The New Fascism Confronting Science

A disturbingly large segment of young people in the West have been badly educated in history, ill-prepared in this important discipline, and purposefully, the damage done by extremist instructors promoting agenda over curricula. In order to purge the horrors of collectivist totalitarianism from students’ worldview, ignorance isn’t a hindrance but rather an advantage. Many of these young adults are therefore apt to unthinkingly repeat the scripted insults of “Nazi!” and “fascist!”, oblivious to the fact that uncounted esteemed rabbis and Jewish leaders have been pleading for years for radical activists to cease resorting to this slanderous misuse of those pejoratives in order to blacken the reputation of their political opponents.

Exploiting the murders of six million victims in World War II is not only an abysmal disgrace in and of itself, but a painful reopening of the wounds left among Jews worldwide whose parents and grandparents suffered unspeakably at the hands of the real Nazis. Political fanatics, seemingly obsessed with those terms and resolved to cling to them in any event, are boorishly unmoved that the direct descendants of an entire generation of Jewry massacred in Europe only decades ago hear them plainly.

The historical obliviousness is sufficiently rarefied to cause the 1940s to blur into little more than hazy images of marching jackboots that can now conveniently be used to incongruously insult people who disagree on dozens of policy points, from abortion to Zoroastrianism. More recent events from the mid-80’s in the USSR haven’t been recorded with much better focus either, with far-leftist propagandists-cum-professors in the West having managed to sanitize the chronicle of what socialist collectivism wrought upon the Jews of Eastern European nations and how the poison diminished the scientific, mathematical and intellectual vigor of those societies—and as recently as some thirty years past.

Only decades ago, the best of an entire generation of Russian-Jewish scholars was refused entry into the top-tier of the USSR’s greatest universities and colleges. Soviet authorities, on the rare occasion when an excuse for these abuses was even muttered under their breaths, gave out that anti-Semitism had nothing to do with the discrimination. It was pure common sense and self-interest, they insisted, for the state to refrain from going to the time, cost, trouble and effort to educate Jews in their most esteemed institutions, only to run the risk of those graduates opting later to quit the country for Israel, taking their talents, discoveries and skills abroad.

Even assuming this justification absolutely truthful, it hardly absolves a system with such egregious side-effects as both hamstringing the progress of science and abrogating the rights and privileges of an entire people based on ethnicity or religion.

So routine was Soviet prejudice against Jewish intellectuals, preventing them admission into the premiere academies, that Russia’s second-tier institutions received a flood of world-class physicists and mathematicians, converting these also-ran colleges into venues of true academic vigor. So many Jewish whip-smart applicants in engineering, chemistry, physics and mathematics were shunted off to these lesser repositories of learning that the graduates became known as “kerosineshchiks”—a turn of phrase reflecting the never-say-die attitude of these brilliant Jewish students, who much like primitive kerosene-burning space heaters, made do with what was to hand and came through nonetheless with flying colors in the end.

The Third Reich did indeed inject fascism into science as well. “A Hundred Authors Against Einstein” is an excellent example of how Germany in the 1930s demanded that science take a backseat to politics, paving the way for the Kerosinka institutions of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s. Yet those inflicting the most damage on science at present are precisely the very voices using the invective “Nazi!” in attempts to destroy their political and cultural adversaries: the fringe far-left.

Their assault has taken on an astoundingly aggressive and outlandishly fervent tenor which few scientists can manage the courage to refute. Biologists, for example, stand mute as the scientific method is elbowed unceremoniously out of the way, with doctrinaire advocacy groups foisting upon the discipline of genetics many dozens of genders rather than just the prosaic male and female having held sway for the last two billion years, and responding to the slightest demur from anyone holding a conflicting opinion by vilifying them.

The expulsion of chromosomes from biology is nothing more than the egregiously politicized tip of a massive extremist left anti-scientific iceberg, fraught with every sort of distortion of science, the only common thread being that a plethora of absurd and fantastical tenets—toxic masculinity, ceaseless end-days climatic doom, industry and commerce and modernity as a scourge, intersectionality in place of physics, etc.—dovetail with an unbroken theme of the West as evil, the enemy, worthy of nothing other than the demise it must certainly be bringing upon itself.

That is, of course, in error. In fact, the only thing inflexible dogmatists have correctly is that there are indeed fascists among us. Were they to pick up a mirror and gaze into the looking glass they’d uncover them at once.