The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Stalinist at Montclair State

Posted on | November 10, 2012 | 38 Comments

Smitty blogged about this Monday, but amid the election excitement, I worry that it may have been overlooked. During an Oct. 25 debate at Montclair State University, Professor Grover Furr denied the systematic mass murders committed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin:

“What you said is a bulls–t. It’s wrong. It’s a lie. . . . I have yet to find one crime that Stalin committed.”

Watch the video again and notice (around 1:50) that there is applause when Professor Furr makes his adamant defense of Stalin:

It is genuinely frightening that this apologist for totalitarianism is tenured at a state university, and doubly frightening that students would applaud him. A reporter for the student newspaper evidently didn’t even realize that what Professor Furr said was controversial, which tells you a lot about how dangerously dumbed-down our education system has become. The murderous brutality of Stalin is one of the best-established facts of 20th-century history, and whatever “research” Professor Furr claims as the basis for his bizarre revisionism is likely akin to the “research” of Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers and other fringe crackpots.

Gabriella Hoffman reported this at College Reform and Front Page Magazine, and it was also picked up by World Net Daily, but . . . that’s it?

I mean, you have this lunatic praising Stalin at a public university in New Jersey and the New York Times can’t be bothered to take notice? Is the strange career of Professor Furr undeserving of attention by, say, the Chronicle of Higher Education? Is this not newsworthy?

Hoffman takes this rather personally because, as she explains at her own blog, her family fled the Soviet Union. What I can’t understand is how this Bolshevik creep could be hiding in plain sight on a university faculty without attracting widespread notoriety.

David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks has a profile on Professor Furr, who teaches multiple “humanities” courses at Montclair State, assigning a syllabus crammed with radical anti-American writers. Professor Furr is the author of a book, Kruschev Lied, which presents itself as “proving” that Nikita Kruschev’s famed 1956 denunciation of Stalin was false:

Virtually everything we thought we knew about the Stalin years turns out to be wrong.

That’s from a flattering review of Professor Furr’s book by Roger Keeran, a “labor studies” professor at Empire State College (part of the State University of New York system), who is co-author (with Thomas Kenny) of Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus it would appear that pro-Soviet “history” is something of a fashionable trend in academia, and that the comrades in the faculty lounge openly promote Stalinism on campus with impunity. But if Howard Zinn is now deemed respectable, this shouldn’t really surprise us.

UPDATE: Montclair, N.J., is in Essex County, which voted 77% for Obama. Maybe that explains something, huh?

UPDATE II: Montclair is also home to many elite journalists, including the executive editor of the New York Times.

So that probably explains something, too.

 

Category: Education, History

Comments

38 Responses to “The Stalinist at Montclair State”

  1. Adobe_Walls
    November 10th, 2012 @ 9:23 pm

    They have to scrub Stalin, Mao and Pol Pots murderous pasts for reimplementation. It’s often remarked that no rational person could support Marxism due to it’s consistent and persistent failures. The retort from the nitwits and dingbats is that it’s never been tried in the right way by the right people. With the proper historical revisionism all the wrong ways of implementing Bolshevism can be wiped from historical memory, making them new ideas again. Most leftists would be quite comfortable with the murder of millions if that produced the desired results, broken eggs etc. By denying the murders of the past the new “New Mans” won’t be as likely to question their orders when it’s our turn to visit the basements of the basements of DHS Fusion Centers.

  2. Adobe_Walls
    November 10th, 2012 @ 9:35 pm

    Hey Stacy, are you familiar with a Steve Chapman? He’s quite the fan of you and Rush.

    “Unhinged by Obama”
    http://townhall.com/columnists/stevechapman/2012/11/10/unhinged_by_obama/page/full/

    I think Townhall could use an editor.

  3. robertstacymccain
    November 10th, 2012 @ 9:47 pm

    Who is this Steve Chapman person, and why should anyone care what he writes?

  4. EBL
    November 10th, 2012 @ 10:17 pm

    Montclair State has a low threshold for professors, what a mendocheous liar or idiot (or both).

  5. Wasserjungen
    November 10th, 2012 @ 10:20 pm

    Just a comment. http://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en&source=mmm-en#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwasserjungen.blogspot.com%2Ffeeds%2Fposts%2Fdefault

  6. Wasserjungen
    November 10th, 2012 @ 10:31 pm

    OOPS try this. http://wasserjungen.blogspot.com/2012/11/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

  7. Ice Cold Troll
    November 10th, 2012 @ 10:34 pm

    By Communist standards, he is correct. Truth is what serves the Party
    and the State, therefore if admitting Stalin committed any crimes hurts
    Progress, it is by definition false. C’mon, folks, it’s all in”1984.”

  8. Tenured Professor Openly Denies Communism’s Atrocities, Defends Josef Stalin | The Lonely Conservative
    November 10th, 2012 @ 10:52 pm

    […] mass murderers like Stalin, which have been documented extensively, they go into full denial mode. It is so disturbing that this man is a tenured professor.It is genuinely frightening that this apologist for totalitarianism is tenured at a state […]

  9. reader
    November 10th, 2012 @ 10:53 pm

    I’ve seen Grover Furr on a variety of education websites over the years. I think even within higher ed he’s regarded as pretty much a crank. But he’s a crank with tenure, so people just tend to ignore him and expect that he’ll eventually pass from the scene.

  10. Wasserjungen
    November 10th, 2012 @ 10:58 pm

    Ahhh. But the damage he will do before he “leaves” will be immeasurable

  11. Wombat_socho
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:02 am

    Solzhenitsyn must be spinning in his grave…or not. He always thought we Americans were too soft to hold out against Socialism.

  12. Adobe_Walls
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:16 am

    I get a Townhall news letter in my e-mail every day. Every once in a while I’ll read someone I don’t usually read and then remember why.

  13. The Stalinist at Montclair State | Spotlight On Corruption
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:34 am

    […] Source:  Stacy McCain […]

  14. Bob Belvedere
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:40 am

    Stacy, you should have included The Gulag Archipelago in your Amazon List.

    It was the book that opened my eyes to the indvidual suffering. After reading Volume I, it never mattered to me what the total number murdered by Stalin totaled.

  15. Bob Belvedere
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:43 am

    Exactly – what’s happening today is nothing but a less overbearing version of how minds were manipulated in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  16. Bob Belvedere
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:46 am

    Denial, it seems, is a river that runs through Chapman’s mind.

  17. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:46 am

    I did see Gregg Allman playing solo at Montclair State back in the day. Gregg was either drunk or high, and generally out of it when I saw him there, but he made a lot more sense than this Communist apologist.

  18. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:48 am

    I am sure Governor Christie can give him a very stern talking too. Then maybe he and his new buddy Bruce Springsteen can sing about the Mahwah autoplant closing, State Troopers, and the fucking beach.

  19. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:51 am

    The required reading list at Montclair State probably includes Alinsky and Dreams From My Father, but not Gulag Archipelago.

  20. New Jersey is really BSC when they are teaching this crap at state funded colleges… | Batshit Crazy News
    November 11th, 2012 @ 1:02 am

    […] at state funded colleges…Posted on November 11, 2012 by Evil Blogger Lady • 0 CommentsMaybe Governor Fat Ass can give this professor a stern talking to.  Then again, Governor Geo-Bio-Mass is too busy crying about meeting Bruce Springsteen to worry […]

  21. The cost of Defense « Chockblock's blog
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    […] suspect that the left hates the military and some want to side with our enemies. The only country that had a military-industrial complex that broke it was the former USSR. A […]

  22. SamSchulz
    November 11th, 2012 @ 3:01 am

    One measure of the bias of the western press and educational system is to observe how different Nazis and Communists are treated. The zero bias state is where both are equally shunned and reviled.

  23. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 11th, 2012 @ 3:07 am

    I have never heard of Steve Chapman. He is not even a Mark Levin “back bencher.” But he probably would make a wonderful addition to the next BlogCon event!

  24. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 11th, 2012 @ 3:35 am

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9t6QyEv_fU&feature=related Ruthless behavior is rewarded and thrives in a Communist culture.

  25. Fritz Katz
    November 11th, 2012 @ 7:02 am

    I suppose it’s on-topic for this thread. Professor Grover Furr is apologizing for Josef Stalin — and Steve Chapman is apologizing for Obama. Townhall also has Pat Buchanan who apologized for Hitler.

  26. Cube
    November 11th, 2012 @ 8:02 am

    Furr only spouts this nonsense because he feels safe doing so. He doesn’t have to worry about a midnight knock on his door and being dragged off never to be seen again. And yes, I realize he has created and read so much of the propaganda that he believes it too. And I know he has plenty of enablers in the radicals he reads and surrounds himself with. But this foolishness would come to a crashing halt if he had to live under the arbitrary totalitarian system he advocates for and constantly worry about getting on the wrong side of the authorities. Wouldn’t be so safe to be such a fool then.

    A question for the rest of us: Why do we tolerate this kind of malignant idiocy when we know it intends to destroy us?

  27. Dai Alanye
    November 11th, 2012 @ 9:55 am

    Does Furr realize he’s implying that that the saintly Nikita Khrushchev was a liar?

  28. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 11th, 2012 @ 12:08 pm

    Teachers paid by public funds should not be subject to tenure, but should be at will employees, same as anyone else.

  29. Veteran’s Day 2012: Saying “Thank You!” and LINKS!
    November 11th, 2012 @ 1:54 pm

    […] Stalinist at Montclair State is a great post Stacy has up at The Other McCain. Clearly, Totalitarianism is alive and well and thriving in […]

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    November 11th, 2012 @ 4:09 pm

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  31. Bob Belvedere
    November 11th, 2012 @ 5:39 pm

    Under Stalin this fool wouldn’t have lasted very long. All it would take would be one slight deviation from the Stalinist Line or Uncle Joe in a bloody-minded, paranoid mood.

    We should never forget that the Soviets first went after the Mensheviks before they went after the Right Wingers.

  32. Bob Belvedere
    November 11th, 2012 @ 5:40 pm

    A version of Crimethink.

  33. PurpAv
    November 11th, 2012 @ 7:28 pm

    The Russians are constantly discovering Stalin’s unmarked mass graves when they initiate some civil engineering project that disturbs dirt that hasn’t been disturbed since that era.

    This is a matter of record reported on by both Russian and other foreign media.

  34. Mark Campbell
    November 11th, 2012 @ 10:34 pm

    “Montclair State”…one of the education mills in NJ. Nice campus, close to NYC but it’s pedigree is pretty pedestrian. If you didn’t know what you wanted to major in pick Montclair State College.

  35. Professor Denies That Stalin Broke Any Laws Or Killed People | The Tree of Mamre
    November 17th, 2012 @ 1:30 am

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  37. KingShamus
    November 24th, 2012 @ 8:29 am

    Montclair State University’s English Department, aka The Junior Varsity Noam Chomsky Squad.

    I’m pretty sure Premier Furr is just the tip of the pinko iceberg.

    Pathetic.

  38. Raanan Geberer
    November 27th, 2012 @ 4:06 pm

    There are thousands and thousands of professors in the U.S., with all sorts of crazy ideas. If just one guy believes this tripe, there’s nothing to worry about. If you had 10,000 professors signing onto this point of view, THEN I’d be concerned. And by the way, just for the record, I’m a Trotsky, NOT a Stalin, guy. Until then, maybe we can get this guy to play Boris Badenov in a film.