December 02, 2002

WAR OF IDEAS: POMOS VS. AMERICA (CONTINUED)

"The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without.
They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the
wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always
found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take
much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of
unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful
section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of
defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians... Nothing
can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in
ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to
live, then indeed our story is told."

- Winston Churchill, Royal Society of St. George, April 24, 1933

     Churchill remains as apposite today as he was in 1933, with the exception that it is no longer just ‘brainy people’ who disseminate the ‘treason of the intellectuals’, and it is debatable whether they add anything to our culture. We now have the spectacle of academics who can barely write a coherent sentence (see below)holding symposia and publishing ‘studies’ in such topics as “critical Holocaust studies”. (In the cant phraseology of Post-Modernism, 'critical Holocaust studies' instantly announces that these scholars are boldly going to question the very existence of a Jewish holocaust.) They do possess one particular skill learned in graduate school; they can deploy post-modernist modes of explication to “inscribe” and "reinscribe"and “narrate” a version of reality that inculpates Western culture as the source of all the world’s woes. In that project, Israel and the Jews are the first target. Hence the new Pomo narrative: The Jews have exaggerated their suffering at the hands of Hitler in order to excuse the genocidal project they’ve undertaken vs. the Palestinians. America has exaggerated it’s suffering at the hands of terrorists in order to conceal its own ambitions to terrorize the downtrodden of the world. Here, thanks to Andrew Sullivan is a representative passage from two of our contemporary Post-Modern academics. Note the substitution of cant phrases ("centering" and "decentering", "discourses", "displacement from these spaces", etc.) for thought, the misspelling and the almost total absence of grammatical coherence. Reading the entire invitation for papers from contributors is enough to make Churchill's words reverberate.

     “…this anthology attempts to decenter the Jewish Holocaust from the ubiquitous discussions of genocide, reparations and U.S.-Israel relations. Our exploration of the arbitrary centering of the Shoah within a number of other discourses, in terms of addressing its presence and affects on the reparations debates, history of genocide, U.S. foreign policy and a number other sites represents a step toward its rightful displacement from these spaces. The Jewish Holocaust, citing its supposed uniqueness, cannot continuously be used as the yardstick or point of reference for all incidents of genocide and xenophobia. This project urges a critical interrogation by moving toward an understanding of how a “Holocaust Industry” influences national and international communities, discourses and debates. We therefore attempts to displace the “Holocaust Industry” from these discourses while centering the specifically national, and more generally genocidal histories which the Jewish Holocaust’s current hyper-visibility inherently stifles our understanding of.”

     While they start with Israel and the Jews, inevitably they arrive back home, in the United States, where they teach our impressionable youth that Islamo-Nazi fanatics who wish to kill us are simply responding to our own “terrorist” oppression of 'Native Americans', 'People of Color' and the world's poor but noble savages(See Judith Butler). There is little question that Churchill correctly described the weakening of the will to defend our civilization induced by such ‘thinkers’. What they never declare openly, but is a prominent part of their subtext: we got what we deserved on Sept. 11. Clearly, these Pomo ideologues would welcome the opportunity to write “the end”, to the “narrative” of America. It is up to the rest of us who value Western Civilization to expose and confront them at every turn.