Coming soon to a New Zealand university near you. Assuming it’s not already here

It’s been true of every Lefty revolution in history, ones that empower the State over the individual.

From the French Revolution to the Russian Soviet Revolution to Mao to Pol Pot and beyond, once the revolution has succeeded in overthrowing the status quo the winners who believe turn on other believers, intent on destroying them.

So it will be with the Woke Identity Politics revolution of recent years, with two great recent examples of how the turn is already beginning in those places where they hold power.

==========================

The first example involves a place called Hamline university in the USA where an art history professor was sacked because he showed an image of a 14th century painting to his art history class. The painting depicts the Archangel Gabriel delivering to the Prophet Mohammad his first Quranic revelation and is by an Islamic artist, which is interesting because I thought the images of Mohammed were verbotten in Islam. That actually was the point the professor was making; that the so called prohibition on images of Muhammad is not universal in Islam, and he even warned his students that he would be showing the image so those offended could avoid seeing it.

But a Muslim student in the class complained to the administration anyway; other students backed her up, saying that they were also offended (obviously Conservative Muslims) and the professor got sacked anyway for showing the painting to his art history class and thereby contributing towards “Islamophobia”, with all the usual crap we’ve come to expect from such trained victims:

“As a Muslim and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them,” the student, Aram Wedatalla, said.

Another Muslim, Amna Khalid, wrote a very different response:

In dismissing the instructor for alleged “Islamophobia,” Hamline has revealed its reductive and simplistic view of Islam, Islamic societies, and Islamic art. In an age when administrators are eager for faculty members to decolonize their syllabi, Hamline’s position is a kind of arch-imperialism, reinforcing a monolithic image of Muslims propounded by the cult of authentic Islam.
…
But most of all, I am offended as a Muslim. In choosing to label this image of Muhammad as Islamophobic, in endorsing the view that figurative representations of the Prophet are prohibited in Islam, Hamline has privileged a most extreme and conservative Muslim point of view. The administrators have flattened the rich history and diversity of Islamic thought. Their insistence that figurative representations of Muhammad are “forbidden for Muslims to look upon” runs counter to historical and contemporary evidence. As Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, reminds us, Muslim artists since the 14th century have depicted Muhammad visually — images that were painted “by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons in respect for, and in exaltation of, Muhammad and the Quran.”

In other words, the Administrators got hung up in their own underwear, in trying to appease Leftie thinking on yet another “ism” to protect offended students, they ended up enforcing the beliefs of a bunch of reactionary Islamic conservatives – who just happened to be the same students.

But the response that had me laughing was this take on the issue in Ye Olde Progressive magazine Slate by a good little progressive, Jill Filipovic, who’s not happy about the whole thing and gets stuck into the University President’s muling excuses about “respect” and “harm” and “safe spaces” and so forth – all the usual Lefty Woke froth:

I realize I sound like a crotchety old conservative here, but college classrooms should not be “safe spaces.” They can’t be safe spaces. They should be respectful spaces, and professors and students alike should treat each other with consideration, but “cause no emotional harm” is not, in fact, a value to which academic institutions should aspire, or an ideal they can ever realistically reach—especially when “this is harmful” has become an easy cudgel to use in order to get one’s way.

You can really see her struggling to maintain her status as a left-winger with all of this, as she realises the horror that, yes, it does sound exactly like something a Rightie like me would say – which is actually quite good until we get to this bit of utterly fucked-in-the-head lack of self-awareness:

This incident is making headlines because conservatives have latched onto it as another example of left-wing “cancel culture.” But how a conservative interpretation of Islam that gets a sensitive and thoughtful art history lecturer fired is “left-wing” is beyond me.

I’ve bold-faced that last sentence because it should be a lightbulb moment. But there’s a lot of things that are beyond her, even as she mutters about “‘this is harmful’ has become an easy cudgel to use in order to get one’s way.” (which political ideology has been playing that game Ms Filipovic?) and in the very next thing she writes, the “lightbulb moment” turns into a fucking dimmer switch:

It is true, though, that many people on the left have stayed quiet about this one, because, well, one doesn’t want to aid a perceived enemy, and perhaps because we want to be sensitive to Muslims who are undeniably often mistreated in the United States.

Think hard about the connection between that Leftist thinking and the firing of the professor – who is now a “perceived enemy” Think very hard sweetie. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

==========================

The second example concerns another university professor – a Black Professor skilled in the arts of “anti-racism”.

I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

You really can’t get more Lefty Woke Identity Politics Black than that. But if you read his article at the link you’ll be horrified at his description of what is happening to all these students at these anti-racism seminars, classes, and workshops given by the Telluride Association. It sounds like something out of Nineteen Eighty Four or Maoist Struggle sessions:

One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. Silence. Then another student would repeat a piece of anti-racist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers.
…
An Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy.
…
Those first few days, the students were exactly what you would expect, at turns bubbly and reserved, all of them curious, playful, figuring out how to relate to each other and to the seminar texts. Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. 

What a fucking surprise. What a grim, insane, toxic, shitty environment in which to “learn”. A Black woman named Keisha is involved and when she’s around the students are especially grim. She’s Stalin to his Trotsky, and so…

Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph. Out of their mouths came everything Keisha had said to me during the “urgent” meetings she had with me after classes when students had allegedly been harmed. The students had all of the dogma of anti-racism, but no actual racism to call out in their world, and Keisha had channeled all of the students’ desire to combat racism at me.

They alleged: I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class.

The classes fall apart and the students simply continue to mindlessly repeat what Keisha tells them, as one White girl explained:“Keisha speaks for me: She says everything I think better than I ever could.”

Professor Lloyd at least recognises what this learning experience had become:

In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult. From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposés, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.

There always has to be an Other and they must always be an Oppressor, except Lloyd never realised it could be him. Perhaps he can use this very personal lesson in an updated copy of his book, Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination.