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The traditional publishing industry is in free fall. Print book sales are falling and the Big Five publishers are facing a crisis. E-books, dominated by independent and self-publishing, are booming. Men in particular are abandoning traditional publishing in droves and turning to the modern-day equivalent of the ‘pulps’ of the early 20th century: web-based platforms like Royal Road.
And is it any wonder?
The Big Five are one of the most gender-distorted industries outside of education or health. Nearly 80 per cent of their employees are women. Even worse are the taxpayer-funded circle-jerks known as ‘literary awards’. Case in point, the lucrative Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Eighty per cent of taxpayers’ money wasted on these awards went to women. Muslims are heavily over-represented, scarfing up 40 per cent of the awards, despite being just three per cent of the Victorian population.
These are the sort of books much admired by a tiny clique of government employees but never read. Well, except by long-suffering school students forced to read them. These books would struggle to sell a few dozen copies if they weren’t bought by the box-load by menopausal left-wing school librarians.
Even worse, they’re openly endorsing anti-Semitism.
Pro-Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah has been honoured as part of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, with her book, Discipline, being voted as the People’s Choice.
The news the public voted overwhelmingly in a online poll to support the activist and academic at the centre of controversies over writers festivals overshadowed the announcement on Wednesday night of winners in the $292,000 annual awards.
“The public voted overwhelmingly”? No, the ‘public’ did not.
In fact, the ‘public’ in this case are just 345 online activists, almost certainly an even smaller clique of ‘pro-Palestine’ anti-Semites using multiple sock-puppet accounts.
Abdel-Fattah’s book was not short-listed but was highly commended by judges in the fiction division, making it eligible for the People’s Choice voting conducted online between December 10 and January 18. Discipline received 47 per cent of the votes – 345 out of a total of 731 – with the next book receiving only 14 per cent of votes.
Even if we’re credulous enough to believe that each of those ‘voters’ were separate individuals, that means just 0.005 per cent of Victorians voted for this anti-Semitic hatemonger. Maybe they’ll keep it next to their well-thumbed copies of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
No doubt, too, university librarians will buy it by the truckload.
University leaders have been branded “quislings’’ over their tolerance of antisemitism, by the coalition education spokesman Julian Leeser.
Welcoming the Albanese government’s decision to deny registration to universities that fail to stamp out racism, Mr Leeser said they should be stripped of public funding.
That doesn’t go nearly far enough. As I’ve been urging for years, bulldoze the lot of them. The university sector has completely, utterly, failed the nation in almost every respect. Rather than fostering critical thinking, they’ve become factories of destructive groupthink. They’ve sold their souls to the last remaining communist superpower, China. They’ve betrayed the nation, again and again. A university degree has become practically valueless, as universities have turned into unconscionably greedy diploma mills.
That they’ve become the epicentres of vicious anti-Semitism should be the last straw.
[Leeser] said the massacre of 15 people at a Jewish festival on Bondi Beach on December 14 was one of the “downstream consequences of failing to deal with antisemitism on campus’’.
“What sort of message does it send when encampments and protests are tolerated for weeks and months?’’ he said in his first keynote speech outlining the coalition’s higher education policies, at the Universities Australia conference in Canberra on Thursday.
“What message does it send when the associated harassment and abuse are seen as accepted as part of campus life?
“When you fail to confront people who engage in harassment and intimidation your public standing is diminished.”
What ‘public standing’?
Leeser shouldn’t act surprised, either. This is just a rinse-and-repeat of German universities’ complicity in the Holocaust. Universities were early and enthusiastic passengers on the Nazi bandwagon. Even in the Third Reich, anti-Semitism was very much a minority view. Indeed, even within the Nazi Party itself: “The vast majority of the Nazi Party’s members and voters were indifferent and sometimes even rejected this rabid antisemitism,” writes scholar Oded Heilbronner.
But not the universities.
The National Socialist German Students’ League was formed as early a 1926. German university fraternities “embraced National Socialism in disproportionate numbers”, records the Holocaust Encyclopedia. In grim echoes of repeated incidents in Australian universities over the last decade, preceding even October 7, German students “interrupted lectures, provoked skirmishes, and physically intimidated Jewish students in actions tolerated by university administrations”. Jewish students and the few remaining Jewish faculty members (over 1100 were expelled by 1935) were directly targeted.
Those iconic book-burnings? Carried out by university students.
Can anyone watch the sickening videos of publicly funded academics screaming abuse at Jewish students and leading mobs of anti-Semitic thugs invading lectures at campuses across Australia and not feel a sickening sense of deja vu dread?
