From The Daily Beast: University College London’s Nietzsche Club Is Banned

“Can debates about right-wing philosophers encourage fascism? That’s what the University College London students’ union decided when it barred the Nietzsche Club from holding meetings.”

“It is like starting a society to study Hitler” said Timur Dautov, who formally proposed the ban to the students’ union, and is the president of the UCL Marxist society.

Frankly, a group for studying Hitler, let alone Nietzsche and other ‘far right’ philosophers whose works may have influenced men like Hitler, would be no more abhorrent than a society for Marxism is. Given that previous implementations of marxist political and economic theory (i.e. communism) by various regimes throughout the 20th century have resulted in the deaths of an estimated 94 million people, far more than fascistic regimes such as Nazism, Dautov’s moral outrage is curious.

Even worse than UCL having a Marxist society and its Students’ Union not finding that morally troublesome or at least very embarrassing is that the Union has now adopted a “fight fascism” motion, which is founded on the (false) premise that capitalism is the root cause of facism. This reveals that Dautov objected to the Nietzsche Club not because he wants to rid the world of fascism particularly, after all it too necessitates a totalitarian state, but because he wants to rid the world of capitalism – like a good Marxist should.

Presumably, then, at some point in the near future the members of the Students’ Union and the Marxist society will be giving away all their possessions, which are of course a product of the ‘evil’ that is capitalism. If nothing else that should make them very popular indeed with cash-strapped students wanting free stuff.

You might think I’m being too harsh on these young men and women, after all most of us believed things in our youth that we later considered shameful or embarrassing, but the difference now is that this is the Information/Internet Age. We have instant access to the largest repository of human knowledge that has ever existed. There is really no good reason for ignorance anymore and young people like Dautov and the members of the Students’ Union have a responsibility to do their research, which no longer means living a nomadic existence in various libraries, but instead searching the web on your laptop in comfort. If there is no excuse for not knowing the history of the horrific human cost of full socialist/communist regimes and understanding their total failure to achieve the utopia promised by Marx or indeed any degree of greater good, then we must ask whether young people who join Marxist societies in universities are not ignorant but instead refusing to see? Sadly, we are left conclude that this probably true. Their blind rage against capitalism finds a great deal of reinforcement in the fuzzy socialism that pervades the lay man’s mind and in the anti-capitalist rhetoric of mainstream media and intellectuals, which is certainly a hefty confirmation bias to overcome, but even so escaping the trap of unthinking opposition to capitalism can still be achieved more easily than ever. If I can do it, then anyone can because I, like most, was raised on the socialist ‘them versus us’ worldview.

The UCL Students’ Union has embarrassed itself and the university by banning the formation of the Nietzsche Club because preventing people from acting in ways that those in power object to is exactly the sort of thing fascistic regimes must do; they ban everything and take away the liberty of everyone that questions the state’s authority. The Students’ Union at UCL seems to be suffering from delusions of grandeur because the role of one isn’t to “…commit to a struggle against fascism and the far-right…”, but simply to organise gigs, give out free contraceptives, and make sure students have a plentiful supply of cheap booze. You know, fun stuff, the kind of stuff capitalism produces in abundance and which would never exist in any Marxist utopia.