Book Review of

The Victim’s Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind by Bruce Bawer (2012) Broadside, pp. 400.

                This book is an astonishing, overwhelming description of victimhood as it has taken over the Academy, the press and media and our culture.   Victimology, perhaps excepting The Prince,  excludes the “great books of the Western World” replaced by the “great kooks,” all named in the book as founders of a cultural sewer of victimhood exploiting the innocent who have a civil conscience enough to be fooled into spurious “guilt” and willingness to offer undeserved sympathy.   

Bruce Bawer powerfully describes the victimhood process for women’s studies, black studies, queer studies, and Chicano studies.   Fascinating are his first hand participation in each group and he gives witness to who, what, where and when.  I will try to give my understanding of Bawer’s experiences and findings, but this book is a knowledge filling asset for every library.

Each study group’s existence is based on publicizing “victims,” and, if none can be found, then victims must be fabricated and created.   Otherwise, these groups would have no reason to exist.   Victim studies are a stagnating, imprisoning process for both teachers and students.

Victimology is done by sanctimonious, poor-me, whimpering, whining, moaning, groaning, cry-baby, sob-sister, how-dare-you routines, which are so inferiority proving, it is embarrassing.  Relevance is created by moaning grandiose narcissism which prevents growth, responsibility and independence.   The need to fabricate about historical matters is blatant proof of the fundamental inferiority of these groups—If Truth is not allowed, what other word applies except, “inferior”?  The process is selfish, uncivil, pseudo-intellectual dead-ended perseveration of psycho-social waste.  It is really un-American in that, “From many, one” is anathema, having been replaced by “Diversity, me! me! me!” (Totally overlooked is that people are still more alike than different even as they proclaim their simple differences).   But professional victims basically refuse to join the productive human race when crackpot hustling, pseudo-academic gobbledygook and begging for the common good enable full throttle entitlement schemes, as they unwittingly thereby reject  duty, honor, reason, responsibility, sanity, self-respect and virtue. 

Victimhood is a grandiose contest of who has suffered the most and “how hurt I have been” because of “plights” of being “a woman”, a “black”, “sexually confused,” or “Chicana/Chicano (both genders so as not to discriminate against whining Hispanic women).”   The chapter titles are worthy of mention:  “Gilligan’s Island—Women’ Studies,” “The Ebony Tower—Black Studies,” “Visit to a Queer Planet—Queer Studies,” and “The Dream of Aztlan—Chicano Studies.”  Each chapter details more than you ever wanted to know about professional victims, hatred of white men, general misandrism, and the trashing of Western Civilization.  They all want to do, to white males especially, what they believe has been done to their ancestors, as if two wrongs make a right.  The kooks and their antics responsible for all this are described by Bawer from direct observation.  Plenty of jargon is provided to blame everyone but themselves for their continued paralysis.  And all this will continue as long as these “study” groups are funded.  Without funding, perhaps, these hate-crime filled and victimhood-disabled will have to get jobs which create, develop, and produce something beneficial to the common good instead of empty sloganeering which reduces freedom and impairs the content of one’s character.

                Victimhood is a dead-end self-excommunicating and withdrawal from not only a civil culture, but from nature itself.  It is a selfish, uncivil, pseudo-intellectual ruination of its practitioners.  It is an empty alternative to real life and against embracing Nature and the world.  It is a dead-ended evolution, and thus not “evolution” at all.   It is behavioral pollution [1].

For women, victimhood is the fragmenting of their lives into emotional, anatomical, body part dysmorphism or the pervasive identification with a simple body reflex always rejecting irrationally the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of  “female” (“belonging to the sex which bears offspring”) and “male” (“belonging to the sex which performs the fecundating function of generation”). 

For Blacks, victimhood is the loss of motivation which should be inspired by the American fact that slavery was the luckiest thing that ever happened FOR the 35 million Blacks in the US who came from the 450,000 slaves brought here…otherwise they would be destitute or dead in some miserable African country, in which they would not want to live (Of interest is that Muslim countries imported many more slaves than the West but have basically no Black descendants—and they were not assimilated—If Blacks knew this, they would reject Islam completely).

For Queers, victimhood promotes a “gay cult”—usually most visible at Queer parades or wherever their flaming look-at-me “gay seizures” take over.  This gay cult prevents the disorder from being seen as an illness such that natural and normal functioning do not occur [2,3].  Queer disorders (Bawers is homosexual, and I am using his words) are most likely due to the feminizing effects of their mothers’ birth control pills taken before their conception or other hormones in the food chain.  For some, if not all, “normality” is possible with civil adjustment and continued embracing of Western Civilization as much as possible.

                For Chicanos, victimhood renders them to be “invaders” or “conquerors” of America rather than immigrants.  To want biculturalism is totally against E pluribus unum and thus tries to defeat all that has made America great.

                Overall, for Victimology, there is an absolute absence of transcendence – there is no truth, oneness, good or beauty – just “me – me – me!”  And “the common good” – well, that is just another Western Civilization crime unless these professional victims are given whatever they want—which, today, might be best called “the common goof.”  They live “reparation” fantasies – undeserved, unearned, unfair and unjust!  For victimhood, Imperialism is anything not in agreement with the sub rosa welfare scheming and self-righteous lifestyle and livelihood. 

                Bawer’s final chapter, 7, “Is there hope?” begins with a reminder that Arthur Schlessinger Jr. in 1998, was confident that universities would not impose victimhood on its students.   Alas, he was wrong except in what he called it: “voguish blather.”  This last chapter, a mandatory re-read, is an uplifting poignant reminder and plea that the Great Books of the Western World need promotion by all, especially by educational institutions, if humanity is to find salutary life, sacrifice, virtue, love, humanity, peace, freedom and acceptance of death.  Victimhood offers only loud withdrawal.