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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Being eaten from the inside, I can almost taste the blood! |
| 2004-05-13 |
| Everytime I read this I do a slow burn. Between the government loving elite and the IslamoPigs they just about have us cornered. I do believe we are very well on our way to an out right armed conflict between Americans in the next 20 years. Can Islam and the Marxist co exist? I was never any good at Math. PC Marxist Roots Unearthed by William S. Lind, Free Congress Foundation Political Correctness is intellectual AIDS. Everything it touches it sickens and eventually kills. On America’s college campuses it has diminished freedom of speech, warped curricula, politicized grading and replaced intellectual integrity with vapid sloganeering. In classroom after classroom, professors offer an ideological rant, which students are compelled to regurgitate to get a grade: the vomit returns to the dog. These places--and they are many--are no longer universities, but small, ivy-covered North Koreas. Just what is Political Correctness? The "Politically Correct" people on your campus really, really don’t want you to know the answer to that question. Why? Because Political Correctness is nothing less than Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. The parallels are obvious. First, both classical, economic Marxism and the Cultural Marxism that is Political Correctness are totalitarian ideologies. Both insist on "truths" that are contrary to human nature and experience. Contrary to economic Marxism, there is no such thing as a "classless society," and economic incentives matter. Contrary to Political Correctness, men and women are different, as are their natural roles in society; races and ethnic groups have specific characteristics; and homosexuality is abnormal. Since the only way people will accept the ideologues’ "truths" is if they are forced to, they will be forced--by the full power of the state, if the Marxists of either stripe can control it. The second parallel is that both classical Marxism and Cultural Marxism have single-factor explanations of history. Classical Marxism argues that all history was determined by ownership of the means of production. The Politically Correct Cultural Marxists say that history is explained by which groups--defined by sex, race and sexual normality or abnormality--have power over which other groups. The third parallel is that both varieties of Marxism declare certain groups virtuous and other evil a priori, without regard for the actual behavior of individuals. Thus economic Marxism defined workers and peasants as good and the middle class as evil, and Cultural Marxism defines blacks, Hispanics, Feminist women, homosexuals and some other minorities as virtuous and white men as evil. Political Correctness does not recognize the existence of non-Feminist women and defines blacks who reject its ideology as whites. The fourth parallel is in means: expropriation. Economic Marxists expropriated the property of the middle and upper classes and gave it to the state. Cultural Marxists, on campuses and in government, lay penalties on white men and give privileges to the groups they favor. Affirmative action is an example of this kind of expropriation. Finally, both types of Marxism employ a method of analysis guaranteed to show the correctness of their ideology in every situation. For classical Marxists, the method is Marxist economics. For Cultural Marxists, the method is linguistic: deconstruction. Deconstruction first removes all meaning from "texts," then inserts new meaning: one way or another, the text illustrates the oppression of women, blacks, homosexuals etc. by white men and Western culture. The intended meaning of the author is irrelevant. These parallels are not coincidental. They exist because the Cultural Marxism of Political Correctness is in fact derived from classical, economic Marxism, largely through the work of the Frankfurt School. Following World War I, European Marxists faced a difficult question: why did the proletariat throughout Europe not rise in revolution and establish a new, Marxist order, as their ideology said it would? Two prominent Marxist thinkers, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came up with an answer: Western culture. Western culture so blinded the workers to their true, "class" interests that they could not act on them. So before socialism could come to power, Western culture had to be destroyed. Lukacs in 1919 posed the question, "Who will save us from Western civilization?" As Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary that same year, the first thing he did was introduce sex education into Hungarian schools. In 1923, Lukacs and a group of German Marxist intellectuals founded a "think tank" intended to translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute quickly became known as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, when the National Socialists came to power in Germany, the Frankfurt School moved to New York City. There, its key figures--Theodor Adano, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich--developed critical theory," a crossing of Mark with Freud that labeled the key components of Western culture "prejudice," i.e., a psychological disease. The "critical theorists" argues that to eliminate "prejudice," Christianity, capitalism and the traditional "patriarchal" family all had to be destroyed. The connection between the Frankfurt School and the student rebellion of the 1960s was made primarily by a key Frankfurt School member, Herbert Marcuse--the man who in the ’60s coined the phrase, "Make love, not war." Marcuse’s books "Eros" and "Civilization" argued that the tools with which to destroy Western culture were, in effect, sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. He popularized the Frankfurt School’s ideas in ways the ’60s student radicals could understand and absorb, and we now know his work Political Correctness. So that is Political Correctness’ dirty little secret: it is Marxism, Marxism translated from economics into culture. We know what economic Marxism did to the old Soviet Union. Are we going to permit Cultural Marxism to do the same thing to the United States? |
| Posted by:Long Hair Republican |
| #19 Isn't it hard to fit the Liberal Arts Majors into the fryer? |
| Posted by: Sgt.DT 2004-05-13 4:02:29 PM |
| #18 Face it, we're fighting 2 wars: the WOT and the Culture Wars. Right now, the Left is making common cause with the IslamoNazis. I guess they're thinking when they "win," then they'll have to fight between themselves as to whether Marxist Socialism or shar'ia wins the day, although the 2 systems have an awful lot in common. But pure Marxism won't tolerate any religion except its own, even the Religion of Pieces. |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-05-13 3:35:10 PM |
| #17 Sam, I hope you are right, but a local incident involving UCLA's Republican Club makes me pessimistic. The goons in the administration were harassing the club until they were frightened by publicity, largely from a local talk radio host, Al Rantel. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-13 12:54:20 PM |
| #16 Capitalist Pig! I real Marxist would have gone without the cream, sugars, and the coffee. |
| Posted by: ed 2004-05-13 9:51:48 AM |
| #15 It is harder the sell the - "all cultures have equal value and worth" and "they're not bad, just different" BS when you see beheadings and children wearing bomb vests on the news. Problem is, the people in charge of the news do their damndest to see to it that we get little to no chance of seeing those kinds of things. Can't have Americans getting pissed at barbarians, ya know. Barbarians getting pissed at Americans though, is perfectly okay. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-05-13 3:31:31 PM |
| #14 "The media fracas over Iraq, the Bush administration's unilateralism, and the 9/11 Commission, have overshadowed the transformation taking place in the ranks of young Americans. A surprisingly large number have embraced President Bush's worldview, often described by foreign policy commentators as "neoconservative," so highlighting its departure from cold, calculating realpolitik. This shift coincides with a surge in the number of active young conservatives. Membership of the College Republicans has tripled in the past three years, while a study by Harvard's Institute of Politics found that two-thirds of American college students supported the war in Iraq. Liberal college professors bemoan the conservatism of their students, many of whom participated in pro-war patriotic rallies to counter the traditional anti-war protests on most college campuses. All this activity amounts to what The Economist has called a youthquake for President Bush. In short, for thousands of future conservative leaders, September 11 was a watershed event, this generation's Vietnam. Fortunately, the lessons of Vietnam and September 11 could not be more different. The lessons of September 11 are threefold." This quote is from an article today in NPR, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/fly200405130856.asp This is why I think campuses will get more conservative. It is harder the sell the - "all cultures have equal value and worth" and "they're not bad, just different" BS when you see beheadings and children wearing bomb vests on the news. |
| Posted by: Sam 2004-05-13 2:38:23 PM |
| #13 Raj - possibly. But whether it was Lenin or lil' Nikita the point is the same. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-13 1:58:33 PM |
| #12 BigEd - wasn't that Lenin (rope to hang oneself)? I remember |
| Posted by: Raj 2004-05-13 12:55:53 PM |
| #11 BigEd, isn't that like punting on the war of ideas? If nothing else good comes out of the current WoT, it at least is exposing the hollowness of the politically correct and multi-cultural BS. Within ten years there will be a dramtic shift in the make-up of university faculties and curriculum, only it will not involve the elimination of the liberal arts. It will involve a replacement of the current illiberal arts curriculums with true liberal arts. |
| Posted by: Sam 2004-05-13 12:39:59 PM |
| #10 I have always refered to the people in the article as PC Totalitarians. This article lays out what most people examining the situation at universities has realized for a long time. It was a half-century ago that Krushchev, supreme ruler of the USSR proclaimed that the west would make the rope to hang itself with. In that vein, I suggest we stop the nonsense by ending all non-technical state funded university courses. Unless we are dealing with medicine or engineering or maybe certain business oriented courses of study (accounting / computer programming e.g.), we pare back all funding. INCLUDING LAW SCHOOLS! If the PC Totalitarians want to spew their dictatorial garbage, let them do it with private funds, and not taxpayer funds. Air America, "left-wing talk radio" is dying a proper slow death, so should it be with the modern "Liberal Arts" education. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-13 11:12:08 AM |
| #9 We have found common ground. We're both too short. |
| Posted by: Jake 2004-05-13 11:00:15 AM |
| #8 That makes us even, Jake. I understand the comments but the article's way over my head. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2004-05-13 10:52:39 AM |
| #7 Liberal Arts majors make the best fries I dunno; Fine Arts majors put more creativity into it. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-05-13 10:47:43 AM |
| #6 I guess I'm too old, but these comments (#3-#6) are way over my simple head. The article is good though. |
| Posted by: Jake 2004-05-13 10:45:12 AM |
| #5 Liberal Arts majors make the best fries |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-05-13 10:06:42 AM |
| #4 Those CM's sure make good fries, though. mmmm |
| Posted by: Cthulhu Akbar 2004-05-13 9:56:57 AM |
| #3 I met a classical Marxist this morning. She gave me a regular with cream and three sugars. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2004-05-13 9:26:35 AM |
| #2 This is news? Hell, the very term "politically correct" is a lightly chocolate-coated version of the Marxist "ideologically correct", and has all it's linguistic ancestor's disasterous consequences. |
| Posted by: mojo 2004-05-13 1:04:44 AM |
| #1 As fast as our cultural elites can lead us. Lets all eat cake. |
| Posted by: Lucky 2004-05-13 12:38:49 AM |