God bless Brad Salmen! Someone has finally had the courage to take a stand against the “left and far-left” orthodoxy that descended upon the campus a few years ago, stifling freedom of speech and dealing a death blow to rational discussion. Let us hope that Mr. Salmen’s brave statement will encourage other members of the Macalester community to speak up, especially students who have been intimidated by political correctness and have felt unable to express their true opinions either in class or out of class. Emboldened by Mr. Salmen’s essay myself, I want to add four unrelated, non-P.C. assertions to his list.
1. Communist regimes have been responsible for the deaths of circa l00,000,000 people: the U.S.S.R., 20 million; China, 65 million; Cambodia, 2 million; North Korea, 2 million and so forth. Martin Malia, well-known historian and authority on Communism calls this “the most colossal case of political carnage in history.” (Hitler and the Nazis are blamed for 25 million deaths.) Why is there no discussion of these Communist atrocities in academia today? There are many reasons, but there are now many academics who are Marxists and would rather not call attention to the horrendous truth. Many act as if McCarthyism were second only to the Holocaust in the history of Evil. For the ghastly facts see The Black Book of Communism, edited by S. Courtois et al. and also Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide & Mass Murder by R.J. Rummel.
2. The poor fare better under capitalism than under any other system. One has only to look at the chief alternative. A couple of years ago in a speech in Minneapolis, Gorbachev admitted that Communism was a “seventy-five-year-long experiment that was an absolute, total and utter failure” (quoted from memory). Communism never worked and never will work. The U.S.S.R., even with millions of slave-laborers in the Gulag, was never able to provide a decent standard of living for its people. In former Soviet satellites such as Albania and Romania today, university professors earn $30 per month, and they survive only because they have friends or relatives who farm. (Two out of five Romanians earn less than $30 per month.) It was not always this way; Bucharest was once known as the “Paris of the East.” But today, as the Romanian poet and writer Andrei Codrescu said here some years ago, “The whole population of Romania would move to any Western country that would have them.” My bet-most would chose the U.S.A. The poor of the world know that this is still a land of opportunity and that the “American dream” is realized everyday by immigrants. How odd that neo-Marxists are now called “progressives.” (See New York Review of Books, Nov. 1, 2001, pp. 41 ff.)
3. Most humanists and social scientists who attempt to support their relativism, deconstruction and social constructivism with quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, Goedel’s theorem, chaos theory and/or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle don’t know what they’re talking about. See Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. These two physicists have set the record straight about such POMO icons as J. Lacan, J. Kristeva, L. Irigaray, B. Latour, J. Baudrillard, G. Deleuze, F. Guattari and P. Virilio. You’ll find statements such as these: “It is gibberish.” “[Lacan’s] statements about math are devoid of meaning.” “Goedel proved exactly the opposite of what Kristeva claims.” Irigaray provides the reader “with a bizarre melange of fluids, psychoanalysis and mathematical logic.” B. Latour’s assertions are “either true but banal or else surprising but manifestly false.”
4. We often hear “thinking in dichotomies” disparaged and “holistic thinking” praised. We are told that dichotomous thinking is characteristic of males and is used by them to establish hierarchies and maintain their hegemony. We are also told that dichotomies are characteristic of “Western thought.” Actually, I am convinced that Claude Levi-Strauss is correct. He argued that the human mind is structurally similar in all cultures and at all times and that it inevitably sorts things into pairs of opposites much as a binary computer does. Being/non-being, culture/nature, subject/object, male/female are examples. He arrived at this conclusion by studying myths from all parts of the world. Martha Nussbaum has written, “Opponents of such oppositions have not explained how one can speak coherently without bounding off one thing against another, opposing one thing to another.” (Pol. Theor. 20, #2, 206) To my knowledge only mystics avoid dichotomies, but then their experiences are ineffable. There are then, it seems, two ways of thinking: in dichotomies and not in dichotomies, but only the first can be expressed in ordinary language.
Coming soon: l) In praise of Capitalism. 2) In praise of corporations, national and multinational. 3) Hierarchies and social classes. 4) The evidence about the “influence” of the Iroquois on the founding fathers of the U.S.A. and the doctrine of human rights.
