My Amazon Review of Nellie Bowles' "Morning After the Revolution........"

 The True Believers*

 

A few years ago, I called Nellie Bowles a “national treasure” on Twitter. With her new book she has certainly lived up to that appellation. Bowles a former New York Times reporter and now a reporter/editor with her wife Bari Weiss at the very lively Free Press. If you haven’t already subscribed, I urge you to check it out.

 

Bowles is today a refugee from the woke culture which she thoroughly subscribed to in the second decade of our century. Her book is a series of essays on such topics as the cancel culture, the failure of San Francisco, the struggle sessions involved in the woke culture, the trans culture, policing and the hustlers in the anti-racism world, among others.

 

It seems that whatever the cause, be it anti-racism, anti-police, support for trans individuals, and today anti-Israel protestors there seems to be need on the far left to believe in something. So, if the protests around Black Lives Matter fizzled out there are new causes to believe in. These folks find their identity in believing in something. They are true believers in the sense Eric Hoffer wrote about them over seventy years ago.

 

As a result, there is no arguing with them because the cause they currently believe in takes on a religious intensity. To me, in many respects, their causes are a substitute for religion. Nellie Bowles has written an important book for our time because it gives insight into the extremes we are now witnessing.

 

·     *  Apologies to Eric Hoffer

 

 

For the full Amazon URL see: The True Believers* (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Ian Buruma's "Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah"

Cancelled

At a time when cancel culture is running rampant in the West, it is useful to note that pernicious as it is, it is not new. In Dutch born Ian Buruma’s biography we find the 23-year-old Baruch Spinoza banned from his Sephardic synagogue in Amsterdam for his heretical ideas about G_d and the origins of the Bible. At the time Spinoza had yet to publish anything, but his ideas were so powerful that he threatened both the Jewish and Christian communities alike. Mind you this occurred in 1656 at the height of the Dutch enlightenment. Along the way we learn much about life in the milieu of the Dutch Republic.

Spinoza would go on to write a major book on the philosophy of Descartes and later several books on his own philosophy. He was part of a coterie of intellectuals that viewed him as a cult figure; a reputation that was enhanced by his ascetism and celibacy.

Spinoza’s god was nature itself. Thus, to study nature in the spirit of open scientific inquiry was the pathway to finding G_d. For espousing freedom of thought, Spinoza was cancelled. Although Spinoza did not believe in organized religion, he did believe that it served the purpose of inculcating the values of justice and charity within the broader population.

Buruma himself was cancelled as the editor of the New York Review of Books in 2018 because he didn’t bow down the #MeToo orthodoxy. In writing about Spinoza, Buruma has exacted a modicum of justice against the radical hyenas of the Left. 

For the full amazon Review see: Cancelled (amazon.com)

My Review* of Greg Lukianoff's and Rikki Schlott's "The Cancelling of the American Mind:..."

The New Totalitarians

 

Greg Lukianoff’s and Rikki Schlott’s new book on the totalitarian nature of America’s cancel culture couldn’t be timelier. I would like to state at the outset that freedom of speech is very important to me because in my misspent youth I put myself at great risk for my beliefs.

 

As I write this, we are witnessing a rampage of totalitarian racial Marxists assaulting Jews on our most elite college campuses. It is not an accident that both Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, schools that witnessed among the worst antisemitic rampages in recent days, scored the lowest on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) scores on campus freedom of speech.  Just to note, Lukianoff is the president of FIRE and Schlott is a research fellow there.

 

This book can be considered a continuation of Jonathan Haidt’s and Greg Lukianoff’s 2018 “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Here Lukianoff and Schlott go into example after example of how people are canceled because of their heterodox beliefs. Most of the examples take place on college campuses, but there are telling examples in the publishing and the corporate world. Most of the examples involve the Left on attack with their rhetorical fortress built around the racial Marxist belief that oppressors can do no right and the oppressed can do no wrong. Thus, under their canon Israel defending itself from a wanton terrorist attack is guilty, while the Hamas terrorist dictatorship is innocent. Although Lukianoff considers himself a man of the Left, it fits neatly into Christopher Rufo’s right wing world view as expressed in his “America’s Cultural Revolution.” ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Christopher Rufo's "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything")

 

This book is not only a screed attacking the Left. The Right doesn’t get off easy as well. The authors recount how anti-Trump conservatives were cancelled, books were banned and “anti-woke” laws were put in place in several states forcing professors to walk on eggshells in what they can say on and off campus.

 

Lukianoff’s and Schlott’s solution calls for the creation of a free speech culture on college campuses, easier said than done, eliminating DEI loyalty oaths in the hiring and promotion of faculty, opening up more jobs to non-college graduates, and calling for employers to widen their horizons with respect to schools they recruit at. (i.e., more state schools over the Ivy’s) Indeed Lukianoff himself had to do away with the college degree requirement to hire Schlott.

 

I would go much further. In my view donors that feel the way I do should cut off their contributions to their alma maters, the entire DEI bureaucracy which enforces the cancel culture should be torn up root and branch and government should withhold funding for those institutions who fail to do that.

 

P.S. I received this book as a gift.

*-Amazon has yet to post the review. 11/16.   Amazon rejected this review because of  a "violation of community standards." I slightly edited the review and it appeared on 12/4 at the following URL:  The New Totalitarians (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Dana Mills' "Rosa Luxemburg"

 

Red Rosa

 

Dana Mills, a self-proclaimed socialist feminist, has written a very hagiographic biography of the early 20^th Century socialist intellectual and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. At least to me, she has grafted her 21^st century politics of enviro-feminism on to Luxemburg’s world view. Luxemburg was a one of a kind rising from a middle-class Jewish family in Poland to become one of the leading socialist intellectuals overcoming the sexism of the day. However, Mills is practically silent on what made Rosa a socialist, a real failure of the book. Another failure is that the book is over-loaded with socialist jargon that tries even the most stout-hearted.

 

At a very young age she wrote a critique of Eduard Bernstein’s reformism which was to become the basis of European social democracy. She takes a no compromise position with capitalism. And nearly unprecedented for the times Luxemburg received a doctorate in law in Switzerland. From Switzerland she moves to Germany and becomes a member of the Social Democratic Party and takes up with one of its leaders, Leo Jogiches. Because of Jogiches family wealth Luxemburg acquires a taste for bourgeois lifestyle, not atypical.  Along the way she writes here opus “The Accumulation of Capital” on Marxist economics.

 

Mills rightly portrays Luxemburg as an internationalist. She opposes Polish nationalism and is a firm believer in proletarian internationalism. That belief falters as most of the working-class parties join hands in supporting their respective nations at the start of World War I.  Her internationalism puts her athwart the leading political force of the 20^th century, nationalism. In this sense she is more Trotsky then Lenin.

 

Luxemburg was a critic of the Leninism in Russia. She believed in a bottom up socialism, not the top down dictatorship of Lenin.  The problem is that full blown socialism can only be accomplished at the point of a gun.

 

After being released from jail in 1918 she joins up with Karl Liebknecht and others to form the German Communist Party. The antecedent of which was formed a few years early in opposition to World War I. She is part of the Spartakist faction that would lead a revolt against the nascent social democratic government. The Spartakists were brutally suppressed leading to her murder at the hands of the Freicorps. Here there is no criticism of the revolt. Why would any serious leftist oppose the first and very fragile social democratic government in Germany? That government had enough problems dealing with the Right that it had to face off against the Left. It reinforces my view that the worst thing that happened to the Left in the 20^th century was the Bolshevik Revolution which split the Left and hardened the Right.

 

Mills notes one of Luxemburg’s famous sayings: “freedom is the freedom for one who thinks different.” I only wish that were true of today’s Left with its odious cancel culture.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2SSCGZ7DTIJSQ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv