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| Nazis blocking Jews from entering the University of Vienna, 1938 |
Analogies are always tricky. Comparing today's university environment with the situation in German universities in the 1930s and 1940s usually sound more like an application of
Godwin's Law rather than serious analysis.
The obvious differences are that today's political orthodoxy in academia is not driven by a ruthless dictatorship and there is relatively little fear (today) of physical harm to those who disagree with that orthodoxy.
But when students and professors are bullied into holding opinions that are not supportable by scholarship, when entire academic fields and research have been subverted, and when hiring practices discriminate against people who hold different opinions or are Jewish - this part of the analogy between Nazi Germany and academia today is way too accurate.
While not everything applies today, way too much of it sounds sickeningly familiar.
That National Socialism is an attack upon the
Western heritage is now a generally accepted truism, nowhere more applicable than in the field of
education. Before considering this basic antagonism the underlying premises of Nazi educational
theory may be noted. To the Nazis the individual
is a myth, having no separate existence apart from
the "total collective- personality" of which he is a
member. This larger, all-comprehending corporate personality is the Volk, a spiritual-historical
being, the ideal form, mold, or type for all its
members. It is immutable and eternal, the reality
which endures and transcends ephemeral circumstance, always embodying the ideality and objectives of personal, group, and national life. Thus
educational objectives cannot be devised or formulated for preconceived ends-they are predestined
by the nature of the Volk and must be discovered.
Personality is a derivative of race and cannot be
fashioned arbitrarily, nor can it evolve autonomously in accordance with its own laws. ...There is no place for free, that is arbitrary and
unmotivated, cultivation of the mind; "abstract
life-strange theories" are to be avoided. ... An ethno-cultural determinism must rule all educational procedures.
Today's DEI race theories that white people are inherently racist and evil is the mirror image of Nazi ideas that non-Aryans are inherently immoral and biologically inferior. There is no recourse for the people who are born with the wrong colored skin. Free will does not exist.
[To Nazis,] Race is the natural form which differentiates life, a primal unity of living substance
expressing itself in body, spirit, and soul, the basic
reality which gives meaning to all knowledge.
Humanity is a myth-there are only racial types.
Education, then, cannot develop man but can only
elicit responses characteristic of a racial group.
Blood has symbolic significance it is the source
of the spirit of a race and transmits the ancestral
heritage.
The German word Volk is untranslatable
as "folk" or "people. " It implies the organic union
of a racially determined community in a collective
personality embracing generations past, present,
and to come. Hence it is eternal, immutable-as
fixed as a Platonic type or form.
The Volk is a communion as well as a community, a fellowship of faith and feeling. The lone thinker easily becomes divorced from his community and no longer shares its intuitive grasp upon vital truths.
Is there really much of a difference between the Nazi embrace of "volk" and the current fetishization of "indigeneity" and "BIPOC"? People viewed as people of color or indigenous are pure and everyone else is a colonialist cancer that cannot contribute to society - and whose previous and current contributions are suspect and to be minimized or ignored.
The Relativity of Truth. Nazi theory denies the
existence of a positivist system resting on truths
of universal validity.
National Socialist reforms in the field of higher
learning can be understood only in the light of
the Nazi attitude toward science and research-an
attitude which springs inevitably from the ethnocentric nature of the premises underlying all National Socialist thinking. It attacks first the detachment of the scientist. "Scientific objectivity",
asserts a German educational journal, "is only one
of the many errors of liberalism. The liberal man
is only an artificial construction. He does not
exist in reality ; there are only men who belong to
a nation and to a specific race. "
And then we get to how Jews were treated in German universities, which sure sounds like how Zionists are treated in Western universities today. Not by law - but by consensus, which is in many ways worse.
Under the Civil Service Law of April 7, 1933 ,
members of the teaching staffs of the universities
and other collegiate institutions might be summarily removed for "non-Aryan" origin, unsatisfactory political records or views, membership
in "subversive" organizations, or on grounds of
administrative necessity. By May 4, according to
reports in the German press, about 200 teachers
had been dismissed, mostly because of their Jewish
origin or liberal views. This number included
former ministers of state, world- famous scientists,
historians, jurists, and two Nobel prize-winners.
...
The position of the college or university teacher in Germany has become one of complete subordination to the regime. Incessant pressure is put
upon him to participate in party functions ( which,
incidentally, monopolize much of the time and
energy of his students) , to subscribe for the official
journals, to lecture at Land-Year camps and SA
gatherings, to favor students who miss work because of party activity, and to refrain from making complaints except through official channels.
He may be disciplined in innumerable and vexatious ways. His lectures may be canceled if they
conflict with party functions. He may not travel
abroad without official permission. His favorite
seminar may be abolished. He may be transferred
as a disciplinary measure.
Again, the analogy is not complete. Discrimination against Jews today is more in not hiring them to begin with than in firing or demoting them. But at a graduate school level, Zionists and Jews are feeling this discrimination and pressure to adhere to the politics of the progressives - or else.
Just like then, students are encouraged to skip classes for "party activity" - anti-Israel protests.
The curriculum in German colleges and universities has been modified
mainly in two directions-greater stress on Rassenkunde (race science)...New chairs have been established in such fields as peasant lore, race science, defense physics, and folk problems. ....Extreme political orientation
tends to undermine speculative science. ....The social studies and the humanities are completely dominated by race
science, in which subject the University of Berlin
alone offers 30 seminars. Nazi mathematicians
have founded a new journal, Deutsche Mathematik, to deal with their subject along racial lines.
The party has financed at Frankfurt an Institute
for the Investigation of the Jewish Question , designed as the first division of a Nazi high academy
as a center of scientific study from the point of
view of race.
The entire enterprise sounds like what the current situation is in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies,
Postcolonial Studies, much of anthropology and sociology. Today, many academic fields suffer from a form of intellectual authoritarianism where questioning becomes tantamount to heresy, undermining the fundamental purpose of academic research: critical, evidence-based inquiry.
Boycotting Israeli universities and protesting Jewish institutions on campus mimics what the Nazis did at their own institutions.
Jews and Zionists face cancellation of invitations to joint conferences, rejection of articles for publication, the rejection of grants, the inability to hold joint projects with Israeli colleagues.
Today's antisemitic "woke" are also working overtime to spread their anti-scientific, antisemitic theories in more and more areas.
I recently wrote about an upcoming edition of "The Journal of Architectural Education" that literally celebrates the murder and rape of Jews under an academic veneer.
This is no different, and no less immoral, than what the Nazis did to turn every academic field into a cesspool of racism and Jew-hatred.
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
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