Equity advocates: The New Komsomol

'Political warfare officers' are now routine appointments in Canadian Schools and Universities

Equity Advocates

In Canadian Universities, recruitment committees are now asked first to rank candidates’ DEI statements. They are judged by authenticity, commitment and real life experience. Just to make double sure, step two is that the candidates are ranked by how much their recruitment as individuals would ‘advance the university’s equity goals’. So if you are white and the goal is to recruit more black people, then your ranking will be …hmmmm… zero presumably. Only after this initial filtering, are academic qualifications considered.

At this point, it’s worth asking if this intersectional heuristic can be quantified. As in Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, the ideal situation would be a ‘handicapper general’ who could carefully calibrate the precise degree of unearned privilege with an equally exact measure of disadvantage: beautiful people wearing sacks on their heads; strong people being weighed down; clever people being drugged etc. Of course, we can’t get there overnight. But for the recruitment committees in question, it would surely be useful to have some kind of easy applicable metric. Is whiteness equivalent to say 5 peer reviewed journal articles — and deserving of a corresponding deduction? Perhaps the Spanish (who after all, in terms of melanin are close to ‘hispanic’) and the Irish (with their freckles) could get a dispensation and a smaller deduction? Tall blond South Africans would clearly get a heavier deduction (even if they have had members of their family killed by activists from the ‘Kill the Boers’ faction). Germans and Anglos of all persuasions would perhaps be excluded from applying all together for the capital crime of Western-Civilization. Either which way, to make it fair — and this is all about fairness — the process needs to be made transparent and quantified.

Now, to make sure that the recruitment committees get the message, most universities insist on the presence of an ‘equity advocate’. This person — selected on the basis of their commitment to the ideological programme of progressivism (which after all any normal, good or mentally-sound person would assent to) — is present to ensure that all members of the committee attend to their duties faithfully. They operate by cajoling, shaming and embarrassing potential dissidents, and by making it clear that any ‘wrong-think’ will be communicated immediately to those on high.

Political Commissars

You could think of the role as part stooge and part spy, but really it is identical to the political commissars of the Soviet Union: representatives of the Party — ‘politruk’ — who were present in all organizations at all levels in a parallel structure to keep an eye on management and ensure compliance with broader party objectives. A portmanteau of политический руководитель (politicheskiy rukovoditel) or ‘political instructor’ the politruk was responsible for ideological conformation and education within a given organization — initially in the military, ensuring political control. The Soviets modelled their own commissars on the ‘commissaire politiques’ who were assigned to French Revolutionary Army in the 1790s. They were used by the Russians to control the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War; but also in the German Wehrmacht by the Nazi Party, for the same reason (Nationalsozialistische Führungsoffiziere (National Socialist Leadership Officers); and they play the same role today in the People’s Liberation Army. The Chinese term (T政戰官) best captures the essence of the role. They call them ‘political warfare officers’.

Now these political warfare officers were necessary to keep the institutions of civil society — and particularly universities and the military — ideologically pure and ‘on message’. For any incumbent revolutionary party, the danger of internal dissent, or even just diversion, was real. From the execution of Robespierre onwards, revolutionary praxis became synonymous with cycles of more or less bloody purges. This process of ideological purification could involve wholesale genocide against classes of people, internal exile, prison camps, selective purges, public rituals of humiliation, show trials and executions — or simply demotions, organizational exiles, fines, punishments, and other sanctions — perhaps against family. The Chinese social credit system provides access to (or denies) housing, first class travel, foreign or internal visas and work permits, health care and even sports facilities. It is basically the East German system of self-regulating, ubiquitous spying and reporting, come of age in era of Internet and social media.

However, even the Chinese system in so far as it is directed at adults, is inefficient. All revolutionary parties have recognized that it is much cheaper and more effective to prevent ideological problems at source. Once whole populations of generic enemies have been eliminated — Kulaks, bourgeoise, capitalists, or in Germany, communists and Jews (they all went for sexual deviants and Jews) — the next step was to focus on children. Effective socialization was always the best vehicle or social order and ideological conformity.

The way to do this was to abolish all independent leisure and youth organizations and bring everything under the umbrella of the party. So there were communist or Nazi camping organizations, hitchhiking groups, football clubs, athletics competitions, dance clubs etc. You name it — and the party would be there for you. And in all cases there would be an apparatchik of the party, ensuring that the organization and its members were promoting the broad objectives of the party which is to say, proletarian brotherhood, international communism, national socialism etc.

Progressive Political Warfare Officers

Now I’m speaking in the past tense — except for China, where the system is alive and well. But in fact, it never really went away in the West either. Marxist radicals — utopians who wish to create heaven on earth in the here and now — are still mincing their zero sum equations, coming up with lists of enemies and friends, and jostling for control of all the institutions of civil society. Since 2020, this has become ever more overt. The examples are so numerous as to be boring at this point. Last week it was the Shakespeare trust — dedicated to promoting the bard — wanting to decolonize Stratford; or La Leche League promoting chest feeding; or the National Trust framing the UK’s architectural and landscape history entirely in the frame of slavery and white privilege bla bla bla. It’s enough to give any normal person a headache just thinking about it.

However, in Canada, they are taking the whole Communist/Nazi model to the next level. The Canadian Association of Principals is now promoting the idea of ‘equity champions’ in every school.

“The importance of principals and vice-principals in leading anti-oppression work in schools cannot be understated. The Wallace report reminds us that “the effectiveness of the principal is more important than the effectiveness of a single teacher” (Wallace Foundation, 2021) and other research shows that “to enhance staff capacity, principals must directly address issues of race, provide ongoing training that focuses on equity, empower staff members with greater professional freedom, and hire specifically with social justice in mind”(Ross, J. A., & Berger, M. J. (2009).”

According to Irfan Toor (he/him), Social Justice and Anti-Oppression Advisor, the work of becoming an “anti-oppressive leader” or “using an ‘equity lens’ “ starts with

“reflection of one’s self, experiences, attitudes, behaviours and past decisions. This is often challenging and often evokes emotional responses including guilt, resentment or fear'“

This is of course the confessional that characterized the infamous struggle sessions of the Chinese cultural revolution.

The point of a struggle session, ultimately, is to get you to confess to made-up crimes on contrived terms that you and others will adopt as a result of confessing (New Discourses, Bulletin, Ep. 69)

In the Soviet Union the forced confession didn’t lead to rehabilitation, but rather to summary execution. In Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, the old Bolshevik Rubashov recognized, during his own show trial, that the process was completely consonant with his own affiliation to the Party. In the end, before being executed — and true to his own lifelong commitment to the cause — he makes a full and public confession to crimes that he never committed.

Describing the role of the new equity advocates, the CDI chief commissar asks:

“How can you lead your staff down a journey that involves acknowledging that they are likely a product of and a participant in a system that continues to perpetuate harm on students? Ask yourself the question – who didn’t I know in school and what was their experience like?”

This paraphrases the questions put to Rubashov by his interrogator:

“In what ways, during the course of my life-long and heroic action in support of the Party, may I have acted, albeit accidentally, contrary to the proletarian revolution, against the Party, and against the interests of the People”

In a bastardized version of the doctrine of original sin, guilt is assumed — as a function of identity. ‘White’, ‘cis’ (sic), ‘heterosexual’, ‘European’, ‘male’ — these are all markers of new ‘bourgeois deviationism’

Then of course, as with all revolutionists, there is the gaslighting Newspeak described by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty Four. Newspeak was characterized by a Simplified Vocabulary with words being eliminated or redefined to fit the Party's ideology; a Restricted Grammar designed to foster the interchangeability of parts of speech, such that words can function unchanged as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs; and Euphemistic Political Words used to create ambiguous and potent double meanings. Thus in Nineteen Eighty Four ‘Goodthink’ means to think in an orthodox and sanctioned manner; ‘Un-good’ means bad etc.

Exactly these devices are evident in the language of the new school of DEI ideologists. ‘Problematic’ means unorthodox and not in line with sanctioned political ideology. ‘Fascist’ means political opponent. ‘Anti-racism’ means ‘good-racism.’ ‘Transphobe’ means someone unwilling to deny biological reality or to acquiesce to transgender-activist ideology. ‘Equity deserving groups’ are the proletarian heroes of the new zero-sum conflict narrative — people whose identity (not actions) necessitate that their interests always trump those of people in the ‘oppressor class’. Just as ‘harm’ is a function of harmless interactions, ‘microagressions’ are defined by an absence of aggression and ‘equity’ by the deliberate unfairness to effect nominal equality of outcome. White fragility is the Kafkaesque proposition that any denial by white people of the charge of inherent racism is both proof of guilt and evidence of psychological fragility that comes from the pathological attempt at denial.

With regard to the role of the ‘equity champions’ — the new political commissars — we are told that, integral to their ‘anti-oppression work,’ the new cadre of teachers will embrace:

cultural humility, compassion and self-awareness. Recognizing your own personal identity, positional power and privilege are essential to creating the conditions where others can feel safe to learn, grow and participate.

What they don’t say is that in the zero-sum framework of intersectional victimhood, identity-guilt (which used to be called class-guilt) is non-negotiable and not based on actions but on ….well identity of course. ‘Kulaks do what Kulaks be.’ The new bourgeois deviationists are whites and especially ‘cis’ heterosexual men, but also anyone who doesn’t acquire a taste of the woke Kool Aid. As in Soviet Russia, Kulaks are Kulaks as a matter of ideological orthodoxy and legal reality.

More disturbingly (and in bold).

every day that we are not engaging in the work individually and collectively is another day that students face harm.

This means that opponents of our project are literally harming (‘killing’) members of equity-deserving groups. This process of hysterical elision and conflation has become discourse as usual since 2020. “Transphobes are ‘literally killing’ transgender children.” People who don’t endorse the agenda of anti-racism ( which is to say good racism) are ‘literally’ killing people of colour. It may seem new, but in fact it is just the same convoluted logic that allowed the Cambodian revolutionaries (or Soviet NKVD; Chinese Red Guard; French Committee of Public Safety) to claim that the continued existence of class enemies was ‘literally killing’ defenceless members of the protected class. Those oppressors in the school system — we’re talking about children here — are deemed to have “deficit mindsets” —evidenced by transphobia and cis-heteronormativity, which must be challenged by modelling the use of pronouns and honouring diverse lived gender identities.

So there we have it. The Canadian school system — and that in Australia, America, the UK, NZ, Scandinavia — is being run by zealots with a new ideology. They employ a softer but more effective version of the cultural revolution that has been rolled out by communists and fascists throughout the 20th century. Afterschool clubs, sports organizations, leisure associations and of course the curricula of the schools are being constructed as kind of woke Komsomol, with woke NewsSpeak and zero-sum conflict models being imposed at every opportunity. The Equity Advocates being infiltrated, at all levels, into schools and universities, are the new political commissars. Their mission is designed explicitly to stifle dissent, communicate fear and effect processes of public shaming.

This is the reality of postliberal, post democratic cultural politics. Democracy is about the peaceful alternation of elites. Losing groups relinquish violence because they will get another shot in the future. Progressive politics now routinely denies this possibility. Deemed fundamentally illegitimate — woke NewsSpeak construes opponents as threats that must be eliminated once and for all. For the last ten years this has involved banishing ideological dissidents from certain occupations and from the public square. With the law fare against Trump and the slew of actions in the European Union, post-democratic politics is now in full flood — with the banning of opponents, imprisoning of dissidents, and the imposition of of single ideology globalists states (SIGS). Inevitably, if this continues, the next phase will be violent conflict and some kind of civil war. How long before, progressives are once again rounding up opponents into gulags?

And even if the ‘right’ come out of this conflict triumphant, will not the stress of the conflict make likely a victory for the statist, fascistic (socialistic) kind of ‘right’ that would see the same gulags with (ostensibly) the opposite political valance. Much as I loathe their politics, progressives and leftists being killed or consigned to the gulag is just as appalling spectre as communist totalitarianism.

It seems to me that postliberalism is here to stay. The question is only what form it takes. Post-democracy — from either side — will be dehumanizing and diabolical. A post-liberal democracy could only thrive to the extent that we re-establish a pre-political, pre-cognitive shared culture and a high degree of consensus as to the nature of virtue. But right now its hard to be optimistic