Friday, March 29, AD 2024 9:43am

Irony

Ryszard Legutko has written a book, The Demon in Democracy:  Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, which I highly recommend.  The editor of Solidarity’s journal of philosophy, he was one of the heroes of Poland’s struggle against the Communist regime imposed on the nation by the Soviet Union.  He is currently a professor of philosophy at Jagellonian University in Krakow.  His book records how liberal democracies lately have been aping some of the intolerant aspects of the old Communist regimes:

Even a preliminary contact with the EU institutions allows one to feel a stifling atmosphere typical of a political monopoly, to see the destruction of language turning into a new form of Newspeak, to observe the creation of surreality, mostly ideological, that obfuscates the real world, to witness an uncompromising hostility against all dissidents, and to perceive many other things only too familiar to anyone who remembers the world governed by the Communist Party.

The relevance to our country is obvious where the Left, wherever it has control, attempts to silence dissenting voices.  Critics of Professor Legutko have recently given a demonstration of what he is talking about.

The scheduled appearance of a conservative European politician Wednesday evening at Middlebury College was canceled for safety purposes.

Ryszard Legutko of Poland is considered a “far right member of the European Parliament,” according to the school’s student-run newspaper The Middlebury Campus.

The college made the announcement hours before the talk, according to the The Middlebury Campus.

An email from the school, according to the student-led publication, said, “this decision was not taken lightly. It was based on an assessment of our ability to respond effectively to potential security and safety risks for both the lecture and the event students had planned in response.”

Go here to read the rest.  More detail:

 

At a meeting last week at Middlebury College, students upset and angry that conservative Ryszard Legutko had been invited to speak on campus were calmed and reassured by three administrators who apologized to the students for their feelings of discomfort, agreed that they had every right to feel aggrieved, and assured them there’s steps underway to ensure controversial right-wing speakers are not easily invited to campus in the future.

That according to a 40-minute recording of the meeting recorded surreptitiously by a student in the room and provided to The College Fix, who said the three administrators at the meeting were Sujata Moorti, the incoming dean of the faculty, as well as Dean of Students Baishakhi Taylor and Renee Wells, director of education for equity and inclusion.

During the meeting, students voiced frustration at the fact that Legutko was invited to campus and at “white male” professors for the so-called educational violence they inflict, among other topics.

In response, the three administrators did not tell these students that college is a time of hearing differing opinions or having difficult conversations, but rather agreed with and apologized to the students and pledged to work to address their concerns.

“I hear you, and you should be outraged, and we should acknowledge that and apologize, because that’s the least we can do right now, because we can’t make it right in the moment. But in the future we will do everything we can to make it right,” an administrator told the students.

The controversy stemmed from the fact that Legutko, a prominent Polish philosopher and politician, had been invited to speak at the behest of the university’s Alexander Hamilton Forum series, the Department of Political Science and the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs.

His April 17 appearance was abruptly cancelled hours before he was set to give his speech, with administrators citing vague “safety” concerns. Student protestors had planned a “celebration of queer identity” counter-protest to take place outside the lecture hall, complete with the shuttling-in of protest participants.

Legutko ended up giving his talk in semi-secret in a political science professor’s class, and it sounds as if students at the crisis meeting were unaware at the time that the speech took place, as the meeting and talk occurred on the same afternoon.

Go here to read the rest.  This is an example of the heckler’s veto where a speaker is denied free speech due to threats of violence from those who wish to shut the speaker up.  An excellent support for the warning that the Professor is giving of a growing desire in liberal democracies to sacrifice free speech on the altar of Leftist dogma.

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Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 4:34am

It’s going to get bloody.

I’m not a pessimist at heart. I just see the incubation of these thugs via “higher education in liberal universities” as a machine without heart, soul and mind.
A mindless robotic operation is already taking hold within our society and it’s hell bent on squashing our freedoms.

ie, Twitter and Unplanned movie openings.
So many examples from the non biased MSM, ( cough ) and Google ect.

It will be a bloody mess.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 5:15am

Perhaps some will disagree with me, but so be. This is the problem with Democracies vs Republics. The United States was founded as a Constitutional Republic, NOT as a National Democracy. Dictatorship by simple majority is what liberals want and given that they congregate in the larger populations of cities like LA, NYC, etc, they have a simple majority at the national level and they are willing to impose their dictatorship on the rest of us. But in a free Republic, rule of law and respect for the rights of the individual supersede the whims and fancies of a simple majority.

Now yes, I realize that most of us use the word Democracy in a very general sense meaning freedom, liberty. But I think we should start being more precise in our language. Democracy is NOT freedom – it’s the system wherein a simple majority can cancel out the rights of an individual and that’s exactly what’s happening today.

Well, people can disagree with me. That’s ok. But that’s how I see things. The Constitution in our Republic protects the individual, but in a Democracy the “peepul” would crush a dissenting individual.

father of seven
father of seven
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 5:18am

What intolerant little fascists these students are. They are the new brown shirts. Schools like Middlebury College are simply reeducation camps.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 6:16am

Philip above, “. . . “higher education in liberal universities.” When one regards that phrase with the assumption that so-called educators’ purposes are to indoctrinate and inflame, it begins to make sense.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 7:03am

It’s going to get bloody

Because the “rules” or this game are so obviously one-sided, that escalation is logically inescapable.

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 7:16am

T Shaw.

The educators make great dishes.
Shake and Bake for example.
One young chicken, a dash of hatred with a cup filled with distortion. Shake 4 years (6 or
8 to taste) and bake on the oven of humanity.

Cheap and effective dish to nauseate America.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 8:43am

We are being prepared for a One World Government which would be socialist and, by necessity, totalitarian. Nearly all of our institutions, especially big businesses, are on-board with this idea including the Catholic Church. Our politics are essentially uni-party. Trump is not a player for this program which is why he is hated by leading citizens and most institutions.

Of course, we must resist and support Nationalism, limited immigration and conservative politics here and around the world such as the yellow vests in France. The problem is most folks hardly realize the severity of the problem, e.g., by and large most Catholics think Pope Francis is OK and Trump a bad guy.

To fix this we most likely need a reckoning at the hands of God. Most folks are just too selfish and materialistic to get engaged in fighting this evil even if they understand something has gone sadly wrong in the world.

c matt
c matt
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 9:06am

Democracy and Republic are basically theoretical constructs. They are interesting concepts hashed out on paper. The reality is that the mob rules. Or, more precisely, he who rules the mob rules.

John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 11:12am

“he who rules the mob rules.” That’s how Napoleon rose to the top with cannons full of grape-shot.

Bob S. in NC
Bob S. in NC
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 1:48pm

I’m honestly confused. I thought “Constitutional Republic” was the best description there was of our form of government. Or should we use the long phrase that we are a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Isn’t there a way to distill that down a bit or is that as good as we can describe our government?

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 2:46pm

Orwell said something about about the power of seeing things as they are for what they are and speaking to the truth of that. (The actual quote is pithier.)

We are a government of the legal-administrative state, by the judicial-bureaucratic state, for the liberal-progressive elite and their clientelage.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Friday, April 26, AD 2019 3:45pm

And if you don’t believe me, just try reading this:

Jesus wept

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Saturday, April 27, AD 2019 5:57am

I think (some say otherwise) Orwell, “In a time of universal deceit, speaking the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Sunday, April 28, AD 2019 7:49am

Middlebury College deserves to be bulldozed and the destroyed remains buried in a landfill. The left wing lackeys who refused to listen to this anti-Communist hero, of a nation of heroes, deserve deportation to Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea, so they can suffer under the type of regime they favor.

They are beneath Ryszard Legutko and all who fought against Communism.

The cleared land should be used as a truck stop or a hockey rink.

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