QED

The West’s Slow-Motion Lobotomy

unswNo civilization ever survived by making itself stupid. And yet this is what our education system is attempting to do. There are innumerable examples of this deliberate dumbing down, but the recent revelations about the sinister instructions contained in the University of New South Wales teaching guide are an excellent illustration.  These edicts institutionalize some of the worst aspects of the History Wars, enshrining an ignorant and negative interpretation of Australian society and its history while prohibiting any questioning or criticism of this arbitrarily imposed view.

According to David Dixon, the Dean of the Law School at UNSW, the guidelines are contained in students’ reading material and are common across tertiary institutions. He claims

The reason that we do this is to help our students, because of a number of incidents in the past where non-Aboriginal students have quite unintentionally said things in class discussion which have caused offence to their Aboriginal peers. 

So providing something which is just a way in which people can look at and find out what is the best way to say things, which will not cause offence to people, is I think a really responsible educational approach. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

The notion that this is simply about avoiding offence is disingenuous. The guidelines are based on a radical and racist interpretation of Australian history that demonizes the everything about European settlement and the civilization it brought with it. They all but criminalize a vast range of previously innocuous terms and concepts that are now deemed offensive, and they are used to stifle free and open discussion. Students know they can be severely censured by their universities for inadvertent speech. And above all else, they are very aware of the draconian Section 18C of the RDA and the way in which it can be used by Indigenous students to target and intimidate others, on even the flimsiest pretext.

The guidelines are a blueprint for intimidation and extortion. On one hand, they encourage Indigenous students to be outraged and offended by a vast range of previously commonplace terms and concepts, while also sanctioning and inviting potentially lucrative legal action against anyone who uses them. On the other hand, they make non-Indigenous students aware that any questions they might ask, or even the slightest verbal slip, could see them dragged before the HRC and the courts and subjected to extremely expensive legal proceedings.

This situation involves a radical escalation of the History Wars, as the Left is now able to back-up its tendentious and racist interpretation of history with the threat of legal action against anyone who questions or criticizes it.  At a time of massive external threats, the West is nurturing a corrosive internal critique that demonizes and immobilizes itself. Consequently, Western civilization is committing slow-motion suicide, ideologically gutted from within by its own political, academic and intellectual elites.

At the core of this crippling critique is a false but deep burden of guilt, which is imposed on Western culture by these elites, starting in the schools and universities, which promote a racist and intolerant view of history (encapsulated in the UNSW guidelines). As Pascal Bruckner observes in The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010), these institutions teach that:

We Europeans are born with a burden of vices and ugliness that marks us like stigmata, for … the white man has sown grief and ruin wherever he has gone … The white man is genetically determined to kill, massacre, rape; he has split himself off from the rest of humanity in order to enslave it. He can’t help it. His skin colour is … a moral defect, an inexpiable stain [and his history is] an uninterrupted spiral of horror.

The West is “the very figure of Satan”, despite its monumental and unparalleled achievements. Indeed, as Bruckner continues, a “curse is hidden behind our civilization that corrupts its meaning and mocks its grandeur … The whole world hates us, and we deserve it”.

This grotesque vision of the West has poisoned the minds of the generations that have passed through our education systems over the past 50 years, and they routinely acquiesce to the demand that they repent continuously and unreservedly for the vast litany of sins for which they are held vicariously responsible. They shy away from discussion and debate because they have been made fearful and ashamed.

Academics are now “the penitential class par excellence … officials of original sin [and] high priests of defamation” of the West. Vast bureaucracies now burden the universities, ensuring that this secular version of original sin and abject penance is honoured endlessly with a multitude of chilling guidelines, groveling statements, meaningless ceremonies, and hollow observances. And Heaven help anyone who fails fully to observe these absurdities or refuses to embrace self-hatred or abase themselves before all things Indigenous or non-Western.

In this fashion, a vast cultural discourse of guilt, remorse, and repentance has been created and elevated to a supreme status that sees it lurk like a supernatural presence, with bureaucrats “appointed to maintain it like the ancient guardians of the sacred flame and issue permits to think and speak”, as Bruckner puts it.

The result is silence, fear, and impotence in the face of even the most monstrous evils, exemplified at present by jihadism and other Islamist atrocities. Moral and cultural relativism reign supreme: “the duty to repent forbids the Western bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions”, however violently they may abuse, mutilate, and attack us or their own people. But while the West cringes before its ruthless assailants, there is no sign of a “guilty conscience in Teheran, Riyadh, Karachi, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Caracas, Algiers, Damascus, Rangoon, Harare, and Khartoum” or any of the other centres of terror and deadly mayhem, as Bruckner points out. In the face of hourly displays of hideous and sadistic violence, “our only right is to remain silent”.

Every day it becomes clearer that the West is involved in a fight to the finish with forces that want only to destroy it and build their tyrannies upon the ruins. But can a civilization crippled by self-imposed guilt and divided against itself survive? Or will it disintegrate through internal decomposition and external assault? As history demonstrates, civilizations rise and fall in a predictable rhythm, with internal decay usually preceding the final collapse. Our civilization has reached that stage and the moment is now overdue in Australia to contest the imposition of the debilitating and racist view of our history promulgated by the Left and promoted throughout our universities and other institutions. The alternative is to abjectly embrace our slow motion suicide.

Merv Bendle is the author of Anzac & Its Enemies (Quadrant Books, 2015).

11 thoughts on “The West’s Slow-Motion Lobotomy

  • ianl says:

    > … Our civilization has reached that stage and the moment is now overdue in Australia to contest the imposition of the debilitating and racist view of our history promulgated by the Left …

    The usual issue – HOW ? The MSM are also captured. Voting ? These questions are never asked at all, let alone during an election campaign. The truth is that the Renaissance has now been successfully rolled back. The people responsible for this breath-taking feat of intellectual treachery remain immune from accountability. They are beyond the reach of democratic process, by design. This is what academic and bureaucratic tenure is for.

    The point in these peak-stupid UNSW “guidelines” that galls me most is the vomitous proclamation that scientific analyses of origins is “inappropriate”. With one nauseating leftoid zippidy-doo-dah, entire scientific disciplines, combined over centuries with enormous and commendable effort into anthropology, are rendered inoperative, Nixon-like. Suicide, of course, but unstoppable now.

    If one wonders how we managed to arrive here, the route becomes plain when examining recent scientific history. The thin end of the wedge was the green roll-over of scientific method (aquired with much treasure, blood and effort through the Renaissance). Once hypotheses did not require empirical evidence but merely consensus, the game was lost.

    People deserve what they get. We’re stuffed now.

  • Patrick McCauley says:

    Is there still a case for violence ? I know the answer is no … yet I can see that this re-writing of history violates me deeply .. and my children are being subjected to even more violent social engineering confusing even their comfortable gender …. is this stuff worth fighting for ? .. sure it is … the anger of the people who developed Eureka stockade took far less provocation than we have seen perpetrated by the political correct class over the last ten years. But how ? … we have seen the lists describing where this blight on our society lives .. right through all our major institutions and universities … throughout the academic and educational world … throughout the MSM …. How can a few disorganised citizens who have managed to survive this juggernaught somehow.. possibly fight this … even the AFL is afflicted fatally. This stuff is way past talking … and yet we have nowhere to go with it … must we lie down and die quietly without even uttering a profanity ?

  • ianl says:

    I’m not trying to hog space here, but my comment on scientific dating of Aboriginal origins and activities has been exquisitely highlighted by the artefacts site uncovered near Randwick during tramway re-construction along Anzac Parade.

    The scientists want to examine the artefacts deposit in fine detail and probably take a decade or two in the process; the Aboriginal leaders are torn between the declared sacredness of the site and the scary issue of what hard information it may actually contain; the tramway re-construction contractors need to push on. Transient as it is, joy and bliss emanate from the confusion of the enemy.

  • Lawrie Ayres says:

    And tell me pray, what is wonderful about a race that uses young girls as the playthings of old men, that has not progressed for thousands of years, that gladly engaged in killing their neighbours? White men created the universities that these pampered. educated idiots inhabit. It is white men who create the wealth that these parasites consume. If left to the noble savage these elitists would be obliterated for being unable to contribute to the benefit of the tribe. Fine thoughts will not put food on the table. The left elite hide behind laws because they are fundamentally weak and would be destroyed if push ever became shove.

    • psstevo says:

      Obviously this university (and others) are failing in its educational duty of care. Changing their water supply will not solve the idiocy now portrayed. Now is the time for Mr Turnbull to turn off their money tap. This is mindless propaganda, not education.

  • a.crooks@internode.on.net says:

    Spengler described all this back in 1918 (The Decline of the West)- always worth a read. It all comes down to four significant quotes.

    “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Arnold J. Toynbee

    “Democracy ends when the voters discover they can vote themselves the contents of the treasury. … From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.” usually attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler (or Alexis de Tocqueville)

    And I add my own corollary to this: “When the treasury is empty, they will force the treasurer to borrow extensively to keep the benefits flowing on the baseless assumption that the future will be more prosperous than the present, and will therefore will be untroubled in repaying the debt. It is the extension of the joke ‘Ha Ha! I’m spending the kids’ inheritance’ to the level of a national economic policy.”

    “Tyrannies are democracies fully played out. Extreme freedom cannot be expected to lead to anything but extreme slavery.” Plato

    And lastly :

    “One can always ignore reality, but one cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” Ann Rand.

  • Simon says:

    There is some light at the end of the long, dark tunnel. And that is that basically the uni’s only have our students prisoner for a few years, and when they get out in the real world they in the main shrug off the self-loathing they are supposed to carry with them to the bitter end.

    But of course that used the case. But since the left wing madrassas are getting them younger and younger these days, it may no longer be so.

    In that case, we really are on the path to self-destruction (and nobody needed a nuclear weapon to accomplish it – all that was needed was our left wing).

    • gardner.peter.d says:

      This a widespread phenomenon, already far advanced in UK and much of Europe. Whereas sending Australian students and young graduates abroad used to broaden their minds, now it confirms that the inherited white culture into which they were born is the wrong one.

  • Jack Richards says:

    It is truly amazing how all these Marxist academics teach only how rotten whites are – but especially how rotten was the British Empire and that the stench infects all Anglo-phone countries but again, especially, the United States. They always fail to mention that it was England that first abolished slavery in 1770 and the British Empire abolished it completely by 1835. The USA most devastating war was the Civil War to end slavery in which something like a million Americans died directly or indirectly. The wail and weep over the West African slave trade but forget the East African trade that still exists – where slaves were taken to Islamic countries. They forget that Saudi Arabia only abolished slavery in 1960 while The Islamic Republic of Mauretania only abolished in 2008. They forget that the West African slave trade was run by Africans themselves – like the Ashanti Empire – and that they became fabulously wealthy selling captives to Arabs who then on-sold them to slavers. They never mention that the British take-over of places like Ghana and Nigeria was as much to do with ending the slave trade as anything else or that the Royal Navy maintained a fleet of warships off West Africa to intercept slave ships heading for Brazil and ports in South America.

    They completely forget that it was the Anglo nations that introduced the first Bill of Rights, ended the institution of serfdom, or gave the vote to all men and subsequently to women – a right still not available in Islamic countries.

    They forget that it was in Britain that nearly every scientific advance was made in the 19th Century and that nearly every advance in the 20th came out of either Great Britain or the United States. It was those two countries that eliminated nearly every disease that used to ravage society; that the Anglos invented the farming methods and crops that now feed the world; the electronics we take for granted; the aircraft we use for inter-continental flight; the cars and railways. The only countries that ever been truly free are the Anglo countries and they’re the only ones who have ever held democracy and personal freedom as a basis for a functioning society. France claims democracy but getting their via the revolution, Napoleon, and half-a-dozen new constitutions was a rough journey.

    No-one had to invade Australia or conquer the Aborigines or displace them. They were a stone age people who quickly realised that life was a lot easier and better if they camped on the fringe of white settlements. The whites had things the Aborigines happily traded away their women and lands for: sugar, salt, fats and alcohol. It was much easier for an Aborigine to hang around what became feeding stations and missions where they could get hand-outs of mutton, sugar, flour and salt than it was to spear a kangaroo and live a traditional life. Aboriginal women sought out the shepherds and other whites on the fringes of settlement – and often they were prostituted by the tribal elders – to get supplies or alcohol. Aboriginal society did not value virginity or practice any sort of Victorian sexual morality. Indeed there were Aboriginal tribes who did not realise that sex created babies; there were even some who did not know how to light a fire.

    There was no invasion, no frontier wars, no stolen generation, no genocide. It’s all bullshit invented by white Marxists. The number of mixed-blood “Aborigines” shows the extent of racial intermingling – and it wasn’t just white men raping Aboriginal women as they’d have us believe as such a thing didn’t need to happen – and there was no shortage of white women partnering off with Aboriginal men as still happens today.

    The whole process is designed to turn minorities against the majority and bring about conflict and social collapse. Out of anarchy and chaos and the collapse of the system, the Marxist believe they can then impose their utopian ideas and everything will be just wonderful. Let’s just forget the examples of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the Khmer Rouge and the disastrous socialist experiments in Cuba and South America.

    If only lying and fiction passed off as fact could generate electricity or cool the air!

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