Universities need to let the cleansing winter sun shine in
Today’s tear-down the statues madness is a sign of the ideologically-inspired drive to rewrite history and undermine the capitalist energy that has permitted democratic society to deliver benefits around the world, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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You don’t need an arts degree to join the dots but graduates from our universities seem unable to understand that they’ve been had.
All that consciousness raising inspired by humanities courses in identity and gender politics has left them clueless and unable to think for themselves.
They’ve been manipulated by the Marxist theorists who’ve been infiltrating the education sector since the 1960s and we’re now seeing them in full illiberal mindless bloom.
How else can those who proclaim themselves to be both independent thinkers and of the woke generation explain their dumb parroting of US slogans and adoption of causes which have zero relevance to Australia?
Proportionally, Australia has taken more migrants since World War II than any other nation, including the United States and the overwhelming majority have made great citizens — hardly the action of an inherently racist nation.
Today’s tear-down the statues madness is an outward and visible sign of the ideologically-inspired drive to rewrite history and undermine the capitalist energy that has permitted democratic society to deliver benefits around the world.
The very culture the woke people wish to destroy is the essence of the civil society which has provided them with the freedom and liberty to take to the streets.
Jonathon Swift presciently parodied these idiots in Gulliver’s Travels 300 years ago when he wrote of a race of ignorant elitists he called Yahoos — and countered them with a race of super-rational and intelligent horse-beings he called the Houyhnhnms.
But we don’t have to go back three centuries — far too long ago for the modern theorists churned out by our universities — to see what happens when the cultural revolutionaries start tearing up the cobblestones.
The French Revolution ran off the rails at such an astonishing pace that the street corner guillotines could barely keep up with the mob’s thirst for more heads. The Russian Revolution created a tidal wave of savagery as the Communist elite turned on itself, eradicating all those who dissented.
This political virus swept into Asia and Mao followed Stalin’s example and murdered tens of millions. Learning was considered suspect and Mao shut down China’s schools, sent students and their professors into the countryside and encouraged his Red Guards to attack all traditional values and “bourgeois” things.
Estimates of the death toll of this social experiment run up to 20 million.
Did things change? Only for what the Chinese would consider a nanosecond in their country’s history. The Communist Party today is as ruthless as it was then and no one should be surprised that the peaceful protest of Tiananmen Square 30 years ago was crushed with the same brutality displayed by the Red Guards.
This history isn’t taught in China, of course, nor does it get much of an airing in those of our universities in which China’s propaganda arm is permitted to flourish but courses in Western culture are forbidden.
The Wuhan virus has helped expose some of the flaws in the Chinese Communist Party, notably its attempts to control of the people through the state-owned media. But with new outbreaks of the coronavirus and the steady erosion of Chinese control of the World Health Organisation, the facade is crumbling.
President-for-life Xi appears to be seeking distractions from the failures in his country’s economy.
Falling back on a tactic familiar to most dictators, he has launched offensive strikes in the Pacific, on the Indian border and now with new cyber weapons, against Australia.
Whether this last action will be sufficient to give our woke vice-chancellors reason to have doubts about the Chinese presence they have welcomed to their campuses is doubtful, so economically reliant have they become on Chinese students.
During the great coronavirus lockdown, Australians have been washing their hands and sanitising public spaces.
Sunlight has always been a most effective cleanser and with today’s winter solstice behind us there will be more sunlight each day until December’s summer solstice.
Our institutions need to be exposed to more cultural sunshine, to greater transparency, more openness — if generations of young people who have been infected in the education system are to be cured of the nihilist ideological virus which is choking them and attacking Western civilisation.