Hiding in plain sight

Oscar Wilde learned the hard way that sometimes it’s expedient to keep a low profile and not draw attention to behaviour that, when exposed to the judgement of the wider society, may not be as acceptable as you may have previously thought.

Sydney University have recently suspended a lecturer for presenting an image of the Israeli flag with a swastika transposed on it….. in a lecture, i.e. not at some private speaking engagement but as part of an official university course. A search of the Sydney University website drew a blank when looking for “Anti-Zionist Studies” or “Anti-Semitism 101” but it’s probably called something else more academicky.

That Professor Tim Anderson is an unreconstructed radical Communist is apparent from even the most cursory glance at his social media accounts, but his history of being wrong about absolutely everything predates the Internet; back in the 1970s, he was involved in a radical group responsible for a bomb attack that killed two innocent garbage collectors. He was imprisoned but had the conviction overturned on appeal.

Regardless of his innocence in the act of terrorism, this is a man who has no moral quandaries with the regimes of Venezuela, Syria and North Korea and has made many visits to these hellholes where he fawned over their dictators. In fact, his life work seems to be in orbit around a simple philosophy; western democracy is bad, authoritarian collectivism in whatever form is good.

That Sydney University ever employed him in the first place is hard to understand. It’s difficult to comprehend quite what academic value there is to be had for students to listen to lectures from someone who pines for a Socialist utopia where we finally, after all these false starts resulting in just a couple of hundred million murders, get the correct version of Socialism.

Should he be prevented from stating his opinions, however loopy they are? Of course not.

Should he be paid to do so by the generosity of the Australian taxpayer? Nah.

Since the suspension, 30 of his fellow academics have broken cover and signed an open letter in support of Anderson.

Amusingly, the letter doesn’t explicitly use the words “free speech“, one assumes because this is a term that has recently been associated with the non-left. I hesitate to use the term “right” as the definitions have shifted so massively in the last half decade or so resulting in classical liberals being called Nazis for defending the rights of people to say things with which they disagree.

Instead, we see the term “academic freedom” used as a proxy for “free speech“.

Ok, what’s their record on free speech then? After all, your arguments for free speech look somewhat insipid if they are limited only to speech with which you agree.

Here’s the open letter with the list of Comrade Anderson’s apologists helpfully listed at the bottom.

Let’s have a dip in to the cess pit of unreconstructed Marxism and radical left lunacy that makes up that list;

Fruitloop #1: Stuart Rosewarne. From his university bio; “Stuart Rosewarne’s research and teaching interests are in environmental and ecological economics, critical socialist ecology, international political economy, and the political economy of gender.”

Critical Socialist ecology? You can be damn certain the one thing he’s not critical of in the slightest is Socialism.

Fruitloop #2: Rebecca Pearse. “Beck” wants us to decolonise the curriculum and some other word salad we can’t translate into English.

Fruitloop #3: Dr. Nick Riemer. Nick’s twitter account shows he’s drunk the climate change KoolAid, supports open borders and, of course is an activist in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) cause, an organisation with a correlation rate trending close to 1.0 of anti-Semitic members;

Fruitloop #4: Dr. Dave Brophy. Dave likes the usual causes of his colleagues but with a slight focus on criticising the Chinese government, which may indicate that all is not yet lost with regards to his ability to actually think for himself. Of course, he’s fully signed up to the BDS bollocks too though;

Fruitloop #5: Dr. Linda Connor. Linda is an anthropologist but seems totally obsessed far more interested in climate change than her field of research, judging by her Twitter account. Presumably she’s classed as an academic expert when people collect statistics proving that 97% of experts believe in catastrophic man-made climate change.

Fruitloop #6: Dr. Jake Lynch. Jake is just your common or garden BDS supporter, so much so in fact, that he had to (successfully) defend himself in court against charges of anti-Semitism.

Bill’s Opinion

Defenders of free speech “academic freedom” would be more credible if they could demonstrate any track record of standing in solidarity for people with opinions they completely reject. The simplest of internet searches on almost everyone on the list of academics supporting terrorist sympathiser and murderous dictators’ ally, Comrade Tim Anderson, proves they are all living in the same radical left wing echo chamber.

Here’s a clue to those beardy hippies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Science; ask your real scientist mates from the engineering department to sign up too.

Here’s another clue; why not channel Voltaire and defend the rights of people with whom you disagree to speak and we might take you a little more seriously. Perhaps start by inviting this tour onto campus;

What can we learn from this depressing episode of cultural Marxism?

Simple; if you have a family member or friend considering studying humanities at the University of Sydney, use every persuasive tool at your disposal to change their minds before they fall down the rabbithole of radical left brainwashing. The “education” they will receive will be useless for anything of tangible benefit to themselves or the world.

As Pandora learned though, there’s always hope;

Finally….. we found ONE!

Not a Fruitloop: Dr. Colin Wight. Colin must feel extremely lonely at the University of Sydney, as he is probably the only academic on the campus who understands nuance and accepts the possibility that very little in life is ever black or white;