The moves by academics and students at Rutgers University to have an invitation to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rescinded might well be viewed as just another instance of a leftwing soft-totalitarianism that attempts to set beyond the pale anyone who does not share their worldview. To a degree this is clearly part of it. Yet, upon scratching the surface of this initiative one discovers a far more unpleasant impulse at work. The academics of the New Brunswick Faculty Council, which has voted to call on the school to disinvite Rice, made no shortage of outlandish claims in their statement, yet they had the good sense not to expose some of the more deeply rooted motives behind their campaign. The same cannot be said, however, for the students who have joined them in their calls.
From the statement released by the faculty council, one would assume that Rice was some kind of hardened war criminal who served in the government of a Third World despot, as opposed to someone who held one of the highest offices in the government of the United States. The statement parrots the usual conspiratorial leftist notions about the Bush administration, accusing Rice of having been complicit in taking America to war on a lie. Furthermore, the statement repeats the accusation that through the war in Iraq, America is responsible for the killing of over a 100,000 Iraqi “men, women and children” and the displacement of millions more. This is a commonly heard figure from the left, but no one knows where it comes from. The actual invasion of Iraq to remove the Saddam regime lasted for just over a month and had a proportionately low civilian casualty rate. Very many more Iraqis, however, were killed during the insurgency and suicide bombings of the factional fighting between Sunni and Shia that followed. But to try and level the blame for this on America rather than with the Islamists who carried out the killings, is itself an expression of the left’s inverted racism that sees non-western peoples as having no agency in their own actions.
Indeed, the tendency of left-wing intellectuals to operate one impossible standard for western leaders and quite another for those running the kind of regimes that appeal to their own ideological prejudices is hardly a great secret. The Rutgers academics argue that Rice should not be invited because they claim she “participated in political efforts to circumvent the law” and because she does not “embody moral authority and exemplary citizenship.” Yet, the record of leftwing intellectuals who have lined up to cheer on the most brutal revolutionaries and dictatorships is itself long and anything but exemplary. One need not look back as far as Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s apologies for the Soviet Union, or even to Noam Chomsky’s efforts to deny the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. Think simply of Judith Butler’s claims that Hamas and Hezbollah are progressives that should be considered part of the “global left.”
No doubt, the academics and students opposing Rice’s visit to their campus would be incensed by such an invitation to any senior figure from the Bush administration, yet Rice holds a particularly reviled status in the minds of the left. The faculty council members were guarded enough not to reference this, the students on the other hand were not and so have ended up unwittingly exposing the whole thing.
To speak candidly for a moment, Condoleezza Rice is black and she is a woman, yet she is also a Republican. For those on the left, this cannot happen. Rice is a member of a minority group, she is female, one of the oppressed, and such people are neither conservatives nor Republicans, and if they were to unaccountably somehow become Republicans then a party of such bigotry would never elevate her to any real position of influence, but if such a figure were ever to achieve any status, then they certainly wouldn’t have joined anything so odious as the Bush administration. According to left-wing thinking Condoleezza Rice cannot exist, and yet there she is nonetheless, pulling their worldview to pieces. In this respect she has unacceptably transgressed the left’s tribal lines.
The editorial of the Rutgers student newspaper the Daily Targum, which supports the campaign to disinvite Rice, makes the mistake of rather giving the game away by quite openly and repeatedly referencing her background. The editorial asks condescendingly, “Do the positive aspects of her personal accomplishments really outweigh the destruction of war she contributed to during her political career?” That line certainly would not have found its way in there if the school had invited Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld. Yet, another opinion piece published in the same paper goes much further, with one student writing that some may wish to overlook Rice’s “behavior” by viewing her “as a powerful woman of color.” No one decent would think for a moment that Rice’s “color” should be used to judge her record, but then the writer dismisses this idea anyway, insisting “Though Rice may have made advancements for black women, they are shallow, even meaningless, when placed side by side with her actions.”
As a clumsy afterthought at the end of the main editorial piece by the students they make the implausible claim; “the point is, we just don’t feel comfortable having politicians as commencement speakers at all.” Does anyone for a moment believe that if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had instead been invited to give the same speech then these same individuals would be expressing such reservations? Quite clearly not.
