The following excerpt is Chapter 6 of Revolution in Mind by Roger Brian Neill. . .
Revolution in Action
SIR GEORGE WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY WAS TO ERUPT IN 1968–69, AND SIMON
Fraser University was soon to follow.
The B.C. Social Credit (Socred) government created a university of
spectacular futuristic design by architect Arthur Erikson.7 The movie industry was to have a heyday making sci-fi flicks onsite. With its elevated quadrangles and prefab concrete-and-glass austerity, not to mention its open concourses and Parthenon staircases, it was a perfect backdrop to the twenty-third century.
Sitting atop Burnaby Mountain with vistas of the Burrard Inlet and Indian Arm Fjord, it was probably Canada’s most spectacular university setting, with the North Shore Mountains dominating the skyline.
I was almost a charter student when I registered in the fall of 1966. During my first semester, I would leave the library at 1:00 a.m. and hitchhike to the bottom of the mountain. Mule deer would frequently be feeding just down the bank from the bus stand. The shoulders of the mountain provided a habitat for bears and cougars. People often got lost on the north side and perished from falls and hypothermia. The Lower Mainland Archery Association Range was located there. While running their bush circuit, you might as well have been on the Sunshine Coast. It was so wild.
For a small-c conservative government, the Socreds were remarkably tolerant and risk-taking in approving SFU’s structural and academic design, which I’m sure they deeply regretted later when an academic Marxist was installed as chair of the Social Sciences department. Dr. Tom Bottomore, an eminently honourable and courageous man, split the department evenly between right- and left-wing teachers and professors. This was to allow the dialectic process to generate a vigorously emergent synthesis: truth. What it, in fact, did was blow the department apart in just three years. The explosion generated a flash of intense heat and light, leaving many “dead and injured” amongst the metaphorical rubble.
Up until that time, it was the most vibrant learning environment one could ever imagine. Halls were filled with union leaders, Communist Party chairpersons, gorgeous female students in see-through blouses, and radical feminists. There were political visitations from the left-wing superstars of our time: Herbert Marcuse (New Left political philosopher), Jerry Rubin (liberation theatre), and representatives of Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party.
The unimaginable phenomenon taking place throughout this social upheaval was a Christian outreach to the hippies and beach bums in Southern California by a pastor by the name of Chuck Smith. The mainline churches tended to reject their presentation and behaviour, not seeing them as a culture to be reached. After the Spirit moved through this man, thousands of long-haired, foul-smelling, barefoot hippies were waiting to become Calvary Chapel pastors and conservative talk show hosts. Today it reaches the tattooed, drug-addicted, body-pierced, green-Mohawk youth with the love of Christ. But I digress.
The Vietnam War was going badly and the Soviet-sponsored Communist bookstores in Vancouver were standing-room only. There were revolutions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Mao’s “great leap forward” (actually backward) was taking place amidst what seemed to be a global phenomenon. In other words, we were winning. It was a carnival atmosphere of drugs and sex and rock n’ roll to the glory of the revolution. Now this was a religion I could believe in!
The once hated and feared Russians became our comrades, and life in the Soviet Union and Cuba wasn’t the way Radio Free America portrayed it. The gulags were a myth and the Chinese Cultural Revolution cleansed the Communist movement of bureaucratic control, returning the revolution to the people. We were later to learn that it was a genocidal orgy of rape, torture, and mutilation that rivalled few others in history.
We “useful idiots,” as Lenin called us, were ready to rally and riot, protest and occupy at the drop of a hat. Every woman, black, Vietnamese, or Hispanic psychopath who got up on a soapbox was a victim of white imperialist racism and couldn’t be confronted, even if they were dead-wrong. In the film Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks depicts the internal abuse and exploitation of idealistic individuals so well. I got progressively angrier at my government, my nation, my race, and my relative prosperity.
This was Bill Clinton’s youth: an epoch of life uncomplicated by humility, integrity, or shame. He injected these characteristics into the White House for eight years to the applause of a significant proportion of the nation.
My classes were extremely exciting, often taught by a Jewish Rhodes scholar who once marched us into the faculty lounge just to embarrass his colleagues. We learned about guerrilla warfare, anarchism, and Mao’s brave march. We learned about the courageous comrades of Leningrad and how the U.S. government was really fascist and not democratic at all. We learned about Marx’s early work and the theorists who sponsored the Marxist-Christian dialogue and wed Marxism to existentialism and psychoanalysis.
None of this is shocking today, since we have a seventies radical in the White House and listen to the same left-wing railing in the universities and on CNN, but in those days there was a price to pay.
In the build-up to a student and teacher’s strike at Simon Fraser University, I was quoted in a newspaper article, and received film coverage from a rally at the university. My wife’s boss recognized my name and asked her about it, whereupon he allegedly pulled out a file drawer, dumped it on the floor, and told her to get down on the floor and refile it.
When we went on strike, we lost all our student loans and bursaries and had to be reinterviewed and sign a disclaimer in order to reregister. My East Coast family was very worried. Their idiot, hedonist son had become a fire-breathing Marxist atheist. My wife’s mother and father, who had survived both Nazi and Soviet occupation during the war and had seen relatives summarily shot before their eyes, were terrified. I was labelled a Bolshevik by one of their relatives and essentially expelled from the house.
We tried to barricade the classrooms from the gears and jocks. Fights broke out in the concourse as the jocks organized to remove the barricades. Chairs flew, there was screaming and bloody noses—not part of one’s normal coursework— and students occupied the administration offices. Ultimately, the president of the university slapped a trusteeship on the PSA department.
As all this was happening, a mild-mannered, sweet-tempered Argentinean from Buenos Aires landed in Vancouver to take a teaching position in Latin American politics. His colleagues had neglected to tell him what was afoot. As soon as he approached a department in chaos, he was asked, by the left- wing professors, to go on strike before receiving his first paycheque, while the conservative faculty petitioned him to maintain classes. He and his wife were devastated. We became fast friends and Amber and I literally saved their mental health by befriending them in the second greatest crisis of their lives.
Pickets were set up and the university was awash with plainclothes RCMP, CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service), NARCS, and newspeople. I had come for an education in the social sciences and found myself bouncing around in a bubbling beaker atop a Bunsen burner set on high heat.
When the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) slapped a censorship on the university for its handling of the department, it created a hiring moratorium. But a radical Maoist revolutionary who had fought with the MPLA8 in Angola took one of the positions; he didn’t care about any of these bourgeois political activities—like strikes—that promoted academic freedom. He knew that power grew from the barrel of a gun (Mao) and that he needed money. In an American university, he had allegedly failed an whole class just so they could “experience Vietnam” and learn the truth about the soon-coming “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He was my instructor. He would hold his classes in the Caribou Pub so the working class could see us studying Mao’s “Little Red Book.”
It was a madhouse, with faculty assigning shoplifting as homework, sleeping with students, carrying on open marriages, committing suicide, and forming communes. Students were dropping out. There were New Age gurus, and people were embracing transcendental meditation. Even the Beatles were going Maoist. Everywhere, you could hear the theme of the soft radicals: “Imagine...”
In other words, it was just like today!
We were dangerous radicals on the social perimeter of an essentially conservative province, nation, and continent. However, we never really knew how dangerous we were. We now know we were being sponsored and encouraged by remarkably grotesque totalitarian regimes who would have incarcerated us first... had we actually been successful. Menachem Begin chronicles this in his book White Nights,9 where in Lithuania the first people the Soviets imprisoned were their allies in the revolution: the Communist Party and labour leaders.
Just as now, thirty-five years later, the Obama White House reflects the same political opinions as we had through people like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Juanita Dunn. Just like Obama’s foot soldiers, we had “one of ours” as prime minister in our own federal government—Pierre Trudeau. He, too, loved snorkelling with Fidel and hated Republicans. Thus, we had an ideological ally at the highest levels.
Meanwhile, our comrade brothers were committing unspeakable acts of genocide, abortion became a major medical industry, and HIV/AIDS and other rampant venereal diseases spread as a result of free love. There were the Chicago Riots, the Civil Rights Movement (as a bright light), the Weathermen (a left-wing U.S. domestic terror group), the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the kidnapping of Patty Hurst. There were the Kent University shootings, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, and that of Martin Luther King Jr. While America convulsed, the Soviet Union and China gobbled up vast territories in Latin America, Africa, and Asia; they had thoroughly infiltrated Europe and the United States.
I was working nights as a childcare counsellor at a residential mental health facility and going to classes during the day. After the trusteeship and the signed disclaimer, things settled down. With the exception of negotiations with the Canadian Association of University Teachers, to lift the state of censure, classes resumed and I set about finishing my BA. As this was happening, the Biafra War came to an end in Nigeria and the first commercial flight of the Boeing 747 put history’s most successful commercial airliner into the air.
Our revolution had failed, but only in a manner of speaking. The trumped-up charges of racism against the professor who catalysed the Sir George Williams riot were dismissed, but students were brought into the university decision-making process. Five of the Chicago Seven, who were charged with conspiracy related to the 1968 Chicago Riots at the Democratic National Convention, settled in favour of the lesser charge of incitement across state lines. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed, to the benefit of the predatory Soviet Union. Three Weathermen blew themselves up trying to assassinate service personnel at a military dance; the survivors didn’t know they were to become frequent flyers in the Obama White House.10
The My Lai Massacre in Vietnam seriously discredited proponents of the Vietnam War and appeared to give the left the moral high ground. The propaganda war waged by the Soviet and Chinese-Communist-sponsored American and European left proved highly successful. Labour unrest in the United States Postal Service required the intervention of the military. The Japanese Red Army hijacked JAL Flight 351, and the Concord made its first supersonic flight. Apollo 13 was launched, the first Earth Day was celebrated in the U.S., and America invaded Cambodia, setting off a firestorm of international protests. China launched its first satellite. The Kent State shootings created martyrs to the anti-Vietnam War cause.
There was, indeed, trouble in paradise. As has always been the case, the leftist denominations fought for power. Labour had its own interests in the West. Many union members were patriotic veterans and knew on which side their bread was buttered.
In New York, unionized workers attacked anti-war protesters in May as the U.S. labour movement’s ideology was challenged by the “New Left.” Patriotism and group interest collided with the New Left’s globalist ideology. The Tupolev Tu-144, the first commercial airliner to acquire Mach-2, represented a coup for the Soviets, who were in competition with the Chinese in determination to defeat the West.
Thus, after the heady days of the prosperous 1950s, the 1970s introduced domestic and international terrorism. Woodstock kicked off a cultural revolution and the Cold War risked becoming hot at any point. Unimaginable technological accomplishments were competing with news of tribal war, international war, civil war, terrorism, and an internal cultural revolution which successfully undermined the West’s resolve to survive. Moral and cultural relativism infected the universities and the left, which couldn’t produce viable economies, democratic freedom, or independent technological innovation, succeeded monumentally at what it did better than anyone else: propaganda.
The cumulative effect of this short list of political and social forces manifested in the 2008 election of Barack Obama, bringing the ideology I believed in into the most powerful office in the world. The road was paved by the disastrous Carter and Clinton years, but the coup de gras was delivered by Obama.
In the hands of the left’s historical revisionists (the rewriting of history in the interests of propaganda), the Vietnam War and Watergate represented coups which live on in the mythology of today’s media. Few have the intestinal fortitude to confront it, since the days of free speech and free press have vanished, with a few notable exceptions. People who believed what I did then now fill university teaching positions and the media. The scandalous propaganda-driven demonization of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George W. Bush, the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin—combined with the “immaculation,” as per Rush Limbaugh, of Barack Obama—may well represent the demise of American democracy.
My 1970 dream was fulfilled thirty-nine years later. Now it is a nightmare.
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7) “Global architect, Arthur Charles Erickson was a passionate advocate of cultural awareness, and a fervent explorer of human and natural environments. His buildings, though remarkably diverse, share deep respect for the context, incomparable freshness and grace, and the dramatic use of space and light. He has brought to his work an understanding of the community of man that, when filtered through his insightful mind and fertile imagination, gives birth to a singular architecture that is in dialogue with the world” (from “Arthur Erickson, Architect,” A Portrait of the Visual Arts in Canada, December 17, 2010 [http://fredericks-artworks.blogspot.ca/2010/12/arthur-erickson- architect.html]).
8) The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola.
9) Menachem Begin, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1979).
10) The Marxist Bill Ayers, author of Weatherman, was to become one of Barack Obama’s mentors and advisors.
*The above excerpt is from pages 47-53, Revolution in Mind by Roger Brian Neill, Word Alive Press (April 14, 2014)