Universities Were Always Extreme

The Nazi cheers of Sieg Heil didn’t start out in Munich, but in Massachusetts.

The Nazi chant was borrowed from Harvard football cheers and imported to Germany by Ernst “Putzy” Hanfstaengl, a Harvard man in good standing who befriended Hitler and helped build a more respectable brand for the National Socialists.

“Putzy” was one of a number of Ivy League elites who were enchanted by the Third Reich.

Socialism forcefully implemented by great men, whether it was FDR, Mussolini, Stalin or Hitler, was the great obsession of America elites of the era who were convinced that it was the only answer to the chaos of capitalism and the hurly burly of democracy and technology.

Columbia University, whose Hamas occupation fills the front pages of every newspaper in the country while driving Jewish students off campus, has changed little in some ways. A hundred years ago, Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler was laboring to keep Jewish students out while celebrating Mussolini’s fascism. Butler’s admiration for fascism was common among university presidents, leaders of society and even in the FDR administration.

Not just remastered football cheers, but eugenics, another obsession of Ivy League elites, made its way over to Germany where it was implemented in a far deadlier fashion, not only against Jews, but against German disabled and others deemed to be “life unworthy of life” in keeping with the ideology whose adherents included Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

Peeling back the layers of the dominant ideologies that Ivy Leaguers hold today leads to National Socialist or Communist ideologies. The Ivy League elites who were environmentalists, socialists, globalists and population control advocates a century ago were strongly influenced by these totalitarian ideologies that called for tyranny and mass murder.

They weren’t liberals then and they’re not liberals now.

A century ago they believed that human beings were defined by race and they still believe it now. A century ago they were convinced that mankind would go extinct unless strong leaders clamped down on independent thinking and undertook emergency measures to impose order. And they still believe it now. A century ago they believed that the only way forward was a planned economy, expert rule and the necessary deaths of certain people and groups.

Do they still believe it now?

The complete support for Hamas at Columbia, Yale and other Ivy League schools took some by surprise, but the idea that elite academic institutions ever had their politics defined by reason, liberalism and a respect for the rights of man has no basis in reality. While these universities and many others had some brilliant professors and students, and provided a rich environment of methodical learning at one time, university politics were always shot through with radicalism.

Even early in the twentieth century, the poison Ivy Leagues were filled with loathing for Americans, democracy and free enterprise while being attracted by any radical ideology. The question was only whether the Marxists or the National Socialists would triumph on campus.

After National Socialism died a mostly unlamented death, Marxism and then, a late entry, Islamism began a battle for the hearts and minds of America’s elites. What does Hamas offer the Ivy League? Much like Nazism and Communism, it believes that America, individualism and free enterprise are worthless, and that only a revolutionary ideology implemented by force can turn around our society. Few of the Yale or Columbia non-Muslim students cheering for Hamas believe in the message of the Koran, but they find it more believable than the American one.

Radicalizing Ivy League students is a lot like tripping the blind. Between the wealthy Third World activists who claim to be victims of racism and the radical rich brats whose hobby is revolution, they need little convincing to support any cause, no matter how horrible and evil, as long as it’s directed against America and is a good fit for their addiction to virtue signaling.

Generations of Muslim Brotherhood activists and their leftist allies did for Hamas and the Jihad what “Putzy” did for the Nazis. They made them respectable by rebranding them, giving them some new chants, logos, and an agenda that is less religious and more anti-American.

The Jew-hatred of “Putzy” or Hatem ‘Hate’em’ Bazian, the professor behind the campus Jihad, made them more popular on campuses where many students, especially those most likely to join leftist movements, quietly resented the competition from the sizable number of Jewish students. Turning on those students by supporting Hitler or Hamas was all too easy.

The multicultural Nazis of today may be more racially diverse than their forebears in the thirties, but, much as then, their intellectual diversity runs the gamut from one totalitarian movement to another. Back then the Ivy League was torn between Fascism and Marxism, now it’s Marxism and Islamism, which have signed their own sort of Hitler-Stalin pact, enabling them to team up against America, Christians, Jews and the entire fabric of Western civilization.

The one thing that the Ivy League can agree on is that the world should be run by the right sorts of people and that they are just the right sort of people to run it. Behind the hysterical rallies and the feigned victimhood is a deep contempt and even hatred for much of humanity.

Right now the campus Hamas Nazis may be cheering for the death of Jews, but tomorrow they will be cheering once again for race riots burning down cities or for some new evil wave of terror. The real question is not just whom they hate, but whom they don’t hate.

That hatred is why the Ivy League has always been so easy to radicalize with a steady drip feed of students eager to be taught that everything they grew up with is a sham, that nothing can be trusted and that the only way to save the world is to put them in charge of managing it.

Generations of Ivy Leaguers have been told at ponderous graduation ceremonies that they are the hope of tomorrow, and that history has tasked them with solving the troubles of the nation and the world by implementing the dogma of the moment. No king was more blatantly endowed with the right to rule without the fitness for it than these puffed up and well-connected children.

Each ruling class is more vicious, hollow and inept than the last. From cheering Nazis to cheering Hamas, the only thing the Ivy League elites have learned is an appetite for destruction.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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