Gender Study Ban

[nlaguie]

www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/hungary-bans-gender-studies-universities/

I did not mention the aryan race. I mentioned aryan culture.

It’s not really a debate is it? The poem exists in many forms and mentions specific groups who were sent to concentration camps, without ordinary Germans speaking up about it, written by someone who experienced the camps.

If I am attempting to debate anything it is the notion that it is morally acceptable to take a poem that forms part of survivor testimony referring to victimised groups - Communists, Jews, disabled people, trade unionists, and replace them with a group - scholars, who were not referred to at all by that testimony.

Even if you were to believe (which you seem to do) that scholars were more persecuted than responsible for state sponsored murder, it still can’t be acceptable to insert them into survivor testimony, when the survivor in question clarified to whom he was referring and why on multiple occasions.

Gender studies function the same way for the true believers of Genderism, which is why you get the long, tedious discussions on here peppered with links to pomo academic tripe redefining what a lesbian is and so forth

I kind of agree, but as I said gender studies is a 'broad church' and is made up of a range of scholars with a range of perspectives - including old-fashioned second-waver feminists. So they are using genderism, but not 'gender studies' per se. I actually think that the real villain is postmodernism - but that's another debate.

I'd rather see a return to real critical thinking and debate in universities than censorship. I'd also like to see an end to the sneughflake culture whereby students need trigger warnings and what-not and certain topics are off bounds because they are upsetting or academics are supposed to dumb-down their curriculum and start with 'the student and where they are at' which really means introspective rubbish is taught that is all about the student and their perspective and not actual knowledge. But this again bites into a bigger debate about child-rearing and what we expect of and for our children and young people.

I think we agree on this one, YetAnother. Postmodernism is, as far as anyone who has the faintest grasp of real world logic can see, the most egregious example of shell game pseudo academia there has ever been, and I would agree it is certainly the main ingredient in the portion of Gender Studies that has been sent awry in recent times.

I can remember when pomo ideas entered feminism. It was, at first, just another way of 'doing feminism' (although I never saw any actual activism from the pomo crowd) - but then it became synonymous with feminism in the way that outsiders understood feminism. I stepped back from feminism at this point partly because of this and partly because of what I saw as conservatism and lack of debate in feminism more generally (this had nothing to do with postmodernism).

I've also re-found the first feminist (postmodern) article I read that makes a claim for male lesbians

www.jstor.org/stable/3810081?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

witnessed by someone who experienced the camps.

As the poster who (accidentally) triggered the Niemoller debate:

I can't speak for other posters, but it certainly wasn't ever my intention to suggest or even imply that academics were a persecuted group under the Nazis. The record in this, AFAIK, is decidedly mixed but didn't include the targeting of academics due to them being academics as such.

It was, however, my intention to point out that a group of people we may think of as unsavory being targeted by a fascist state should never be a reason to cheer when it's abundantly clear that it's being done in the service of a worldview that demonstrably makes little difference between the target du jour and positions we may ourselves hold. Such as how the Hungarian fascist arguably couldn't give less of a shit about whether you're into queer theory or a classical radfem. It all falls into the general category of "scum" to them.

And, yes, in the specific case of Hungary anti-intellectual discourse is a thing.

I also think it's not quite sufficient to characterise Niemoller as a camp survivor. The key to the text's significant isn't, IMO, the narrator's victimhood but his complicity with the perpetrators. The German original does a much better job of pointing this out than the English does in a number of ways such as its use of an active verb form ("ich habe geschwiegen") instead of a more passive failing to do something by "not speaking up". It also indicates the ongoing relevance of the speaker's actions by using present perfect tense for every occasion on which the narrator stayed silent (but not for the final line after he is seized himself).

Relevant context: Pastor Niemoller voted for the Nazis in several elections and, even after starting to oppose them, went on the record with suggestions that seemed to aim at flying under the radar rather than all out confrontation (e.g. by suggesting that Christian clergy with e.g. Jewish backgrounds refrain from seeking higher office within the church).

So basically, the text, in addition to being survivor's testimony, is also the testimony of someone who was not only a silent bystander but actively complicit to some degree and for some time but later realising that the same people who'd come for all these others wouldn't reward complicity with mercy or turning a blind eye.

And that's where the "first they came" comparison originated for me. I see it in a much more abstract sense.

For the sake of intellectual honesty: I'll also have to point out that the original German is less amenable to abstraction or application to a different context due to its use of "the Nazis" rather than the generic "they" of most English versions.

But, yeah, that's that: what I actually meant to say was "let's not cheer for the fascists, they'll come for you and me, too."

Skull, what you said made sense in the original context of referring to gender studies.

By which I mean there is a difference between saying ‘first they (the Hungarian state) came for the gender theorists’ and an American politician who said ‘first they (the actual Nazis) came for the industrialists.’

The former is an analogy, while the latter was a rewriting of historical fact.

Once we get into truth claims about what academics did in Nazi Germany, putting words into testimony matters in a way that it does not when using the sentiment as an analogy.

And I understand your point to be purely an analogy. The conversation that followed went off in another direction.

Niemoller did more than vote for the nazis. He was a party member who met with hitler to discuss restrictions on Jews. At the time he was not bothered by the principle of anti Semitism, just its extent. His later brave opposition makes more than full atonement and he paid a high price for his sins.

But, relevantly here, Niemoller flirted with fascists because they were his enemy’s enemy (like many churchmen, he saw the Weimar Republic as atheistic) and he therefore saw the NSDAP as saviours. Unlike many other German he rapidly saw he was very, very wrong and paid the full bill for that. With interest.

And also because he saw Communists as the enemies of the church, and so was not opposed to their persecution.

Indeed. In fact, all the groups in the poem were groups his younger self was fine with persecuting. It wasn’t just “did nothing”, he was in part involved. Then he woke up. As you point out, the poem is not about passive bystanders, but about those who think that discrimination is ok so long as the “right” people are the victims.

It’s not just gender studies. The whole CEU university has been forced out of the country and is now moving to Vienna to get out of Hungary.
www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/world/europe/soros-hungary-central-european-university.html

Other universities are being defunded by the Hungarian government.

This is the experience of an international (US) student talking about the last days of the university and how international scholars came to speak:
www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/opinion/hungary-central-european-university-george-soros.html

Noting

I think might be useful to put the original text here SkullPointer

Agreeing with PP ‘let’s not cheer for the fascists’ and that women’s lives are next for restrictions by fascists.

Look now: a new Hungarian government policy of paying women to have multiple babies:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47192612

‘Hungarian women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax, the prime minister has said, unveiling plans designed to boost the number of babies being born.
It was a way of defending Hungary's future without depending on immigration, Viktor Orban said.
The right-wing nationalist particularly opposes immigration by Muslims.
Hungary's population is falling by 32,000 a year, and women there have fewer children than the EU average.
As part of the measures, young couples will be offered interest-free loans of 10 million forint ($36,000), to be cancelled once they have three children.’