Others have already chronicled this so well that I am largely just
going to assemble quotations here. For some of you, this will be
review. For the rest of you, this is a necessary foundation. It took
me years of digging through books and blogs and websites before I
found out about this.
Most Americans look back on the 1950s as a good time. Our homes
were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock
their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their
problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls.
Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their
time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and
helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in
two–parent households, and the mother was there to meet the
child when he came home from school. Entertainment was something the
whole family could enjoy.
What happened?
If a man from America of the 1950s were suddenly introduced into
America in the 2000s, he would hardly recognize it as the same
country. He would be in immediate danger of getting mugged, carjacked
or worse, because he would not have learned to live in constant fear.
He would not know that he shouldn’t go into certain parts of
the city, that his car must not only be locked but equipped with an
alarm, that he dare not go to sleep at night without locking the
windows and bolting the doors – and setting the electronic
security system.
If he brought his family with him, he and his wife would probably
cheerfully pack their children off to the nearest public school. When
the children came home in the afternoon and told them they had to go
through a metal detector to get in the building, had been given some
funny white powder by another kid and learned that homosexuality is
normal and good, the parents would be uncomprehending.
What
is “Political Correctness”? by William S. Lind
This, by the way, was brilliantly dramatized in the delightful
movie Blast From The
Past. A man who has been hiding in a bomb shelter since 1962
emerges, looks around 1997 Los Angeles, and promptly concludes that
what he sees is the result of nuclear devastation.
Mr. Lind answers his own question:
Cultural Marxism began not in the 1960s but in 1919, immediately
after World War I. Marxist theory had predicted that in the event of
a big European war, the working class all over Europe would rise up
to overthrow capitalism and create communism. But when war came in
1914, that did not happen. When it finally did happen in Russia in
1917, workers in other European countries did not support it. What
had gone wrong?
Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and
Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: Western culture and
the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true,
Marxist class interest that Communism was impossible in the West
until both could be destroyed. In 1919, Lukacs asked, “Who will
save us from Western civilization?” That same year, when he
became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela
Kun government in Hungary, one of Lukacs’s first acts was to
introduce sex education into Hungary’s public schools. He knew
that if he could destroy the West’s traditional sexual morals,
he would have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture
itself.
In 1923, inspired in part by Lukacs, a group of German Marxists
established a think tank at Frankfurt University in Germany called
the Institute for Social Research. This institute, soon known simply
as the Frankfurt School, would become the creator of cultural
Marxism.
To translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the
members of the Frankfurt School – – Max Horkheimer, Theodor
Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, to name the
most important – – had to contradict Marx on several points.
They argued that culture was not just part of what Marx had called
society’s “superstructure,” but an independent and
very important variable. They also said that the working class would
not lead a Marxist revolution, because it was becoming part of the
middle class, the hated bourgeoisie.
Who would? In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question: a
coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals.
What
is Cultural Marxism? By William S. Lind
In 1926, an Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci ended up in
Mussolini’s prison after a return from Russia. While there, he
wrote his “prison notebooks” and they laid out a plan for
destroying Western faith and culture. His plans included ways to
undermine and discourage Westerners through the intentional collapse
of the existing social structure from within.
Gramsci advocated not only Marxist class warfare, which was
economically focused, but also social and cultural warfare at the
same time. His theories and the “slow march through the
culture” (or institutions) which he envisioned to destroy the
West are enshrined in current American social policy. His theories
surrounding “hegemony” and a “counter-hegemony”
were designed to destroy Western social structure and overthrow the
“West” from within.
Hegemony, as defined by Gramsci is that widely accepted system of
values, morals, ethics, and social structure which holds a society
together and creates a cohesive people. Western social structures
holding society together (i.e. “the hegemony”) include:
authority, morality, sexual restraint, monogamous marriage, personal
responsibility, patriotism, national unity, community, tradition,
heredity, education, conservatism, language, Christianity, law, and
truth. His theory called for media and communications to slowly
co-opt the people with the “counter-hegemony” propaganda
message.
Statement
of Bill Wood, Charlotte, North Carolina
The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to
a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not
surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And
its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was
reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And
the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though
many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from
Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about
every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward
American society. There is another very important transition when the
war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including
Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor
to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to
Hollywood.
These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too
much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the
student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by
resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels
needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there
and say, “Hell no we won’t go,” they had to have
some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were
interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical,
economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s
were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our
country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse
remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to
Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is
appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there –
when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls
the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who
remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He
saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make
it the theory of the New Left in the United States.
The Origins
of Political Correctness by Bill Lind
Let me pause to draw some attention to this sentence from the
above: “The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they
are also, to a man, Jewish.” This is not, in fact, correct.
Gramsci was an Italian Catholic; indeed, the
Vatican claims that he had a deathbed conversion. As far as I
have been able to determine, Felix Weil and Jürgen Habermas were
not Jewish (correct me if I am wrong). And there are a few other,
lesser-known Frankfurt School members who were not. However, most of
them were, which of course just lends support to those who believe
that we Jews are in a worldwide conspiracy to destroy/dominate/make
money off everyone else. (I would like to know why I haven’t
been invited to join.)
My own theory about why so many of these eggheaded scoundrels were
Jewish is that first, we tend to be intellectual, so where goyische
scoundrels rob banks or beat their wives and Islamic scoundrels blow
up buildings, our scoundrels come up with deranged theories (see:
Marx, Freud). Second, they were all from secular, assimilated
families. Barred from their own heritage and not entirely belonging
to the larger society in which they were moving, they had to feel
alienated, and they struck out in the only way that they could see.
On the other end of the scale, cultural Marxists who read
conservative articles exposing the well documented activities of the
Frankfurt School do not hesitate to ignore all of the facts involved
except for the fact that most of them were Jewish and accuse these
conservatives of antisemitism for daring to criticize Jewish
Marxists. In doing this, they are only following Communist Party
procedure as set out by the Moscow Central Committee in 1943:
“Members and front organizations must continually embarrass,
discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too
irritating, label them as fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic…The
association will, after enough repetition, become ‘fact’
in the public mind.”
Since nearly all of the Frankfurt School denizens were German,
except for a Hungarian and a couple of Italians, those of us who
denounce it could just as easily be labelled “anti-German”
– which, by the way, I am not. However, I am reminded that in
his popular book The Closing of the American Mind, Jewish
author Allan Bloom discusses several of these same cultural Marxists,
without using the phrase “Frankfurt School”, and then
remarks, “My insistence on the Germanness of all this is
intended not as a know-nothing response to foreign influence, the
search for a German intellectual under every bed, but to heighten
awareness of where we must look if we are to understand what we are
saying and thinking, for we are in danger of forgetting.”
Today’s disintegration of the family can be laid entirely at
the door of the Frankfurt School. Lenin said, “Destroy the
family and you destroy society.” His followers have proven him
right:
“Gramsci hated marriage and the family, the very founding
blocks of a civilized society. To him, marriage was a plot, a
conspiracy… to perpetuate an evil system that oppressed women
and children. It was a dangerous institution, characterized by
violence and exploitation, the forerunner of fascism and tyranny.
Patriarchy served as the main target of the cultural Marxists. They
strove to feminize the family with legions of single and homosexual
mothers and ‘fathers’ who would serve to weaken the
structure of civilized society.”
…[A]nother cultural Marxist (George Lukacs) brought the
Gramscian strategy to the schools… As deputy commissioner in
Hungary… his first task was to put radical sex education in
the schools… it was the best way to destroy traditional sexual
morality, and weaken the family. Hungarian children learned…
free love, sexual intercourse, and the archaic nature of middle-class
family codes, the obsolete nature of monogamy, and the irrelevance of
organized religion which deprived man of pleasure. Children were
urged to deride and ignore… parental authority, and precepts
of traditional morality. If this sounds familiar, it is because this
is what is happening in our public… schools.
…Under the rubric of ‘diversity,’ its hidden
goal is to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all
Americans. The cultural Marxists, often teachers, university
professors and administrators, TV producers, newspaper editor and the
like, serve as gatekeepers by keeping all traditional and positive
ideas, especially religious ideas, out of the public marketplace.
Herbert Marcuse was largely responsible for bringing cultural
Marxism to the United States… He believed that all taboos,
especially sexual ones, should be relaxed. “Make love, not
war!” was his battle cry that echoed through ivy-covered
college campuses all over America. His methodology for rebellion
included the deconstruction of the language, the infamous “what
does ‘is’ mean?” which fostered the destruction of
the culture. By confusing and obliterating word meanings, he helped
cause a breakdown in the social conformity of the nation, especially
among the… young of America…
Many people would be shocked to learn that much of the current
“family law” system we have today, which is at the heart
of so much of our modern social upheaval and America’s “welfare
state,” was born in the Soviet Union. Still more shocking would
be the revelation that when the Soviet Union discovered its system
was a disastrous failure, it instituted serious reforms in the early
1940’s to try to restore the family and the country. The
Soviets made these changes when fatherlessness (which included
children from divorced fathers) reached around 7 million children and
their social welfare structure (day cares, kindergartens, state
children’s facilities, etc.) was overburdened….
“Family law” is one of the key tools of the
“counter-hegemony” which is used to advance the social
welfare state through the promotion of the social structural collapse
of America. The early Soviet system focused on personal happiness and
self-centered fulfillment with its roots in class warfare. When it
was determined that this type of class warfare directed at the family
was a complete failure, the Soviets worked quickly to restore the
traditional nuclear family in the 1940’s. Shortly after this,
the NAWL (National Association of Women Lawyers) began their push for
adopting these failed Soviet policies in America.
Statement
of Bill Wood, Charlotte, North Carolina
Communist ACLU founder William Z. Foster says this: “To free
the woman from the enslavement of the perpetual care of her children
is also a major object of Socialism. To this end in the Soviet Union
there is being developed the most elaborate system of kindergartens
and playgrounds in the world . . . .”
Here, Foster really spills the frijoles. Notice that for a mother
to take care of her own children is “enslavement.”
Apparently it is not enslavement for someone else – a different
mother – to take care of them, while their own mother works as
a machinist.
THE COMMUNIST PLAN FOR AMERICAN WOMEN by Alan Stang
Conservative Americans fancy that socialism has been largely
defeated or that its greatest remaining threat lies in taxation and
spending. They forget that the dream of leftist revolutionaries for
centuries has been not only to equalize wealth and social status, but
to eliminate all distinctions among the citizens of their ideal
republic. All of these revolutionaries from Marx on down have
targeted the family for destruction.
Undemocratic Institution
The family is a highly undemocratic institution. The nuclear
family consists of one man and one woman, a highly specific and
unliberated straitjacket of a social structure. They have loyalty to
one another greater than that to society at large and also dedication
to their own children, over whom they have authority—and any
private authority is a rival to the government’s. To a true
democrat, this preference for one’s spouse and authority over
one’s children violates the principle of equality, which
proclaims that we must treat everyone exactly the same. For the
modern democratic statist, these loyalties and authorities weaken his
own power and inhibit the ongoing concentration of all authority in
one central government.
Children of the State by Joseph A. D’Agostino
And there was one more area that Marxists had to attack for their
plan to work. I have been contending for years that the ugliness of
the modern world is not just a fashion or an accident, but that it
has a fundamental connection to the collapse of morality and of our
legal system. Hardly anyone agrees with me, but I stand by my
assertions: the ugly fonts, advertisements, clothes, music, cars and
houses go hand in hand with no-fault divorce, man-hating feminism,
our current useless educational system, welfare, the crime rate, and
our inability to deal with terrorism. The two feed upon each other.
Get rid of one and the other will collapse.
Guess what? I was right about that too.
Congressman George
Dondero said, “Modern art is Communistic because it is
distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful
country…. It is therefore opposed to our government, and those
who create and promote it are our enemies.” I wouldn’t
confine it it “our beautiful country” or “our
government” – it does not glorify any beautiful
country and it opposes all non-communist governments –
but other than that, he was quite right.
On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist
Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote
non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would
become arid and ugly.
Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets,
following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci,
took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s
intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will
to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The
explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling
class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by
Marxism-Leninism.
The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they
pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements”
of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example,
Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and
the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here.)
This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western
popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the
products of Hollywood.
Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer
think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a
significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even
for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was
a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas
would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people —
at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst
instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American
way of life….
Adorno, a trained musician, wrote The Philosophy of Modern Music,
in which he, in essence, polemicizes against beauty itself —
because it has become part of the ideology of advanced capitalist
society and the false consciousness that contributes to domination by
prettifying it. Avant-garde art and music preserve the truth by
capturing the reality of human suffering. Hence:
“What radical music perceives is the untransfigured
suffering of man… The seismographic registration of traumatic
shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of
music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is
polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock
resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other
towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes
to freeze in her tracks… Modern music sees absolute oblivion
as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the
shipwrecked.”
This view of modern art as producing truth only through the
negation of traditional aesthetic form and traditional norms of
beauty because they have become ideological is characteristic of
Adorno and of the Frankfurt School generally. It has been criticized
by those who do not share its conception of modern society as a false
totality that renders obsolete traditional conceptions and images of
beauty and harmony.
Wikipedia
article on the Frankfurt School
Here are a few more links for those who wish to read further:
Political Correctness — The Revenge of Marxismby Baron Bodissey
Why There Is A Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America
by John Fonte
Cultural Marxism By Linda Kimball
The Origins of Political Correctness by Bill Lind
The Four Horsemen of the Frankfort SchoolBy Charles A. Morse
What is the Frankfurt School? By Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson CDR USN (Ret.)
Who
are the real radicals? by Jennifer King
EDIT: I just came across a link I forgot to include in this post:
Why There Is A Culture War
“The Revolution won’t happen with guns, rather it will
happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will
gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their
political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as
we move towards universal egalitarianism.”
~Max Horkheimer
