by Anthony Oluwatoyin
The recently released 10th Anniversary issue of Antithesis, Simon Fraser University’s Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) magazine, is a must-read for all taxpayers of the province and anyone who wants a good peek into the future of our politics and journalism.
PIRG is part of an American-based left-wing activism group going all the way back to the late 1960s, early 1970s, inspired by then consumer advocate and later US Presidential candidate Ralph Nader. PIRGs were and still are mainly centered on University campuses. The one at SFU (SFPIRG), originally BCPIRG, was organized around 1981.
PIRG power at SFU is now at such a point that every single student is a member of the group. And not by application, either. It’s automatic with enrolment, and there is only a brief period each semester when a student may apply for a refund of fees. That’s right. With involuntary membership comes a $3 fee for each full-time student ($1.50, part-time) that the group gets, straight from the administration. At 25,000 students, this is serious money. Not to mention taxation without representation.
So what SFPIRG stands for is not something to dismiss. Its 10 year-old magazine, Antithesis, calls itself “alternative”. Well, it’s certainly different. The Spring 2005, 10th Anniversary edition is chock-full of stuff on “white male predators”, the “apartheid” system of Canada (and, of course, the US), and complaints about the “much too white” membership of the environmental movement. Enough to make you think you’re reading a National Geographic spin-off: The Wild White North edition. Or else, SFU is being run by a Brave New Black KKK.
Antithesis, though billed as “The Zine of SFPIRG”, bears the editorial disclaimer that its “views and opinions are not necessarily those of SFPIRG”.
What is really interesting is what the magazine does not disclaim. “We do not perpetuate the myth of media objectivity”, it declares. Adding: “We reserve the right to our biases”.
Except that the biases are all anti-white. Is SFU now a bastion of what I call, ethno-masochism? I refer to people who seem to get their jollies bashing their own culture and heritage. All too often these people are white. The master practitioner of this anti-ideology is, of course, Michael Moore, of Stupid White Men. And, I must tell you, I still don’t quite know what to make of these people. Seriously, would white liberals publish a book with the title Stupid Black Men, even if it were written by a black man?
But even stupid white Moore has more recently been eclipsed in the ethno-masochismic morass by US Chairman of the Democratic National Party, the notorious Howard (“Screeeem”) Dean. Dean referred to the Republican Party as basically just a “white Christian” party. Wow. Do you really think that if you referred to an inner city neighbourhood as basically “just a black area”, the accuracy of the description would even come into play with the Commissars of Political Correctness?
Not surprisingly, this double standard indulgence actually encourages more and more non-white youth to be almost viscerally critical of white culture. But isn’t SFU, like any university, supposed to train for broad-based insights that transcend ethnocentric bias?
My deeper fear is that such sentiments must backfire. People hear a whine fest about “the white man”; “the white system”, and automatically, people think the complainant is black. That’s the ugly truth of race reality. White echoes black; black echoes white. Any child in the sandbox will tell you that black/white is the most elementary of all binary systems. Ying/Yang. Tall/short. Blond/brunette. Clean/dirty. Rich/poor. That’s just the way the brain works.
In other words, the vernacular of race in North America, unfortunately, has an incestuous link in basic biology. You would think then that white liberals would be careful not to bait white people into race resentment. After all, it’s not the white liberal who is going to be the victim of the backlash. Why would white democrats want to put blacks in the bull’s eye of such a perfectly predictable provocation?
Does SFU care if Antithesis turns our very multicultural province into an Al-Qaeda of resentment and envy? SFPIRG boasts that it is autonomous of SFU administration. But where is the accountability to student diversity? Never mind white students who are not ashamed of Western values. What about non-white students who are more pro-capitalism, pro-democracy than any living white group? Is that a misnomer? An oxymoron? And that would be because of …? What? Their skin color? (Holy Pigment.)
Antithesis is named for the method of criticism and analysis that goes back to Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, who took it over from the German philosopher, Hegel. But there are three parts to the method. First, there is the thesis, stating the position in question. The Antithesis, which comes next, actually states the other side, the opposition. Without the thesis, what is the Antithesis counter to? What is it anti? Last is the most important stage, the synthesis, which tries to resolve the conflict between the first two, looking for common ground, the happy medium.
SFU’s Antithesis is teaching our future reporters and politicians something even worse than bias. It is actually telling them to forget the other side altogether. From Victoria, BC, all the way to Ottawa, you can see where that leads.
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