THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Brian is downloading all the WOL stuff all the way back to 1998. Then he'll get on the blog. He is going to make it possible for me to do what David Irving does, allow anyone who wants to download it ALL.

I personally need this more than Irving does. At this moment ALL my Internet work on WOL is dependent on the fragile connection I have with my bandwidth, and I have to call Kelso to straighten it out even when the blog goes down. That has caused me great worry each time it goes down. It would be an enormous comfort to me if some of you had the whole thing.

There is a story here that is worth keeping. If you will LOOK AT THE COMMENTS, especially today and yesterday, you will see commenters doing the work only I could have done. More important, they are discussing these things at a level I was only beginning to scratch at in 1998. My thinking has developed to an extent I can hardly recognize the superficial things I was writing, as Brain says, "in the last century."

I have picked your brains so much I could be a neurosurgeon. Like any good teacher, I have learned far, far more than you by having to explain everything over and over, from ground zero. That process alone will be a major contribution to the whole field of intellectual development.

Looking at thinkers my age that lived in earlier times, and not THAT much earlier, I see the process of intellectual calcification setting in their late fifties, the exact time I started WOL. No matter how many admirers and former students they had, their thinking had formed, and each conversation became a restatement of what they had already said.

This was inevitable. After forty years of nailing down what they thought, every conversation had to be mostly getting the person they were talking to up to speed. That is what we see in what are called "seminars" in graduate school today. The professor may not be lecturing, but he is mostly being sure his students have the tools, Political Correctness, which is necessary for the TRADE of being a college professor. Intellectual curiosity or original thought is as unwelcome as political discussion in a high school shop class.

That does the student a lot of harm, but few consider, as I must, what that does to the PROFESSOR. Trying to talk with a person who calls himself - try not to laugh - an "intellectual." It is like trying to talk to a jack-in-the-box. You say something and he comes back with an answer that was old when Neanderthal Man was an endangered species.

Actually it's WORSE than talking to a jack-in-the-box. That toy is not under the impression that he THOUGHT of the tired old reply. That is what makes it really painful that is what takes it from silly to pathetic.

It destroys the students, it destroys the professors, but we can take it a step farther. It destroys the minds of the OPPOSITION. If you try to read conservative books you find they are the same thing. A person is being programmed to pop up with a standard jack-in-box reply to each standard liberal statement. Listening to a "debate" on television is like watching a bunch of statues with tape recorders in them.

If you look at WOL back at the turn of the century (Gee, Brian, that's GOOD!) you can see signs of the same thing happening to me. I had some excellent new ideas for the time, but if you read my 1976 A Plague on Both Your Houses! You will have EXTREME difficulty believing that it contains one new idea. You would have to do dissertation's worth of research to find that everything I said then was not already common thought. One of my original ideas began to appear in commentary at the 1976 political conventions. Another became the basis of a bet between the two top party staffers on Capitol Hill that same year.

You might have some trouble seeing that the twentieth-century ideas at the turn of this century in WOL were NEW. They are part of routine political discourse. As for me, starting in my late fifties, I have outgrown them. For that I have you to thank.

Brian, do it for the Gipper!