug 1996 13:19:25 GMT
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]> writes:
> >An Anti Anti-Racist Explains Eurocentrism
>
> >transformed into absolutes. By now, however, one can see a softening on the
> >question of Rushdie’s innocence among the more modish radical intellectuals.
>
> Name two, with verifiable references. You can’t? Why am I not surprised.
>
> -rich
I believe Bloom was referring to a counter reaction in the U.K. by a number of
multiculturalist leftists. I concede I don’t recall their names, but it
undoubtedly occurred. If memory serves, there was talk among those on the Left
who sided with the Muslim protesters to amend the blasphemy laws to include
anti-Islamic, as well as anti-Christian, blasphemy, in order that Rushdie could
be charged. I used to have a series of clippings from the *Manchester Guardian*
on the subject, but I’ve misplaced them. Someone from Britain may recall the
details more accurately than I do. In fairness I should point out that a
similar counter reaction occurred on the Right in the United States, notably
with Patrick Buchanan.
For a certifiably leftist criticism of Rushdie see
http://www.indiastar.com/jsamuel.html, (Page doesn`t exist) and for a discussion (in German) of the
debate over Dr Annemarie Schimmel, the Orientalist academic whose (perhaps less
certifiably) leftist remarks on the subject aroused controversy, see
http://www.sonntagsblatt.de/1995/ds/41/achim.htm. (Page doesn`t exist) In any case, Bloom was not
lying, as I assume you were suggesting.
From [email protected] Fri Aug 30 08:39:53 PDT 1996
Article: 60938 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.society.conservatism,
alt.politics.libertarian,can.politics
Subject: Re: Left Wing Radicals Obsessed with Race
Date: 29 Aug 1996 22:28:39 GMT
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Rich Graves <[email protected]> wrote in article
<[email protected]>…
> As for “defending the indefensible,” it depends what you mean. Like you,
> I’ll defend the rights of neo-Nazis to speak freely. Unlike you, I’ll also
> defend pornographers and wacko leftists.
I’m sure our views on this issue are identical.
> So I’m a leftist now, am I? How amusing. That’s almost as funny as your
> bigoted assumptions about Professor Takaki.
Actually, I didn’t make any bigoted assumptions. You assumed I was alluding to
Takaki when in fact I was describing multiculturalism as it is too often
practised. I’ll surprise you by saying that I have read Takaki’s *Different
Mirror*; I just interpret it in terms of the concrete programmes that I
imagine (rightly or wrongly, since we’re being pacific) flowing from even
mainstream multiculturalism. In yesterday’s paper, for example, I discover that
the Ontario Ministry of Education is circulating an “anti-racist kit” that uses
mathematics so that six-year old school kids can “calculate the number of white
men in positions of power compared to women and people of colour” and literary
criticism so that “they are made aware of appropriation of voice and racial
stereotypes in children’s literature.” In other words, in Ontario we now
actually have anti-racist math. This Orwellian stuff is really happening, it’s
not a figment of the conservative imagination, and I’m astonished that only
right-wing “backlashers” like Horowitz consistently speak out against it. It
happens because rarefied theories at the top of the academic hierarchy
eventually do filter down to the bottom, with results that, in this case, can
only be called Stalinist, albeit of the nonlethal and admittedly comical
variety. If Holocaust studies become part of this anti-racist education, as I
fear they will, the former will quickly acquire a host of new enemies on the
basis of (to put it politely) the eccentricities of the latter.
> (Have you noticed that with the exception of the troll inexplicably
> crossposted to comp.sys.mac.advocacy, only I have responded to any of the
> threads you started? *Nobody* else.)
Actually, I received a lot of e-mail, even concerning the more esoteric
subjects, much of it quite thoughtful. Some, I’ll grant, was pretty strange,
which is why I heeded your advice and dumped the Stern crosspost, the source as
it turned out.
> Of course you were right in your analysis of the anti-right hit piece,
> though not in your belief that Ken or anyone else at Nizkor supported
> the author’s point of view. Nizkor has archived some of your posts, and
> some of mine. It’s an archive.
>
> My point is that this 30-post anti-left hit piece is at least as bad as
> the Canada-Right report you criticized back in July. Worse, in my opinion,
> because you’re not speaking for an avowedly “activist” organization, and
> because you should know better.
There is no similarity whatever. I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that even the
most rabid academic “anti-racist” is morally comparable to or occupies a
continuum with some Stalinist mass murderer or left-wing terrorist; I insist
only that the assumption of race-specific knowledge is at least part of (to be
pacific again) the muticulturalist project, and I consider that assumption both
factually wrong and socially dangerous. The respectable Right is doing its best
to insist that “Western civilization” is neither a geographic nor a racial
concept but an intellectual and political tradition of ideas in which anyone
may participate through the vehicle of mind, yet it faces opposition from the
respectable Left, which increasingly insists on both.
The far-right report put Bloom and Buckley et al in the company of Zuendel
and David Duke, claiming that they were part of the same political network. You
and I may call each other names and call our respective views, say, bigoted or
reprehensible, but we do so within a continuum of respectable opinion that
excludes mass murder, advocacy of mass murder, or denial of mass murder. Linda
Wayne’s report acknowledged no such division between respectable right-wing
political commentators on the one hand and murderers and apologists for
murderers on the other. Even if the material I presented was exceptional,
exaggerated or even fabricated, as you have been suggesting, none of it made
any comparable suggestion.
>I believe we are still
> waiting on your apology for suggesting that Ken and the other Nizkor
> archivists “are vile beyond anything I could ever have imagined” for
> “libelling” right-wingers by archiving, without comment, someone else’s
> article.
I was actually planning to e-mail Ken McVay today, but since you’ve brought the
subject up, I’ll make my apology here. Hence this post-retirement post.
I’ve been troubled for some time about that “rebuttal” lodged, apparently
permanently, on the Nizkor site. I stand by the substance of it, and I stand by
the concerns about context that animated it, but the contemptuous language was
unjustified and my assumption that Nizkor endorsed the report’s content was
entirely wrong, as I now recognize. Much as I enjoy seeing my name up in
lights, I would prefer that it come down. At the time, if I recall correctly,
one accessed Linda Wayne’s diatribe both through her name and through the
subject “can-far-right” (or something similar); it now appears (along,
unnecessarily, with my comments) only under “Wayne, Linda,” which adequately
identifies it as a personal statement. Allan Bloom is one of my intellectual
heroes, for reasons ranging from his political views to his apolitical theories
on translation, and seeing him and other commentators and academics I admire in
the company of Zuendel and his soul-mates infuriated me–hence the rebuttal’s
legion of unmerited insults, for which I apologize. Anger tends to chase away
reason, I should have recalled.
Only once have I actually said something nice about Ken McVay, so I’ll say some
more now. Despite my disagreement with him on one other issue, I think he is a
remarkable man. He has a powerful ability to adapt his messages to
circumstances: polite, intelligent disagreement when called for, withering
scorn when that’s appropriate, supplemented by occasional off-the-wall humour,
as in yesterday’s “Test” pseudo-troll, which caught me in its trap (a free
language lesson in a strange dialect being the prize for the congenitally
curious). I’m amazed that anyone can write so quickly, as I assume he must, and
still express ideas so effectively. Few people could match his output in
quality and quantity, and certainly not in dedication. All this in the course
of an activity that must, for obvious reasons, continually make him angry and
in the face of some outrageous personal insults that would make most people
lose all sense of judgement. I know I couldn’t even begin to do anything
comparable, as the reasons for the apology I’ve just made partly demonstrate.
From [email protected] Thu Aug 1 06:53:36 PDT 1996
Article: 54815 of alt.revisionism
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From: “Duncan Coons” <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: That Lipstadt quote on Nizkor’s home page…
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