Teaching Students to Hate

James Lewis has a provocative piece in the American Thinker asking where the Virginia Tech shooting may have learned to hate:

Yes, I know. Tens of thousands of ordinary college students are lonely, full of rage, lost and frustrated. A few percent are psychotically disturbed, and some of them can kill. Our big factory colleges are alienating. Take millions of adolescents, and at any time there are bound to be quite a few confused and seething souls walking loose. Just visit downtown in any American or European city, and you can see all the lost and disturbed living in their private hells. And no, that doesn't excuse executing thirty-two innocents.

Still, I wonder --- was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes --- did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently --- was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho's English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.

Just check out their websites.

He gives a number of interesting examples of the kind of stuff the English department at VT is teaching. So, how did the English Department react to the shooting by one of their majors? With this:

"We do not understand this tragedy 



We know we did nothing to deserve it


But neither does a child in Africa 



Dying of AIDS


Neither does the baby elephant watching his community 



Be devastated for ivory 



... Neither does the Mexican child looking 



For fresh water


... Neither does the Appalachian infant killed 



By a boulder 



Dislodged

Because the land was destabilized"

James Lewis explains that nonsense:

In other words: We didn't do nuthin.' It ain't our fault. It's greedy capitalism's fault. We don't teach civilized behavior, the value of reason, the cultural foundations of Western thought. We teach adolescent rage, because that's how we make a living. We do narcissistic "research" in Marxist analysis of American brutal capitalism. We're good people. See how much we care about AIDS in Africa. Don't blame us. We ain't responsible.

The other day I posted an item suggesting that perhaps Cho received some of his hate training from anti-American/anti-capitalistic college professors. I may have been right.