It was 1987 when Jessie Jackson rallied 500 useful idiots to march on Stanford and chant, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go."
Their gripe what the university's Western Civilization program.
I guess we'll never know what it would have looked like in practice. That's censorship done effectively. Still, I assume that it wasn't going to be a love fest of Western Culture. It was probably going to include a lot of the bad history to balance the good.
Even those this self-loathing among Westerners predate this march, it's a good window into where we are today.
I don't think that Jesse Jackson and his minions were just chanting about that program at Stanford. I think they were talking about Western Civilization in general.
It seems that the academy has gone well beyond teaching a balanced history of the Western Civilization and values, and pushed to the point of pushing credulous kids into self-loathing and demanding the destruction of Western Civilization.
This trickle down proselytizing has taken root over the last few decades. As Andrew Sullivan eloquently put it, we're not teaching Critical race theory (CRT) -- we're teaching in CRT. We're teaching in intersectionality. We're teaching in the presumption that success is always nefarious, and that failure is always noble.
That's the only way that people take to the streets to call for the destruction of Israel under the flag of second-rate Nazis -- they think of Israel of a satellite of the West invading the East that needs to be destroyed first, before the rest of us fall.
The sad irony is that, the reason why the West is right is the same reason why we may lose.
The movements against the West seem to be full of minions who think that colonization, slavery, racism, and brutality are special to the West. They seem to not want to answer how Islam started in Mecca, and expanded through most of Northern Africa and most of the Middle East and South Asia (it wasn't peaceful). Slavery is an institution that every old culture is guilty of, East and West.
What the East and West have in common is all all of the bad.
So, what is "the West"?
The West is the idea of individuals over the group. It's the idea of equality rather than equity. It's democracy. It's political freedom.
No western nation has ever been perfect in living by those values; but, no eastern nation has been a perfect theocracy.
The West has always been better.
If you're a woman, it's better to live in the West. If you're a racial minority, it's better to live in the West. If you're gay, you're way WAY better off living in the West. If you're trans, you're way Way WAY better off living in the West. Political dissent and opposition to authority is always more welcome in the West.
The difference in regard to our sins, is that the West has the good sense to feel contrite about the evils of our past. Some of us in the West are so contrite about our generations'-old iniquities that we're willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Eventually, the people of the West need to stop whipping themselves, and see the good.
There's plenty to see.