The historian of reason Mark Ajita once described college as the place where young people go into massive debt and enslave their future selves so “they can go there and read books about how it shouldn’t be this way.”
Never has this been more apparent than this spring as the state turned on American college students like a kindergarten version of the USSR:
“The opaque [Soviet] regime had originated as a conspiracy and had never ceased being one, while fighting against what one scholar has aptly called the ‘omnipresent conspiracy.’ The plots could be so convoluted that many of those involved did not even know about them. (As Macduff says in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘Cruel are the times when we are traitors / And do not know ourselves’).”
Since April 17, when students at Columbia University set up a protest encampment to communicate their horror and disgust at Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, protests have spread throughout America’s colleges and universities.
The state has pretended to believe there is an omnipresent, antisemitic conspiracy deep within the American Academy. A convoluted conspiracy directed by a new Axis of Evil. The NYPD, in true knockoff NKVD style, recently held up a textbook on the history of terrorism as evidence of a plot to…do something…bad…to Israel?
Cruel are the times when we are traitors to a genocidal, foreign government / And do not know ourselves.
The state’s response to this “vast conspiracy” has been to put boots on the ground, dish out beat downs, and arrest thousands of protesters. Which is sick, because the state’s administrative interior troops (the police) are beating on our young adults for protesting a foreign government’s wanton and gleeful killing of children.
America was once a nation where a man who caught a beating from the cops could be confident and proud to know it was all for his nation state. I for one don’t want our cops riding foreign motorcycles or beating on us for foreign governments. We must restore integrity to police beatings! But I digress.
The ad hominem attacks on the students were no less swift than the police crack downs. One of the most ridiculous accusations is that they are communists. Communists are hard people who are almost as good at enduring suffering as they are at inflicting it. The Russian state murdered Vladimir Lenin’s older brother. Lenin returned the favor by murdering the entire Russian state. That’s a communist. An American college student telling you she’s a communist is like a stripper telling you she’s a marine biologist.
What the college students actually are, predominantly, is anti-capitalist and government supremacist. The United States has a capitalist economic-social order but an anti-capitalist cultural order. Our college students are shaped by this culture as they consume music, television shows, movies, novels and news.
A recent movie that deploys the anti-capitalist, government supremacist narrative with epic precision is The Beekeeper. Starring Jason Statham, the film boasts the tagline “Expose the Corruption. Protect the Hive.”
The corruption is capitalism, portrayed as a massive network of boiler rooms running phishing scams. This has nothing to do with a system of purposeful individuals engaging in voluntary association and voluntary exchange guided by prices through interactions of supply and demand. But close enough for Hollywood.
The hive is the entire social order, which is downright creepy. Even a genocide apologist like Yuval Noah can tell you bees are an inflexible species:
“There is basically just one way in which a bee hive can function, and if there is a new opportunity or a new danger the bees cannot reinvent the social system overnight.”
Statham portrays a former “beekeeper,” an operative of a government agency “completely outside the chain of command.” Statham spends the movie going full Waco on the evil “capitalists” who swindled his friend and drove her to suicide.
The hierarchy of social value presented by the film has the state’s military-intelligence apparatus at the top. Then private companies that contract with the state. Then the cops. And finally, the humble workers.
The villain, an arch capitalist portrayed by Josh Hutcherson, runs the family business: Danforth Enterprises. The company manages a “classified algorithmic data mining software package” for the intelligence community like a fictionalized version of Palantir. But our villain used the software to target “the weakest in our society” for the phishing scam.
“I taught CIA software to hunt money and not terrorists,” he says.
Hutcherson’s chief of security, portrayed by Jeremy Irons, is a former director of the CIA. He reinforces the government supremacist mythology while lamenting his role within the vile capitalist system:
“I did 35 years of loyal government service. Culminating as director of the world’s premiere intelligence agency. I could have done anything. But I chose this job as a favor to your mother.”
Hutcherson’s mother, portrayed by Jemma Redgrave, is president of the United States.
The WASPy name “Danforth” implies an America controlled by patrician Protestants, which is really very adorable. One would have to be extremely color blind to not notice how not color blind our government’s highest echelon is. To be fair to…whoever dominates the government, the waspy WASPs gave us Vietnam.
When an active beekeeper is dispatched to take out Statham, we get another fun Hollywood trope: The government trained him to kill. Now it’s trying to kill him. But it can’t. Statham cannot be stopped. He meticulously hunts down Hutcherson, who reveals he used his ill-gotten gains to fund his mother’s presidential campaign. If only we could get the money out of politics and put the state at the exclusive service of the workers! So sad. Well, at least we can watch Statham kill Hutcherson.
American students no doubt watched this film in their dorm rooms this spring. So don’t be surprised if they think money is making the Israelis kill babies. The students protesting the slaughter in Gaza still have a great point. It shouldn’t be this way.
