In Brief: The Root Cause of the Insanity
There’s one main thread running through the shocking campus protests we’ve witnessed since the Hamas terror attacks in Israel.
Academia has increasingly succumbed to what Jordan Peterson recently called idiot meta-Marxism — the idea that every relationship is about the “oppressor-oppressed narrative” and “the lens of power.” Likewise, Mike Gonzalez and Lindsey Burke of The Heritage Foundation see it gaining steam.
Americans are finally catching on that the oppressor-oppressed narrative being taught in our schools and universities is not a conspiracy theory disseminated by conservatives. It’s real. Jewish students having to barricade themselves in a college to escape a mob in Manhattan, of all places, has opened people’s eyes to the threat woke ideology represents to civilization.
Too bad it took a grotesque massacre and mass rapes in the Holy Land to do it. But now that we have people’s attention, let’s connect the dots.
The oppressor-oppressed worldview that paints democratic Israel as the “oppressor” and Palestinian terrorists as the “oppressed,” so prevalent on college campuses, is pure Marxism.
In the first page of “The Communist Manifesto” of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explain that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” They add:
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
Capitalism and democracy are based on competition, but competition requires compromise and that gives each side something.
In the American system, they note, “one party or side seldom gets all it wants” because “there are checks and balances.” That means compromise.
Not so in Marx’s “oppressor and oppressed” view. There you end up with a “revolutionary reconstitution,” which Marx himself promised would be ruthless. “This cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads,” he averred in the manifesto.
A few months later, Marx wrote, more ominously, “There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
Blood will run — it’s a feature, not a bug, of Marxism.
Gonzalez and Burke call what we’re seeing in America “cultural Marxism,” a term they note with mild amusement has “a Wikipedia page that informs the reader that ‘The term "Cultural Marxism” refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory.’“ Given the rage of Hamas against Israel shared by so many on American college campuses, they conclude:
They’ll have a harder time hiding the truth now.
