Michael Marrus, the history professor whose racially offensive remarks have led to a public controversy at the University of Toronto's Massey College, has submitted his resignation as a Senior Fellow from the college, but says he is "disheartened" by the lack of dialogue between him and those who asked for his resignation.
"Where was the due process, where was the effort to hear me out, where was the effort to relate to 30 years of scholarship that have a lot to do with human rights? There is something cruel and reckless about this campaign," he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
He had been trying to apologize for the comment he made, e-mailing the person he hurt and offended and trying to talk to them, but his apology was not accepted, he said.
"I was so sorry for having wounded someone," Dr. Marrus said. "But nothing availed," he said.
The resignation comes after an incident during a lunch last week that gave rise to a petition that was signed by almost 200 students and faculty at U of T. (more...)
I have to view my alma mater's ideological "purification" of a Holocaust Studies historian with a jaded eye. At the college I enrolled in as a freshman many years ago, there was blatant holocaust denial among the group of students I was introduced to by my don. Some expressed enthusiastic support for Ernst Zundel, Canada's most notorious Nazi apologist. In time, I discovered I had been placed among many sons and daughters of immigrants from former Axis countries -- Austria, Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Hungary, and Romania -- presumably because I am of Polish ancestry and served in the military, and would therefore be anti-communist as they were. However, these closet Nazis were also highly antisemitic, which I would not countenance, and I strengthened my resolve to befriend Jews despite the pressure to ostracize them.
This college also pushed an ideology of eugenics and population control, and cleverly utilized Culture Marxism as a fig leaf to mask racial discrimination with sexual identity, thereby neutralizing civil rights discourse. My American college don, who had studied under Herbert Marcuse at Columbia, was fully complicit in this scheme. He often affirmed his idolization of Margaret Atwood, then Reader in Residence at Massey College and eventually joined her in that Mordor of Canadian social engineering. The trajectory of a fascist provocateur to elitist Massey College makes perfect sense in the context of Canada's complicity in the Nazi ratlines. Against all of this is the backdrop of the technical architect of the holocaust, IBM, as the largest benefactor of the university's engineering and computer science schools.
So, an observer must take care to avoid the hidden agendas lurking in our institutions. The expulsion of a holocaust historian over racial issues in a school that has harbored closet Nazis is a bit twisted. And, boycotts of Israel by academics, despite the real sufferings of Palestinians, need to be examined in light of latent antisemitism in education. Media headlines tend to focus on Nazi thugs marching in Canadian small towns. However, the few who have scrutinized Canada's elite institutions from the inside know the rot that has coagulated beneath the genteel surface of high society, and where power and wealth waits to fuel horrors like Nazi Germany.
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