There on the ABC, right on schedule after the Nice massacre, was an argument for moral equivalence being presented by no less than a full-blown academic from the University of Sydney. It takes that sort of mind to grasp that the US is no different from its Islamist adversaries.
I have a strong suspicion that some of the most pointless people in this country have PhDs in the Social Sciences. Of course, I don’t really mean to say that these people are unintelligent; obviously they know a good deal about Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and the rest of the gang. It’s their moral relativism that irks me, as well as the cultivated grudges against their own societies and culture. I’m thinking of the insistence that Australia was ‘invaded’, for example, or the tendency to self-blame after each attack by our Islamist enemies. In a way, one has to admire their industriousness: every day they manage to find brand new ways of hating themselves.
When it comes, then, to questions about the upkeep of Western civilisation, the university lecturer is not the person one first thinks to consult. Once upon a time, I have heard, his thoughts and recommendations were confined to the mercifully recondite and unreadable journals of the academic Left. No longer, though. This means I have to update my earlier suspicion: if I am right (and let’s face it, I am), all these useless people will appear, at some stage of their careers, on the ABC.
For a measure of proof, I invite the reader to consider last Friday’s episode of ABC’s The Drum, which featured Peter Chen (above), a senior lecturer in politics at University of Sydney. The topic was the ongoing assault on French civil society, but Chen seemed to wonder if this was a conversation worth having at all. He argued that what happened in Nice was awful, of course, but it was hardly new: the conversion of trucks into weapons of suicide terror happens every day in other parts of the world. For Chen, shock was an invalid emotional response. It proved that Westerners only care about their own. He sneered: “Why are we shocked about this? Because it occurred in France.”