PrintBritain's new Treason of the Clerks
A dirty little secret is that totalitarian ideologies always empower intellectuals. The best name for all the bloody—minded professors of the last hundred years comes from a Frenchman named Julien Benda. It is the title of his book, The Treason of the Clerks. The treasonous "clerks" are the intellectuals of Europe, who directly inspired all of its mass—murdering ideologies, ever since Lenin and Hitler.
In light of this well—known history, it came as stunning news last week that the union bosses of Britain's colleges have decided to boycott Israel's university teachers — unless those teachers denounce their own country. The clerks of Britain are at it again.
The aim of the academic boycott is to dehumanize Israel, to turn it into the South Africa of the new century. This is now standard procedure. It is how the Left put African tyrants like Robert Mugabe into power. It is exactly why they slander America, day after day, in the Euromedia.
The Soviet Union is long gone, but the clerks have learned nothing. They are still trashing democracies that are threatened by aggression. In stark contrast, Europe covered up mass murders in Rwanda and the Sudan for years, because telling the truth might embarrass their good friends in the Third World. Murdered children don't bother the Left, unless they are politically useful children.
The ground for today's boycott has been carefully prepared. It comes after decades of daily disinformation (that is, lies) in Europe's media. The once—fearless British Broadcasting Corporation is now a captive donkey of the hard Left. Just last week, the BBC was caught with its hands in the cookie jar —sneaking Leftist hecklers with microphones under their shirts into a Conservative Party meeting, with a BBC crew to film them. This is fairly typical for the BBC, which was the model for Orwell's Ministry of Truth (that is, lies) in 1984.
Just a few years ago the Beeb peddled the Big Lie of the 'Jenin massacre,' when Israeli troops battled a heavily booby—trapped center of armed terrorists in the city of Jenin. In the first days of house—to—house fighting the Beeb went ballistic, claiming that a thousand Palestinian civilians were dead. The final count: 52 dead terrorists, 23 dead Israeli soldiers. The BBC never bothered to apologize. Instead, their correspondent tearfully confessed on national radio how sadly she cried when the dying pedophile and terror chief Arafat was flown out of Jordan. Europeans are now saturated with anti—Israel disinformation. In Britain, Jewish teachers and students fear violence, abuse, and intimidation. Last week a friend of Tony Blair's son was spat at.
It was Europe's clerks who conceived of National Socialism a century before the Nazis came to power. It was they who connived at Hitler's Final Solution, and they who carried out Lenin's bloody war on the peasants of Russia and the Ukraine. Stalin thought of himself as an intellectual. For decades, Fabian ideologues in England pushed Stalin's propaganda, just as they went into great spasms of outrage to defend Saddam Hussein two years ago. American universities are now politically correct "islands of tyranny in a sea of freedom," but Europe led the way. Our campus bullies are only a pale copy of theirs.
Contrary to myth, Hitler was a classic European intellectual, a failed artist who acquired his lifelong hatreds in the bohemian cafes of Vienna. He just echoed some of the most famous intellectuals of his time. Lenin dwelt in the same circles, as did Mussolini. All were attracted to the Left. Jean Paul Sartre, the most famous European philosopher of the 20th century, publicly proclaimed that Marxism was more important than Existentialism. That was in the mid—1950s, when no one could close their eyes any more to the true nature of Marx and Stalin. Just a few years later, Sartre switched his public support to Mao, who was even then massacring 30 million Chinese people in the insane Great Leap Forward.
But the Treason of the Clerks did not stop in the 1950s. Pol Pot was a French—educated intellectual who executed one out of every four Cambodians in the 1970s. He remarked calmly at the end of his career that "my conscience is clear." One of today's celebrated heroes in philosophy, Martin Heidegger, was an enthusiastic Nazi. Even the New York Times showed a photo of Herr Doktor—Professor Heidegger in Nazi uniform, proudly showing off his Hitler salute for the camera.
Winston Churchill called them "bloody—minded professors" at the time, and bloody—minded professors is what they still are today.
If the British Left has its way, Israel will commit suicide. There will now be a European campaign to shun the universities of Israel and dehumanize its six million Jews. Europe's treacherous clerks would love see a Palestinian Mugabe instead of today's vibrant democracy, in which all Israeli Arabs have full and equal rights. Israelis will be called Nazis and racists, as many of Europe's famous intellectuals have already done.
Europe is coming full circle to its proud past.
In old—fashioned thinking, the university was about a search for truth. It was about tolerance and free debate, and an honest effort to find evidence one way or the other. The PC academy has put all that bourgeois nonsense behind it. It already knows the Truth, and it will lie, cheat, and yes, support murder to make others obey the Party Line. That is the record of the 20th century. Today, we are just seeing more of the same.
