By Josh Gelernter
Saturday, February 13, 2016
A fetish for de-honoring objectionable historical figures
is sweeping American college campuses. Targets range from unrepentant bastards
like Jeffery Amherst to imperfect great men like Thomas Jefferson. I wonder if
America’s undergrads realize that imperfection, and bastardy, are surprisingly
widespread conditions:
“The white race of South Africa should be the
predominating race,” said Mahatma Gandhi. He also said, of himself and his
followers, “We believe as much in the purity of race as” white South Africans.
He called black South Africans “kaffirs,” which is South Africa’s equivalent of
“niggers,” and objected to blacks living among South African Indians: “About
this mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel strongly. I
think it is very unfair to the Indian population.” He wrote that “Kaffirs are
as a rule uncivilized. . . . The reader can easily imagine the plight of the
poor Indian thrown into such company!”
There are dozens of such Gandhi quotes. Students at
Oxford tried to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes — who endowed Oxford’s
Rhodes Scholarship — after they found out he held comparable, Gandhi-esque
views. Should we expect a “Gandhi Must Fall” campaign targeting the innumerable
Gandhi statues worldwide? Like the one standing in London, in front of the
Houses of Parliament?
“The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager
wage on frivolity or drink,” said Che Guevara. He added that members of the
“African race” had “maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an
affinity with bathing.” After the Cuban Communists took over, Che promised that
they were “going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution.
By which I mean: nothing.”
(Of course, it bears mentioning that Che also tortured
and murdered many, many people. But to a young intellectual, thinking wrong is
much worse than doing wrong.)
“I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by
my side. . . . Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled
in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded
by mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds,” wrote Robert
Byrd, who — as you recall — was a Democratic senator in office from 1959 until
2010, the Senate’s president pro tempore until the Republican landslide in
2010, and the leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus from 1977 to 1989. He was
also an ex–Exalted Cyclops of the KKK. What to do with the 50 or so schools,
buildings, bridges, and highways named for Byrd?
The philosopher and political theorist Ferdinand Lassalle
was described as a “Jewish Nigger” by Karl Marx, who added, “It is now
completely clear to me that he, as is proven by his cranial formation and his
hair, descended from the Negroes of Egypt, assuming that his mother or
grandmother had not interbred with a nigger. . . . The obtrusiveness of the
fellow is also nigger-like.” Jews were of particular interest to Marx, who
accused them of being anti-Communists “at the head of the counterrevolution.”
“It is only because the Jews are so strong that it is timely and expedient to
expose and stigmatize” them, said Marx, evidently living in the conspiracy
theorists’ version of 1850s Europe.
He was quite candid about his plan for Communist
revolutionary violence, saying of himself and Engels, “We have no compassion .
. . we shall not make excuses for the terror.” He was likewise candid in his
support for slavery, particularly what he called “the good side of slavery”:
“Slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as
are machinery, credit, etc. Slavery is therefore an economic category of
paramount importance.”
Will American college kids protest The Communist Manifesto being — according to Market Watch — the most-assigned economics text in the country?
And do those students realize that the only man as
universally well-regarded as Gandhi — Nelson Mandela — said, during a visit to
Israel, “I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing [from the West Bank and Gaza]
if Arab states do not recognize Israel within secure borders”? Of course,
that’s an opinion that carries the day on NRO, but what would all those
undergrads chanting Viva, Viva Palestina!
say about Madiba supporting Israeli
“apartheid”?
I won’t presume to tell our undergrads whom they should
and shouldn’t revile. But I suggest they wait to rewrite history until they
know something about it.
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