DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Communist group disrupts Timothy Snyder’s Yale lecture, forces evacuation.
Snyder is a historian specializing in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust, and he has been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine’s resistance effort since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. His class focuses on Nazi and Stalinist regimes in the mid-twentieth century.
The demonstrators walked into the back of class and held up signs while Raymond Lotta, the group’s leader, declared, “No class as usual today!” Lotta called on Snyder to condemn the United States for its support of Israel’s military offensive against Hamas in Gaza and accused him of “brainwashing” students with “anti-communism.”
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Lotta continued to shout while other demonstrators stood in place and held signs such as “Where’s Snyder’s moral outrage over US backed genocide in GAZA?” and “Hitler killed 6 million Jews and Stalin saved 1.6 million Jews.”
After five minutes of shouting, students and Snyder began filing out of the classroom. Shortly after, Lotta and his group were escorted out of the building by Yale security.
Speaking to the News afterward, Lotta called the demonstration a “success.”
“This was meant to be a jolt,” Lotta said. “We wanted to be dramatic and stir students up. This is a challenge for Snyder to debate me on the past and future of the Communist revolution.”
Why is Yale such a hotbed of white supremacy? Flashback: Berkeley students angry that they have to read Marx, not because he was, well, a Marxist, but because he was yet another dead white European male: “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.”
As James Lileks wrote in response, “Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate. By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.”