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SPEECH BY JOEL POLLAK CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESSNINTH DISTRICT, ILLINOISKNOX COLLEGE – GALESBURG, ILTHURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2009, 7:00 PM
“The challenge of education in the post-communist era”
It is a great privilege to address you here tonight at Knox College, one of the academicgems of Illinois and the Midwest. It is a privilege made greater still by the knowledge that it washere, almost exactly one hundred fifty-one years ago, that Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A.Douglas held the fifth of their seven debates in the 1858 Senate race.To study the text of that debate is to realize both how much and how little has changed inAmerica. No one today would disagree, as they did, about whether the Declaration of Independence ought to apply to black people as well as white—and if so, to what degree. Today,it is almost hard to believe that was a serious political question. And yet their disagreement aboutthe power of the states relative to the federal government on moral questions remains with ustoday. Lincoln challenged Douglas directly: the argument for states’ rights is easy, he said, if youdo not admit slavery is wrong. But if you do, states’ rights cannot dispose of the issue. Weencounter the same difficulty today when we try to tackle the great dividing issues of the “culturewar”: school prayer, abortion, gay marriage, and so on. The states’ rights argument is notenough, nor have the federal courts given us satisfactory answers. All we can do is turn to eachother in dialogue and debate, as we do here tonight.I am grateful to Rachel Cullin of the Knox College Republicans, and to Kory Atkinsonand the Intellectual Diversity Foundation, for making my visit to Knox possible, and for all thatthey are doing on campus. Most colleges and universities in the United States today believediversity means a diversity of people alone, rather than a diversity of ideas as well. It may betrue, of course, that we are more likely to find different ideas if we assemble students and facultyfrom as wide a range of backgrounds as possible. But we ought not make the mistake of  believing our ideas are the fated products of our origins. Demography is not destiny.We should also remember that ideas do not always exist in a realm of their own—noteven in Galesburg—and that there is much that our experiences can teach us about our ideas.Discussions such as this are a special kind of experience, where we can push each other to testour most heartfelt convictions. It is my experience that experiences such as these are all too rareon university campuses—the very place where they should be most natural and ordinary.Therefore I salute the Foundation, the College, and all of you who are here tonight. Other colleges—including Harvard, my alma mater—can learn from your example.When Kory asked me how I wanted to structure the question-and-answer period later thisevening, I replied that I wanted it to be open and spontaneous. I am aware that I am here partly because I myself dared to ask a question at a university lecture that dared to give students the1
 
opportunity.In April, as I was completing my law degree at Harvard, I attended a forum featuringCongressman Barney Frank. I asked him the question that seemed obvious to me but which I hadnot heard anyone in Washington or the media ask: “How much, if any, responsibility do
 you
have for our financial crisis?” Congressman Frank lost his temper and immediately labeled me as“right wing.” The truth is that I am a Republican today, but in college I was a radical Democrat.And I was just as prone to asking simple but difficult questions then as I am today, even if my perspective has changed.In that same forum, more than ten years ago, I challenged Michael Moore, who had justscreened a movie called
The Big One
about low-wage workers in America. I asked him, quitesimply, whether he had paid the interns who had worked on his film. He admitted that he hadnot, and the audience turned against him.I didn’t ask that question to score political points. I asked it because I had begun toquestion some of the left-wing orthodoxies I had imbibed in the first two years of my Harvardeducation. That year, my junior year, I had added environmental science as a major—or concentration, as we called it then. What stunned me about environmental science as a disciplinewas the thinly-veiled desire for control that seemed to lurk in places—not just control of  pollution, but also control of production, control of people’s everyday lives. It contrasted sharplywith the spirit of my first major, social studies—which, though certainly leftist, still nurturedsomething of the romantic desire for emancipation.And so I asked questions. I got involved in left-wing protest movements, but I usuallyended up organizing the discussions instead of the demonstrations. It was a deeply exciting andfrustrating time for me. Eventually, I concluded that I was not going to find the answers in thelibrary. They might have been there, but I didn’t seem to know what the right questions were. Or  perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right places. Of the many disciplines I was interested in, perhapsthe one I neglected most was history. Of course I took a few history classes, but my interest wasgenerally in which side was right and which side was wrong, rather than on what actuallyhappened. I believe that is true of most students in our contemporary era.It is telling, though unfortunate, that President Barack Obama has chosen not to attendceremonies commemorating the 20
th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall next month. Inmany of his speeches and gestures, the President cuts against the grain of American norms, buton this occasion he represents the fashion of our age perfectly. Few of us seem to know or carewhat the events of 1989 meant for the world—or, indeed, for the United States. We foughtagainst communism for two generations, yet we have never managed to commemorate the heroesof that struggle. Nor have we bothered to remind ourselves what we were fighting, or why.I am a member of the first generation to grow up in a post-communist world. At schooland university, we were taught little about communism, save for the McCarthy era. The lessonwe took from that episode is that it is far worse to accuse someone of being a communist thanactually to be one. We went on class trips to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and learned importantlessons about the horrors of fascism and the dangers of bigotry. Yet there is no museum to teach2
 
America’s youth about the millions who were killed by communists across the world in their insane pursuit of utopia.I ought to have known better. I grew up in Skokie, Illinois, among both Holocaustsurvivors and Soviet refugees. A distant cousin of mine had been imprisoned in the Gulag for  being a Zionist. He later emigrated to Israel and wrote a book about his experiences: he called it
Short Stories of the Long Death
.But I was swept along with the fashionable skepticism of the 1990s. Not only did we takefreedom for granted, we viewed it as a sort of cruel joke played on the poor and themarginalized. What good was freedom without substantive equality? The end of communism leftits underlying political impulse fully intact. That impulse—crude in the way it reduces all moralquestions to material terms, enduring because greater equality only whets the appetite for further leveling—is the essence of intellectual life in America today. It has escaped the academic worldand now occupies the commanding heights of power.We are governed today by the members of two distinct but related cohorts—those of mygeneration, who are largely ignorant about communism, and those of the generation before,many of whom suspected all along that the fight against communism around the world wasmerely a tool of oppression at home. What is striking about the emerging authoritarian impulsesof the White House—the attacks on Fox News, the attempts to encourage citizens to report eachother’s “fishy” views on health care, the singling out of particular interest groups and individuals —is not just that they resemble the practices of communist regimes, but that our leaders seemunaware of that fact.We are witness today to the triumph of Saul Alinsky, who sought in his book 
 Rules For  Radicals
to separate “revolution” from communism so that communism’s basic instinct—“to use power for a more equitable distribution of the means of life,” in his words—could survive theCold War and live to fight another day. I, too, might be celebrating Alinsky’s victory today had Inot had the opportunity to experience the reality of communist governance firsthand, albeit inrump form, in my native South Africa, where I studied and worked after college and where thehopes of democracy have been thwarted by a power-hungry, corrupt and intolerant ruling party.In South Africa, I learned two critical lessons about the communist impulse. One lessonis that it is a policy disaster: vast increases in government size and power inevitably hurt the people the people they are supposedly intended to benefit. The other is that the communistimpulse cannot tolerate truth. It regards truth and democracy as mere instruments, not ends inthemselves.These lessons were reinforced when I returned to Harvard to study law. I often arguedwith classmates and professors who joined the totalitarians of the official internationalcommunity in accusing the U.S. and Israel of “war crimes,” of gross breaches of internationaltreaties and human rights law in the fight against terror. When we actually examined the text of these laws and treaties, almost invariably the democracies were in the right, and the terror groupsand their sponsors in the wrong. At that point the argument always changed: suddenly the criticsinsisted that international and human rights law were unfair, having been written by strong3
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