On April 18, Google fired 28 of its employees who had barged into its Sunnyvale and New York offices and staged a “sit-in” protesting against Google Cloud’s $1.2 billion deal with the Israeli government. “Sit-in” is the politically correct term for “forcible occupation”. The protestors’ agenda is familiar: they characterise Israel’s ongoing defensive against the terror organisation Hamas, as a genocide.
For Indians, this narrative is sickeningly resonant: over the last half a century or more, a substantial clutch of such “protestors” (NGOs, “civil society,” academics, intellectuals, etc) have risen in defence of Pakistan and various Islamic terror groups, which have inflicted horrendous terrorism at regular intervals on Indian soil. In relative terms, such terrorism supporters are a rather new phenomenon in America.
The dismissed Google employees, in reality, are indoctrinated activists who aren’t even aware that they have been indoctrinated. They are the harvest of an unrelenting, decadal propaganda, which in turn is the yield of a rigged Far-Left political, ideological and educational subversion that feeds rabid Islamic outfits of all hues including but not limited to Hamas.
The story of all such Far Left subversions in the West begins in Europe. With a renegade theory called multiculturalism, which acquired political heft in the 1960s. Theodore Dalrymple provides one of the most penetrating critiques of multiculturalism.
“Multiculturalism rests on…the dishonest pretence that all cultures are equal and that no fundamental conflict can arise between the customs, mores, and philosophical outlooks of two different cultures. The multiculturalist preaches that, in an age of mass migration, society can (and should) be a kind of salad bowl, a receptacle for wonderful exotic ingredients from around the world, the more the better, each bringing its special flavour to the cultural mix. For the salad to be delicious, no ingredient should predominate and impose its flavour on the others,” he writes.
Dalrymple adds, “Even as a culinary metaphor, this view is wrong: every cook knows that not every ingredient blends with every other. But the spread and influence of an idea is by no means necessarily proportional to its intrinsic worth… especially among those who gain their living by playing with ideas, the intelligentsia.”
As the multiculturalism theory gained steam, it translated into political policy, which then birthed unchecked and rampant Muslim immigration throughout Europe and later, America. The 1973 Arab Oil Crisis marks a major milestone in this history. The OPEC which imposed an oil embargo against America was rooted precisely in American support for Israel in the Arab-Israel war of 1973. The meteoric ascent of the late terrorist, Yasser Arafat was thus not coincidental. A measure of how swiftly and cravenly the West capitulated to the Islamic world is seen in the shameless award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Arafat in 1994.
By this time, huge tranches of Arab oil cash had flooded into the political, cultural and educational landscapes. It slowly began altering the United States in ways that have become clear to us now. On a parallel track, a good chunk of the infamous Frankfurt School academics had infiltrated universities and were subverting the American educational system on an unprecedented scale. Alan Bloom’s 1987 classic, The Closing of the American Mind, is a majestic and stunning expose of and a dire warning about the kind of degeneracy that these Far-Left academics had infected higher education with. Other books on this topic include Charles Sykes’ Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education and Dumbing Down Our Kids.
Needless, all such sane voices of caution were ignored, and three decades later, it appears that the Far-Left has ultimately triumphed. Its triumph is represented by an ugly acronym: DEI — diversity, equity and inclusiveness. DEI is the latest avatar of political correctness. Its practical consequences have manifested as unthinking support for terror groups like Hamas, a relentless witch-hunt of Sanatana Dharma, and lethal outgrowths including but not limited to sex change, sexualising children and the ever-expanding alphabet soup of engineered gender pronouns.
This Far-Left ideological usurpation of American education naturally spilled over into and disrupted corporate America including Google. It is instructive to read Alan Bloom’s prediction of this outcome: “The modern university is a place where diversity of opinion is suppressed, and students are discouraged from seeking truth…Political correctness has stifled free speech and intellectual debate on campus… The rise of identity politics has led to the fragmentation of intellectual discourse… The liberal arts have been devalued in favour of specialised technical training.”
Clearly, these specialists of technical training in our own time — the founders and heads of technology giants — having no solid grounding in classical humanities, remain incapable of responding to the DEI and the politically correct thralldom imposed by the Far-Left. In this context, the Google episode has larger and more far-reaching ramifications.
To be continued
The author is the founder and chief editor, The Dharma Dispatch. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
Comments
0 comment