“You are now entering Northwestern liberated zone,” the scrawled sign says on the university gate, accompanied by a Palestinian flag.
True that, superficially anyway.
The supposedly esteemed private midwestern university has reached an agreement with, more accurately bent a knee to, pro-Palestinian protestors who have now promised to take down all but one of the 100 tents in their “Gaza solidarity encampment.”
“In exchange, Northwestern has agreed to take several steps to expand student engagement in the school’s financial investments.
“The protesters have demanded that the university divest from Israeli companies and cease partnerships with Israeli institutions.
“Northwestern also agreed to fund the tuition of five Palestinian undergraduates and hire two visiting Palestinian faculty members in addition to providing a temporary space on campus for Middle Eastern and Muslim students until their existing house finishes renovation.”
As British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously reassured us in 1938, “there will be peace for our time.”
Not surprisingly, many of the protesters were upset that the settlement was not sufficient. So much for peace. What we are dealing with here is a familiar pattern, especially familiar if you were around China from 1966 to 1976 for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Accepted demands beget more demands. The Cultural Revolution ended with deaths in the hundreds of thousands to the many millions, depending on your source. Millions more had their lives ruined.
We are in the midst of our version now.
Is that an exaggeration? Hardly. The day after Northwestern acquiesced, protestors at Columbia upped the ante and smashed their way into Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and unfurled a two-story “intifada” banner from a window while hundreds of sympathizers encircled the building, creating a human chain, according to The Times of Israel. Nothing like this occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, even with the many exaggerations of the biased committee that investigated it.
It wouldn’t be surprising to soon see Jewish students marched around campus on chairs with the legendary dunce caps of the Cultural Revolution exchanged for their yarmulkes (assuming they even wear them anymore).
The professorate are either complicit, pathetically trying to recover their lost radical youths, or terrified to say anything lest they lose their jobs. A friend of mine, who will be nameless to preserve his or her position, in one of our universities has described faculty meetings to me that resemble the “struggle sessions” of the Cultural Revolution. As for the administrations and the endless DEI bureaucracies, they are, if anything, worse.
It took the death of Mao Zedong (1976) to put a gradual end to the Cultural Revolution. I was in China in 1979 and saw many remnants, even though that was the era of the campaign against the so-called Gang of Four, including Mao’s militant fourth wife, Jiang Qing, who was supposedly responsible for the excesses. Many aspects of the Cultural Revolution exist there to this day and even seem to be returning.
Some believe that the reelection of former President Donald Trump in November will put an end to the bleeding in our society and the concomitant madness on our campuses and in our streets. I hope they are right, but it’s easy to be skeptical.
They say that what’s going on on our campuses will go quiescent for the summer after graduation and final exams, which are already in progress. That’s possibly true, but come fall, if President Trump is reelected, and even if he is not, they are likely to explode beyond what we have seen.
The moral rot in our culture is too great for one man or one election. His election will be a start and a necessary one, but it will take years to put right what has become of this republic.
We can look to that same professorate, many with their lifetime sinecures, even more than their students, for the source of that moral rot. Almost all are clones of each other, with mentalities formed by the 1960s worldview, whether they lived through or participated in that era or not. They assume that what’s happening now is a battle between oppressors and the oppressed even though the leaders of the Hamas terrorist group and other Palestinian organizations, not to mention their supporters, are billionaires living in Qatar penthouses.
With 90 percent or more of professors voting for the Democrat Party, they, and teachers at lower grades, most of whom were educated by those same professors, have created a society of unquestioning drones and prepared them, even in many cases encouraged them, to participate in an American Cultural Revolution.
The greatest hope is that they have sown the seeds of their own destruction. There are indications, strong ones at that, that an increasing number of students are realizing that their professors are, to be blunt, “full of it.”
The more the demonstrators “act out” in a manner that is beyond juvenile and veers to psychological disturbance, the more this will increase. The more the universities acquiesce to their behavior, the more absurd and cowardly they will seem.
If we look more closely, the “useful idiots” of Northwestern may have done us a favor.
