E. Rowell: The infiltration of cultural Marxism into all American institutions started in the 1920’s. We are witnessing now the culmination of a century’s effort to subvert and destroy American institutions and to turn America’s tradition, culture, and values into chaos. What this effort teaches us is that a small but dedicated group of individuals can, little by little, seriously damage a culture that was over 200 years in the making. Thus it is possible that no matter what the size of the group of patriots, we can stop the chaos, and unwind the century’s efforts to destabilize, demoralize, and subvert the Constitution, our system of justice, our political process, our centers of leadership and power, and advance a stronger version of America, one more protected from subversion for the future.
A letter from 500 Jews at Columbia University may be a landmark in the struggle to escape a stifling regime of doublethink and ensure the American Jewish future through proud and open dissent
By Natan Sharansky, THE DAILY SCROLL/BACK PAGES 28 May 2024
In the furor over America’s campuses, it was easy to miss the letter that 500 of Columbia University’s Jews penned and signed to present their position in their own voice. Yet it was this letter, quietly distributed and far less aggressive than some of the other events that overshadowed it, that may prove to be the turning point in the struggle for American Jewry’s future. This is why.
Twenty years ago, just after the second intifada, I went on a tour of American and Canadian campuses. Shaken by what I saw and heard, I told (then) Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that the major battle for the future of American Jewry will be fought on campuses. So disturbed was I by this visit, that I titled the article I wrote about it in the Hebrew press “a journey into occupied territory.”
The “occupiers” in my metaphor were the centers for Middle East studies that had sprouted like mushrooms in American universities to spread anti-Zionist propaganda. Their influence was palpable, not only in events they organized, but also in their effect on the Jewish students I met. While many expressed deep solidarity with Israel and support for its struggle against terror, a few young men and women told me that for them, as liberal Jews, it would be better if Israel didn’t exist. “Then,” they told me, “I won’t be perceived as responsible for such awful crimes.”
Such statements, which foreshadowed attempts by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace to dissociate themselves from Israel, didn’t concern me as much as yet another, and far more alarming, set of statements. People who wish to fully sever their association with Israel neither reflect nor sway the sentiments and opinions of the overwhelming majority of American Jews. No, the statements that concerned me and led me to speak of occupation and battlefields were the many variations I heard on one young woman’s quietly spoken and regretful admission that she would very much like to speak against divestment and other anti-Israel measures, but she couldn’t. Her professors won’t like it, she told me. It would harm her future career.
Dear Lord, I thought, when I first heard these words. We are not in the Moscow of my youth, where one’s career depended on pretending to buy the Soviet credo hook, line and sinker! Yet the more students I met, the more I heard of similar, stifling concerns. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, I knew very well how catching and pervasive self-censorship can become. No one will need to “occupy” the campuses physically if the Jewish students will carry out their own occupation themselves by growing too afraid to speak their own truths.
Totalitarian societies survive by relying on a core of true believers to frighten even those who don’t buy the ideological party line into becoming “doublethinkers”—people who adhere to the party line in public regardless of their private thoughts—rather than outright dissidents. In the normal course of events, the percentage of doublethinkers is always on the rise, as more and more people grow disillusioned with the false promises of the regime yet continue to pledge allegiance to it out of fear instead of faith. The regime controls them not through their own convictions but through the power its institutions hold over their lives, livelihoods, and safety. In other words, it controls them by frightening them into censoring themselves on the regime’s behalf.
Of course America is a free country and not a totalitarian regime. However, it was impossible to miss the resemblance between the culture I encountered in the American academy 20 years ago and the Soviet worldview of my youth. Like the Communist party (following Marx), more and more people started dividing the world into oppressors (read: always bad, always in the wrong) and oppressed (read: always in the right), and claiming that whoever belonged to the first camp wasn’t worthy of the same rights, freedoms, and protections as the latter. Since Israel and successful “white” Jews elsewhere were a priori classified as oppressors, hating and indeed abusing them became less and less taboo.
In the past 20 years, the ideologues of this new antisemitism continued to pour their fervor into demonizing Israel, and to use every tool at their disposal to press the majority of American Jews who don’t believe their lies into becoming doublethinkers. They made it more and more difficult to get a public position in a student body for students who supported Israel or even visited it on a Birthright trip. They gaslighted Jewish students who spoke about their personal experiences of antisemitism by telling them that what they experienced was really “only” and “legitimate” anti-Zionism, putting them on the defensive for their so called “alarmism” and “rejection of legitimate criticism.” More and more Jewish students found that standing up for their beliefs marked them for discrimination and harassment. Jewish students found themselves unwilling doublethinkers in the very places that are supposed to be the bedrock and bastion of free society.
***
After Oct. 7, the campaign to vilify Israel and scare its potential supporters on campuses has exploded into the open. Explicit antisemitism became legitimate and accepted on many American campuses, as so-called “anti-Zionism” revealed itself to be a flimsy cover for unadorned antisemitism. At Drexel University, “anti-Zionist” protesters demanded that the university sever its association with Hillel and Chabad, eliminating Jewish life on campus. At the University of Toronto and other campuses, protesters proudly recite classic antisemitic canards about Jewish control of the banks and the press while calling for genocide and praising Hitler. At UCLA, the university administration reached an agreement with protesters allowing them to bar students with the “wrong” opinions—i.e., Jews—from campus. At Columbia, a leader of the student protests expressed his personal desire to kill Jews.
None of these are isolated incidents; they are in fact true expressions of what “anti-Zionism” means to its proponents, namely, to drive Jewish students and professors off campus or at the very least to force them to live in disguise. Jews are now routinely warned not to speak Hebrew or wear a kippa on campuses for their own protection, while their would-be harassers are lauded as heroes and are at best given slaps on the wrist which are revoked weeks or days later, when presumably fewer people are watching (imagine the outrage if female students were warned not to dress immodestly on campus for their own protection, while their would-be harassers were lauded as heroes!). A flat denial of Israel’s right to exist became an axiom that goes without saying. Surrounded by classmates and professors who celebrate the worst violations of human rights in recent history—Hamas’ horrific massacre on Oct. 7—as a legitimate step toward liberation, the Jewish students are left to fend for themselves, abandoned by the progressive allies that Jewish institutions and individuals supported unquestioningly in their own hours of need.
The occupation of the campuses, which 20 years ago was but a metaphor, has become a real movement with funding, leadership, and physical presence. Young Jews no longer face ostensible threats against their professional futures; they face daily threats against their physical safety and the core of their identities as Jews and as human beings.
It was into this foul atmosphere that Columbia’s Jewish students wrote their letter. Five hundred of Columbia’s Jewish students declared that they won’t be cowed by the haters, that they reject the attacks against their Jewish identity, and that Zionism is a part of Jewish identity. They called out their haters for the antisemites they are, and the administration of the university for downplaying and mishandling the attacks that target Jews. They flatly rejected attempts to victim-blame the Jews for the hatred that targets them. Most remarkably, they all signed the letter with their full names, proudly and openly, shedding the self-censorship and silence of the doublethinker for the proud stance of the dissident. In the days since then, more and more Jews added their names to this list.
When I was a dissident in the USSR, my friends and I knew well that a revolution can only start when a critical mass of doublethinkers stops being afraid and crosses the line into open dissent. Only when the masses lose their fear and drop the mask of pretense, can they lead their society into a different future. It was true in the USSR, and it is true today: The ideological regime of antisemitism that has entrenched itself in America’s universities for decades will only collapse when enough Jews stop being afraid. It will only collapse if they stop unwillingly aiding it by hiding and self-censoring, and instead speak their truths openly and loudly.
When we were fighting the USSR from within, we estimated that once approximately a fifth of the population will transform from doublethinkers into dissidents, the authorities will no longer be able to contain the spread of free thought. Heartwarmingly, more than a fifth of the Jews of Columbia University have already signed the letter that marks them as dissidents to the reigning ideological regime. I hope that our estimations decades ago about the tipping point from oppression to revolution will prove right in the case of this revolution as well.
The next year will likely be as tough for Jews on campus as this one. Of course, in democratic America there are many tools that can be used to fight antisemitism: going to court, encouraging hearings in Congress, using the press to unmask the dangerous actors who finance the new antisemitic waves, and so forth. But in order to defend your rights, you have to first define and claim them. Until America’s Jewish students publicly claim their right to their Jewish and Zionist identity, they will continue to fight at a disadvantage.
However, if the Jewish students of Cornell, Stanford, Harvard, and the other campuses will join Columbia’s Jews in their public statement, they stand a chance to do more than stand up for their own truths—they stand a real chance to revolutionize the campuses, defeat the antisemitic forces that have occupied them, and win the battle for American Jewry’s future.
Dear Jewish students of America, today, you are on the front line. The future of American Jewry, and maybe even America itself, is in your hands. Be brave.
Hi, Felix, know this one?
Stalin was working late one night at his desk in the Kremlin going through his correspondence when after opening a letter, read it, overjoyed at the good news, looked around for someone to share it with. He found an elderly Jewish janitor.
“Comrade janitor, Comrade janitor look! Trotsky recants. He admits he’s wrong! Listen:
{and he read aloud} “Dear Stalin. You were right. I was wrong. The poor peasantry Are the firmest allies of the proletariat. Socialism CAN be built in one country. I’m sorry. Trotsky.
The comrade janitor said, “Comrade General Secretary, may I see the letter please?”
“Certainly,” said Stalin, handing him the
letter.
Taking the letter with one hand, he retrieved his spectacles out of his pocket and read the letter, silently.
“Comrade Stalin,” he said, When you read a letter by a Jew, you have to read it LIKE a Jew. May I?
He read aloud in a thick Yiddish accent, ” Dear Stalin, You were right and I was wrong? The poor peasantry are the firmest allies of the proletariat? Socialism can be built in one country?
I’M SORRY!”
😀
@Honeybee You reminded me of a bit if humor I wrote some years ago and saved in Googke Drive:
In case that reference isn’t obvious
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier
Sebastien ” Teach-ins” Yawl has been preachin to the choir Come out to Texas or some other such state and preach. I’ll back cookies for the crowd.
Just lost my reply to Seb…didn’t go through
Seb
All your stuff is super interesting
Marxism-Leninism
A term used by Stalin to hide that his concept of building socialism in one country was the opposite (of above term)
Trotsky…truth
Stalin…the opposite… obfuscation
The Shakura family…
The confused striving for freedom is connected to birth of cultural Marxism
Her brother released after 37 years to die within 6 months of cancer
Engels with little data wrote Part played by labour in transition ape to man
Book by Don Johansson backed up his main conclusions…Lucy…bought it when it appeared. Lent it. Lost it.
And yes, I helped organize teach-ins on campuses in the ’80s, and in people’s homes and venues like the Village Jazz club , The Village Gate, for people like Edward Said, Hanan Ashrawi, also staffing book tables. colleges, unions, liberal churches, participating in coalitions for fraternal liberal/left i.e., Progressive causes, even Gay Pride 😀 ( this is for the pals) speaking at their events, – I spoke at at least one rally for the All African Revolutionary People’s party and the last Jesse Rainbow Coaltion convention in upstate NY alongside Philip Agee and somebody else – he got us lost looking for the venue in the winding staircases In this hotel in Buffalo, NY and I joked that he must have been a lousy spy and got a laugh from him and the other speaker, a woman, don’t remember who – helping to organize them, pooling mailing lists, phone banking, handing out fliers. This is some of where it started. Ironically, I never did anything on a college campus when I was, myself, a student. I was far too busy. 😀
But, in the ’90s, the college takeovers at CCNY (City College of New York) and there were at least a couple where students occupied a building or two, were all about cuts in the state budget.
This is qualitatively different. Also, we didn’t have any outside funding. We had bake sales, or the equivalent and we were more like the proverbial guy who stands on a podium in Hyde Park. Nobody got paid. This was all after hours and on weekends and holidays after our regular jobs or school, we had a few college students.
This contemporary movement is more like a color revolution.
Correction, on second thought, the parody in Network might have been of Angela Davis or a composite. In the 70s, she was the ’60s Che like heroine, I think Chesimard/Shakur came later as a cultural icon. I’m pretty sure the crazy white girl was a parody of Patty Hearst. Not sure who the black nationalist guy with the shades and the fez was supposed to be.
As for predicting the mainstreaming of Cultural Marxism, “Putney Swope” (1969) a satire directed by Robert Downey Sr. , was absolutely prophetic as well as hilariously absurdist.
“When its chairman dies, an advertising firm’s executive board must elect someone to fill the position. Each member, unable to vote for himself, casts a secret ballot for Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson), the firm’s only black executive, assuming he wouldn’t receive any votes from the other members. But once in power, Swope makes radical changes to the firm — like keeping only one white employee and refusing to advertise harmful products — all under the firm’s new moniker, “Truth and Soul, Inc.”
I have to say that the scene with the original board is stereotypically Jewish and is an antisemitic caricature in the exaggerated way – much as D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” did in its depictions of African-American ex-slaves dancing – they are depicted as well as the suggestion that they are really racists pretending they are not. Remember, this is the time that radical Marxist black nationalists threw the whites, meaning disproportionately and pointedly with antisemitic venom, Jews out of the civil rights movement our people had selflessly championed cofounded and funded long before it became fashionable.
But it’s a must see film to understand the historical transition we have been experiencing and which the Soviet defector, Yuri Bezmanov talked about, though as Daniel Greenberg discussed in his new book, these are also indigenous ideological offshoots dating back to the Jacobins or, I would argue, the English Revolution.
Excellent book about this, one of my textbooks in college, “The World Turned Upside down: “Radical ideas During the English Revolution” by Christopher Hill (1972)
“Detailed analysis of a 17th century counter-culture and of religio-political ideas of the Left Wing of English Puritanism led by Milton, Bunyan and others.
Source: Publisher”
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_World_Turned_Upside_Down/6JUhAQAAIAAJ?hl=en
Putney Swope
https://www.google.com/search?q=putney+swope&rlz=1C9BKJA_enUS790US791&oq=putney+swope&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCggAEAAY4wIYgAQyCggAEAAY4wIYgAQyBwgBEC4YgAQyBwgCEAAYgAQyBwgDEAAYgAQyBwgEEAAYgAQyBwgFEAAYgAQyBwgGEAAYgAQyBwgHEAAYgAQyBwgIEAAYgAQyBwgJEAAYgATSAQg1MDA4ajBqN6gCCrACAQ&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Compare the language below with that of Soviet and CCP pronouncements. It’s identical. This isn’t even cultural Marxism, this is classical Marxism-Leninism. When I was at City College of New York in the early ’90s, and again in the early 2000’s, there was an Assata Shakur Club that had a huge office on the landings between two floors, right by the escalator., though It was removed, at one point. She’s a professor in Cuba now, for many years., or she was, I haven’t kept up. *
“…The measure, called Resolution in Support of CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment, also demanded that CUNY divest from all “companies complicit in the imperialist-Zionist genocide”…
And it called for a “fully-funded, free CUNY that is not beholden to Zionist and imperialist private donors.”
*You may recall I posted Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant parody of her and other crazies and “moderates” on the far left in “Network” (1976)
“Network-The Mao Tse Tung Hour Negotiations”
https://youtu.be/CuqvlMxfGA4?si=NZHxcH_OZA2Zx9dg
They are in the pay of China, Qatar and Soros orgs.
Global warming is not an actual problem, it’s a hoax to deindustrialize the US, destroy our economy and empower China.
I would like to hear from Seb
He has some knowledge of this issue
Not denying he has courage. But can Jewish students go forward totally ignorant of history?
I spent time showing that Sharansky was fighting against Stalinism not Communism. The communists were murdered by Stalinism in the Moscow Trials etc al.
I might not have bothered
It is perhaps the oldest lie
Stalin was literally the gravedigger of the Revolution
Why are you denying history?
If you mangle history like this where does it end?
When and where did this term originated?
I heard it recently and do not understand
From the 20d you say.
That might be just a lie you have read somewhere
Communists and anti-Semites hate Nate Sharansky as he has a long history of fighting both. A strong brave man with an equally strong moral fiber.
So a minority of a minority of the Jews on these campuses are going to do what?
These are staged events and they are performing the useful purpose for the ruling classes of capitalism.
The issue of Antisemitism is also a massive diversion.
Most of the leaders of these campus operations are unknown and could be in the pay of the CIA
Certainly they divert away from every critical issue that the ruling class is involved with, and powerless
Global Warming
Virus danger
Nuclear war danger
Growing poverty
Antisemitism
Then the issue of understanding these fake manipulation of people
Milosevic was made into a bogeyman
Saddam Gaddafi Putin
And easily 20 others
Latest is Trevor Loudain talking about the pernicious role of china.
With massive lies about the lab leak when we can prove COVID came from and through animals
Now the big lies about Russia and Ukraine and lies hiding from the people about the closeness we are to Nuclear Conflagration
Sharansky
Natan Sharansky does not tell the reader when he is talking about. Let’s try to figure.
Say Sharansky is aged 80 now. His youth he mentions say aged 20.
So 60 years ago – he is active in 1964. Or thereabouts.
He is talking about the Soviet Union in the sixties or seventies is fairly close I think.
He is therefore talking about Stalinism not socialism or communism. These are different things.
I have tried twice, seven hour ago and just now to post this. This is the third attempt
Sharansky
Natan Sharansky does not tell the reader when he is talking about. Let’s try to figure.
Say Sharansky is aged 80 now. His youth he mentions say aged 20.
So 60 years ago – he is active in 1964. Or thereabouts.
He is talking about the Soviet Union in the sixties or seventies is fairly close I think.
He is therefore talking about Stalinism not socialism or communism. These are different things.
Stalinism originated in the 1920s as a concept that it was possible to create “socialism in one country”. This is a total revisionism. Stalinism was responsible for major revolutionary defeats, in China 1927, in Spain 1933 to 1939, especially Germany in 1933.
Lenin was opposing Stalin (the latter previously had been a rather minor figure) before his life was cut short in 1924.
It fell to Leon Trotsky to carry on and deepen the struggle against Stalin. And against this new phenomenon of Stalinism.
The Moscow Trials of 1936 to 37 saw Stalin aiming to cut ties to the 1917 Revolution
And 1940 saw the assassination of the final tie to the 1905 and 1917 Revolutionary period.
But especially Trotsky was able to lay down the basis for the understanding of the phenomenon of this distinct category – Stalinism
This was always not done by Trotsky as an academic exercise but in the context of creating a new leadership to meet the challenges of deteriorating Stalinism, and inevitably deepening crisis in world capitalism as a system.
I emphasise it is this crisis which the youth of today are faced with, such as the Jewish students in Columbia University which Sharansky refers to.
Those Jewish students have to learn this history, as have all workers, youth and nations.
Sadly Nathan Sharansky who in his own way fought against the Antisemitism of Stalinism in Russia, revised that history. To such an extent that I had to trace back to even grasp what period he was talking about. He left out all the key historical moments that I have covered.
So he has left these Jewish students actually very much unprepared.
I have very much and equal to Sharansky got the welfare of the Jewish students he refers to. To say that their Antisemitic opponents have any connection with Marxism is a bald lie. Even if the ruling class invented a new term (cultural Marxism) it is still or even more deviously a lie. To blacken the name of socialism or Marxism which alone can save the youth.