We Should’ve Killed the Deconstructionist Monster Decades Ago

Bruce Bawer

Now that it’s grown into a million-headed creature whose tentacles reach into every corner of the United States, it’s too big to kill.

This monster should have been strangled in its cradle 40 years ago.

Those of us who were in college humanities and social science departments at the time witnessed its birth. I was a grad student in English when postmodern schools of literary criticism took root in my department. The deconstructionists had bought into an approach to literature—or to all “texts,” as they liked to put it—and in fact to reality itself, that seemed calculated ultimately to undermine any concept of objective truth and justice. The feminist critics, for example, based their entire enterprise on the firm belief that the history of humanity was one of non-stop oppression of women.

Democracy is not a suicide pact to tolerate all those who seek our destruction.

ANTIFA is the military wing of the Democrat Party, created by Hussein Obama. But libturd media will not tell you that.

Meanwhile, much the same thing was happening in the other humanities and social studies departments. Many of the people who’d been college students in the 1960s were now, in the years around 1980, young assistant professors at the beginning of their academic careers. As students, between their marches and sit-ins and riots, they’d eagerly passed around copies of books by such ardent haters of the West as Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, and Frantz Fanon.

From those books, they learned to see America as the very incarnation of evil and to admire the Chinese cultural revolution. In their dorms they hung posters of Mao Zedong and Ché Guevara. Now they were spreading their poisonous ideologies in college classrooms, encouraging contempt for everything of value—civilization, freedom, high art, capitalism, and social order.

As I say, some of us witnessed the start of this takeover. I was just a powerless student. But the senior faculty had power. They despised this stuff. Aside from being potentially very destructive, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the serious study of—well—anything. On the other hand, the older professors believed in diversity of thought. So they let it happen.

And soon they retired, the Marxists and anarchists, now in charge of the departments—tenured radicals, as Roger Kimball famously called them—began hiring others like themselves and nobody else, because that’s what radicals do. And before long, the humanities and social studies departments of many universities, especially the most prestigious of them, were little more than indoctrination centers for the far Left.

Yes, from the time he appeared on the scene, Obama was seductive. He cut an attractive, dignified figure. He was well-spoken. His self-presentation was cool, smooth. He looked and sounded like the kind of guy you’d want to be the first black president of the United States.

But behind the façade, his intimate ties to people like Jeremiah Wright should have made it obvious what he was all about. Ditto a close reading of his autobiography. Yet millions who should have known better voted for him anyway, thinking that it was time for a black president and that, at the very least, his election would put an end, once and for all, to America’s racial divisions.

And so he was anointed. Far from healing racial wounds, however, he managed to pull off all the scabs. In his first speech outside the United States, he painted a picture of America that would have had Frantz Fanon nodding vigorously and served up a glorious image of the Islamic world that bore not the slightest resemblance to reality. He reached out a hand of comradery to the Castro regime and repeatedly kicked Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, in the teeth.

Throughout his eight years in the White House, Obama pursued a dangerous agenda, showing contempt for American workers and America’s allies while courting our enemies. Millions failed to realize just how appalling he was, thanks to his allies in the mainstream media and Hollywood. They’d all been taught the same postmodern claptrap that Obama had been taught, and consequently felt everything he did and said as president was just peachy. And so they had his back.

When Hillary Clinton referred to Americans in flyover country as “deplorables,” maybe it was unfair of those Americans to focus all their ire on her; because Obama had made it clear over and over again that he felt exactly the same way about them. So did any number of big cultural and political names in New York, L.A., and Washington, who’d learned in college that the proper reaction, when one espied a patriotic, hard-working, law-abiding middle American, was utter contempt.

Which, of course, is why all those deplorables voted for Trump, the only GOP candidate in 2016 who dared to take on coastal-elite America-hatred. And after his election—given these elites’ toxic hatred of American values, and given that they’d tasted what it was like to have one of their own in the White House for eight years—it was only to be expected that Trump would spend his first term as president fighting to stay in office. Naturally, they made up bald-faced lies about him—they’d learned that duplicity in the cause of their ideology was a virtue.

And when the anti-Trump lies failed and the liars began to be exposed one by one—what to do, then, with an election only a few months away? What to do, when your decades-long quiet revolution is threatened? What to do, when their own candidate was a feeble, dithering shell of the corrupt, uninspiring mediocrity that he used to be?

Well, of course, the last remaining option, in that desperate moment, was violence. Vandalism. Fires. Mass destruction of property.

And then blaming it all on white nationalists. Or suggesting that it’s not yet clear who the real perpetrators are.

Make no mistake: the near-unanimity with which the mainstream media have tried to cover for the rioters and deny the truth is stunning. The New York Times on Sunday published a “news analysis” in which Neil MacFarquhar declared that Antifa doesn’t exist—an outrageous assertion contradicted by numerous Times news stories over the last few years. He also quoted Keith Ellison, the former congressman and current Minnesota attorney general, who said “nobody really knows” who’s behind the violent protests. MacFarquhar should have asked for the thoughts of Ellison’s son Jeremiah—who on the same day, in the midst of all the mayhem—tweeted his support for Antifa.

Jeremiah Ellison wasn’t the only child of a prominent politician who made clear his loyalties in the matter. To no one’s surprise, the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) also tweeted her support for Antifa. On May 31, New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, was arrested at an Antifa riot in that city. And let’s not forget CNN’s Chris Cuomo, who is the brother of the governor of New York, and who has also defended Antifa from critics. All of which helps remind us that many of the politicians who are supposed to protect ordinary citizens from violence are, in fact, on the same side as the rioters who are out to destroy.

No, we should have strangled this monster in the cradle 40 years ago. Now that it’s grown into a million-headed creature whose tentacles reach into every corner of the United States, it’s too big to kill.

No. The monster is not too big to kill.

It’s just that civilized people–quite understandably–don’t have the stomach to do what must be done. Hence the conundrum: (1) do what must be done, which no decent human being would do; or, (2) suffer the inevitable result of a violent, leftist takeover and agenda–and, trust me, those people do have the stomach to do whatever it takes to advance their cause.

Not too difficult to correctly guess the outcome.

Update:

End the Antifa terror now

Arthur Chrenkoff

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The Spectator Australia 2 June 2020

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President Trump’s decision to designate Antifa as a terrorist organisation is long overdue. Whether you call them a terrorist organisation or a criminal organisation – or both – the underlying facts are the same: Antifa is a network of groups committed to a violent revolution to overthrow the democratic system of government and replace it with some sort of a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat”, whoever the current proletariat is supposed to be (which does not in the end matter very much, because it’s all about the party organisation rather than “the masses”). To effect such revolution, Antifa uses tactics of violence against people it considers enemies, as well as the destruction of property.

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Remember, these people are not Scandinavian social democrats or even Bernie and AOC-style “democratic socialists” who advocate and follow a democratic and peaceful path of transformation to achieve their objectives of building what they consider a better and more just society. Antifa are thugs who desire to tear down and destroy the current political and economic order and erect their utopia on its ashes. They want to abolish democracy, capitalism, liberalism and all the other existing institutions in favour of a Marxist-Leninist state – or just for the fun of it, if they are more of an anarchist rather than communist frame of mind. Groups whose entire modus operandi is based on breaking the law and criminal activity have no legitimate place in a democratic society. Antifa are political organised crime.

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The label Antifa has been used and abused too long to muddy the waters and confuse people – many of whom, granted, want to be confused. Because fascism is objectively bad (and considers so by an overwhelming majority of people), calling themselves “anti-fascist”, Antifa seeks to claim the moral high ground and the role of the good guys who stand up to white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extreme elements. But you cannot simply judge people by who their enemies are, or who they say their enemies are – you also have to judge them by their intentions, actions and aims. In the Second World War, the United States and the United Kingdom and their Western allies were anti-fascist, but so was the Soviet Union. Stalin hated fascists (except for a period of two years in 1939-41 when he collaborated with them).

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This did not make him a good guy, even if for the Allies at the time it made him the lesser of the two evils. Coincidentally, for Stalin the label “fascist” was a very broad one, applying not just to German Nazis and their sympathisers but to anyone opposed to communism and the Soviet Union and so in turn opposed by them, including at times even social democrats and other non-revolutionary socialists — “social fascists” in the Stalinist nomenclature. And so it is for Antifa – we are all fascists. Just as in Russia in 1917 onward and all the other communist countries in history, your position on the democratic political spectrum can never give you an ultimate immunity, it only determines the order in which you will be shot (left-wingers and anarchists last, because they can be used the longest by the forces of revolution).

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This really should not have to be repeated over and over again to register with people: Antifa are violent communist thugs who seek to exterminate their “class” enemies and destroy our society as we know it, using violent means to do so, and replace it with a communist dictatorship – with them, of course, in charge. How street-fighting brawlers who assault people and destroy buildings and property through vandalism and arson have nevertheless managed to acquire a patina of respectability is almost beyond belief, or would be if we disregarded a long history of intellectual fascination with violence (in “good causes”) and the willingness of the self-described sophisticates to get easily bamboozled by people they think they share something in common with in terms of enemies (“the (far) right”) and objectives (end to racism, poverty and other social and economic ills). Just because Antifa’s ultimate ends can sound so antiquated or obscure or far-fetched, it does not mean their activity and their means should be tolerated. Violent enemies of democracy should not become a concern only when they’re strong enough to actually present an existential threat to the democratic order – because by then it’s often too late.

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The Weimar Republic eventually collapsed and gave way to a Nazi totalitarian dictatorship because the democratic institutions were never strong and committed enough to ending political violence from both the Nazi SA are various communist paramilitaries, including the original “anti-fascists”. The first duty of every state – in fact, the basic reason for the social contract between the people and their government – is the protection of life and safety of citizens and the protection of their property from internal and external threats. No state can tolerate the lawlessness and anarchy created by armed and dangerous factions fighting each other as well as others they consider to be their enemies and obstacles to achieving their political objectives. There is no place in our liberal democratic societies for violent paramilitaries like Antifa as well as any others of other inclinations and ideologies (such as neo-Nazis seeking racial war to destroy the existing political, economic and social arrangements and replace them with some ill-defined Aryan Reich).

Antifa deserves the same treatment from law as Al Qaeda gets from anti-terror laws or Mafia from RICO legislation. Those who plot and commit crimes and use violence as an instrument of terror and politics belong in jail. It’s time to stop coddling the next generation of Lenin, Mao and Che wannabes in our midst.

Democracy is not a suicide pact to tolerate all those who seek our destruction.

If I seem more passionate about this issue than an average person in the street, it’s because I had the pleasure to grow up in a society created by the original Antifa of revolutionary communists through violence in 1917 and spread and perpetuated through more violence over the following decades. Strange that but when you eliminate democracy, property ownership and basic human rights you don’t actually end up with a society that’s better, happier, richer or more equal. In the twentieth century we went there, did that, and somehow managed to eventually survive it (except, of course, for all those who didn’t).

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In the twenty-first century, there is no excuse for tolerating people trying to make the same mind-bogglingly bloody mistake all over again, just as we would not – and should not – tolerate people who think Nazism was a good idea that deserves another go. Totalitarianism is a virus and our social body has every right and responsibility to defend itself from such illness. The game’s over. Dismantle Antifa and lock them up.

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Arthur Chrenkoff blogs at The Daily Chrenk, where a version of this piece also appears.