The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Civilizational Suicide
Some students at Harvard and other places are nuts, as we noted last week. They’re supporting the genocidal terrorists of Hamas while blaming Israel’s “apartheid regime.” Christopher Rufo studies these sorts of cultural phenomena and he has thoughts.
First, he recounts just what happened among student groups and what they said. Then there was the public response that even extended to a rebuke from former Harvard president Lawrence Summers. Yet none of this should be surprising, Rufo argues, because “the politics of decolonization, critical race theory, and anti-Israel agitation has been a staple of public life on that campus for decades.” It’s also not driven by students, but by faculty and administrators.
One needs only to browse the current Harvard course catalog to see how deeply the rhetoric of “decolonization” has been embedded. One course, “Global Rebellion: Race, Solidarity, and Decolonization,” draws on critical ethnic studies, a subfield of critical race theory, and promises to promote “Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous radicalism” — that is, left-wing ethnopolitics for everyone except whites and Jews. The goal, according to the course description, is to “discuss how BIPOC communities forged cross-racial, internationalist solidarities to rebel against global white supremacy.”
He details other courses to expand the point about the usual metaphors: “refusal,” “resistance,” “postcoloniality,” and “decoloniality.”
What might these terms mean? To answer that question, we can turn to a Harvard-funded program called “Decolonize Harvard.” In 2021, Harvard’s Derek Bok Center hired Marcelo Garzo Montalvo, a visiting assistant professor of Latinx Studies who uses “he/they” pseudo-pronouns, to lead an initiative about “decolonizing” the university. The premise was simple: administrators, faculty, and students, Montalvo said in his recorded lectures, must “understand and frame Harvard as a settler-colonial, genocidal, and Eurocentric institution” built on the “foundational violence” of white Europeans.
The solution, Montalvo said, was to engage in a “decolonizing process” that embeds critical theory, ethno-political struggle, and left-wing pedagogy throughout the university. After this process is completed, Montalvo speculated, “Harvard and the settler university [may] cease to be recognizable as Harvard as such.” The goal could be, ontologically and epistemologically speaking, “to abolish the university” altogether.
Israel, too, figures into this dialectic. In his program to “decolonize Harvard,” Montalvo promoted materials highlighting Harvard student and faculty activism against Israel’s supposed “apartheid regime” and “settlement enterprise.” The student groups accused Israel of “structural and cultural forms of violence” and called for both “scholarly action” and “collective resistance” against the Jewish state. Five Harvard faculty also issued a statement linking the work of “Palestinian liberation” to the work of decolonizing Harvard, arguing for “a more robust commitment to teaching about Palestine, to incorporating work by Palestinians into our syllabi, to inviting Palestinian scholars and community members to speak at university events, and to supporting campus activism for Palestinian liberation.”
Montalvo and his fellow travelers make clear that “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” as the title of a scholarly paper asserts. As Palestinian militants decolonize Israel, the logic goes, domestic academics should decolonize institutions such as Harvard.
This isn’t just academics, though. Rufo concludes:
As we have seen this week, the outcome of “decolonization” is barbarism. For Hamas, it means murdering women, children, and the elderly, executing innocent people on the street, and mutilating infants in their homes. For the radical academics, the process is less brutal but barbaric all the same: it means destroying our best institutions, obliterating academic standards, and elevating witchcraft, voodoo, and pseudo-science into positions of prestige. The philosopher Leo Strauss once defined nihilism as opposition to civilization as such — and this is precisely what the decolonizing academics have done, acting out their vengeful fantasies to “abolish” Harvard, once a crowning symbol of Western civilization.
Americans need to understand that the massacre in Gaza is not only a foreign outrage. The same ethno-radicals who cheer Hamas’s destruction of civilization abroad also want to commit civilizational suicide here at home.