EVEN AS ISRAEL is doggedly punishing Hamas in Gaza, the contours of a civil war are taking concrete shape on American university campuses. The terror organisation Hamas has found support here, in the alleged land of the free and home of the brave, which is allegedly also the most powerful nation on earth. In less than thirty years, the definitions of freedom and bravery have been overturned. Freedom is now defined as support for Jihad and bravery, as waging war against your own nation.
On 18 April, Google fired twenty-eight of its employees who had barged into its Sunnyvale and New York offices and staged a “sit-in” protesting against Google Cloud’s $1.2 billion deal with the Israeli government. “Sit-in” is the politically correct term for “forcible occupation.” The protestors’ agenda is familiar: they characterise Israel’s ongoing defensive against Hamas, as a genocide.
For Indians, this narrative is sickeningly resonant: over the last half a century or more, a substantial clutch of such “protestors” (NGOs, “civil society,” academics, intellectuals, etc) have repeatedly risen in defence of Pakistan and various Islamic terror groups, which have inflicted horrendous terrorism at regular intervals on Indian soil. In relative terms, such terrorism-supporters are a rather new breed in America.
The dismissed Google employees, in reality, are indoctrinated activists who aren’t even aware that they have been indoctrinated. They are the harvest of an unrelenting, decadal propaganda, which in turn is the yield of an all-encompassing Far Left subversion that fattens rabid Islamic outfits of all hues including but not limited to Hamas. Let’s not forget the fact that the Far Left academic Angana Chaterji was close to and coached by Gulam Nabi Fai, the Pakistani hireling lobbying for a separate Kashmir nation.
THE STORY OF all such Far Left subterfuges in the West begins in Europe. With a renegade theory called multiculturalism, which acquired political heft in the 1960s. Theodore Dalrymple provides one of the most penetrating critiques of multiculturalism:
Multiculturalism rests on…the dishonest pretense that all cultures are equal and that no fundamental conflict can arise between the customs, mores, and philosophical outlooks of two different cultures. The multiculturalist preaches that, in an age of mass migration, society can (and should) be a kind of salad bowl, a receptacle for wonderful exotic ingredients from around the world, the more the better, each bringing its special flavor to the cultural mix. For the salad to be delicious, no ingredient should predominate and impose its flavor on the others. Even as a culinary metaphor, this view is wrong: every cook knows that not every ingredient blends with every other. But the spread and influence of an idea is by no means necessarily proportional to its intrinsic worth… especially among those who gain their living by playing with ideas, the intelligentsia.
As the multiculturalism theory gained steam, it translated into political policy, which then birthed unchecked and rampant Muslim immigrations first in Europe and later, America. The 1973 Arab Oil Crisis marks a major milestone in this history. The OPEC’s imposition of an oil embargo against America was rooted precisely in American support for Israel in the Arab-Israel war of 1973. The meteoric ascent of the late terrorist, Yaseer Arafat was thus not coincidental. A measure of how swiftly and cravenly the West capitulated to the Islamic world is seen in the shameless award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Arafat in 1994.
By this time, huge tranches of Arab oil cash had flooded into the political, cultural and educational landscapes of the US. It slowly began altering the United States in ways that have become clear to us now.
On a parallel track, a good chunk of the infamous Frankfurt School academics had infiltrated universities and were subverting the American educational system on an unprecedented scale.
Alan Bloom’s 1987 classic, The Closing of the American Mind is a majestic and stunning expose of and a dire warning about the kind of degeneracy that these Far Left academics had infected higher education with. Other notable books on this topic include Charles Sykes’ Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education and Dumbing Down Our Kids. All such sane warnings were duly ignored by an America that had convinced itself that it had no challenger in the world. It was after all, the heady 1980s and Gordon Geccko’s mantra, Greed is good, was the ruling credo.
Three decades later, this headiness of the 1980s has been replaced by a nightmarish hangover. Except that its sufferers are the children of the 1980s. The parents got sloshed but it is the kids that have the migraine. In real world terms, it means that the Far Left has ultimately triumphed. Its triumph is represented by an ugly acronym: DEI — diversity, equity and inclusiveness.
DEI is also the latest avatar of the Far Left-imposed political correctness. It is more malevolent and infinitely more lethal than anything that the Communists and Progressives could conceive of even at the height of their political and ideological dominance.
The practical consequences of DEI have manifested as unthinking support for Jihadi terror groups like Hamas, a relentless witch-hunt of Sanatana Dharma, and toxic outgrowths including but not limited to sex change, sexualising children and the ever-expanding alphabet soup of engineered gender pronouns.
THIS FAR LEFT IDEOLOGICAL USURPATION of American education naturally spilled over into and disrupted corporate America including Google. It is instructive to read Alan Bloom’s prediction of this outcome in his aforementioned 1987 book:
The modern university is a place where diversity of opinion is suppressed, and students are discouraged from seeking truth…Political correctness has stifled free speech and intellectual debate on campus… The rise of identity politics has led to the fragmentation of intellectual discourse… The liberal arts have been devalued in favor of specialized technical training.
Clearly, these specialists of technical training in our own time — the founders and heads of technology giants — having no solid grounding in classical humanities, remain incapable of responding to the politically correct DEI thralldom imposed by the Far Left. In this context, the April 18 Google episode has larger and more far-reaching ramifications.
Among the several eerie elements in the DEI narrative and its ongoing practical implications, nothing is deadlier than the transformation of students into full time activists of the Far Left. The methods and processes of this transformation include a wholesale rigging of textbooks at all levels, which are then enforced and dinned into students’ brains by a committed faculty. And when these students “graduate” with useless and unemployable degrees, they know of no reality other than the woolly atmosphere of insanity and dangerous heroism that they have experienced in their classrooms and campuses. But it is even more sinister. Their very capacity to recognise other realities has already been obliterated from a very early age.
From this perspective, substantial sections of the American academia today resemble Islamic Madrassas where students are taught only the Islamic scripture and nothing else. It is instructive to read this insightful analysis by V.S. Naipaul on the consequences of such an “education.”
A convert’s worldview alters…His idea of history alters. He rejects his own… The convert has to turn away from everything that is his… People develop fantasies about who and what they are… there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.
We observe precisely these consequences in action across America. The destruction of the statues of America’s founding fathers. The recurrent bouts of campus violence. The total repudiation of America’s history and its recasting as a history of nothing else but White, upper class oppression. And the blind and simultaneous embrace of the worst of the fanatical Islamist elements.
All this has happened primarily because of a twofold destruction: history and family. These twin destructions have created at least three generations of rootless Americans.
IN 2010, WIDESPREAD PROTESTS erupted in New York and elsewhere in the US against the proposed construction of a mosque and an Islamic community centre just across the site of the Twin Towers which were brought down by Jihadis on September 11, 2001. The protestors viewed the proposal as an expression of the triumph of the 9/11 Jihad on American soil, dubbing it “Ground Zero Mosque.” Unsurprisingly, a big investor of the aforementioned real estate project named Park51 was Sharif El-Gamal. His partner, Nour Mousa is the nephew of Amr Moussa, the former Secretary General of the Arab League.
Around the same period, in 2005, Harvard University received a whopping $20 million endowment from Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia for an Islamic Studies Chair. Fast forward, today, Harvard and other major American universities boast of a slew of academic programs that teach various aspects of Islam to Americans. Concomitant with this was a steady spurt of all kinds of radical Islamic student groups on US campuses. Chief among these is CAIR, which has repeatedly come under fire for having links with Jihadi outfits like Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Elsewhere, American foreign policy, since the last two and half decades, has embarked on a reckless pursuit of Muslim immigrants from all over the world. It seems determined to repeat the same mistake that Europe had committed from the 1960s onwards. All this sounds eerily similar to what the successive Left Governments did in Bengal for more than three decades: a wholesale import of illegal Muslim immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.
And two plus decades later, the proverbial chickens have come home to roost. A thoroughly subverted education system has created two generations of rootless American youth brainwashed into supporting Jihadi groups like Hamas. And this indoctrinated generation has flooded all realms — tech, finance, education and policy making.
IN 2017, A STORM hit the tech industry and corporate America when James Damore was fired by Google for “circulating an internal memo asserting there are biological causes behind gender inequality in the tech industry.” This had nothing to do with his job as an engineer at Google. It had everything to do with the stranglehold that the Far Left has acquired in the corporate world. This is what Damore said in a lengthy YouTube interview with Stefan Molyneux, a podcaster.
I went to a diversity programme at Google, it was totally secretive and shameful. I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programmes. I had some discussions there, there was lots of just shaming, and ‘No you can’t say that, that’s sexist’ and ‘You can’t do this.’ … There’s just so much hypocrisy in the things they are saying… the left-wing was getting so bad…Lots of upper management was shaming me.
That interview was enough for YouTube to permanently deplatform Molyneux. Other tech giants quickly followed suit. As of date, Molyneux has been permanently banned from PayPal, Mailchimp, YouTube, SoundCloud and X (formerly Twitter. His X account was reinstated after Elon Musk’s acquisition). As we mentioned, the Far Left has upended the very notion of freedom in America.
This Leftist hijack of corporate America reminds us of Ayn Rand’s bestselling The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which describe in excruciating detail the methods and tactics that the Left uses in order to seize economic power from the people and then destroys the existing social and political order. While these two novels concentrate their narrative mostly only on economics, what the Far Left - Woke combine is now doing goes far beyond economics — it is a call for total annihilation, and its methods include a conscious and declared support for Jihadi terror.
From James Damore’s firing for being politically incorrect to Google employees supporting Hamas, the downfall has been swift and deadly in just seven years. In the coming years, this self-perpetuating vicious cycle will only inflict more harm.
But at the moment, Google did the sensible thing by firing the twenty-eight Hamas supporters last week. Let’s not forget that these activists were on Google’s payroll. However, it would do better to vacuum-clean the Far Left gangs that have near completely usurped tech companies in Silicon Valley and corporate America in general.
Sinister job titles like President: Diversity, in these companies augur a return of a fatal phenomenon that violently exterminated the existing social order in Russia in 1917 and China in 1949.
Back then, Lenin and Mao had to unleash vast armies of their Communist cadre to do this job. This time around, the same thing is being accomplished through a steady but certain subterfuge in the Government apparatus, universities and the private sector.
It is thus befitting to conclude this essay with an excerpt from Vladimir Putin’s brilliant speech delivered in November 2021:
This conservative approach is not about an ignorant traditionalism, a fear of change…it is primarily about reliance on a time-tested tradition, the preservation and growth of the population, a realistic assessment of oneself and others, a precise alignment of priorities… and a fundamental rejection of extremism as a method… for us in Russia, these are not some speculative postulates, but lessons from our difficult and sometimes tragic history. The cost of ill-conceived social experiments is sometimes beyond estimation. such actions can destroy not only the material, but also the spiritual foundations of human existence, leaving behind moral wreckage where nothing can be built to replace it for a long time.
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