The Captive Mind and America’s Resegregation, Wall Street Journal
by Andrew Micha, Dean of College of international and Security Studies at George Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany
Introduction
All Americans have been impacted by our nationwide protests. Sadly, for me there appears to be no newspaper, magazine, or television newscast that provides meaningful guidelines to help me form meaningful insights. Instead, I hear and see so many conflicting messages that I am afraid to develop a coherent philosophy. In grasping for a rational response, I wanted to share an editorial by Andrew Micha. I believe his candid criticisms of the neo-Marxist Left could only come from a person working abroad who does not have to worry about retaliation. Isn today’s world, one indiscreet comment leads to retaliation and job loss. While I concur that the Right also has spokesmen similarly irresponsible, his editorial focused on the Left.
Article (Extract)
Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel Laureate, who fled from Poland to Paris, wrote a book, “The Captive Mind.” He warned the West of what happens to the human mind and soul in a totalitarian system. He witnessed first hand how men and women lose their liberty and become “affirmative cogs” in service of the state. The human language is replaced. Instead words signify the dominant party’s ever-changing ideas of what is and is not true.
Since the death of George Floyd, nationwide protests have morphed into an all-out assault on American cities and institutions. The assault is underpinned by an attempt to rewrite history that turns specific past events into weapons not only to overpower political opponents but recast American history as a litany of racial transgressions.
The radicals have turned race into a lens through which to view the country’s history. It allows them to identify and separate groups that deserve affirmation and those that do not. What is taking place is the Resegregation of America, the endpoint of which will be the rejection of everything the civil-rights movement stood for.
There is contempt for the freedom of anyone who fails to comport with their image of a just society. Totalitarians claim unconditional authority to reach deep into each person’s conscious. They prescribe an interpretation of the world and dictate the language which citizens are permitted to express that interpretation.
The ill-named progressivism has inspired shrill demands to dismantle police forces and destroy statues in only a small manifestation of a massive project aimed at the re-education of the American population. They want to negate the story of the American republic and replace it with a tale anchored exclusively in race categories and narratives of oppression. Their sledgehammer rhetoric obliterates complexities in favor of one-dimensional “correct” interpretations.
The elites do not want to be exposed to the charges of “populism” and “racism.” Those who control the symbols of political discourse can dominate the culture and control the collective consciousness. We feel in our bones the wrongness of the violence being visited on the nation but lack the language to speak against it.
The Resegregation of American society is fundamentally undemocratic and un-American. It is incompatible with individual freedom and constitutional government. Hence the drive to overhaul the U.S. Constitution, rewrites textbooks, and restructures museums by race and sex quotas.
Democracy cannot survive in a society in which winners and losers are adjudicated arbitrarily according to criteria beyond individual control. Any society built around the principle of skin color will become a caste system in which accident, not merits, will allocate value and benefit. Civil society will be buried once and for all.
The current radical trends carry the seeds of violence unseen in the U.S. since the Civil War. The activist in American cities insists on dominance of their ideological precepts, brooking no alternative. Such absolutism forces Americans away from compromise. One side claims monopoly on virtue and decency and the other side is expected to accept its status as perpetually evil, and thus assume a permanent penitent stance for all its real and imagined misdeeds across history.
Only when the state creates a space for an unbiased debate over history can a discussion truly take place unhindered by ideology and dogma. Only then can a society move toward a consensus on a shared understanding of its past and how its collective memory should be shaped. The U.S. is roiled by spasms of violence and intolerance today because government at all levels—public education systems, states that allow universities to promulgate speech codes and “safe spaces,” court decisions that define constitutionally protected speech as, in effect, everything but political speech—has abdicated its duty to protect the public space. Children are rampaging through the cities because the adults have left the room.
America is in the throes of a destructive ideological experiment, subjected to a sweeping and increasingly state-sanctioned reordering of its collective memory, with the increasingly totalitarian left given free rein to dominate public discourse.
Miłosz, who died in 2004, would see an American mind bloated by a steady diet of identity politics and group grievance served up by ideologues in schools nationwide. These ideologues have nearly succeeded in remaking our politics and culture; they are reinforced by a media in thrall to groupthink, by credentialed bureaucrats, and by politicians shaped in the monochrome factories of intellectual uniformity that are America’s institutions of higher learning.
American society is faced with a stark binary choice. Either we push back against the unrelenting assault of the neo-Marxist narrative, or we yield to the totalitarian impulse now in full view in our politics. It is no longer enough to wait for the next election, or to pin our hopes on a “silent majority” that will eventually stop the madness. There may be no such majority. If there is, its members may no longer be able to articulate what they see unfolding around them. It is hard to call things by their proper names in a society whose elites insist on calling looters and arsonists “protesters,” national monuments “symbols of racism,” and the victims of looting and arson the beneficiaries of “white privilege.” The challenge is massive, but it starts with the simple act of calling things by their proper names.
