Much has been made of the “unholy alliance” between the imperial left and a triumphalist Islam in advancing the cause of the modern totalitarian project. The left wants to see a top-down socialist utopia supplant the international order as we know it and militant Islam is determined to impose a Shariate upon the world. Indeed, as Norwegian scholar Hege Storhaug documents in But the Greatest of These Is Freedom, there is a brisk migration “from left-wing totalitarianism to religio-political totalitarianism.” The totalitarian mind is identical with itself, so to speak, differing only in the accidental content of its doctrines.
No less important, however, than this deep symbiosis between superficially implausible collaborators is the potent tutorial relationship that has been established between the patricians of the left and the emancipated youth of the contemporary West. Such an alliance, conducted under the aegis of the so-called “liberal” academy, is equally unholy. As with the German universities of the 1930s, modern universities throughout the “free world” have become factories of political indoctrination in which history is reinterpreted as a chronicle of infamy and the young are conscripted into the army of those who promise the advent of a golden millennium.
Palpably, the democratic West is becoming less democratic by the day. The rewriting of history linked with the virulent assault against the palladium of traditional liberalism — now better known as conservatism — has captivated the sensibility of the West and a resurgent authoritarianism once again marches into the future. The venerable impulse to restructure the world along the lines of a theoretical blueprint for universal salvation may periodically sink into abeyance, but it always re-emerges in one form or another, whether theocratic or secular. Today the movement has assumed massive proportions, uniting disparate cultures once thought to be immiscible and, as we have noted, even resolving the immemorial conflict between the generations.
The cultural stereotype of youth rebelling against the progenitor generation no longer holds, at least not in the West. Instead, what we are observing is the tightening bond between the clichéd antagonists of old. The generation of the Sixties, controlling the levers of power, has embarked on an intensive recruiting campaign among its epigones to ensure the eventual victory of what we might call the Fourth Reich, a grim collectivist world governed by the presumably enlightened benefactors of all mankind.
— David Solway, “The Coming of the Fourth Reich?”, Pajamas Media
Actually, your overt generalizations sound quite a bit like fundamentalist dogma from any religion. Maybe you don’t understand academia because the basis of rationale thought is lost on you. For instance, your comparison between “leftists” and sharia-seeking Islamicists lacks any substance. Basically, you are arguing that each group has principles which it values and wants to disseminate. Doesn’t everyone? Why is Academia not allowed to have values of its own? At least Academia encourages students to encounter many values, and question them before determing which values they should make their own. Can you say the same about your institutions? No.
hdaniels — You’re right: “rationale thought” is “lost” on me … “rational” thought, not so much.
And did you happen to notice that the entire posting was a pull quote from David Solway and not me?
“Why is Academia not allowed to have values of its own?” — Having values is one thing, propagandizing a captive audience with them is something else.
“At least Academia encourages students to encounter many values …” — In theory, yes; in practice, no. The essence of propaganda is projecting what SEEMS to be fair and rational while subliminally inoculating the subject with pernicious ideas. Liberal-Progressive “memes” have been promulgated throughout Academia for well over a century now. Any pretense at objectivity in higher educational discourse has long since been exposed as a myth.
“… question them [values] before determing [sic] which values they should make their own.” — It seems to have completely escaped you that the PURPOSE of ALL education, at whatever level, OUTSIDE OF PAROCHIAL INSTITUTIONS is to introduce students to the collective knowledge of mankind as painstakingly accumulated over the millennia. The questioning of values which you posit as an aim of Academia is a perversion, a usurpation of parental prerogatives, and evil in its ultimate effects.
Congratulations! You have just made a case AGAINST government-run education and FOR both home schooling and parochial schools!
— Mike Gray