Ever get the feeling the fix is on?
I caught a glimpse of the three National Champion UNC basketball players staging a news conference to announce they were leaving the school early to enter the NBA draft. Their decisions bring the number of non-seniors leaving the team to four, an NCAA record. At the obvious advice of very shrewd spin-doctors, they seized the moral initiative by going on TV to cut off what their public knows is sheer avarice. With the complicity of coach Roy Williams, they seized the moral high ground by going straight to the people together, disingenuously communicating that their chance at the NBA draft was obviously a slam dunk choice compared to love of school or attaining a college degree.
In other words, it was a set-up. We (they were actually saying behind the spin) stood on the shoulders of UNC to grab the ring, but we actually have no connection to the school. We brought home the bacon and you got a whiff, but we scoffed down the meat: a sure shot to be pro basketball millionaires. Sadly, the fans (and sports writers who dare not criticize for fear of losing their credentials) just thought it was fine, proud of their boys for walking all over them. The reality that their college has become a warehouse for semi-pro athletes is obviously an acceptable condition to fans for thrills and wins during March Madness. Is it actually valid to use home-run records on steroids and ringers to win the national basketball championship?
VATICAN RAG
Just the week before, thousands of another sort of fan, ecstatic true believers in the Roman Catholic church, cheered and cried in joy after a convocation of the College of Cardinals basically ran a fait accompli right by them and elected a German Pope to replace John Paul II. It was a spin-doctor set-up too, a brazen transfer of power to a pre-ordained candidate, suffused in the pomp and circumstance of smoke, bells, ermines and jewels, providing bread and circuses to disguise the machinations of a very slick curia.
Obviously the dead Pope made it clear he had blessed the ascension of Benedict XV1; and it is probable the wily German, who served as John Pauls papal palace watchdoghe was nicknamed the Rotweiler by ecclesiastical wags, now Adolph II by otherstook advantage of the Pontiffs feebleness to push his ambition on the declining Polish Vicar of Christ. Using his Metternich-like role, perhaps Ratszinger used his Vatican power-base to get the goods on his competitors. After all, he held the post of director of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith before his elevation to Pope, the same crowd that brought us the Inquisition.
Or perhaps the Cardinals really did commune in their own hearts and sincerely struggle to elect a successor by calling on spiritual advice from above, as the folklore goes. Yet taking only one day to be guided by God must appear a bit hurried and brusque to the man upstairs.
Martin Luther is spinning in his grave: A Pope from the birthplace of Protestantism? It was just such displays of finery and trickery that contributed to Luthers outrage in 1517, leading to his historic display of the 95 Theses hammered on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral ushering in the Protestant Reformation. But that was only a part of Luthers problem with his colleagues in the Church of Rome. And it was not merely corruptionselling indulgences, sexual licentiousnessit was the brazen refusal by church officials even to pretend to be modest or priest-like. Today, the corruption is even more lurid. We now know that many members of the Catholic priesthood, in the US and elsewhere, have been using the respect and power of their office to sexually molest young boys.
John Paul II, otherwise a hero to many in the victory over the Soviets in the Cold War, did not address this scandal while sitting on the throne of St. Peter. Yet he called for a hard line for practicing Catholics against homosexuality. Thus the transparent contradiction: Church members better not engage in illicit behavior, but its fine for the priesthood. I suspect Benedict will stay the party line and protect his own. Everyone else will risk excommunication. And where was Father Guido Sarducci during the papal succession? He was sorely missed.
THE BIGGEST LIE OF ALL
The blue ribbon for the most monumental spin-doctor con job goes to Americas universities. As tuition skyrockets, the content of a college degree is plummeting. A nasty cabal of Leftists revisionists has a chokehold on the curriculum, squeezing the life out of what used to be a liberal arts education. Graduates have been screwed, blued and tattooed during their four-year stint. Its when they engage in conversation with anyone who has a grasp of the world that the sinking feeling overcomes them: My parents and I spent that much money to attend a prestigious university and I am basically ignorant of the world around me?
They learn quickly that not only are they incapable of a literate conversation, but also they picked up in school the parallel disposition of having unacceptable attitudes in the workplace. These poor kids realize that all that self-esteem jargon they had drilled in them has inflated their self-value far out of proportion to their actual assets. And the group therapy doctrine that accompanied this hokey theory of education is not how you solve problems in real life, especially in an office environment.
Yet the cost of admission to gain this illusory leg up by attending what are now basically third-rate schools, continues to climb in direct negative proportion to the quality of the education. Coddled and clueless, riding on the air of grade inflation and content disintegration, an entire generation entering the real world today is probably less factually informed than high school graduates of 40 years ago.
The villains in this tragedy are the revisionist scholars who have been hiding out behind the campus walls since the 1960s and 70s, oblivious to the facts of political reality since their heady days in the golden era gone by of occupying the deans office and demanding raises for cafeteria workers. These scholars in turn propagandized entering college classes and in turn kept the indoctrination in full swing as they attained academic status, careful as they went, to cull out for professorships and tenure anyone who failed to toe the party line. They are Marxist in their mind-sets and unrelenting in their allegiance to failed doctrines: world socialism, a classless society and utopian zealotry. Think of Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado and you get the picture. A poseur who claims he is American Indian, he called the people killed in the World Trade Center attack on 9-11 little Eichmanns for working in a capitalist buildingwho deserved to be killed for being American fascists.
Churchill and his type may be a minority in academe, but they have succeeded in tearing down the antithesis to their dreams, Western culture and American principles of individualism, capitalism and freedom. To accomplish their goals, they have rewritten history and twisted the present, all the while calling for a theoretical future that reality has proven to be fancifulthat is without dictatorial tyranny and enslavement as practiced by their heroes Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. The upshot is a scandal: Students receive a mangled menu of propaganda posing as history, and the benediction to continue the war against the principles of their culture.
THE HEROES OF THE CONFLICT
Fortunately, there are those who have stood up to the campus radicals, and three of the most prominent will be here August 31 through September 2 for the third annual Raleigh International Spy Conference, presented by Metro Magazine in association with the NC Museum of History. Their many books are scantly covered in the slanted mainstream press, but read by those who know the fix is in on campus and within the intellectual community.
Ronald Radosh, at one time a typical liberal scholar, discovered he was the victim of an outrage after setting out to write a book in an objective manner to verify that Julius Rosenberg was innocent of espionage against the United States. After all, everyone he knew or knew about in the intellectual community in New York, where he taught at City College, believed absolutely that Rosenberg was innocent. To them, it was right-wing American fascists who arrested, convicted and executed Julius and his wife Ethel.
But Radosh was educated in the days before the decline in scholastic standards now so common on campus. He discovered through his research that actually Rosenberg (if not Ethel exactly) was indeed guilty. For his trouble to tell the truth in the Rosenberg File (1983), he was the victim of ridicule and humiliation from his colleagues. He discovered to his dismay that things were changing in the academic community. Scholarship was out and adherence to the party line was in. (Radoshs latest book, Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colonys Long Romance With the Left, is due out this month).
Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes learned their lesson a little later, in the early 90s when they were granted access to KGB archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They co-wrote two books in the Annals of Communism series sponsored by Yale University Press, only to find that their academic colleagues were not interested in the reality that many Americans worked for the Soviet Union from the 1930s onward. The two then wrote about the revelations in the Venona files, declassified by NSA in 1995. Therein the American communists who worked for the KGB were exposed. Once again the scholarly community and the two major historical societies refused to care or to cover their books.
The two authors were more than highly suspicious that historic scholarship has been high-jacked by a lethal strain of revisionist
theory on campus that goes beyond ignoring the facts of the Cold War. These people are actually rewriting it and in the process denying the crimes of Stalinism and the complicity of American communists on the Soviet side. Klehr and Haynes then co-wrote In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, that reveals clearly the radical revisionism on campus.
I recommend you attend the conference. With our concentration of universities in the Triangle, it is important that we understand why knowledge has been replaced with propaganda in the liberal arts.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
The documentary on FDR on the History Channel last month featured new photos, diaries and information, but once again what was left out is just as important. In keeping with the revisionist party line in media, there was no mention of Stalins purge trials, the gulags or of the scandal that hundreds of Soviet-directed communists were working in every department of FDRs four administrations. More light was she'd on Harry Hopkins as the man who ran the war for the President, forgetting to include the fact that he was a Soviet asset. Hopkins extorted Churchill to end the Empire in exchange for US ships and gave Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta. Of course, the program ignored Ultra and intelligence during World War II, a critical factor in the allied victory.
Contradictions prevail as usual when the social engineers get up a head of steam. As studies pop up pointing out the problems of childhood obesity, school districts around the nation are dropping recess. Says one administrator, softball and dodge ball are too violent and diminish the self-esteem of a child. After spending their formative years in car seats, wearing a helmet to ride a big wheel, being browbeaten with self-esteem and group therapy indoctrination, unable to express an opinion in class for fear of being abusive, expecting parents to accompany them to soccer practice and being told they can't drink a beer until they are 21, no wonder kids hide beneath headphones and tune out the world.
Bernard Henri-Levi, the French freewheeling philosopher said on the Charlie Rose programafter his travels in the US retracing the travels of Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835 book Democracy In America the same thing I tried to tell a French aristocrat recently: You just don't get the size of America. Its why we are who we are and why we prevail. Levi discovered there was a vast nation out there beyond New York City. America, he said, is factory that makes Americans.
Chris Andrew, the UK intelligence scholar, told me at Cambridge recently that the reason the West believed Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons was based on his reluctance to say he didnt. Saddam, it is now known, was afraid to admit it for fear he would be attacked by Iran. And for that reason, he was indeed seeking weapons of mass destruction. Chris Andrews second installment of The Mitrokhin Archives is due out soon. He was scheduled to return this year to the Raleigh Spy Conference in late August in conjunction with the US release, but vetting and security checks have delayed publication.