The Other Half of History Blog
Columbia University Today
“The problem for the world today is how to deal with the unparalleled and unprecedented power of the United States.” Professor Edward Said
Last week’s HistoryHalf post described Columbia University’s historic role as a meeting place and recruitment center for Soviet sympathizers and agents during the Cold war. From 1917 through the late 1980’s, Soviet Communism was a great unifying cause for leftist radicals, and Columbia was the most Moscow-friendly of all the universities in the United States. The Columbia scholars profiled last week all communicated with the Soviet government through one channel or another, and most of them actually worked as spies.
This week’s column is about left wing extremists at Columbia who were never known to have worked directly with the Soviets. The world is full of anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist movements, some of which were never closely connected to the Communist International or the Soviet Union; and Columbia professors and grads have been among the leaders of most of them.
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Columbia University and Communism
In 2009 the University of Alabama won its seventh AP-recognized national championship in football. Crimson Tide fans could probably be forgiven for thinking that their school is the nation’s all-time number one in football, but in reality there are several other universities with comparable records of excellence on the gridiron.
When it comes to left wing politics, however, one university stands alone as the all-time champion. Columbia University has been a training ground for America-hating radicals since at least the start of the twentieth century. The left has had to take new directions since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but before that, leftist scholars from Columbia often expressed their loathing of the American way by supporting Soviet-centered Communism, as the following examples will show.
The Left and the Far Left
“The campaign against subversion redrew the boundaries of acceptable Democratic liberalism to exclude both Communists and those willing to cooperate with them.” Professor Eric Foner
Political beliefs in this country run the whole gamut from the far right to the far left, but most Americans hold views that are fairly close to the center. The political mainstream includes people who differ with each other on important political issues, but continue to see themselves as loyal Americans, and endorse and support our current constitutional form of government.
People on the radical fringes make up a very small minority of the America population, but they tend to put themselves in positions of influence in government, in the media, and especially in academia. College faculties attract left wing extremists the way a picnic attracts ants, and history faculties, for whatever reason, appear to have an especially strong appeal for radicals.
American Capitalism: The Engine of Progress
“The world doesn’t suffer from an unequal distribution of wealth. It suffers from an unequal distribution of capitalism.” Rush Limbaugh
In 1776 Scottish economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations
Mainstream history books don’t say this, but life today would be almost as harsh as it was in 1776 if the United States, that one single nation, had not come into existence.
Treacherous Ally: The Soviets in WWII
“If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Winston Churchill
During World War II the United States and England joined forces with the Soviet Union to fight National Socialist Germany. While the US and Britain were fighting the Germans, and subsidizing the Soviet government with billions of dollars worth of weapons and other supplies, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was actively working against the interests of his allies.
All through the war years Stalin’s Communist government operated a network spies and subversives within the governments of England and the US. His agents stole the secrets of the atom bomb, undermined the pro-American forces of Chiang Kai-shek in China and Draja Mihailovich in Yugoslavia, interfered with communications between US President Franklin Roosevelt and English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and generally tried to weaken Britain and the US in every way possible. But don’t expect to hear that in a typical US History class. Because most of America’s modern-day history professors and textbook writers lean very far to the left politically, they are reluctant to discuss the sins of the Soviet Union.
