Because Lying and Resenting is What Angels Do
Many moons ago, in a post on classroom radicalism and the grooming of students, I wrote,
The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Grover Furr and Rhonda Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism – and in order to justify funding, influence and status – great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t. As mainstream society becomes less fixated by race, gender, sexuality, etc., so peddlers of grievance and victimhood must search out – or invent – something to oppose. Overstatement and escalation are all but inevitable.
This last point was illustrated with the ‘scholarship’ of Barbara Barnett, a graduate of Duke’s infamous humanities department, who claimed that college campuses have a rate of rape and violent sexual assault almost 1000 times higher than any credible calculation. Other, equally bizarre examples of activist ‘scholarship’ can be found in the archives, starting with this gem. You can imagine my dismay on discovering that my thoughts were not at all original, as Jeff Goldstein had demonstrated three years earlier:
An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics. And in an era of academic specialisation wherein just about every individual identity group has its own set of researchers and theoretical champions – as well as a widely accepted generic narrative of grievance – the observation that continued relevance (which translates into political power) is contingent upon the nursing and care of the grievance is something that too often goes unexamined by a society that, at base, really does wish to understand and fix the problems and frustrations expressed by individual identity groups.
That nursing of grievance – from hoax hate crimes to hallucinated racism - is a subject that’s cropped up here many times since. It’s a trend that’s becoming increasingly surreal. As, for instance, when Kerri Dunn, a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College, slashed her own tyres and defaced her own car with abusive and racist messages, before walking over to puzzled onlookers and asking if they’d seen who was responsible. Despite being witnessed vandalising her own vehicle, Dunn protested her victimhood to faculty and police, citing a “crisis of hate” on campus, while students held rallies for “tolerance and diversity.”
With an eye to the latest such fabrication, involving an imaginative lesbian waitress named Dayna Morales, Daniel Greenfield takes it from there:
An identity defined in terms of victimhood needs fresh injections of oppression to sustain its existence. Those African-Americans who define “blackness” not in terms of positive values but in terms of negative values, need white racism, the real thing or the fake one, to remind them of who they are. And the same holds true for other minorities who define themselves not by their culture or values, but by their resentments…
The left’s need for victimisation means that increasing levels of tolerance actually lead to escalating confrontations with these manufacturers of intolerance. The assertion that all white people are innately racist because of their privilege is one such response to increasing tolerance. By claiming that whiteness itself is racist, the left gets back to political identity, rather than actual discrimination, as the source of conflict, and redefines even the most tolerant university multicultural spaces as racist.
The manufacturers of intolerance, whether they’re tenured academics like Ward Churchill, professional politicians like Barack Obama or angry waitresses like Dayna Morales, respond to tolerance with provocations. Their goal is to elicit evidence of intolerance to sustain their political identity. The more tolerance they encounter, the more they escalate their provocations. Their goal is not a tolerant society. It’s not a multiracial society or a post-racial society. It is a society perpetually at war over identity politics. That conflict is what gives them power.
We’ve seen the kinds of personalities to whom that endless psychodrama, and browbeating and attention, typically appeals. And for whom passive-aggression is both a lifestyle and matter of expertise. Habitual unrealism and opportunist dishonesty are apparently a small price to pay for being professionally aggrieved and therefore interesting, if only as a cartoon, a parody of a person. And even if the basis for that grievance is absurdly exaggerated or didn’t actually occur.
It’s no coincidence that these dramas usually originate in and around the clown quarter of academia, where the left holds court, and where pretentious victimhood is encouraged as a credential. Given the scrupulously PC environment of the typical campus, this creates a big problem for enthusiasts of identity politics and grievance leverage. There won’t be nearly enough actual racism or misogyny or homophobia to justify the inflated rhetoric and pre-booked outrage, on which so many egos and careers depend. And so what’s a warrior for “social justice” to do? The inflated rhetoric isn’t going away – for many it’s now the standard rhetoric, and its users can get quite upset if you dare to question them. And so liberties have to be taken – whether by denouncing grammatical correction as a racist “micro-aggression” or slashing your own tyres and blaming someone in your class. It’s a lot to ask, I know. But for heroes – for warriors – it’s the path to utopia. A world in which everyone is tolerant. And WrongThought™ has been scolded out of existence.
Via the invaluable Protein Wisdom.
Henry,
The interesting thing was this: having denounced his opponents as stupid racists, he warmed to his subject and curiously announced that British people were not only very lazy, but ugly too, and that thanks to high immigration levels “our grandchildren will be beautiful”.
I think there will always be occasions that one someone follows a particular dogma, they very quickly find themselves running out of things to say – they are left either to repeat themselves or, as apparently the case with the guy you mention above, revealing the considerably less enlightened views than the one’s he has borrowed.
there was only so much of the madness that you can wade through at any one point.
Welcome to my world. Spend an afternoon sifting through Occupier tweets and you’ll be trying to gnaw through your own neck.
Along similar lines:
Five students at Sussex Uni banned from campus for ‘peaceful protest’
Around 40-60 students have occupied a conference centre and top floor of a University of Sussex building as “a last recourse” to prevent the privatisation of … catering and estate management services.
Not quite sure how the privatisation of the canteen symbolises the end of civilisation as we know it, but anyway …
Students occupy Sussex University in protest against privatization
“The suspension… has caused outrage among students.” Isn’t it just awful when your actions have consequences?
“In the town where I live, the EDL (English Defence League, a racist organisation / mob of drunken thugs in the UK) have staged demonstrations over the past few years and each time they have been met head-on by a coalition of anti-fascist protestors (Respect, Socialist Worker Party, Anarchists, the English Disco Lovers etc.) holding a counter-demonstation.”
You know who else was “anti-fascist”? Communists. That’s who your buddies are. They are, in fact, PAID communists. Paid by your government (and mine) to brutalize you into acquiescing to a campaign of genocide committed against you by ( I’ll give you 3 guesses,but you won’t need ’em.) the governments of most of the Western nations, who are entirely captured by a species of Communism or perhaps more accurately a diabolically twisted oligarchism which resembles communism,a bastard political scion of the most poisonous aspects of capitalism welded by pure class hatred to….. well, how do you pick which aspects of communism are the MOST poisonous?
“The first time there was a demo, I knew nothing about it until the street I was walking down at the time suddenly had to be cleared to make way for the anti-fascist protestors to march through. I was standing in a shop doorway, waiting for them to pass, when a young man of about 20 with a Trotsky beard and thin, wire-rim glasses broke away from his friends rushed up to me and fairly screamed ‘EDL GO TO HELL!!!!!’ right into my face.”
What a shocker. Guess what? That’s not a fellow civilian. He’s a paramilitary shocktrooper. The same ones go to every one of these events ,all around the world,and terrorize everyone without a Che Guevara T-shirt/ski mask ensemble on. Incidentally, do you know why they wear masks? I mean, aside from the fact that terrorists wear masks? Reread what I wrote earlier, I gave you the answer. It is so you won’t recognize that a couple hundred of them, at most, are going to EVERY SINGLE ONE of these events. It is always the SAME GROUP. I’m an American. Our government has been doing this stuff,destabilizing societies,that is,throughout most of the last century. Yours has too, probably not as successfully as us,though.
It seems they have figured out that destabilizing their own societies is a good way to gain even greater power for themselves.They can tear up those pesky constitutions and have their detractors summarily executed,the wet dream of every tyrant.
“I was as embarrassed as all hell as everyone in the street with me began to eye me with suspicion / hatred and some of the other shoppers in the same doorway even started to shuffle away from me.”
You know why that is? You should. You’re one of the ones creating the situation. Consider the following paragraph:
“If you’re reading this anecdote, please do understand that I am absolutely not, never have been or ever will be, a member or even a tacit supporter of any kind of moronic organisation like the EDL; I hope it’s also clear that I’d never seen the Trotskyite before in my life, nor him me.”
You’re CREATING the climate of fear you live in, by agreeing that organizing in the interests of white British is A BAD THING, a “moronic” thing,a thing you should feel ashamed of. Listen, these antifas organize enraged mobs for a living. Their job is to terrorize you. The only antidote to their terrorism is to use terrorism against them. It is the only thing terrorists understand. If they are coming at you with a knife, you need at least a knife, and really, a gun if you can get one, in order to insure that you SURVIVE the encounter.
Ergo, it follows that if they bring threats screamed into your face at close range, you need to surprise them by planting a brick in the middle of theirs. First, because it immediately puts you back in control, which you have every right to as he was the one who violated your personal boundaries, and second, because it marks them. When you see the toothless guy with the broken nose at the next antifa hate rally in support of white genocide, everyone knows he’s a soft target. He’s been punked before, so he’ll be easy to step over to get to the next commie or easy to track in order to ferret out where,precisely,his money and directions are coming from.
You are in a war, Nik. If you do not favor Communism,if you have no desire to be a serf in your grandfather’s country, you need to join with other British who also despise it, and you need to FIGHT these bastards. You need to start screaming in THEIR faces, before they ever get a chance to scream in yours. If you don’t, you will be destroyed. The aim of the masters of the so-called antifascist commies is to KILL YOU. The longer you wait, the less chance you have of staging an effective resistance. You will be tyrannized, you will be unjustly imprisoned, and ultimately, you will be murdered.
I’m not saying join the EDL. From what I hear, they’re controlled opposition. but,you have to realize something. YOU are the “fascist” that they want to destroy, and you are a good guy who deserves his life, his liberty, and his property. The “fascists” that these commies are intent on wiping out are the GOOD GUYS. The guys who love their country, who’ve dutifully paid taxes for years, who’ve meekly accepted the constantly-escalating intrusions and encroachments on their privacy, their dignity, even their sanity. You were not targeted by accident. You were attacked ON PURPOSE. They would never dream of attacking a real fascist. He might stab or beat them to death. Instead, they have orders to assault YOU, and claim victory over “fascists”. I cannot overstate this. To them, YOU are the fascist.
They will make a little old lady into a “fascist” in the eyes of their dull-witted supporters,after the fact, unless she beats the crap out of them.
These guys claim to fight “fascists” but they are fighting YOU. If the “fascists” don’t show up to this war that the commies want, well-armed and well-prepared,and spoiling for a fight, then YOU are the one who will lose your property,your liberty, and perhaps even your life.
Choose whom you will serve. Will you support “fascism” and suffer accusations of racism and bigotry in the short-term for it, or will you support this globalist collectivism that wants your blood, and perish, taking your fellow good-natured,law-abiding,patriotic countrymen down with you? I know whom I have chosen to stand with. I have no right to put the lives and well-being of others in jeopardy because I refuse to stand on their behalf.
If they are so scared of “fascism”, then it must be the perfect vehicle for robbing them of any power to terrorize myself and my loved ones. Antifas are not Gods,they are not priests, they are not even elected officials. They are mercenaries and terrorists of an alien government; alien because it is neither wholly your government, nor mine, nor Germany’s, nor Spain’s,Nor France’s but all of them, all of the wretched,delusional,power-mad bastards. Loose the f*cking dogs on the cowardly pricks,I say.
Terrorists have always called themselves something other than terrorists, whether it’s “holy warrior”,”freedom fighter”, or “antifascist”. Anti-fascist is a codeword for Terrorism.