December 7th Raises Interesting Comparisons to Today's College Generation

This article first appeared in New English Review


Yesterday, four of the five living survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack participated in the 75th anniversary of the "Day of Infamy". Now in their 90s, they were somewhere between nineteen and twenty-something on December 7, 1941. They had already answered their country's call to service before that day marked America's entry into WW II. For them there was no "trigger warning". There was no warning at all when the bombs began to fall.

With the obvious exception of the current crop of military personnel and recent vets, one can only wonder what today's generation-especially the cupcakes we find today on our campuses would have done 75 years ago. Pearl Harbor was certainly no "micro-aggression". To call it a "macro-aggression" would hardly do it justice. Imagine the horrors that troops faced fighting in the Pacific and in Europe in the Second World War. Imagine taking the five living survivors of Pearl Harbor on a tour of a college campus today. Imagine their reactions if they saw college students recoiling in fright because some skinny gay guy named Milo Yiannopoulos was coming to speak exercising the right those five men put their lives on the line to secure. What would they say if they saw today's victim generation huddling in some campus hall "safe space" holding hands, sipping hot chocolate, weeping in front of a mic, and squeezing play dough in their hands? Do you think those five men would join in the singing of "Imagine" or "What the world needs now is love, sweet love"?

I don't think so.

You see, there were no safe spaces for our men fighting World War II-only dangerous spaces. When bombs starting falling on Pearl Harbor, there was no safe space to run to. When our troops landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, there was no safe space to run to-only straight ahead through the machine gun fire.

How have we turned this current generation into the quivering mass of oatmeal it is today? The same way we have turned college educated people into the ignorant mass of uninformed young people we have ever seen. Large credit goes to our educators, and I use that term loosely. It begins somewhere around the 7th grade I guess, where our children are forced to use textbooks that glorify Islam as a peaceful force that gave us the greatest civilization ever seen while Christianity and our Judeo-Christian heritage are buried forever.

But the real dose of indoctrination hits them in the faces when they enter college. That's when they learn that Western Civilization is a force for evil in the world. Multi-culturalism is the new religion. In addition, if our children happen to be white, they are shamed into believing that they are inherently racist and "privileged". They must acknowledge their genetic shortcoming and defer to "people of color", who are victims no matter how young they are and how many years removed from the true discrimination their fathers and grandfathers suffered.  There must be no concession that America has worked hard to right the wrongs. "Social justice", whatever that means, demands much more than that.

And if you are a Jewish student, guess what. The lessons the world learned after the Holocaust are being forgotten. Anti-Semitism is respectable again thanks to the imported grievances of the ever-noble Palestinians. As Jews flee Europe, we hardly take note because real history is not being taught. Even Jewish students are buying into the lie that Israel is an illegitimate nation that engages in Nazi-like practices against the poor Palestinians, whose slaughter of innocents is termed, "legitimate resistance".  And they are even being taught this tripe by some Jewish professors, misfits who have found a home in the left-wing loony bin that is academia today.

Gullible students, eager to believe they are victims, radical, Marxist faculty, and gutless administrators: It is the perfect cocktail. Throw in entire departments devoted to ethnic studies, gender studies, and gay/lesbian/transgender/trans-sexual studies and you have a generation of college educated graduates with no knowledge and no skills to market to the outside world. All you have is a punch line for comics like Jay Leno and Jesse Watters to go to a college campus and ask students or graduates in cap and gown who the vice president of the United States is.

Once upon a time, there was something called the Comintern, created by the Soviet Union to spread communist gospel around the world and strengthen the USSR's reach globally. Then the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc collapsed and communism largely went away, forever discredited. Or did it?

I offer one example: On May 18 of this year, Students Supporting Israel at UC Irvine was showing a film about the Israeli Defense Forces. The event was verbally and physically disrupted by a brown-shirt student group called Students for Justice in Palestine, which has chapters on numerous campuses across the nation. This group routinely uses tactics of disruption and intimidation wherever they exist. Campus police had to be called to restore order, and the mostly female audience was terrified for their safety as the protesters tried to force their way into the room. There were other student groups present that participated in the ruckus. There were also a group of so-called legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild-attached to the UCI Law School, who were demanding that the protesters be allowed into the room. The NLG was founded in the 1930s as a legal arm of the Communist Party USA. Today, they take up pretty much any cause that will make the US look bad. Their Los Angles chapter head, Jim Lafferty, has spoken at UCI on behalf of the Muslim Student Union against Israel. He was also a leader in the Occupy-LA crowd that camped in front of City Hall a few years back and caused so much disruption.

But that is just a small ingredient. Was it not part of the original game plan that the West would be weakened from within, and that its belief in itself would be weakened from within? Whoever picked up the ball, it is working. And where it is working best is on our college campuses. No, I don't think the five living survivors of Pearl Harbor or all those who died in World War II would recognize what goes on in our universities today. They were from a time when there really were millions upon millions of victims.