by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2023
(Dec. 9, 2023) — A lesson in ‘context,’ taught free where others pay $80,000 per year. Such was the gift from the presidents of three of the most prestigious universities in the country, as they testified before Congress. All of the same mind, a hive mind. Genocide, they say, depends on context, like it’s a word in a crossword puzzle.
Nazi goons in Nuremberg had more sense. They claimed, “Befehl ist Befehl,” just following orders. They never had the gall to suggest the Holocaust wasn’t genocide, depending on context. That, perhaps inside the gas chambers, the Jews were at fault for breathing.
But even these chambers were contextual. They marked the terminal point of a sequence: terror, persecution, forced labour, extermination. The rhetoric wasn’t the genocide. Only the conduct was. Adopting the logic of these university leaders, it only escalated to genocide when the gas nozzles were activated.
But we don’t have extermination camps on campuses. Not yet. Just strong rhetoric and modest persecution. The modern university, like the Third Reich, runs like a well-oiled machine, cranking out technocrats so embedded in the system it’s hard to tell if they are cogs or architects. [Continue]