... there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies...
We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from
the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination...
Vladimir Lenin, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union
To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. ... As for the rest ... they must be annihilated.
Grigory Zinoviev, Chairman of the Communist International
______________________________
I thought my farewell post of May 2020 would be my last. I was mistaken. That post was removed a few weeks later because I came across news articles (1, 2, 3) describing how distinguished academics came to grief for publicly voicing opinions deemed heretical by the Stalinist-Maoists hashtag activists who see themselves as front-line defenders of diversity, inclusion, social justice, and other 'virtues' described by equally vacuous combinations of words. If it weren't for their eminence, these academics would quickly find themselves standing in line at their local unemployment offices, wondering why the fuck didn't they major in Finance to become high-earning investment bankers at Goldman Sachs.
Of course, I am a tiny fish in the academic pond,
and the internet visibility of my alter ego is very low. Still, the possibility of having to stand before the execution squad of
trigger-happy administrators - whose principal job these days is to console and
hug consumers of educational services (formerly known as students)
who complain about not being sufficiently cuddled by providers of
educational services (formerly known as professors) – would be
enough to poison my rapidly shrinking future.
Have I become paranoid? Maybe. But then again, maybe not. Not in the world where reason and sanity have been "cancelled" by infantile, ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous,
brain-washed, Twitter-Instagram-Facebook-
