Political Correctness
The year was 1923. The town, Frankfurt, Germany. The
people, a group of Marxists who had started an "Institute for Social
Research," which came to be known as "The Frankfurt School." Since we
know a bit about Marx, the words "social research" have a sinister ring.
Would we be correct in mistrusting that "feel good" sound? What does one
mean by "social research?" Looking into--prying into human
motivations, desires, goals, frustrations, beliefs, hatreds? To what
purpose? To change, to manipulate, or just to study? It soon became
obvious to the local authorities that the main goal of these "scholars"
was the mixing of Freud with Marx, the use of sex as a tool to tamper
with the psychological development of young minds. If Marx was right,
and society had chained the human animal with its rules and regulations,
then Freud was right in releasing those chains and allowing the libido
to follow its desires and damn the consequences. In fact, part of this
new educational system was devoted to the instruction of just how to
enjoy this new "freedom." The result (to be expected by anybody past the
age of puberty) was the dumbing-down of Prussian education, and the
authorities, who were old enough to understand the pitfalls awaiting
such abandonment, would have none of it. This total, all-out assault on
biological restrictions would have to wait for a "sexual revolution" to
occur across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1960's. A step in that direction
came with the advent of Adolph Hitler, when members of the Frankfurt
Group fled to the United States and were received with open arms by
Columbia University as "Jewish refugees." They were Jewish, but they
were also hard-core Marxists dedicated to the destruction of Western
culture and their method would be the infiltration of American education
as the best way to ruin it.
Their method would be simple. The first item, the
liberation of the libido into that never-never land called Instant
Gratification, had already proved effective. Communist leadership had
long advocated complete "libertinism and promiscuity" to replace
marriage and family. As early as 1919 the Soviets issued a decree that
women were the property of the state, and one month after delivery,
"children will be placed in an institution entrusted with their care and
education." Thus the State became the Great Nanny. Now the second phase
of the agenda, the assault on individualism, would be easy. Listen to W.
Cleon Skousen, in The Naked Communist:
"There is no such thing as a woman being violated by a
man; he who says that a violation is wrong denies the October Communist Revolution. To defend a violated woman is to reveal
oneself as a bourgeois and a partisan of
private property."
I wonder if Patricia Ireland of NOW (National
Organization of Women) knows that the revered idea of "sexual equality"
is really a Communist undertow dragging everybody--male and female--into
a rip tide that will crush us all into an equality, to be sure, but an
equality of zero, without value or consequence. If defending a violated
woman brands one as "a partisan of private property," we are in a world
where people have become things. It is amusing to watch the communists
of the 1930's rail against the authoritarian regime of the Nazis and
then transfer this animosity to "the authoritarian family" (as a frontal
attack against parental authority) when it would be difficult to find,
in any level of class or culture, people more "authoritarian" than the
communists themselves. (Aye, but it’s impossible to see ourselves as
others see us, a poet once wrote.)
Once a person is a thing, it is easy to further reduce
its individualism by making it part of a group. "Group therapy" will now
have an added purpose: the old Roman military custom of Divide and
Conquer. Separate people according to race, religion, inclination,
politics, or gender, and fool them with words like "tolerance" and "diversity" and "multiculturalism." If they
don’t comply control them with something as old as Original Sin. Make
them feel guilty.
Thus we have arrived at the true method behind cultural
Marxism: Political Correctness. An elusive, silent, invisible Big
Brother lurking in the background of our every move, our every thought.
A cultural policeman with the threat of a guillotine in his eye, his
every look. Even worse, he is everywhere. Like an evil leprechaun
he has invaded every body of every person we know. We recognize his
presence instantly, from his effect on the people around us. To
understand what I mean, try criticizing the Israeli mistreatment of
Palestinians at a bar mitzvah. Dead silence. You are intimidated. You
have exhibited Anti-Semitism. You exude a socio-religious moral
B.O. that brands you as intolerant, just when you thought you
were objecting to intolerance! You have said something not exactly de
rigueur. Suddenly the date is 1984, and George Orwell’s Thought
Police are dictating, through "doublethink," your every move. You are in
an open, hostile sea. Your friends have become sharks, swirling around
you, their jaws open, and they mean business. How did all this come to
be?
You soon learn that Political Correctness, the splendid
stepchild of economic Marxism, stubbornly retains the old battle cries
against the ownership of property in the form of class warfare ("Tax
cuts for the rich!"). But something more significant has happened. With
cultural Marxism the war has turned inward, into our psyches, into our
souls. Old-time Marxists are still in a state of denial that the
critical center has moved from the pocketbook to the heart. Perhaps this
frustration explains the militant resentment of media-savvy liberals
such as the Reverend Al Sharpton who, like Bill Press on CNN’s
"Crossfire," seem almost trigger-happy in their eagerness for conflict.
If you analyze their angry bluster, you may discover just a hint of
desperation concealing a defensive posture. They don’t want to admit
that the same totalitarian, inhuman agenda of economic Marxism operates
in their efforts to "improve" society. If they were really the
experts they pretend to be they should have anticipated some objection
to their view of Socialist Utopia. People will only tolerate being
treated as things for just so long (or things in a group) before they
wake up.
Even in the early days, economic Marxism was
understandably unpopular with the governments of Europe. In Paris, in
1847, Marx and Engels rashly proclaimed, in their great call-to-arms,
The Communist Manifesto, that "the fall of capitalism and the
victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." This fall and
victory would be accomplished by one thing and one thing only:
REVOLUTIONARY TERROR. Perhaps, carried away as they were by their own
exaggerated, inflated opinion of themselves, they had no idea that their
rantings contained a logical contradiction. If the fall of capitalism
and the victory of the proletariat are indeed "inevitable," then why
would you need terrorism? Evidently the authorities realized the danger
lurking behind such a conundrum. The two geniuses received orders "at
the request of the Prussian government" to leave France. Evidently, they
had not learned their lesson. In May, 1848, they went to Cologne and
began a daily revolutionary paper they called, ironically, "The Organ of
Democracy." When, in November of that year the king of Prussia dissolved
the National Assembly, Marx and his friends called for a tax revolt.
They were put on trial for high treason. Marx was lucky; he was
acquitted by the people he hated so much: a middle-class jury. In May,
1849 he was expelled from Prussian territory. He went back to Paris, but
found himself a persona non grata.
The French government gave him the option of either
leaving France or settling in a small provincial village. He chose the
former, and went to England, where he lived the rest of his life.
Now, with the collapse of communism in Russia and the
shambles that economic Marxism has left wherever it has been tried, you
would think we could at last bury the matter. Not so. Marxism, as we
noted, has just gone underground--or, to be more specific, inward. It
has become more personal because it has invaded not only our daily
lives, but our thoughts--sometimes, even before we think them. Remember
that dead silence at your criticism of Israel? The unspoken message was
clear: you suffer from some hidden, deadly disease. You know neither its
origin nor its cure. To repeat ourselves, in our confusion, we ask
again, "How did this happen?" It has happened by dedicated Marxists
posing as university professors or government officials (elected and
otherwise) taking aim at specific targets and weaving them into a vast
tapestry so cleverly that we no longer recognize them for what they
really are. The ultimate goal is the same, the annihilation of
capitalism, with variations.
The #1 villain used to be Christianity. Now it is any
belief. But, again, with a difference. Now we will REPLACE the belief
with something else. As G.K. Chesterton said, "People who no longer
believe in God will believe anything." Now we can smear elephant dung on
an image of the Virgin Mary and call it "free speech." Now we can bestow
on Communist China "most favored nation status." Are the Chinese
communists most favored because we sent them missile technology to
enable their missiles to hit us with more accuracy? Or as thanks for
allowing us to have such an enormous trade deficit? Now we can destroy
the family by allowing homosexuals to "marry" and receive all the
financial benefits from that clever arrangement. We can educate our
children by providing them with "sex education" in kindergarten and
condoms in junior high (Marx would be pleased). Or, even better still,
if you are a cultural Marxist, will be the chance to prevent the kid
from getting here in the first place--and call it "choice." If you make
the decision soon enough you can cut off his arms and legs and pull him
out of the "mother’s" body or, if you are an abortionist wanting to make
your money an easier way, you can wait until the kid is almost here and,
by turning him around so he comes out feet-first, puncture his skull
with a scissors, spread it apart to accommodate a tube and vacuum the
brains out. Since the skull is still soft, it will collapse and make the
whole operation easier and more profitable, for now you can sell the
body parts. And we think we live in an "advanced" society! There is some
hope, though. If you did that to a dog in this country, you would
go to jail.
But let us not get carried away by our own frustration.
After all, we want to discover, by a systematic examination of the
development of American Marxism, how we got here. And what here
really means. It may be that open sea full of not-so-friendly sharks
that we found ourselves in at the beginning of this discussion.
For cultural Marxism aims at destroying our MOORINGS. No
longer can we depend on a connection with anything remotely resembling
humanity--or safety. We are adrift on an angry surge of power, endless,
unrelenting, with the mad, mindless agenda which is not human, but
cosmic. The method of cultural Marxism is not only to destroy our
moorings, but to eradicate every item that even hints at our old life of
belief, of love, of commitment, of marriage, of family. The weapon,
discovered by the Frankfurt School back in the 30's, is still
ready-at-hand and universal. The word is SEX. Uninhibited, "free" (
i.e., totally-without-consequences) sex. Couple that with "women’s
liberation" and you have the spectacle in Montreal, on "International
Women’s Day," when feminist vandals sacked the city’s Roman Catholic
cathedral by smearing paintings with soiled sanitary napkins and hurling
used condoms at terrified worshippers, in protest at the Church’s
anti-abortion position. Yet nowhere in the Montreal newspaper--except in
a tiny notice at the bottom of one page C9--was the atrocity recognized.
Thus we meet another Tar Baby, the Media. There is certainly an element
of communist hubris in the stances of many TV "reporters" who
pose as cultural popes, completely unaware that the centrifugal forces
of class envy into which they have plunged ("Let’s get the
rich.") might just backfire on their own bloated salaries.
Once you have destroyed belief--or even the memory of a
time when we could believe in anything--you can begin to INVENT. The old
style Marxism had convenient victims, the workers. Now we need to
invent victims--but always in a group, for we are still dedicated to
the death of individualism. Our groups will be women, homosexuals,
"people of color." Our method will be simple. We will begin by causing a
vague feeling of repression, then replace it with a pseudo-solution
which will create an even larger problem. But, you say, we have a
relatively affluent society. Good. We can use affluence as a new weapon.
For the men, we will make them dissatisfied by showing them on every TV
or internet even more affluence. They will feel that they have
somehow fallen short. In grasping after this ring on the Wall Street
merry-go-round, they will get into the largest personal debt ever
recorded in this country. Then they will really be victims. For
the women, their victimization will be easy. They already have a
biologically built-in problem, with child-bearing and child-rearing.
Since any desire is now a right, we will introduce the "right" to
"choose."
We will avoid saying "murder" or the fact that the only
true moment of choice came nine months before the inevitable. Thus the
"women of choice" can become victims of those "pro-lifers"--refusing to
think of themselves as "pro-death." And certainly, in these good
economic times, smaller families make more "sense." With the death of
unwanted children the lust for affluence can know no bounds, can cause
both parents to work to support a "standard" of living--and
increase, ironically, the worry, the insecurity. Add to this the
injection of "affirmative action," to make the whites feel guilty and
the blacks unappreciated. It will all be so easy, because the ground has been plowed and waiting for these new seeds.
The ground has been prepared by that old false hope of
Instant Gratification (remember "free" love?). All we have to do now is
encourage the purchase of anything and everything advertised on TV--new
cars, clothes, cruises, a houseful of toys for our already
psychologically overloaded children. Not to worry, say our leaders. Once
you comrades are dissatisfied enough, we will be ready with our
pseudo-solutions. These will be another
form of weapon: "tolerance," "diversity," "multiculturalism," to imply
that anybody identifying himself as an "American" must be a fossil. The
new wave is international. Boundaries, or any kind, are stupid. We are
in a New World Order. Controls over illegal immigration are
unnecessary, for nothing is illegal, not even perjury by a president. As
for the victims of racism, let’s worship O.J. and call him a victim,
despite the fact that he is a millionaire, a football "hero"-- and glory
in his victory over justice. Let’s admire Jesse Jackson’s slogan "Keep
hope alive," despite our suspicion that he might just be hoping to keep
racism alive--as job security. So many questions.
*~*~*~*~*~*
For these questions Political Correctness offers two
interesting answers. The first is called "Critical Theory," the second
"Deconstruction." Both have to do with literature and language, and the
battleground will be in education, more specifically on college
campuses, for this is where the founders of "The Frankfurt School" found
a home, in the teachers colleges. If you can recruit the
teachers, the students will follow.
As we approach an understanding of Critical Theory, it
would be well to remember that the nickname given to Marx by his teenage
friends was "Destroy."
Even a five-year old knows that the best way to avoid
doing something is to criticize it. If he doesn’t like spinach he can
find all kinds of things wrong with it. If that doesn’t work he can
always spit it out (preferably, if he is determined, in your face).
I think it was Spinoza who said that "It is not things
that bother us but our idea of things." If you can change the way
you see something, you can change the way you think about it. Once you
do that, you can eat the spinach or, when you "grow up" you can even
approve of elephant dung on the Virgin Mary, or dead fetuses being
carved up for sale. Or you can, with haughty disdain, refuse to see
good-or-bad in anything. You can become "amoral," which in this
fin-de-siecle has come to mean "cool." A hundred years ago the
excuse for such disconnection was called "Art for Art’s Sake." In
literature, New Critics prepared the way by finding meaning in texts
without regard to background or facts or even the author’s intent. They
said "the text is everything." With the advent of Critical Theory, that
slogan became "everything is text"--i.e.., everything is up for
grabs, open for investigation, for analyzing in relation to the literary
work. Thus they intentionally forgot (even if they knew) the author’s
biography, loves, hates, or religion. The only relevant item to be
considered was one’s own viewpoint, one’s own prejudices. Thus a
work could be judged from "the woman’s point of view," or "the gay’s
point of view," or "the minority point of view." They were not
interested in finding any intent left there by the author but their own
vehicles of blame--sexism, racism, or "homophobia" if the author
happened to be a white heterosexual male.
Marx was everywhere, although few knew it. Baudelaire
(1821-1867), a contemporary of Marx, unconsciously promoted his theories
as he flaunted "Bohemian freedom." Sounding like a flower child of the
1960's, he wrote poems with a kind of dandyism that was really a cult of
the ego, complete with its own severe laws: to be original, to be
independent of every social tie to family, friends, or nation, and above
all to despise the bourgeois rabble. As 1900 loomed on the
horizon, the effort to chuck the past became a passion. Everything was
"New." Oscar Wilde wrote on "The New Remorse." There was a New Spirit,
New Humor, New Realism, New Hedonism, New Drama, New Woman, and (does
this sound familiar?) The New Age. Most called themselves "symbolists,"
with an emphasis not on the symbols of things but on the opposite--a
conviction that the objective world is not the true reality, but merely
a reflection--and a transient reflection, at that--to be caught in the
present moment, on the fly, NOW. It was no coincidence, as we shall see
in a moment, that these same decades of the 1870's and 1880's saw the
great flourishing of Impressionism in painting. The Norton Anthology
of English Literature sums up the movement succinctly: "The doctrine
of ‘art for art’s sake’...really meant art for the sake of the
sensations and experience it could induce, with no reference to any
standard of morality or utility." Edmund Wilson, in Axel’s Castle,
finds something "pathetic-ironic, worldly-aesthetic" in the moods at the
end of the nineteenth century. As the new century moved through its
first decade, symbolism emerged from its cocoon of implied emotions into
the audacious new efforts of the "Imagists" (1909-1917), who admitted
bluntly that an image need not be associated with meaning. Poetry for
them was designed to suggest, not to state an idea. And sometimes their
suggestions were vague, at best. Try reading Ezra Pound. The Imagists
have been called "the cult of unintelligibility."
Falling somewhere between symbolism and the imagists was
a St. Louis-born American who, when he moved to England, became more
British than the Brits. Perhaps there is no writer better qualified to
represent a kind of gentleman’s club, watered-down intellectualized
Marxism at the beginning of the twentieth century than T.S. Eliot. The
dandyism of Baudelaire’s bohemians lives beneath all this posing and
prancing, this trailing of arcane quotations (which only the initiated
Oxford types would know), much as an art nouveau woman with
bobbed hair and a tight-fitting hat (with a little brim) might pull
after her a feathered boa as she enters a room. There is, too, more than
a hint of the old Marxian despair, minus its crusading energy, to be
found in Eliot’s poetry. Now we find a weary, civilized man with a
studied languor, a weary sophistication, measuring out, as J. Alfred
Prufrock does in his "Love Song," his life with coffee spoons. "I should
have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent
seas," Eliot cries out in rejection to the old Victorian, bourgeois
morality. But I find something just a bit phony in all this histrionic
debauchery. It tries a bit too hard to avoid, to use Eliot’s phrase in
Tradition and the Individual Talent, "any semi-ethical criterion
of ‘sublimity.’" The World in Literature says of Eliot’s poetry
that it contains "more than a little obscurantism." As for the author,
he "showed every symptom of being an intellectual snob, supercilious and
recondite." Eliot himself, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"
seemed to agree:
"Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -- Almost, at times, the
Fool."
As impatient as we have been with all this very-proper
despair, when we move into the "surrealism" spawned in France between
the two world wars we will miss T.S. Eliot at high tea. For we will meet
a combination of Dadaism (from "da-da" baby talk) and Freud. We must
deal now with "the uncontrolled fantasies and associations of the mind
which represent a higher reality (?) than the deliberately manipulated world of practical life"--to quote
an insufferably esoteric, hoity-toity entry in The Reader’s Companion
to World Literature (the italics and question mark are mine).
How does the "modern critic" know that uncontrolled fantasies represent
a "higher reality?" Or that everyday life is so degraded that it is
merely something manipulated? Evidently, to be acceptable to the
academic requirements of "modern poetry" we must enter a dream world of
free association and automatic writing and delight in the illogical and
the inexplicable. We must tolerate statements such as "elephants are
contagious." We have arrived, with that "literary cubist," Gertrude
Stein, beyond language. It is time to move to art.
As we have noted, toward the end of Marx’s century, in
the 1870's and 1880's, real things became only the transient impression
of things, as if a gauzy half-light had been thrown over the scene. It
was all very pleasant, all very South-of-France, with girls under
parasols strolling through poppies, and a blue glimpse of the
Mediterranean through the trees. But even in the "Age of Impressionism,"
among Monet’s water lilies, there were signs of a harsher reality, an
undercurrent of despair on the faces of Dega’s absinthe drinkers and
Manet’s isolated waitress at the bar of the Folies-Bergere. As we move
closer to the end of the century the artists become preoccupied with a
discontent bordering on decadence, hinting at a decline, even a decay,
of hope. There is something joyless and oppressive in Toulouse-Lautrec’s
"Moulin Rouge (1892). If these are party-goers, excuse me. When the
Norwegian Edvard Munch paints "The Scream" in 1893 we experience a
premonition of totalitarian terrorism.
But this was only the beginning. At least with Munch and
even Picasso, whose women seem to have suffered the slippage of tectonic
plates, people were still recognizable. Dali’s drooling watches and
endless deserts were, after all, watches and deserts. But it would not
be long before artists like Kandinsky and Pollock , by eliminating all
resemblance to the physical world, would destroy the perspective that
had anchored art to reality since the Renaissance. Now the artist can
attack his canvas. He can even roll on it nude! Everything is
surface--blobs of color, criss-crossing lines. As the twentieth century
moved on, we suffered through cubism (distortion of an object via
dislocation of its parts, or superimposition of different views),
surrealism (free from reason or any aesthetic or moral purpose), and
into "abstract expressionism" (non-specific content). We have finally
discovered ourselves in the rarified air of the "mind" of the artist. We
are now, as we did with the "Imagist" poets, witnessing another "cult of
unintelligibility." It would be but a step to the second effort of
Political Correctness, the "Deconstruction" of language.
Here, I think, we don’t even need to seek a definition.
In America, from the very beginning of the Clinton administration, the
program has been clear. Take a word. Give it a non-meaning, and
voila! you have an issue. "Reform" the health-care system really
meant "commandeer, dictate,"and all the old Marxist intentions, hiding
behind the illusion of words, begin to dig deeper into the national
psyche until we no longer recognize a real problem when we see one. The
"Growing CRISIS in Health Care" became a battle cry when no war had been
declared---indeed, when THERE WAS NO CRISIS. Christian Josi, in
his Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Every American Should Know,
quotes an article in Parade concerning "Hillarycare" in 1993:
"Surveys over the course of a ten-year period report a stable 84% to 88%
of respondents expressing satisfaction with the quality of care received
from doctors...." Furthermore, nearly three-fourths of all Americans
reported that they were "very satisfied" with the availability of
health care. Suddenly, once the Political Correctness campaign from the
White House cranked up, 60 to 70 percent now believed the system was
failing and needed reform. As for health insurance, 64 percent of
Americans were under the age of 40, and less likely to need it. First
Lady Hillary Clinton was put in charge. She held secret meetings for
five months. Even the names of her task force were kept secret. No
doctors were invited--a strange omission, given the circumstances, but
understandable if, as alleged, the fear of leaks made the whole scene
something out of Jekyll Island. Why this fear of leaks? Did they have
something momentous to hide? After all, we thought we were dealing with
health care, not the hidden wealth of nations. An inkling of an answer
surfaced when we learned that the real task force organizer was not
Hillary but her husband’s Marx-indoctrinated Oxford friend, Ira
Magaziner. As Christian Josi points out, Magaziner was the self-anointed
"expert" for everything, from transforming Brown University into a
politically correct opinion mill to telling GE how to make
refrigerators. In Josi’s words, he was "an upper-management klutz with a
spotless record for breaking things that were fixed." But who would
know? Her husband the President "shrewdly described Hillarycare as
consisting of a consortium of ‘managed competition’ programs." If it
sounded like a business corporation, so did the mechanics of the
venture.
The primary doctor would be called a "gatekeeper" with
an allotted amount of money that could be spent on each patient. Only
the gatekeeper could decide whether a patient would be allowed to
see a specialist, or get an x-ray. Any funds left over from a patient’s
account would contain the "gatekeeper’s" kickback at the end of the
year. He would hold the gates, all right, but they would be protecting
the doctors’ bank accounts--and his own cut of the profits, not the
patient’s health--as the primary consideration. Hillarycare was unveiled
in September of 1993, eight months after her husband’s inauguration,
despite the warnings of eminent economists that it would cause the
largest tax in American history. Hillary was not deterred. In fact, she
became a Marxian Joan of Arc, waving the banner of class warfare,
attacking the insurance companies and doctors for greed, and the
pharmaceutical companies for heartlessly protecting their ill-deserved,
obscene profits. Not realizing--or not caring--that the high prices of
drugs, hospital beds and doctors’ visits were caused not by the medical
profession but by the government, by the cost ceilings created by
Medicare. If a procedure has a "benefit" of a thousand dollars, the cost
will naturally float to that level. As Walter
E. Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University, said
of teenage pregnancies in the welfare system: "I don’t know why the
American public should be surprised. Whenever the government subsidizes
something, it always gets more of it." Each of us has a horror to story
to tell of an overcharged visit to an emergency room or an unnecessary
procedure costing thousands of dollars. (My own husband was charged $72
for the removal of one eyelash.) With these experiences generating
doubt--if not resentment against the freebies, it is not surprising that
Hillary’s medical revolution met with less than enthusiasm. For once,
the American populace was not fooled: only 15% thought they would be
better off , and this government straitjacket was put back in the
socialistic junkyard where it belonged, with the other totalitarian
daydreams.
But if the fear-driven "crisis" and the feel-good
"managed" care misfired, the White House had other ammunition. The first
of these is the fact that the American population, from the socialist
days of FDR, have been mesmerized and put to sleep by the soothing
sounds of "I’ll-take-care-of-you" promises. These are cleverly implicit,
though never quite clear enough to be fully understood, in phrases like
"Social Security," "Medicare," and "Head Start."
Underneath all this wordy window-dressing is the same old ideology of
economic Marxism in "PC" clothing--radical egalitarianism enforced by
the power of the state. Americans will get used to it, as they have
accepted the unconstitutional IRS--a government within a government,
with its own judicial system and operating rules that resist any sane
interpretation. Soften your proletariat with promises, deductions or
"targeted" tax breaks, then control them by penalties--or even
prison--if they deviate. Encourage them to jump into thirty-year
mortgages, thinking they have an asset instead of a liability with a
stranglehold on their future. Mix fear of death or bankruptcy with
sticky-sweet pseudo-solutions and unattainable ideals that are a sure
setup for psychological or financial disaster, or worse. Follow Marx’s
lead by finding victims and beating the drum for racism, women’s rights,
or gay rights, and when the blacks start entering the middle class and
the women start finding better jobs and the gays get more "rights" than
the ordinary citizen, find another victim, someone essentially and
intrinsically helpless, and fire away. And, of course, these victims
exist--all around us. The CHILDREN. Children without health insurance,
with poverty, with parents or without. Unlike the aborted babies, keep
these alive, so the poverty pimps can stay in business. Use the word
"children" like a mantra, over and over, until they become icons, not
unlike the little square symbols in a computer "menu," until they become
an "issue."
Remember we are exploring the method used by Political
Correctness to destroy language. "Welfare" is one of those feel-good
words. With the implication of "Soak the rich" or "Let Uncle Sam take
care of you" the word soon loses meaning.
We only have to read a little history. Charles Adams, in
his excellent book, Those Dirty Rotten Taxes, remembers the
lessons the rulers of Rome learned when they gave free food and
entertainment to Romans who chose not to work. Adams writes:
At first, those who qualified numbered about 200,000,
and the costs were paid for by the emperor and
Roman and provincial taxpayers.
Once word got out, the ranks almost doubled as peasant
farmers came to Rome, gave up their farming
duties, and joined the rabble.
When Julius Caesar came to rule, he cut the number
substantially through an ingenious device. He
shipped thousands of the freeloaders to the
provinces, where they would have to work--where there was no free lunch. But no emperor could ever get out from
under this costly government handout. It
contributed to the fiscal troubles of Rome in
the centuries to follow, playing no small role in Rome’s prolonged inflation, heavy taxes, decline, and eventual
collapse.
Thus the government of Rome was caught in its own trap.
It had created a plantation that turned out to be a Tar Baby. Oh when,
oh when will we ever learn from history?
Stupidity often starts with honest good intentions. I
fully believe that the Great Give-Away Welfare State (the ultimate
"state" of the United States?) had its origins in the old chivalrous
Christian tradition of noblesse oblige, the idea that the "haves"
have an obligation to care for those less fortunate. The
knight in armor giving his cloak to the beggar. Only now it is the
beggar (the taxpayer) giving his cloak (and much more) to the fatcat
politicians. And, to move from this absurdity to a true anachronism,
witness the blame game of affluent blacks demanding compensation for
slavery! Capitalism has become the Great Grab Bag for soothing the sins
of the world--even the sins of our ancestors. Politicians constantly
talk about "a level playing field." What do they mean? Communism? Or is
this just another "feel good" phrase to avoid the basic fact of
capitalism--that everybody wants to get rich! I can still remember that
old black man I met once in New Orleans who scratched his gray head,
bent over and looked at me with a grin. "Ain’t no po’ man evah give me a
job!"
Such wisdom is rare--almost, in this year 2000,
prehistoric. Compare that honesty with the recent charade by a president
who, in an attempt to avoid the conviction of perjury, rested his whole
defense on the meaning of "is." How clever, how absolutely
intellectually superior to the rest of us this Marxist trick has lifted
Mr. Clinton above the groveling crowd! If we try to understand we find
ourselves in a web of deceit. If we try to escape we find ourselves
stuck in a maze of irrational muck--a Beltway Tar Baby. If we try to
think we will discover that we have lost our minds. But it serves us
right. We have allowed ourselves to be thought of as nothing but
gullible TV-saturated raw material for the creation of a political
agenda passed off as pious charity--Marxism pretending magnanimity. And
now we have Vice-President Gore trying to explain his ignorance about a
fund-raiser in a Buddhist temple by echoing his President: "It all
depends on what you mean by ‘raise.’" Am I being too "mean-spirited?"
Before we condemn such criticism to that Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, we
need to examine the beginnings of "PC," how it originated, what it hoped
to do, and how it hoped to do it.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Like a vampire needing blood to stay alive, Marxism
needs revolutions. The French Revolution of 1789 inspired Marx--or
perhaps evoked a need in him to satisfy that revenge he spoke of in his
Satanic teenage poetry. Yet as hungry as he was for destruction, he was
also a pragmatist, cautious enough to realize that his crusade for
uplifting humanity would need idealistic followers. He could inspire
them with explosive tirades in radical journals, wielding his pen like a
sword, while he spent most of his life in London, safely out of harm’s
way, gulping his whiskey. Marx died in 1883. One wonders what would have
happened to his theories if the Bolsheviks hadn’t conquered the
imagination of Russia in 1917. Optimism for communism spread like
wildfire across Europe that next year, when World War I ended. In Berlin
there was a "Spartacus" uprising. In Bavaria Kurt Eisner created a
"Soviet," and in Hungary a "communist republic" (an oxymoron?) was
established by Bela Kun in 1919, the year Trotsky’s Red Army invaded
Poland. Marx had been dead only twenty-six years. Everything he had
preached and worked for seemed about to happen.
Europe was engulfed in a mad dream of egalitarianism
which would, its champions hoped, end in anarchy and nihilism. Then,
when Trotsky’s army was defeated by Polish forces at the battle of
Vistula in 1920, the revolutionaries found themselves in a dilemma. The
workers, who were supposed to have answered the call as front line
troops, suddenly realized that the promised benefits from all this
intellectual talk of social revolution was so much hogwash. They went
back to work, where the bread was. And the intellectuals went
underground, onto a cultural battlefield which would develop, through
the Frankfurt School and its followers, into Political Correctness.
The year Marx died was the year that Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche, the future philosophic hero of the Nazis, wrote the first
part of Also Sprach Zarathustra, with its pulsing, Wagnerian
rhythms of destruction, echoing the Twilight of the Gods. Although the
influence of Marxism on Nietzsche has received little attention, it
would be almost unavoidable for a university, such as the one at Basle
where Nietzsche taught, not to have its Marxist advocates, given the
Bolshevik upheaval and the unfavorable reactions to democracy (and in
Nietzsche’s case, to Christianity) after World War I. Speaking through
Zarathustra, Nietzsche urges men to "Live dangerously. Erect your cities
beside Vesuvius. Send out your ships to unexplored seas. Live in a state
of war." Encouraged by Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea,
this timid academic (who was delighted the day a horse threw him, ending
his career in the cavalry) cried out for a "Will to War, a Will to
Power, a Will to Over-power!" Democracy for Nietzsche meant drift. He
admired Russia, calling it the "blond beast of Europe," for it was
blessed with a government without "parliamentary imbecility." Out of the
vapors of his deranged genius (he died in an asylum) rose the idea of
"Superman," a new breed of humanity which would aspire to more cruelty,
more evil, through the most important will of all, the Will to Power.
When you meet the pups from Marx’s kennel, who would fan out from the
Frankfurt School into the United States, it is not too fanciful to
recognize a similar, driven will-to-conquer in operation.
The names of the Frankfurt School are barely known, even
by those principals and school board members who develop curriculums and
follow the dictates of the Great-Schoolmarm-in-the-Sky, the Department
of Education in Washington, D.C., where, if their names are not known,
their policies and goals have become the New Marxist Bible. These
political "educators" keep Marx alive through an unspoken, cleverly
concealed agenda. It seems incredible that academic political
"scientists" and cultural historians have been so completely fooled. A
book review of Francis Wheen’s Karl Marx: A Life in a recent
scholarly quarterly treats him as a harmless relic, a closet eccentric
whose efforts misfired and are now relegated to the tomb:
"Wheen’s Karl Marx is neither the laboring man’s messiah
who founded the revolutionary workers’
movement nor the satanic force who unleashed
the horrors of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Having been
stripped of this baggage by the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the fall of all but a few die-hard communist
parties, Marx is now neither prophet nor
threat. What is left? A peculiar, frustrated, and generally unhappy 19th-century intellectual, whose outer
world was that of a stolid Victorian bourgeois
and whose inner world was defined by ‘paradox, irony, and contradiction.’"
Well, hardly. The fall of the Berlin wall did not bury
Karl Marx, nor did the painful maturing of the "flower children" of the
1960's turn him into an item on a list of dead Victorians. He is alive
and well in every protest against the Ten Commandments or prayer in
school, in every "black studies"(or "women’s studies") program on
college campuses, in every condom handed out in junior high, in every
book read by third graders about "Mommie’s girl friend." When I asked a
seventh-grade neighbor to name his favorite subject, he said "social
studies." When I asked about Thomas Jefferson, he had never heard of
him. Nor Ben Franklin. I asked him what he was reading about that week.
He said "The Ku Klux Klan."
Marx’s followers have done an excellent job. They are to
be congratulated. They, too, are alive and well. They have moved from
Europe through the Frankfurt School into the bookstores and schoolrooms
of America. It won’t take an infusion of extra brain cells to make the
connection between their enthusiastic jihad and their spiritual
commander-in-chief. Recognized as the leading Marxist theorist since
Marx died, Georg Lukacs, the son of a wealthy Hungarian banker and an
agent of the Communist International, published a book called History
and Class Consciousness which called for the destruction of society
"as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the
epoch." According to Raymond V. Raehn, in "The Historical Roots of
‘Political Correctness’" (from Essays of Our Times, published by
the Free Congress Foundation), Lukacs, as Deputy Commissar for Culture
in the Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary in 1919, launched his
brainchild, "Cultural Terrorism."
Does some of this sound familiar? Radical sex education
in public schools, where the children were instructed in free love,
sexual intercourse, and the irrelevance of religion (since it deprived
people of pleasure). The rejection of parental and moral authority. The
rebellion of women against any sexual restriction. But let Lukacs speak
to us in his own words:
"All the social forces I had hated since my youth, and
which I aimed in spirit to annihilate, now
came together to unleash the First Global
War....The abandonment of the soul’s uniqueness solves the problem
of "unleashing" the diabolic forces
lurking in all the violence which are
needed to create a revolution."
The italics are mine. Immediately "diabolic forces"
brings us back to Satan. If anyone doubts the kind of program we in the
West are up against, let him remember that Lukacs helped found the
Frankfurt School for the expressed purpose of the "annihilation of the
old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries."
In a secret meeting in 1923, which led to the creation
of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University (later
called the Frankfurt School), Lukacs introduced the concept of "Cultural
Pessimism," designed to increase a state of hopelessness and alienation
as a prerequisite for revolution. These boys were not your
mild-mannered, soft-spoken professors in leather-elbowed tweed jackets
puffing thoughtfully on cozy pipes. They were hard-headed,
bullet-proofed mental swat teams who meant business, and all the
bra-burning, long-haired blond little girls and their bearded boy
friends at Woodstock were so much meat to be ground up to the tune of
The Grateful Dead.
But Georg Lukacs was just the beginning. Worse was to
come, worse because more subtle, less obvious, more accommodating,
sounding downright helpful. About the time that Lukacs was founding the
Frankfurt School an Italian named Antonio Gramsci was working for the
Communist International in Moscow and Vienna. Later, in the 1930's, he
would spend time in one of Mussolini’s jails, where he created his
version of revolution in his Prison Notebooks. His revolution
would not need violence because the people would be re-created to accept
changes. There would be a "New Soviet man" and a "New Child" in a "New
Generation." Gramsci would be like a sculptor, shaping his
flesh-and-blood robots through a psychological revolution which would
become nothing short of an education cartel, a giant brain-washing
operation that could soften sinews, tenderize thinking, pour the vitriol
of apathy into the vigor, the energy of life itself. Acquiescence to
totalitarianism would then be easy--"going along," "not making waves,"
shutting up. Political Correctness, the modus operandi of the New
Marxism, was born. Although one could never accuse those long-haired
girls and bearded young men enjoying themselves at Woodstock of
"shutting up," still, in their camaraderie and blatant espousing of
blacks they were walking the strict lines laid down by Marxism. Without
knowing it, these educated children of the ‘60's were following Leon
Trotsky, who believed that oppressed blacks could become the vanguard of
a Communist revolution in America--not through revolting on their own
but through their white supporters, the "counterculture" movement, which
could, through guilt over slavery or a mere "in-your-face" personal
aggression against accepted norms, elevate black revolutionaries into
positions of leadership on campus.
There was another, much more powerful force than
sympathy for the underdog to be tapped. That force was sex, as proposed
by its god-like guru, Sigmund Freud.
We need look no farther than Freud’s explosive little
book, Civilization and its Discontents. His analysis of mankind’s
frustrations and their possible solutions leads straight to the
bra-burning, Dionysiac excesses, narcissistic libido worship of a
generation too affluent to know the hard work that supported their
leisure-generated revolt. The only thing that can make character is
hardship, the one item parents cannot
force themselves to provide their offspring. Being completely ignorant
of the bruising effort of a day’s work, they become easy targets for the
endearing altruism preached by revolutionaries who need their energy
(and their fathers’ wealth) to enhance a Marxist agenda. The marriage of
Freud with Marx in this revolutionary effort was to be expected. Just a
glance at Civilization and its Discontents provides a running
outline of the process. First, Freud says, "Life, as we find it, is too
hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible
tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense
with palliative measures." Those measures are art, intoxicating
substances, happiness gained through "the experiencing of strong
feelings of pleasure." (Now we have neuroses passed off as art, drugs as
paradise, and promiscuity as love--an unbeatable combination for
Freudian happiness!) Religion tries to preach a purpose in life. For
Freud there is only one purpose in life: the "pleasure principle." Of
necessity, this is an individual need, a power that civilization
has labeled as "brute force." But this force is absolutely essential for
the realization of life. Opposed to this internal force is the outward
force of civilization, which tries constantly to usurp pleasure’s
natural authority by replacing it with the idea of community. But
underneath this usurpation lies the essence of Freud’s total philosophy.
We only need to read his words:
"This replacement of the power of the individual by the
power of a community constitutes the decisive
step of civilization. The essence of it lies
in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction,
whereas the individual knew no such
restrictions."
The italics are mine. There you have it. This
deprivation, which Freud calls "the urge for
freedom," becomes a sword which can fight a civilization whose whole
purpose is the prevention of an individual from satisfying his erotic,
physical and psychological needs--or, as Freud calls it, the
individual’s "libidinal development." Thus the libido, that inner energy
which is the engine behind instinctual, biological drives, has become a
victim of the outward restrictions of civilization. "Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of
cultural development," he writes.
"Civilization is built up upon a renunciation of
instinct...the non-satisfaction of powerful instincts." Thus Freud has
led us to the battlefield of "cultural frustration," which "dominates
the social relationships between human beings." The ego is, indeed, "the
libido’s original home, and remains to some extent its headquarters."
Attached to the ego is also a sadistic instinct, "clearly a part of
sexual life, in the activities of which affection could be replaced by
cruelty." As for neurosis, Freud regards it "as the outcome of a
struggle between the interest of self-preservation and the demands of
the libido, a struggle in which the ego had been victorious but at the
price of severe sufferings and renunciation." So we are a bundle of
hidden resentments caused by the restrictions of civilization against
our legitimate, completely innocent libido instincts. Indeed, he writes:
"The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was
greatest before there was any civilization."
So what are we supposed to replace civilization with?
When we return to those Marxian devotees from the Frankfurt School, we
soon find out. In 1933 Wilhelm Reich urged the economic revolution to
turn from the old worker -
vs. -
capitalist format (which hadn’t worked) to a "sex-economic" sociology.
Man is essentially a sexual animal, whose instincts are more powerful
than any authoritarian state, and capable of overpowering any external
authority, especially the family. Reich’s battleground would be
education, insisting on sexual instruction from kindergarten onwards.
His 1933 book, Mass Psychology of Fascism, became required
reading on college campuses, and as of 1991 was in its ninth printing.
Prophetic in its
implications was his The Sexual Revolution, which
lent its name to the 60's movement of the abandonment of restraint and
the worship of uninhibited individualism.
Like Reich, Erich Fromm came to the United States in the
1930's from the Frankfurt School. He found fertile fields in American
colleges. His choice of Escape from Freedom as the title of his
1941 book indicates its contents, the superiority of the individual to
any outward authority which pretends to offer freedom, since freedom can
only be found in the "natural man" with his "natural instincts." His
name tag for this essential cathexis was "Positive Freedom," the clarion
call for the realization of man’s individuality as the central purpose
of life, that can never be subordinated to any loyalty outside the
self--whether that loyalty be to parents, family, race, party, or
religion. His Art of Loving had another catchy title, with
contents belying love for anybody other than one’s self. Its intent was
Marx’s old agenda of destruction, this time the destruction of any
social entity operating with compassion and mutual affection. It was a
very popular book, and stayed on my own bookshelves for years.
Theodor Adorno was another immigrant to the United
States from the Frankfurt School in the 1930's. His propaganda was the
same as his co-workers in that zany playground of "social" ideas. With
Reich, Fromm and the others, Adorno’s strategic goal was the distrust
engendered upon examination of "the authoritarian character" that was
imbedded in capitalism, Christianity, the family, conservatism, or any
sexual repression that dared assault any libido longing to escape into
the ultimate experience of complete abandonment to desire. In The
Authoritarian Personality, co-authored in 1950, he established the
idea that the authoritarian person was naturally prejudiced, in need of
"re-education." Such "re-education" became the motivating force behind
his one-man crusade to re-create American replicas of the German
students in "the Frankfurt School." Thus transformed into little
revolutionaries cleansed of prejudice but replete with a fire-in-the
belly determination to overthrow existing morality, the New American
Child was born.
We have saved the worst for last. In his masterful
essay, "Further Readings on the Frankfurt School" (Part VI of a series
on "Political Correctness" published by the Free Congress Foundation),
William S. Lind correctly identifies Herbert Marcuse as the high priest
of Marxian propaganda in America, a high priest whose ideology has had a
profound effect on all aspects of our culture from the time he arrived
on these shores in the 1930's to the present day. His Eros and
Civilization, which had its first paperback edition in 1974, is
still in print. Its subtitle, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud,
reveals his agenda. He has set out to integrate Marx’s destruction of
idealism with the annihilation of the family through the worship of
sexual desire found in the teachings of Freud. As Lind writes, "This
book became the bible of the young radicals who took over America’s
college campuses from 1965 onward, and who are still there as faculty
members." It preaches total rebellion against American society by way of
the "Great Refusal," which promises free sex and no work--an unbeatable
combination for the average modern teenager (or those "adults" still in
moral diapers):
"... instinctual liberation (and consequently total
liberation) would explode civilization itself,
since the latter is sustained only through renunciation and work
(labor)--in other words, through the repressive utilization of
instinctual energy. Freed from these constraints, man would exist
without work and without order; he would fall back into nature, which would destroy culture."
Thus we would have a new form of civilization, where
sensual experience, and not work or productivity, would run things. In
1955 his message, "If it feels good, do it" became the banner for a
protest which has now left the streets and the dorms and is firmly
planted in the White House. As William Lind says, "Marcuse understood
what most of the rest of his Frankfurt School colleagues did not: the
way to destroy Western civilization--the objective set forth by George
Lukacs in 1919--was not through abstruse theory, but through "sex,
drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll." The titles of Marcuse’s other books read like
a curriculum for the New Left: One-Dimensional Man (1964),
Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965), An Essay on Liberation
(1969), and Counter-revolution and Revolt (1972).
But perhaps the most memorable influence of Marcuse
came, as Lind said, from his time as a professor, when he "served as the
chief guru for the student rebellion of the 1960's." Freud was now
completely imbedded in Marxism, or vice versa. Marcuse’s slogan, "Make
Love, Not War," became a battle cry not only for the adolescent rebels
wanting endless sex, but, as a predictable outcome of such a
call-to-arms, the Women’s Liberation Movement, which would develop into
the most radical, and most enduring, group of all. The bra-burners are
now in full armor, waging war on the European/American white male, and
as many of his descendants as they can identify. They occupy positions
from the local school boards to the Congress of the United States. In
the White House the asbestos-like figure of Hillary Clinton, impervious
to morality or criticism, is seeking a seat in the Senate! Daily we
witness the charade. When will it end? We know where it began: with
Friedrich Engels, that friend of Marx, whose book The Origin of the
Family, Private Property, and the State, was published in 1884.
Engels blamed the male-dominated family structure for all the woes of
the oppressed female. Anticipating Freud, he saw in gender roles and
differences the discrimination natural to a patriarchal society. His
theories blossomed in the Frankfurt School’s promotion of matriarchy as
the bedrock effort to upend, invert, and otherwise thoroughly confuse
the basic operation of the family. The Frankfurt School brought these
ideas to America. Why should we be surprised at Betty Friedan’s
"revolution in sex roles" or the latest fad of wife-swapping (or worse)
on Jerry Springer’s TV show?
Perhaps even more frightening, because more pervasive
and more encompassing than the destruction of
the family, has been the attempt to disrupt, destroy and evaporate the
identity of the individual. As with the "sexual revolution" (as old as
the destructive Dionysiac rites in Euripides’s play "The Bacchae"), this
assault on the individual’s self-identity begins with a natural
instinct, in this case, the need to know one’s self, to know one’s
origins, one’s blood lines, one’s history. That last word is the clue.
If you can destroy--or confuse--history, then you have taken the first
step toward destroying the individual--his sense of purpose, his
heritage, his life-values. If you can destroy--or confuse--religious
symbols, then you can destroy religion. We have mentioned elephant dung
on the Virgin Mary. That was no surrealistic fantasy. It actually
happened, in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, under the auspices of the
taxpayer-sponsored NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) in an exhibit
called, appropriately, "Sensation." Not only was the dung on the
Virgin Mary--it formed her breasts! As if that were not enough, there
was a Virgin Mary with pasted cut-outs of bare bottoms strewn about her
body. And manikins of children with genitals sprouting from odd places.
When New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani protested he was branded as an enemy
of the First Amendment. Since when does free speech represent sacrilege?
But such an effort does not confine itself to New York
City. A recent letter to the editor in our local newspaper complained
about a ruling by a federal district judge in Kentucky who ruled
unconstitutional any reference to God in the public schools, and
ordered all such references removed. Not only the Ten Commandments
(which are engraved on the walls at the Supreme Court), but the
Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to
the Kentucky State Constitution (which dares to be "grateful to Almighty
God for the civil, political and religious blessings we enjoy) are
"violations of the First Amendment." And now these do-gooders, these
politically correct cleansers of the American conscience, have descended
on the Confederate flag on the statehouse at Columbia, South Carolina,
demanding its removal. It has become an "embarrassment" because, they
say, it symbolizes slavery. Jesse Jackson goes even further. For him it
is a "swastika." Charley Reese, a syndicated columnist with The
Orlando Sentinel, disagrees. For him the war between 1861-1865 was a
War for Southern Independence. Casualty figures differ, but I have seen
the figure of 680,000 dead from the brutal slaughter we call the "Civil"
War. The real tragedy is that the seeds of that nightmare are still with
us, and there are enough thoughtless demagogues willing to plant those
seeds and nourish them to the ultimate destruction of the only nation on
earth founded on the idea of freedom and human dignity.
