https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-landmark-on-the-road-to-decline/
The normalization of antisemitic terror we have witnessed among protestors since the October 7 attacks on Israel is a portentous landmark on the West’s road to civilizational degeneration. Every dimension of our socio-political order––all three branches of the federal government, and many blue-state governments; popular entertainment and high-brow culture; mainline churches; corporate boards and C-suites; national security and defense agencies, and education from K-12 to universities–– has been corrupted by illiberal, if not antihuman ideologies that undercut the foundations both of our political freedom and equality, and the morality and ethics that nourish both.
We’ve known for decades that our educational systems have been failing to educate the young, even as politics, social fads, and culture war propaganda have replaced foundational skills like reading, writing, basic science, critical thought, and history. More inimical to learning is the illiberal attacks on First Amendment rights to free speech and academic freedom, and the enforcement of a rigid orthodoxy that punishes and “cancels” those who challenge the party line. Such a regime stifles truth and replaces history with false narratives that serve autocratic agendas.
The protests in support of Hamas, antisemitism, and genocide show how ignorant of basic historical facts are many students attending our most prestigious universities. Consider the historical terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism” incessantly chanted like mantras. They are now stripped of their meaning and reduced to question-begging epithets ––“mind-blockers” and “thought-extinguishers,” as the great historian of Soviet mass murder Robert Conquest describes them, which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.”
“Inflammation” is exactly the purpose of similar clichés like “genocide,” “settlers,” “famine,” “disproportionate,” “Palestinian homeland,” and all the other slogans and chants we’ve heard over the last eight months from the callow, self-righteous protestors. But it’s not just ignorance of history, but also moral idiocy that afflicts the “activists” siding with sadistic killers
And how grotesque is the lack of self-awareness among affluent “snowflake” undergrads who want to trespass, destroy, assault, and burn, and then demand they be fed, accommodated, and never required to be held accountable by the police, district attorneys, their universities, or future employers? They are the products of the same pathologies to which Sallust, the 1st century B.C. Roman historian, attributed the Roman Republic’s demise: “decadence and hubris—the natural dividends of prosperity.” Just as in Rome, the same cultural malignities now dominate our civilization.
