Posted by
Reasonsjester on Thursday, September 03, 2009 10:51:28 PM
The following article is reprinted here in full due to its immense
value in the war against the statists, who are attempting to realize
the disintegration of every traditional American institution in this
nation. It is well-written and authoritative.
A full
understanding of the implications of the content of the following
article separates the foot soldier in the war of ideas from the general.
Read,
digest, inquire, and refer to trustworthy dictionaries or encyclopedias
for any unknown words or ideas. Not comprehending a word or idea from
time to time happens to us all.
After reading the article in
full, which may take some intellectual effort, you may wonder how we
can reverse the insidious and destructive trend of cultural marxism in
America and its attendant vehicles
Gramscianism and
Alinskyite tactics.
But
before we get to the solution, we must recognize the last piece in the
puzzle to understanding the nature of the threat to this nation, which
is quite simply The Federal Reserve System. Read or watch online the
lecture of "The Creature from Jekyll Island" or the documentary "From
Freedom to Fascism." Explore the works of Austrian School economists
like F.A. Hayek, who wrote "The Road to Serfdom," or Ludwig von Mises,
who wrote "Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis," or
Frederic Bastiat, who wrote "The Law," or read a history of American
macro-finance such as Murray Rothbard's "A History of Money and Banking
in the United States," or Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom."
But these works are all about diagnosing the problems. What we need is a root cure. And this comes from one woman: Ayn Rand.
Quite
simply and ultimately the solution to our nation's problems is Ayn
Rand's Objectivism. Rand's is the ONLY philosophy that can reverse the
path we are on. I cannot emphasize this enough.
Some of Rand's
ideas may seem counter-intuitive. Please make sure to read works on her
most controversial ideas, such as "selfishness." She has written an
entire work on this subject entitled, "The Virtue of Selfishness."
Remember,
we have been trained to be unselfish since kindergarten, but a full
appreciation of the self is crucial for rationality. Rationality is not
destructive because it does not imply non-cooperation; it implies
cooperation based on self-interest; this is fine because capitalism is
not a zero-sum economic system, but a sum-gain economic system. Freedom
and capitalism are our only ways out of this mess.
About the Frankfurt School
Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson CDR USN (Ret.)
Copyright August 1999
Who
in America today is at work destroying our traditions, our family
bonds, our religious beginnings, our reinforcing institutions, indeed,
our entire culture? What is it that is changing our American
civilization?
Suppose you were to learn that nearly all of the
observations made in this series of essays 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!
Just such a core group did, indeed, exist. 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 in
this series of essays, 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. It is more commonly known today as
'political correctness.'
'Cultural Marxism' and 'critical
theory' are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who,
in 1923, 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 [1]. 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, Brandeis, 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 [2]. "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, [3] "...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 concept which led to the current fetish for the rewriting of
history, and the vogue for our universities' law, English literature,
and humanities disciplines -- deconstruction.
Critical theory
rejected the ideal of Western Civilization in the age of modern
science, that is, the verification or falsifying [4] 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 Sigmund 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 Totalitarians [5] 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 were the elites of the Boomer generation. They are
the current 'foot soldiers' of the original Frankfurt School gurus. 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, Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm
Reich, and others [6,7]. Its influence is now felt in nearly every
institution in the United States. The elite Boomers, throwbacks to the
dangerous idealist Transcendental generation of the mid-1800s, are the
'agents of change,' who have introduced 'cultural Marxism' into
American life.
William S. Lind relates [8] that 'cultural
Marxism' 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
[9]. 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 that "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 gospel of the Frankfurt
School, resistance to '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 book [10] 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 Reich's
elite Boomer generation. And the mantra for these New Age 'foot
soldiers' of the Frankfurt School prophets, would be 'have the courage
to change [11].'
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,' 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 a 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 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.
As an 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 [12]. 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, who [13]
"...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 takmen 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
observed [14] 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.
It is of 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 during
World War II and thereafter by Kurt Lewin [15] and his proteges. One of
them, Abraham Maslow, was a member of the Frankfurt school and the
author [16] of 'The Art of Facilitation' which is a manual used during
such 'sensitivity' training. Thereby teachers were indoctrinated not to
teach but to 'facilitate.' This manual describes the techniques
developed by Kurt Lewin and others to change a person's world view via
participation in small-group encounter sessions. Teachers were to
become amateur group therapists. The classroom became the center of
self-examination, therapeutic circles where children (and later on,
military [17] personnel) talked about their own subjective feelings.
This technique was designed to convince children they were the sole
authority in their own lives.
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, [18]
"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."
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 liberal [19] "...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 non-authoritarian (utopian) personality, insofar as it was
defined, was posited as a person with a non-dogmatic tolerance for
diversity [20]. This thought is dominant in today's power elite of the
Boomer generation, the New Totalitarians.
One of the basic
tenets of Critical Theory was the necessity to break down the
contemporary family. The Institute scholars preached that [21] "...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 femininity [22] 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.
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.
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 the Anglo-American path [23] taken by Western
Civilization in forming the unique American culture.
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
[24]. 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 dangerous [25] 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.
If we allow this subversion of
American values and interests to continue, we will (in future
generations) lose all that our ancestors suffered and died for. We are
forewarned. A reading of history -- it is all in mainstream historical
accounts -- tells us that we are about to lose the most precious thing
we have -- our individual freedoms.
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Footnotes:
1) Raehn, Raymond V., "The Historical Roots of 'Political Correctness,'" Free Congress Foundation, Number 44, June 1997.
2)
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.
3) Ibid, pp. 81.
4) Ibid, pp. 82.
5) Atkinson, Gerald L., "The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America's Future," Atkinson Associates Press, 1996.
6)
Jay, Martin, "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt
School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950," University of
California Press, 1973.
7) Wiggershaus, Rolf, "The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance," The MIT Press, 1994.
8) Lind, William S., "What is 'Political Correctness?," Essays on our Times, Free Congress Foundation, Number 43, March 1997.
9) Ibid.
10) Reich, Charles A., "The Greening of America," Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1995.
11) A phrase commonly heard during the 1992 Presidential campaign.
12) London, Herbert, "Discipline of history under assault," The Washington Times, 26 October 1997.
13) Ibid.
14)
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Panel on 'Academic Reform: Internal Sources,'
National Association of Scholars, NAS Sixth General Conference, 3-5 May
1996.
15) Marrow, Alfred Jay, "The Practical Theorist: The Life and
Work of Kurt Lewin," Teachers College Press, new York, 1977. Kurt Lewin
was a primary figure in the wartime research that was later translated
into the techniques used today in 'sensitivity training.'
16) Raehn, Raymond V., "Critical Theory: A Special Research Report, 1 April 1996.
17)
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."
18) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 172.
19) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 227.
20) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 248.
21) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 135.
22) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 95.
23) Vazsonyi, Balint, "America's Thirty Years War: Who is Winning?," Regnery, 1998.
24) Ibid, Atkinson, Gerald L.
25)
Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "Generations: The History of America's
Future -- 1584 to 2069," pp. 382, William Morrow & Company, 1991.
"We can foresee a full range of possible outcomes, from stirring
achievement to apocalyptic tragedy...Boomers can best serve
civilization by restraining themselves (or by letting themselves be
restrained by others) until their twilight years, when their spiritual
energy would find expression not in midlife leadership [for which they
are not equipped], but in elder stewardship."