Academia is a pillar of society. Without advanced learning, the pursuit of knowledge well outside the everyday, nothing could advance. Knowledge is one of the most prized attributes in the Tanach; from our teacher Moses to wise King Solomon, wisdom and understanding are the most precious, even sacred attributes a person can acquire.
Without an ambitious drive for knowledge, stagnation preys upon society.
The Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, once a member of the ruthless KGB, gave a famous interview in 1984 on the subject of knowledge - and on the subject of how it can be contaminated, or gnawed away from an unwary population. (He claimed Russia was engaging in this subversion, but we know today that Russia is joined by Islamists.) He called this process ‘demoralization’. Yuri stated, “[a] person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him.”
Specifically, he explained how the cycle of generations is on the side of a would-be infiltrator. Once a generation which was exposed in youth to the ideals that some hostile entity- say, the USSR -wants fostered in them ages into positions of power, the next generation is sure to be brought up in an environment dictated by those same ideals.
Bezmenov laid out this plan in four stages: demoralization, then destabilization- when the burden of this propaganda makes the pillars of the country it sits on creak and snap -then crisis, a total collapse. After these comes normalization: a new reality of living under an invader’s rule.
And all this without a tank, without a nuke, without a bullet. It would be, he said, a silent “total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system”.
Last year, many universities around the world- but particularly in the Anglophone, democratic sphere -proved just how little they are worth. Students who considered themselves to be filled with determination and the spirit of equality, justice and religious freedom leapt into action- by condemning the victims of terror and glorifying the perpetrators.
Headscarves or bandanas mimicking the style of Hamas soldiers were commonplace. Jewish students were mobbed and attacked, or chased off of campus. Banners called for ‘intifada’, and it takes malicious naivete to claim that the ones who put up those banners do not know that word is a call for violence against Jews.
US President Joe Biden, no true friend to Israel with his constant demands for ceasefires, delay of arms shipments, acquiescence to terrorists, sitting twiddling thumbs at a negotiating table while missiles keep falling and hostages keep suffering, even found it necessary to denounce the radicalism brewing in his country with self-evident platitudes:
“Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campus, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduation…none of this is a peaceful protest.”
Pro-Hamas activists in the US have claimed that all of their actions are justified, all their cries for killing Jews are the acts of rational and lawful people. If they fail in that, they fall back to the redoubt of claiming that being lawful and rational is not something they are obligated to, and that the ‘crisis’ facing the people of Gaza- the people who have been smothered in aid by the US,the people who receive truckloads of supplies from Israel, the people who cheered for the murderous incursions into Israeli territory -that this crisis warrants civil disruption and violence across the United States.
The tyrant of Iran, Ali Khamenei praised these radicalized student mobs for their discrimination and hatred. In a message on Twitter/X he declared that they are on “the right side of history”.
(This particular phrase is beloved by the uberprogressive radicals: having no G-d to claim they are favored by, they appeal to faceless ‘history’ instead.)
His message read, in part, “[these students] have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front and have begun an honorable struggle in the face of your governmen[t].” Who are the other branches of this ‘Resistance Front’? The bloodsoaked murderers of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khamenei’s own brutal theocratic police.
Now, as the new academic year begins, Islamists have heartily endorsed this idea of sowing hatred and anarchy on the grounds of places of higher education in the West. Ali Al-Hajj Hassan, head of the Youth Section at Hezbollah’s Cultural Mobilization Department, on Efforts to Mobilize Students in the West for Palestine Action in the Upcoming Year, declared his hope that the “new academic year will be marked by Palestine, the defense of Palestine, and the slogans of liberating Palestine”.
Already, at the University of Columbia, the very first day of classes was marked with picket lines and vandalism of campus property. Pro-Hamas student organizations, unchecked by faculty, demanded on Telegram and via other social media channels that students do not attend classes, and berated the administration for daring to defend Jewish students and failing to abandon the duties of education in favor of “fully divest[ing] from all forms of settler-colonial violence,” according to a list of demands that one of these organizations, Unity of Fields, published.
The university’s Alma Mater statue was vandalized and drenched in red paint, a treatment familiar to anyone who has seen the way the American left is eager to treat statues of genuine American heroes (or, in some cases, as the craze to demolish ‘problematic’ statues grew, any memorial at all: a statue of General Lee, but American William Lee, not Confederate rebel Robert Lee, possibly due to the perpetrators' profound ignorance, was once set on fire).
Higher education is not something that can be waved off as insignificant, neither is the disruption of life on campus. Western society relies not on blue- or white-collar professionals exclusively, but on a balance between them. If universities are not producing high-level engineers, doctors, filmmakers, physicists and more, the works gummed up by radicals who turn schools into soapboxes for their propaganda screeds, it will be a victory for Iran and their puppet armies over the democratic spheres: having demolished one of the proudest pillars in the colonnade of free society without even needing to blow themselves up in the process.
If education in the democratic world is overthrown or becomes deteriorated in this way, demoralization has well and truly taken root, even among those who should have had the discernment to see it coming.
And Yuri had one other thing to say about this method of infiltration, undeclared ideological warfare: Demoralization, once instilled, is effectively irreversible.