The newly elected Democrat candidate for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is a perfect exemplar of an American college graduate: an antisemitic communist. Mamdani, who refuses to disavow “globalize the intifada” (which means “kill Jews wherever you find them”), says the ultimate goal is to “seize the means of production,” the foundational strategy of communism. It is noteworthy that Mamdani was not elected by the poor or the rich, but by the middle-class college-educated, young professional managers struggling in high-priced New York.
Mamdani graduated from Bowdoin College, where he majored in Africana studies. But he was also situated in the Ivy League, his father being a professor at Columbia University. Of course, not all North American university graduates are genocidal antisemitic communists; some are just Jew-averse and inclined toward communism.
The Soviet Union fell, but Marx has triumphed in American academia, and even more in Canada and Western Europe. (Eastern Europeans, although historically great champions of antisemitism, have experienced communism in practice too recently to be tempted by its faux utopianism.) Woke “social justice” gave the game away clearly, demanding “equity,” which means absolute equality imposed by authority.
And that is not even to mention that the woke “social justice” dominating our colleges and universities assumes the foundational Marxist class conflict theory at the heart of intersectionalism: Society is divided between evil oppressors and helpless victims. It is true that economic class conflict was replaced by race, sex, and sexuality class conflict—each of which had its identified oppressors and victims. The spirit is Marxism through and through.
At the same time, the most popular theory in the social sciences and humanities was Marxist-Leninist postcolonial theory, which blamed all of the ills of the world on imperialism and colonialism, which were presented as having been invented and imposed by the evil West on the whole world. This stunningly ahistorical view of the world was enthusiastically adopted by almost every professor—even archaeologists—and indoctrinated into students, who were trained not to interrogate and test theories and arguments, but to swear loyalty to progressive truths and become activists to advance the interests of the “victims” as defined.
The U.S., once again “Amerika,” a Nazi-like country, is condemned for having murdered all of its indigenous people and stolen their land. The country formerly known as Canada, now “Turtle Island,” has officially declared itself genocidal murderers of its indigenous people (who miraculously make up five percent of the population today). Academics are leading the movement to “decolonialize” the West and its institutions. For example, in many universities, ethnocentric Western science is being replaced—or at least supplemented—by “indigenous science.” Western Civilization has been cancelled in our universities. Western Europe is making up for its imperialist impositions by opening its gates to the world and turning its countries over to largely Muslim immigrants who are enjoying an immigration jihad.
Western college and university graduates are innocent of historical facts about the subjects of their received ideologies. There is a two-hundred-year history of socialist and communist utopianism, from the short-lived group sex communes to Soviet mass murders and gulags, to the slaughter of the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, to the economy-killing “liberation” of Cuba. None of this well-known history is taught in Western schools or universities. Students learn from grievance “studies” subjects and their allies in the social sciences and humanities that capitalism is evil and oppresses the innocent citizens whom it holds captive. None of the evidence of the stunning worldwide improvements in health, wealth, and longevity is ever attributed to its source in capitalism.
Our graduates are taught to blame their own countries for vicious misdeeds that are alleged to be the sins of their founding. The U.S. is blamed for inventing slavery and for being inhumanly cruel to non-whites. There is a hysterical insistence on applying cultural standards of the 21st century to the 17th and 18th centuries, with a presentist villainization of those from earlier times who did not live up to the standards of 21st-century moralists. The reality is that slavery was standard practice around the world for most of human history.
Nothing could be more jejune than claiming slavery was a special American sin when it was a worldwide phenomenon. Capturing slaves among the conquered in warfare was not only standard practice, it was one of the major motivators of engaging in warfare and a valuable reward for the effort. Slaves were a large part of ancient Greek society and a critical part of Roman society. Indian political culture was based on a purity hierarchy, and the large percentage of “untouchables” at the bottom provided near-compensation-free labor. The Islamic Empire conquered half of the world and collected slaves from every population it conquered.
Communist China today exercises its imperial control and colonial expansion, notably against the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, the Tibetans in Tibet, and the Turks in Chinese Turkestan. The indigenous populations of these regions have been swamped by the transfer of large Han Chinese populations into their homelands. Russia still has imperial ambitions, expressed recently and today by its invasion of and war against Ukraine (the independence of which had been guaranteed by Russia in earlier treaties).
Just as some native peoples of Africa and North America enslaved their captives, so too did some expand into the territories of others. Likewise, European countries are all the result of population flows, expansions, and settlers. The Celts of Great Britain were invaded and settled by the Germanic Angles and Saxons, the Scandinavian Norsemen, the French Normans, and now by Pakistanis, Middle Easterners, and North Africans. Human life is lived in history, and part of that history is invasions and settlements. It is beyond childish to castigate North Americans for coming from Europe to found new homes, and to delegitimize centuries of extraordinary achievements by demanding “decolonization” and advocating turning everything over to the tiny minority of indigenes.
Finally, a word of congratulations to the Marxists who have cancelled Western Civilization. The feminists peopled their oppressor-victim class conflict with sex classes of male oppressors and female victims. They banished Western Civilization because it was invented by men; it was men who invented the government, who ran the churches, who made the scientific discoveries, who wrote the books and symphonies, and painted the pictures and shaped the sculptures. Feminist professors and administrators cancelled the male Western Civilization and banned it from education. So our “higher education” graduates know almost nothing about it.
The race activists peopled their oppressor-victim class conflict with race classes of white (and Jewish) oppressors and black, indigenous, people of color victims. So the study of Europe was forbidden, because it was all white people. (Hollywood and Big Tech solved this problem by reinventing European history as having been peopled by Africans. In North American settings, they solved the same problem by highly overrepresenting blacks. Truth never stood in the way of these industries.) Homosexuals and other non-normative sexualities followed the same script, with heterosexuals and homosexuals as the class conflict combatants. (Hollywood and Big Tech stepped in by highly overrepresenting this segment of the population and claiming that people could change their sex by saying so.)
Education in the West has become a propaganda machine for Marxist “social justice,” defined by absolute equality, all of the participants being assessed according to their moral “virtue” in advancing the cause. The Enlightenment university dedicated to the search for truth through evidence and debate is a dead letter in Western countries. We have replaced higher education with Marxist propaganda.
Help PJ Media continue to tell the truth about the Trump administration’s accomplishments as we continue to usher in the Golden Era of America. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
