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Forum on Education & Academics
Some intellectuals and academics have urged Americans to think hard about why so many in the world hate us. So I have been thinking, and I have come with a reason that they are not going to like.
Could it be that some people hate us because academics and intellectuals have encouraged them to do so?
For forty years, many "progressive" academics have vilified and defamed the United States (as well as Western civilization). I am not talking about reasoned criticism of America's policies, practices, and institutions, but about wholesale condemnation of the United States as a source of evil throughout the world.
The bill of indictment should be familiar by now: America is imperialistic, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive, materialistic, and vulgar - a global scourge. Some American academics have even suggested that the world would have been better off if the United States had never been founded.
The demonization of this country has been an enterprise of the academic Left for decades. Stalin popularized the notion that the United States is "fascist," and this slander was repeated so often that it became creedal in academic circles. In 1971 the president of Howard University publicly declared that the United States "conquered Hitler, but we have come to embrace Hitlerism." In 1984 a professor found five parallels between popular support for Reagan and that for Hitler. In 1989, Canadian academics listed Reagan (29 percent) as more reprehensible than Hitler (10 percent), Stalin (8.5 percent), Idi Amin (3 percent), or Pol Pot (2 percent), the most blood-soaked butchers...