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.  

Oration and Ordure: Obama’s Trail

• If towns remain divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs — if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.

                           President Barack Obama, Speech in Northern Ireland, June 2013

Another speech, another slur from the world’s greatest orator.  We are now in Anno V of the reign of The One.  Three and half years remain for him to flit about the world and, with his teleprompter, his instrument of admonition and edification, continue to do what he likes to do most – assert his moral and intellectual superiority and scold his inferiors.

This particular remark of the President (above) caused a bit more than the usual stir. Many Catholics in Northern Ireland understandably heard the speech as a gratuitous insult from, no less, a prestigious guest who took his visit as an opportunity to flaunt in still a very Catholic country his anti-Catholic bigotry, and, to signal how Christians under his watch might fare if he had even more power than he already does.  The President’s minders, as they always do when his inner-Karl Marx suddenly protrudes (“religion is the opiate of the masses”) reacted by simply denying that he said what he said. 

In light of the controversy thus sparked and the condescending dismal rationalization by Obama’s minions of the Catholic reaction this extract is worthy of dissection.

This jumbled up smear is a signature piece of Obama oratory, the most conspicuous element being that it is a jaw dropping non-sequitur.  No logic, no facts, no history underlie this crude and stupid calumny – it is no more than a candid extrusion of a usually sublimated, virulent anti-clericalism.   From separate schools and buildings for Catholics and Protestants there follows from the President’s logic moral blindness, the hardening of fear and resentment, etc.   "Obama was not condemning Catholic schools – he was condemning segregation," wrote one of Obama’s defenders.  Well, yes, Obama was condemning segregation.  However, parochial education by its very nature is a kind of segregation -- voluntary segregation.  That is the whole point. People segregate for all sorts of reasons, most of them benign.  The Polish-American Veterans Club is a segregated association. Does it augment fear and resentment?   Obama clearly views parochial education as morally equivalent to Jim Crow and Apartheid.   So before the shock of the slip could fully register, once again as with his 2012 “You didn’t build that” quip, his propaganda mill churned out the dense smog of denial.    

For all of his supposed intellectual sophistication and moral sensitivity, Obama rarely seems able to rise above his ideologically rigid, viscerally-based antagonisms and attempt to consider that those who do not share his views might not be stupid or depraved.  In any case Obama’s admonition in Northern Ireland was explicit and unequivocal. The four invidious “ifs” in this extract are tightly, if clumsily linked – separate Protestant and Catholic schools are a major piece of social-religious conflict. That he meant what he said here is also entirely consistent with his personal history and political career.      

While many of Obama’s speeches are poll-tested, focus-group vetted, campaign schlock, on occasion the President actually goes off script and says what he really thinks. And when he does, somebody somewhere gets smeared or threatened.  In 2008 the white voters in Pennsylvania who preferred Ms. Clinton over him in the primary were people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."  Here is Obama in yet another self-assumed authoritative posture, as rural sociologist “explaining” to his audience of fawning sophisticates in San Francisco why those dumb white folks in the sticks of PA didn’t vote for him.  For someone who agonizes about not being able to “see ourselves in one another” the President cannot seem to see anything but chauvinism and ignorance in people whose views are not like his, or people who aren’t like him.  The “other” for him is always a knuckle-dragging, bible-thumping bigot or a rich, selfish exploiter of the disadvantaged.

Condescension and contempt are deep in Obama’s reflexes and make their way often into his oratory as we see above. In the 2012 election he successfully reduced his opponent to a vicious caricature, a vulture capitalist who enjoyed throwing people out of work and letting them die for lack of health insurance.  He could never even slightly dissimulate his contempt and loathing for Mr. Romney and his demeanor during the debates was a study of arrogant disdain and condescension.      

While Obama routinely smears his critics – “Dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance” is what Republicans want, he said in a 2011 speech – he also is given to threats.  “Were gonna punish our enemies and reward our friends…” he said in a 2010 Univision address. At that time even his critics did not likely take him literally.  It is now clear that the IRS and his Attorney General were busy doing just that. In a short four and a half years the “Hope and Change” Obama of transparency, bi-partisanship and post-racial America, now seems rather to have dropped out of the mold that formed the likes of Juan Peron, Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe.  

Recently in Germany for the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s historic speech there the Germans, somewhat less enthralled with him than when he descended in 2008, were recipients of the another side of  Obama’s oratory, the fluffy, anodyne version. “[W]e believe that real prosperity comes from our most precious resource -- our people.  And that’s why we choose to invest in education, and science and research.”  Yes, of course. Who other than those troglodyte Republicans doesn’t believe that? This is the Miss America-oratory that so impressed the Norwegian Nobel Prize award committee a few years and a few wars ago. When Obama is not smearing or defaming his opposition, he wallows in banalities and platitudes.  And so his oratory moves from the Ying of “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America” (2004) to the Yang of “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun” (June 2008, Philadelphia).  It is all of a piece, but he is most believable when he is making his insults and threats.   

When we are finally done with him in 2017 there will be some very angry and bitter discussion about all that he has done to us.  But even now no one, anyone, can say that he turned out to be what he said he was.