LIBERAL TOTALITARIANISM

From the Houston Chronicle editorial page:

Crime and punishment for reading a book on the Klan

The cover shows the Notre Dame dome and two burning crosses amid a crowd of robed and hooded Klansmen.

The pages inside tell the story of a 1924 street fight between Notre Dame students and Klansmen, who had gathered in South Bend purposely to terrorize the university's Catholic students. The clash lasted two days, during which the fighting Irish prevailed, and is recognized as a turning point in Klan history.

But never mind. The co-worker apparently wasn't interested in the content. The cover art was deemed traumatizing enough to prompt the shop steward to reprimand Sampson, saying that reading a book about the Klan was comparable to bringing pornography into the workplace.

A few weeks later, Sampson heard from the school's affirmative action office that a racial harassment complaint had been filed against him. In a November 2007 letter, affirmative action officer Lillian Charleston told Sampson that he demonstrated "disdain and insensitivity" to his co-workers.

"You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black co-workers."

The letter also noted that by the "legal 'reasonable person standard,' a majority of adults are aware of and understand how repugnant the KKK is to African-Americans." Sampson was ordered not to read the book in the presence of his co-workers.

And the punchline

Following a few weeks of relatively quiet controversy, a smattering of media reports and chatter in the blogosphere, Sampson received another letter from the affirmative action office saying that no determination could be made as to whether his reading choice was intentionally hostile. Therefore, no disciplinary action would be taken.

Click here for the rest.

Needless to say, this is infuriating.

I don't even know where to begin condemning this outrage. Perhaps I should start with the fact that this incident took place at a university, which ought to be the one place in our culture where free inquiry has absolutely no limit, but then universities also created this kind of politically correct bullshit in the first place. Perhaps I should start with the fact that, even though Americans have a perfect right to publicly read Mein Kampf if they like, especially at a university, the book in question here is an anti-Klan book. But then we live in a nation where the greatest American literary attack on racism of the nineteenth century, and perhaps of all time, Huckleberry Finn, has been banned on numerous occasions, often in schools, because of its use of the "n-word."

The bottom line here is that the learned and wise people behind this intellectual atrocity most likely see themselves as being very liberal--after all, doesn't their presumed motivation, keeping African-Americans from being offended by a book cover with a burning cross, reek of white liberal "compassion"? But lemme tell ya, in their zeal to show the world how liberal and compassionate they are, they've gone into a realm where liberalism simply doesn't exist. Real liberals understand that a free flow of information is not only vital to a free society, but that without it, there is no free society.

Look, I could imagine a situation where a white university employee purposely and repeatedly displays a book with the title "My Great and Pure White Race" being interpreted as some kind of racist harassment, but this case is definitely not that. That it actually got the ball rolling in terms of disciplinary action is nothing short of disgusting.

What really gets me is that there is some truth to charges that there are elements of fascism on the left. I mean, it's not like the right, which created fascism and is still its home on the ideological spectrum, but still very troubling nonetheless. This is the same kind of left-wing ideological spirit that has killed countless millions during the French Revolution, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in Russia under Stalin, in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and on and on. Intellectual absolutism fucking kills people.

How can university officials be so fucking stupid? How can liberals be so reactionary? Disgusting, thoroughly disgusting.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$