Race, Wokeness, And Ketman

Several items having to do with our hysteria over race, and the ideologically-driven dishonesty that has captured our culture, have crossed my path this week.

First, in France right now, there’s a massive controversy over something a Romanian soccer referee said in a match between Paris St-Germain and Istanbul’s team (thanks to reader Brian V. for tipping me off). Deutsche Welle tells what happened:

The Champions League fixture between Paris Saint Germain and Istanbul Basaksehir was abandoned Tuesday after players left the pitch over alleged racist slurs by a match official.

“Our assistant coach, Pierre Webo has been sent off with a ‘racist’ word by the 4th official ref. of the match. Match has stopped for a while,” the Turkish club said on its official Twitter feed.

Basaksehir players left the match some 20 minutes into the game, after a long and heated discussion with match officials. The PSG team followed.

The score was 0-0 after 14 minutes when the game was stopped. Basaksehir assistant coach Pierre Webo accused the fourth official, Sebastian Coltescu of Romania, of using a racial term to describe him. It sparked a commotion in the technical area that led to Webo being sent off by the referee.

Coltescu was audible in the empty Parc des Princes stadium as the match was being played behind closed doors because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking in Romanian, the official was heard saying: “The black one over there. Go and check who he is. The black one over there, it’s not possible to act like that.”

Television microphones also picked up a furious Webo repeatedly asking the official why the racist term was used to describe him.

Basaksehir substitute Demba Ba came off the bench and demanded an explanation from Coltescu.

“When you mention a white guy, you never say ‘this white guy’, you just say ‘this guy,’ so why when you mention a black guy do you say, ‘this black guy?'” Demba Ba asked the fourth official.

PSG players Neymar and Kylian Mbappe also demanded an explanation and Basaksehir coach Okan Buruk told Coltescu: “You are racist.”

You can imagine how well it went after that. Here is a detailed breakdown of the incident by a Twitter commenter. The Romanian ref explained that he used the word “negru,” which is the Romanian word for “black.” But that wasn’t enough either, because the simple fact of identifying a coach by his race — this, as an indication of which person the ref was talking about — is racist, according to these people.

So: according to the Woke, if you don’t see color, you are a racist. But if you see color, you are also a racist. You cannot win. If they want to destroy you with accusations of racism, they will. What you have actually done, and what you actually thought, doesn’t matter. All that matters is what those with the power to destroy you on the basis of accusation alone say you have done.

Do you understand now why the people who grew up under Soviet communism are so alarmed now? Do you understand why I wrote Live Not By Lies? It’s totalitarian garbage like this. What they are doing, the Woke, is compelling people vulnerable to having their careers destroyed by bogus accusations of racism to avoid any contact with people of color, out of naked fear for their livelihoods. All it takes is an accusation. Just an accusation.

At the University of Pittsburgh, a reader writes, all students are required to take a course on “Anti-Black Racism: History, Ideology, and Resistance.” Here is the syllabus, including online lectures. 

An explainer, from the website:

This is obviously nothing but woke ideological indoctrination. One thing that jumped out at me came in the final lecture, on “how to be antiracist.” The instructor, from the university’s diversity office, talks in part about the scourge of “microaggressions” (like, I guess, being Romanian and using your language’s word for “black” to talk about a black man), and then gets on to discussing crime. Just short of the 13 minute mark, the instructor repeats a familiar ideological claim from Critical Race Theory:

 

Crime is prevalent in some communities, she admits:

 

 

Really? So, in Minneapolis of late, there has been a “staggering” surge in carjackings.” This is because Minneapolis is overpoliced? Really? From the Star-Tribune story:

The spree comes amid a nearly unprecedented spike in violent crime, particularly shootings, since the May 25 killing of George Floyd in police custody and the civil unrest that followed.

In November, the toll of people shot this year surpassed 500 in Minneapolis, the most in 15 years. Seventy-nine homicides is the highest count since the mid-1990s, an era when the city earned the grim moniker “Murderapolis.”

The nice lady from Pitt’s diversity office, her salary paid by the taxpayers of Pennsylvania, would have you know that this is happening because there are too many police in Minneapolis picking on black people. Who you gonna believe, the Pitt diversity officer, or your lying eyes? Some things are so insane that only intellectuals can believe them.

What a mess we are in. Our universities, and all institutions consumed by wokeness, are systematically training people to live by lies, to deny the evidence of their eyes, to dismiss facts as bigotry. And taxpayers are funding the destruction of their own societies! Pitt, by the way, because of Covid, has instituted a university-wide salary freeze, a 78 percent cut in capital spending, and other emergency budget measures. You can be sure, though, that the diversity office will be the last thing left standing. It is vital to our leadership elites that the next generation be educated in lies.

Meanwhile, I refer to you to a recent clip from Prof. Glenn Loury of Brown University, a total badass who refuses to live by lies:

John McWhorter and I at The Glenn Show getting down to cases re. reporting on urban violence: pic.twitter.com/1z1CQrn9hZ

— Glenn Loury (@GlennLoury) December 10, 2020

Look, I completely understand people like my liberal friend Damon Linker being up in arms about conservatives who are eager to believe things that are untrue.  But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the left-liberal establishment — directors within institutions — are undertaking a mass project in educating students to see the world through ideological lenses, including instructing them to believe lies, e.g., that the overrepresentation of black men in violent crime statistics is because black communities are policed too much. These are lies that, among other things, will cost people their lives. It’s happening in Minneapolis. These kinds of lies will also cost people their livelihoods. You think that unfortunate Romanian referee will ever work in that field again?

A side effect of these woke lies is that students who are savvy enough to see through the bullshit will acquire an important skill: ketman. From Live Not By Lies:

It is difficult for people raised in the free world to grasp the breadth and the depth of lying required simply to exist under communism. All the lies, and lies about lies, that formed the communist order were built on the basis of this foundational lie: the communist state is the sole source of truth. Orwell expressed this truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Under the dictatorship of Big Brother, the Party understands that by changing language—Newspeak is the Party’s word for the jargon it imposes on society—it controls the categories in which people think. “Freedom” is slavery, “truth” is falsehood, and so forth. Doublethink—“holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”—is how people learn to submit their minds to the Party’s ideology. If the Party says 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 2 = 5. The goal is to convince the person that all truth exists within the mind, and the rightly ordered mind believes whatever the Party says is true.

Orwell writes:

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this on us. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called “he.” Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result.

To update an Orwell line to our own situation: “The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Many Christians will see through these lies today but will choose not to speak up. Their silence will not save them and will instead corrode them, according to Miłosz.

In his writing about communism’s insidiousness, Miłosz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them.

As part of the plan to take over the nation, people began turning up in the streets selling “the pill of Murti-Bing,” named after a Mongolian philosopher who found a way to embody his “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy in a tablet. Those who took the Pill of Murti-Bing quit worrying about life, even though things were falling apart around them. When the Eastern army arrived, it surrendered happily, its soldiers relieved to have found deliverance from their internal tension and struggles.

Only the peace didn’t last. “But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities,” writes Miłosz, “they became schizophrenics.”

What do you do when the Pill of Murti-Bing stops working and you find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail?

You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense.

What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society.

Students ought to know that this required course is not about truth, but about educating for conformity to the ruling ideology within American institutions. Honestly, if I were a student at Pitt, I would not risk my degree to stand up to this. I would go along to get along, give the Controllers what they want, and keep my powder dry for a more meaningful act of resistance. But what about the next time it happens? How do I know that I won’t rationalize away my act of ketman? How do I know that I won’t eventually become the role I play, living out lies permanently, for the sake of protecting my job and my status? Maybe I will even come to believe the lies.

 

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