WHEN DID RADICALS GO BAD?

Andrea Dworkin writes,

"Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it. In life, they commit it."

Dworkin was a very popular feminist in her day. Her books sold millions of copies.

Every revolution begins by pointing out the rottenness of those in power. But when they are replaced, the newly empowered are often even worse.

Valerie Solanas is the woman that shot Andy Warhol. Many women at NOW supported this act, which eventually killed one of America's greatest artists (it took him ten years to die from the wound). Solanas wrote,

"As humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.”

Once one demonizes another group, murder swiftly follows. A not-too-close unpacking of Solanas' paragraph reveals that she is a female supremacist.

Neither Solanas nor Dworkin were academics. I don't know if they ever taught in college classrooms, or what the state of academic feminism is at this point across the board. When you read an anti-Marxist feminist like Christina Hoff Sommers, or Daphne Patai, you get the sense that many within the academia are as bad as Dworkin and Solanas. But are they picking on the weakest members of a herd, and arguing that they represent the mainstream of a body of thought? SdB's The Second Sex, which is considered to be the Bible of the field, opens with a call to murder men. I know it's hard to believe, but here's the sentence:

"The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males" (xxv).

At least as I read the sentence, it appears to be a call to do just that. Within twenty years, Solanas, at least, is thinking that men must be destroyed. And Dworkin, too, who is selling millions of copies of her books, is also thinking about destroying men. To what extent do they represent a tendency within feminism? I find the likes of Solanas and Dworkin to be so upsetting, that I can't read them. And I can't read Katherine McKinnon, who teaches at places like U of Chicago and Harvard, and who often co-authored books with Dworkin. The Wikipedia page on Valerie Solanas gives a brief indication of some of the support she received from the feminist community after she had attempted to murder Andy Warhol:

"Feminist Robin Morgan (later editor of Ms. magazine) demonstrated for Solanas' release from prison. Ti-Grace Atkinson, the New York chapter president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), described Solanas as "the first outstanding champion of women's rights."[6] Another member, Florynce Kennedy, represented Solanas at her trial, calling her "one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement."[6]"

With Ward Churchill, and many other leftists, you get the sense that everybody in the WTC is evil, and should be destroyed, as they are ALL "little Eichmanns." And that they are somehow better, perhaps simply because they say they are. If this isn't dangerous, then what is? I can't read Ward Churchill's work. It's too disturbing. I've read the summaries by the committee called upon to review his work, and those are disturbing enough.

I worry that thought is not what is being presented in many new departments of study on university campuses. It's instead bigotry, which is excused because it's a reversal of the previous bigotry. Naturally, there are some, probably in every one of these areas of study, who stand up against it, and urge instead a sense of community, and equality. Daphne Patai, for instance, in Women's Studies, has argued against the intense bigotry of much of contemporary feminism. But even reading Daphne Patai, for me, is a very harrowing experience, because it hurts to read about minds that have gone so far away from truth.

To think carefully means to think slowly and to reserve judgment until there is proof. Churchill showed in his scholarship that he didn't care about proof, or truth. Careful thinking is difficult, and accurate thinking is almost impossible to achieve, but it's an ideal that should be revered. Locke offered four human rights: life, health, liberty, and property. But he forgot the truest and most important human right: the right to think clearly. I'm not sure if it's a right, or a duty.

Too often, it is one of the first things that disappears in Marxist countries. The only duty is to take the party line. Those that don't, are disappeared.

The Duke 88 group revealed in their witchhunt that they had no care for accurate thinking. Even the District Attorney revealed this lack of a sense of duty to the truth. At least Nifong was sacked. We are used to such parodies of thought in places like Zimbabwe, or in Ceausescu's Romania, where the conclusion has already been reached before the research ever even begins. How can it now happen here, and how can it be defended by Stanley Fish, in the nation's most important newspaper (has the paper always been this bad, or is it now a shadow of its former self?). I don't believe that academia has always been this bad. Maybe it has. Is there any way that our country, and our profession, can reassert the primary necessity of thinking clearly, at least as clearly as possible? A programmatic rethinking of the curriculum should de-emphasize French thinkers (wooly-headed and goofy, the French think of the Marquis de Sade as one of their most important novelists). I'd rather we went back to Aristotle, and continued up through to Locke, and ending with Mary Midgley, in philosophy (bypassing Marx, but indicating a deep swampy pit, in which millions of souls have already been lost).

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/ward-churchill-redux/