Struggle Sessions

From FIRE: Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Tensions at Yale University hit a boiling point yesterday after an email about Halloween costumes created a week-long controversy on campus.

Students called for the resignation of Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis after she responded to an email from the school’s Intercultural Affairs Council asking students to be thoughtful about the cultural implications of their Halloween costumes. According to The Washington Post, students are also calling for the resignation of her husband, Master of Silliman College, Nicholas Christakis, who defended her statement.

FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff recorded video of students confronting Nicholas Christakis yesterday in the courtyard of the Silliman College dormitory complex at Yale. Lukianoff was on Yale’s campus to speak at a conference on issues related to free speech in higher education.

[Note the synchronized finger snapping - an indication that this is a specific group - a la "Occupy Wall Street" surrounding the professor being "struggled"]

Lots of people on the Right call them “Hothouse Flowers” and “Precious Snowflakes.” That a possibility, but I view them differently.   It's assumed that they are what they claim, emotionally fragile children who need protection from the world around them.

HERE is what they are protesting: a memo about allowing people to wear what they want for Halloween.

Flowers and snowflakes don’t surround a professor at a university and demand an apology for standing up for free expression. They don’t demand his firing. These are not people who are so fragile emotionally that they curl up in a ball because of a word that “triggers” deep seated fears.

These are tough cadres.

They are America's Mao Youth.

They have absorbed an ideology that allows them to give vent to their emotions and ideology.  They can ban conservatives from speaking on campus.  They can destroy newspapers that print ideas with which they disagree.  They can accuse an innocent man of rape, destroy his life and think it's a good thing.  Theirs is an ideology that is quite often blatantly racist, sexist and definitely hostile to their class and ideological enemies.  

We appear to have forgotten the Mao era.  He first proposed “let a hundred flowers bloom.” After enough people believed that it gave them the right to speak out and expose themselves, the hammer fell. Mao’s cadres, often students, participated in “Struggle Sessions” in which the victim was required to admit to his or her "crimes."

From Wikipedia

A struggle session was a form of public humiliation and torture used by the Communist Party of China in the Mao Zedong era to shape public opinion and to humiliate, persecute, or execute political rivals and class enemies. In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit to various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until he or she confessed. Struggle sessions were often held at the workplace of the accused, but were sometimes conducted in sports stadiums where large crowds would gather if the target was famous enough

A Struggle Session:

You Xiaoli was standing, precariously balanced, on a stool. Her body was bent over from the waist into a right angle, and her arms, elbows stiff and straight, were behind her back, one hand grasping the other at the wrist. It was the position known as "doing the airplane." Around her neck was a heavy chain, and attached to the chain was a blackboard, a real blackboard, one that had been removed from a classroom at the university where You Xiaoli, for more than ten years, had served as a full professor. On both sides of the blackboard were chalked her name and the myriad crimes she was alleged to have committed....

The scene was taking place at the university, too, in a sports field at one of China's most prestigious institutions of higher learning. In the audience were You Xiaoli's students and colleagues and former friends. Workers from local factories and peasants from nearby communes had been bused in for the spectacle. From the audience came repeated, rhythmic chants.... "Down with You Xiaoli! Down with You Xiaoli!"

You can almost hear the finger snap, snap, snapping.

We don’t live in a communist dictatorship although college campuses house quite a few of Mao's admirers. But the methods are eerily familiar. People who have committed though crime are not required to “do the airplane” on a college campus .... yet. Instead, they must apologize for speaking banned thoughts, and then they must be fired.

We have imported communist-lite Struggle Sessions to Yale and other American campuses.  They are not brought to you by Hothouse Flowers or Precious Snowflakes but by America's Mao Youth.