Is
it possible to shame whoever is supposed to be in charge at Marquette
University – The President, the Board of Trustees, a distinguished, influential
Jesuit somewhere in residence, someone, anyone who might know even a little
history from the last hundred years or so and understand what Communists do to
Christians when they get power? Not even
remotely. The real operatives, the social justice “priests” at this pretend
Catholic university apparently have deeply inhaled the same fetid vapors of the
cultural Marxism that saturate every molecule of air at the most secular,
anti-Christian universities such as Berkeley, or closer to home, the one in
Madison. From the MU website:
The
Marquette Forum will host Dr. Angela Davis for a distinguished
lecture on Wednesday, March 29 …. Davis is a scholar, activist and
sought-after speaker who has presented at dozens of universities…. This
event is part of the Marquette Forum, a yearlong series of
conversations inspired by visions of inclusion and a better world emerging from
black freedom struggles.
Here is
Orwell-inspired, DiversitySpeak perfected – anodyne, flawlessly crafted so as
not to arouse suspicion that the foxes now guard the hen house, that the
radicals at MU run the show and stage their phony PC-scripted lectures and discussions.
No one can object to healthy “conversations”, especially ones “inspired by
visions of inclusion.” Who could be opposed to “a better world” or cheering on
the “freedom struggles” of anyone? This announcement in both content and style
smacks of Soviet era agitprop, the technique of which is to show how morally
immaculate you are by wrapping all the right words around yourself – “peace,” “justice,”
“freedom,” “democracy.” Communist East Germany (euphemistically, The German Democratic Republic), it
might be recalled, was so just, democratic, free and prosperous, that the
Stalinists in charge needed to build a wall to keep its citizens from leaving
and shot them whenever they tried.
What is omitted in
the vapid, banal happy talk about the “scholar,
activist and sought-after speaker” is that at 73 years of age, the life-long Marxist,
Angela Davis, is not just some intellectually formidable village atheist
imported to rattle the sheltered, complacent young Christians on campus. Neither is she a 1960s-era, hallowed civil
rights celebrity who happened to have mellowed out of a distant radical past
and embraced American traditions and joined the Rotary Club. Her life’s mission continues to unfold with
an unwavering, militant commitment to the destruction of what this 136 year-old
Jesuit university is (supposed to be) all about. From Marquette University’s website:
Marquette University Guiding Values
Endorsed Dec. 8, 2014
In accordance with the Catholic, Jesuit mission and vision of Marquette University, we hold that all people and things are created to praise, reverence and serve God in our community and throughout the world, and thus every aspect of the university’s lifeblood and work holds this principle and foundation as its beginning and end. Therefore, we will enact the following values and behaviors in our lives and our work to serve the greater glory of God…
One does not have
to be a Jesuit-educated theologian or a philosopher to grasp that nowhere in
any country that might have had the misfortune to be governed by this former
Black Panther, FBI fugitive and Communist Party USA candidate for Vice
President 1980 would any follower of MU’s Catholic, Jesuit mission – praising,
revering and serving God – not find his life to be pure misery, assuming that he was not liquidated. Those at MU who
extended the “distinguished lecture” invitation to Davis should review the video
clip of her remarks in her pilgrimage in 1979 to Moscow where she accepted
the Lenin
Peace Prize, in her words, “the esteemed peace prize bearing the
glorious name of Vladimir Illich Lenin here on the soil where he led the great
October Revolution.” Sounds very reverential, doesn’t it? And, for a man
whose violent hatred for religion could not be matched by anyone.
Davis was also feted
in 1972 by the East German Stalinist, Erich Honecker, collecting honorary degrees,
effusing praise and admiration for the GDR and denouncing her native land for
its repression and racism.
Most of those MU
students who had hoped to be “inspired” by Davis’s “visions of inclusion” were
likely unaware that after the “great October Revolution,” the “glorious” Lenin’s
vision for the millions of Christians in the Russia he was about to turn into a
“workers’ paradise” was somewhat less than inclusive. In a 1922 letter to his ruling Politboro,
Lenin outlined his approach to religious diversity in the young regime that was
struggling to gain control over those who were somewhat less than enthusiastic
about their prospects – show trials, followed by executions, public ones just
to make sure everyone got the message. “The result,” he wrote, “of the trial is to
be the execution, by public shooting, of a large number of the Chuya Black
Hundreds as well as the shooting of as many as possible from Moscow and other
important religious centers… The more we shoot, the better it will be
for us.” [Black Book of Communism,
Harvard University Press, 1999, pp 125-26, emphasis added] Not exactly encouraging for those who wanted "to serve the greater glory of God." Lenin, and then his
disciple, Stalin went on to obliterate Russian Christianity with an unprecedented
savagery, as well as to persecute Islam.
The pattern was repeated by Communist dictatorships across the world, as
in China, Cuba and the Soviet block in Eastern and Central Europe.
That an
institution like Marquette University would host and honor a militant atheist
like Angela Davis, an implacable enemy of its sacred teachings, its religious
faith and aspirations, someone who has made a life-long, worshipful embrace of
Lenin’s October Revolution and the failed Communist regimes through out the
last century that repressed, tortured and murdered millions of Christians all
over the world, is just one more piece of the depressing evidence that
resistance to the cultural Marxism that pervades even our once conservative,
religious institutions has utterly collapsed.
One of the curious
and largely unnoticed ironies of this debacle is that Marquette University, so
eager and enthusiastic to welcome an aging Communist
radical peddling all the standard Marxist tropes, is that it is the alma mater
of perhaps the most famous anti-Communist
of all, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a 1935 graduate of its school of law.
It is a safe bet that
very few of the current students at Marquette University Law School (MULS) are
even aware that Joe McCarthy is an alumnus (LL.B., 1935) of the law school.
This unawareness, however, is excusable. The halls, offices, and classrooms of
most law schools are teeming with portraits, plaques, and busts of prominent
alumni. It is not uncommon for law schools to name buildings, classrooms,
courtrooms, professorships, and scholarships after prominent graduates. At
MULS, however, Joe McCarthy-undoubtedly the law school's most famous alumnus
and a man Lyndon B. Johnson said "will never be forgotten"-is persona
non grata. [From,
Jeffry S. Kinsler, Marquette Law Review, #2, 2001]
Indeed,
even more than ever, Senator McCarthy remains a persona non grata at MU. However, the irony, of course, is that this
most anti- of anti-communists is an embarrassment to the cognitive-dissonant Jesuit
Catholics at MU who at the same time roll out the red carpet for a speaker whose long,
illustrious CV describes someone who might well be called the perfect American
Bolshevik, a life-long apologist for communist butchers (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro) across the globe. Those who refuse to recognize their enemies, especially ones who are
so open, consistent and brazen as Angela Davis, are a hopeless, pathetic lot.
The pattern of philo-communism and PC-enforced,
leftist identity politics is not, of course, unique to MU. It is a pervasive
feature of higher education. Recently, Young
America’s Foundation’s spokeswoman Emily Jashinsky told staff at
the National
Review “that there has been a “disturbing pattern of suppressing
conservativism” on Jesuit campuses, citing DePaul University and Gonzaga
University as the most recent instances of conservative speakers receiving
significant backlash from university faculty.
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