ACADEMIA ISN'T responsibly or morally exempted from being held responsible for its nurturing of those who encourage mass murder or murder or enslavement or promoting racism and other forms of inequality. The continuum of genocide.
I know that like the exemptions of other rackets for making those employed in them, "journalism," "the press," lawyering-liaring they all insist that THEY! by virtue of their privilege mistaken as virtue are not to be held responsible for the consequences of their promoting lies and pseudo-science and their own stupid belief in the superiority of "their" race or gender or ethnicity or, most of all, ECONOMIC CLASS but no one is morally obligated to pretend they don't see what's there right in front of their eyes.
You may think I'm hard on lawyers, which I am but only because they completely deserve it but they are hardly the only ones who claim a "right" to lie and do other things based in amorality being professionally convenient AND PROFITABLE.
The Nazi genocides were a product of what academics claimed, what scientists claimed as is known by what the publisher of science textbooks gave Hitler and his allies to read in prison as he and his fellow Nazis were creating their "race hygiene." It can be seen in the science of the likes of Karl Pearson who was pushing the line that Polish and Russian Jews presence in London was a biological danger to the British Population, as he was collaborating in that with one of those soon to be Nazi scientists who wrote the material that informed Hitler and his future genocidalists. That record of "academic freedom" to lie and promote racism is alive and flourishing in the United States in regard to Black People and other People of Color. It is certainly active and alive among those who promote genocide against Palestinians.
Those scientific racists I called out and the "ethicist" are all thoroughly enculturated in the academic orthodoxy that informed Pearson, Davenport, Fischer Baur, Lenz, Lorenz, Rüdin, Günther, . . . Watson, Crick, Herrnstein, Murray, . . . Cofnas. It informs Steven Pinker who, though he has disclaimed being a scientific racist seems to be mighty comfortable with giving them the ersatz respectability of going on their podcasts these days. I don't buy Pinker's disclaimer for a second. As I said, a belief in natural selection will always lead to eugenics, scientific racism and, in the fullness of time, lists of those to be treated as lesser and then it's a short step to killing.
Universities, colleges, research rackets, the publishing industry, all have an active part in that promotion of racism and have a direct role to the consequences of it in the wider culture and society. Any institution that does what they do has that responsibility, from the white evangelical and largely racist church,* the Republican-fascist party, Hollywood (probably the most powerful promoter of such evils is the entertainment industry) etc. And the quality of such academic scribbleage and babbleage is as much garbage as a fictitious "historical" movie treatment despite the academic imprimatur.
Even the academic racist Nathan Cofnas feels that way when he felt the bite of it in regard to the evolutionary psychological bullshit of Kevin MacDonald, who flourished in academic science UNTIL HE BECAME NOTORIOUS BY BEING DAVID IRVING'S SCIENTIFIC EXPERT IN HIS INFAMOUS LIBEL ACTION. It wasn't because his anti-Jewish science was hidden, it was as known as Karl Pearson's was in the 1920s, it was the substance of the academic science he was promoted for, honored for, given the editorship of scientific journals for.
The difference is that I hold all of them responsible, not just those who put a target on "my people." All of their targets are morally as "my people" as LGBTQ, leftist, Irish Catholics from New England are.
I've been over this before, here's something I said about these things three years ago.
Their insistence of striving for from some daffy notion of "even handed" "objective" "fair" letting all opinions flourish and seeing which side wins, instead of the only legitimate goal for egalitarian democratic governance, equality FOR PEOPLE, of the ability of us to be governed by a government BASED ON A REALISTICALLY INFORMED VOTING POPULATION, and to the establishment and perpetuation of egalitarian democracy, economic justice, a decent, safe life for everyone couldn't possibly be more of a habit of those with privilege. It's such a stupidly legitimate thing, "even handedness" a "level playing field" "impartiality" but only if you're dishonest enough to deny that there is no such even condition, no level field, and the nature of the legal apparatus could not be more partial to those with the wealth and privilege
Let me ask, who would have been the worse if the ideas of Nazism had successfully been suppressed in Germany in the 1920s and 30s? Who would have been worse off if the calls for genocide had been entirely suppressed in the 1990s? I can tell you who would have been better off if the Bill Clinton administration had ignored the doctrine of "free speech-press" absolutism and destroyed the radio tower of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines as they were broadcasting encouragement to commit genocide and announcing the hiding places of those who were being murdered, those who were being murdered. I have every confidence that if Bill Clinton had taken that opportunity to do the right thing, the ACLU style "civil libertarians" would have been besides themselves as they sat on their asses on North American in perfect, privileged white-collar safety.
I mentioned those prerequisites of egalitarian democracy that appear nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights and hardly matter to our "justice system," adequate food, drinkable water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, the right to a good education, . . .
That those are left out is not only a glaring inadequacy of our Constitutional notions and, also, our law, they are symptomatic of the kind of privilege that those who wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights, those who were permitted to vote for it - the small minority of even those who were legally eligible to vote in a ratification process that was as rigged as anything the Republican-fascists do to our elections today.
That they neglected to specify that there is a right to tell the truth but there is no right to lie, that People who are slandered and libeled and the subject of whipped up mob action and attack have a right to their reputation and safety is due, no doubt, to their own knowledge that they and those they cared about were not in serious danger of the sort that People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ and members of other minority groups live under their entire conscious lives. Of course it wouldn't have occurred to the rich, white, almost exclusively Protestant men who gave us the inadequate 18th century Constitution and Bill of Rights, the 19th century men who put most of the amendments to it in that those things were far more important than their abbreviated slogans of "free speech" and "free press" which has been used to destroy the lives and rights of scores of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans throughout our history.
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I don't care about "academic freedom" to lie. To hell with liars, they're on their own, they can get the billionaires and millionaires to cry over them. That's not a matter of any kind of right, it's a privilege given to those who choose to lie by the artificial and often quite evil lore of the civil law. There is nothing to be proud of in supporting that meta-lie, no matter how virtuous it makes idiots who ignore all the above feel because they watched some movies and plays and read some garbage fiction.
* I will not ever again pretend that such evangelicals, Pentecostals, "trad" Catholics, etc. are exempt from the same slamming for their hypocrisy because of the modern scruple against noting their complete rejection of the Gospel they pretend to honor above all. I reject the social and cultural taboo on calling out their heresy and apostasy and culpability in what the sciences, the entertainment industry and other professions like lawyering are up to their eyes in. Though I think that aside from the Bible Belt and Midwest, the power of religious institutions is vastly exaggerated, especially among academics. Certainly it has little power as compared to the organs of the legal profession and the entertainment industry. Though it might have some external influence that academic publishing doesn't exercise. The easier to consume lies and junk are, the more influence it has.
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