By Eugene Narrett, Framingham State College
September 1995 – In Orwell’s dystopia all political facts were manufactured at the offices of “Newspeak,” the department of disinformation. There the bureaucrats churned out such spirit-breakers as “war is peace,” and “two plus two equals five.”
For several years America has suffered a similar decay of language and thought. Our cultural elite’s infatuation with underclass lifestyles and with the exoticism of the Third World has produced an orgy of linguistic duplicity. Slogans of our day are churned out by media empires like Time Warner. Among the most infamous are “multiculturalism” (a pathological hatred of Western culture); and “diversity,” the notion that social and economic justice, moral purity and academic excellence can be achieved by categorizing people according to their skin color and genitalia. As in Orwell’s 1984, those who dissent from today’s doctrinal verities are subjected to ruthless re-education. This is especially true in higher education, as I recently discovered first hand.
THOUGHT CRIME
Yes, I’ve been guilty of “thought crime.” For my local daily paper I’ve written columns criticizing abortion and divorce on demand, quotas, homosexual advocacy, welfare and feminism, with its culture-killing mystique of victimology. This criticism makes me a “right-wing fanatic” and class traitor to my liberal colleagues at Framingham State College.
Their anger has conveyed itself to a minority of angry students. Anonymous leaflets slandering me were posted in classroom buildings. Anonymous notes from colleagues directed me to write my columns on toilet paper. Earlier this month in the faculty dining room, a colleague stood over me, seething and yelling after I made an innocuous reference to a political cartoon about Bill Clinton.
At my request, a meeting was convened to address 1st Amendment issues and the need to support reasoned debate. Before a large gathering of students, faculty and administrators, I took the podium and exposed the left-liberal monologue on campus regarding issues of broad social concern. Many students expressed similar complaints. They also testified to the lack of political agenda in my classes (unlike most of their other classes, several of them said), and to the openness of discussion I foster.
The response of my colleagues? Some disparaged the meeting as “a love fest” and decided to call another the next week.
In the interim they must have been busy scraping the barrel’s bottom. They managed to convene about 30 members of what Harold Bloom terms the “school of resentment,” none of whom ever had studied with me. I sat for an hour in a star-chamber proceeding in which I was “indicted” for my columns and asked to defend and explain them. I also was told repeatedly to “be quiet” so the critics could each have his say. I was on trial.
Several professors, devotees of reasoned debate and diversity that they are, led the way in ad hominem attacks on me. One claimed that my columns were “a cynical attempt to cash in on the right wing mood in the country.” Another spouted hearsay that he knew a student who knew a student who once dropped one of my classes and out of school “because of an intimidating remark” I supposedly had made. Another character attacked me for criticizing multiculturalism. When I recounted hearing a feminist colleague spit out the phrase “worthless white man” with the kind of anger an anti-Semite uses in spitting out the word, “Jew,” he told me I had “Jews on the brain.”
About 15 months ago, an African-American colleague of mine found a racist remark scrawled on his office door. The college formally apologized, condemning the incident in the student newspaper, the faculty newsletter and in a separate memo. Well and good. But to date, there has been no formal expression of regret for the slanderous leaflet or the defamatory attacks against me. Why the double standard?
We know very well, don’t we? Liberals have created a state in which praise and blame are parceled out according to genitalia and skin color. White men are the lowest of the low. Here, too, Orwell is the touchstone. As in Animal Farm in the liberal nanny-state, “all animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.”
Yes, the pigs are ruling the farm. And how interesting that in the “gay ’90s” we’ve discovered who the pigs in this nation truly are. As Francis Fukuyama recently noted, “The two most powerful groups promoting the Balkanization of America have been feminists and gays.” Ever since these sensitivity experts began directing the culture, America has been torn apart by crime, ruined families and incivility.
And so, for exercising my freedom and duty as a citizen, for having critiqued the reigning orthodoxies of our cultural elite, I have been defamed and vilified in my workplace, the ostensible bastion of free speech.
Having listened to liberals spend 10 months comparing their critics to Nazis, I guess we should not be surprised. Still, it’s saddening, and a chastening reminder of our task. The next 18 months will not be easy ones. The Democrats are used to power and will not relinquish it gracefully. The death throes of the Quota Nation will continue to produce turbulent political weather.
The challenge is on us to resist intimidation, to continue to expound and exercise our rights, and to analyze as best we can the damaging ignorance and Newspeak of the Pharaoh on the Potomac. 
