Marquette University: the journey from Joe McCarthy to Angela Davis

                                                           

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.  

For a parent seeking a Catholic university education for his child – some advice.  Skip Marquette University. Save the money and send the kid to a state university.  There is no difference.  

THE STALINIZATION OF THE AMERICAN LEFT -- JOHN KERRY

ce, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.  (John Kerry)

n Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

    Remarks before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 23, 1971

   

John Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

Joseph Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, most likely from a stroke, stricken late during the night in his sleep. In his dotage and pathologically suspicious of doctors, Stalin’s cowering associates hesitated to call for medical assistance fearing his wrath. So he lay helpless for some time, unable to speak or otherwise communicate, soaking in his own urine before his final exodus. When his closest henchmen, Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin, confirmed that “the Boss” was finely and safely dead, they scurried off to the Kremlin offices to clean out the files and papers that might document their extensive complicity in Stalin’s long reign of terror and criminality.  

The Georgian Bolshevik was seventy three years old.  As the undisputed God of the Communist world his passing unleashed paroxysms of grief in the Socialist Workers Paradise of his making and regions elsewhere under the banner of the hammer and sickle. The CPSU bosses set his embalmed corpse next to Lenin’s in the Red Square mausoleum. Eight years later he would be quietly evicted by the ‘kinder, gentler’ Nikita Khrushchev after he began to ponder with his colleagues at the 20^th Party Congress the “imperfections” of the reign of the General Secretary, his long-time mentor and father of the world’s first modern terror-command state, and what they might signal for his own political fortunes.                                 

Stalin’s legacy was not just two and a half decades of repression and mass murder. He also left posterity the gift of Stalinism, a unique form of tyranny that combined systematic terror with an ideology at once rigid yet flexible and adaptable, held together with a mindless cult of personality. The ‘mold’ of J.V. Stalin stamped out a number of working copies – ambitious, overachieving Stalinists wielding vast power in many places. An assortment of vicious, self-infatuated monsters such as Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Communist chiefs of the Eastern block countries, like the Master, devoted their waking energies to the celebration of their self-perceived genius and the wreckage of the millions of lives of those under their domination. The authors of the Black Book of Communism estimate that Communist rule snuffed out the lives of some 100 million people during the 20^th century.     

Stalinism survived Stalin – survived and flourished in fact. In the 21^st century its practitioners have cleverly adapted themselves to the changing world but, like the Bolsheviks from the early days, continue to embrace Stalinism’s core conviction – that they, the Stalinists, alone possess a cognitive and moral superiority that entitles them to wield whatever power they need to smash the old, corrupt order and micromanage the lives of others. The old guard Stalinists were open, confident and ardent about what they intended to do to their real, and imagined, opposition; the 21^st- century ones tend to hide behind the customs, institutions and traditions they loath and surreptitiously work to destroy. Twentieth-century Stalinists were about Revolution: twenty-first-century Stalinists promise “transformation.”

After WWII the Stalinists of note in the U.S. could be found undercover high up in FDR’s government—Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins being some of the better known, as we now know from the Venona decrypts. The America’s mainstream, however, for a season disdained every feature of Communism. During the Cold War, particularly in the early years, most Americans were appalled by the grim spectacle of Soviet imposed helotry in central and eastern Europe and the murderous fanaticism unfolding in Mao’s China, Stalinism with an Asian accent. Americans were also threatened by the Communist self-confident assertions of their superiority and inevitability. “We will bury you!" ("Мы вас похороним!") predicted Nikita Khrushchev while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956.

Reflecting the sentiments and convictions of the American people post WWII, both the Republicans and the Democrats at least appeared resolutely anti-Communist. Joseph Kennedy Sr. was close to Joe McCarthy, and early in his career Bobby Kennedy worked for the Wisconsin senator before the American Left accomplished it’s most successful and enduring smear. Nixon of course launched his political career combating Communism in America, defeating Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate race.  Nixon dubbed her as “the pink lady … red down to her underwear.” President Kennedy warned the country of domino threat of Communism to Southeast Asia and following General Maxwell Taylor’s counsel, sent 8,000 troops to Vietnam to support the Catholic, anti-Communist, South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diệm.

Vietnam, as we now know, was a disaster for the Americans, fifty-seven thousand soldiers who perished fighting there, and, of course, for the Vietnamese all of whom ended up living under a repressive Communist regime. The Vietnam War marked a major turning point for Americans in their engagement with Communism. Rife with political assassinations, race riots and radicalized universities during the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. hard-turned to the Left. Vietnam became for the Left a propaganda fulcrum used to de-moralize America, its traditions, history and promises, all exposed as a various elements of false consciousness that disguised its essential character – a viciously, hopelessly racist, rigged system propped up with a phony, exploitative Christianity and Horatio Alger mythology.

America, John Kennedy in his 1961 inauguration speech promised would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty”. Liberty-Schmiberty, throw away lines for the naive and the dummies. Such sentimental schlock was quickly turned upside down by our adversarial intellectual class who were busy polishing their favorite Marxist leitmotifs and disseminating a view of American history (Charles Beard comes to mind) that that read exploitation and oppression into the country’s foundational fabric. 

Southeast Asia refracted through the hermeneutical Marxist lens became a theater of imperial aggression fought with conscripts extracted from America’s underclass – poor and minorities dragooned and dropped into rice paddies half way around the world to bomb, napalm, and devastate a colonialized third world people. The American presence in Vietnam stripped of anti-Communist rhetoric was shown to be in essence about its true core, aggression and racism: the white imperialist descendants of American slave owners were conscripting young, black Americans, discriminated against and marginalized from the slums at home, to wage war on Asian people whom they (the leaders) viewed as racially inferior, culturally insignificant and physically expendable. American foreign policy particularly in all of its ugly Vietnamese contortions became an external (international) reflection of its fundamentally racist internal (domestic) character and its chauvinist history.

One especially notable indictment of American racism in Vietnam came from none other than the future Massachusetts U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, John Kerry, who had returned home from active duty to throw away his service medals and help organize the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Among other symbolic gestures of condemnation of the U.S. government prosecution of the war, Kerry carried a North Vietnamese flag in a protest march. His book, The New Soldier denounced the architects of the war as racists hiding behind a phony vale of anti-Communism. “We are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism…  [W]e watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.”

It would not be quite correct to say that Kerry was opposed to the war.  It was far more than that. The war itself was a manifestation of something much worse for him. “The country doesn't realize it yet but it has created a monster in the form of thousands of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.” It is difficult to know what to make of this sweeping, slanderous verbiage, a poisoned cocktail of vituperation and nihilism that one might expect to hear from a raging anarchist on a street corner, not from a decorated veteran testifying before Congress. This “monster” was made up of his comrades in arms some of whom had died believing, perhaps, that they were about more than dealing and trading in violence. Kerry’s personal history and ascendance to high office—from a 1960’s anti-war radical, communist sympathizer to high establishmentarian is a splendid prototype of the political trajectory of many of our current elites and helps to explain why American political and social institutions now bear scant resemblance to what they were a generation ago.

Thus: many years later when he appeared before a national audience to accept the Democrat Party’s nomination to run for the Presidency, Kerry opened his speech with a snappy salute and announced that he was “reporting for duty”, apparently having calculated for purposes of garnering votes that the “biggest nothing in history” he had fought in and subsequently with great fanfare denounced as an enterprise concocted and conducted by war criminals was now an illustrious entry in his autobiography. And so, from John Kerry, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” as he put it in his testimony before Congress … to John Kerry, the proud war hero! This was the sort of amoral reversal that reminds one of an earlier volte-face from a cynical power monger, Joseph Stalin: Stalin was for Hitler (Mototov-Ribbontrop pact 1939) until he was against him (1941-1945). Kerry’s opportunistic affinity for Stalin-like switcheroos was captured in his risible, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion [for the Iraq war] before I voted against it." Needless to say, Kerry did not during his Presidential campaign bring up the authorship of The New Soldier and his characterization of the U.S. effort in Vietnam as he so delicately put it, “a filthy obscene memory.”

Kerry's ambition to be President in 2004 was foiled in part by emergence of his former naval Swift Boat comrades from the Vietnam days who had served with Kerry and told the voters the truth about his self-exaggerated war heroics and reminded the voters of his sweeping condemnations of the American military in which he served. For their efforts they were smeared by the Left for doing what Stalinists most resent from those who oppose them, telling the truth.