Weapons of Mass Cultural and Religious Destruction
By Geoff R. Leonard
There is just too much logical and historical information on the Internet not to pin the tail on this donkey.
I thought your response excellent and parts of it read just like the authors. The Frankfurt School is in fact the locus of what has been described as Cultural Marxism and the very source of the Culture War that is raging today. I have no confidence that it will not ultimately triumph. I suspect that we are in the thick of the battle, which we are by no means winning. Make no mistake about it, Christianity and Western Civilization is the enemy and this is a war with our way of life at stake. The intention, which is a familiar one, is to subvert existing order and to supplant it with an elite group who are the only ones capable of interpreting reality.
What we have in the Frankfurt School is a Manhattan Project like effort by men as intellectually strong in Cultural Critique as Einstein, Oppenheimer and Edward Teller were in Physics. Instead of pondering quantum or nuclear physics, those of the Frankfurt School were constructing cultural weapons to be used in disintegrating Western Civilization, Christianity and Gentile European history. In point of fact and to use Richard Dawkin's Meme Theory, these men were designing "meme complexes" much like a terrorist group would construct biological weapons of mass destruction. Instead of a squash court at the University of Chicago, the Frankfurt School operated out of a little non descript building in Berlin, then Columbia University and Berkeley. Herbert Marcuse was the man who almost single-handedly mutated the Frankfurt School into the Boomer generation during the Counter Culture Revolution of the 60's (ref. Eros and Civilization). So with our attention diverted, while we were working to bring down the Soviet Union, Political Correctness aka Cultural Marxism penetrated under the cover of darkness the American psyche and began to take hold in the 80's and 90's.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this always ha been a Conspiracy, especially in its initial stages. It is as much of a conspiracy as the Commintern and events preceding and following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It has grown beyond the level of a select Elite and has become the conspiracy of the Boomer Elite.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Myths of Multiculturalism: "Tribes, Tribulations, and Self-Evident Truths"
"We are besieged with calls for a more "Multicultural" approach to learning and life. Americans are supposed, according to this view, to be "sensitive" to the many different cultures that surround them. Underlying these calls to sensitivity, however, is an assumption that Western culture is evil, and has, by caveat and coercion, oppressed all other cultures and made them feel inferior. Thus, all people who belong to these oppressed cultures, whether they realize it or not, have a low self-esteem. It is therefore the task of "Multiculturalism" to expose the evils of Western Culture, summarily discredit it, and by empowering disadvantaged and oppressed cultures and holding them to their own standards (whatever those might be) allow the members to thereby gain in that ever-important self-esteem. Their actions should be judged according to their culture, not their human duty. All of this has its own obvious and evil implications for a civil society. It threatens to bring every issue down to the level of a relativistic tribalism. But perhaps even more invidious than the idea of cultural/tribal rule is the current understanding in American culture."
Tribes, Tribulations, and Self-Evident Truths
Res Publica, v3n1
October 1991
by: Julie Ann Kessler
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/respub/v3n1/kessler1.html
It was a typical college scene: a group of students gathered in the lobby of a dorm talking. There wasn’t anything especially different about the banter except the addition of a new member to the group. The new student had just recently arrived from South Korea and so, naturally, much of the discussion centered around him and his country. "What about the United States, above all else, has left the greatest impression upon you?" I asked him when it was my turn to keep discussion flowing. He stopped for a moment and stared at me, but it was not an empty or questioning stare. I could tell that this was a question he had thought about extensively, and one that he was prepared to answer. Perhaps his stare originated in surprise. Possibly he was simply surprised to have some actually ask him what he thought. Maybe he expected me to ask him about Korean art or cuisine, or other aspects of Korean "culture." At any rate, after a deep breath he began: "In my country," he said, "everybody same. All look same, talk same, do same. It is homogeneous. Here," he went on, "everybody different. Not homogeneous. I don’t understand; how do you live together? But I think this is good. I like this country very much. " [emphasis added]
Needless to say, though I had anticipated an answer akin to this, I was at a loss for words. "I like it too," I finally said, "very much." Later, however, in a more composed and less public setting he was more straightforward. "How," he demanded, did we Americans live together? I guess, at the time, I just didn’t realize the fundamental nature of the conversation, because I just looked at him and replied in my "this is too easy to be a serious question" tone, "Because all men are created equal." He looked dissatisfied, even puzzled, and it was only then that I realized what I was confronted with. This was the ground upon which we would truly meet; not as a "Korean" and a "God-knows-what"-American, but rather, as men; as two equal human beings. And, as men, we had the following conversation:
"You mean all rich men equal to other rich men?"
"No," I said, "I mean all men are equal."
"You mean all white…"
"No," I interrupted, "all men."
"You mean all Americans…"
"No," I stopped him here. "All men are created equal. That is what we believe. This is why anyone can be an American, no matter where he is born."
"All men are created equal?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "I think this is good."
"Yes," he said, "this is good."
Though the smile on my face was approaching my ears, and the tears swelling up in my eyes were threatening to spill over at any given moment, I somehow managed to get out these few words, (feeble after what has transpired), "I think so too, Lee."
As the night progressed, I learned a great deal about Korean culture, politics, and religion. These were things that I had not known before and it was certainly interesting to learn them. Similarly, he learned about Disneyland, apple pie and all of the things that tend to characterize the life of a typical American. Yet, while all of this was interesting, it was certainly not on the same level as our previous conversation. It was polite dinner conversation, the kind we all experience upon meeting someone new. And while there were interesting differences displayed in our two cultures, we understood that they do not define one’s humanity; they don’t determine one’s identity.
The thing that did define the identity of my guest was his last statement. "I," he said, "think this is good." I, as a man, think. That is what is important. Yet, when looking at American behavior over the past several years, and especially the behavior manifested on America’s college and university campuses, one would be hard-pressed if he had to prove that Americans really do believe this; the only truth that can hold them together as a nation and the only truth that gives that living together worth.
We are besieged with calls for a more "Multicultural" approach to learning and life. Americans are supposed, according to this view, to be "sensitive" to the many different cultures that surround them. Underlying these calls to sensitivity, however, is an assumption that Western culture is evil, and has, by caveat and coercion, oppressed all other cultures and made them feel inferior. Thus, all people who belong to these oppressed cultures, whether they realize it or not, have a low self-esteem. It is therefore the task of "Multiculturalism" to expose the evils of Western Culture, summarily discredit it, and by empowering disadvantaged and oppressed cultures and holding them to their own standards (whatever those might be) allow the members to thereby gain in that ever-important self-esteem. Their actions should be judged according to their culture, not their human duty. All of this has its own obvious and evil implications for a civil society. It threatens to bring every issue down to the level of a relativistic tribalism. But perhaps even more invidious than the idea of cultural/tribal rule is the current understanding in American culture.
Membership in a "culture" is not determined by the factors that one might expect it to be. In America, it has very little to do with where one is born or raised. It has very little to do with customs, traditions, or language. Membership in a culture might be granted to/imposed upon someone simply because of his race, sex, or ethnicity; and the characteristics of the culture club to which he is now a part are determined not by his own actions, but by the so-called "leadership" of that "community." The individual is defined only in terms of his group and his only rights exist not by nature, but because of whatever level of power that particular group is able to take. Similarly, power is obtained not in the name of Justice – for Justice is relative to one’s culture – rather, power is got in the name of Desire. All members of the culture, in order to be "authentic," must voice the rhetoric determined by the leadership. Thus we have seen all sorts of people, from undergraduates to Supreme Court nominees, decried for "looking black, but thinking white."
"Thinking white." What exactly does it mean for one to think white? Or for that matter, to think black? Upon a closer examination one sees that what is really meant by saying that someone "thinks white" is a condemnation of the individual in question for not following the established rhetoric and "ideas" of his so-called culture. Upon an even closer examination, of not only the intention of such charges, but also the implications of such, dare I call it "logic," are the following: my conversation with the student from South Korea meant nothing. We are two incompatible things, he and I. There can be no possibility for discourse or thought between us. The fact is, according to this way of looking at culture, I am an American white female, he is a Korean male. We are not capable of transcending these factors. All that we think or do or say is determined by these elements of our existence. In other words, we are not human beings, or rational thinking creatures with a free will; we are simply lumps of clay shaped by factors beyond our control.
Who does control these factors that shape our existence? The leaders of our culture of course! (Or, if one is unfortunate enough to attend a university or college that pays attention to this stuff, the curriculum committee!) Thus, we are through the media, through our laws, and in our very classrooms force fed these views on culture and we play no role in shaping them. All of this in a country whose very birth is the refutation of the importance of culture and the declaration to the world of the dignity of the human individual.
I do not mean to say that one can learn nothing from culture. Certainly one can. But there is a danger when one places an artificial importance on culture. It is a part of our existence, not its essence. So while there is obviously nothing wrong with learning about different customs and ways of doing things, it seems that when we get to the point where we have to divide academic departments along racial, ethnic or other insignificant lines and where most Americans feel the need to hyphenate their citizenship, we are in the midst of a serious flirtation with a most dangerous possibility.
In sum, there seems to be too much made of culture, ethnicity, and gender in today’s education and public life. Americans, quite foolishly, are giving more attention to those things which divide us than we are to those things that unite, and even elevate us. If we were living in a place like India, for example, where there are 15 different languages recognized and generations upon generations of hostile history between tribes with no universal principle of equality readily accessible, then and only then might such attempts at "Multiculturalism" be justified. But we are not living in a particular nation; a nation where truth has to be sacrificed in order to maintain peace. We are living in the universal nation; the only nation whose founding document pledges the "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" of its Founders and future citizens to the principle that "All men are created equal." In other words, why should we search for "Multiculturalism" when we are living in a regime that is above culture? Our quest to apply "Multiculturalism" to our institutions of learning and in our public life is similar to the crusades of Don Quixote, with one important difference. When Don Quixote fought his "giants" there was little chance of him taking them down. If we keep up this exercise is self-destruction there is no guarantee that we won’t take down the "giant," only to discover that it was actually a very worthy windmill.
Julie Ann Kessler is a senior from Zanesville, Ohio, majoring in Political Science and minoring in History.
Tribes, Tribulations, and Self-Evident Truths
Res Publica, v3n1
October 1991
by: Julie Ann Kessler
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/respub/v3n1/kessler1.html
It was a typical college scene: a group of students gathered in the lobby of a dorm talking. There wasn’t anything especially different about the banter except the addition of a new member to the group. The new student had just recently arrived from South Korea and so, naturally, much of the discussion centered around him and his country. "What about the United States, above all else, has left the greatest impression upon you?" I asked him when it was my turn to keep discussion flowing. He stopped for a moment and stared at me, but it was not an empty or questioning stare. I could tell that this was a question he had thought about extensively, and one that he was prepared to answer. Perhaps his stare originated in surprise. Possibly he was simply surprised to have some actually ask him what he thought. Maybe he expected me to ask him about Korean art or cuisine, or other aspects of Korean "culture." At any rate, after a deep breath he began: "In my country," he said, "everybody same. All look same, talk same, do same. It is homogeneous. Here," he went on, "everybody different. Not homogeneous. I don’t understand; how do you live together? But I think this is good. I like this country very much. " [emphasis added]
Needless to say, though I had anticipated an answer akin to this, I was at a loss for words. "I like it too," I finally said, "very much." Later, however, in a more composed and less public setting he was more straightforward. "How," he demanded, did we Americans live together? I guess, at the time, I just didn’t realize the fundamental nature of the conversation, because I just looked at him and replied in my "this is too easy to be a serious question" tone, "Because all men are created equal." He looked dissatisfied, even puzzled, and it was only then that I realized what I was confronted with. This was the ground upon which we would truly meet; not as a "Korean" and a "God-knows-what"-American, but rather, as men; as two equal human beings. And, as men, we had the following conversation:
"You mean all rich men equal to other rich men?"
"No," I said, "I mean all men are equal."
"You mean all white…"
"No," I interrupted, "all men."
"You mean all Americans…"
"No," I stopped him here. "All men are created equal. That is what we believe. This is why anyone can be an American, no matter where he is born."
"All men are created equal?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "I think this is good."
"Yes," he said, "this is good."
Though the smile on my face was approaching my ears, and the tears swelling up in my eyes were threatening to spill over at any given moment, I somehow managed to get out these few words, (feeble after what has transpired), "I think so too, Lee."
As the night progressed, I learned a great deal about Korean culture, politics, and religion. These were things that I had not known before and it was certainly interesting to learn them. Similarly, he learned about Disneyland, apple pie and all of the things that tend to characterize the life of a typical American. Yet, while all of this was interesting, it was certainly not on the same level as our previous conversation. It was polite dinner conversation, the kind we all experience upon meeting someone new. And while there were interesting differences displayed in our two cultures, we understood that they do not define one’s humanity; they don’t determine one’s identity.
The thing that did define the identity of my guest was his last statement. "I," he said, "think this is good." I, as a man, think. That is what is important. Yet, when looking at American behavior over the past several years, and especially the behavior manifested on America’s college and university campuses, one would be hard-pressed if he had to prove that Americans really do believe this; the only truth that can hold them together as a nation and the only truth that gives that living together worth.
We are besieged with calls for a more "Multicultural" approach to learning and life. Americans are supposed, according to this view, to be "sensitive" to the many different cultures that surround them. Underlying these calls to sensitivity, however, is an assumption that Western culture is evil, and has, by caveat and coercion, oppressed all other cultures and made them feel inferior. Thus, all people who belong to these oppressed cultures, whether they realize it or not, have a low self-esteem. It is therefore the task of "Multiculturalism" to expose the evils of Western Culture, summarily discredit it, and by empowering disadvantaged and oppressed cultures and holding them to their own standards (whatever those might be) allow the members to thereby gain in that ever-important self-esteem. Their actions should be judged according to their culture, not their human duty. All of this has its own obvious and evil implications for a civil society. It threatens to bring every issue down to the level of a relativistic tribalism. But perhaps even more invidious than the idea of cultural/tribal rule is the current understanding in American culture.
Membership in a "culture" is not determined by the factors that one might expect it to be. In America, it has very little to do with where one is born or raised. It has very little to do with customs, traditions, or language. Membership in a culture might be granted to/imposed upon someone simply because of his race, sex, or ethnicity; and the characteristics of the culture club to which he is now a part are determined not by his own actions, but by the so-called "leadership" of that "community." The individual is defined only in terms of his group and his only rights exist not by nature, but because of whatever level of power that particular group is able to take. Similarly, power is obtained not in the name of Justice – for Justice is relative to one’s culture – rather, power is got in the name of Desire. All members of the culture, in order to be "authentic," must voice the rhetoric determined by the leadership. Thus we have seen all sorts of people, from undergraduates to Supreme Court nominees, decried for "looking black, but thinking white."
"Thinking white." What exactly does it mean for one to think white? Or for that matter, to think black? Upon a closer examination one sees that what is really meant by saying that someone "thinks white" is a condemnation of the individual in question for not following the established rhetoric and "ideas" of his so-called culture. Upon an even closer examination, of not only the intention of such charges, but also the implications of such, dare I call it "logic," are the following: my conversation with the student from South Korea meant nothing. We are two incompatible things, he and I. There can be no possibility for discourse or thought between us. The fact is, according to this way of looking at culture, I am an American white female, he is a Korean male. We are not capable of transcending these factors. All that we think or do or say is determined by these elements of our existence. In other words, we are not human beings, or rational thinking creatures with a free will; we are simply lumps of clay shaped by factors beyond our control.
Who does control these factors that shape our existence? The leaders of our culture of course! (Or, if one is unfortunate enough to attend a university or college that pays attention to this stuff, the curriculum committee!) Thus, we are through the media, through our laws, and in our very classrooms force fed these views on culture and we play no role in shaping them. All of this in a country whose very birth is the refutation of the importance of culture and the declaration to the world of the dignity of the human individual.
I do not mean to say that one can learn nothing from culture. Certainly one can. But there is a danger when one places an artificial importance on culture. It is a part of our existence, not its essence. So while there is obviously nothing wrong with learning about different customs and ways of doing things, it seems that when we get to the point where we have to divide academic departments along racial, ethnic or other insignificant lines and where most Americans feel the need to hyphenate their citizenship, we are in the midst of a serious flirtation with a most dangerous possibility.
In sum, there seems to be too much made of culture, ethnicity, and gender in today’s education and public life. Americans, quite foolishly, are giving more attention to those things which divide us than we are to those things that unite, and even elevate us. If we were living in a place like India, for example, where there are 15 different languages recognized and generations upon generations of hostile history between tribes with no universal principle of equality readily accessible, then and only then might such attempts at "Multiculturalism" be justified. But we are not living in a particular nation; a nation where truth has to be sacrificed in order to maintain peace. We are living in the universal nation; the only nation whose founding document pledges the "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" of its Founders and future citizens to the principle that "All men are created equal." In other words, why should we search for "Multiculturalism" when we are living in a regime that is above culture? Our quest to apply "Multiculturalism" to our institutions of learning and in our public life is similar to the crusades of Don Quixote, with one important difference. When Don Quixote fought his "giants" there was little chance of him taking them down. If we keep up this exercise is self-destruction there is no guarantee that we won’t take down the "giant," only to discover that it was actually a very worthy windmill.
Julie Ann Kessler is a senior from Zanesville, Ohio, majoring in Political Science and minoring in History.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Excerpted from Aldou Huxley's Doors of Perception
Excerpted from Aldou Huxley's Doors of Perception
A Profound Insight as to how symbols, language and concept resstrict human consciousness.
Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs.
Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.
The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain's normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows.
(1) The ability to remember and to "think straight" is little if at all reduced. (Listening to the recordings of my conversation under the influence of the drug, I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary times.)
(2) Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.
(3) Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change for the worse. The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular and finds most of the causes for which, at ordinary times, he was prepared to act and suffer, profoundly uninteresting. He can't be bothered with them, for the good reason that he has better things to think about.
(4) These better things may be experienced (as I experienced them) "out there," or "in here," or in both worlds, the inner and the outer, simultaneously or successively. That they are better seems to be self-evident to all mescalin takers who come to the drug with a sound liver and an untroubled mind.
These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an "obscure knowledge" that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to "perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe."
A Profound Insight as to how symbols, language and concept resstrict human consciousness.
Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs.
Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.
The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain's normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows.
(1) The ability to remember and to "think straight" is little if at all reduced. (Listening to the recordings of my conversation under the influence of the drug, I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary times.)
(2) Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.
(3) Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change for the worse. The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular and finds most of the causes for which, at ordinary times, he was prepared to act and suffer, profoundly uninteresting. He can't be bothered with them, for the good reason that he has better things to think about.
(4) These better things may be experienced (as I experienced them) "out there," or "in here," or in both worlds, the inner and the outer, simultaneously or successively. That they are better seems to be self-evident to all mescalin takers who come to the drug with a sound liver and an untroubled mind.
These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an "obscure knowledge" that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to "perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe."
Who Placed American Men in a Psychic 'Iron Cage'
Who Placed American Men in a Psychic 'Iron Cage?'
Part II
The Thread of 'Cultural Marxism'
by
Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson
15 May 1998
In Part I of this series, the radical feminist 'thread' of the complex fabric of American civilization was described in terms of its antecedent in the idealist Transcendental generation of the early-to-mid 1800s. In that essay, it was observed that if the 'feminization' of our culture, driven primarily by radical feminists bent on destroying a perceived male-dominated hierarchical culture, were the only aspect of American life that appeared ominous, we could probably rest assured that the cycles of American history would take care of it. But this is not the only linear thread in the complex nonlinear fabric of American civilization. Another such thread, 'cultural Marxism,' interacting with the radical feminist thread, has the potential to drive this chaotic system into a precipitous disintegration.1,2,3,4
This essay is an attempt to describe the effects of 'cultural Marxism' in American life.
Suppose you awakened one morning and realized that TV news, sports, and political pundit personalities, television sitcoms, television and Hollywood movies (plots and leading characters), were dominated by females and minorities of various races and ethnicities. You may have recognized that 'authority figures' are now more likely to be portrayed by women and minorities, than the white male. You would find this image quite commonplace. It is the age in which we live.
Suppose you visited any major university in America and perused the curriculum. You would find a vast spawning ground of non-content subjects and even departments set up to deal with everything from women's studies, to race-based culture studies, to sexual orientation studies, to studies of the popular culture. Yes, the times are-a-changing. Just the natural dynamics of a free society seeking its right to the 'pursuit of happiness.'
Suppose you found that you, your son, or your grandson had just been terminated from his job because the affirmative action policies of the employer demanded a 'remedy' which gave preference to a woman and/or minorities. Or, worse yet, suppose these white Americans of European descent were not even allowed to apply for positions in universities or the workplace reserved specifically for women and/or minorities. Or if allowed to compete, these unfortunates would be at the bottom of the 'preference' scale used to judge entrance. Observing this, you would feel right at home in an America entering the 21st century.
Suppose you asked your children or grandchildren what they were learning in our public schools. You would most likely find that they were being subjected to teaching methods that explore the child's 'feelings,' and build their 'self esteem,' even in such traditional disciplines as math, science, and English. You would also find that their test scores in national aptitude tests are going down -- as they have continuously over the past three decades.
If you have a son or grandson in the U.S. military, you would undoubtedly find him subject to frequent, periodic 'sensitivity training' sessions aimed at purging him of his chauvinist cultural attitudes toward women and minorities -- whether or not he possesses such attitudes.
Suppose you listened to the presidential political 'debates' over the past two election cycles. You undoubtedly would have heard the phrase, 'have the courage to change.' Left unspecified was the direction and nature of such change. It appeared that 'change,' simply for its own sake was good enough. Change is indeed invigorating to those who feel that they are part of a great democratic process and tradition. After all, after having won the Cold War, maybe we can now lead the whole world to freedom!
Suppose you have listened to what serves as foreign policy 'debate' over the past five years. If you listened carefully, you would have heard our leaders claim, '...it's the right thing to do.' This moral justification, without a shred of thought of the long-term consequences, has guided our foreign policy in Bosnia, Somalia, NATO-expansion, and China. Indeed, some believe this moralizing of foreign policy is simply the result of a cult of 'personalizing' everything our political leaders do -- primarily for domestic political advantage.
Suppose you woke up one morning and noticed that one of the most brutalizing professions on earth, that of combat arms, is being treated (by some) as if it were just another bureaucratic job. That is, it is a candidate for the infusion of anyone who simply 'chooses' it. The concept that 'many apply, but few are chosen' is being supplanted by 'let anyone who chooses, serve.' Many of our political leaders are seriously considering opening ground combat arms to women. They have already opened aviation combat arms to women.
If you are one of those who forgot (or never knew) that combat service is an extremely brutal, physically demanding, and mentally punishing profession, you are a candidate for 'having the courage to change.' You are such a candidate in spite of the fact that armies, over many centuries and many civilizations, and, in particular the American military, have discriminated against various groups in their selection of the best 'warriors.' And for good reason. The aged, the infirm, the mentally unsound, the weak, and women have been discriminated against in selection for combat arms. This discrimination is as sound as that by which the human race, early in its evolution, learned to 'discriminate' between predator and prey, friend or foe, and which 'knowledge' set in motion the biological mechanisms of 'fight or flee.' Such 'discrimination' ensured our survival as a species. Discrimination is not necessarily a flawed concept.
If you awoke some morning and realized that many of your fellow Americans believe that it is 'the right thing to do' when the most helpless among us are condemned to death by a 'woman's right to choose,' you might wonder where we are headed as a culture and why.
Finally, you may even become aware that an influential minority of the elite Boomers openly discuss and defend the practice of neonaticide5 (the purposeful killing of an infant soon after birth). According to a distinguished professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "...we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life...What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed?...the right to life must come...from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect on ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die." Of course, under this definition any of us could have been killed, not only shortly after birth, but right up to adolescence or even young adulthood -- subject to a decision by one of the 'anointed' New Totalitarians.
Pinker observes that "...several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons...and thus neonatocide should not be classified as murder." Rational observers6 of this abomination remind us that infanticide is rightly universally treated as a "...greatly aberrant act, the very definition of a moral horror." The point to be made here is that, if we finally awaken one morning and find the New Totalitarians presenting this abhorrence as rational policy for America, we might logically wonder where all of this stuff came from.
Indeed, a thoughtful person should ask himself or herself whether or not all this 'change' from America's traditional culture is simply a random set of events played out by a random set of players, all independent of each other - all disconnected from any central premise or guidance. It is entirely possible that chance is at work here and all of these 'threads' of American culture are the random workings of the human intellect (the pursuit of what is possible, vice what is appropriate) in a free, democratic culture.
But suppose you were to learn that nearly all of the above observations are completely consistent with a 'design' -that is a concept, a way of thinking, and a process for bringing it about. And suppose one could identify a small core group of people who designed just such a concept and thought through the process of infusing it into a culture. Wouldn't you be interested in at least learning about such a core group? Wouldn't you want to know who they were, what they thought, and how they conjured up a process for bringing their thoughts into action? For Americans with even a smidgeon of curiosity, the answer should be a resounding yes!
If such a core group could be found, then it would still depend on your personal 'world view' as to its significance. If you believe in the 'blind watchmaker,' that is, all cosmic and social events are random and guided only by the laws of nature, 'evolutionary' in the sense of competing with other random events for survival in a 'stochastic' world, you may choose to believe that such a core group was meaningless -- it may have existed but so what? It may have been only one of an uncountably large number of such 'groups' in the world's history. And you may believe that any particular group's 'window of opportunity' to influence future generations was passed by and did little to influence the course of America's history.
If you believe, instead, that nature has a 'design,' and that all events can be connected and we humans can make sense out of many of them if we will only 'connect all of the dots,' then you may believe that this small core group has great influence, even today, in American Culture. If this is your world view, you may (but not necessarily) even believe in a 'conspiracy. and 'conspirators' which and who aim to alter our culture on a vast scale.
It is clear, however, that irrespective of one's 'world view,' it is informative to at least know of such a core group (if it, indeed, existed), what it believed, what it set out to accomplish, and what methods it followed to take action on its beliefs.
Just such a core group existed. That is, history identifies a small group of German intellectuals who devised concepts, processes, and action plans which conform very closely to what Americans presently observe every day in their culture. Observations, such as those made at the beginning of this piece, can be directly traced to the work of this core group of intellectuals. They were members of the Frankfurt School, formed in Germany in 1923. They were the forebears of what some proclaim as 'cultural Marxism,' a radical social movement that has transformed American culture.
'Cultural Marxism' and 'critical theory' are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute, modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as the Frankfurt School.7 In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. While here, they migrated to major U.S. universities (Columbia, Princeton, and California at Berkeley). These intellectual Marxists included Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, 'make love, not war,' during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
By promoting the dialectic of 'negative' criticism, that is, pointing out the rational contradictions in a society's belief system, the Frankfurt School 'revolutionaries' dreamed of a utopia where their rules governed.8 "Their Critical Theory had to contain a strongly imaginative, even utopian strain, which transcends the limits of reality." Its tenets would never be subject to experimental evidence. The pure logic of their thoughts would be incontrovertible. As a precursor to today's 'postmodernism' in the intellectual academic community,9 "...it recognized that disinterested scientific research was impossible in a society in which men were themselves not yet autonomous...the researcher was always part of the social object he was attempting to study." This, of course, is the current fetish for the rewriting of history, and the vogue for our universities' law, English literature, and humanities disciplines.
Critical theory rejected the ideal of Western Civilization in the age of modern science, that is, the verification or falsifying10 of theory by experimental evidence. Only the superior mind was able to fashion the 'truths' from observation of the evidence. There would be no need to test these hypotheses against everyday experience.
The Frankfurt school studied the 'authoritarian personality' which became synonymous with the male, the patriarchal head of the American family. A modern utopia would be constructed by these idealistic intellectuals by 'turning Western civilization' upside down. This utopia would be a product of their imagination, a product not susceptible to criticism on the basis of the examination of evidence. This 'revolution' would be accomplished by fomenting a very quiet, subtle and slowly spreading 'cultural Marxism' which would apply to culture the principles of Karl Marx bolstered by the modern psychological tools of Freud. Thus, 'cultural Marxism' became a marriage of Marx and Freud aimed at producing a 'quiet' revolution in the United States of America. This 'quiet' revolution has occurred in America over the past 30 years. While America slept!
What is 'cultural Marxism?' Why should it even be considered when the world's vast experiment with the economic theory of Karl Marx has recently gone down to defeat with the disintegration of Soviet communism? Didn't America win the Cold War against the spread of communism? The answer is a resounding 'yes, BUT. We won the 55-year Cold War but, while winning it abroad, we have failed to understand that an intellectual elite has subtly but systematically and surely converted the economic theory of Marx to culture in American society. And they did it while we were busy winning the Cold War abroad. They introduced 'cultural Marxism' into the mainstream of American life over a period of thirty years, while our attention was diverted elsewhere.
The vehicle for this introduction was the idealistic Boomer elite, those young middle-class and well-to-do college students who became the vanguard of America's counter-culture revolution of the mid-1960s - those draft-dodging, pot smoking, hippies who demonstrated against the Vietnam War and who fomented the destructive (to women) 'women's liberation' movement. These New Totalitarians11 are now in power as they have come to middle-age and control every public institution in our nation. But that is getting ahead of the story.
The cauldron for implementing this witches brew was the elite Boomer generation. The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s was set in motion and guided intellectually by the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School -- Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno and others.12,13 Its influence is now felt in nearly every institution in the U.S. The elite Boomers, throwbacks to the dangerous idealist Transcendental generation of the 1820s, are the 'agents of change,' who have introduced 'cultural Marxism' into American life.
William S. Lind reminds14 us that our nation's story since the 1950s would be "...that of a nation that has decayed and degenerated at a fantastic pace, moving in less than half a century from the greatest country on earth to a Third World nation, overrun by crime, noise, drugs and dirt. The fall of Rome was graceful by comparison. Why did it happen?
Lind relates that over the last forty years, America has been conquered by the same force that earlier took over Russia, China, Germany and Italy. That force is ideology. The ideology that has taken over America goes most commonly by the name of 'Political Correctness.' It is, in fact, 'cultural Marxism,' -- that is, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an ideology with deep roots. It did not begin with the counter-culture revolution in the mid-1960s. Its roots go back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.15 These roots, over time, spread to the writings of Herbert Marcuse.
Herbert Marcuse was one of the most prominent Frankfurt School promoters of Critical Theory's social revolution among college and university students in the 1960s. It is instructive to review what he has written on the subject: "One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society ... there is one thing we can say with complete assurance. The traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution have ended. These ideas are old-fashioned ... what we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system." This sentiment was first expressed by the early 20th century Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci, a young communist who died in one of Mussolini's prisons in 1937 at the age of 46, conjured up the notion of a 'quiet' revolution that could be diffused throughout a culture -- over a period of time - to destroy it from within. He was the first to suggest that the application of psychology to break the traditions, beliefs, morals, and will of a people could be accomplished quietly and without the possibility of resistance. He deduced that16 "The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2,000 years..." and a culture based on this religion could only be captured from within.
Gramsci insisted that alliances with non-Communist leftist groups would be essential to Communist victory. In our time, these would include radical feminist groups, extremist environmental organizations, so-called civil rights movements, anti-police associations, internationalist-minded groups, liberal church denominations, and others. Working together, these groups could create a united front working for the destructive transformation of the old Judeo-Christian culture of the West.
By winning 'cultural hegemony,' Gramsci pointed out that they could control the deepest wellsprings of human thought -- through the medium of mass psychology. Indeed, men could be made to 'love their servitude.' In terms of the preaching of the Frankfurt School, which followed Gramsci's death, resistance to the 'cultural Marxism' could be completely negated by placing the resister in a psychic 'iron cage.' The tools of mass psychology could be applied to produce this result.
The essential nature of Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary strategy is reflected in a 1990s book17 by the American Boomer author, Charles A. Reich, 'The Greening of America.' "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and the culture, and it will change the political structure as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is the revolution of the New Generation." Of course this New Generation would be the author's elite Boomer generation. Indeed, this is the underlying premise of the implementation of 'cultural Marxism' in American society by the 'graduates' of the Frankfurt School. This intellectual foundation is the basis of the mantra of the elite Boomers, who in the 1992 presidential election, asked Americans to 'have the courage to change.'
The Frankfurt School theorized that the authoritarian personality is a product of the patriarchal family. This idea is in turn directly connected to Frederich Engels' 'The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,' which promotes matriarchy. Furthermore, it was Karl Marx who wrote about the radical notion of a 'community of women' in the Communist manifesto. And it was Karl Marx who wrote disparagingly about the idea that the family was the basic unit of society in 'The German Ideology'of 1845.
The 'authoritarian personality' is not to be interpreted primarily as a handbook for the conduct of warfare against prejudice as such, but as a handbook for psychological warfare against the American male for the purpose of rendering him unwilling to defend traditional and formerly held beliefs and values. In other words, the purpose would be to emasculate him. Undoubtedly, this is what the Institute meant by 'psychological techniques for changing personality.'
'The Authoritarian personality,' studied by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s in America, prepared the way for the subsequent warfare against the masculine gender promoted by Herbert Marcuse and his band of social revolutionaries under the guise of 'women's liberation' and the New Left movement in the 1960s. The evidence that psychological techniques for changing personality is intended to mean emasculation of the American male is provided by Abraham Maslow, founder of Third Force Humanist Psychology and promoter of the psychotherapeutic classroom, who wrote that, '...the next step in personal evolution is a transcendence of both masculinity and femininity to general humanness.' The Marxist revolutionaries knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it. They have succeeded in accomplishing much of their agenda.
But how can we claim the 'causes' of the breakdown of our schools, our universities, indeed, the very fiber of our culture were a product of a tiny group of Jewish intellectuals who immigrated from Germany in 1933? Given all of the special-interest groups involved in these activities, how can we trace these 'causes' to the Frankfurt school? Look at some of the evidence.
For example, postmodern reconstruction of the history of Western Civilization (now prevalent in our universities) has its roots in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This rewriting of history by the postmodern scholars in America has only recently come under attack. Keith Windschuttle, in his book, 'Killing of History,' has severely criticized the rush to 'relativism' by historiographers. What is truly astonishing, however, is that 'relativism' has largely supplanted the pursuit of truth as a goal in historical study.18 George G. Iggers' recently published book, 'Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge,' reminds us of the now famous line by Hayden White, a postmodernist, "Historical narratives...are verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found." He quotes other postmodernists, mostly non- historians, who19 "...reinforce the proposition that truth and reality are primarily authoritarian weapons of our times." We now recognize the source of this postmodern assault -- the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School who became experts in criticizing the 'authoritarian personality' in American culture.
Herbert London refutes White's proposition by observing, "...if history is largely invention, who can say with authority that the American Revolution came before the French Revolution?" He observes that evidence has taken a back seat to inventiveness. He thus cuts right to the chase -- the inventions of postmodernism, which are cutting successive generations of Americans off from their culture and their history, evolved directly from the 'cultural Marxist' scholars of the Frankfurt School.
How did this situation come about in America's universities? Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed20 that it slipped past those traditional academics almost unobserved until it was too late. It occurred so 'quietly' that when they 'looked up,' postmodernism was upon them with a vengeance. "They were surrounded by a tidal wave of faddish multicultural subjects such as radical feminism, deconstructed relativism as history and other courses" which undermine the perpetuation of Western Civilization. Indeed, this tidal wave slipped by just as Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School had envisioned -- a 'quiet' revolution. A revolution that could not be resisted by force.
Where can we see other evidence of the teachings of the Frankfurt School in our culture today? One example is the public school system. William Kilpatrick21 observes that our public schools have shifted to a moral 'value neutral' mode of teaching over the past three decades. For students, this has meant wholesale confusion about moral values: learning to question values they have scarcely acquired, unlearning values taught at home, and concluding that questions of right and wrong are always subjective and relative.
The new educational techniques, implemented under a 'values clarification' methodology, incorporated overtones of 'sensitivity training'. An emphasis was placed on one's 'feelings,' which borders on invasion of privacy. For example, a Virginia mother of a third-grade daughter tells22 us that her daughter was "...told to write in a journal five things she couldn't tell her mother." Teaching more resembled psychotherapy than education. This method of teaching in our public schools has created a generation of moral illiterates; students who know their own feelings but don't know their culture.
Parents of public schooled children seldom know that such methods exist. Quite often this is a matter of deliberate policy. In one community, when a teacher asked what she should do if parents objected to the new 'values clarification' program, she was told by a seminar leader,23 "You call it 'life skills' and you do it anyway." In other communities, parents have been forced to sue under the Freedom of Information Act in order to find out what materials were being used in their children's classes. Professor Sidney Simon, who created the 'values clarification' method, boasted24 that as a young teacher at Temple University he "...always bootlegged the values stuff under other titles: I was assigned to teach Social Studies in the elementary school, and I taught values clarification. I was assigned Current Trends in American Education, and I taught my trend." Indeed, the 'cultural Marxists' have taken charge of our public schools. While America slept!
It is if interest to note that the 'sensitivity' training techniques used in our public schools over the past 30 years and which are now employed by the U.S. military to educate the troops about 'sexual harassment' were developed in 1943 by a Frankfurt School protegé. Abraham Maslow is the author25 of 'The Art of Facilitation' which is a manual used during such 'sensitivity' training. Thereby teachers were indoctrinated not to teach but to facilitate. They were to become amateur group therapists. The classroom became the center of self-examination, therapeutic circles where children (and later on, military26 personnel) talked about their own subjective feelings. This technique was designed to convince children they were the sole authority in their own lives.
Parental authority, as well as authoritative teaching, were to be denied since under Critical Theory the young might become authoritarian characters or worse. Through applied mass psychology, the parents were to be convinced that children should make their own decisions so they could be molded into the new American child (Hillary Clinton's 'It Takes a Village to Raise a Child') who would have none of the attributes which the social psychologists considered negative. Techniques for overcoming resistance (by the child and/or the parent), developed mainly in the field of individual psychotherapy, were improved and adopted for use with groups and even for use on a mass scale.
It is important to realize that this movement, 'cultural Marxism,' exists, understand where it came from, and what its objectives were - the complete destruction of Western Civilization in America. That is, these 'cultural Marxists' aimed to destroy, slowly but surely from the bottom up, the entire fabric of American Civilization.
By the end of World War II, almost all the original Frankfurt School members had become American citizens. This meant the beginning of a new English-speaking audience for the school. Now the focus was on American forms of authoritarianism. With this shift in subject matter came a subtle change in the center of the Institute's work. In America, authoritarianism appeared in different forms than its European counterpart. Instead of terror or coercion, more gentle forms of enforced conformism had been developed. According to Martin Jay,27 "Perhaps the most effective of these were to be found in the cultural field. American mass culture thus became one of the central concerns of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s."
The Frankfurt School had devised the concept of designating the opponents of the Marxist social revolution as 'authoritarian characters.' According to available accounts,28 "..there was a meeting of American scholars at a conference on religious and racial prejudice in 1944. Over the next five years, a Frankfurt School team under the direction of Max Horkheimer conducted in depth social and psychological profiles of Americans under a project entitled 'Studies of Prejudice.' One of the results was a book entitled 'The Authoritarian Personality' by Theodor Adorno, et al, that summarized one of the largest public opinion surveys ever undertaken in the United States. It was published in 1950, and conformed to the original Critical Theory in every respect. As a document which testified to the belief system of the Frankfurt School revolutionaries, it was essentially anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-nationalist, anti-patriot, anti-conservative, anti-hereditarian, anti ethnocentric, anti-masculine, anti-tradition, and anti-morality. All of these are elements inherent in Critical Theory."
Since the 1940s, subtle changes appeared in the Frankfurt School's descriptions of their work. For example, the opposite of the 'authoritarian personality' was no longer the 'revolutionary,' as it had been in previous studies aimed at Europeans. In America, it was now the 'democratic' who opposed the 'authoritarian personality.' Thus, their language matched more closely the liberal29 "...New Deal rather than Marxist or radical.." language. Education for tolerance, rather than praxis for revolutionary change, was the ostensible goal of their research. They were cleverly merging their language with the mainstream of liberal left thought in America while maintaining their 'cultural Marxist' objectives.
Toleration had never been an end in itself for the Frankfurt School, and yet the nonauthoritarian (utopian) personality, insofar as it was defined, was posited as a person with a nondogmatic tolerance for diversity.30 This thought is dominant in today's elite Boomer generation, the New Totalitarians.
'Cultural Marxism,' as preached by the Frankfurt School alumni in the U.S. and as followed by the elite Boomers, The New Totalitarians, laid the foundation for and spawned the widely popular, long-term nationwide campaign against prejudice, bigotry and discrimination which was the precursor of the less popular, and potentially destructive concepts of affirmative action, multiculturalism and diversity. Recognize the terms? You can't escape them if you watch national television or read the mainstream press in the U.S. today. They take their roots from the study of anti-semitism and discrimination by the Institute during the 1940s and the systematic insertion of the language of 'discrimination,' civil rights, women's rights and other 'minority' rights into the mainstream of American culture.
According to Raehn,31 "Critical Theory as applied mass psychology has led to the radical deconstruction of gender in the American culture. Following Critical Theory, the distinction between masculinity and femininity will disappear. The traditional roles of mothers and fathers are to be dissolved so that patriarchy will be ended. Children are not to be raised according to their biological differences, but should be free to move in and out of existing genders and gender roles according to their own preferences. This reflects the Frankfurt School rationale for the disintegration of the traditional family."
Thus, one of the basic tenets of Critical Theory was the necessity to break down the contemporary family. The Institute scholars preached that32 "...Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change." The 'generation gap' of the 1960s and the 'gender gap' of the 1990s are two aspects of the attempt by the elite Boomers (taking a page out of 'cultural Marxism') to transform American culture into their 'Marxist' utopia.
The transformation of American culture envisioned by the 'cultural Marxists' is based on matriarchal theory. That is, they propose transforming American culture into a female-dominated one. This is a direct throwback to Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School member who considered matriarchal theory in psychoanalytic terms. In 1933, he wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that matriarchy was the only genuine family type of 'natural society.'
Eric Fromm, another charter member of the Institute, was also one of the most active advocates of matriarchal theory. Fromm was especially taken with the idea that all love and altruistic feelings were ultimately derived from the maternal love necessitated by the extended period of human pregnancy and postnatal care. "Love was thus not dependent on sexuality, as Freud had supposed. In fact, sex was more often tied to hatred and destruction. Masculinity and femininity33 were not reflections of 'essential' sexual differences, as the romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined." This dogma was the precedent for today's radical feminist pronouncements appearing in nearly every major newspaper and TV program, including the television newscasts. For these current day radicals, male and female roles result from cultural indoctrination in America -- an indoctrination carried out by the male patriarchy to the detriment of women. Nature plays no role in this matter.
Raehn reveals34 that Irving Kristol's description35 of womanly traits closely resemble Eric Fromm's justification for a matriarchal society which became an integral part of the social revolutionary process promoted by the 'cultural Marxists.' Raehn builds on the work of Martin Jay36 to reveal the psycho-dynamics of the social revolutionary process of 'cultural Marxism' in our day. He builds a framework for simplifying and understanding this process as follows:
1. Critical Theory and its integral group of sub-theories by its very essence consists of destructive criticism of the social order to foment a non-violent social revolution in America.
2. The social order by definition consists of those in varying levels of position, power and influence which can be simplified into those in the higher order and those in the lower order.
3. A social revolution is by definition an inversion of the social order whereby there is an exchange of position, power and influence between those of the higher order and those of the lower order,
4. For a non-violent social revolution to be successfully executed, those of the higher order must be brought into a psychic condition of voluntary submission to those of the lower order.
5. The creation of this psychic condition means that those of the higher order by their own induced volition become willing to agree to an exchange of position, power and influence with those of the lower order.
6. As the social order is formed in the first place under the prevailing culture set by custom and tradition as inherited wisdom, inversion of the culture itself is required in order to bring about the psychic condition of submission of the higher order.
7. An inversion of the culture really means an inversion of the prevailing belief system whereby the beliefs of those of the higher order are exchanged for beliefs of those of the lower order.
8. The inversion of beliefs means the belief in the authority of those of the higher order to set and enforce standards of thinking and behavior for the society is dissolved in favor of belief in the authority of those in the lower order to think and do as they please.
9. This inversion of the structure of authority really means an inversion of the moral order and so leads to disorder, chaos, and social disintegration.
Raehn states that the reference to higher order and lower order is necessary in this framework since the social revolutionary ideology is one in which women and children are viewed as those of the oppressed lower order while males are viewed as the oppressor higher order. This flows from the original view of the utopian social revolutionaries themselves as those of the oppressed lower order who thereafter identify with those of the lower order of all kinds. This reflects the underlying impulse of the Frankfurt School and their Critical Theory which in their eyes justifies the social revolution.
Indeed, the 'cultural Marxists' have, in the 1990s, melded with radical feminism in the elite Boomer generation, that throwback to the dangerous Transcendentals of the 1820s, to form a caldron of discontent (via Critical Theory -- destructive criticism) in our nation which has the potential to destroy American Civilization.
For example, the combat arms of the U.S. military are the last bastions of male domination in American culture. The matter of women-in-combat37 is not really about gender equity or equal opportunity as is commonly argued. These are only the given reasons. The real reason is to create the psychic condition of submission of the male gender in American culture to the will of the social revolutionaries by depriving higher order males of any authority to set and enforce standards. This functions as a means of transferring authority to the social revolutionaries themselves so they might gain the position of power and influence of the higher order and thereby achieve the exchange that is the aim of the social revolutionary process. The radical feminists and the 'cultural Marxist' revolutionaries are placing women on top in order to set the stage for the destruction of American Civilization.
Indeed, Critical Theory as mass psychology came to be applied against America on a vast scale and with great success. 'The Authoritarian Personality' served to ignite a massive concerted effort by the Marxist revolutionaries in the guise of social psychologists to eliminate 'prejudice' in American life and later 'discrimination.' This concerted effort led to the psychic criminalization of prejudice and discrimination in precisely the same way Karl Marx criminalized the bourgeoisie middle class in Europe. This would later lead to legal criminalization by a series of Federal Laws and Judicial decisions.
The final straw in this process was affirmative action. Tom Chittum, a Vietnam War veteran and spokesman for a growing number of middle-class Americans (especially those who have seen their manufacturing jobs exported to foreign shores via NAFTA and other free-trade mechanisms), tells us that38 "The racist euphemism for [the] systematic dismantling of the rights of [white] English-speaking Europeans [in America] is affirmative action." Indeed, affirmative action has separated white American males of European descent from minorities and women in ways that could lead to violence in America's future -- a violence fed by the same factors that led to the chaotic disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.39
Only recently has a majority of Americans awakened and fought back against this tyranny. California's successful referendum via Proposition 209 to outlaw preferences based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin is an example of this 'awakening.'
The next stage in this applied mass psychology was the psychic criminalization of what the Marxist social revolutionaries termed racism, sexism and anti-Semitism directed against white males. This was a logical outcome of Critical Theory which also inspired Betty Friedan's feminist movement with her book, 'The Feminine Mystique.' Obviously, she understood the revolutionary intent of Herbert Marcuse who proclaimed it on the campuses of American colleges and universities in the mid-1960s. Friedan quotes Eric Fromm in her seminal book40 which initiated the modern feminist movement. Indeed, radical feminism was introduced to 'cultural Marxism' during the 1960s and 1970s.
Virtually everyone in today's America who is familiar with Karl Marx's demonic poetry of destruction, his War Plan of 1843 which revealed his process for the disintegration of the middle class, and his castigation of the family as the basic unit of society as he wrote in 'The German Ideology' of 1845, will find it easy to accept the reality that Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is but a mere transmutation of these ideas.
But in terms of destruction and disintegration, Critical Theory absorbed by the 'change agents' and other social revolutionaries has led them to declare their intent to restructure America. As they proclaim, this means their activities have been directed toward the disintegration of the traditional white male power structure. As anyone with eyes to view present-day television and motion pictures can confirm, this has been largely achieved. In other words, Critical Theory, as applied mass psychology, brought forth a 'quiet' psychic revolution which facilitated an actual physical revolution that has become visible everywhere in the United States of America.
This 'quiet' revolution resulted in a mass conversion of the American people by dialectic stages of operant conditioning by words such as prejudice, discrimination, bigotry, racism, sexism and anti-Semitism that were designed to instill guilt, pity, shame, fear, anger and hatred in the American psyche so that no one would dare oppose the social revolution without being exposed to uncontrollable rage, intimidation, and terror -- this latter being a reflection of Karl Marx's dictum that 'the nation must be taught to be terrified of itself...'
This is the psychic 'iron cage' in which the American male has been placed by the confluence of two dangerous ideologies -- radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism.'
It was the destructive criticism of the primary elements of American culture that inspired the 1960s counter-culture revolution. As the name implies, this false 'spiritual awakening' by the idealist Boomers in their coming-of-age years was an effort to transform the prevailing culture into an inverted or opposite kind of culture that is a necessary prelude to social revolution. Now that these elite Boomers are in positions of power in the United States, they are completing their work of destroying every institution that has been built up over 200 years of American history. Their aim is to destroy any vestige of Western Civilization in American culture.
As Richard Bernstein made clear in his book on multiculturalism,41"...the Marxist revolutionary process for the past several decades in America has centered on race and sex warfare rather than class warfare" as in earlier times. This constitutes a grand scheme to restructure American society. As the social revolutionaries readily proclaim, their purpose is to destroy the hegemonic white male power structure. In order to accomplish this, all barriers to the insertion of women and minorities into this power structure are to be broken down by all means available. Laws and lawsuits against discrimination serve as some of these means. Intimidation and outright terrorization of white males as oppressive racists and sexists are carried out by the mass media and our universities. These are the psycho-dynamics of the revolutionary process that are designed to render psychic decapitation of anyone who might offer effective opposition.
It has been pointed out recently by Steve Forbes, a Republican presidential primary candidate in 1996, that42 "This country's Founders recognized three primal values in the Declaration of Independence, and they ranked them properly: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Forbes observes that if the order of these fundamental human rights is switched putting happiness before liberty or liberty before life -- you end up with moral chaos and social anarchy. This very condition is what Judge Robert H. Bork describes43 as 'modern liberalism.' He identifies the defining characteristics of this ideology as "...'radical egalitarianism' (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and 'radical individualism' (the drastic reduction of limit to personal gratification)." These traits are the ultimate in pure 'pursuit of happiness.' This condition is the ultimate goal of the 'social Marxists' of the Frankfurt School -- a utopian paradise where they and they alone make the rules.
Judge Bork also identifies 'radical feminism' as "...the most destructive and fanatical..." element of this modern liberalism. He further describes radical feminism as "...totalitarian in spirit." This is a refined way of saying that the forces of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' have joined in the elite Boomer generation to set the stage for the destruction of American Civilization.
Most Americans do not yet realize that they are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new social order in the world. These revolutionaries are the New Age elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians.44 They now control every public institution in the United States of America. Their 'quiet' revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearly complete. It was based on the intellectual foundation of the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School. Its completion depends on keeping the American male in his psychic 'iron cage.'
The confluence of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' within the span of a single generation, that of the elite Boomers (possibly the most dangerous45 generation in America's history), has imposed this yoke on the American male. It remains to be seen whether or not he will continue his 'voluntary submission' to a future of slavery in a new American matriarchy, the precursor to a state of complete anarchy and an end to America's experiment with democracy. It may be that the fate of American civilization will depend on his steadfast and possibly violent resistance to the reality of 'cultural Marxism' in our nation.
Indeed, the new elites, the dangerous Boomer generation who are now in control of every American public institution and wield power over all of us, stand at the intersection of two of the most destructive ideologies known to mankind, radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism,' derived from the Frankfurt School. This confluence of ideologies may be more than the experiment with American democracy can withstand. Unless the American male breaks out of his psychic 'iron cage'. The continuation of America's experiment with democracy, a democratic republic, may well depend on whether or not this bondage can be broken. If it can, there is hope for a renewed and stronger America. If it cannot, a chaotic disintegration is in our future.
1 'Chaotic,' as used here, has a specific scientific meaning. For a primer on chaos theory, see Gleick, James, "Chaos: Making a New Science," Viking Press, 1987.
2 For a more detailed mathematical description of chaos theory, along with an exhaustive treatment of the simple but revealing mathematical 'quadratic iterator,' see Pietgen, Heinz-Otto et al, "Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers in Science," Springer-Verlag, 1992.
3 Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069," Quill, William Morrow, 1991. This book, though not intended by its authors, describes American history in terms of a complex, non-linear iterative feedback system -- a system which can be expected to exhibit chaotic behavior in the sense of chaos theory as described in the two previous references.
4 Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell US About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny," Broadway Books, 1997. This book provides a more detailed description of the current epoch in American History than that presented in the previous reference. It focuses on the elite Boomer generation and its role in meeting America's future challenges.
5 Pinker, Steve, "Why They Kill Their Newborns," The New York Times Magazine, 2 November 1997.
6 Kelly, Michael, "Arguing for Infanticide," The Washington Post, 6 November 1997.
7 Raehn, Raymond V., "The Historical Roots of 'Political Correctness,'" Free Congress Foundation, Number 44, June 1997.
8 Jay, Martin, "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950," pp. 77, University of California Press, 1973.
9 Ibid, pp. 81.
10 Ibid, pp. 82.
11 Atkinson, Gerald L., "The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America's Future," Atkinson Associates Press, 1996.
12 Jay, Martin, "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950," University of California Press, 1973.
13 Wiggershaus, Rolf, "The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance," The MIT Press, 1994.
14 Lind, William S., "What is 'Political Correctness?," Essays on our Times, Free Congress Foundation, Number 43, March 1997.
15 Ibid.
16 Thornton, Fr. James, "'Gramscian' Strategy at Work," The New American, pp. 25, 18 September 1995.
17 Reich, Charles A., "The Greening of America," Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1995.
18 London, Herbert, "Discipline of history under assault," The Washington Times, 26 October 1997.
19 Ibid.
20 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Panel on 'Academic Reform: Internal Sources,' National Association of Scholars, NAS Sixth General Conference, 3-5 May
1996.
21 Kilpatrick, William, "Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: And What We Can Do About It," Simon & Schuster, 1992.
22 Innerst, Carol, "The Dumbing Down of America," Part One of a Three-Part Series, The Washington Times, 19 October 1997.
23 Ibid, Kilpatrick, William.
24 Ibid, Kilpatrick, William.
25 Raehn, Raymond V., "Critical Theory: A Special Research Report, 1 April1996.
26 Editorial, "The crying of the admirals," The Washington Times, 3
November 1995. The U.S. Naval Academy has added female 'role models' to
the faculty. In August 1994, the Academy placed a new emphasis on conflict
resolution and consciousness-raising. "As 'Lean On Me' started playing,
Master Chief Liz Johns gave the plebes her final orders: stand in a circle,
sway to the music, sing along, and hug. From the circle came the sharp
sniffle of sobs. The future admirals of America were crying."
27 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 172.
28 Ibid, Raehn, Raymond V.
29 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 227.
30 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 248.
31 Ibid, Raehn, Raymond V.
32 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 135.
33 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 95.
34 Raehn, Raymond V., "Letter to COL Robert L. Maginnis, USA (Ret.), 1 March 1997.
35 Kristol, Irving, "The Feminization of the Democrats," The Wall Street Journal, 9 September 1996. Kristol reported that 50 percent of the delegates to the Democratic Party convention were women. Women were described as tending to be more sentimental, more risk-adverse, less competitive than men, and also more permissive and less judgmental.
36 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 94-96.
37 Ibid, Raehn, Raymond V., pp. 6.
38 Chittum, Thomas W., "Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America," American Eagle Publications, Inc., 1996.
39 Atkinson, Gerald L., "The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America's Future," Atkinson Associates Press, 1996.
40 Friedan, Betty, "The Feminine Mystique," pp. 278, Dell Publishing, 1963-1983.
41 Bernstein, Richard, "The Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future," Knopf, 1994.
42 Snow, Tony, "Moral of the story: Forbes virtue stance," The Washington Times, 27 October 1997. Mr. Snow reports on an article by Steve Forbes in the November 1997 issue of 'Policy Review' magazine.
43 Bork, Robert H., "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," HarperCollins, 1996.
44 Ibid, Atkinson, Gerald L.
Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "Generations: The History of America's Future -- 1584 to 2069," pp. 374-426, William Morrow & Company, 1991.
Part II
The Thread of 'Cultural Marxism'
by
Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson
15 May 1998
In Part I of this series, the radical feminist 'thread' of the complex fabric of American civilization was described in terms of its antecedent in the idealist Transcendental generation of the early-to-mid 1800s. In that essay, it was observed that if the 'feminization' of our culture, driven primarily by radical feminists bent on destroying a perceived male-dominated hierarchical culture, were the only aspect of American life that appeared ominous, we could probably rest assured that the cycles of American history would take care of it. But this is not the only linear thread in the complex nonlinear fabric of American civilization. Another such thread, 'cultural Marxism,' interacting with the radical feminist thread, has the potential to drive this chaotic system into a precipitous disintegration.1,2,3,4
This essay is an attempt to describe the effects of 'cultural Marxism' in American life.
Suppose you awakened one morning and realized that TV news, sports, and political pundit personalities, television sitcoms, television and Hollywood movies (plots and leading characters), were dominated by females and minorities of various races and ethnicities. You may have recognized that 'authority figures' are now more likely to be portrayed by women and minorities, than the white male. You would find this image quite commonplace. It is the age in which we live.
Suppose you visited any major university in America and perused the curriculum. You would find a vast spawning ground of non-content subjects and even departments set up to deal with everything from women's studies, to race-based culture studies, to sexual orientation studies, to studies of the popular culture. Yes, the times are-a-changing. Just the natural dynamics of a free society seeking its right to the 'pursuit of happiness.'
Suppose you found that you, your son, or your grandson had just been terminated from his job because the affirmative action policies of the employer demanded a 'remedy' which gave preference to a woman and/or minorities. Or, worse yet, suppose these white Americans of European descent were not even allowed to apply for positions in universities or the workplace reserved specifically for women and/or minorities. Or if allowed to compete, these unfortunates would be at the bottom of the 'preference' scale used to judge entrance. Observing this, you would feel right at home in an America entering the 21st century.
Suppose you asked your children or grandchildren what they were learning in our public schools. You would most likely find that they were being subjected to teaching methods that explore the child's 'feelings,' and build their 'self esteem,' even in such traditional disciplines as math, science, and English. You would also find that their test scores in national aptitude tests are going down -- as they have continuously over the past three decades.
If you have a son or grandson in the U.S. military, you would undoubtedly find him subject to frequent, periodic 'sensitivity training' sessions aimed at purging him of his chauvinist cultural attitudes toward women and minorities -- whether or not he possesses such attitudes.
Suppose you listened to the presidential political 'debates' over the past two election cycles. You undoubtedly would have heard the phrase, 'have the courage to change.' Left unspecified was the direction and nature of such change. It appeared that 'change,' simply for its own sake was good enough. Change is indeed invigorating to those who feel that they are part of a great democratic process and tradition. After all, after having won the Cold War, maybe we can now lead the whole world to freedom!
Suppose you have listened to what serves as foreign policy 'debate' over the past five years. If you listened carefully, you would have heard our leaders claim, '...it's the right thing to do.' This moral justification, without a shred of thought of the long-term consequences, has guided our foreign policy in Bosnia, Somalia, NATO-expansion, and China. Indeed, some believe this moralizing of foreign policy is simply the result of a cult of 'personalizing' everything our political leaders do -- primarily for domestic political advantage.
Suppose you woke up one morning and noticed that one of the most brutalizing professions on earth, that of combat arms, is being treated (by some) as if it were just another bureaucratic job. That is, it is a candidate for the infusion of anyone who simply 'chooses' it. The concept that 'many apply, but few are chosen' is being supplanted by 'let anyone who chooses, serve.' Many of our political leaders are seriously considering opening ground combat arms to women. They have already opened aviation combat arms to women.
If you are one of those who forgot (or never knew) that combat service is an extremely brutal, physically demanding, and mentally punishing profession, you are a candidate for 'having the courage to change.' You are such a candidate in spite of the fact that armies, over many centuries and many civilizations, and, in particular the American military, have discriminated against various groups in their selection of the best 'warriors.' And for good reason. The aged, the infirm, the mentally unsound, the weak, and women have been discriminated against in selection for combat arms. This discrimination is as sound as that by which the human race, early in its evolution, learned to 'discriminate' between predator and prey, friend or foe, and which 'knowledge' set in motion the biological mechanisms of 'fight or flee.' Such 'discrimination' ensured our survival as a species. Discrimination is not necessarily a flawed concept.
If you awoke some morning and realized that many of your fellow Americans believe that it is 'the right thing to do' when the most helpless among us are condemned to death by a 'woman's right to choose,' you might wonder where we are headed as a culture and why.
Finally, you may even become aware that an influential minority of the elite Boomers openly discuss and defend the practice of neonaticide5 (the purposeful killing of an infant soon after birth). According to a distinguished professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "...we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life...What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed?...the right to life must come...from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect on ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die." Of course, under this definition any of us could have been killed, not only shortly after birth, but right up to adolescence or even young adulthood -- subject to a decision by one of the 'anointed' New Totalitarians.
Pinker observes that "...several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons...and thus neonatocide should not be classified as murder." Rational observers6 of this abomination remind us that infanticide is rightly universally treated as a "...greatly aberrant act, the very definition of a moral horror." The point to be made here is that, if we finally awaken one morning and find the New Totalitarians presenting this abhorrence as rational policy for America, we might logically wonder where all of this stuff came from.
Indeed, a thoughtful person should ask himself or herself whether or not all this 'change' from America's traditional culture is simply a random set of events played out by a random set of players, all independent of each other - all disconnected from any central premise or guidance. It is entirely possible that chance is at work here and all of these 'threads' of American culture are the random workings of the human intellect (the pursuit of what is possible, vice what is appropriate) in a free, democratic culture.
But suppose you were to learn that nearly all of the above observations are completely consistent with a 'design' -that is a concept, a way of thinking, and a process for bringing it about. And suppose one could identify a small core group of people who designed just such a concept and thought through the process of infusing it into a culture. Wouldn't you be interested in at least learning about such a core group? Wouldn't you want to know who they were, what they thought, and how they conjured up a process for bringing their thoughts into action? For Americans with even a smidgeon of curiosity, the answer should be a resounding yes!
If such a core group could be found, then it would still depend on your personal 'world view' as to its significance. If you believe in the 'blind watchmaker,' that is, all cosmic and social events are random and guided only by the laws of nature, 'evolutionary' in the sense of competing with other random events for survival in a 'stochastic' world, you may choose to believe that such a core group was meaningless -- it may have existed but so what? It may have been only one of an uncountably large number of such 'groups' in the world's history. And you may believe that any particular group's 'window of opportunity' to influence future generations was passed by and did little to influence the course of America's history.
If you believe, instead, that nature has a 'design,' and that all events can be connected and we humans can make sense out of many of them if we will only 'connect all of the dots,' then you may believe that this small core group has great influence, even today, in American Culture. If this is your world view, you may (but not necessarily) even believe in a 'conspiracy. and 'conspirators' which and who aim to alter our culture on a vast scale.
It is clear, however, that irrespective of one's 'world view,' it is informative to at least know of such a core group (if it, indeed, existed), what it believed, what it set out to accomplish, and what methods it followed to take action on its beliefs.
Just such a core group existed. That is, history identifies a small group of German intellectuals who devised concepts, processes, and action plans which conform very closely to what Americans presently observe every day in their culture. Observations, such as those made at the beginning of this piece, can be directly traced to the work of this core group of intellectuals. They were members of the Frankfurt School, formed in Germany in 1923. They were the forebears of what some proclaim as 'cultural Marxism,' a radical social movement that has transformed American culture.
'Cultural Marxism' and 'critical theory' are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute, modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as the Frankfurt School.7 In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. While here, they migrated to major U.S. universities (Columbia, Princeton, and California at Berkeley). These intellectual Marxists included Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, 'make love, not war,' during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
By promoting the dialectic of 'negative' criticism, that is, pointing out the rational contradictions in a society's belief system, the Frankfurt School 'revolutionaries' dreamed of a utopia where their rules governed.8 "Their Critical Theory had to contain a strongly imaginative, even utopian strain, which transcends the limits of reality." Its tenets would never be subject to experimental evidence. The pure logic of their thoughts would be incontrovertible. As a precursor to today's 'postmodernism' in the intellectual academic community,9 "...it recognized that disinterested scientific research was impossible in a society in which men were themselves not yet autonomous...the researcher was always part of the social object he was attempting to study." This, of course, is the current fetish for the rewriting of history, and the vogue for our universities' law, English literature, and humanities disciplines.
Critical theory rejected the ideal of Western Civilization in the age of modern science, that is, the verification or falsifying10 of theory by experimental evidence. Only the superior mind was able to fashion the 'truths' from observation of the evidence. There would be no need to test these hypotheses against everyday experience.
The Frankfurt school studied the 'authoritarian personality' which became synonymous with the male, the patriarchal head of the American family. A modern utopia would be constructed by these idealistic intellectuals by 'turning Western civilization' upside down. This utopia would be a product of their imagination, a product not susceptible to criticism on the basis of the examination of evidence. This 'revolution' would be accomplished by fomenting a very quiet, subtle and slowly spreading 'cultural Marxism' which would apply to culture the principles of Karl Marx bolstered by the modern psychological tools of Freud. Thus, 'cultural Marxism' became a marriage of Marx and Freud aimed at producing a 'quiet' revolution in the United States of America. This 'quiet' revolution has occurred in America over the past 30 years. While America slept!
What is 'cultural Marxism?' Why should it even be considered when the world's vast experiment with the economic theory of Karl Marx has recently gone down to defeat with the disintegration of Soviet communism? Didn't America win the Cold War against the spread of communism? The answer is a resounding 'yes, BUT. We won the 55-year Cold War but, while winning it abroad, we have failed to understand that an intellectual elite has subtly but systematically and surely converted the economic theory of Marx to culture in American society. And they did it while we were busy winning the Cold War abroad. They introduced 'cultural Marxism' into the mainstream of American life over a period of thirty years, while our attention was diverted elsewhere.
The vehicle for this introduction was the idealistic Boomer elite, those young middle-class and well-to-do college students who became the vanguard of America's counter-culture revolution of the mid-1960s - those draft-dodging, pot smoking, hippies who demonstrated against the Vietnam War and who fomented the destructive (to women) 'women's liberation' movement. These New Totalitarians11 are now in power as they have come to middle-age and control every public institution in our nation. But that is getting ahead of the story.
The cauldron for implementing this witches brew was the elite Boomer generation. The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s was set in motion and guided intellectually by the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School -- Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno and others.12,13 Its influence is now felt in nearly every institution in the U.S. The elite Boomers, throwbacks to the dangerous idealist Transcendental generation of the 1820s, are the 'agents of change,' who have introduced 'cultural Marxism' into American life.
William S. Lind reminds14 us that our nation's story since the 1950s would be "...that of a nation that has decayed and degenerated at a fantastic pace, moving in less than half a century from the greatest country on earth to a Third World nation, overrun by crime, noise, drugs and dirt. The fall of Rome was graceful by comparison. Why did it happen?
Lind relates that over the last forty years, America has been conquered by the same force that earlier took over Russia, China, Germany and Italy. That force is ideology. The ideology that has taken over America goes most commonly by the name of 'Political Correctness.' It is, in fact, 'cultural Marxism,' -- that is, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an ideology with deep roots. It did not begin with the counter-culture revolution in the mid-1960s. Its roots go back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.15 These roots, over time, spread to the writings of Herbert Marcuse.
Herbert Marcuse was one of the most prominent Frankfurt School promoters of Critical Theory's social revolution among college and university students in the 1960s. It is instructive to review what he has written on the subject: "One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society ... there is one thing we can say with complete assurance. The traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution have ended. These ideas are old-fashioned ... what we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system." This sentiment was first expressed by the early 20th century Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci, a young communist who died in one of Mussolini's prisons in 1937 at the age of 46, conjured up the notion of a 'quiet' revolution that could be diffused throughout a culture -- over a period of time - to destroy it from within. He was the first to suggest that the application of psychology to break the traditions, beliefs, morals, and will of a people could be accomplished quietly and without the possibility of resistance. He deduced that16 "The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2,000 years..." and a culture based on this religion could only be captured from within.
Gramsci insisted that alliances with non-Communist leftist groups would be essential to Communist victory. In our time, these would include radical feminist groups, extremist environmental organizations, so-called civil rights movements, anti-police associations, internationalist-minded groups, liberal church denominations, and others. Working together, these groups could create a united front working for the destructive transformation of the old Judeo-Christian culture of the West.
By winning 'cultural hegemony,' Gramsci pointed out that they could control the deepest wellsprings of human thought -- through the medium of mass psychology. Indeed, men could be made to 'love their servitude.' In terms of the preaching of the Frankfurt School, which followed Gramsci's death, resistance to the 'cultural Marxism' could be completely negated by placing the resister in a psychic 'iron cage.' The tools of mass psychology could be applied to produce this result.
The essential nature of Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary strategy is reflected in a 1990s book17 by the American Boomer author, Charles A. Reich, 'The Greening of America.' "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and the culture, and it will change the political structure as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is the revolution of the New Generation." Of course this New Generation would be the author's elite Boomer generation. Indeed, this is the underlying premise of the implementation of 'cultural Marxism' in American society by the 'graduates' of the Frankfurt School. This intellectual foundation is the basis of the mantra of the elite Boomers, who in the 1992 presidential election, asked Americans to 'have the courage to change.'
The Frankfurt School theorized that the authoritarian personality is a product of the patriarchal family. This idea is in turn directly connected to Frederich Engels' 'The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,' which promotes matriarchy. Furthermore, it was Karl Marx who wrote about the radical notion of a 'community of women' in the Communist manifesto. And it was Karl Marx who wrote disparagingly about the idea that the family was the basic unit of society in 'The German Ideology'of 1845.
The 'authoritarian personality' is not to be interpreted primarily as a handbook for the conduct of warfare against prejudice as such, but as a handbook for psychological warfare against the American male for the purpose of rendering him unwilling to defend traditional and formerly held beliefs and values. In other words, the purpose would be to emasculate him. Undoubtedly, this is what the Institute meant by 'psychological techniques for changing personality.'
'The Authoritarian personality,' studied by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s in America, prepared the way for the subsequent warfare against the masculine gender promoted by Herbert Marcuse and his band of social revolutionaries under the guise of 'women's liberation' and the New Left movement in the 1960s. The evidence that psychological techniques for changing personality is intended to mean emasculation of the American male is provided by Abraham Maslow, founder of Third Force Humanist Psychology and promoter of the psychotherapeutic classroom, who wrote that, '...the next step in personal evolution is a transcendence of both masculinity and femininity to general humanness.' The Marxist revolutionaries knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it. They have succeeded in accomplishing much of their agenda.
But how can we claim the 'causes' of the breakdown of our schools, our universities, indeed, the very fiber of our culture were a product of a tiny group of Jewish intellectuals who immigrated from Germany in 1933? Given all of the special-interest groups involved in these activities, how can we trace these 'causes' to the Frankfurt school? Look at some of the evidence.
For example, postmodern reconstruction of the history of Western Civilization (now prevalent in our universities) has its roots in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This rewriting of history by the postmodern scholars in America has only recently come under attack. Keith Windschuttle, in his book, 'Killing of History,' has severely criticized the rush to 'relativism' by historiographers. What is truly astonishing, however, is that 'relativism' has largely supplanted the pursuit of truth as a goal in historical study.18 George G. Iggers' recently published book, 'Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge,' reminds us of the now famous line by Hayden White, a postmodernist, "Historical narratives...are verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found." He quotes other postmodernists, mostly non- historians, who19 "...reinforce the proposition that truth and reality are primarily authoritarian weapons of our times." We now recognize the source of this postmodern assault -- the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School who became experts in criticizing the 'authoritarian personality' in American culture.
Herbert London refutes White's proposition by observing, "...if history is largely invention, who can say with authority that the American Revolution came before the French Revolution?" He observes that evidence has taken a back seat to inventiveness. He thus cuts right to the chase -- the inventions of postmodernism, which are cutting successive generations of Americans off from their culture and their history, evolved directly from the 'cultural Marxist' scholars of the Frankfurt School.
How did this situation come about in America's universities? Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed20 that it slipped past those traditional academics almost unobserved until it was too late. It occurred so 'quietly' that when they 'looked up,' postmodernism was upon them with a vengeance. "They were surrounded by a tidal wave of faddish multicultural subjects such as radical feminism, deconstructed relativism as history and other courses" which undermine the perpetuation of Western Civilization. Indeed, this tidal wave slipped by just as Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School had envisioned -- a 'quiet' revolution. A revolution that could not be resisted by force.
Where can we see other evidence of the teachings of the Frankfurt School in our culture today? One example is the public school system. William Kilpatrick21 observes that our public schools have shifted to a moral 'value neutral' mode of teaching over the past three decades. For students, this has meant wholesale confusion about moral values: learning to question values they have scarcely acquired, unlearning values taught at home, and concluding that questions of right and wrong are always subjective and relative.
The new educational techniques, implemented under a 'values clarification' methodology, incorporated overtones of 'sensitivity training'. An emphasis was placed on one's 'feelings,' which borders on invasion of privacy. For example, a Virginia mother of a third-grade daughter tells22 us that her daughter was "...told to write in a journal five things she couldn't tell her mother." Teaching more resembled psychotherapy than education. This method of teaching in our public schools has created a generation of moral illiterates; students who know their own feelings but don't know their culture.
Parents of public schooled children seldom know that such methods exist. Quite often this is a matter of deliberate policy. In one community, when a teacher asked what she should do if parents objected to the new 'values clarification' program, she was told by a seminar leader,23 "You call it 'life skills' and you do it anyway." In other communities, parents have been forced to sue under the Freedom of Information Act in order to find out what materials were being used in their children's classes. Professor Sidney Simon, who created the 'values clarification' method, boasted24 that as a young teacher at Temple University he "...always bootlegged the values stuff under other titles: I was assigned to teach Social Studies in the elementary school, and I taught values clarification. I was assigned Current Trends in American Education, and I taught my trend." Indeed, the 'cultural Marxists' have taken charge of our public schools. While America slept!
It is if interest to note that the 'sensitivity' training techniques used in our public schools over the past 30 years and which are now employed by the U.S. military to educate the troops about 'sexual harassment' were developed in 1943 by a Frankfurt School protegé. Abraham Maslow is the author25 of 'The Art of Facilitation' which is a manual used during such 'sensitivity' training. Thereby teachers were indoctrinated not to teach but to facilitate. They were to become amateur group therapists. The classroom became the center of self-examination, therapeutic circles where children (and later on, military26 personnel) talked about their own subjective feelings. This technique was designed to convince children they were the sole authority in their own lives.
Parental authority, as well as authoritative teaching, were to be denied since under Critical Theory the young might become authoritarian characters or worse. Through applied mass psychology, the parents were to be convinced that children should make their own decisions so they could be molded into the new American child (Hillary Clinton's 'It Takes a Village to Raise a Child') who would have none of the attributes which the social psychologists considered negative. Techniques for overcoming resistance (by the child and/or the parent), developed mainly in the field of individual psychotherapy, were improved and adopted for use with groups and even for use on a mass scale.
It is important to realize that this movement, 'cultural Marxism,' exists, understand where it came from, and what its objectives were - the complete destruction of Western Civilization in America. That is, these 'cultural Marxists' aimed to destroy, slowly but surely from the bottom up, the entire fabric of American Civilization.
By the end of World War II, almost all the original Frankfurt School members had become American citizens. This meant the beginning of a new English-speaking audience for the school. Now the focus was on American forms of authoritarianism. With this shift in subject matter came a subtle change in the center of the Institute's work. In America, authoritarianism appeared in different forms than its European counterpart. Instead of terror or coercion, more gentle forms of enforced conformism had been developed. According to Martin Jay,27 "Perhaps the most effective of these were to be found in the cultural field. American mass culture thus became one of the central concerns of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s."
The Frankfurt School had devised the concept of designating the opponents of the Marxist social revolution as 'authoritarian characters.' According to available accounts,28 "..there was a meeting of American scholars at a conference on religious and racial prejudice in 1944. Over the next five years, a Frankfurt School team under the direction of Max Horkheimer conducted in depth social and psychological profiles of Americans under a project entitled 'Studies of Prejudice.' One of the results was a book entitled 'The Authoritarian Personality' by Theodor Adorno, et al, that summarized one of the largest public opinion surveys ever undertaken in the United States. It was published in 1950, and conformed to the original Critical Theory in every respect. As a document which testified to the belief system of the Frankfurt School revolutionaries, it was essentially anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-nationalist, anti-patriot, anti-conservative, anti-hereditarian, anti ethnocentric, anti-masculine, anti-tradition, and anti-morality. All of these are elements inherent in Critical Theory."
Since the 1940s, subtle changes appeared in the Frankfurt School's descriptions of their work. For example, the opposite of the 'authoritarian personality' was no longer the 'revolutionary,' as it had been in previous studies aimed at Europeans. In America, it was now the 'democratic' who opposed the 'authoritarian personality.' Thus, their language matched more closely the liberal29 "...New Deal rather than Marxist or radical.." language. Education for tolerance, rather than praxis for revolutionary change, was the ostensible goal of their research. They were cleverly merging their language with the mainstream of liberal left thought in America while maintaining their 'cultural Marxist' objectives.
Toleration had never been an end in itself for the Frankfurt School, and yet the nonauthoritarian (utopian) personality, insofar as it was defined, was posited as a person with a nondogmatic tolerance for diversity.30 This thought is dominant in today's elite Boomer generation, the New Totalitarians.
'Cultural Marxism,' as preached by the Frankfurt School alumni in the U.S. and as followed by the elite Boomers, The New Totalitarians, laid the foundation for and spawned the widely popular, long-term nationwide campaign against prejudice, bigotry and discrimination which was the precursor of the less popular, and potentially destructive concepts of affirmative action, multiculturalism and diversity. Recognize the terms? You can't escape them if you watch national television or read the mainstream press in the U.S. today. They take their roots from the study of anti-semitism and discrimination by the Institute during the 1940s and the systematic insertion of the language of 'discrimination,' civil rights, women's rights and other 'minority' rights into the mainstream of American culture.
According to Raehn,31 "Critical Theory as applied mass psychology has led to the radical deconstruction of gender in the American culture. Following Critical Theory, the distinction between masculinity and femininity will disappear. The traditional roles of mothers and fathers are to be dissolved so that patriarchy will be ended. Children are not to be raised according to their biological differences, but should be free to move in and out of existing genders and gender roles according to their own preferences. This reflects the Frankfurt School rationale for the disintegration of the traditional family."
Thus, one of the basic tenets of Critical Theory was the necessity to break down the contemporary family. The Institute scholars preached that32 "...Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change." The 'generation gap' of the 1960s and the 'gender gap' of the 1990s are two aspects of the attempt by the elite Boomers (taking a page out of 'cultural Marxism') to transform American culture into their 'Marxist' utopia.
The transformation of American culture envisioned by the 'cultural Marxists' is based on matriarchal theory. That is, they propose transforming American culture into a female-dominated one. This is a direct throwback to Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School member who considered matriarchal theory in psychoanalytic terms. In 1933, he wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that matriarchy was the only genuine family type of 'natural society.'
Eric Fromm, another charter member of the Institute, was also one of the most active advocates of matriarchal theory. Fromm was especially taken with the idea that all love and altruistic feelings were ultimately derived from the maternal love necessitated by the extended period of human pregnancy and postnatal care. "Love was thus not dependent on sexuality, as Freud had supposed. In fact, sex was more often tied to hatred and destruction. Masculinity and femininity33 were not reflections of 'essential' sexual differences, as the romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined." This dogma was the precedent for today's radical feminist pronouncements appearing in nearly every major newspaper and TV program, including the television newscasts. For these current day radicals, male and female roles result from cultural indoctrination in America -- an indoctrination carried out by the male patriarchy to the detriment of women. Nature plays no role in this matter.
Raehn reveals34 that Irving Kristol's description35 of womanly traits closely resemble Eric Fromm's justification for a matriarchal society which became an integral part of the social revolutionary process promoted by the 'cultural Marxists.' Raehn builds on the work of Martin Jay36 to reveal the psycho-dynamics of the social revolutionary process of 'cultural Marxism' in our day. He builds a framework for simplifying and understanding this process as follows:
1. Critical Theory and its integral group of sub-theories by its very essence consists of destructive criticism of the social order to foment a non-violent social revolution in America.
2. The social order by definition consists of those in varying levels of position, power and influence which can be simplified into those in the higher order and those in the lower order.
3. A social revolution is by definition an inversion of the social order whereby there is an exchange of position, power and influence between those of the higher order and those of the lower order,
4. For a non-violent social revolution to be successfully executed, those of the higher order must be brought into a psychic condition of voluntary submission to those of the lower order.
5. The creation of this psychic condition means that those of the higher order by their own induced volition become willing to agree to an exchange of position, power and influence with those of the lower order.
6. As the social order is formed in the first place under the prevailing culture set by custom and tradition as inherited wisdom, inversion of the culture itself is required in order to bring about the psychic condition of submission of the higher order.
7. An inversion of the culture really means an inversion of the prevailing belief system whereby the beliefs of those of the higher order are exchanged for beliefs of those of the lower order.
8. The inversion of beliefs means the belief in the authority of those of the higher order to set and enforce standards of thinking and behavior for the society is dissolved in favor of belief in the authority of those in the lower order to think and do as they please.
9. This inversion of the structure of authority really means an inversion of the moral order and so leads to disorder, chaos, and social disintegration.
Raehn states that the reference to higher order and lower order is necessary in this framework since the social revolutionary ideology is one in which women and children are viewed as those of the oppressed lower order while males are viewed as the oppressor higher order. This flows from the original view of the utopian social revolutionaries themselves as those of the oppressed lower order who thereafter identify with those of the lower order of all kinds. This reflects the underlying impulse of the Frankfurt School and their Critical Theory which in their eyes justifies the social revolution.
Indeed, the 'cultural Marxists' have, in the 1990s, melded with radical feminism in the elite Boomer generation, that throwback to the dangerous Transcendentals of the 1820s, to form a caldron of discontent (via Critical Theory -- destructive criticism) in our nation which has the potential to destroy American Civilization.
For example, the combat arms of the U.S. military are the last bastions of male domination in American culture. The matter of women-in-combat37 is not really about gender equity or equal opportunity as is commonly argued. These are only the given reasons. The real reason is to create the psychic condition of submission of the male gender in American culture to the will of the social revolutionaries by depriving higher order males of any authority to set and enforce standards. This functions as a means of transferring authority to the social revolutionaries themselves so they might gain the position of power and influence of the higher order and thereby achieve the exchange that is the aim of the social revolutionary process. The radical feminists and the 'cultural Marxist' revolutionaries are placing women on top in order to set the stage for the destruction of American Civilization.
Indeed, Critical Theory as mass psychology came to be applied against America on a vast scale and with great success. 'The Authoritarian Personality' served to ignite a massive concerted effort by the Marxist revolutionaries in the guise of social psychologists to eliminate 'prejudice' in American life and later 'discrimination.' This concerted effort led to the psychic criminalization of prejudice and discrimination in precisely the same way Karl Marx criminalized the bourgeoisie middle class in Europe. This would later lead to legal criminalization by a series of Federal Laws and Judicial decisions.
The final straw in this process was affirmative action. Tom Chittum, a Vietnam War veteran and spokesman for a growing number of middle-class Americans (especially those who have seen their manufacturing jobs exported to foreign shores via NAFTA and other free-trade mechanisms), tells us that38 "The racist euphemism for [the] systematic dismantling of the rights of [white] English-speaking Europeans [in America] is affirmative action." Indeed, affirmative action has separated white American males of European descent from minorities and women in ways that could lead to violence in America's future -- a violence fed by the same factors that led to the chaotic disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.39
Only recently has a majority of Americans awakened and fought back against this tyranny. California's successful referendum via Proposition 209 to outlaw preferences based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin is an example of this 'awakening.'
The next stage in this applied mass psychology was the psychic criminalization of what the Marxist social revolutionaries termed racism, sexism and anti-Semitism directed against white males. This was a logical outcome of Critical Theory which also inspired Betty Friedan's feminist movement with her book, 'The Feminine Mystique.' Obviously, she understood the revolutionary intent of Herbert Marcuse who proclaimed it on the campuses of American colleges and universities in the mid-1960s. Friedan quotes Eric Fromm in her seminal book40 which initiated the modern feminist movement. Indeed, radical feminism was introduced to 'cultural Marxism' during the 1960s and 1970s.
Virtually everyone in today's America who is familiar with Karl Marx's demonic poetry of destruction, his War Plan of 1843 which revealed his process for the disintegration of the middle class, and his castigation of the family as the basic unit of society as he wrote in 'The German Ideology' of 1845, will find it easy to accept the reality that Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is but a mere transmutation of these ideas.
But in terms of destruction and disintegration, Critical Theory absorbed by the 'change agents' and other social revolutionaries has led them to declare their intent to restructure America. As they proclaim, this means their activities have been directed toward the disintegration of the traditional white male power structure. As anyone with eyes to view present-day television and motion pictures can confirm, this has been largely achieved. In other words, Critical Theory, as applied mass psychology, brought forth a 'quiet' psychic revolution which facilitated an actual physical revolution that has become visible everywhere in the United States of America.
This 'quiet' revolution resulted in a mass conversion of the American people by dialectic stages of operant conditioning by words such as prejudice, discrimination, bigotry, racism, sexism and anti-Semitism that were designed to instill guilt, pity, shame, fear, anger and hatred in the American psyche so that no one would dare oppose the social revolution without being exposed to uncontrollable rage, intimidation, and terror -- this latter being a reflection of Karl Marx's dictum that 'the nation must be taught to be terrified of itself...'
This is the psychic 'iron cage' in which the American male has been placed by the confluence of two dangerous ideologies -- radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism.'
It was the destructive criticism of the primary elements of American culture that inspired the 1960s counter-culture revolution. As the name implies, this false 'spiritual awakening' by the idealist Boomers in their coming-of-age years was an effort to transform the prevailing culture into an inverted or opposite kind of culture that is a necessary prelude to social revolution. Now that these elite Boomers are in positions of power in the United States, they are completing their work of destroying every institution that has been built up over 200 years of American history. Their aim is to destroy any vestige of Western Civilization in American culture.
As Richard Bernstein made clear in his book on multiculturalism,41"...the Marxist revolutionary process for the past several decades in America has centered on race and sex warfare rather than class warfare" as in earlier times. This constitutes a grand scheme to restructure American society. As the social revolutionaries readily proclaim, their purpose is to destroy the hegemonic white male power structure. In order to accomplish this, all barriers to the insertion of women and minorities into this power structure are to be broken down by all means available. Laws and lawsuits against discrimination serve as some of these means. Intimidation and outright terrorization of white males as oppressive racists and sexists are carried out by the mass media and our universities. These are the psycho-dynamics of the revolutionary process that are designed to render psychic decapitation of anyone who might offer effective opposition.
It has been pointed out recently by Steve Forbes, a Republican presidential primary candidate in 1996, that42 "This country's Founders recognized three primal values in the Declaration of Independence, and they ranked them properly: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Forbes observes that if the order of these fundamental human rights is switched putting happiness before liberty or liberty before life -- you end up with moral chaos and social anarchy. This very condition is what Judge Robert H. Bork describes43 as 'modern liberalism.' He identifies the defining characteristics of this ideology as "...'radical egalitarianism' (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and 'radical individualism' (the drastic reduction of limit to personal gratification)." These traits are the ultimate in pure 'pursuit of happiness.' This condition is the ultimate goal of the 'social Marxists' of the Frankfurt School -- a utopian paradise where they and they alone make the rules.
Judge Bork also identifies 'radical feminism' as "...the most destructive and fanatical..." element of this modern liberalism. He further describes radical feminism as "...totalitarian in spirit." This is a refined way of saying that the forces of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' have joined in the elite Boomer generation to set the stage for the destruction of American Civilization.
Most Americans do not yet realize that they are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new social order in the world. These revolutionaries are the New Age elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians.44 They now control every public institution in the United States of America. Their 'quiet' revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearly complete. It was based on the intellectual foundation of the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School. Its completion depends on keeping the American male in his psychic 'iron cage.'
The confluence of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' within the span of a single generation, that of the elite Boomers (possibly the most dangerous45 generation in America's history), has imposed this yoke on the American male. It remains to be seen whether or not he will continue his 'voluntary submission' to a future of slavery in a new American matriarchy, the precursor to a state of complete anarchy and an end to America's experiment with democracy. It may be that the fate of American civilization will depend on his steadfast and possibly violent resistance to the reality of 'cultural Marxism' in our nation.
Indeed, the new elites, the dangerous Boomer generation who are now in control of every American public institution and wield power over all of us, stand at the intersection of two of the most destructive ideologies known to mankind, radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism,' derived from the Frankfurt School. This confluence of ideologies may be more than the experiment with American democracy can withstand. Unless the American male breaks out of his psychic 'iron cage'. The continuation of America's experiment with democracy, a democratic republic, may well depend on whether or not this bondage can be broken. If it can, there is hope for a renewed and stronger America. If it cannot, a chaotic disintegration is in our future.
1 'Chaotic,' as used here, has a specific scientific meaning. For a primer on chaos theory, see Gleick, James, "Chaos: Making a New Science," Viking Press, 1987.
2 For a more detailed mathematical description of chaos theory, along with an exhaustive treatment of the simple but revealing mathematical 'quadratic iterator,' see Pietgen, Heinz-Otto et al, "Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers in Science," Springer-Verlag, 1992.
3 Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069," Quill, William Morrow, 1991. This book, though not intended by its authors, describes American history in terms of a complex, non-linear iterative feedback system -- a system which can be expected to exhibit chaotic behavior in the sense of chaos theory as described in the two previous references.
4 Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell US About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny," Broadway Books, 1997. This book provides a more detailed description of the current epoch in American History than that presented in the previous reference. It focuses on the elite Boomer generation and its role in meeting America's future challenges.
5 Pinker, Steve, "Why They Kill Their Newborns," The New York Times Magazine, 2 November 1997.
6 Kelly, Michael, "Arguing for Infanticide," The Washington Post, 6 November 1997.
7 Raehn, Raymond V., "The Historical Roots of 'Political Correctness,'" Free Congress Foundation, Number 44, June 1997.
8 Jay, Martin, "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950," pp. 77, University of California Press, 1973.
9 Ibid, pp. 81.
10 Ibid, pp. 82.
11 Atkinson, Gerald L., "The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America's Future," Atkinson Associates Press, 1996.
12 Jay, Martin, "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950," University of California Press, 1973.
13 Wiggershaus, Rolf, "The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance," The MIT Press, 1994.
14 Lind, William S., "What is 'Political Correctness?," Essays on our Times, Free Congress Foundation, Number 43, March 1997.
15 Ibid.
16 Thornton, Fr. James, "'Gramscian' Strategy at Work," The New American, pp. 25, 18 September 1995.
17 Reich, Charles A., "The Greening of America," Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1995.
18 London, Herbert, "Discipline of history under assault," The Washington Times, 26 October 1997.
19 Ibid.
20 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Panel on 'Academic Reform: Internal Sources,' National Association of Scholars, NAS Sixth General Conference, 3-5 May
1996.
21 Kilpatrick, William, "Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: And What We Can Do About It," Simon & Schuster, 1992.
22 Innerst, Carol, "The Dumbing Down of America," Part One of a Three-Part Series, The Washington Times, 19 October 1997.
23 Ibid, Kilpatrick, William.
24 Ibid, Kilpatrick, William.
25 Raehn, Raymond V., "Critical Theory: A Special Research Report, 1 April1996.
26 Editorial, "The crying of the admirals," The Washington Times, 3
November 1995. The U.S. Naval Academy has added female 'role models' to
the faculty. In August 1994, the Academy placed a new emphasis on conflict
resolution and consciousness-raising. "As 'Lean On Me' started playing,
Master Chief Liz Johns gave the plebes her final orders: stand in a circle,
sway to the music, sing along, and hug. From the circle came the sharp
sniffle of sobs. The future admirals of America were crying."
27 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 172.
28 Ibid, Raehn, Raymond V.
29 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 227.
30 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 248.
31 Ibid, Raehn, Raymond V.
32 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 135.
33 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 95.
34 Raehn, Raymond V., "Letter to COL Robert L. Maginnis, USA (Ret.), 1 March 1997.
35 Kristol, Irving, "The Feminization of the Democrats," The Wall Street Journal, 9 September 1996. Kristol reported that 50 percent of the delegates to the Democratic Party convention were women. Women were described as tending to be more sentimental, more risk-adverse, less competitive than men, and also more permissive and less judgmental.
36 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 94-96.
37 Ibid, Raehn, Raymond V., pp. 6.
38 Chittum, Thomas W., "Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America," American Eagle Publications, Inc., 1996.
39 Atkinson, Gerald L., "The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America's Future," Atkinson Associates Press, 1996.
40 Friedan, Betty, "The Feminine Mystique," pp. 278, Dell Publishing, 1963-1983.
41 Bernstein, Richard, "The Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future," Knopf, 1994.
42 Snow, Tony, "Moral of the story: Forbes virtue stance," The Washington Times, 27 October 1997. Mr. Snow reports on an article by Steve Forbes in the November 1997 issue of 'Policy Review' magazine.
43 Bork, Robert H., "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," HarperCollins, 1996.
44 Ibid, Atkinson, Gerald L.
Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "Generations: The History of America's Future -- 1584 to 2069," pp. 374-426, William Morrow & Company, 1991.
Who Placed American Men in a Psychic 'Iron Cage?'
Who Placed American Men (read White European Hetrosexual Males) in a Psychic 'Iron Cage?'
Part I
The Radical Feminist Thread
by
Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson
10 November 1997
Radical feminism was conceived and birthed in America in the 1820s by a generation which experienced the first stage of the industrial revolution. Women who were previously (over the two centuries of colonization) forced to share in the hardship of survival in a harsh agrarian society were becoming part of a 'middle class' gentry with time and energy spent writing novels and newspaper articles for their 'sisters' of the period. The initial stages of the 'feminization' of American culture has been dated from this time.
These radical feminists became a featured staple of the idealistic Transcendental generation which included David Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and many ultra-radical Unitarian ministers of the day. These abolitionists were joined by others of their generation, not so well known, who were bent on destroying 'Southern' culture, at any cost. Driven by the rhetoric of Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin), Julia Ward Howe (author of the words to 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'), and Margaret Fuller (the first radical feminist newspaper columnist), the men and women of this Transcendental generation pushed our nation into a needless,, and destructive Civil War.
Mythology has been kind to these young idealists of their day. They were the driving force behind the abolition of slavery, a goal that all present-day Americans support. But the methods of these 'non-violent, pacifist' Transcendentals of the Civil War period were not at all glorious. They provided the support, material and moral, for John Brown and his gang of cutthroats who, in the middle of the night, murdered in cold blood five innocent Southern settlers in Kansas who had committed no crime. That night, Old Brown left behind "...five mutilated dead men, two widows, and a number of fatherless children. And the peace of the region was in a shambles." The Transcendentals, including the radical feminists of the time, provided the support for this raid (and the subsequent raid on Harper's Ferry) through the Secret Six. Otto J. Scott reminds us that "...As the civil war moves toward legend their names [the Secret Six] have become enshrined among the best...[they] were really contemptible men who hired an assassin, armed a murderer, supported secret crime in the name of compassion and dealt their country a terrible blow while claiming the motives of angels."
It is only after several generations that it can be seen, with terrible clarity that, "...Old Brown -- by linking murder to his distorted version of religion, and by selecting victims who were innocent of any crime -- had reintroduced the old, evil and pagan principle of human sacrifice..." into American politics. The idealist Transcendentals, including America's first radical feminists, had a heavy hand in supporting this treachery.
Who were these Transcendental idealists and why is it important to be reminded of them today? The Transcendentals were a generation who were the precursors of today's idealistic Boomer generation. We can infer where we are headed under the leadership of the elite Boomers, with President Clinton as their titular head, by observing the behavior of the Transcendentals prior to and during the American Civil War.
The Transcendentals supported abolition of slavery, women's rights, temperance, pacifism, and many other causes that we now observe as modern New Age popular culture. They delved in spiritualism (talking with the dead), eastern mysticism, and phrenology (foretelling personality by the shape of one's head). They would be right at home in today's New Age fascination with claims of impregnation by visiting aliens from outer space. But the Transcendentals had a darker side. They supported the introduction of terrorism into American politics.
For example, they nurtured John Brown, a cold-blooded assassin. Then, as now, political assassins desire not simply to murder, but also to attract attention -- to incite and terrify as many people as possible. In the late 1850s a new type of political assassin appeared in the United States. "He did not murder the mighty -- but the obscure. He did not pursue officials, or leaders, or persons in the public eye; he murdered at random -- among the innocent. Yet his purposes were the same as those of his classic predecessors: to force the nation into a new political pattern by creating terror."
Unlike those who murdered innocent people in the past, this new type of assassin was praised by many journalists and hailed by some as a hero of the people. His murders were blended, by skillful propaganda, into praises of the cause he claimed to represent and this, too, was a departure from standards of judgment that had distinguished civilization from barbarity throughout the centuries.
According to Scott, "...Such a clear break with the ethos of the ages was remarkable, but it was not sudden. It took generations to evolve and did not emerge from the poorly educated underclasses of society. It was the result of efforts by persons from privileged backgrounds, of outstanding abilities, famous for their eloquence and elevated by great success, who built an intellectual movement in which this new type of assassin was a welcome figure." These people were the elite idealistic Transcendentals of the period, the ancestral cauldron of today's idealistic Boomer elite.
Within this movement in the 1850s was a small cluster of conspirators (the Secret Six) who armed, financed and advised the assassin. The members of that cabal were "...persons of high standing in the community. All were in comfortable circumstances. Some were famous and others were wealthy. All of them were dissatisfied with the normal process of government, and all were obsessed with the desire to make their opinions -- and not the decisions of the elected leaders of the people -- the determining factors in the life of a nation."
Scott reminds us that the efforts of the Transcendentals led not only to bloody murder but to a great civil war and "...they were praised as patriots and humanitarians, and they became connected with the cause they claimed. Historians have written monographs and biographies of them that come close to [eulogies]. Schoolchildren are still taught that they were heroes." They, in fact, were contemptible people who fanned the flames for a civil war that even today divides Americans irreversibly.
Radical feminists were at the heart of the Transcendental movement. L.G. Williams, publishing his master's thesis at Harvard University, tells the riveting story of the death of Theodore Parkman, a Ph.D. and color-bearer of the 45th Massachusetts Regiment, and son of a Unitarian minister and a Transcendental feminist. Parkman, who is commemorated in Harvard's Memorial Hall of Heroes, was actually killed by a fratricidal artillery bombardment by Union forces at the battle of Whitehall, NC (Williams' ancestral plantation).
Theodore Parkman and his cousin, Robert Gould Shaw, embodied the sensitive, fair-haired, beautiful and awful [Whittier] 'angel of death' romanticized by the radical feminist, Lydia Maria Child, and other wealthy Transcendentals who also promoted temperance, women's rights and "...vigorous prosecution of the war at any cost." They were bent on destroying 'Southern' culture, one of the four different 'cultures' (ways of life and folkways) brought to America from four different and distinct parts of England in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Child wrote Robert Shaw's mother, another Transcendental, noting the "...solemn possibility that he [Robert] may also lie in his blanket at the foot of some distant tree ... like Theodore ... a worthy companion of the angels, to whom he has gone." Williams observes that Robert did not understand that, "[The abolitionists who controlled the political thought in Boston, New York and Washington] were hungry for martyrs and believed that socially-prominent casualties would pressure Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation..."
Sadly for Robert, one of the more devout Transcendentals was his own mother who wrote the governor of Massachusetts in praise of her son, that "...I believe this time [i.e. civil war] to be the fulfillment of the Prophecies, the second advent of Christ..." Her son, Robert, who wanted to transfer to the Regular Army, earn his own money and get married, must have wondered about his mother's state of mind. Why pressure him to take a post where his death was a political necessity? "Was his own 'death' her attempt to even the loss for Theodore or was she jealous of her sister's martyrdom [in having lost a son in the war on the side of the abolitionists]?" Indeed, the radical feminists of the period treasured 'the cause' above the life of their own sons. They showed a me, me, meism even stronger than any demonstrated by today's elite Boomers.
Williams reveals a larger theme. "The Abolitionist forces that drove the war represented in the main by the civil-rights movements for Blacks and women, had great distrust of the 'Democratic' Federal Army. They believed, correctly, that many of the soldiers detested Anti-Slavery and Feminist politics. This knowledge may have produced apathy toward any particular soldier's fate among Abolitionists." For example, the famous Irish Brigade was composed of Irish immigrants who were victims of the famine years in Ireland and came to America only to face poverty and bigotry in their adopted country. When the Civil War broke out, they joined the Union Army in droves, even though many rejected the North's mission to abolish slavery.
Williams informs us that Northern soldiers, like the Irish Brigade, cursed emancipation and insisted that they fought to preserve the Union. They had fears that, after the war, freed slaves would flood northern cities, taking their jobs thereby forcing them into poverty. Many of these Yankee soldiers were recent immigrants imported from Europe as labor for the industrial North. Moreover, many men saw women as a privileged class who, if they received the vote, would establish socialism by combining their votes with those of the slaves who would become citizens. According to Williams, "Added to this general confusion, was the thirst for blood by formerly-pacifist Abolitionists who cared little for the consequences. Their cries for ceaseless fighting demoralized soldiers on both sides and made them believe that some maniacal force drove them into a frenzied attrition of each other."
The Confederate General, R.S. Ewell wrote in August of 1862 that, "Some 100,000 human beings have been massacred in every conceivable form of horror, with three times as many wounded, all because of a set of fanatical abolitionist and unprincipled politicians backed by women in petticoats and pants, and children."
Meanwhile, the Transcendentals, abolitionists and wealthy business interests, intensified their efforts in U.S. Government offices to become rich and powerful. They exerted relentless pressure on Lincoln in the final weeks of 1862 demanding that he issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He did, but the Proclamation did not give them immediate success -- neither did winning the war.
Williams points out that, "Freed slaves secured the vote only after the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (ratified in 1870), but women fared worse. They did not receive the vote until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. However, the substantial political victories that these groups achieved [during the Civil War period] guaranteed that they would remain allies. Today, their political organizations dominate every aspect of society, politics and education in America -- including the military." Indeed, the present-day radical feminist assault on VMI and the Citadel, the only two remaining bastions of 'Southern' culture involving male-only education, has a direct political link to the Transcendental activists of the Civil War period. This assault is a continuation of the century-old effort to destroy 'Southern' culture.
Indeed, Transcendental history poses a precedent for today's society and the U.S. military, bogged down endlessly in Bosnia with pronounced 'moral' justifications by today's idealistic generation -- the elite Boomers. Consider Williams, "The Abolitionists championed the Boston men who went to [Whitehall] as 'bearers' of women's rights and anti-slavery banners. However, their support drew the wrath of weary veterans who believed that the Abolitionists started the war for their own benefit and left years of bloody fighting to them. This belief weighed on the minds of the new arrivals [the 45th Massachusetts Regiment] and their convictions about the war began to change as they shared campaign rigors with veterans and realized that Boston knew little of the South, Southerners, slaves, slavery and Negro life."
"Dismayed by their [soldiers'] bitterness, Reverends, wives, girlfriends, mothers and fathers hastened to [Whitehall] with rewards that most field soldiers never received. They brought money, clothing, food, supplies; even ice, to ensure that their men kept faith with the 'holy cause,' Abolitionism. This further angered the veterans and made the young men warier of their association with civilians promoting the war." Williams speculates that, "Perhaps many of them marched in front of their own artillery at Whitehall in a hapless attempt to somehow wash away this perceived disgrace and regain their self-respect."
This tale, told by a U.S. Army Reserve officer, a Gulf War veteran, L.G. Williams, prompts him to conclude, "For the soldier, the battle of Whitehall reflects the tragic politics of war: hidden agendas, corrupt policies, self-serving strategies and senseless tactics. This inevitable sequence murdered Theodore Parkman and millions of others, before and after. His death is a perfect example of the useless waste of men sent to war for reasons that most of them do not understand no matter how hard they try." This conclusion is as valid today, in response to the foreign policy adventures of the elite Boomer generation in Bosnia as it was in the Transcendental days. Indeed, history is repeating itself.
The feminization of American culture continues to this day. Radical feminists demand that women be allowed to 'choose' entry to the infantry, artillery, special forces, and combat engineering positions in the Army and Marine Corps. These demands follow the current 'feminization' of combat aviation in the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Army since 1993.
The feminization of American politics was completed in the 1996 Presidential election when both parties produced 'feminized' conventions featuring soft, emotional, Oprah Winfrey-type orations and sentimental film clips of the presidential candidates. Both candidates were portrayed as soft, gentle, emotion-driven creatures sufficiently in touch with their feelings that women across America would feel 'comfortable' in their care. With 60 million female votes at stake, both political parties pandered to America's 'feminine' side.
There is no doubt that the 'man of the 90s' is expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda. He is a staple of Hollywood, the television network sitcoms and movies, and the political pundit talk shows. This 'feminization' is becoming so noticeable that newspapers and weekly monthly magazines are picking up on it. For example, The Washington Times and National Review magazine combine to tell us that, "...behind the breezy celebration of 'guy stuff' in today's men's magazines lurks a crisis of confidence. What does it mean to be masculine in the 1990s?" It is revealed that today's men's magazines (Esquire, GQ, Men's Health, Men's Fitness, Men's Journal, Details, maxim, Men's Perspective) "...are all geared to a new feminized man..."
What has happened? First, the old masculine attitude toward personal appearance has all but disappeared. If childhood memory serves, our fathers' acts of personal upkeep were mostly limited to shaving and putting on a tie. So, "...it's hard to imagine [them] interested in articles on 'A Flat Belly for the Beach' (Verge), or, the three new men's fragrances for the fall season (GQ), or even, for that matter, 'The New Fall Suit' (Esquire). But somewhere along the line men became less concerned with being strong and silent, and more worried about making themselves pretty." Indeed, the feminization of American culture is nearly complete. The last bastion of male domination, the U.S. military, must be conquered by the radical feminists in order to complete the process.
If this 'feminization' trend, driven primarily by radical feminists bent on destroying a perceived male-dominated hierarchical culture, were the only aspect of American life that appears ominous, we could probably rest assured that the 'cycles' of American history would take care of it. Clearer heads would prevail over time. The grinding march of history would move America toward a more stable accommodation between men and women, based on cooperation and mutual respect, in the future as it has in the past.
But 'feminization' is not the only disturbing thread in American culture today. Another thread, apparently linear in affect, but in concert with other threads, including the 'feminization' of American culture, has the potential to create an explosion that we may not be able to contain. That thread is 'cultural Marxism.' The confluence of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' in a single generation, the elite Boomers (a throwback to the destructive Transcendentals), renders the complex, non-linear feedback system of American Civilization susceptible to a chaotic disintegration.
Part I
The Radical Feminist Thread
by
Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson
10 November 1997
Radical feminism was conceived and birthed in America in the 1820s by a generation which experienced the first stage of the industrial revolution. Women who were previously (over the two centuries of colonization) forced to share in the hardship of survival in a harsh agrarian society were becoming part of a 'middle class' gentry with time and energy spent writing novels and newspaper articles for their 'sisters' of the period. The initial stages of the 'feminization' of American culture has been dated from this time.
These radical feminists became a featured staple of the idealistic Transcendental generation which included David Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and many ultra-radical Unitarian ministers of the day. These abolitionists were joined by others of their generation, not so well known, who were bent on destroying 'Southern' culture, at any cost. Driven by the rhetoric of Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin), Julia Ward Howe (author of the words to 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'), and Margaret Fuller (the first radical feminist newspaper columnist), the men and women of this Transcendental generation pushed our nation into a needless,, and destructive Civil War.
Mythology has been kind to these young idealists of their day. They were the driving force behind the abolition of slavery, a goal that all present-day Americans support. But the methods of these 'non-violent, pacifist' Transcendentals of the Civil War period were not at all glorious. They provided the support, material and moral, for John Brown and his gang of cutthroats who, in the middle of the night, murdered in cold blood five innocent Southern settlers in Kansas who had committed no crime. That night, Old Brown left behind "...five mutilated dead men, two widows, and a number of fatherless children. And the peace of the region was in a shambles." The Transcendentals, including the radical feminists of the time, provided the support for this raid (and the subsequent raid on Harper's Ferry) through the Secret Six. Otto J. Scott reminds us that "...As the civil war moves toward legend their names [the Secret Six] have become enshrined among the best...[they] were really contemptible men who hired an assassin, armed a murderer, supported secret crime in the name of compassion and dealt their country a terrible blow while claiming the motives of angels."
It is only after several generations that it can be seen, with terrible clarity that, "...Old Brown -- by linking murder to his distorted version of religion, and by selecting victims who were innocent of any crime -- had reintroduced the old, evil and pagan principle of human sacrifice..." into American politics. The idealist Transcendentals, including America's first radical feminists, had a heavy hand in supporting this treachery.
Who were these Transcendental idealists and why is it important to be reminded of them today? The Transcendentals were a generation who were the precursors of today's idealistic Boomer generation. We can infer where we are headed under the leadership of the elite Boomers, with President Clinton as their titular head, by observing the behavior of the Transcendentals prior to and during the American Civil War.
The Transcendentals supported abolition of slavery, women's rights, temperance, pacifism, and many other causes that we now observe as modern New Age popular culture. They delved in spiritualism (talking with the dead), eastern mysticism, and phrenology (foretelling personality by the shape of one's head). They would be right at home in today's New Age fascination with claims of impregnation by visiting aliens from outer space. But the Transcendentals had a darker side. They supported the introduction of terrorism into American politics.
For example, they nurtured John Brown, a cold-blooded assassin. Then, as now, political assassins desire not simply to murder, but also to attract attention -- to incite and terrify as many people as possible. In the late 1850s a new type of political assassin appeared in the United States. "He did not murder the mighty -- but the obscure. He did not pursue officials, or leaders, or persons in the public eye; he murdered at random -- among the innocent. Yet his purposes were the same as those of his classic predecessors: to force the nation into a new political pattern by creating terror."
Unlike those who murdered innocent people in the past, this new type of assassin was praised by many journalists and hailed by some as a hero of the people. His murders were blended, by skillful propaganda, into praises of the cause he claimed to represent and this, too, was a departure from standards of judgment that had distinguished civilization from barbarity throughout the centuries.
According to Scott, "...Such a clear break with the ethos of the ages was remarkable, but it was not sudden. It took generations to evolve and did not emerge from the poorly educated underclasses of society. It was the result of efforts by persons from privileged backgrounds, of outstanding abilities, famous for their eloquence and elevated by great success, who built an intellectual movement in which this new type of assassin was a welcome figure." These people were the elite idealistic Transcendentals of the period, the ancestral cauldron of today's idealistic Boomer elite.
Within this movement in the 1850s was a small cluster of conspirators (the Secret Six) who armed, financed and advised the assassin. The members of that cabal were "...persons of high standing in the community. All were in comfortable circumstances. Some were famous and others were wealthy. All of them were dissatisfied with the normal process of government, and all were obsessed with the desire to make their opinions -- and not the decisions of the elected leaders of the people -- the determining factors in the life of a nation."
Scott reminds us that the efforts of the Transcendentals led not only to bloody murder but to a great civil war and "...they were praised as patriots and humanitarians, and they became connected with the cause they claimed. Historians have written monographs and biographies of them that come close to [eulogies]. Schoolchildren are still taught that they were heroes." They, in fact, were contemptible people who fanned the flames for a civil war that even today divides Americans irreversibly.
Radical feminists were at the heart of the Transcendental movement. L.G. Williams, publishing his master's thesis at Harvard University, tells the riveting story of the death of Theodore Parkman, a Ph.D. and color-bearer of the 45th Massachusetts Regiment, and son of a Unitarian minister and a Transcendental feminist. Parkman, who is commemorated in Harvard's Memorial Hall of Heroes, was actually killed by a fratricidal artillery bombardment by Union forces at the battle of Whitehall, NC (Williams' ancestral plantation).
Theodore Parkman and his cousin, Robert Gould Shaw, embodied the sensitive, fair-haired, beautiful and awful [Whittier] 'angel of death' romanticized by the radical feminist, Lydia Maria Child, and other wealthy Transcendentals who also promoted temperance, women's rights and "...vigorous prosecution of the war at any cost." They were bent on destroying 'Southern' culture, one of the four different 'cultures' (ways of life and folkways) brought to America from four different and distinct parts of England in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Child wrote Robert Shaw's mother, another Transcendental, noting the "...solemn possibility that he [Robert] may also lie in his blanket at the foot of some distant tree ... like Theodore ... a worthy companion of the angels, to whom he has gone." Williams observes that Robert did not understand that, "[The abolitionists who controlled the political thought in Boston, New York and Washington] were hungry for martyrs and believed that socially-prominent casualties would pressure Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation..."
Sadly for Robert, one of the more devout Transcendentals was his own mother who wrote the governor of Massachusetts in praise of her son, that "...I believe this time [i.e. civil war] to be the fulfillment of the Prophecies, the second advent of Christ..." Her son, Robert, who wanted to transfer to the Regular Army, earn his own money and get married, must have wondered about his mother's state of mind. Why pressure him to take a post where his death was a political necessity? "Was his own 'death' her attempt to even the loss for Theodore or was she jealous of her sister's martyrdom [in having lost a son in the war on the side of the abolitionists]?" Indeed, the radical feminists of the period treasured 'the cause' above the life of their own sons. They showed a me, me, meism even stronger than any demonstrated by today's elite Boomers.
Williams reveals a larger theme. "The Abolitionist forces that drove the war represented in the main by the civil-rights movements for Blacks and women, had great distrust of the 'Democratic' Federal Army. They believed, correctly, that many of the soldiers detested Anti-Slavery and Feminist politics. This knowledge may have produced apathy toward any particular soldier's fate among Abolitionists." For example, the famous Irish Brigade was composed of Irish immigrants who were victims of the famine years in Ireland and came to America only to face poverty and bigotry in their adopted country. When the Civil War broke out, they joined the Union Army in droves, even though many rejected the North's mission to abolish slavery.
Williams informs us that Northern soldiers, like the Irish Brigade, cursed emancipation and insisted that they fought to preserve the Union. They had fears that, after the war, freed slaves would flood northern cities, taking their jobs thereby forcing them into poverty. Many of these Yankee soldiers were recent immigrants imported from Europe as labor for the industrial North. Moreover, many men saw women as a privileged class who, if they received the vote, would establish socialism by combining their votes with those of the slaves who would become citizens. According to Williams, "Added to this general confusion, was the thirst for blood by formerly-pacifist Abolitionists who cared little for the consequences. Their cries for ceaseless fighting demoralized soldiers on both sides and made them believe that some maniacal force drove them into a frenzied attrition of each other."
The Confederate General, R.S. Ewell wrote in August of 1862 that, "Some 100,000 human beings have been massacred in every conceivable form of horror, with three times as many wounded, all because of a set of fanatical abolitionist and unprincipled politicians backed by women in petticoats and pants, and children."
Meanwhile, the Transcendentals, abolitionists and wealthy business interests, intensified their efforts in U.S. Government offices to become rich and powerful. They exerted relentless pressure on Lincoln in the final weeks of 1862 demanding that he issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He did, but the Proclamation did not give them immediate success -- neither did winning the war.
Williams points out that, "Freed slaves secured the vote only after the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (ratified in 1870), but women fared worse. They did not receive the vote until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. However, the substantial political victories that these groups achieved [during the Civil War period] guaranteed that they would remain allies. Today, their political organizations dominate every aspect of society, politics and education in America -- including the military." Indeed, the present-day radical feminist assault on VMI and the Citadel, the only two remaining bastions of 'Southern' culture involving male-only education, has a direct political link to the Transcendental activists of the Civil War period. This assault is a continuation of the century-old effort to destroy 'Southern' culture.
Indeed, Transcendental history poses a precedent for today's society and the U.S. military, bogged down endlessly in Bosnia with pronounced 'moral' justifications by today's idealistic generation -- the elite Boomers. Consider Williams, "The Abolitionists championed the Boston men who went to [Whitehall] as 'bearers' of women's rights and anti-slavery banners. However, their support drew the wrath of weary veterans who believed that the Abolitionists started the war for their own benefit and left years of bloody fighting to them. This belief weighed on the minds of the new arrivals [the 45th Massachusetts Regiment] and their convictions about the war began to change as they shared campaign rigors with veterans and realized that Boston knew little of the South, Southerners, slaves, slavery and Negro life."
"Dismayed by their [soldiers'] bitterness, Reverends, wives, girlfriends, mothers and fathers hastened to [Whitehall] with rewards that most field soldiers never received. They brought money, clothing, food, supplies; even ice, to ensure that their men kept faith with the 'holy cause,' Abolitionism. This further angered the veterans and made the young men warier of their association with civilians promoting the war." Williams speculates that, "Perhaps many of them marched in front of their own artillery at Whitehall in a hapless attempt to somehow wash away this perceived disgrace and regain their self-respect."
This tale, told by a U.S. Army Reserve officer, a Gulf War veteran, L.G. Williams, prompts him to conclude, "For the soldier, the battle of Whitehall reflects the tragic politics of war: hidden agendas, corrupt policies, self-serving strategies and senseless tactics. This inevitable sequence murdered Theodore Parkman and millions of others, before and after. His death is a perfect example of the useless waste of men sent to war for reasons that most of them do not understand no matter how hard they try." This conclusion is as valid today, in response to the foreign policy adventures of the elite Boomer generation in Bosnia as it was in the Transcendental days. Indeed, history is repeating itself.
The feminization of American culture continues to this day. Radical feminists demand that women be allowed to 'choose' entry to the infantry, artillery, special forces, and combat engineering positions in the Army and Marine Corps. These demands follow the current 'feminization' of combat aviation in the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Army since 1993.
The feminization of American politics was completed in the 1996 Presidential election when both parties produced 'feminized' conventions featuring soft, emotional, Oprah Winfrey-type orations and sentimental film clips of the presidential candidates. Both candidates were portrayed as soft, gentle, emotion-driven creatures sufficiently in touch with their feelings that women across America would feel 'comfortable' in their care. With 60 million female votes at stake, both political parties pandered to America's 'feminine' side.
There is no doubt that the 'man of the 90s' is expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda. He is a staple of Hollywood, the television network sitcoms and movies, and the political pundit talk shows. This 'feminization' is becoming so noticeable that newspapers and weekly monthly magazines are picking up on it. For example, The Washington Times and National Review magazine combine to tell us that, "...behind the breezy celebration of 'guy stuff' in today's men's magazines lurks a crisis of confidence. What does it mean to be masculine in the 1990s?" It is revealed that today's men's magazines (Esquire, GQ, Men's Health, Men's Fitness, Men's Journal, Details, maxim, Men's Perspective) "...are all geared to a new feminized man..."
What has happened? First, the old masculine attitude toward personal appearance has all but disappeared. If childhood memory serves, our fathers' acts of personal upkeep were mostly limited to shaving and putting on a tie. So, "...it's hard to imagine [them] interested in articles on 'A Flat Belly for the Beach' (Verge), or, the three new men's fragrances for the fall season (GQ), or even, for that matter, 'The New Fall Suit' (Esquire). But somewhere along the line men became less concerned with being strong and silent, and more worried about making themselves pretty." Indeed, the feminization of American culture is nearly complete. The last bastion of male domination, the U.S. military, must be conquered by the radical feminists in order to complete the process.
If this 'feminization' trend, driven primarily by radical feminists bent on destroying a perceived male-dominated hierarchical culture, were the only aspect of American life that appears ominous, we could probably rest assured that the 'cycles' of American history would take care of it. Clearer heads would prevail over time. The grinding march of history would move America toward a more stable accommodation between men and women, based on cooperation and mutual respect, in the future as it has in the past.
But 'feminization' is not the only disturbing thread in American culture today. Another thread, apparently linear in affect, but in concert with other threads, including the 'feminization' of American culture, has the potential to create an explosion that we may not be able to contain. That thread is 'cultural Marxism.' The confluence of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' in a single generation, the elite Boomers (a throwback to the destructive Transcendentals), renders the complex, non-linear feedback system of American Civilization susceptible to a chaotic disintegration.
Of Tranzis and Fog
TRANSNATIONAL PROGRESSIVISM
(Part One)
by Ralph Maddocks
There's a mouthful for you. It meant nothing to me either, until recently when I came across a rather lengthy article by John Fonte, written in 2001, and entitled "The Future of the Ideological War Within the West."(1) To make a very long story short, Fonte claims that elite institutions ranging in size and influence from the National Council of Churches to the United Nations are pushing the notion that "the nation-state and the idea of national citizenship are ill suited to deal with the global problems of the future." They propose abolishing nations and replacing them with a single, global government. Fonte says that, for reasons that are still not completely clear, practically every government in the world appears to have embraced Transnational Progressivism and is working around the clock to make global government a reality.
Of Tranzis and fog
It was David Carr, a London-based Libertarian, who provided the memorable nickname for Transnational Progressivists when he called them "Tranzis." He explained, "A lot of us have known for some time there was something wrong in the world but it was difficult to pin down and put our fingers on. It was something that has no face and no name. Like fog it swirled all around us but not being corporeal we lashed out in all directions, landing blows on nothing. It was like an itch we could never scratch." We used to call these people "the left," and still do I suppose, but many of those pushing this apparently "left-wing" agenda seem to be high-level statesmen, the wealthy and the heads of multibillion-dollar corporations. Their behaviour cannot be explained away in terms of the Marxist "Class struggle." If the Tranzis are indeed leftists, they are so only in the sense that a frog was once a tadpole, having emerged long ago from its pond and jumped on to dry land.
Fonte is quick to forewarn us that this coming global administration will be no respecter of our freedoms and suggests that some form of racialist police state will be imposed. A state where the elites will encourage the historically oppressed to get even with their former oppressors. He claims that "dominant" groups will be obliged to yield power to "oppressed" groups, with the former being displaced from their jobs in the economic sphere until each category of task reflects the proportion of "oppressed" people in the population. Fonte believes that this will not be the end of it either. The proportion of "oppressed" people in the population will grow constantly. That's because another tenet of this Tranzi-ism holds that "dominant" countries must welcome immigrants from "oppressed" countries in unlimited numbers. Furthermore, if any "dominant" people protest, they will be jailed for "hate speech."
Looking around our world we can see this beginning to happen with all kinds of laws being enacted to punish those who offend, even just by thinking something the authorities think you shouldn't. It is becoming clear too that these laws are applied to the native "dominant" population rather than to the "oppressed" new arrivals. Examples abound of assaults by "oppressed" people on the persons of "dominant" people being ignored by police. Even replying in kind to a racist comment from an "oppressed" person brings instant arrest and the imprisonment of the offender. The "hate" laws apply to crimes against other groups and to quote a senior policeman, "homophobic and transphobic crimes are seen as particularly serious because they are motivated by prejudice, discrimination and hate, and undermine people's right to feel safe in their sexual orientation and gender."
As defined by the UK Crown Prosecution Service, "homophobic" means "a fear of or dislike directed towards lesbian, gay or bisexual people, or their perceived lifestyle, culture or characteristics." Incidentally, the word "homosexual" is no longer to be used, apparently because it is seen as offensive. "Transphobic" was not a term I had ever heard before. Apparently, it means "a fear of or dislike towards trans people." And what might they be? "Trans people," again according to the CPS, is "a phrase which is intended to include transsexual, transgender and transvestite people." A "transgendered" person is someone "whose biological gender is not the same as the gender they own as theirs." So now you know, although how you will ever be certain remains a mystery.
Third Way actions
Perhaps it is all an outcome of Tony Blair's Third Way view as an international response to the end of Thatcherism and a philosophical claim which he asserts brought the centre-left back into government across the world. Third Way actions though seem to be more like those we saw in Stalin's country, to say nothing of Hitler. It isn't surprising that even comments mentioning Hitler are now found offensive let alone direct comparisons. Judging by the way oppressive "hate" laws are applied in the UK, using the police to investigate your home for evidence to support government paranoia the future does not look promising for any of us who believe in such archaic concepts as "free speech."
In the UK, a well known TV presenter and Daily Telegraph columnist, Robin Page, was arrested on suspicion of using insulting words that were likely to stir up racial hatred. His supposed crime? He told a rally in September that the rural minority in favour of hunting (a subject of great political interest in the UK these days) should have the same rights as blacks, Muslims and gays. As Mr Page himself pointed out, after six burglaries and break-ins on his farm – when no policeman was prepared to travel the four miles from Cambridge to his farm to take a statement – he found it odd that a policeman was prepared to travel nearly 200 miles to his home to investigate an incident which the policeman seemed reluctant to discuss on the telephone. The policeman then arrested him because Mr Page refused to answer questions without his solicitor being present, questions about what he was not told at the time. Mr Page was then taken to the local police station and thrown into a cell. Unable to feed his cattle from a cell, Mr Page had to agree to be interviewed because his solicitor could not arrive until the next day.
The interview began with the policeman alleging that Mr Page had "...started your speech with racist comments." When Mr Page asked what these comments were, the policeman could not supply them but said that they had received a complaint from someone in a nearby town. This is the new Britain, the country where a man was presumed innocent until proven guilty; now – through the power of political correctness – a man is assumed to be guilty until he proves himself innocent. Regular readers will not be surprised to read this since I have been saying this for some time. It is truly surprising though how quickly a supposedly free country can slide into the habits of a police state and how easy it has become to intimidate those who object. As Pierre Lemieux has remarked, in an article written in 1994, "Giving public policy goals – like anti-racism – precedence on individual rights amounts to admitting that individuals have no rights but the ones that are congruent with the government's, or the majority's, agenda."(2)
Our southern neighbours aren't much better when it comes to the pursuit of those they presume offensive. In 1999, there was an incident in Washington D.C., when one David Howard, an aide to the mayor, was pressured to resign because he uttered the innocuous word "niggardly" to describe a fund he was administering? People, however, chose to be offended by the word's phonetic resemblance to the "N Word," despite Howard's insistence that he "would never think of making a racist remark." As even those with limited literacy skills know, the word's meaning is totally unrelated to the one denoting a racial slur. "Niggardly" means "grudgingly mean about spending or granting," or "stingy." The N word (spelled differently anyway) is a pejorative to describe blacks.
« Among the main concepts of Transnational Progressivism is the notion that the key political unit is not the individual who forms voluntary associations and works with his fellow citizens regardless of their race, sex or national origin, it is the ascriptive group – racial, ethnic or gender – into which one is born. »
Any etymological dictionary would have revealed instantly that there is no connection at all between the evolution of the two words. Yet, presumably showing his own ignorance or perhaps settling some old score of his own, D.C.'s Mayor Anthony Williams accepted Howard's resignation, explaining to reporters, "I don't think that the use of this term showed the kind of judgment that I like to see in our top management." Williams added that he was "committed to representing all of the people of our city and making sure my administration truly reflects the city's diversity." Our Mr Williams' views on diversity are surely not niggardly.
Creating a cohesive nation
The recent clamour over Trent Lott's encomium at Strom Thurmond's retirement party proves – if proof is needed – that the First Amendment has been replaced by the race-based privileges of the so-called "oppressed" groups. Ignored in all this furor, in which the Republican pundits and the President were quick to take part, was that Thurmond's main party plank was in favour of "State's Rights." As the libertarian writer, Lew Rockwell, pointed out, fundamentally states' rights are about the Tenth Amendment, not segregation. Strom Thurmond's political movement was looking for a return to the enumerated powers guaranteed to the states by the Constitution. If Thurmond had won, then we may not have to witness today the spectacle of people being incarcerated by the Federal government for using marijuana to quell their cancer induced vomiting when their home state has legalised its medical use. One is constantly being reminded of Napoleon Bonaparte's remark that, "In politics, stupidity is not a handicap." Nor, apparently is ignorance of history.
Canada's Criminal Code imposes sanctions against publicly and wilfully promoting hatred (section 319) against an identifiable group. It also allows judges to seize hate propaganda (section 320). But the primary criminal provision available to combat hate propaganda is Section 319 (2), which prohibits the promotion of hatred by "communicating statements, other than in private conversation." This has resulted in a man being fined more than $6,000 for running a newspaper advertisement in which he quoted a verse about homosexuality from the book of Leviticus.
Among the main concepts of Transnational Progressivism is the notion that the key political unit is not the individual who forms voluntary associations and works with his fellow citizens regardless of their race, sex or national origin, it is the ascriptive group – racial, ethnic or gender – into which one is born. It is from this concept, Forte notes, that we find this emphasis on race, ethnicity and gender leading to group consciousness and a corresponding de-emphasis of the individual's capacity for choice and for transcendence of the above ascriptive categories, joining with others outside the confines of social class, tribe and gender to create a cohesive nation.
Many will have noticed the rise in the number of "victim" groups emerging into the national consciousness. Groups such as women, blacks, Muslims, gays, Latinos (in the USA) and immigrants or any conceivable combination thereof. This too is part of the "oppressor" groups versus the "victim" groups philosophy espoused by the Marxists, the privileged and the marginalised. As one philosopher remarked, "Multiculturalism is not ‘multi' or concerned with many groups, but ‘binary' concerned with two groups, the hegemon (bad) and "the Other" (good) or the oppressor and the oppressed." This means that "equity" and "social justice" mean strengthening the position of the victim groups and weakening the position of the oppressors – thus justifying group preferences. Equality under the law is replaced by legal preferences for victimised groups. This is illustrated by a recent decision of the US Equal Opportunity Commission which ruled that illegal immigrants as a class are discriminated against, thereby giving them victim status and entitling them to preferential treatment as a group.
Complicating all this is the assumption that the "victim" groups should be represented in all institutions of society in rough proportion to their percentage of the population. So theoretically, if women represent 51% of the population and Spanish speakers represent 10% of that same population then 51% of all executives, doctors, salespersons, professors, etc., should be women and 10% of them should be Spanish speakers. Introduce other variations such as sexual preferences, colour and physical characteristics and it is not hard to imagine the complexities which may result. Even the US Park Service has expressed concern that 85% of all park visitors are white, although whites are only 74% of the population. No consideration apparently being given to the possibility that many of those visitors do not belong to the US population in the first place. The Park Service has announced that it is working on this "problem."
The "Tranzis" insist also that it is not enough to have proportionate numbers of minorities (including illegal and legal immigrants) and women in major institutions, if these institutions continue to reflect the "white Anglo male culture and world view." These ethnic and linguistic minorities, they insist, have values and cultures which must be respected and represented in these institutions and they should not be expected to conform to the dominant culture. At a conference promoting bilingual education, SUNY professor Joel Spring was quoted as saying, "We must use multiculturalism and multilingualism to change the dominant culture of the United States." He added that, unlike Anglo culture, Latino culture is "warm" and would not promote harsh disciplinary measures in the schools.
Fonte's paper was rather lengthy and contains a great deal more material explaining how the Transnational Progressivists are challenging the existing world view, so reviewing his remaining points will have to be done in a second article to be published later.
1. John Fonte, "Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the Ideological Civil War Within the West," Orbis, Summer Issue, 2002. >>
2. Pierre Lemieux, "In Defense of Hate Literature (Sort Of)," Fall of 1994. >>
PART TWO >>
TRANSNATIONAL PROGRESSIVISM
(Part Two)
by Ralph Maddocks
Each year, in a different country, a secret meeting is held which is attended by a number of prominent politicians, government representatives, bankers, industrialists and academics. The conference, known as Bilderberg, is named after the Bilderberg Hotel in Osterbeek, Holland, where the original meeting was held in 1954 under the Chairmanship of HRH Bernard, Prince of the Netherlands. Many countries are represented at each meeting which publishes no proceedings, among them Canada which in 1967 for example sent four representatives: a banker, a Toronto University professor, a former Ambassador and the then Minister for External Affairs. At that time the post was held by none other than the late Paul Martin Sr. Along with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group is alleged to be among the prime movers in the creation of the New World Order, a collaborative effort to establish "World Government."
Thus it was not very surprising to read the speech by the late Paul Martin Sr's son at the University of Toronto convocation address on Tuesday 17 December 2002. The younger Mr Martin, heir apparent to the Chrétien legacy of governmental incompetence, believes that Canada is the only country on the planet able to shape the future of global government. Many may have found this surprising since we don't seem to be doing all that well when it comes to governing ourselves as a nation-state, a form of government which Mr Martin seems to believe is no longer adequate in a globalized world. He admits that the USA is not interested in a new model of global governance, the Europeans are too busy building Europe, the countries of the Far East are too busy with old rivalries and Latin America is mired "deep in economic problems" and "poverty and misery." Hence his view that Canada is the one country with the capacity to understand the direction in which the world must go. Mr Martin believes that immigration in Europe and the US has not changed their "core identities" whereas in Canada the immigrants "are in the process of changing and enriching fundamentally" Canada's identity.
The Demographic Imperative
This brings me back to Transnational Progressivism about which I wrote in my last article. Among the lengthy list of points which John Fonte raised in his article, was one he described as the Demographic Imperative. This, he explained, means that the Tranzis require Americans to alter their value system because of the major demographic changes which are occurring there as massive immigration from non-Western countries takes place. The Tranzis claim that the global interdependence of the world's peoples and the transnational connections among them will increase and that these changes will make the traditional paradigm obsolete. In other words, a society based on individual rights, majority rule, national sovereignty, citizenship, and the assimilation of immigrants must be changed to a system promoting "diversity" or group proportionalism.
The Tranzis then would redefine democracy and "democratic ideals." The system of majority rule among equal citizens would yield to power sharing among ethnic groups composed of citizens and non-citizens. Fonte provides as an example, the words of the Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castenada who wrote that it is "undemocratic" for California to exclude non-citizens, specifically illegal aliens, from voting. A view which is supported by the former US Immigration and Naturalisation General Counsel, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, who declared that "[we] live in a post assimilationist age," adding that majority preferences simply "reflect the norms and cultures of dominant groups," (as opposed to the norms and cultures of "feminists and people of colour.") In effect what is being said is that American democracy is not authentic and that "real" democracy is yet to be created when the different "peoples" or groups within America "share power" as groups.
The Tranzis have been active in recent years busily deconstructing the symbols and traditions of the Western democratic nation-states. In the UK, a Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain chaired by the Labour life peer Lord Parekh denounced the concept of "Britishness" as having "systemic [...] racist connotations." The noble peer declared too that, instead of defining itself as a nation, the UK should be considered a "community of communities." The Commission found the concepts of "Britain" and "nation" troubling. Other pronouncements from this gathering of like-minded globalists sought to recognise Britain formally as a "multicultural society," whose history needs to be "revised, rethought, or jettisoned."
The USA has not escaped similar deconstructionist activity and the view is being advanced that the US civilisation is not a Western nation formed by European settlers, but a "convergence" of three civilisations, Amerindian, West African and European. A proposition which has become dominant in America's public schools.
"Denationalised" citizenship
Another concept which is being advanced, writes Fonte, is that citizenship should be "denationalised." In the name of "inclusion," "social justice," "democratic engagement" and "human rights" some theorists argue for "transnational citizenship," "postnational citizenship" or even "global citizenship" embedded in international human rights accords and "evolving" forms of transnational arrangements. To this end, a number of books have been published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, dealing with such matters as "challenging traditional understandings of belonging and membership" in nation-states and "rethinking the meaning of citizenship." These essays by authors from countries such as France, Germany, Britain and Canada argue for new and "evolving" transnational forms of citizenship as a normative good.
Fonte believes that the theory of transnationalism will be the next stage of the multicultural ideology and he expects it to be for the first decade of the 21st century what multiculturalism was during the last decade of the 20th century. A kind of multiculturalism with a human face, a concept that gives the elites an empirical tool (a plausible analysis of what is) and an ideological framework (a vision of what should be). My dictionary defines plausible as being "apparently right, using specious (pleasing to the eye) arguments." Those who argue in favour of transnationalism believe that globalization requires some form of transnational "global governance" because, like our Mr Martin, they think that the nation-state and the concept of national citizenship are not suited to dealing with the global problems we may expect in the future.
We can expect to be bombarded with all kinds of combinations of terms preceded by the word transnational such as "t-citizenship," "t-actors," "t-organisation," "t-migrants,"and "t-jurisprudence." Academics at public policy conferences will be spouting these words, just as during the last decade they wittered on about multiculturalism and education, law, literature and citizenship. A distinguished anthropologist from the University of Chicago has opined that the USA is in transition from being a "land of immigrants" to "one node in a post-national network of diasporas."
« Fonte believes that the theory of transnationalism will be the next stage of the multicultural ideology and he expects it to be for the first decade of the 21st century what multiculturalism was during the last decade of the 20th century. »
According to Fonte, the arguments about globalization which will dominate public debate during the early part of this century will use transnationalism to shape it. Those who believe in the concept of the nation-state will be castigated as backward looking anti-globalists, and those who espouse transnationalism will be praised as forward-looking globalists. Those who believe in internationalism and free market economics will have to insist that the argument is not between the globalists and the anti-globalists but over the form that Western global engagement should take in the future: transnationalist or internationalist.
Producers/popularisers/practitioners
Mr Fonte defines the social base of global progressivism as a "rising post-national intelligentsia," loosely defined as including three elements; the producers of ideas and concepts, the popularisers of ideas and values and the practitioners who implement ideas and values at all levels. He says that to belong to this group intelligence is not particularly required and could include anyone from a Western government official to a kindergarten teacher pushing the crudest form of multiculturalism. He cites as examples, John O'Sullivan's "... lumpenintelligentsia of teachers, librarians, researchers, small-town-newspaper "liberals," clergymen, and assorted ancillary brainworkers," first posited in his article in the October 15, 2001, issue of National Review.
The leaders in this post-national intelligentsia, according to Fonte, will include law professors at prestigious Western universities, activists in the NGOs, UN and EU bureaucrats and administrators, corporate executives and politicians throughout the West. Fonte cites such luminaries as Anthony Giddens, the "Third Way" theorist who has said already that he is "in favour of pioneering some quasi-utopian trans-national forms of democracy." Others include Martha Nussbaum, the Chicago University Professor of Philosophy, who calls for reinvigorating the concept of "global citizenship" denouncing patriotism as "indistinguishable from jingoism."
In addition, we have the Italian Marxist theorist – a jailed former associate of Italy's Red Brigade – Toni Negri, and Duke University Literature Professor, Michael Hardt – a former student of his – whose best-selling book Empire has been praised by the New York Times as the next big idea. Empire used Marxist concepts such as the "multitudes" (read "the masses") versus the Empire, attacking the power of the global corporations and called for a new form of "global" or transnational democracy.
On the other side he quotes Strobe Talbot – of whom we heard in QL no 115 (see SOCIAL GLOBALIZATION) – and the late Carl Gerstacker, Chairman of Dow Chermical in the 1960s and 1970s, who expressed the libertarian thread of transnationalism when he declared "I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation and of establishing the World Headquarters of the Dow Company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society."
Some kind of inevitability
While some of this may seem diffuse and uncoordinated it should not be forgotten that many of the NGOs spend a great deal of their time trying to bring about transnationalism. These social movements with their ideologies of "global governance" and "transnationalism" imply that there is some kind of inevitability about it all because it is the result of social forces or the movement of history. It isn't. If it happens at all it will be like all the previous movements such as the Bolshevik Revolution, the New Deal, the European Union and the National Socialist Revolution. It will be because of the exercise of political will by elites who mobilised their strengths and conquered all their opponents. Just like "diversity" and "multiculturalism," transnationalism and global governance are not the forces of history but simply ideological tools advocated by the activist elites.
What is being attempted is the achievement by the NGOs of political ends that cannot be achieved by democratic means. It is done by going outside the democratic framework and is exemplified by such issues as the International Criminal Court, the UN Convention on Women's Rights, the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, etc. The latter being particularly pertinent in Canada where we have just seen the Kyoto Treaty rubber stamped by a parliament whose elected Liberal majority feared the political consequences of opposing their discredited leader in his quest for a so-called legacy. In an Ipsos-Reid poll, almost half of Canadians (45%) said that the Government of Canada "should withdraw from the Kyoto protocol and develop a made-in-Canada plan for reducing greenhouse gasses." Essentially the same number (44%) said that Canada should "ratify the Kyoto Protocol," but, one in ten (9%) said they "don't know" what the federal government should do.
Dissent was even greater in the West, but objections by the Western Provinces were completely ignored and cosy deals are alleged to have been cut with industry groups located in heavily Liberal voting provinces. The electorate at large was never consulted at all of course. Perhaps not all that surprising, given that few, if any, of our elected representatives understand the treaty's implications or the economic fallout to be expected from its implementation.
The recent UN Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia in Durban is a perfect example of the NGOs at work. Some fifty of them, including the Mexican-American Legal Defense (sic) and Educational Fund, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, the NAACP, the International Human Rights Law Group and many more, called upon Mary Robinson, then UN Human Rights Commissioner, to hold the USA "accountable for the intractable and persistent problem of discrimination that men and women of color (sic) face at the hands of the US criminal justice system." The result of this exercise in chicanery was the passing of a number of resolutions demanding reparations for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 17th to 19th centuries, ignoring of course the 14 million African slaves who were sent to Islamic lands during that same period. Demands that the USA "publicly acknowledge the breadth and pervasiveness of institutional racism" which "permeates every institution at every level," accompanied calls for a declaration that "racial bias corrupts every stage of the US criminal justice process from suspicion to investigation, arrest, prosecution, trial and sentencing."
Suggesting a 4th dimension
The NGOs denounce free market capitalism as "a fundamentally flawed system" and insist that the US ratify all major UN "human rights" treaties. Although, in 1994, the USA ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) it refused to accept the restriction of certain types of speech and political activity permitted by the First Amendment
For the US to agree to these terms would mean the abandonment of constitutional guarantees of free speech, federalism, and majority rule – all the concepts upon which the US is based. What is interesting is that the language used in almost all UN conventions, such as the Convention on Women's Rights and the International Criminal Court – which ignore the guarantees of the US Constitution – was written by Western NGOs and Americans.
Many of the international law professors and NGOs advocate the elimination of the distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, vigorously opposing assimilation of immigrants into what they see as the "dominant Anglo culture." They attack what they call "archaic notions of sovereignty" and call for the elimination of the differences between the citizens and non-citizens in all federal laws. They propose dropping the hyphenated American in favour of the "ampersand" individual and suggest that those who are say, "Mexican & American" should be allowed to vote in both countries. One can imagine the damage this might do, where large numbers of people living outside their native country could destroy the policies of the government in their country of origin without suffering the consequences.
The consequences of transnational progressivism can be seen vividly in the European Union where they are moving to absorb the component nation states into a supranational post-democratic structure. The resulting denial of the authority of the nation state, as well as the transfer of policymaking authority from the governed and their elected representatives to a professional bureaucracy, is a marked change from the idea of popular sovereignty once present in Europe's democracies. That countries such as those from the former communist bloc raise little fuss about the prospect is perhaps understandable, they see little change; but that the populations of democracies such as those of France and especially England seem to be rushing willingly into this bureaucratic maelstrom is beyond this chronicler's comprehension.
Fonte ends his paper by suggesting that a fourth dimension be added to the conceptual framework of international politics. The three present dimensions are the competition and conflict between and among nation states (and supranational ones like the EU), the competition between civilisations and thirdly, the division (and conflict) between the democratic world and the undemocratic world. Fonte's proposed fourth dimension is the conflict between the forces of liberal democracy and the forces of transnational progressivism. He sees the conflicts and tensions within these dimensions as occurring simultaneously and being affected by each other, believing that they must be incorporated into any understanding of the world in the 21st century.
He concludes that Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" theory – wherein Fukuyama suggested that liberal democracy is the final form of political governance – is wrong.
(Part One)
by Ralph Maddocks
There's a mouthful for you. It meant nothing to me either, until recently when I came across a rather lengthy article by John Fonte, written in 2001, and entitled "The Future of the Ideological War Within the West."(1) To make a very long story short, Fonte claims that elite institutions ranging in size and influence from the National Council of Churches to the United Nations are pushing the notion that "the nation-state and the idea of national citizenship are ill suited to deal with the global problems of the future." They propose abolishing nations and replacing them with a single, global government. Fonte says that, for reasons that are still not completely clear, practically every government in the world appears to have embraced Transnational Progressivism and is working around the clock to make global government a reality.
Of Tranzis and fog
It was David Carr, a London-based Libertarian, who provided the memorable nickname for Transnational Progressivists when he called them "Tranzis." He explained, "A lot of us have known for some time there was something wrong in the world but it was difficult to pin down and put our fingers on. It was something that has no face and no name. Like fog it swirled all around us but not being corporeal we lashed out in all directions, landing blows on nothing. It was like an itch we could never scratch." We used to call these people "the left," and still do I suppose, but many of those pushing this apparently "left-wing" agenda seem to be high-level statesmen, the wealthy and the heads of multibillion-dollar corporations. Their behaviour cannot be explained away in terms of the Marxist "Class struggle." If the Tranzis are indeed leftists, they are so only in the sense that a frog was once a tadpole, having emerged long ago from its pond and jumped on to dry land.
Fonte is quick to forewarn us that this coming global administration will be no respecter of our freedoms and suggests that some form of racialist police state will be imposed. A state where the elites will encourage the historically oppressed to get even with their former oppressors. He claims that "dominant" groups will be obliged to yield power to "oppressed" groups, with the former being displaced from their jobs in the economic sphere until each category of task reflects the proportion of "oppressed" people in the population. Fonte believes that this will not be the end of it either. The proportion of "oppressed" people in the population will grow constantly. That's because another tenet of this Tranzi-ism holds that "dominant" countries must welcome immigrants from "oppressed" countries in unlimited numbers. Furthermore, if any "dominant" people protest, they will be jailed for "hate speech."
Looking around our world we can see this beginning to happen with all kinds of laws being enacted to punish those who offend, even just by thinking something the authorities think you shouldn't. It is becoming clear too that these laws are applied to the native "dominant" population rather than to the "oppressed" new arrivals. Examples abound of assaults by "oppressed" people on the persons of "dominant" people being ignored by police. Even replying in kind to a racist comment from an "oppressed" person brings instant arrest and the imprisonment of the offender. The "hate" laws apply to crimes against other groups and to quote a senior policeman, "homophobic and transphobic crimes are seen as particularly serious because they are motivated by prejudice, discrimination and hate, and undermine people's right to feel safe in their sexual orientation and gender."
As defined by the UK Crown Prosecution Service, "homophobic" means "a fear of or dislike directed towards lesbian, gay or bisexual people, or their perceived lifestyle, culture or characteristics." Incidentally, the word "homosexual" is no longer to be used, apparently because it is seen as offensive. "Transphobic" was not a term I had ever heard before. Apparently, it means "a fear of or dislike towards trans people." And what might they be? "Trans people," again according to the CPS, is "a phrase which is intended to include transsexual, transgender and transvestite people." A "transgendered" person is someone "whose biological gender is not the same as the gender they own as theirs." So now you know, although how you will ever be certain remains a mystery.
Third Way actions
Perhaps it is all an outcome of Tony Blair's Third Way view as an international response to the end of Thatcherism and a philosophical claim which he asserts brought the centre-left back into government across the world. Third Way actions though seem to be more like those we saw in Stalin's country, to say nothing of Hitler. It isn't surprising that even comments mentioning Hitler are now found offensive let alone direct comparisons. Judging by the way oppressive "hate" laws are applied in the UK, using the police to investigate your home for evidence to support government paranoia the future does not look promising for any of us who believe in such archaic concepts as "free speech."
In the UK, a well known TV presenter and Daily Telegraph columnist, Robin Page, was arrested on suspicion of using insulting words that were likely to stir up racial hatred. His supposed crime? He told a rally in September that the rural minority in favour of hunting (a subject of great political interest in the UK these days) should have the same rights as blacks, Muslims and gays. As Mr Page himself pointed out, after six burglaries and break-ins on his farm – when no policeman was prepared to travel the four miles from Cambridge to his farm to take a statement – he found it odd that a policeman was prepared to travel nearly 200 miles to his home to investigate an incident which the policeman seemed reluctant to discuss on the telephone. The policeman then arrested him because Mr Page refused to answer questions without his solicitor being present, questions about what he was not told at the time. Mr Page was then taken to the local police station and thrown into a cell. Unable to feed his cattle from a cell, Mr Page had to agree to be interviewed because his solicitor could not arrive until the next day.
The interview began with the policeman alleging that Mr Page had "...started your speech with racist comments." When Mr Page asked what these comments were, the policeman could not supply them but said that they had received a complaint from someone in a nearby town. This is the new Britain, the country where a man was presumed innocent until proven guilty; now – through the power of political correctness – a man is assumed to be guilty until he proves himself innocent. Regular readers will not be surprised to read this since I have been saying this for some time. It is truly surprising though how quickly a supposedly free country can slide into the habits of a police state and how easy it has become to intimidate those who object. As Pierre Lemieux has remarked, in an article written in 1994, "Giving public policy goals – like anti-racism – precedence on individual rights amounts to admitting that individuals have no rights but the ones that are congruent with the government's, or the majority's, agenda."(2)
Our southern neighbours aren't much better when it comes to the pursuit of those they presume offensive. In 1999, there was an incident in Washington D.C., when one David Howard, an aide to the mayor, was pressured to resign because he uttered the innocuous word "niggardly" to describe a fund he was administering? People, however, chose to be offended by the word's phonetic resemblance to the "N Word," despite Howard's insistence that he "would never think of making a racist remark." As even those with limited literacy skills know, the word's meaning is totally unrelated to the one denoting a racial slur. "Niggardly" means "grudgingly mean about spending or granting," or "stingy." The N word (spelled differently anyway) is a pejorative to describe blacks.
« Among the main concepts of Transnational Progressivism is the notion that the key political unit is not the individual who forms voluntary associations and works with his fellow citizens regardless of their race, sex or national origin, it is the ascriptive group – racial, ethnic or gender – into which one is born. »
Any etymological dictionary would have revealed instantly that there is no connection at all between the evolution of the two words. Yet, presumably showing his own ignorance or perhaps settling some old score of his own, D.C.'s Mayor Anthony Williams accepted Howard's resignation, explaining to reporters, "I don't think that the use of this term showed the kind of judgment that I like to see in our top management." Williams added that he was "committed to representing all of the people of our city and making sure my administration truly reflects the city's diversity." Our Mr Williams' views on diversity are surely not niggardly.
Creating a cohesive nation
The recent clamour over Trent Lott's encomium at Strom Thurmond's retirement party proves – if proof is needed – that the First Amendment has been replaced by the race-based privileges of the so-called "oppressed" groups. Ignored in all this furor, in which the Republican pundits and the President were quick to take part, was that Thurmond's main party plank was in favour of "State's Rights." As the libertarian writer, Lew Rockwell, pointed out, fundamentally states' rights are about the Tenth Amendment, not segregation. Strom Thurmond's political movement was looking for a return to the enumerated powers guaranteed to the states by the Constitution. If Thurmond had won, then we may not have to witness today the spectacle of people being incarcerated by the Federal government for using marijuana to quell their cancer induced vomiting when their home state has legalised its medical use. One is constantly being reminded of Napoleon Bonaparte's remark that, "In politics, stupidity is not a handicap." Nor, apparently is ignorance of history.
Canada's Criminal Code imposes sanctions against publicly and wilfully promoting hatred (section 319) against an identifiable group. It also allows judges to seize hate propaganda (section 320). But the primary criminal provision available to combat hate propaganda is Section 319 (2), which prohibits the promotion of hatred by "communicating statements, other than in private conversation." This has resulted in a man being fined more than $6,000 for running a newspaper advertisement in which he quoted a verse about homosexuality from the book of Leviticus.
Among the main concepts of Transnational Progressivism is the notion that the key political unit is not the individual who forms voluntary associations and works with his fellow citizens regardless of their race, sex or national origin, it is the ascriptive group – racial, ethnic or gender – into which one is born. It is from this concept, Forte notes, that we find this emphasis on race, ethnicity and gender leading to group consciousness and a corresponding de-emphasis of the individual's capacity for choice and for transcendence of the above ascriptive categories, joining with others outside the confines of social class, tribe and gender to create a cohesive nation.
Many will have noticed the rise in the number of "victim" groups emerging into the national consciousness. Groups such as women, blacks, Muslims, gays, Latinos (in the USA) and immigrants or any conceivable combination thereof. This too is part of the "oppressor" groups versus the "victim" groups philosophy espoused by the Marxists, the privileged and the marginalised. As one philosopher remarked, "Multiculturalism is not ‘multi' or concerned with many groups, but ‘binary' concerned with two groups, the hegemon (bad) and "the Other" (good) or the oppressor and the oppressed." This means that "equity" and "social justice" mean strengthening the position of the victim groups and weakening the position of the oppressors – thus justifying group preferences. Equality under the law is replaced by legal preferences for victimised groups. This is illustrated by a recent decision of the US Equal Opportunity Commission which ruled that illegal immigrants as a class are discriminated against, thereby giving them victim status and entitling them to preferential treatment as a group.
Complicating all this is the assumption that the "victim" groups should be represented in all institutions of society in rough proportion to their percentage of the population. So theoretically, if women represent 51% of the population and Spanish speakers represent 10% of that same population then 51% of all executives, doctors, salespersons, professors, etc., should be women and 10% of them should be Spanish speakers. Introduce other variations such as sexual preferences, colour and physical characteristics and it is not hard to imagine the complexities which may result. Even the US Park Service has expressed concern that 85% of all park visitors are white, although whites are only 74% of the population. No consideration apparently being given to the possibility that many of those visitors do not belong to the US population in the first place. The Park Service has announced that it is working on this "problem."
The "Tranzis" insist also that it is not enough to have proportionate numbers of minorities (including illegal and legal immigrants) and women in major institutions, if these institutions continue to reflect the "white Anglo male culture and world view." These ethnic and linguistic minorities, they insist, have values and cultures which must be respected and represented in these institutions and they should not be expected to conform to the dominant culture. At a conference promoting bilingual education, SUNY professor Joel Spring was quoted as saying, "We must use multiculturalism and multilingualism to change the dominant culture of the United States." He added that, unlike Anglo culture, Latino culture is "warm" and would not promote harsh disciplinary measures in the schools.
Fonte's paper was rather lengthy and contains a great deal more material explaining how the Transnational Progressivists are challenging the existing world view, so reviewing his remaining points will have to be done in a second article to be published later.
1. John Fonte, "Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the Ideological Civil War Within the West," Orbis, Summer Issue, 2002. >>
2. Pierre Lemieux, "In Defense of Hate Literature (Sort Of)," Fall of 1994. >>
PART TWO >>
TRANSNATIONAL PROGRESSIVISM
(Part Two)
by Ralph Maddocks
Each year, in a different country, a secret meeting is held which is attended by a number of prominent politicians, government representatives, bankers, industrialists and academics. The conference, known as Bilderberg, is named after the Bilderberg Hotel in Osterbeek, Holland, where the original meeting was held in 1954 under the Chairmanship of HRH Bernard, Prince of the Netherlands. Many countries are represented at each meeting which publishes no proceedings, among them Canada which in 1967 for example sent four representatives: a banker, a Toronto University professor, a former Ambassador and the then Minister for External Affairs. At that time the post was held by none other than the late Paul Martin Sr. Along with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group is alleged to be among the prime movers in the creation of the New World Order, a collaborative effort to establish "World Government."
Thus it was not very surprising to read the speech by the late Paul Martin Sr's son at the University of Toronto convocation address on Tuesday 17 December 2002. The younger Mr Martin, heir apparent to the Chrétien legacy of governmental incompetence, believes that Canada is the only country on the planet able to shape the future of global government. Many may have found this surprising since we don't seem to be doing all that well when it comes to governing ourselves as a nation-state, a form of government which Mr Martin seems to believe is no longer adequate in a globalized world. He admits that the USA is not interested in a new model of global governance, the Europeans are too busy building Europe, the countries of the Far East are too busy with old rivalries and Latin America is mired "deep in economic problems" and "poverty and misery." Hence his view that Canada is the one country with the capacity to understand the direction in which the world must go. Mr Martin believes that immigration in Europe and the US has not changed their "core identities" whereas in Canada the immigrants "are in the process of changing and enriching fundamentally" Canada's identity.
The Demographic Imperative
This brings me back to Transnational Progressivism about which I wrote in my last article. Among the lengthy list of points which John Fonte raised in his article, was one he described as the Demographic Imperative. This, he explained, means that the Tranzis require Americans to alter their value system because of the major demographic changes which are occurring there as massive immigration from non-Western countries takes place. The Tranzis claim that the global interdependence of the world's peoples and the transnational connections among them will increase and that these changes will make the traditional paradigm obsolete. In other words, a society based on individual rights, majority rule, national sovereignty, citizenship, and the assimilation of immigrants must be changed to a system promoting "diversity" or group proportionalism.
The Tranzis then would redefine democracy and "democratic ideals." The system of majority rule among equal citizens would yield to power sharing among ethnic groups composed of citizens and non-citizens. Fonte provides as an example, the words of the Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castenada who wrote that it is "undemocratic" for California to exclude non-citizens, specifically illegal aliens, from voting. A view which is supported by the former US Immigration and Naturalisation General Counsel, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, who declared that "[we] live in a post assimilationist age," adding that majority preferences simply "reflect the norms and cultures of dominant groups," (as opposed to the norms and cultures of "feminists and people of colour.") In effect what is being said is that American democracy is not authentic and that "real" democracy is yet to be created when the different "peoples" or groups within America "share power" as groups.
The Tranzis have been active in recent years busily deconstructing the symbols and traditions of the Western democratic nation-states. In the UK, a Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain chaired by the Labour life peer Lord Parekh denounced the concept of "Britishness" as having "systemic [...] racist connotations." The noble peer declared too that, instead of defining itself as a nation, the UK should be considered a "community of communities." The Commission found the concepts of "Britain" and "nation" troubling. Other pronouncements from this gathering of like-minded globalists sought to recognise Britain formally as a "multicultural society," whose history needs to be "revised, rethought, or jettisoned."
The USA has not escaped similar deconstructionist activity and the view is being advanced that the US civilisation is not a Western nation formed by European settlers, but a "convergence" of three civilisations, Amerindian, West African and European. A proposition which has become dominant in America's public schools.
"Denationalised" citizenship
Another concept which is being advanced, writes Fonte, is that citizenship should be "denationalised." In the name of "inclusion," "social justice," "democratic engagement" and "human rights" some theorists argue for "transnational citizenship," "postnational citizenship" or even "global citizenship" embedded in international human rights accords and "evolving" forms of transnational arrangements. To this end, a number of books have been published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, dealing with such matters as "challenging traditional understandings of belonging and membership" in nation-states and "rethinking the meaning of citizenship." These essays by authors from countries such as France, Germany, Britain and Canada argue for new and "evolving" transnational forms of citizenship as a normative good.
Fonte believes that the theory of transnationalism will be the next stage of the multicultural ideology and he expects it to be for the first decade of the 21st century what multiculturalism was during the last decade of the 20th century. A kind of multiculturalism with a human face, a concept that gives the elites an empirical tool (a plausible analysis of what is) and an ideological framework (a vision of what should be). My dictionary defines plausible as being "apparently right, using specious (pleasing to the eye) arguments." Those who argue in favour of transnationalism believe that globalization requires some form of transnational "global governance" because, like our Mr Martin, they think that the nation-state and the concept of national citizenship are not suited to dealing with the global problems we may expect in the future.
We can expect to be bombarded with all kinds of combinations of terms preceded by the word transnational such as "t-citizenship," "t-actors," "t-organisation," "t-migrants,"and "t-jurisprudence." Academics at public policy conferences will be spouting these words, just as during the last decade they wittered on about multiculturalism and education, law, literature and citizenship. A distinguished anthropologist from the University of Chicago has opined that the USA is in transition from being a "land of immigrants" to "one node in a post-national network of diasporas."
« Fonte believes that the theory of transnationalism will be the next stage of the multicultural ideology and he expects it to be for the first decade of the 21st century what multiculturalism was during the last decade of the 20th century. »
According to Fonte, the arguments about globalization which will dominate public debate during the early part of this century will use transnationalism to shape it. Those who believe in the concept of the nation-state will be castigated as backward looking anti-globalists, and those who espouse transnationalism will be praised as forward-looking globalists. Those who believe in internationalism and free market economics will have to insist that the argument is not between the globalists and the anti-globalists but over the form that Western global engagement should take in the future: transnationalist or internationalist.
Producers/popularisers/practitioners
Mr Fonte defines the social base of global progressivism as a "rising post-national intelligentsia," loosely defined as including three elements; the producers of ideas and concepts, the popularisers of ideas and values and the practitioners who implement ideas and values at all levels. He says that to belong to this group intelligence is not particularly required and could include anyone from a Western government official to a kindergarten teacher pushing the crudest form of multiculturalism. He cites as examples, John O'Sullivan's "... lumpenintelligentsia of teachers, librarians, researchers, small-town-newspaper "liberals," clergymen, and assorted ancillary brainworkers," first posited in his article in the October 15, 2001, issue of National Review.
The leaders in this post-national intelligentsia, according to Fonte, will include law professors at prestigious Western universities, activists in the NGOs, UN and EU bureaucrats and administrators, corporate executives and politicians throughout the West. Fonte cites such luminaries as Anthony Giddens, the "Third Way" theorist who has said already that he is "in favour of pioneering some quasi-utopian trans-national forms of democracy." Others include Martha Nussbaum, the Chicago University Professor of Philosophy, who calls for reinvigorating the concept of "global citizenship" denouncing patriotism as "indistinguishable from jingoism."
In addition, we have the Italian Marxist theorist – a jailed former associate of Italy's Red Brigade – Toni Negri, and Duke University Literature Professor, Michael Hardt – a former student of his – whose best-selling book Empire has been praised by the New York Times as the next big idea. Empire used Marxist concepts such as the "multitudes" (read "the masses") versus the Empire, attacking the power of the global corporations and called for a new form of "global" or transnational democracy.
On the other side he quotes Strobe Talbot – of whom we heard in QL no 115 (see SOCIAL GLOBALIZATION) – and the late Carl Gerstacker, Chairman of Dow Chermical in the 1960s and 1970s, who expressed the libertarian thread of transnationalism when he declared "I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation and of establishing the World Headquarters of the Dow Company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society."
Some kind of inevitability
While some of this may seem diffuse and uncoordinated it should not be forgotten that many of the NGOs spend a great deal of their time trying to bring about transnationalism. These social movements with their ideologies of "global governance" and "transnationalism" imply that there is some kind of inevitability about it all because it is the result of social forces or the movement of history. It isn't. If it happens at all it will be like all the previous movements such as the Bolshevik Revolution, the New Deal, the European Union and the National Socialist Revolution. It will be because of the exercise of political will by elites who mobilised their strengths and conquered all their opponents. Just like "diversity" and "multiculturalism," transnationalism and global governance are not the forces of history but simply ideological tools advocated by the activist elites.
What is being attempted is the achievement by the NGOs of political ends that cannot be achieved by democratic means. It is done by going outside the democratic framework and is exemplified by such issues as the International Criminal Court, the UN Convention on Women's Rights, the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, etc. The latter being particularly pertinent in Canada where we have just seen the Kyoto Treaty rubber stamped by a parliament whose elected Liberal majority feared the political consequences of opposing their discredited leader in his quest for a so-called legacy. In an Ipsos-Reid poll, almost half of Canadians (45%) said that the Government of Canada "should withdraw from the Kyoto protocol and develop a made-in-Canada plan for reducing greenhouse gasses." Essentially the same number (44%) said that Canada should "ratify the Kyoto Protocol," but, one in ten (9%) said they "don't know" what the federal government should do.
Dissent was even greater in the West, but objections by the Western Provinces were completely ignored and cosy deals are alleged to have been cut with industry groups located in heavily Liberal voting provinces. The electorate at large was never consulted at all of course. Perhaps not all that surprising, given that few, if any, of our elected representatives understand the treaty's implications or the economic fallout to be expected from its implementation.
The recent UN Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia in Durban is a perfect example of the NGOs at work. Some fifty of them, including the Mexican-American Legal Defense (sic) and Educational Fund, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, the NAACP, the International Human Rights Law Group and many more, called upon Mary Robinson, then UN Human Rights Commissioner, to hold the USA "accountable for the intractable and persistent problem of discrimination that men and women of color (sic) face at the hands of the US criminal justice system." The result of this exercise in chicanery was the passing of a number of resolutions demanding reparations for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 17th to 19th centuries, ignoring of course the 14 million African slaves who were sent to Islamic lands during that same period. Demands that the USA "publicly acknowledge the breadth and pervasiveness of institutional racism" which "permeates every institution at every level," accompanied calls for a declaration that "racial bias corrupts every stage of the US criminal justice process from suspicion to investigation, arrest, prosecution, trial and sentencing."
Suggesting a 4th dimension
The NGOs denounce free market capitalism as "a fundamentally flawed system" and insist that the US ratify all major UN "human rights" treaties. Although, in 1994, the USA ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) it refused to accept the restriction of certain types of speech and political activity permitted by the First Amendment
For the US to agree to these terms would mean the abandonment of constitutional guarantees of free speech, federalism, and majority rule – all the concepts upon which the US is based. What is interesting is that the language used in almost all UN conventions, such as the Convention on Women's Rights and the International Criminal Court – which ignore the guarantees of the US Constitution – was written by Western NGOs and Americans.
Many of the international law professors and NGOs advocate the elimination of the distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, vigorously opposing assimilation of immigrants into what they see as the "dominant Anglo culture." They attack what they call "archaic notions of sovereignty" and call for the elimination of the differences between the citizens and non-citizens in all federal laws. They propose dropping the hyphenated American in favour of the "ampersand" individual and suggest that those who are say, "Mexican & American" should be allowed to vote in both countries. One can imagine the damage this might do, where large numbers of people living outside their native country could destroy the policies of the government in their country of origin without suffering the consequences.
The consequences of transnational progressivism can be seen vividly in the European Union where they are moving to absorb the component nation states into a supranational post-democratic structure. The resulting denial of the authority of the nation state, as well as the transfer of policymaking authority from the governed and their elected representatives to a professional bureaucracy, is a marked change from the idea of popular sovereignty once present in Europe's democracies. That countries such as those from the former communist bloc raise little fuss about the prospect is perhaps understandable, they see little change; but that the populations of democracies such as those of France and especially England seem to be rushing willingly into this bureaucratic maelstrom is beyond this chronicler's comprehension.
Fonte ends his paper by suggesting that a fourth dimension be added to the conceptual framework of international politics. The three present dimensions are the competition and conflict between and among nation states (and supranational ones like the EU), the competition between civilisations and thirdly, the division (and conflict) between the democratic world and the undemocratic world. Fonte's proposed fourth dimension is the conflict between the forces of liberal democracy and the forces of transnational progressivism. He sees the conflicts and tensions within these dimensions as occurring simultaneously and being affected by each other, believing that they must be incorporated into any understanding of the world in the 21st century.
He concludes that Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" theory – wherein Fukuyama suggested that liberal democracy is the final form of political governance – is wrong.
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