Post by PIBBSounds like a demented notion.
The Origins of Political Correctness
An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind
Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA
conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American
University
Where does all this stuff that you've heard about this morning - the
victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the
rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it - where
does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have
to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they
think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word
denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or
homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this
has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of
pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as
so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they
would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this
situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses,
but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come
from? What is it?
We call it "Political Correctness." The name originated as something
of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of
it as only half-serious. In fact, it's deadly serious. It is the great
disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of
people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world.
It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.
If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we
quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural
Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.
It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and
the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic
tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels
are very obvious.
First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian
nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than
on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered
North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross
any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-
rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the
other sainted "victims" groups that PC revolves around, quickly find
themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the
college, they face formal charges - some star-chamber proceeding - and
punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political
Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an
ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not
an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this
philosophy certain things must be true - such as the whole of the
history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women.
Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must
become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People
must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant
to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and
say, "Wait a minute. This isn't true. I can see it isn't true," the
power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That
is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.
Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic
Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism
says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of
production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all
history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of
race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else
matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past
is about that one thing.
Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e.
workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the
bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of
Political Correctness certain groups are good - feminist women, (only
feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks,
Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims,"
and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do.
Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil,
thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic
Marxism.
Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When
the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like
Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their
property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university
campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions.
When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance
to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn't as well
qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative
action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation.
White owned companies don't get a contract because the contract is
reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So
expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism....
In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role
of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates
Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has
created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about
because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by
the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to
spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he
sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings
Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week,
working on the differences of Marxism.
And he says, "What we need is a think-tank." Washington is full of
think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back
quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt
University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be
known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided
at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly
identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is
for people to figure out it's a form of Marxism. So instead they
decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.
Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay
the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the
Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he
said, "I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to
its contributions to Marxism." Well, he was successful. The first
director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist,
concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, "by clearly
stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific
methodology." Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the
Institute, and that never changed...
The stuff we've been hearing about this morning - the radical
feminism, the women's studies departments, the gay studies
departments, the black studies departments - all these things are
branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially
does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory
called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you're tempted
to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticize. The theory
is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order
is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that.
They say it can't be done, that we can't imagine what a free society
would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we're
living under repression - the repression of a capitalistic economic
order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the
conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression - we
can't even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply
criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in
every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of
course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is
just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a
derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not
the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno,
and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and
Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political
Correctness, and that's the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse,
who in his own writings calls for a society of "polymorphous
perversity," that is his definition of the future of the world that
they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing
some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this
runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in
Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm's view,
masculinity and femininity 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." Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct...
How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our
universities, and indeed into our lives today? 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.
One of Marcuse's books was the key book. It virtually became the bible
of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and
Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he
downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A
Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist),
repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person
Freud describes - the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses,
because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future,
if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we
liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of
"polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing." And by
the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a
wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They're students,
they're baby-boomers, and they've grown up never having to worry about
anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy
writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn't require them to
read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to
hear which is essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels good do
it," and "You never have to go to work." By the way, Marcuse is also
the man who creates the phrase, "Make love, not war." Coming back to
the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating
tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and
tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the
Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes
back to the 1930s.
In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and
direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological
state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power
of the state. In "hate crimes" we now have people serving jail
sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to
expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it.
The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on
campus is part of it. It's exactly what we have seen happen in Russia,
in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it's coming here. And we don't
recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it
off. My message today is that it's not funny, it's here, it's growing
and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything
that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.
<http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-PC-Origins-Tony.htm>
Post by PIBBMeanwhile Wikipedia writes the
following. It's much more sensible.
Modern Western feminist history is split into three time
periods, or "waves", each with slightly different aims based on
prior progress.
First-wave feminism of the 19th and early 20th centuries
focuses on overturning legal inequalities, particularly women's
suffrage.
Second-wave feminism (1960s–1980s) broadened debate to include
cultural inequalities, gender norms, and the role of women in
society.
Third-wave feminism (1990s–2000s) refers to diverse strains of
feminist activity, seen as both a continuation of the second
wave and a response to its perceived failures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism
Israeli Propagandists Taking Over Wikipedia?
Redress Information & Analysis
http://www.redressonline.com/2014/06/israeli-propagandists-taking-over-wikipedia/
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates
Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, has signed an agreement
that will allow Israeli propagandists to promote apartheid Israel and
its racist, Zionist policies through the pages of Wikipedia, the
world's largest and most popular free encyclopedia. The agreement was
signed by Rabbi Shai Piron, the Israeli education minister ...
Israelis are already making extensive use of Wikipedia to promote
their views. "In the framework of cooperation that is already in place
between Wikimedia Israel and the Ministry of Education, several pilot
projects are being conducted."
www.tomatobubble.com www.ihr.org http://nationalvanguard.org
http://national-socialist-worldview.blogspot.com
