Gloria Greenfield created Doc Emet Productions, a not-for-profit corporation, in 2008 to produce “hard-hitting feature documentary films that promote the values of freedom and democracy, and contribute to the strengthening of Jewish identity and nationhood.” In 2020 she established the series Deep Dives, which consists of commissioned blogs by prominent scholars and public intellectuals who delve into searing issues of our time. Previous blogs have featured commentary on such issues as the Armenian genocide, national security, and anti-Semitism. In the August 31 installment of Deep Dives, Ms. Greenfield asks AHI President Robert Paquette to make a return appearance to explain why “Social Justice Is Not Justice.”
AHI President Robert Paquette
The term “social justice,” as Paquette points out, has a nineteenth-century origin, during an age of ideology that was warming up to the imposition in industrializing Western societies of one or another variety of socialism. Although the term has become totemic on college campuses, it remains largely undefined and uncritiqued. “Regimes committed to the cause of social justice,” Paquette maintains, “have piled up millions of corpses—the majority of them non-white, by the way—in attaining and holding on to power.” A careful reading of history reveals that every totalitarian movement in history carried with it the banner of social justice. In his essay, Paquette describes the underlying logic of the process and the threat it poses to the vitals of a free society. The more ancient concept of justice aimed at the preservation and restoration of what was properly one’s own; social justice aims at the transformation of society to achieve the predetermined ends of particularly powerful political groups.
Gloria Greenfield’s most recent film, the prize-winning Fight of Our Lives: Defeating the Ideological War against the West, includes an appearance by AHI President Robert Paquette.
On February 28, Deep Dives published Paquette’s “The 1619 Project and the Constitution: Was It Proslavery or Antislavery?” On April 30 Deep Dives published “The 1619 Project: Stripping Away Manhood,” by AHI resident fellow Mary Grabar.
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