The first talk of the second day of the conference was openly conservative. A Spanish academic said that the Left has created a hive mentality that is not in the least more open or less ideological than that of the Franco dictatorship. And it’s time to let go of the Civil War era resentments instead of stoking them with “historical memory initiatives.” Let’s get over our addiction to feeling virtuous by condemning the past and let’s concentrate on the actual problems our society faces, he said.
This might sound like the most boring of commonsensical approaches but I never thought I’d hear something like this at an academic conference. Of course, several Latin American women started henpecking the speaker for thought crimes but the next speaker said similar things and I nodded so much my head almost flew off into outer space.
After the session, I asked the Ukrainian organizer to tell me honestly if I’d died abs was now in an intellectual heaven. “What did you expect?” he said. “That I’d gather a group of leftist twaddlers?”
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