Mao Mao

by Henry Farrell on March 17, 2005

David Horowitz “meets”:http://billmon.org/archives/001752.html the Cultural Revolution, with Billmon presiding. Via “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2005/03/whiskey_bar_unearths_the_maoists_among_us.html.

{ 8 comments }

1

C.J.Colucci 03.17.05 at 11:57 am

Brilliant!

2

abb1 03.17.05 at 12:26 pm

Hey, I like that. I have a soft spot for Dazibaos. Hongweibing are the coolest. Thanks.

3

Jake 03.17.05 at 12:49 pm

Poor Horowitz. He abandoned his leftist views but couldn’t abandon the dreadful rhetorical style. Now he just sounds stupid.

4

Jake 03.17.05 at 12:55 pm

Were there any public statements by people suggesting that Kerry would not make a good president because of his knowledge of French, I wonder? One imagines they could be nicely compared with statements from and writing about the Cambodian government under Pol Pot . . . .

5

jet 03.17.05 at 1:33 pm

Lame!
“For those on the right, true freedom requires more diversity–which, to them, means more conservatives in faculty ranks. “If the system were fair,” says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere.””
Vs
“We will strike down the reactionary, bourgeois academic savants! . . . We will vigorously establish proletarian intellectual authorities, our own academic savants.”
One talks about equal representation, the other talks about replacement, frigg’n lamer. This thing needs a good fisking.
And does anyone who isn’t completely retarded think it wouldn’t be just as easy to do the same comparison for the 1960s-1970s when the professor student dynamic was the exact opposite? But I’ll give it that someone did some good work on the art.

6

Dan Simon 03.17.05 at 2:29 pm

Henry, campus radicals have been Mau-Mauing supine administrations and sympathetic faculties literally for decades, now, in the name of “free speech”. Classes disrupted, professors, administrators and visitors hounded off campus, publications destroyed, dissenters physically threatened–these have all been fairly commonplace occurrences on campus for many, many years. Horowitz was among the early supporters of these techniques, and he had lots of allies–many of whom are now legendary heroes of the academic left.
Well, he’s changed sides now, and is simply up to his old tricks. Personally, I consider his arguments nonsensical–and have said so, repeatedly. But why would you, Henry, hold them up to ridicule–unless you’re prepared at the same time to condemn his earlier self, and forty years’ worth of his disciples on the academic left, for the destruction they wrought upon university life?

7

Harry 03.17.05 at 2:55 pm

Dan, campus ‘radicals’ who think that hounding faculty helps in any way to acheive liberal socialist goals, and would be acceptable even if it did are, indeed, quite wrong, and properly subject to ridicule. I don’t know which particular legednary heroes you think have committed the crimes to which you refer — tell me chapter and verse and I’ll take it seriously. The point here, though, is that Horowitz doesn’t have a former self. He has been over the course of his career a consistent enemy of intellectual freedom, intellectual seriousness and, in my view, of any humane values worth fighting for. The comparisons emphasize that continuity. He is a thug; he didn’t learn this from the Panthers; he was attracted to them because he was a thug already.
jet, there’s something to what you say (but not in Horowitz’s case). I would avoid quoting anyone who thinks that Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity should be tenured professors anywhere, though. Such people sound too sily to take seriously.

8

fafnir 03.22.05 at 9:45 am

Wooo! You’re back! I was gettin lonely.

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