Mick Hartley

Further to that previous post, here's Gabriel Noah Brahm at Fathom – After the Hamas Pogrom, we can see what American Universities have become:

What too many variants of radical ideology have in common—besides gauzy dreams of a qualitative break with present reality, in favor of some utopian alternative that can hardly be specified—is a palpable, visceral attraction to fantasies of transformative, retributive violence.

In roughly psychoanalytic terms, they gravitate to alibis for sadistic murder. Or as one says nowadays, they seek a ‘permission structure’ to vent their spleen to the fullest. According to the eminent myth scholar and philosophical anthropologist, René Girard, these befuddled victimisers of innocents hunger for sacrificial scapegoats who are designated, essentially arbitrarily, as responsible for the ills of the world, and they bond together as a solidaristic community of the (self-)righteous in the act of executing them.

Add to that the predominance of ‘woke’ progressive ideology on the American college campus today—too often a wooly-minded mélange of every sort of anti-civilisational, anti-systemic ‘thought’—and what you get that’s somewhat novel is the uninhibited cries of bloodlust, worthy of a proud troop of resentful Raskolnikovs, now echoing through the halls of academe so loudly that they can no longer be ignored, but have instead at last forced the broader public to take note of the rot festering in the universities for decades.

Albeit, the mad shrieks had surely been sounding there over a very long period of time. Nonetheless, the cumulative results of so much grotesque miseducation foisted on our young have yet been on display more starkly than ever, since 7 October: support or apologia for a ‘resistance’ that carried out the worst antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust… Even torture is okay with the kids today, it seems, when sacrificing to the pagan gods of wokedom. The ‘resistance’ is being hailed, despite the fact that many of the terrorists’ victims on October 7th in southern Israel were denied even the mercy of a swift death—or, rather, as one senses, in fair measure because of it. Remember, we’re talking about human sacrifice, as I began by mentioning, the enjoyment of a ritualistic, albeit frenzied cruelty. Thus, many had their hands tied first, then were laid on the ground, then stabbed, then set on fire, then shot. Including children.[6] This is what decolonization looks like? While university administrators have been wringing their hands about ‘micro-aggressions,’ it turns out the English department and Gender Studies program have been softening the ground for their students’ to exult in the face of antisemitic butchery….

Since 7 October nobody can any longer fail to hear this supposedly woke’s unmistakably anti-Semitic chants. Once-respected American universities, from Berkeley to Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Michigan State, Stanford, UCLA (my own beloved alma matter), University of Pennsylvania, Yale, et al., have been issuing mealy-mouthed statements often containing rationalisations or apologias at best, while rejoicing at worst, over the slaughter, rape and kidnapping of close to 2000 Jews….