The Real Fight, Pt 1

It's not between Israel and Hamas.

www.aljazeera.com

From DIE to Campus Upheavals.

College and university campuses have been roiled by pro-Palestinian protests, some pro-Israeli counterprotests, and more than a few professional agitators posing as pro-Palestinian. Columbia University and UCLA seem to be competing for Ground Zero status. I penned an article to address this but decided not to use it. Sometimes that happens. It explains my absence last week, for which I apologize.

Among the things that piece said that seems worth keeping around: academia has done this to itself.

For four decades now, colleges and universities (and other institutions as well) have hired and promoted based on group identity, not merit.

The result is the DIE (Diversity-Inclusion-Equity) intellectual vacuum in which a Claudine Gay rises to the top at Harvard and is forced to resign when she can’t navigate this kind of situation and is exposed as a plagiarist besides. Columbia University has Minouche Shavik at the helm. She has somewhat better credentials than Gay’s, having been at the helm of the London School of Economics — the U.K.’s Fabian-founded elite institution. But when asked about free speech and “antisemitism” at Columbia, she stammered helplessly, and also faces calls to resign.

As for the protests, I’ve no doubt that most of the students are sincere. They might not be able to find Gaza on a map, but normal human beings react viscerally to news that an admittedly vicious, psychopathic attack that killed 1,200 people including a lot of women and children is answered with a much greater power that proceeds to slaughter 35,000 more people including women and children. The other day, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s strongman, was profiled as having orchestrated the October 7, 2023 attack. What emerges is a portrait of a violent psychopath. Is Netanyahu a psychopath as well as a closet globalist? This wouldn’t surprise me at all. What we can believe is that when violent psychopaths tick off other violent psychopaths, the results are likely to be spectacularly bloody, with a lot of innocent people getting caught in the crossfire.

Returning to the U.S. and academia’s disastrous DIE policies:

Students of Palestinian heritage probably wonder why they don’t seem to be included in The Diversity. Back in 2020, Black Lives Matter “peaceful protesters” did hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage in over a dozen major cities and got off with slaps on the wrist. The majority of these students really are peaceful (walkouts at commencement are one species of nonviolent protest). But instead of the kid-glove treatment afforded BLM, their DIE university presidents or other administrators call in the cops who start breaking limbs and heads.

Or: unidentified black-clad troublemakers appear out of the dark and attack violently, while campus police stand down.

Perhaps if they’d consulted Steve Salaita….

The Strange Case of Steve Salaita.

Back in 2014, Salaita, a left-of-center literary scholar who is part-Palestinian, was summarily fired from a newly acquired position at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana. His offense: he’d posted tweets sharply critical of Israel following actions on the occupied West Bank that year — using casual obscenities I wouldn’t have used, but that’s just me.

Warranting a dressing down, perhaps, especially for the new kid on the block, but—  a firing offense?

Salaita had signed his contract, resigned his previous position, and moved with his family to Champagne-Urbana. Suddenly he didn’t have a job.

No other institution would touch him. He was radioactive.

The university clearly breached its contract, an actionable offense. Their lawyers settled with Salaita out of court. With no teaching prospects, he retrained to drive a bus.

Eventually he found a job overseas, at the American University of Cairo, in Cairo, Egypt.

So why was Salaita’s contract breached?

At least one wealthy Jewish donor had threatened to end an annual million dollar donation to the school if it allowed Salaita into the classroom. If honoring Salaita’s contract meant the loss of that money, I doubt there was discussion or hesitation.

In a money political economy, money talks! Truth is often what walks!  

Donors, moreover, talk to each other. There’s little doubt: Salaita was blackballed in the U.S.

Takeaway: being a man of the left doesn’t matter if you cross the wrong people!

www.stevesalaita.com

The Power of the Zionist Lobby in the U.S.

Zionism, both nationally and globally, is probably more influential behind the scenes than cultural Marxism. Zionism is not Judaism. The latter is a religion. The former is a political-economic movement which has come to equate criticisms of Israel and its policies with criticisms of Jewry as a whole and therefore as constituting “antisemitism.”

An Antisemitism Awareness Act currently making its way through Congress trades on this purposeful confusion.

AIPAC (acronym for the American-Israeli Political Action Committee) is easily the most powerful lobby in Washington.

Even Trump bows to this lobby.

One of the most influential organizations in the country is the Anti-Defamation League, founded the same year as the Federal Reserve (1913). Another is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which we’re not supposed to notice has nothing whatsoever to do with Southern poverty.

These outfits ruin careers and lives for sport. Their networks are vast, with tendrils all throughout academia, corporate media, Big Tech, and the business world generally. The latter remains the go-to organization by corporate media on “hate groups” which are almost invariably conservative and Patriotic.

Enough said, to explain why Palestinians were never incorporated into the DIE intellectual vacuum. Some of those involved in the campus protests couldn’t care less about the Palestinians, or about Israeli policy, however, and probably couldn’t tell you what Zionism is.

I’m referring to the professional agitators that have mixed and mingled with the sincere students I mentioned. Some, like this woman, wear it on their sleeves! She’s not alone.

These people are there to cause trouble. Some may have been on the scene back in 2020 as well, because no one really thinks everyone involved with Black Lives Matter instigated or participated in the mayhem back then.  

The Real Fight.

Cutting to the chase.  

What’s the Real Fight? Is it between supporters of Israel and supporters of Hamas?

No.

Sure, you’ll find a few Hamas supporters among the students who are oblivious to the psychopathic nature of Hamas leadership. But they aren’t the majority.

The Real Fight is not between “right” versus “left,” moreover. There are supporters of a “hard” Zionism that equates criticism of Israeli policy with antisemitism on both sides of the aisle.

It’s not between Republicans and Democrats. It’s not between those who support Donald Trump and those who hate him.

It’s not between blacks and whites, or any other groups. It’s not men versus women, though systemic attacks by the same forces that built up the DIE cognitive vacuum have been driving them apart.

Social media has done its part isolating everyone into online echo chambers.

The Real Fight is not between Muslims and Jews. Or between Muslims and Christians. Or between Christians and any other non-Christians.

The Real Fight is between people who desire to live as they see fit, participating in the traditions they grew up with, and otherwise be left alone providing they aren’t bothering anyone else, versus those who won’t allow them to live as they see fit either because they have a vision of global domination or because leaving others alone isn’t profitable. They believe themselves most fit to rule. They have proven themselves willing to pull out all stops in order to establish themselves as a global ruling class.

Those are “our” really dangerous psychopaths, with a deep-seated need for control over others, whatever the source of their pathology (theories are circulating such as their having been abused or neglected as children).

We’re talking about less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the total human population. That fraction of a fraction of a percent is superbly skilled at driving the rest of us apart, applying the divide-and-conquer principle, using money to incentivize “the masses” (i.e., an industrial age peasantry) in specific directions, distracting and isolating us all into bubbles, some based on ideology, some on religion, some on supposed educational level and profession, and some on other things which may be innocent in themselves but which serve the psychopaths’ purposes which is to hijack our attention (e.g., fascination with celebrities, film or television franchises, whatever).  

If you want to live a free life, however you define this (and I hope your definition includes leaving others alone if they decline to be involved), that fraction of a fraction of a percent is your enemy!

Are we getting this?

Not whites as a group, not blacks as a group, not Muslims, not Jews, not men collectively or women collectively. Not Christians and not non-Christians necessarily.

Not supposed sexual minorities.

Not Trump supporters, and not all Democrats.

Not “conservatives” who can’t tell you want they want to conserve; nor “liberals” who can’t identify what they want liberation from.  

We’ve been busy pointing fingers at each other! Are we asleep, or what?

Who was G.I. Gurdjieff? Why he might matter.

The subconscious mind is a strange entity. I sometimes think it will dredge up information from our distant past that might prove useful in a troubled present, and we don’t even have to ask it!  

This morning as I write this (15 May 2024) I awakened with a name on my lips that I hadn’t heard in decades — not since my undergraduate days. The name was G.I. Gurdjieff. As a thinker, he’s unclassifiable — at least given most Western categorizations. He penned tracts with curious names like Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’ (1934?). I once had a copy I’d found in a used bookstore. I wasn’t able to make much sense of it.

Some of his students, such as P.D. Ouspensky and J.G. Bennett, explained him better.

Their school communicated an idea that resonated with me back then. This, I should note, was my take on it. What Gurdjieff originally meant might be different, and I’m sure my account is incomplete.  

The idea: nearly all humanity is asleep (metaphorically). We go through life in a kind of hypnosis, a waking sleep. In this state, we are subject to outside control. The source may be an ideology, a mass movement, an appeal to fear, or even a Christian denomination that has lost touch with its roots.

If every soldier and every commander in every army fighting every war were to awaken all at once in this sense — both sides — they would stop, drop their weapons, and go home to be with their families.

Political leaders, too, of whatever stripe, if they awakened, would drop their power agendas, shake hands, and decide as one to work on common problems, such as seeing to it that the people they have responsibility for have food to eat, a roof over their heads, and an environment safe enough to conduct personal business and care for loved ones. They would attend to conditions necessary for this to happen and serve those conditions, not their previous fascination with power.

Gurdjieff seemed to believe that as persons we could wake up and become what a human being should be — by working on ourselves and recovering our spiritual roots. He called this “The Work.” It could help us become simultaneously autonomous and able to live mindfully in a world of other people, some of whom are different from us but with many common problems.

I wonder what such a figure might offer today.

G.I. Gurdjieff (www.onlinefourthwayschool.com)

My interest in philosophy arose around the time I discovered Gurdjieff, one of a smorgasbord of thinkers to draw on. I sought a criterion for who to study and who to leave aside.

My question: suppose we’d looked at what seemed to be the foundations of the scientific view of the universe, compared this to what seemed necessary for a moral view of the human world, and discovered that the two came into conflict. What then?

Later, the realizations came: we’re tribal beings. Our natural tendency is to divide the world into us and them. For most of recorded history, ethical norms call for a respect for persons applied to us; it did not apply to them. This made it possible to rationalize everything from chattel slavery to genocide.

A number of significant philosophers attempted a universal morality: ethnical norms that would apply to everyone, not just us. We’ve never figured out how to apply this idea. We’ve remained in our tribes even if we refuse to call them that.

Materialism as a view of the universe (and, a fortiori, humanity) has only reinforced this tendency, and accompanied with advancing technology, made the capacity for genocide magnitudes worse.

If the Creator created all of us in His image, then we have a basis for persons’ intrinsic value, and, a fortiori, a moral sense able to transcend us versus them by appealing to the transcendent (which modern secular philosophers don’t do).

At least in principle. Perhaps it is this moral sense that is telling students that what the Israeli IDF has been doing in Gaza is wrong, however much we repudiate Hamas, since 2007 the dominant force in Gaza, and independently of what we may or may not believe about Israel generally.

How does this square with what I said above, about the Real Fight and who the enemy is? Is that not just a recreation of us (the people) versus them (the elites)?

Continued in Pt. 2.

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Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national. 

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