DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

Education status: incomplete

by Alex Kurtagic

After the disastrous economic mismanagement of a succession of Labour governments, which managed to give away 60% of the nation’s gold reserves, double public debt, build a huge out-of-control budget deficit (despite constantly raising taxes), and shrink GDP by a whopping 5% during its last full year, the incoming coalition government was faced with difficult choices.  Amazingly, they made the right one, and set out to implement drastic cuts in public spending in order to reduce the deficit. Unfortunately, however, they were either unable, or unwilling, to eliminate the deficit with just cuts, and decided they also had to increase VAT and raise taxes. With citizens under ever increasing economic pressure, particularly during the past two years, during which they had to put up with bankster perfidy, government waste, fiscal rapacity, job losses, and inflation (the true extent of which remains hidden), the coalition’s decision to cut subsidies and allow universities to treble their fees was not going to be met with smiles—particularly after 13 years of a Labour government that fomented a culture of entitlement through their egalitarian efforts to extend university education to half the population.

Leftist agitators mobilised their pawns—the university students—who yesterday converged in London to protest the increase in university fees. The protest turned violent and 5,000 protesters mobbed the Conservative Party’s headquarters in Millibank, London, where property was smashed and angry graffiti sprayed on marble walls. The UCU and NUS (unions, for educators and students respectively) were there, demanding the cuts to be stopped. The Socialist Worker, a fringe Marxist organ, also made their presence felt; their placards read ‘F**K FEES FREE EDUCATION NOW’.

Stupidly, or disingenuously, the agitators blame the Conservatives, even though the Liberal Democrats, who are left of Labour, are also part of the two-party coalition government. Stupidly, or disingenuously too, they (conveniently) forget that it was Labour who created the conditions that forced the cuts in the first place: the United Kingdom is estimated to have become the most indebted country in the world during the Labour years.

Does this mean that the Conservatives are free from blame? By no means! Over successive governments they encouraged immigration, which increasingly put the education system and public services under pressure. They also engaged in deficit spending, so the public debt was bigger each time they were voted out than each time they were voted in. They aligned themselves with the United States government’s Zionist Middle East policy, which eventually led to a wave of terrorist plots and attacks. They supported the spurious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost many thousands of millions of pounds. They ring-fenced the ever-growing international aid and ‘development’ budget, which wastes thousands of millions more every year. And so on.

The Conservatives are, in sum, as guilty as their Labour colleagues.

It is an outrage that citizens are made to pay for the blunders of governing politicians—many of whom are not even qualified to run the departments they run. Gordon Brown, for example, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer for a decade, had no training in economics: he is qualified as an historian; the topic of his PhD was The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918-1929. Brown’s successor in the post, Alistair Darling, who during the 1970s supported the British section of the Trotskyist Fourth International (and together with Brown ruined the British economy in the 2000s), is qualified as a lawyer. George Osborne, the present Chancellor, studied modern history. In any normal profession of high responsibility, it is expected that people be qualified for the positions they hold. In any such profession, a blunder affecting lives and / or involving large sums of money is punished with loss of employment, lawsuits, and imprisonment.

Not so with professional politicians.

Therefore, I am pleased that the current crop is being made to feel the heat, because whether Labour or Conservative, they are all responsible and it is about time they face public fury.

Yet, I am irritated by how this public fury is being misdirected (and therefore made counter productive) by the Left: after all, the cuts are long over due, they need to be wider and deeper, and people need to learn to pay for the goods and services that they use, instead of relying on the government and thereby living off the taxpayer. That this means universities will lose students because their fees have become too expensive is not necessarily a bad thing. Firstly, graduate supply exceeds current needs, as evinced by the fact that not a few university graduates subsequently have difficulty finding employment and are forced to take up menial or clerical work. Secondly, many of the students currently populating universities do not belong there: not a few study junk degrees and quite a few have squeezed in thanks to ‘inclusive’ entry requirements and various equality schemes. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, a university education has dubious benefits, particularly for students in the humanities, whose minds are miseducated, misinformed, and systematically warped there by the egalitarian Freudo-Marxist scholastic regime.

Those aware of the latter will wonder whether said regime is up in arms partly because its members see in the cuts an erosion of their power: fewer students means fewer young minds to indoctrinate, and therefore more citizens out there, ‘in the wild’, with a looser, more rickety set of Leftist cognitive structures that are more likely to crumble in the face of a crisis or exposure to ideas not approved by the system. Fewer students also means possibly a reallocation of resources on the basis of profitability, a consequence that might entail the defunding of courses, schemes, and programmes dear to the Left—programmes that are typically heavy on ideology, light on benefits, and always vampiric money suckers.

Of course, there the legitimate issue of whether universities, able to attract only a wealthy clientele, will begin to operate more as businesses and less as centres of learning. This is a real risk when the talk is of remaining internationally ‘competitive’. If the evolution of consumer goods over the past century is any indication, this could well lead to a process or rationalisation, whereby universities evaluate their courses and their degrees on a purely economic basis, focusing solely on cutting costs and growing profits. Usually, this kind of pragmatism results in the elimination of many of the things that make life worth living, that give life meaning. It also results in the eventual growth of scams and rackets, designed to leech as much money as possible from the inadvertent. The ugly aspect of Western modernity, particularly on the aesthetic and spiritual levels, owes in large measure to the prevalence of this purely economic, materialistic outlook, not just to the rise of a culture of critique. If you are surrounded by cheap gaudy plastic, if your jeans tear after twenty washes, if your expensive watch inexplicably malfunctions after a few years, if your local estate agent is a rapacious and deceitful phony, if your friends appear or disappear on the basis of your net worth at any given point in time, it is because the individuals masquerading as friends or running the businesses concerned are preoccupied mostly with making a quick buck and see no meaning in life beyond a fat balance in their bank accounts.

For the moment, the hard Left appears resolute in its drive to force a course reversal out of the coalition; more protests are scheduled, and students are being agitated into a peasant revolt. The Left might succeed in its endeavours, even if partially, through compromise. All the same, university fees have been rising for a long time, well before the present government; and, because chronic money shortages will afflict this and any subsequent government, it seems fees will continue to rise until they reach United States levels. Should this happen, there will likely be even more foreign students (they are sought after, because they pay extra), and greater Jewish representation (they are clever and wealthy). Universities, especially elite ones, will become even more of a liberal racket, which will continue—now more than ever—actively to perpetuate a wealthy liberal establishment.

The upside is that this establishment is already hated, and, as wave after wave of ever-more indoctrinated graduates are incorporated into it, it will become even more hated, as its odious traits become more pronounced, distinctive, and extreme—more at variance with a growing body of ‘wild’ non-university-educated citizens. Said establishment will increasingly find itself at one end of a polarity, viewed more and more as a weird clique; a decadent, degenerate, incestuous freak show of beings who are completely out of touch with reality, out of synch with the universe. We already see this in many parts of Western academia, particularly in the humanities and the liberal arts, where much of the theorising is incomprehensible, bizarre, and insane.

In the long run, however, like some of the European monarchs of old, they might find their palaces burnt, their severed heads falling into wicker baskets to the cheers of angry mobs. What the character of this mob will be is not necessarily what readers of this and similar websites like to imagine. So far, at least in Europe, it looks as if it might be comprised of dark-skinned bearded men, wearing thoubs and sandals, wielding Qu’rans, and jubilant in their aggressive drive for Islamisation. This is by no means a foregone conclusion, of course, but to accept the likelihood of a different future one would need to see effective action from the Right—a feat that is next to impossible when the education system is dominated by the extreme Left. Hence, the extreme Left steals the march, with their brain-dead ‘TORY SCUM’ line.

It is easy to demand the closing down of the Department for International Development (budget £9,100,000,000 this year), the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan (cost £4,000,000,000 last year), and the injection of that money into education. The resulting spare £13,000,000,000 would indeed make a significant difference in a budget of £89,000,000,000. But the problem is not just money; it is also where it comes from, whom it funds, and what is done with it. I am all for funding research and for training our best minds; for having the very best universities in the world; and for them not being in the grip of economism. But I am against an education system in the grip of a perverse clique of Freudo-Marxist scholastics who labour diligently to miseducate, indoctrinate, mentally disarm, and instil feelings of guilt and worthlessness in our young intellectual elite—scholastics who, put plainly, abuse the minds entrusted into their care. I am against funding these Freudo-Marxist scholastics, against their enjoying a high standard of living, and against enabling them to further their aim of destroying European peoples, cultures, and civilisation. Unfortunately, any money presently received by them, whether it comes from the taxpayer via government subsidies, or via the taxpayer via fees paid directly to the universities, is money that they will use against us: against our young, and against our not-so-young, including writers for this and similar websites. Thus I do not mind seeing the scholastics, and their aberrant activist progeny, screaming in pain, dying by a thousand cuts, starved of students and resources. And I do not mind a funding shift from government subsidies to fees, as at least with fees the citizen has the option not to pay them.

Ultimately, it is dominant ideas that need to change, not just funding options. Once egalitarianism is discredited, Freudo-Marxist scholasticism will be purged from the system. Our own safety depends on whether the dominant ideas are replaced by ours, or by those of another alien group.