July 15, 2003

Communism Being Advocated in Class at UC Santa Barbara

In a million years I could never have imagined anything this crazy. At UC Santa Barbara, the Professors are teaching the students to be Communists. It’s being done in the Film Theory Department.

[Professor] Branigan has tangled brown-gray hair, a shaggy beard, large glasses coated with flecks of dandruff and fingerprints, and wears an oversized gray sweater and corduroy pants. As he speaks, his hands grasp at the air, shaping it as he shapes his thoughts. He punches certain words out with an odd, inflectionless emphasis. “The nature of the photography: Benjamin says the camera strips people who are in front of the camera lenslike actorsand alienaaaates them from their labor! Alienaaaation! False coooonsciousness! ... Benjamin says the camera does not show the equipment that’s used to make the film. It obscures or hides or masks THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION! Now in Marxism if you hide the process of production, you are obscuring and further alienating the labor that goes into that, the BOOODILY labor that yoooou are contributing to that manufacture. OK? Which is a bad, bad fact. . . .”

Well, surely that was just one lecture. That’s not really what they’re teaching. That would be absurd. Even Russia has abandoned Communism, for gosh sakes. Let’s see how a UC Santa Barbara student sums up what he’s being taught:

“I love film theory,” says Chris Scotten. ... “We learn how film psychologically manipulates us, and the power inherent in the language of cinema. It can be two things, a useful propaganda tool in a communist revolution, or part of the capitalist superstructure, a way of lulling the working class into a haze to subdue them and give them an escape from the pressures of reality. The old communists writing about film theory in Russia and Germany really had something to say, and it’s still relevant today. You’ve got about six companies that own the biggest, most awesome propaganda machine in the history of the whole wretched world. What are the consequences of that?”

Did you see that? “A useful propaganda tool in a communist revolution”?

From Kevin Brownlow, the world’s leading silent movie historian, author of “The Parade’s Gone By . . .,” and co-producer, with David Gill, of acclaimed documentaries: “You would think, from this closed-circuit attitude to teaching, that such academics would be politically right wing. .... But they are not right wing. They are, regrettably, usually left wingquite aggressively Marxistwhich makes the whole situation even more alarming.”

These ultra-leftwing professors are actually advocating Communism. The author of this article, David Weddle, was shocked to find out he’d spent thousands of dollars to have his daughter taught that she ought to be a Marxist.

This is just too ridiculous.