The Fall of the Decolonizers

Science calls this a working hypothesis, because we are going to talk, or, at least, I am going to talk, about things about which I have no final conclusions about. I wish to share a certain collection of observations that fall outside both my area of responsibility and my area of competence. Therefore, here I am merely observing certain things that, to me, appear to be lining up in a certain order. I am going to tell you what I see, even if perhaps it’s not at all what it seems – at least, it appears to me quite interesting and worthy of discussion.

It was Senator McCarthy that had said that it’s all the leftists, the accursed Communists, meaning Soviet Bolsheviks, that are spreading throughout the world a heresy that aims to knock down American values and conquer America. As I understand it, the important thing about this line of thought is to not go too far and to maintain a sensible cautiousness, because as you remember, when under the lead of Senator McCarthy, they started to hunt for ‘Reds under the bed’, it turned out that, first, every other one was a Jew, and second, they also worked (“the parasites!”) in Hollywood and other humanitarian institutions. So, after iterating on this a couple times, the Americans stopped understanding why they had fought Hitler – “also didn’t like Jews and Communists? Good guy!”. This is why we have to be careful.

Having said that, what I’m getting at is that for many years, decades even, the mainstream direction of historical, philosophical and political thought in American, and in many cases, European universities was some version of Trotskyism. It’s hard to deny, as it’s often indicated by formulas like “If you’re not a leftist when you are young, you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain”. This truism is not without it’s share of truth: young people have a tendency to want to change the world according to ideals of justice and humanism as they understand it, they are worried and upset by oppression and discrimination – it sets their young hearts aflame. All in all, this is completely normal if society is capable of channeling this in some sort of a healthy direction without letting them become terrorists or other deviants. Also, it’s inevitable that university structures are a bit like greenhouse plants where people occupy themselves with useless things, discuss the inedible and live like birds in the sky: without a care in the world, in the morning not knowing where their lunch will be coming from because society or government feeds them so they can be free to evolve ideas. This too is necessary for a society because not everyone should be tilling the soil, weaving and fixing the plumbing – someone should also discuss other ideas, make some sort of innovations appear and try to improve the social order. Thus, progress is made. To repeat, it’s all about the proportion, measure and balance.

I sense that since Fukuyama’s so-called “End of History” – since the wave of democratization in the late eighties, early nineties, the western world began to feel like it has no more enemies. In the paradigm of the open society and it’s enemies, the enemies had faded away somehow, so the bipolar world that used to be kept in an unhealthy, but stable balance between the Free People on one side and the Evil Empire on the other, that world began to list. There was a pretender for the role of post-Soviet evil – that which was called, no offense to anyone, “Radical Islam”. Whether radical or not, this anti-west anti-Americanism, this part of the Islamic world never could become universal the way the Communist idea was. While the latter which was for everyone, acceptable whether you were a Jew or Gentile, it’s like a religion, whereas the former was difficult to proselytize, meaning that if you do not belong to that civilization by birth, it’s not easy to join it. Even though those people are defending the suffering Palestinians, they are not converting to Islam themselves. This is why, I think, the imbalance developed.

Americans said that the “End of History” had happened, there’s nobody left to fight, so let’s continue to humanize our own society further, forever. According to Kissinger, all political regimes will trend towards becoming liberal democracies because, naturally, it’s an inevitable evolution, roll credits. So, we should all occupy ourselves with achieving maximum humanization for our own societies: search inside yourselves for injustices and correct historical mistakes and distortions and let’s do what is abbreviated as DEI: diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity is variety and multifacetedness; equity is equality, except it’s not – unlike equality that is understood as equality of opportunity, equity is is the equality of outcomes: the idea that society should make it so that everyone reaches more or less the same result. Because if you have different outcomes, that’s because the groups that performed poorly were systematically discriminated against in the past and did not have a solid foundation. And, likewise, inclusion – that engagement and a society with equal access. These are all good and wonderful things, but where does decolonization come in?

Decolonization is the western society, having turned it’s gaze inward, saw how it had oppressed, colonized, harmed, genocided, robbed, etc, and now it should do better. This concerns not only oppressed nations and racial groups, but also, for example, women, who were also, so to speak, crushed by the patriarchy for centuries, and now, it was time to make good on all those debts. So, how did the victorious global advance of this ideology go? We remember the MeToo movement, and we remember BLM which seemed to almost push America over the brink of civil war. However, I cannot go without saying that fights among Americans are never as terrible as they seem to an outside observer. American society is certainly armed, somewhat violent and loves to fight. Looking from the outside in, especially from the side of an observer from those regimes that value civil order, it always looks like the fire of a civil war, and it was easy to imagine that if such pogroms as happened in America had happened, God forbid, in Novosibirsk, Saransk, and Saratov, it would have meant that it’s all over, there’s no rule of law, the Kremlin had been blown up, the roads are controlled by gangs and there are nationwide massacres. In America, however, it works out somehow where they just sweep the broken glass, collect insurance payments and go on living better than before. This is not without limit, but by and large, that’s exactly how it all usually turns out. I must make this note now so that we don’t start to create some image of yet another fall of the West that keeps falling, but somehow never quite manages to. I hope we all could learn to “fall” like that! Later, I will attempt to cover why the fall never happens, despite how it always seems to onlookers that observe with either horror or hope.

So, as for MeToo, BLM, discourse on decolonization applied to literature, art, academic knowledge and academic hierarchies, arguments that all these norms, rules and hierarchies were created by dead white men for their own benefit, to put it carefully, I have a certain feeling about them. That feeling is that these mass movements, having played their part in, maybe, changing some norms, maybe giving voice to those who were not noticed before, somehow, maybe democratizing, broadly speaking, the public arena and the academic arena in particular, have reached a certain level where they have started to do harm and pose a risk for the status quo and the actual order of things, for real. How that looks to me is like this: first, a storm brews – a Twitter storm, some youths are protesting, some other youths are attempting to pull down a monument or to paint it with red paint because it’s some bloody colonizer or some other bad white man. Some politicians, who, in a way that’s most natural in a democracy, rely on their electorate, begin to bend themselves to that discourse because they see it as having mass appeal, and they must have the support of these masses. That’s why they also post something on Twitter that will give them lots of likes. They write that something, and indeed they get lots of likes, and then, this happens: those wonderful youths that write on twitter, go to protests and fight statues, just like all other youths in all countries don’t vote that much. That’s how it is everywhere – the young protest, but it’s the old that vote. However, with all their enthusiasm and public reflection of this enthusiasm in mass media and in social networks, they scare those who vote. And those people, those of middle age and the elderly, and bear in mind, middle age is growing – all societies are aging and while the young are noisy and loud, but they are few, and not only that, they, (such garbage!) don’t vote. It’s the elderly that vote – the unprofitable ones, from Twitter’s point of view, and they would vote for rightists because they feel that the scales of the public arena are so imbalanced that they must throw their weight on the other side. And then what happens? To put it plainly, the Twitter armies, social justice warriors and woke crusaders are breaking their backs lifting Trump to heaven. Same in Europe: AfD in Germany, rightists in the Netherlands, rightists in Italy, rightists in France, etc.

The thing about Democracy, the reason why it’s such a nasty thing, is that if someone got voted in, then you can’t throw them in jail, like in Russia or Turkey, but you must sit them at your table, share power with them and they become shareholders of your political enterprise. The result is that the establishment - those not young and not dead white men and women that have real power and own real property begin to think, like, OK, we thought all we heard was some yapping, and we all know that the youths are what they are, and that the university professors are all a little crazy, and that they were just chatting about something or another, but now they have weaponized Twitter, became a political factor, and with their ramblings, which seemed so harmless, they… to us… into our secret chambers… into our cabinets, they are bringing in some right-wing trash. And then it’s us who have to deal with it! How about, says the establishment to itself, how about we turn this firehose off – it’s beginning to cost us a bit too much.

Look, if we were dealing with an autocracy, we could have said that those university administrators were fired by conservatives because conservatives are in power. I don’t think so – I sense that they were removed by their own people in order to keep conservatives from gaining too much power. I sensed this so acutely when I read a column in the New York Times that went like of course Claudine Gay is a good woman, and we respect women and black people so very much, but nonetheless it must be said that mandatory diversity went a little overboard, and it should have been seen as recommendations, not requirements, and there shouldn’t have been quotas – that’s a bit overkill, and overall, the role of a universities should be to create an arena for opposing ideas, not to create ethical utopias. That stood out to me – this isn’t written by Fox News or some other similarly aligned and friendly publication, this is written by the New York Times. This is written by the same people who invented writing black with a capital B and white with a lowercase w and all that – these are the standard-bearers of this movement. Now, living systems are capable of self-regulation – that’s the answer to why the West keeps falling, but never falls, despite the hopes or fears of the onlookers. It’s because what smart little me sees, they see also, and see it more clearly because it’s their lifeblood – they do not want to allow some Trump or some far-right German party to kick them out. They, like all elites want to preserve their elite status, and if that means silencing the same decolonizers that they themselves nurtured and fed, believe you me, they will do it with excellence.

Here I must note another thing, so that my Russian optics will not get in the way of seeing things in their own light: ofcourse democracies and free societies differ from not-democracies in that there are no manuals that get sent out from some center to all mass media. There are no meetings with Gromov where chief editors of the Washington Post, the New York Times, Newyorker, etc are told that we used to sing in one register, but starting this week, we will be singing in a new one – it’s not possible, and if you try to do such a thing, it will be you who they will be writing about, and that would be the end of your story. Nonetheless, I sense certain shared understandings in the air – or vibes as they say on the Internet – a conspiracy without a conspiracy where everyone looks at each other and they all understand. I must say that even as early as a year and a half ago, I was reading commentary that the woke movement is past it’s prime and is in decline. Here I must also say that they were helped along by two international actors – Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Hamas. I think they helped – that’s my working hypothesis. To the question of who fired Claudine Gay, I respond that it was that couple – one solitary actor, and another, a collective one.

First, if you have a war, and the war is in Europe, then you would need to curtail your humanism. I’m not saying that’s something Europe can do, since anthropocentrism makes her who she is, but many things that are suitable for decades of peace are no longer suitable in, to put it delicately, in the looming decades of remilitarization. Like, you need to get soldiers from somewhere, and you need to develop your defense industry, and someone needs to work there. You need to raise military spending and sell that to your own electorate that just thought that the most important thing was to fight for the climate and to not allow the temperature to climb a degree and a half, or do the opposite. You somehow need to explain this change, this new era, like Chancellor Scholtz delcared at the very onset of the war, and it must be ideologically framed. This is what I crudely called “selling” something to the electorate, in reality, that’s a dialog that a society has with itself about a new situation, and that is what Vladimir Valdimirovich Putin helped to do.

Now, what did Hamas help with? A terrorist act happened, a barbaric and an immeasurable one, and a part of the humanitarian establishment reacts to it with something from another world – they kept talking about the same things as before. They had already forgotten the last Intifada, which devolved into a stalemate that was defined by some sort of a sick symbiosis between Hamas and Israeli secret services. I can’t go too deep into this one, but nobody was expecting such an act – it was like we thought that we could keep on doing a little guarding the border and they would occasionally misbehave (with the same scope as before, like we know, like they always do), and afterwards we would keep appropriating and expanding budgets. And then one day, this perverse balance broke. Here too, I cannot get into a discussion on whether Hamas had overplayed their hand, or whether they got encouraged by their older Iranian brothers, that’s not just something I understand and will not insist on. However, I can say what is evident to anyone, even non-experts – that unprecedented events had transpired that went far beyond anything prior and hereto and that exceeded all expectations and projections. Our previously mentioned humanitarian establishment did not wake up, but continued in the same state of mental slumber that it could afford to be in, and continued to repeat the same thing. This was not liked by, let’s just say, more than just a few.

In America, things are simple: money goes one way, then money goes the other way. There were charitable donations to universities, and then there weren’t. With this in the background, it was laid bare just how much was being donated by Qatar and various other Islamic countries. When I was watching that Congressional hearing, I’ll tell you right away, I had mixed feelings. First, it was unpleasant to see how people with the highest education, whose job it is to educate the next generation, are shamefully avoiding the questions. Very unpleasant. That’s not a method for someone who had reached the leadership position of their department, it’s not a good look. That was the first component of my mixed feelings, and here’s the second. That Congresswoman who was grilling them with something like “Calls to genocide the Jews, does that contradict your values? Yes or no?”. In my mind’s eye, I can see some kind of Mizulina asking “Anti-Russian activities, compatible with working in a Russian university? Yes or no?”. I’d have many questions, like what do you mean calling for the genocide of Jews? Do they include the discussion of this or that Palestinian government? Is that a call for genocide? Where does it begin? Where does it end? The third component of my mixed feelings, but definitely one of the most certain ones: I wish and I hope very very much that I will live to see the day when we have such a Parliament that can bench three university administrators in a row, each of them have more money than most sovereign nations and can ask them questions as if they were children: “Now then, Vasya, tell me – yes or no? One more time – yes or no?” to which they will jump up and down like they are being prodded with hot irons. That is what I hope for. And also for our universities to have so much prestige, for our universities to be so rich, for our Parliament to be this powerful, for public discussion to be so important that the whole world watches with baited breath, and for it to have consequences: organizational, administrative, financial, and ideological. For someone coming from our, political sphere, such as it is, I can only look on and wonder about all these things that grownups have. This is the third component of my mixed feelings and it’s the most certain.

What do you think about it all? What do you think about the fall of the current zeitgeist because of all this? Am I engaging in wishful thinking, do you think, or is there something to this? Or has the leftist paradigm conquered so many minds that the youth, having been educated this way, when they grow old, like it says in the Talmud, they will not depart from it?

˦˫