The Dartmouth Speech They Tried To Suppress
By Fred Elbel on 14 November 2018
I came across this speech and nearly passed it over as a ho-hum article about universal university insanity. But because it was a speech by David Horowitz, I was intrigued. I read the entire speech and recommend it to others. It contains a plethora of facts, relating both to the Mideast and to our American history. It soundly condemns identity politics and college Marxism.
The Dartmouth Speech They Tried To Suppress, by David Horowitz, FrontPage Mag, November 14, 2018. A few excerpts are included below:
Author's note: On October 23, I spoke at Dartmouth, at the invitation of College Republicans and Students Supporting Israel. Before I had even arrived, I was attacked as a racist, a sexist and a bigot, and one professor sent out a tweet urging students to disrupt my talk. In fact, nearly 100 Dartmouth radicals had already met and laid out an elaborate plan of disruption and attack, which in the event was made possible but the Dartmouth administrators in charge of “Security and Safety” who encouraged the chaos by refusing to enforce any rules of decorum. The Dartmouth school paper reported the chaos, not the speech. For details, click here. What follows is a transcript of my talk....
... A lot of you are actually paying $75,000 a year for an education. How could you not want to hear somebody who has different views from you? How do you learn, if you don’t?...
So what is the consequence of this purging of conservatives from Dartmouth’s faculty and administration? ... Last spring, the Office of Pluralism invited a Jew-hating, America-hating, terrorist-supporting, women-despising individual named Linda Sarsour to speak, and to speak as part of Asian Pacific Islanders Heritage Month. Come on. This is a joke, a very bad joke. They paid her $10,000 plus expenses.
The university didn’t give me a dime to come here. ...
The claim the Palestinians make to justify their terrorism and war is that Israel stole Palestinian land. This is a total lie, and it is very easy to check the facts. How many of you know the origin of the word Palestine? To begin with, it’s not an Arab word. “Palestine” is the name the Romans gave to the area around the Jordan. This was the holy land of the Jews, who are the indigenous people of this area.
The Romans gave it the name “Palestine” after the Philistines, who were the mortal enemies of the Jews. They did so because the Jews had the very bad judgment to revolt against the Roman Empire and were slaughtered. The Romans gave the Jewish homeland the name of the Jews’ enemies, the Philistines, who were not Arabs. The Arabs didn’t arrive in this area by conquest for another 500-600 years. Palestine is not a nation. It is a geographical designation, like “New England.” It refers to the area around the Jordan River. It is not a nation or a nationality.
So why did the Jews get a sliver of land carved out of the Palestine Mandate, which is what they got - actually three slivers of land - in 1948? These slivers were not land that belonged to the Arabs. It was land that had belonged to the Turks, the Ottoman Empire, for 400 years previous to the creation of the State of Israel. Four-hundred years. In other words, American Indians or Native Americans, if you like that term, have a greater claim on the United States than Arabs do on the land on which Israel was created. That’s just a fact.
...
But they [Americans] worked out, over the course of 150 years in this country, a vision in which there would one day be actual pluralism, not the Dartmouth kind, but actual pluralism, in which individuals would be judged by the content of their character and not either the color of their skin or their gender....
Here’s the truth about the founding of this country: black slaves in America were all enslaved originally by black Africans. White Europeans did not go into Africa and throw nets over Kunta Kinte. They went to slave auctions in Ghana and Benin, where black slave owners sold their brethren to the Europeans.
The United States of America was created in in 1787, but our birth certificate was a revolutionary document written in 1776, which said that all people are created equal and everyone has a God-given right to liberty. Within little over one generation - at a cost of 350,000 mainly white lives, including a white president who signed - and was murdered because he signed - the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks were freed. I have been attacked as a white supremacist by the leftists responsible for the lies in the leaflet distributed about me. But it is an unarguable truth. And for many it is the difference between appreciating what a great gift this country is and wanting to destroy it. Another uncomfortable truth for the identity politics crowd is that the freedoms they enjoy as women, as blacks, and other so-called oppressed groups, were the creation not only of whites, but of white Christian males. ...
The hatred of those groups and the hatred of America that this university and others are teaching is incredibly dangerous, ignorant and self-defeating. ...
Read the entire article: The Dartmouth Speech They Tried To Suppress
More from David Horowitz
From Radical Son - A Generational Odyssey, page 397:
I pointed out that socialists had contrived to demonstrate by bloody example what everyone else already knew: Equality and freedom are inherently in conflict. This was really all that socialist efforts had shown, over the dead bodies of millions of people. In talent, intelligence, and physical attributes, individuals were by nature different and unequal; consequently, the attempt to make them equal could only be achieved by restricting - ultimately eliminating - their individual freedom. For the same reason, economic redistribution could be carried out only by force. Socialism was theft.
Socialism could not even achieve the general welfare that its adherents promised. Socialist efforts to create economic equality invariably led, in practice, to the imposition of poverty on society as a whole, because socialism destroyed the incentives to produce. There were entire socialist libraries devoted to the confiscation and division of existing wealth, but not a single article on how people were motivated to create wealth. Socialists did not know how to make a society work. That was the lesson of the Communist debacle, which the Left had refused to learn.
In the final analysis, social injustice was rooted in humanity's flaws. There had been social institutions, like slavery and segregation, that were wicked and unjust, and needed to be abolished. But in America's democracy, social injustices - and other evils which leftists decried - were caused primarily by humanity itself. The problem of controlling humanity's dark side was what necessitated institutions of constraint - the economic market and the democratic state. There was no exit from the dilemmas of history.
It was this perspective - conservative in its essence - that had inspired the creators of the American republic. In the Federalist Papers, Madison had defended the American idea of liberty by means of legal checks and balances as a design to thwart the leveling agendas of the Left - "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project." The conservatism I had arrived at could be expressed in a single patriotic idea: The revolutionary failures of the Twentieth Century had demonstrated the wisdom of the American founding, and validated its tenets: private property, individual rights, and a limited state. Becoming a conservative turned out, ultimately, to be a way of coming home.
From an interview with Horowitz by a leftist group that was then posted at Horowitz's own FrontPage site: “Who Is The Enemy?”, FrontPage Mag, January 16, 2008:
If you're on the left, you believe in an earthly redemption of one sort or another. You regard yourself as a social redeemer. You see the problems of the world, social problems, as the result of bad institutions that can be changed, and you believe that there can be a world with no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, no Islamophobia, no poverty, no war, etc. This is really as close to the kingdom of heaven on earth as you can get. That's conceptually what the left's revolutionary fantasy - its fantasy of "social jusstice" - is about. It's an escape from the existential realiity that we all face, which is a world full of misery and suffering. Which is what it has always has been and - unless we re-engineer mankind genetically - always will be. So if you're on the left you see yourself as a member of the Army of the Saints and you see your opponent - conservatives and Republicans who think that you really can't do what you want to do and who are going to oppose it -you see us as the Partty of Satan. So the left is by nature much more intolerant than the right.
Of course there are people on the right who are religious fanatics, who have the same mentality as leftists. People who blow up abortion clinics or people who, you know, think that you can eliminate abortions all together by passing laws. You can't do that, anymore than you could outlaw alcohol and make that stick. You just can't. I think abortion is a bad idea but I don't think it should be completely outlawed. I'm kind of in the middle. When I grew up abortion was illegal after the first trimester, and so I regard that as a reasonable compromise.
Conservatives believe that the root cause of social problems is us - individuals. We are the problem. We're greedy, we're deceptive, capable of evil. Everybody, without exception. It is remarkable, when you think about it, that people on the left can think that government can be the solution to anything. After all, government is responsible for slavery. The people in government have the same protoplasm as the people causing the problems, except that they have more power. That's why limited government seems like a really good idea.
From another FrontPageMag article by David Horowitz:
There is a sense, of course, in which the left has always been defined by its destructive agendas. Its utopian vision was just that - utopian, a vision of nowhere. In practice, socialism didn't work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy. In the vast library of socialist theory (and in all of Marx's compendious works), there is hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth – to what will cause human beings to wwork and to innovate, and to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is a plan of morally sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies don't work; they create poverty instead of wealth. This is unarguable historical fact now, but that has not prompted the left to have second thoughts.