For the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen (5/29/17), students who protested eugenics–the pseudo-science used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust–are the real fascists.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (5/29/17) continues his impressive streak of downplaying racism and being wrong with his latest half-baked column, “Protesters at Middlebury College Demonstrate ‘Cultural Appropriation’—of Fascism.”
After describing the chaotic events at Vermont’s Middlebury College three months ago—which left one professor with a concussion after activists sought to shut down a speech by white supremacist-with-a-PhD Charles Murray—Cohen goes full-Godwin, equating the students with 1920s Italian fascists, a comparison that’s both fresh and totally proportionate to accidentally hitting a person on the head:
Far more dangerous than what any of these speakers has to say is the reaction to it. The protesters—some of them non-students—are involved in what’s called, to invoke a trendy term, “cultural appropriation.” In this case, it is the culture of fascism. Benito Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy was facilitated by the steady use of violent protesters to break up meetings and silence opponents. The tactic proved successful, and in 1922 Mussolini became dictator of Italy. Hitler, on the other side of the Alps, took careful notes.
You see, the Middlebury protestors are the real fascists. Not the person who’s dedicated his life to normalizing eugenics; he is a mere “conservative,” posing “controversial” questions.
The outrageous false equivalencies didn’t stop there, Cohen went on to equate the Middlebury activists with 1960s-era radicals who bombed colleges, and to the jihadist attack last month in Manchester:
The Vietnam War engendered the same sort of fascistic response. In the name of a good cause—ending the war—the occasional protester set off the occasional bomb. One, ostensibly directed at the University of Wisconsin’s cooperation with the Defense Department, nearly demolished Sterling Hall on the Madison campus. It killed a physics researcher, whose work was entirely unconnected with the Pentagon, not that it matters any. The mad, arrogant virtue that animated the bombers is little different than what drove Manchester’s suicide bomber to wantonly kill kids at the Ariana Grande concert in England. Spare us the true believers.
It’s unclear whether, by Cohen’s reasoning, the war in Vietnam that killed millions of Indochinese was also fascist. Or if it was fascism when the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State in 1970—the incident that the Wisconsin bombing was actually in response to. Or, for that matter, whether the bombs the US and UK have been pummeling Syria and Libya with for the past three years, killing at least 3,600 civilians, qualify as fascism. It’s fitting Cohen wrote this column the same week three Americans were killed by white terrorism, further putting his ideological myopia on stark display.
Cohen would, conveniently, avoid the substance of the Middlebury dispute, dismissing the overarching scientific racism advanced by Murray as “beside the point.” As FAIR (Extra!, 1–2/95) noted at the time, Cohen accepted the underlying racist assumptions of Murray’s book The Bell Curve upon its release in 1994, writing in the Washington Post:
Both Murray and Herrnstein have been called racists. So, too, have Arthur Jensen and other scientists who have declared intelligence to be largely inherited and have found blacks, on the average, to have lower IQ scores than whites. Their findings, though, have been accepted by others in their field, and it would be wrong—both intellectually and politically—to suppress them. What really matters is what is done with such findings.
Cohen carried water for the idea that race determines intelligence 23 years ago—only arguing over how to best wield this knowledge politically—and now acts as if he can’t remember what all the outrage was about, or his own role in normalizing it. Nope, the racist canards being advanced are actually “beside the point,” because to debate them would bring up his own skeletons. Best to hide behind the vague catch-all “freedom of speech,” and pivot to calling Middlebury undergraduates blackshirts, the moral equivalent of people who plant bombs in university research departments and blow up kids at Ariana Grande concerts.
Cohen’s previous forays into the subject of race didn’t fare much better, having himself often ventured into overt racism (“I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize”—7/15/13), obtuse racism (“People think an innocent man was murdered for being black. This is anti-cop sentiment taken to an extreme”—12/2/14) and soft pedalling historical iterations of racism (“Woodrow Wilson was racist, but he deserves our understanding”—11/23/15).
Cohen is also a long-time defender of child rapist Roman Polanski, a downplayer of workplace harassment and, himself, the subject of accusation of unwanted sexual advances. The irony, of course, is that Cohen is the perfect embodiment of the same white privilege he routinely downplays: a long, documented history of being wrong and gross and lazy while still holding on to the most coveted real estate in opinion journalism, through sheer inertia of being in the right class with the right political disposition and and the right skin color sometime around 1976.
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Absurd indeed.
Beautifully written. If I were still participating in the deteriorating American university system, this would be an article I would share with students. I hope it reaches them.
Beautifully written, maybe. But the agenda is extremely destructive to real journalism. Take just one example – the way in which he twists Cohen’s comment on the fascism of eugenics. Suddenly, we are to believe that we should ignore all context and focus on the tenuous connection between Mussolini’s disruptions of protests and Middlebury protesters? Ignore the degree of violence used. Ignore the fact that Mussolini used these tactics to mobilize his fascist regime – and so, used such tactics in service of the State. Ignore the fact that eugenics is indeed fascist in its roots. That’s to say nothing of Adam Johnson’s own colorful history of criticism. But I’d rather not muck around with character assassination to make my point. I’m not Adam Johnson.
Beautifully reported indeed. If some manager at bully Jeff Bezos’s very own propaganda rag wants to talk about Mussolini and cultural fascism he could have the integrity to allude to Mussolini’s definition of fascism: “fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” That condition has obtained for decades before some isolated incident at a liberal arts college in Vermont.
Calling Charles Murray a “white supremacist” might score you a few cheap points with the outrage echo chamber of the left, but that doesn’t make it “Fair” or “Accurate.” Anyone who has actually read or listened to the man speak knows how ridiculous this claim is. And Adam’s casual and unironic hurling of the charge shows quite clearly that he’s either too pompous or too lazy to have done either.
And anyone who has read “The Mismeasure of Man” by Gould would know how mistaken Charles Murray is about racial IQ claims…
Congratulations, you’ve done what I thought was impossible: made me sympathize w/Richard Cohen! I agree w/him about the Middlebury protesters, & about Polanski (which has nothing to do w/the ostensible subject of your article, but never mind) & the “harassment” charges against Cohen himself sound like fuckin’ bullshit…much like your article.
Thanks for all those specifics! After reading your post I know exactly what parts of the article you disagree with! Or not.
When was Cohen accused of “harassment”?
Adam Johnson, if you spent half the time looking at the current administration with the same critical eye as you do digging for scraps of “lazy” writing in the occasional Washington Post article you would have a Pulitzer on the way. Don’t fool yourself into thinking this is doing anyone any good when Trump and his administration have called all-out war on journalism – yours included. Or did you thinking Fair.Org is considered “good reporting” by Trump’s administration? No, instead you encourage the collapse of the nation by turning a blind eye to the real fascists gaining power every day. And if you can’t admit that to yourself, take a good look around…
Maybe he’s just projecting? Holding a picket sign and yelling at my local politician is my constitutional right, and I won’t lay a finger on them. The powerful play the victim if their power is questioned.
I thought I was reading a Vox or Huffpost article. I thought this was supposed to be an actual 3rd party anti-narrative site. I saw so many leftist talking points that I would have swore it was a Vox article. huh. Was looking for a genuine neutral news organization, I guess FAIR isn’t it. Lot’s of false equivalencies and leftist talking points. Nevermind FAIR.
I’d be interested to know your source for the assertion that the Sterling Hall bombing in Wisconsin was a response to the shooting of students at Kent State. My understanding has always been that it was directed at the Army Mathematics Research Center and that the University of Wisconsin student paper, for which two of the bombers wrote, had published reports establishing that the AMRC was doing work directly related to the War in Vietnam. Moreover, I believe that two of the bombers had made previous bombing attempts, well before the shootings at Kent State.
More directly relevant to the stupidity of Cohen’s comparison of the Wisconsin bombers to the Manchester bomber is that the bombers in Wisconsin set off their bomb at three in the morning specifically to avoid casualties (though they hadn’t anticipated a late-night physicist), whereas the Manchester bomber chose the time, the location, and the nature of the bomb specifically to cause casualties.
I don’t support either bombing, but they were not the same. I do support accuracy in criticism.
“dedicated his life to normalizing eugenics”
The Vox article that this phrase is linked to (a good one) does not support the assertion that Murray advocates eugenics. It doesn’t even mention eugenics. If you want to back up this accusation, you’re going to have to make the argument, or at least supply a more pertinent link.