Worldwide Rally for Freedom & Democracy — British Columbia END THE LOCKDOWN Rallies MARCH 20, 2021 Worldwide Rally for Freedom and Democracy – CANADA There are several rallies in British Columbia, so please check the above link for more locations. One day, every one together! Over 50 countries are taking part. https://t.me/worldwidedemonstration 1. Saturday, March 19th Vancouver Art Gallery Open Mic – 12-3 pm 2. Victoria at Centennial Square, City Hall from 12-4 pm. 3. Kelowna at Stuart Park from 11:30 – 4:00 There is a convoy of vehicles that will be travelling to Kelowna on Friday morning! Friday Morning Kelowna Convoy Meeting Place: At the Chevron Station in Langley at 9:30am. 8615 200th St. Exit 200th to the right and then proceed to the 1st Light/86th. Bring your Canada Flags so we can identify you in the convoy. We will have chalk there to decorate your windows. Convoy leaves at 10 am. Bring your Canada flags so we can identify you in the convoy. We will have chalk there to decorate your windows. We will leave at 10:00 am! Sunday, MARCH 21, 2021 No New Normal Rally and March at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 1-3, followed by music and dancing. Rain or Shine. Every Sunday. Everyone welcome! We look forward to sharing our experience at the Kelowna Rally and hearing all about the Vancouver Rally. The No New Normal Team: Raoul, Maria, Glen and Eileen |
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Silicon Valley Censors: Facebook Just Banned This Post About a White Man Murdered in a Black Hate Crime
Silicon Valley Censors: Facebook Just Banned This Post About a White Man Murdered in a Black Hate Crime
Another anti-White hate crime. I didn’t see this on CNN
https://vdare.com/posts/his-name-is-steven-amenhauser-53-year-old-white-male-dies-after-being-set-on-fire-by-two-black-teens-ages-16-and-14
His name is Steven Amenhauser a white male, 53-years-old.
He was set on fire by two black teens (16 & 14)—who doused Steven in a flammable liquid & was murdered in this “brutal and vicious crime.”
Facebook says: “This URL goes against our Community Standards on spam:
- vdare.com” Outright political censorship of immigration reformers VDARE. Presumably, the murder of Whites is OK with Facebook “community standards’.
MORE SILICON VALLEY CENSORSHIP: TWITTER WOULDN’T LET ME POST THIS
MORE SILICON VALLEY CENSORSHIP: TWITTER WOULDN’T LET ME POST THIS
A Satirical Song, by British political prisoner Alison Chabloz, in response to Canadian gender/sex insanity law
https://www.bitchute.com/video/BU8eBi7FeGqO/ The musical antidote to gender/sex insanity law.. WOTS MY IDENTITY ?
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/03/18/canadian-man-jailed-after-misgendering-his-daughter/
Canadian Man Jailed After ‘Misgendering’ His Daughter
From Bad to Worse
Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Canadian Red Ensign
![The Canadian Red Ensign](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ShJ56ncRijQ/Vic7ppYOalI/AAAAAAAAABc/d3gWM-vfhbM/s1600-r/red%2Bensign.jpg)
Thursday, March 18, 2021
From Bad to Worse
It is less than two months since I posted an essay entitled “Death and Doctors” that discussed how in the depravity of modern progressive liberalism those who are supposed to have dedicated their lives to healing disease and injury, alleviating pain and suffering, and saving lives are now expected to take the lives of the vulnerable at either end of the lifecycle through abortion or physician assisted suicide. As I pointed out in that essay, both of these practices were against the law throughout most of Canadian history and the latter practice was only legalized quite recently. It was in 2014 that Lower Canada – Quebec to those who are vulgarly up-to-date – became the first province to legalize physician assisted suicide and in February of 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada once again flexed the shiny new muscle that Pierre Trudeau had given them in 1982 by striking down the law against physician assisted suicide in its Carter ruling. The Court placed a one year delay on this ruling coming into effect in order to give Parliament time to fix the issues with the law which the Court considered to be constitutionally problematic. The Liberals, however, won a majority government in the Dominion election that year and so passed Bill C-14 instead, which completely legalized the practice and, indeed, allowed for physicians under certain circumstances, to go beyond assisting in suicide and actively terminate the lives themselves. Note that while I would like to think that had Harper’s Conservatives remained in power the outcome would have been different, I am not so naïve as to be certain of that. Indeed, the week after the Carter ruling, I had discussed how the Conservatives appeared to be preparing to capitulate on this issue in “Stephen Fletcher, the Byfields, and the Failure of Canada’s New Right”.
Now, one might be tempted to think that with regards to the issue of physician assisted suicide there is not much further in the wrong direction that our government could have gone than Bill C-14. One would be very wrong in thinking so, however, as the government has just demonstrated.
On February 24th of last year, a few weeks before the World Health Organization hit the panic button because a new virus that is significantly dangerous only to the very sorts of people most likely to be on the receiving end of euthanasia had escaped from China and was making the rounds of the world, Captain Airhead’s Liberals introduced Bill C-7 in the House of Commons. David Lametti, who became Justice Minister and Attorney General after Jody Wilson-Raybould was removed from this position for refusing to go along with the Prime Minister’s corruption, was the sponsor. The aim of the bill was to make it easier for those who wanted what they are now calling “Medical Assistance In Dying” or MAID – in my opinion the acronym produced by the old convention of leaving out words of three letters or less would be more apt – but were not already on death’s door to obtain it.
As bad as the original draft of Bill C-7 was, it has undergone revisions over the course of the year since its first reading that make it much worse. The most controversial revision is the one that includes a provision that is set to come into effect two years after the bill passes into law and which would allow access to the procedure to those who are neither at death’s door nor experiencing extreme physical pain and suffering but only have severe mental or psychological conditions. Since it could be easily argued that wanting to terminate one’s own life constitutes such a condition – I suspect the vast majority of people would see it as such – the revised version of Bill C-7 looks suspiciously like it is saying that eventually everyone who wants a physician’s assistance in committing suicide for whatever reason will be entitled to that assistance.
Last week the revised bill passed the House of Commons after the Grits, with the support of the Bloc Quebecois, invoked closure on the debate and forced a vote. Since the bill will eventually make euthanasia available to those with merely psychological problems, why exactly the Bloc would support a bill with the potential to drastically reduce the numbers of their voters remains a mystery. Jimmy Dhaliwal, or rather Jagmeet Singh to call him by his post-transition name as we would hate to mis-whatever anyone, announced that the NDP would not support the bill. This should not be mistaken for an example of principled opposition to physician assisted suicide for the mentally ill, it was rather an example of voting the right way for the wrong reason – Singh’s rabid hatred of Canada’s traditional constitution. In my last essay I pointed out how he, in marked contrast with the more popular and sane man who led his party ten years ago, has taken aim against the office of Her Majesty the Queen and wishes to turn the country into some sort of lousy people’s republic. Here it is his problem with the Upper Chamber of Parliament that is relevant. He did not like that some of the revisions were introduced in the Senate rather than the House of Commons. As for that august body, the Senate passed the bill yesterday, by a vote of 60-25 with five abstentions. This is easily enough explained. Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day, and even though the Senate is the chamber of sober second thought, its members were probably drunk. The only mystery here is, with apologies to the Irish Rovers, whether it was the whiskey, the gin, or the three-or-four six packs.
A little under a year before Bill C-7 was introduced, it was announced in the federal budget that that the Dominion government would be spending $25 million dollars over a five year period to develop a nation-wide suicide prevention service. In the fall of last year, after the information began to come out about just how badly the insane and unsuccessful experiment in locking down society to prevent the spread of a virus had affected the mental health of Canadians driving suicide rates through the roof, the government announced that it would be investing $11.5 million towards suicide prevention for “marginalized communities” that had been disproportionately affected by this mental health crisis, which they, of course, blamed on the virus rather than on their own tyrannical suspension of everyone’s basic rights, freedoms, and social lives. Apparently the government cannot see any contradiction between prioritizing suicide prevention and providing easily available assistance in taking one’s own life.
By funding suicide prevention programs the government would seem to be taking the side in the ancient ethical debate that says that suicide is a bad thing and that it is wrong to take your own life. The strongest version of this ethical position has traditionally been that of Christian moral theology. Suicide, in Christian ethics, is not merely a violation of the Sixth Commandment, as the Commandments are numbered by the Jews, the Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestants, but a particularly bad violation of this Commandment because it leaves no room for earthly repentance and is an expression of despair, the abandonment of faith and hope in God. In other traditions, suicide is generally frowned upon but in a less absolute way. In some traditions suicide brings shame upon the memory and family of the person who commits it except under a specific set of circumstances in which case it accomplishes the opposite of this by erasing shame that the individual had already brought upon himself and his family through his disgraceful actions, shame which could only be expunged in this manner. It is easier to reconcile these traditions with each other – preserving one’s family honour is a very different motivation from despair – than it is to reconcile either with physician assisted suicide. Physician assisted suicide in no way resembles what would have been considered an honourable suicide in any pagan tradition. In Christian ethics, since taking your own life is so bad, getting someone else to help you do it or do it for you is downright diabolical.
Perhaps the very worst thing about Bill C-7 is that gives even more power to the medical profession. The liberalization of the Criminal Code in 1969 and the Morgentaler decision from the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988 gave doctors the power of life and death over the unborn. This was already too much power, but the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carter in 2015 and the passing of Bill C-14 the following year gave them similar power over the elderly and infirm. Last year, the Dominion government and every provincial government gave their top doctors dictatorial power over all Canadians, allowing them to suspend all of the basic Common Law rights and freedoms that are the traditional property of all of Her Majesty’s subjects regardless of Charter protections, power which they proceeded to disgracefully abuse as they gleefully and sadistically traded the serpentine staff of Asclepius for the Orwellian symbol of a boot stamping on a human face forever. Now, Bill C-7 is extending their power of life and death even further in a most irresponsible way. Physician assisted suicide is the foot in the door for outright euthanasia or “mercy killing”, extending the availability of the former to people who are not already dying will lead inevitably to doctors being allowed to perform the latter on those who are not already dying, and since it is doctors who get to say what is and what is not illness, mental or otherwise, the ultimate effect of this bill is to give the medical profession total and unlimited power of life and death over every Canadian. Nobody should be trusted with that kind of power, least of all the medical profession as their behaviour over the last twelve months demonstrates. Indeed, the disgrace they have brought upon their profession by their tyranny and their callous disregard for the social, psychological, spiritual and economic harm they have done with their universal quarantines, mask mandates and social distancing is such, that even seppuku on the part of all non-dissenting physicians may prove insufficient to restore their professional honour. Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 6:46 AM
GORDON WATSON, HAPPY FREEDOM FIGHTER: “How the heck am I still alive?”
GORDON WATSON, HAPPY FREEDOM FIGHTER: “How the heck am I still alive?”
How the heck am I still alive?
At age 71, I am “in the COVID zone”; i.e, a senior citizen most at risk, so I’m told … Yet, for the last year I’ve sanitized nothing, breathed freely and hugged hundreds of complete strangers at “super-spreader events;” i.e., GATHERINGS where we voice dissent from the official nonsense and never do the social distance dance.
The highwater marks were entering into the Colwood, Victoria and Vancouver court buildings without the muzzle. Wednesday I went in to the Service BC office barefaced … not a word was said
Just a walkin’ miracle? Or personification of the fact that the SCAM-demic is an utter HOAX
Gordon S Watson
Justice Critic
Party of Citizens Who Have Decided To Think for Ourselves & Be Our Own Politicians Metchosin British Columbia March 12 2021
![](http://cafe.nfshost.com/wp-content/uploads/gordon-watson-protesting-1024x819.jpg)
Commentator & Sometime White Rapper Stan Hess Liked Paul Fromm’s Appearance on “The Political Cesspool” March 13
Commentator & Sometime White Rapper Stan Hess Liked Paul Fromm’s Appearance on “The Political Cesspool” March 13
Guest: Paul Fromm – Our world tour continues in Canada with Paul Fromm, Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression. A program mainstay and free speech activist extraordinaire, Paul’s appearances are always lively and informative.
Folks .. Paul Fromm is a dedicated activist living in Canada. He has been a friend of mine for over 25 years. Paul has traveled all over the world standing up for the rights of European people. He has now been barred from traveling to the UK and the United States because of his activism . But can still travel to Russia. …So much for equal rights for Whites ….
Listen to this informative and entertaining hour with James Edwards .. Keith Alexander… and Paul Fromm.
I am a proud member of Paul’s group CAFÉ.
Sincerely
Stan Hess
Report from Freedom Fighter Gordon Watson in British Columbia on the END THE LOCKDOWN Rallies
Report from Freedom Fighter Gordon Watson in British Columbia on the END THE LOCKDOWN Rallies
The spot where we protest in downtown Victoria is perfect for getting feedback from citizens who go by. Katie has been on the scene since dissident voices began denouncing the Lockdown a year ago. On Saturday she told me lately response to our presence on the doorstep of the Ministry of Health headquarters, is 75 percent favourable to us = drastically up from when she started. There is no movement of folks who ‘get it’ about the SCAMdemic, to take the contrary position. In this authentic populist movement, the trend is our friend
On Saturday March 13 one of the “UN-acceptables” * brought her vintage boom-box and played Van Morrison’s new album. Doing his bit, contributing to the soundtrack of our lives … the poet asks:
“Why are they working and why are we not?” Eh?
As the states down south awaken, what looms, is momentary respite before the Tyrants abandon all pretence of fiscal sanity so the economy spirals down into the pigsty of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. By which I mean = implosion of the value of fiat currency issued by the Federal Reserve System against the value of other nations’ currencies / the mother-of-all financial crises. For which the SARS 2 Covid 19 thing, is the cover story
If we aren’t yet in The End Times, 2020 gave us a glimpse of it. Jesus Christ himself foretold that we will be jostling with “the swine” for something to eat. Read the Bible, folks. And ALL of it. As you do, ask for wisdom identifying the Prodigal Son and also the “swine” in that Parable. My own interpretation as derived from a lifetime of studying the theme of National Salvation …. often called the British Israel interpretation of Biblical prophecy …is, the most politically-incorrect thing that can be said these days. That Caucasians are True Israel. Our God chastens those whom He loves. He allows the enemies of Israel to prevail, for a while, to discipline us. We are being humbled for having despised our heritage during the last century of profligate living.
What if that peculiar interpretation is so? Then the tsunami of racial aliens invading our territory is the communist agenda outworking … creating a permanent welfare class with which to drag America down to Third World conditions subservient to the antichrist UN. After the Democrats stole the election, the Republic alongside the Dominion of Canada, both founded in Christianity, are in the grip of crypto commies shamelessly crowing in Time magazine how they clambered up to the high office of the Presidency by hook and by crook.
No mere coincidence the BC New Democrats used the same grand Myth ie. the PLAN-demic, to the same end. John Horgan & Co ‘stole a march’ in British Columbia. And before my critics start yelping about that assertion, read the report of the Ombudsman from last summer Extraordinary Times Extraordinary Measures. Jay Chalke says that what the NDP did – using the Emergency Power Act as excuse to avoid putting a law of general applicability before the Legislature, so as to pretend government by cabinet Order – is illegal to start with.
Of course, many people will be so relieved when the diktats finally go away, that they’ll try just to get back to where they left off. Not me : not some of us who are insulted to the very core of our being by such wickedness in high places.
What we must do, is; restore the Westminster model of representative government as promised in the Terms of Union in 1871. Which requires, first : identifying the perpetrators of this gross medical mal-practice. Naming names, compiling evidence with which to make the case for prosecution of the race Traitors. Then – after all due process of law – putting them away in prison. Those who knowingly participated in this crime against humanity ought to be executed for Treason. Ideally : by firing squad televised live to the nation. That won’t happen, but public opprobrium is appropriate so the names of godless socialistas Horgan, Dix, Farnworth and the one fronting their criminal conspiracy … Doctor Henry … go down in infamy.
Of course I’m aware that what I say comes off as IN-sanity, today. Yet the role of the prophetic type is to tell the nation what it needs to hear, versus what volk want to hear. For the past year, soft words and comforting noises issuing from the pulpits of so-called “Christian churches” abetted UNethical Doktor Henry. False shepherds Pulpit parrots all singing from the same songbook = the Central Party Line = are what let the tragedy unfold.
By hiding from the electorate the bombshell news about the Site C dam disaster Mr Horgan snatched a mandate for 4 more years. That 2020 victory at the polls was the NDP’s highwater mark. As the electorate catches on to his rank perfidy, the NDP is in freefall to the very bottom of the barrel. His administration demonstrates the Peter Principle > people rise to the level of their incompetence.
They are characterologically UN-able to admit the mistake they made. So they just make it up as they go. Dr Henry and Solicitor General Farnworth amending ministerial and Public Health Orders on the fly, admitting out loud there is no science behind them! Such bumbling is a moving target so the paperwork of anyone preparing to challenge an Order in Court, is always out of date. At the outset of the hearing in court last week, the lawyer for the govt. side argued the Churches’ Petition was not properly framed in that it pointed at Orders no longer extant. That got laughed out of court quickly.
It’s sobering to realize that, parroting the cry of “Awk ! covid!” Premier Horgan et al. managed to borrow 10 times more funds in one year, than British Columbia has ever done before. With interest rate at an all-time low, that appears do-able at first blush. But we know one thing fersure … when confidence is lost, interest rates go hyperbolic
Revolutions are nearly always tax revolts. Once it becomes clear how – and by whom – British Columbia was sold out to the Bankxsters, critical mass of resentment will move tax payers to turn on the politicians who did it. I am just getting warmed up : the campaign to have John Horgan removed as an MLA according with the Recall law, starts here.
it does bother me slightly that, in the accompanying photo, I resemble Karl Marx. Reason being: no haircut in a year. Meanwhile, I haven’t been compelled to put on the muzzle, either
Finally : I most strongly urge readers to get a copy of the new newspaper DRUTHERS
The Free Press The People’s Friend The Tyrant’s Foe
Gordon S Watson
Justice Critic
Party of Citizens Who Have Decided To Think for Ourselves & Be Our Own Politicians
* Dr Bonnie’s perjorative for us, whimpering on national tv that she feels our presence outside her office is a threat to her personal safety
Fallout from the World of Imposed Masks
Chronicles Interview With a Condemned Academic
![0819-MILLERMAN](https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/assets/1/28/f8e77423671748bba6162d7811cdeed01.jpg)
Society & Culture August 2019
Interview With a Condemned Academic
By John Howting
Michael Millerman was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto when he got into trouble. The trouble wasn’t drugs or alcohol, debt, or academic improprieties. Nor was he troubled by poor academic performance.
The trouble was that he was reading, examining, and translating the works of controversial political thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger. His dissertation focused on Heidegger’s influence on Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Aleksandr Dugin. The study of Dugin is what started the trouble.
Dugin is a Russian Neo-Eurasianist political philosopher, who served as an advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, even earning the nickname “Putin’s Rasputin.” Dugin argues for a political and social system based on the conception of a distinct culture shared by the former USSR member states and rejects the Western neoliberal world order. Dugin has also been branded by his enemies, fairly or unfairly, as a neo-fascist—in part because his greatest influence was Heidegger, who was a member of the Nazi Party, and in part because of his often-incendiary political rhetoric directed at the West, including support for enemies of Western liberalism, such as ISIS.
Millerman, who keeps his own beliefs largely private, has never endorsed Dugin’s views, but believes that he is an influential thinker worth studying. But that was too supportive for his dissertation advisors, several of whom resigned from his committee. But that’s not all. Millerman alleges that some of these former advisors tried to sabotage his efforts to get replacement advisors and to finish his Ph.D. program. He alleges they tried to block his progress while, ironically, publishing articles about their own “thick skin” and admiration for open inquiry in higher learning.
Millerman eventually got his replacement advisors and finished his doctorate in the fall of 2018. He is now the preeminent translator and scholar of Dugin’s works in the West—and is without work in academia. He’s now working as a financial services copywriter in Toronto. In an interview, he said his work on Dugin has taught him a great deal about geopolitics and philosophy, but even more about the intolerance for even discussing right-wing ideas in academia. He said he has no desire to return to academia. If he did, his academic colleagues would probably have a cup of hemlock waiting for him.
[The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.]
What was the topic of your dissertation?
My dissertation examined the influence of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger on the subfield of political science called political theory. Heidegger is widely recognized as one of the most outstanding philosophers of the 20th century.
I argued in my dissertation that our understanding of Heidegger and our understanding of political theory are both impoverished by the fact that we mainly get our Heidegger from his appropriation by the left. That’s why I chose to do a comparative study of four thinkers or schools of thought, ranging from left to right and representing diverse geopolitical constellations: Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Aleksandr Dugin, a less well-known Russian Heideggerian.
Not all scholars approve of the project of trying to liberate Heidegger from leftist or liberal appropriations of his thought. Heidegger was what you could consider a right-wing anti-liberal. In my dissertation I acknowledged the fact that the serious study of right-wing anti-liberalism risks exposing students to supposedly “Nazistic” themes—for instance, homeland, belonging, dwelling, authenticity, and peoplehood—which are legitimate concerns for citizens of a liberal democracy. But I argued that it is also important to guard against an overzealous liberal dogmatism, however well-intentioned. Political theory, or political philosophy, cannot simply take for granted the goodness, or philosophical soundness, of liberal democracy or any other regime type.
What was the reason your dissertation advisors resigned? Why all the controversy?
Not one, but four professors resigned from my committee, including my original supervisor. It was not easy for me to find replacement committee members, and there was a period when I considered dropping out, although I was the top student in the program, held a major national scholarship, and more than 90 percent of my student reviews as a teaching assistant were positive.
On the surface, the controversy surrounded my interest in Aleksandr Dugin. My supervisor had never heard of Dugin before I arrived at the University of Toronto. I had been translating him since 2011 and studying works unavailable in English. My supervisor, by contrast, seems to have Googled Dugin and found in the search results the worst of his crude propagandizing. In the meeting where my supervisor resigned, he read me in a trembling voice a long letter about Dugin’s supposed Satanism and anti-Semitism and wondered which of those I found most appealing. He did not have the professional courtesy or human decency to inquire into the reasons for my interest in Dugin… He told me that Dugin is guilty of hundreds of crimes and that…I was also guilty of them by association. I rejected the logic of guilt by association and defended my interest in Dugin. He told me he was worried about the costs to his reputation in continuing to associate with me. He seems to me to have abandoned the principles he had elaborated in previous writings on the academic study of political philosophy and retreated like a turtle into his ideological shell.
Clifford Orwin, a prominent political theorist at the University of Toronto, was the other original member of my dissertation committee who resigned over Dugin. In our meeting, he told me more or less the following: “Michael, my son is fighting against ISIS in the Middle East. You support Dugin, who supports ISIS. I am a man of principle, and I assume that you are a man of principle. Therefore, there is an unbridgeable gap between us, and I have to resign from your committee.” His reason, then, was that because I study Dugin, and because I embrace aspects of Dugin’s thought, therefore I must embrace his geopolitical anti-liberalism specifically and therefore harbor enmity toward Orwin’s son. As anyone who knows me knows—and Orwin knew me well enough to know this—I support the State of Israel and regard myself as a Zionist. Conspiracy theorizing aside, it is unlikely that my interest in Dugin would stem from or include support for ISIS.
Years later, he telephoned new members of my committee and tried to persuade them not to work with me for political reasons, in one case successfully. After resigning from my committee, and while sabotaging what remained of it, Orwin continued to write op-eds for a Canadian newspaper about the importance of letting graduate students pursue heterodox opinions without persecution or ideological tests. [When asked about Millerman’s characterization of these events, Prof. Orwin declined to comment.]
I gave an interview on Canadian TV about my Dugin research in December 2014. I stated my opinion that I support Dugin inasmuch as he helps us understand that there is more to “the human being” than is contained in the interpretation of the human being as an “individual.” Liberal anthropology does not in my opinion exhaust the spectrum of plausible interpretations of what it is to be human. And for that reason I find Dugin’s writings useful in describing the “blossoming complexity” of human existence.
In the months following that interview, faculty members at my university started to haul me into their offices for a grilling, one after another. They projected their worst nightmares and half-formed opinions into my words, rather than making an effort to understand my meaning.
On the surface, the controversy is over my supposed support for a radical right-wing anti-liberal. More fundamentally, the controversy centers on whether or not there is still a place in the University for genuine political philosophy, which must engage with controversial ideas…The professors who resigned from my committee made a habit of giving other people the impression that they are defenders of political philosophy in that grand or epic sense. But sadly they behaved no better than those they might otherwise dismiss as ideologues under other circumstances.
Eventually, I did have a supportive committee that helped me reason through the philosophical questions motivating my dissertation. They included a scholar of political spiritualities, a Zionist rabbi deeply versed in German philosophy, a charming “Left Platonist” who hates Heidegger, and an expert on Pentecostalism in Africa who served as my replacement supervisor and who was the only original committee member who did not resign—to her eternal credit! And my external reader, who warmly encouraged me not to give up on academic employment, since he, too, thought it was time for philosophy to return to the university.
Do you believe the University should be similar to the way Aristophanes portrays Socrates’ academy in The Clouds, where everything can be questioned and everything is open to academic inquiry?
There should be somewhere within the University where students are encouraged to think without the fear of reprisal, without ideological tests. I do not claim that [academe] must be a free-for-all at all times. There are times to become familiar with the orthodoxies and times to subject them to critical analysis. Before students learn to consider serious objections to liberalism, it is a good idea for them to learn about liberal ideas and institutions and the strongest arguments supporting them. But if they learn only about the latter without the criticism, or if they hear only the criticisms without the original justifications, their learning will be lopsided.
What was strange to me about my own situation was not that genuine inquiry was suppressed, but that it was suppressed for reasons without merit, unrelated to the quality of work, by people who were supposedly champions of inquiry, well after they had agreed to supervise the project. One person who declined to work with me at the outset at least stated upfront that she was in principle unwilling to supervise a dissertation on Heidegger and wouldn’t even read his writings. I understand that better than the people who started and then quit.
By the way, I take Leo Strauss’s analysis of the significance of The Clouds as a friendly warning [from Aristophanes] to Socrates to be correct and instructive. But to be clear, the situation I encountered working on Dugin is not analogous. The people who resigned from my committee did not do so out of a Platonic-Socratic gesture of preserving moderation in the face of pure inquiry. They are rather like offended fathers, and their behavior stems more from psychological projection and low motives than from thoughtful concern for the issue itself.
But to repeat the main point: I don’t claim the University should be a free-for-all, constantly calling the established axioms of every system into question, never advancing along a settled path of inquiry. Nor should it become so settled as to be mentally stultifying. Questioning should not be forbidden. Students who do have an urge to dig deeper into the status of axioms, orthodoxies, settled truths, first principles, and the like, should certainly not be discouraged from doing so on strictly ideological grounds.
Would you put any limits on academic inquiry? Should any thinker be considered off-limits or beyond the pale? If a doctoral candidate approached you to sit on his committee, is there any topic on which he could be studying to which you’d say, ‘I’m sorry, that’s just too much for me?’
It’s hard for me to say for sure. I would like to think that, assuming the student was well-meaning and intelligent, and the topic was not altogether outrageous, and it was within my purview…I would deal with any cases of concern through patient feedback and guidance, with a willingness to have my own initial sensibilities overturned.
In his essay “German Nihilism,” Leo Strauss talks about young Germans who were disillusioned with both liberalism and communism and therefore attracted to politically immoderate, dangerous ideas. He says that what they needed most were old-fashioned, undogmatic teachers who understood where they were coming from and could work with them. The worst thing for such students were clueless progressive teachers, so out of touch as to confirm the students in their own beliefs about the degraded status of the progressive ideologies. If I imagine the best-case scenario of myself as a doctoral supervisor working with young radicals, I see an undogmatic, old-fashioned teacher, understanding, patient, moderate, sympathetic.
If academia is anything worthwhile besides a place for monetizable discoveries and human resources, it has got to be a place where we can entertain thoughts with no regard for whether we find them attractive or not, on their merits alone, with a willingness ourselves to be transformed in the process. Some people who resigned from my committee hold that such willingness implicates oneself in a guilt-by-association logic. For them, for instance, where something is said matters just as much as what is said there; thus if a speaker speaks at a conference of Satanists, he is a Satanist and is thereby academically discredited. There’s a place for guilt-by-association thinking as a general rule of thumb in life: You may not want friends who befriend people you find objectionable. But guilt by association is a poor rule of thumb for the life of the mind. I believe that professors who operate with a guilt-by-association logic leave themselves unequipped to deal with “passionary” young men and risk further radicalizing them as a result, whereas a patient engagement with them could have a moderating effect. If you chase these students out of your polite society, they will start getting their fix from YouTube superstars and possibly from an online underground, where it may be harder to regulate and oversee the quality of the arguments.
If I thought that a proposed dissertation was a justifiable contribution to research in political science or political philosophy, and if I was the man for the job, I would supervise it, regardless of whether it risked crossing my red lines. I myself don’t know exactly what those lines are or where they’re drawn. I suppose you find that out, more than anything, in the course of doing the job. My professors discovered that Dugin was a red line for them—so be it. But that forces a reinterpretation of their previously stated positions in political theory and political philosophy, and it does not justify subsequent efforts at professional sabotage.
As you say, “I myself don’t know exactly what those lines are or where they’re drawn. I suppose you find that out more than anything in the course of doing the job.” Is that not what happened with your advisors? They didn’t know where their own red lines were, they were doing their jobs, and then they found their limits?
They seemingly did find a limit that they were not aware of before they agreed to be on my committee. But recall that, in one case, a committee member was telephoning new committee members behind my back, years later, to persuade them not to work with me, at about the very time that he was writing op-eds on how “exposure to different points of view is the core of higher learning”—op-eds in which he wrote the following: “Universities are not and must not become enablers of the thin skinned who would rather repress views contrary to their own than rise to the challenge of debating them.”
Orwin wrote that after precisely trying to repress my views by making it difficult for me to have a committee and to complete my program. Needless to say, neither he nor anyone else who resigned from my committee or called me a fascist sympathizer and the like ever showed the slightest interest in debating, or even understanding, the specific details of my work on Dugin and his reading of Heidegger.
So, what’s crucial isn’t that they found their limits, but that they engaged in unprofessional, underhanded efforts at sabotage, while posturing publicly in a manner betrayed by their conduct. Again, Orwin also wrote op-eds on what “professors owe to their graduate students” that reeks of hypocrisy. He wrote others on the importance of thick skin and debate. This from a person who resigned from my committee because, as he basically put it, my work on Dugin means I support ISIS, and his son is fighting ISIS, therefore he can’t supervise me. Where are the arguments? Where is the debate? Where is the thick skin?
Moreover, we can learn something about Heidegger and the limitations of…the field of political theory by doing a comparative study that brings the unique Russian reception of Heidegger to the table. That’s what I did in my dissertation. Yet “serious academics” turned their back on the project and in some cases apparently tried to kill it altogether because…ISIS?
So you see, the whole affair is about more than the red lines of some individual professors who might have discovered a blind spot and been forced to reconsider some things. It raises fundamental questions about the constitution of the fields of political theory and political philosophy in the West after WWII, and about the university as a place for original intellectual inquiry—not only in the pious speeches of its public posturers but in practice.
The issue is not that all but one of my original committee refused to work with me, but that there is a larger refusal at play; a refusal, perhaps, of the thoughtful consideration of the truth of being. What is the philosophical significance of the fact that Heidegger’s concept of the “history of being” is taken more seriously in Russia and elsewhere outside the West than in the West? At stake is the question of the essence of philosophy in the West today.
Quesnel BC Joins the World Wide Freedom Rally — March 20
Quesnel BC Joins the World Wide Freedom Rally — March 20
The world-wide END THE LOCKDOWN freedom express is picking up support all around the world — 50 countries and now Quesnel, BC in the heart of the Cariboo.
Quesnel-WORLD WIDE RALLY FOR FREEDOM
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