A Journal for Western Man-- Issue VI
Part II: The Enemies of Civilization (Click here to view Part III)
Harry Roolaart
I referred to an enemy not so obvious as a terrorist, but one I consider far more dangerous. The threat this enemy poses does not lie in sudden and savage acts of brutal violence, such as those perpetrated on 9-11. This enemy's battleground is man's mind – man's tool for survival. This enemy counts his victories one small step at a time, each separated by an appropriate interval so as to pass by unnoticed. His patience is unmatched, his willingness to sacrifice man endless, and his drive to destroy Western civilization fueled by his seething hatred for mankind …
Who is this enemy? What makes him possible? To discover the answers to such questions requires us to cast a long eye back into history.
Western civilization, the account of it, is the history of a quiet war waged between the ideas of two men. Throughout this history, when we stop to admire the best in man, then we consider he who has inspired the very best civilization has to offer . Conversely, when we stop to observe the lowliest in man, then we must consider he who originated the ideas that have guided man to his worst excesses. The former gave us a few centuries known as The Renaissance and The Age of Reason, while the latter gave us 1500 years of horror known as the Dark Ages. Lifting man out of the darkness, saving man from his own self-destruction, we have Aristotle. Drowning man, sending him back to the horror of his own self-destruction, we have Plato. In the former, we have the student; in the latter, we have his teacher. And despite all who came after them, in essence, the intellectual battle between Aristotle and Plato continues to this day, some two thousand years later. And in spite of the teacher's power, it is certain that because of his student that man continues to exist.
And therefore, it is appropriate that this intellectual battle must now take place in the very institution named after Plato’s intellectual training ground: The Academy. Make no mistake: academia will host the battlefield upon which America's quiet war will be waged. Today, the enemies of civilization, those who champion the derivative ideas as originally put forth by Plato, reside in academia. By and large, they are today’s leading intellectuals: the teachers, professors, educators and administrators who have been entrusted with the training of man’s mind. Their target was, and still remains, the susceptible minds of their young and eager students – our sons and daughters.
Men like Aristotle and Plato put forth systems of ideas, but it is the academic who imitates and circulates them. The academic does this in the classroom: he disseminates ideologies to his students. The student absorbs these ideas and readies himself to enter society. He grows up and through his personal and professional life circulates what he has been taught directly or indirectly to the public at large. The ideas he holds guide his every action. Though each individual is responsible for the ownership of his thoughts, and therefore is responsible for his own actions, it may still be observed that the degree to which the student becomes a willing or unwilling participant in this process, is due in large part to the academic’s methodology. Does the academic instill ideologies with a partisan view, does he perhaps fail to present an idea’s antithesis, or does he remain objective as he presents contrasting ideas to his students? Does the academic indoctrinate or educate?
Educators need to be taught that the immense task of training a student’s mind is a grave responsibility – and not an open license for indoctrinating our children to only their partisan ideologies. Consider the words of Professor Vivian Ng of the University of Oklahoma, who openly admits to using her lectern as a pulpit for leftist ideologies: “ I do political work,” she says, “both inside the classroom and outside it…My students come around and I convert them.” Or, Professor Ohmann of Wesleyan University, who makes no bones about his agenda: “We work in whatever ways we can toward the end of capitalist patriarchy.”
Professor Ohmann and Professor Vivian Ng, and thousands more like them, are not educators – they are indoctrinators. Under the guise of providing an education for our children they instead use their influential and powerful positions to train the student to oppose the very principles upon which their survival outside of academia depends.
For instance: Professor Ohmann, in seeking to end “capitalist patriarchy," fails to explain why he describes a statist-run, mixed economy as capitalism. Were he forced to explain it, Professor Ohmann would be faced with the uncomfortable task of explaining why his leftist ideologies applied to an economy have themselves failed. The answer is that the disintegrating nature of a mixed economy is all too apparent for everyone to see. And for that reason a mixed economy is often referred to as capitalism.
And what about Ohmann's students? Having been duped by the man they entrust to give them factual information, they, in turn, grow up with the firm notion that capitalism cannot work, that alternatives must be sought – particularly those alternatives that give even more power to the State. That, after all, is the political objective behind the Ohmann's of this world. So successful are these academic anti-capitalists, that today we wage war, not against terrorists, but against capitalism. Even more surprising is the fact that despite the overwhelming antipathy towards capitalism, this political and economic ideology has never before been practiced in our country. Not in the United States, not anywhere on earth.
But these two academics are not alone. In the Los Angeles Times November 1991 paper, Ann Rosenhaft, secretary of the Socialist Party of the USA estimated that there were 10,000 Marxist professors and administrators in U.S. colleges. Over a decade later, this number has increased, rather than decreased. The demise of the Soviet Union, the untold millions that have died in the name of Marxism attest to the horror of that ideology. And, how many millions of students have passed through these Marxist classrooms – today, and in our past?
Observe that the United States the only difference between this country’s inception and today’s version of it, is that in the beginning, it was freedom that dominated our system, whereas today, it is statism that dominates it. Freedom is the necessary requirement for individual rights. Statism is the requirement for collectivism. To assume that this transference from freedom to statism was an arbitrary idea disseminated into our political and economic culture via some collective mind is impossible. We have already seen that ideas originate and are disseminated by individuals. Who are the primary disseminators? Our academics who have been very busy indoctrinating the minds of our children. Over the last century how many individuals did it take to accomplish this transference from freedom to statism? One can easily imagine a number in the millions: the generations of bureaucrats, politicians, economists, and journalists who had as their point of convergence, the lower and higher institutes of learning. Who trained them to implement the ideas required to further altruism and statism? Our academics.
That these altruist academics are the enemies of civilization is true to the extent that they are the “distributors” of collectivist philosophies created by others, ideologies that may be traced back to Plato and his descendants. Though we may properly blame Kant for the invidious ideas that destroyed the Age of Reason, it is today's academics who continue to imitate him. Observe that this process of imitation makes academics second-handers, for the most part incapable of original thought. Having accepted Kant and therefore, rejected reason, and because they are but second-handed intellectuals themselves, today's academic is ruled instead by one, primary emotion: envy.
Observe his nature: the academic’s profound hatred and envy for those who can “think”, “evaluate”, “and further their lives” makes him an advocate for egalitarianism – a collectivist doctrine that “levels all men, so that no one man may enjoy that denied to others.” “All men are equal”, he tells his students. What is the equality to which he refers? An equality of that which sets men apart in reality: their degree of ability, their talent, their skill, and their qualifications – intellectual virtues towards which the academic is envious and hostile.
In their world, when given the choice between an unqualified, black female and a qualified, white male it is the unqualified candidate who gets the job. But what about the candidate's talent, skill, and qualifications? They are equal, the academic says. No man is intellectually better, more talented than another. And what does set them apart? The color of their skin, their gender…precisely those attributes that hold no bearing on the position and therefore ought to have placed both candidates on an equal level.