RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/29/the-unholy-alliance-between-wokeism-and-barbarism/

My favourite story about Spinoza concerns the time he lost his cool. A philosopher, a Jew and history’s finest defender of Enlightenment, Spinoza was normally a picture of quiet reason. But when he heard about the lynching of Johan and Cornelis de Witt he became gripped by an uncommon fury. The de Witt brothers were key political figures in the Dutch Republic, the enlightened new nation in which Spinoza enjoyed such great liberty to think and write. On 20 August 1672, at The Hague, they were set upon by a ferocious mob that held them responsible for the invasion of the republic by a French-English alliance. They were murdered, mutilated and clumps of their flesh were eaten.

Spinoza was enraged. He made a plan to visit the site of the mob’s savagery to hold a one-man protest. Think Greta Thunberg, but enlightened. He prepared a placard to hold up. But his landlord restrained him, fearing he too would be slain by the mob. And so history was denied the image of one of our great philosophers staging a lonely, angry protest. What did his makeshift placard say? It had two words on it. ‘Ultimi barbarorum.’ Rough translation: ‘You are the greatest of barbarians.’

This year more than any other I’ve understood how Spinoza felt. On numerous occasions in 2023 I’ve been tempted to go places with a placard saying ‘Ultimi barbarorum’. To the kibbutzim of southern Israel following Hamas’s fascistic savagery against the Jews there on 7 October. To George Washington University after students projected the words ‘Glory to our martyrs’ on the side of the library building: young Americans of unimaginable privilege taking pleasure in the butchery of Jews. To the lovely, leafy campus of Columbia in New York City where students planned to hold a meeting on Hamas’s stirring ‘counter-offensive’. To those ‘pro-Palestine’ marches in London at which the morally treacherous middle classes marched alongside individuals dressed as Hamas terrorists and extremists chanting for yet more slaughter in Israel: ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad!’

To New York University where students shouted, ‘We don’t want no Jew state / We want all of it’: a cry by the comfortable for Hamas to finish the genocidal job of eliminating Jews in the Middle East. To the streets of Manhattan where protesters shouted ‘Shame on you!’ at an Israeli woman whose daughter was kidnapped and brutalised by Hamas. Shaming the victims of racist terror – a low even for the unhinged woke. To any gathering of politically minded Gen Zers, to be frank, after polls found that huge numbers of them view Jews as an ‘oppressor class’ and believe Hamas’s pogrom was ‘justified’. And to the Sydney Opera House, where radical Islamists chanted ‘Gas the Jews’ and ‘Fuck the Jews’ mere days after Hamas murdered the Jews. Nazi-style parades, uncontained glee at genocidal violence, on the streets of a Western city.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/decolonisation-and-the-closing-of-the-western-mind/

EXCERPT:

It is nearly forty years since the University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom warned us about the stealthy takeover of US universities since the 1960s by intellectual relativism. In a prescient observation, he detected that it was leading to the “closing of the American mind”. There had been an increasing rejection of the foundations of a liberal education, namely the vigorous pursuit of objective truth through free and rational inquiry and the fundamental importance of great books and ideas for the understanding and defence of Western civilisation. It was being replaced by a new culture which fixated on group identity and historical grievances which saw the United States as the prime enemy. As Bruce Bawer pointed out in 2012, in an updated version of Bloom, this new ideology was destroying not only US universities but “the America of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the melting pot”. “Grievance studies”, namely women’s studies, black studies and queer studies, metastasised quickly in universities in America and abroad. They have produced several generations now of indoctrinated students, or “pod people”, who have gone on to spread in their places of work the seed of the ideology of white “oppression” of ethnic and other minorities. Regarded by its adherents as a great awakening (hence the term “woke”) of US society to the need for social justice, it has led to the denigration of US culture, the polarisation of its politics and the coarsening of public debate. It has torn the very fabric of American society.

The woke takeover of US universities and other institutions received a boost during the outbreak of mass hysteria and rioting which followed the death at police hands of a black petty criminal and drug addict, George Floyd, in Minneapolis in 2020 and its exploitation by the race hustlers of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is in the wake of this seemingly catalytic event that Doug Stokes takes up the story. He notes how President Biden on his first day in office in January 2021 signed the “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities” act. It is intended to tackle “the enormous human costs of systemic racism, persistent poverty and other disparities”. It was, in reality (and Stokes could have pointed this out) a reward to those notables who had got out the black vote for Biden in the recent election. The aim now was to transform American society in such a way as to benefit the 12.4 per cent of the US population who are black.

Federal law was to be used to force US institutions, including the universities, to change their allegedly “white supremacist” culture. In effect, this comes down to hiring more blacks for high positions in the US government, the universities and corporate America.

https://quillette.com/2023/12/27/the-splcs-new-enemy/

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 with a mission to fight poverty and racial discrimination. Its early litigation campaigns, which targeted the Ku Klux Klan and other overtly racist organizations, met with success, and the group soon came to be seen as an authoritative source in regard to right-wing extremism more generally. 

Another form of expertise the organization developed was in the area of marketing—especially when the market in question consisted of deep-pocketed urban liberals. As former SPLC staffer Bob Moser reported in a 2019 New Yorker article, the group has consistently taken on attention-grabbing urgent-seeming causes that its leaders knew could be leveraged as a means to gain publicity and—more importantly—donations. It’s no coincidence that the SPLC’s co-founder and long-time fundraising guru, Morris Dees, had previously operated a direct-mail business that sold cookbooks and tchotchkes. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same,” Dees told a journalist in 1988.

The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center
The work at the S.P.L.C. could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us there, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.

Dees’ big fundraising break at the SPLC came when he got access to the direct-mail list from the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern. The SPLC co-founder went on to maximize the SPLC’s revenues through what would now be known as targeted methods. According to one former legal colleague, for instance, Dees rarely used his middle name—Seligman—in SPLC mailings, except when it came to “Jewish zip codes.”

Thanks to Dees’ slick marketing expertise, the SPLC was eventually taking in more money than it paid out in operational expenses. (As of October 2022, its endowment fund was valued at almost US$640 million.) But over time, his hard-sell tactics began to alienate co-workers, as there was an obvious disconnect between the real class-based problems they observed in society and the fixations of the naïve northern donors whose wallets Dees was seeking to pry open.

“I felt that [Dees] was on the Klan kick because it was such an easy target—easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on,” former SPLC attorney Deborah Ellis told Progressive writer John Egerton. “The Klan is no longer one of the South’s biggest problems—not because racism has gone away, but because the racists simply can’t get away with terrorism any more.”

On March 14, 2019, Dees—by now 82 years old, but still listed as the SPLC’s chief trial lawyer—was fired amid widespread rumors that he’d been the subject of internal sexual-harassment accusations. His affiliation was scrubbed from the group’s web site; and the organization’s president, Richard Cohen, cryptically (but damningly) declared that, “when one of our own fails to meet [SPLC] standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” (Less than two weeks later, Cohen himself left the organization, casting his resignation as part of a transition “to a new generation of leaders.”)