In the shadow of the college protests is a generation’s collective identity crisis 

The West is struggling with a collective identity crisis. Our values, culture and notions like nationhood (in the sense of patriotism, not fascism) are being challenged in the face of continuous pressure from the left that whatever we stand for is wrong and has to change. 

This is evident in recent events transpiring on our university campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And recently, in Hamburg Germany, pro-Palestine protestors demanded “Sharia” law. Politicians denounced these protests and said that whoever seeks to replace German democracy with “caliphate” is the enemy. Social media is filled with comments from demonstrators who gleefully call for violence. How did we get here? 

Let me tell you something. Thousands of Iranians and Afghans have fled from Sharia-governed countries. The lucky ones got out with their limbs and lives intact, while the unlucky ones lost so much; some never got the chance. It is beyond me how the world has forgotten how the Taliban condemned Afghan women to miserable lives. The aftermath of the Mahsa Amini movement is still haunting Iranian society. Just last week, a horrific report about the last few hours of the life of Nika Shakarami went viral. She protested for her basic human rights; she was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, beaten and murdered by regime forces.  

These are not a few pages from the next big fiction book of the year. But all of this seems to be lost to young North Americans, and one has to wonder why. 

The left has spent the last few decades instilling a victimhood mentality in North American youth. The prevailing ideology in Western societies — that we are at the forefront of the war against inequality — ironically has led to more discrimination. This ideology has turned everyone into a victim, leading to a constant battle for supremacy in victim status. 

In an article, humanistic psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman says that moral elitism can be one of the outcomes of having a victimhood mindset. “Moral elitism often develops as a defence mechanism against deeply painful emotions and as a way to maintain a positive self-image. As a result, those under distress tend to deny their own aggressiveness and destructive impulses and project them onto others.” 

This is the agenda the left has pursued; turning every individual into a victim as a way to control them. It suggests to the marginalized communities that how the world treats them is based on their victimhood status and not on what they contribute to society; it constantly encourages the idea that they are the outsiders and fails to create a sense of belonging for them. 

It concurrently insinuates that the “white community” is the culprit. It keeps reminding the white youth that their ancestors were colonizers, their history is smeared with blood and the only way they can be relevant now is to be allies to the victims. It implies that whatever sense of collective identity they share is fascist and it prompts them to rebel against their nationhood. This agenda rarely ever points to the history of the rest of the world — and believe me, that history is just as gruesome, if not more so.  

What we are witnessing on our university campuses is a dangerous collective identity crisis our youth is grappling with, subsequent to years of manipulation and cancel culture. Some of them want to be relevant by chanting alongside the group that has garnered the most attention for years, while the other group feels entitled to be angry all the time. In this equation, the care for the well-being of Palestinians is secondary at best. (Some of them don’t even know how to spell Palestine). They wear the keffiyeh and make a fist at the world, because they yearn to create a new identity for themselves.  

In a time when we all need to have a hero figure to make sense out of the world we live in, they want to be the heroes. But what is lost to them is that they are being heroes to someone else’s ego.  

Golnaz Fakhari is an Iranian-Canadian freelance journalist based in Vancouver, with a background in political science.