RIP VUW

Dear Sirs/Mesdames

Thank you for the invitation to comment on the University’s new name.  I was a student at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) in the early 1970s.  I do not approve of the name change or its visual identity.

There are several reasons for this, and they relate mainly to ideological trends which have markedly progressed in recent decades.   They have suffused the Weltanschauung to an extent where the majority of commentators seem unaware of it. The changes to the University’s identity follow these trends diligently.

Its close identification with Maori culture is perhaps the most incongruous facet.  Maori culture is primitive, and lies in sharp contrast to developed cultures.  By that I mean that it is tribal, with no national or overarching identity, and has collective land ownership gained by conquest.  It rejects rule of law and the state’s monopoly on violence.  It exhibits lower levels of the value of human life along with cannibalism, and higher levels of violence, often practiced as retributive subsidiarity since the rule of law is not part of primitive cultures.  It is hierarchical and includes slavery.  It is highly spiritual but low on analysis or development.  Its traditions are oral which limits its transmissibility.  While its culture has sufficient breadth to cover the needs of its members, it is shallow, and thus has limited artistic development and shows a low tendency to refinement. It appears loath to adopt external influences, and of late, to share their own with other cultures.   Primitive cultures’ education process is that of informal enculturation, a simple one-on-one process which does not lend itself to accumulation and advancement, which is in antipodal contrast to the sine qua non of universities’ purpose.

Maori culture’s move away from its worst features is solely due to the civilising influence of Western migration.  Western culture’s move towards Maori culture is more complex and imbued with ideologies.  One is a nod to anarcho-primitivism, manifest in forms such as ‘paleo-diets’, ‘rewilding’, and the elevation of primitive culture and beliefs to an equal basis with advanced cultures, as an imaginary age of Rousseauian innocence against Hobbesian evidence.  Since primitive culture and universities are antithetical, the true reason for VUW’s increased association with Maori culture is obscure and can only be guessed at.  Is it pandering?  Is it a morally-anachronistic judgment on civilisational expansion?  Is it a way of destroying the status ante, and with nothing significant to identify with, it attaches itself to a culture of convenience?

Another ideology which could have affected VUW Council’s proposal is Marxism, in its neo or Gramscian cultural mode.  Plenty has been written about the shift from political neutrality to the far Left and its damning results.  For example, Kenneth Westhues on academic mobbing, Frank Furedi with Free Speech on Campus, Langbert, Quain and Klein’s paper on Faculty Voter Registration, research and commentaries by Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Haidt and Camille Paglia, the Adam Smith Institute’s paper Lackademia, Brookings Institute’s findings on ‘positive’ as opposed to ‘open’ learning environments, and much more.  There are commonplace events such as no-platforming (Don Brash, Roger Scruton, Heather MacDonald), disinvitation, hecklers’ veto, smear and jeer, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and capitulation to student demands in a form of liberum veto.

Conservative institutions such as The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation has great difficulty in finding a campus to host it.  Islamic institutions have no such difficulty, despite being extremely conservative and financed from overseas, because the neo-Marxist influence on universities blind them from seeing it as an ally in Marxism’s near-term goal.  Academia’s creation of an Islamic imaginary is something it should have to answer for, but it won’t need to in the current environment. 

 TO BE CONTINUED...

Neo-Marxists moving into all areas of our lives

Journalist Karl du Fresne has written some insightful articles into existential threats faced by New Zealand and the West, particularly from the extreme Left.  Given that he is perhaps the only one to have done so in the New Zealand press makes him outstanding, even though his subject matter is well-aired elsewhere.  He is a couple of decades behind my own thinking, but clearly on the right track and I hope that with a bit of persuasion he will follow through on the predictable consequences of the trends he writes about.  I wrote this comment on his blog essay The long march of cultural Marxism, though the process of doing so is restrictive.  It will make better sense here.

Dear Mr du Fresne

Neo-Marxists moving into all areas of our lives

You have written an excellent article, one which aligns precisely with my own observations.

It’s worth following through on consequences of the issues you mention.  For example, questioning why neo-Marxists are so soft on the “infinitely more controlling” Islam shows that there is indeed a form of consistency in their ideology. 

I would suggest that Marxists are concerned about how society should be run once they have achieved their goal of “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”  Anarchists of various persuasions cannot be relied upon because they have no history of societal management.  Marxism can, has and does manage societies, but its credibility is severely impugned by its failures and has antipathy in the West in those terms. 

On the other hand, Islam has a 1,400-year reputation for managing all aspects of society, albeit badly flawed in comparison with today’s Western civilisational standards.  It shares with Marxism a communitarian interest. Its tribal origins means that its transcendent doctrine of tawhid – that all people on earth were born Muslim – works well with polarised and fragmented collectives without affecting any identity as long as it is subservient to ‘Muslim’, submitting to the will of Allah.  However, Islam’s essentialism will slowly erode sexual identities and preferences until its purely normative standards prevail.

There is copious evidence to show that neo-Marxists, and the Left in general, are changing the West’s ethical orientation to match that of Islam.  Fragmentation, relativism and Gramsci’s Long March allows an increasing number of feminists to defend Islam’s treatment of women along with Linda Sarsour’s Islamic form of feminism. The tolerance and incorporation of polygyny and sharia law compliance in Western societies is a matter of record; concessions and pandering to appease Muslim perceptions of victimhood – another Marxist trope – are daily events, and are made to prevent a Muslim backlash.  Witness Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s cancelled tour here due to Australian Muslims’ threats. 

Conflict regarding Islam’s future role in societal management is controlled right now with increasing calls for stricter blasphemy laws, foreign interference in domestic politics such as Turkey’s in Germany, ‘Islamophobia’ and racism being used to silence debate, and Marxist students and faculty members quashing any intellectual discourse that challenges Islam’s role in the West.

A further issue worth noting is academia’s ‘Islamic imaginary’, where it appears to have created its own form of Islam which is at variance with Islamic praxis.  This narrative focusses in particular on two aspects, that Muslims are peaceful and integrate well with Western society, and that Islam’s inherent violence and misogyny do not represent ‘true Islam’.  It supports the three arms of Islamic conquest, jihad (holy war) in, for example, student advocacy for Hamas against Israel, hijra (migration) in the Left’s support for unconstrained migration into the West, and dawah (proselytising) in promoting ‘moderate’ Islam as beneficial.  (Moderate Islam is a contradiction in terms, but that’s another issue.)  In this, it influences media, local and national governance and education, and through this, the national world view.  It is hardly surprising that Marxists go easy on Islam.  In the hegemonic conquest of the West, they’re both fighting for the same goal, notwithstanding that the correlation between Islamism and fascism is very high.  What happens when Marxism’s atheistic philosophy tries to get the upper hand over Islam’s fundamentalist doctrines after the revolution doesn’t bear thinking about.

A few resources that provide evidence for the Marxist / Islamist coalition can be found here:

·         The Left and Jihad by Fred Halliday, professor of international relations, covers Islam’s anti-imperialist exegesis and a history of the relationship between jihadis, the Soviets, the Left, and the West.

·         Fundamentally, we’re useful idiots by Anthony Browne, Europe Correspondent of The Times, who shows how the Left supports the fascistic tendencies of Islam.

·         The Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies by Bruce Thornton, Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University, who exposes Edward Said’s ‘baleful influence’ on Western Marxist academics.

Some resources showing the effects of Marxism on universities, lecturers and students can be found here:

·         Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology.  “We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1. The D:R ratios for the five fields were: Economics 4.5:1, History 33.5:1, Journalism/Communications 20.0:1, Law 8.6:1, and Psychology 17.4:1. The results indicate that D:R ratios have increased since 2004, and the age profile suggests that in the future they will be even higher.”

·         New Study Indicates Existence of Eight Conservative Social Psychologists, by Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, who comments on diversity in social psychology.  “An academic field that leans left (or right) can still function, as long as ideological claims or politically motivated research is sure to be challenged. But when a field goes from leaning left to being entirely on the left, the normal safeguards of peer review and institutionalized disconfirmation break down. Research on politically controversial topics becomes unreliable because politically favoured conclusions receive less-than-normal scrutiny while politically incorrect findings must scale mountains of motivated and hostile reasoning from reviewers and editors.”

·         Jordan Peterson is the go-to spokesman on the influence of Marxism on universities.  References are ubiquitous.

There are precious few public figures and journalists in New Zealand who display an understanding of what is going on with the nation’s Weltanschauung at a deeper level, so I appreciate your input.  Others fail spectacularly in their understanding of history’s arc, as letters in response to your article indicate.  However, there are signs of change, with opposition to destructive ‘progressive’ values, along with a glimmer of understanding of what Western societies have to lose with the very real threat of Islamic and Marxist development, if not actual conquest, getting greater exposure.  For myself, I enjoy analysing its complexity and its trends, resulting in a huge range of references and resources collected over forty years, even though it’s just a part of my interest in conceptual thinking.  But it leaves me with no public voice except that which I publish on Dyspeptic Lucubrations. 

For this reason, I value your ability to promote a realistic perspective in the public domain.  I hope you pursue this line of reasoning even deeper, because there’s plenty to consider.

Yours sincerely

Chris Slater