If Communism Is Dead, Why Do These Universities Love It?
The great conflict between East and West marked the twentieth century. On one side, oppressive regimes formed around the ideologies of Marx, Lenin and Mao. On the other, societies cherished individual freedom, private property and free enterprise. In 1991, many believed that the conflict between East and West had finally ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However, they are wrong. Experienced academics claim the politically-correct system on American college campuses today is just as oppressive as old-style communism. What is more, many of these intellectuals are well qualified to give their opinions since they lived under former communist regimes.
The Fall of the Wall and the Rise of Political Correctness
Noting this phenomenon, anti-Soviet Russian dissident and neurophysiologist, Vladimir Bukovsky, observes that, after the collapse of communism, left-wing politicians and parties have come to power all over the world and especially in Europe.
Thus, Bukovsky concludes that “Communism survived. Francisco Fukuyama could have said that it was the end of history, but history proved otherwise – Cuba, Vietnam, China, North Korea remained communist.”
Bukovsky further argues that communist leaders in the liberated countries were replaced by a different set of figureheads who remained closely enmeshed with the communist establishment, making the fall of communism more cosmetic than genuine.
What surprised Bukovsky most, however, was the appearance of political correctness in the West at the same time that the Soviet Union was disappearing. “If we were to pinpoint when political correctness came into being, I could specify precisely – it came into being at the beginning of the nineties of the twentieth century.” (Our emphasis)
“Toward Full-Blown Communism”
Another observer of the neo-communist tyranny is Prof. Andrei Serban. He was born in Bucharest four years before the official establishment of the Romanian People’s Republic, a communist regime that ruled the country until 1989. Before immigrating to the United States in 1969, he witnessed first-hand one of the most repressive communist regimes in the world. This system included an extensive network of the secret police, a system of gulags and a set of the vilest torture techniques conceived by man.
He worked at Columbia University as a tenured professor of theatre for twenty-seven years. However, he cut his career short and recently resigned, claiming that the Ivy League school is “on its way toward full-blown communism.” Among the incidents triggering his resignation was a policy that forced him to give unqualified students positions in plays simply by virtue of claiming to be “transgendered.” He also objected to unfair hiring practices based on racial, sexual and gender quotas.
“Columbia [University] is some sort of socialist left, on its way toward full-blown communism, a new strain of communism,” said Prof. Andrei Serban in an interview on Romanian television.
[See https://youtube/RUuD1d9-tnQ]
Less Freedom than Communist Yugoslavia
Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, another Eastern European intellectual, echoes these sentiments. Like Prof. Serban, he grew up in a communist state where he was a “pro-Western” youth in the socialist state of Yugoslavia. After emigrating to the West in the late seventies, he began a successful career as a journalist, author and academic. He served as a professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas and currently teaches at the University of Banja Luka in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He claims that repression in today’s politically-correct climate in America is worse than communist Yugoslavia. Under communism, he stated that, outside of some more politicized fields of learning, most university studies were free of Marxist and Party harassment. At contemporary universities, however, all fields and disciplines are infected with PC ideology.
Dr. Trifkovic explains:
“… I feel less free today in my fifties in the United States than I did in my teens, as a teenager in Tito’s Yugoslavia, because at least with people you could trust and with people who shared the same social and cultural milieu you come from, you could share your innermost thoughts without being looked upon as an eccentric and a deviant… In today’s America, if you fall outside of the parameters of acceptable discourse, and if you’re branded controversial, and let alone a ‘maverick’, these terms automatically place you beyond the pale.”
Describing the current dictatorship of political correctness in America, Dr. Trifkovic continues:
“It functions in an informal and an unofficial way… [A]t the lower end of the scale it is non-tenure for those associate professors who do not toe the line, non-renewal of contracts in media outlets. There is a very well developed informal mechanism, which actually has the same end result [as the secret police].”
A Universal Problem
The problem is found all over the West. Highlighting the spread of this Marxist ideology everywhere, Prof. Janice Fiamengo of the University of Ottawa, Canada notes that:
“[In 2013], at the University of Toronto, for example, radical feminist students were allowed, with the police standing by, to verbally assault and physically harass young men attempting to attend a men’s issues talk.”
Although recorded on camera, university administrators ignored and refused to punish those who engaged in illegal activity. “Canadian universities are not in the business of debating ideas,” Prof. Fiamengo states. “More and more, they’re in the business of declaring and enforcing what is and is not acceptable to say and think.”
The Marxist takeover is calculated and incremental. “This is often referred to as the ‘long march through the institutions,’” continued Prof. Fiamengo. “That’s a cultural-Marxist phrase describing the gradual, deliberate takeover of the academy and other elite institutions… And the result is totalitarianism not of the jackboot, but of the rainbow flag, the sweet-grass ceremony and the women-only safe space.”
Time to Wake Up
Marx, Lenin and Mao might be dead, but communist ideas on campus are alive and well.
The volunteers of Tradition, Family, Property’s university outreach, TFP Student Action, constantly witness this culture of progressive totalitarianism on university campuses everywhere. A brief survey of its youtube channel will reveal dozens of examples of violent and intolerant behavior by leftist activists. If right-wing students behaved in the same manner, disciplinary action would be swift and merciless. The double standard is apparent in the case of Nick Sandmann and other pro-life schoolboys who were branded “guilty” of smirking when confronted by a leftist provocateur.
If the survivors of brutal communist regimes recognize what is happening to America and the West, then shouldn’t everyone take notice? Is it not time to wake up and react with energy?