Our Culture, What’s Left Of It
The Mandarins and the Masses
By Jamie Glazov
August 31, 2005
FrontPage Magazine: You make the shrewd observation of how
political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence
that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply
what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk
about this a bit?
Theodore Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist
propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I
came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda
was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to
humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality
the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they
are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they
are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for
all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to
co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil
oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and
even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to
control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has
the same effect and is intended to.
I have heard people who have grown up in former Communist
countries say that we in the West are at least as brainwashed by
Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were
with Communism, perhaps more so. Even in the heyday of the East
Bloc, there were active dissident groups in these countries. The
scary thing is, I sometimes believe they are right.
But how is that possible? Don’t we have free speech here? And we
have no Gulag?
The simple fact is that we never won the Cold War as decisively
as we should have. Yes, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet
Union collapsed. This removed the military threat to the West,
and the most hardcore, economic Marxism suffered a blow as a
credible alternative. However, one of the really big mistakes we
made after the Cold War ended was to declare that Socialism was
now dead, and thus no longer anything to worry about. Here we
are, nearly a generation later, discovering that Marxist
rhetoric and thinking have penetrated every single stratum of
our society, from the Universities to the media. Islamic
terrorism is explained as caused by “poverty, oppression and
marginalization,” a classic, Marxist interpretation.
What happened is that while the “hard” Marxism of the Soviet
Union may have collapsed, at least for now, the “soft” Marxism
of the Western Left has actually grown stronger, in part because
we deemed it to be less threatening. The “hard” Marxists had
intercontinental nuclear missiles and openly said that they
would “bury” us. The soft Marxists talk about tolerance and may
seem less threatening, but their goal of overthrowing the evil,
capitalist West remains the same. In fact, they are more
dangerous precisely because they hide their true goals under
different labels. Perhaps we should call it “stealth Socialism”
instead of soft Socialism.
One of the readers of Fjordman blog once pointed out that we
never had a thorough de-Marxification process after the Cold
War, similar to the de-Nazification after WW2. He was thinking
of the former Soviet Union and the countries in Eastern Europe,
but he should probably have included their Marxist fellow
travellers, their sympathizers and apologists in the West. We
never fully confronted the ideology of Marxism, and demonstrated
that the suffering it caused for hundreds of millions of people
was a direct result of Marxist ideas. We just assumed that
Marxism was dead and moved on, allowing many of its ideals to
mutate into new forms and many of its champions to continue
their work uninterrupted, sometimes filled with a vengeance and
a renewed zeal for another assault on the capitalist West.
We are now paying the price for this. Not only has Marxism
survived, it is thriving and has in some ways grown stronger.
Leftist ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders
have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse, their
critics vilified and demonized. By hiding their intentions under
labels such as “anti-racism” and “tolerance,” Leftists have
achieved a degree of censorship of public discourse they could
never have dreamt of had they openly stated that their intention
was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its
foundations.
The Left have become ideological orphans after the Cold War, or
perhaps we should call them ideological mercenaries. Although
the viable economic alternative to capitalism didn’t work out,
their hatred for this system never subsided, it merely
transformed into other forms. Multiculturalism is just a
different word for “divide and conquer,” pitting various ethnic
and cultural groups against each other and destroying the
coherence of Western society from within.
At the very least, the people living in the former Communist
countries knew and admitted that they were taking part in a
gigantic social experiment, and that the media and the
authorities were serving them propaganda to shore up support for
this project. Yet in the supposedly free West, we are taking
part in a gigantic social experiment of Multiculturalism and
Muslim immigration every bit as radical, utopian and potentially
dangerous as Communism, seeking to transform our entire society
from top to bottom, and still we refuse to even acknowledge that
this is going on.
In Norway, a tiny Scandinavian nation that was until recently
99% white and Lutheran Christian, native Norwegians will soon be
a minority in their own capital city, later in the whole
country. And still, Norwegian politicians, journalists and
University professors insist that there is nothing to worry
about over this. Multiculturalism is nothing new, neither is
immigration. In fact, our king a century ago was born in
Denmark, so having a capital city dominated by Pakistanis,
Kurds, Arabs and Somalis is just business as usual. The most
massive transformation of the country in a thousand years,
probably in recorded history, is thus treated as if it were the
most natural thing in the world. To even hint that there might
be something wrong about this has been immediately shouted down
as “racism.”
Eric Hoffer has noted that “It is obvious that a proselytizing
mass movement must break down all existing group ties if it is
to win a considerable following. The ideal potential convert is
the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he
can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness,
meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence.
Where a mass movement finds the corporate pattern of family,
tribe, country, etcetera, in a state of disruption and decay, it
moves in and gathers the harvest. Where it finds the corporate
pattern in good repair, it must attack and disrupt.” This
corresponds exactly to the behavior of much of the Western Left
in our age.
In Germany, Hans-Peter Raddatz in his book “Allahs Frauen”
(Allah’s Women) dissects the destructive attitude of
Multiculturalism that is shared by many civil servants,
journalists, politicians and lawyers in Germany and the EU. In
particular, he documents how the German Green Party has a
program for dismantling and dissolving the Christian
“Leitkultur,” or common culture, that so far has been the
foundation of Germany and the West. Raddatz thinks that the
decades of Muslim immigration are used as an instrument for
breaking down the institutions, norms and ideas that the Left
has earlier tried to break down through economics.
From powerful positions in the media, public institutions and
the system of education, these Multiculturalists are working on
a larger project of renewing a Western civilization that,
according to them, has failed.
A Norwegian newspaper called Dagens Næringsliv exposed the fact
that the largest “anti-racist” organization in the country, SOS
Rasisme, was heavily infiltrated by Communists and extreme
Leftists. They infiltrated the organization in the late 1980s
and early ’90s, in other words, during the downfall of Communism
in Eastern Europe. They went directly from Communism to
Multiculturalism, which should indicate that at least some of
them viewed Multiculturalism as the continuation of Communism by
other means. It speaks volumes about the close connection
between economic Marxism and cultural Marxism. They just have
different means of reaching the same ends.
Much of the political Left is simply engaged in outing their
opponents as evil, instead of rationally arguing against their
ideas. Attaching labels such as “racist” or even “Fascist” to
anyone criticizing massive immigration or Multiculturalism has
become so common that Norwegian anti-Islamists have coined a new
word for it: “Hitling,” which could be roughly translated to
English as “to make like Hitler.” The logic behind “hitling” is
a bit like this: “You have a beard. Adolf Hitler had facial
hair, too, so you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler liked dogs.
You have pets, too, you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a
vegetarian. You like carrots, you are just like Hitler.”
Any “right-winger” can be slimed with such accusations.
Curiously enough, the reverse is almost never true. Although
Marxism may have killed 100 million people during the 20th
century and failed in every single society in which it has ever
been tried out, there seems to be little stigma attached to
being a Leftist. The fact that Leftists can get away with this
and claim to hold the moral high ground amply demonstrates that
we didn’t win the Cold War. We let our guard down after the fall
of the Berlin Wall and never properly denounced the ideology
behind it. This is now coming back to haunt us.
One member of an anti-immigration party in Britain stated that
to be called racist in 21st-century Britain is “the same as
being branded a witch in the Middle Ages.” He’s probably right,
which means that anti-racism has quite literally become a modern
witch-hunt.
Naomi Klein, Canadian activist and author of the book No Logo,
is a darling of the Western Left. She claims that the real cause
of Islamic terrorism is Western racism, traceable back to the
personal experiences of Sayyid Qutb, theorist of modern Islamic
Jihad, while in the USA in the late 1940s. “The real problem,”
she concludes, “is not too much Multiculturalism but too
little.” More Multiculturalism, she claims, “would rob
terrorists of what has always been their greatest recruitment
tool: our racism.”
Robert Spencer, however, is not too impressed with Klein’s logic
or historical knowledge: “Qutb’s world-changing rage?” Is that
rage really Qutb’s? Can modern-day Islamic terrorism really be
attributed to him, and to his experience of racism in Colorado?
One would expect that if that were so, there would be no
evidence of political or violent Islam dating from before 1948.
But in fact the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Qutb was part, was
founded not in 1948 but in 1928, and not by Qutb, but by Hasan
Al-Banna. It was Al-Banna, not Qutb, who wrote: “In [Muslim]
Tradition, there is a clear indication of the obligation to
fight the People of the Book [that is, Jews and Christians], and
of the fact that God doubles the reward of those who fight them.
Jihad is not against polytheists alone, but against all who do
not embrace Islam.”
Paul Berman does not share Klein’s interpretation, either.
According to him, Qutb’s book from the 1940’s, Social Justice
and Islam,’ shows that, even before his voyage to the USA, Qutb
“was pretty well set in his Islamic fundamentalism,” although it
may have gotten worse after his meetings with Western
“immorality.” According to Berman, the truly dangerous element
in American life, in Sayyid Qutb’s estimation, “was not
capitalism or foreign policy or racism or the unfortunate cult
of women’s independence. The truly dangerous element lay in
America’s separation of church and state — the modern political
legacy of Christianity’s ancient division between the sacred and
the secular.”
Islam’s true champions had to gather themselves together into
what Qutb in his book Milestones called a vanguard. This
vanguard of true Muslims was going to resurrect the caliphate
and take Islam to all the world, just as Muhammad had done.”
Both Milestones and parts of Qutb’s perhaps most important work,
In the Shade of the Qur’an, are available online in English. In
Milestones, he writes that Jihad will continue until all of the
world answers to Islam, that “Islam came into this world to
establish God’s rule on God’s earth.” “Islam has a right to
remove all those obstacles which are in its path,” it “has the
right to destroy all obstacles in the form of institutions and
traditions” around the world that are in opposition to this.
“God’s rule on earth can be established only through the Islamic
system.” What does this have to do with Western racism? Why did
Jihad start a thousand years before Western colonialism ever
touched Islamic lands? What about the tens of millions of people
massacred in India because of Islamic Jihad? Was that due to
Western racism, too? Naomi Klein doesn’t say, she just blames
the West. And she is far from the only one suffering from this
delusion.
Commenting on the Jihad riots in France in the fall of 2005,
philosopher Alain Finkielkraut stated: “In France, they would
like very much to reduce these riots to their social dimension,
to see them as a revolt of youths from the suburbs against their
situation, against the discrimination they suffer from, against
the unemployment. The problem is that most of these youths are
blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity. Look, in France there
are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult —
Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese — and they’re not taking part in
the riots. Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an
ethno-religious character. These people were treated like
rebels, like revolutionaries. (…) They’re ‘interesting.’ They’re
‘the wretched of the earth.’ “Imagine for a moment that they
were whites, like in Rostock in Germany. Right away, everyone
would have said: ‘Fascism won’t be tolerated.’ When an Arab
torches a school, it’s rebellion. When a white guy does it, it’s
fascism. Evil is evil, no matter what color it is.”
In an interview with Danish weekly Weekendavisen, Finkielkraut
said that: “Racism is the only thing that can still arouse anger
among the intellectuals, the journalists and people in the
entertainment business, in other words, the elites. Culture and
religion have collapsed, only anti-racism is left. And it
functions like an intolerant and inhumane idolatry.” “A leader
from one of the organizations against racism had the nerve to
refer to the actions of the police in the Parisian suburbs as
‘ethnic cleansing.’ That kind of expression used about the
French situation indicates a deliberate manipulation of the
language. Unfortunately, these insane lies have convinced the
public that the destruction in the suburbs should be viewed as a
protest against exclusion and racism.” “I think that the lofty
idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a
hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the
21st century what communism was for the 20th century: A source
of violence.”
Maybe the French have fallen prey to the nihilism of Jean-Paul
Sartre? Roger Scruton wrote about his continued influence in The
Spectator: “The French have not recovered from Sartre and
perhaps never will. For they have had to live with an
intellectual establishment that has consistently repudiated the
two things that hold the country together: Christianity and the
idea of France. The anti-bourgeois posture of the left-bank
intellectual has entered the political process, and given rise
to an elite for whom nothing is certain save the repudiation of
the national idea. It is thanks to this elite that the mad
project of European Union has become indelibly inscribed in the
French political process, even though the people of France
reject it. It is thanks to this elite that the mass immigration
into France of unassimilable Muslim communities has been both
encouraged and subsidised. It is thanks to this elite that
socialism has been so firmly embedded in the French state that
no one now can reform it.” “Man cannot live by negation alone.”
Karl Marx himself has stated that “The meaning of peace is the
absence of opposition to socialism,” a sentiment that
corresponds almost exactly to the Islamic idea that “peace”
means the absence of opposition to Islamic rule. Cultural
Marxism — aka Political Correctness — and Islam share the same
totalitarian outlook and instinctively agree in their opposition
to free discussion, and in the idea that freedom of speech must
be curtailed when it is “offensive” to certain groups.
Former Muslim Ali Sina notes that “there is very little
difference between the Left and Islam. What is lacking in both
these creeds is the adherence to the Golden Rule. Just as for
Muslims, everything Islamic is a priori right and good and
everything un-Islamic is a priori wrong and evil, for the Left,
everything leftist is a priori oppressed and good and everything
rightist is a priori oppressor and evil. Facts don’t matter.
Justice is determined by who you are and not by what you have
done.” “Political correctness is an intellectual sickness. It
means expediently lying when telling the truth is not expedient.
This practice is so widespread and so common that it is
considered to be normal.”
Sina also quotes historian Christopher Dawson in writing: “It is
easy enough for the individual to adopt a negative attitude of
critical skepticism. But if society as a whole abandons all
positive beliefs, it is powerless to resist the disintegrating
effects of selfishness and private interest. Every society rests
in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and
common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to
the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces.”
This will be the end result of Multiculturalism, and one
suspects that this was the point of it to begin with.
Another former Muslim, writer Ibn Warraq, visited Denmark to
launch his book Why I am not a Muslim. In an interview, Ibn
Warraq stated that especially among the Left there is a
post-colonial guilt complex that constitutes an almost
insuperable obstacle to any criticism of Islam and Third World
cultures. The Left have thus put their own, universal values
aside in favor of a dangerous relativism. Ibn Warraq pointed out
that more than fifty years after the West left its colonies in
the Third World, Leftists are still blaming all the ills of
Africa and the Middle East on the former colonial powers, while
the same left-wingers only ten years after the fall of Communism
blamed Russia’s troubles on unrestrained capitalism. “The Left
refuses to seek answers elsewhere. At the same time they are,
because of Marx, accustomed to look for economic explanations to
everything. Consequently, they seek the explanation to Islamic
terrorism in the economic situation. But it is a great mystery
to me how 200 dead people in Madrid are supposed to help the
poor in the Islamic world.”
Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus, who has personal
experience with living under Socialism, warns that it may not be
as dead as many seem to think: “We can probably confidently say
that its “hard version” – communism – is over.” However,
“fifteen years after the collapse of communism I am afraid, more
than at the beginning of its softer (or weaker) version, of
social-democratism, which has become – under different names,
e.g. the welfare state – the dominant model of the economic and
social system of current Western civilization. It is based on
big and patronizing government, on extensive regulating of human
behavior, and on large-scale income redistribution.” “The
explicit socialism has lost its appeal and we should not have it
as the main rival to our ideas today.”
Klaus warns that illiberal ideas are making a comeback in
different shapes: “These ideas are, however, in many respects
similar to it. There is always a limiting (or constraining) of
human freedom, there is always ambitious social engineering,
there is always an immodest “enforcement of a good” by those who
are anointed (Thomas Sowell) on others against their will.” “The
current threats to liberty may use different ‘hats’, they may
better hide their real nature, they may be more sophisticated
than before, but they are – in principle – the same as always.”
“I have in mind environmentalism (with its Earth First, not
Freedom First principle), radical humanrightism (based – as de
Jasay precisely argues – on not distinguishing rights and
rightism), ideology of ‘civic society’ (or communitarism), which
is nothing less than one version of post-Marxist collectivism
which wants privileges for organized groups, and in consequence,
a refeudalization of society. I also have in mind
multiculturalism, feminism, apolitical technocratism (based on
the resentment against politics and politicians),
internationalism (and especially its European variant called
Europeanism) and a rapidly growing phenomenon I call NGOism.”
The EUSSR
Vladimir Bukovsky is a former Soviet dissident, author and human
rights activist. He was one of the first to expose the use of
psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the
USSR, and spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons. Now
living in England, he warns against some of the same
anti-democratic impulses in the West, especially in the EU,
which he views as a heir to the Soviet Union. In 2002, he joined
in on protests against the BBC’s compulsory TV licence, which he
considers “such a medieval arrangement I simply must protest
against it” “The British people are being forced to pay money to
a corporation which suppresses free speech — publicising views
they don’t necessarily agree with.” He has blasted the BBC for
their “bias and propaganda,” especially on stories related to
the EU or the Middle East. “I would like the BBC to become the
KGB successors in imprisoning me for demanding freedom of
speech. Nothing would expose them more for what they are.”
He is not the only one who is tired of what he thinks is the
Leftist bias of the BBC. Michael Gove, a Conservative MP, and
political commentator Mark Dooley complain about lopsided
coverage of certain issues: “Take, for example, the BBC’s
coverage of the late Yasser Arafat. In one profile broadcast in
2002, he was lauded as an “icon” and a “hero,” but no mention
was made of his terror squads, corruption, or his brutal
suppression of dissident Palestinians. Similarly, when Israel
assassinated the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin,
in 2004, one BBC reporter described him as “polite, charming and
witty, a deeply religious man.” This despite the fact that under
Yassin’s guidance, Hamas murdered hundreds.” “A soft left
worldview influences too much of what the corporation produces.
We have a right to expect more honesty from the broadcasting
service we are being asked to pay for.”
Vladimir Bukovsky thinks that the West lost the Cold War. “There
were no Nuremberg-type trials in Moscow. Why? Because while we
won the Cold War in a military sense, we lost it in the context
of ideas. The West stopped one day too soon, just like in Desert
Storm. Just imagine the Allies in 1945 being satisfied with some
kind of Perestroika in Nazi Germany — instead of unconditional
surrender. What would have been the situation in Europe then, to
say nothing of Germany? All former Nazi collaborators would have
remained in power, albeit under a new disguise. This is exactly
what happened in the Soviet Union in 1991.” “Communism might
have been dead, but the communists remained in power in most of
the former Warsaw bloc countries, while their Western
collaborators came to power all over the world (in Europe in
particular). This is nothing short of a miracle: the defeat of
the Nazis in 1945 quite logically brought a shift to the Left in
world politics, while a defeat of communism in 1991 brought
again a shift to the Left, this time quite illogically.” “It is
no surprise, therefore, that despite the defeat of communism,
the radical Left in the West still arrogates the moral high
ground to itself.”
“When the Nazis lost the Second World War, racial hatred was
discredited. When the Soviets lost the Cold War, the tenet of
class hatred remained as popular as ever.” Bukovsky argues that
while there might have been a Western military victory,
Socialism still prevailed as a popular idea ideologically
throughout the world. He writes: “Having failed to finish off
conclusively the communist system, we are now in danger of
integrating the resulting monster into our world. It may not be
called communism anymore, but it retained many of its dangerous
characteristics. . . .Until the Nuremberg-style tribunal passes
its judgement on all the crimes committed by communism, it is
not dead and the war is not over.”
Karl Marx
Cultural Marxism has roots as far back as the 1920s, when some
Socialist thinkers advocated attacking the cultural base of
Western civilization to pave the way for the Socialist
transition. Cultural Marxism is thus not something “new.” It has
coexisted with economic Marxism for generations, but it received
a great boost in the West from the 1960s and 70s onwards. As the
Soviet Union fell apart and China embraced capitalism, the
economic Marxists joined in on the “cultural” train, too, as it
was now the only game in town. They don’t have a viable
alternative to present, but they don’t care. They truly believe
that we, the West, are so evil and exploitative that literally
anything would be better, even the Islamic Caliphate.
The Free Congress Foundation has an interesting booklet online
called Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology,
edited by William S. Lind. According to Lind, Political
Correctness “wants to change behavior, thought, even the words
we use. To a significant extent, it already has.” “Whoever or
whatever controls language also controls thought.” “Political
Correctness” is in fact cultural Marxism. The effort to
translate Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with
the student rebellion of the 1960s. It goes back at least to the
1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.
In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute
devoted to making the translation, the Institute of Social
Research (later known as the Frankfurt School). One of its
founders, George Lukacs, stated its purpose as answering the
question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilization?” Lind
thinks there are major parallels between classical and cultural
Marxism: “Both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian
nature of Political Correctness can be seen on [University]
campuses where ‘PC’ has taken over the college: freedom of
speech, of the press, and even of thought are all eliminated.”
“Today, with economic Marxism dead, cultural Marxism has filled
its shoes. The medium has changed, but the message is the same:
a society of radical egalitarianism enforced by the power of the
state.”
“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,” for
instance feminist women. Similarly, “white males are determined
automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the
bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.” Both economic and cultural
Marxism “have a method of analysis that automatically gives the
answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist
economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction.
Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning
from it and re-inserts any meaning desired.”
Raymond V. Raehn agrees with Lind that “Political Correctness is
Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression,
thought control, inversion of the traditional social order and,
ultimately, a totalitarian state.” According to him, “Gramsci
envisioned a long march through the society’s institutions,
including the government, the judiciary, the military, the
schools and the media.” “He also concluded that so long as the
workers had a Christian soul, they would not respond to
revolutionary appeals.” Another one of the early cultural
Marxists, Georg Lukacs, noted that “Such a worldwide overturning
of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old
values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.” At
a meeting in Germany in 1923, “Lukacs proposed the concept of
inducing “Cultural Pessimism” in order to increase the state of
hopelessness and alienation in the people of the West as a
necessary prerequisite for revolution.”
William S. Lind points out that this cultural Marxism had its
beginnings after the Marxist Revolution in Russia in 1917 failed
to take roots in other countries. Marxists tried to analyze the
reasons for this, and found them in Western civilization and
culture itself. “Gramsci said the workers will never see their
true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are
freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian
religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to
their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most
brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919,
“Who will save us from Western Civilization?”
John Fonte describes how this cultural war is now being played
out in the USA in his powerful piece “Why There Is A Culture
War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America.” According to him,
“beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological
struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews. I will
call these “Gramscian” and “Tocquevillian” after the
intellectuals who authored the warring ideas — the
twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, and, of
course, the nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de
Tocqueville. The stakes in the battle between the intellectual
heirs of these two men are no less than what kind of country the
United States will be in decades to come.”
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Marxist intellectual and
politician, “believed that it was necessary first to
delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant
groups and to create a “counter-hegemony” (i.e., a new system of
values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could
be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all
spheres of civil society — schools, churches, the media,
voluntary associations — civil society itself, he argued, is the
great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the “war of
position.” From this point, too, followed a corollary for which
Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist
slogan) — that all life is “political.” Thus, private life, the
work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil
society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle
to achieve societal transformation.”
This, according to Fonte, “is the very core of the
Gramscian-Hegelian world view — group-based morality, or the
idea that what is moral is what serves the interests of
“oppressed” or “marginalized” ethnic, racial, and gender
groups.” “The concept of ‘internalized oppression’ is the same
as the Hegelian-Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness,’ in
which people in the subordinate groups ‘internalize’(and thus
accept) the values and ways of thinking of their oppressors in
the dominant groups.” “This is classic Hegelian-Marxist thinking
— actions (including free speech) that ‘objectively’ harm people
in a subordinate class are unjust (and should be outlawed).”
He tracks how the ideas of Gramsci and cultural Marxists have
spread throughout Western academia. Law professor Catharine
MacKinnon writes in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
(1989), “The rule of law and the rule of men are one thing,
indivisible,” because “State power, embodied in law, exists
throughout society as male power.” Furthermore, “Male power is
systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and epistemic, it is the
regime.” MacKinnon has argued that .ual harassment is
essentially an issue of power exercised by the dominant over the
subordinate group.” At an academic conference sponsored by the
University of Nebraska, “the attendees articulated the view that
‘White students desperately need formal “training” in racial and
cultural awareness. The moral goal of such training should
override white notions of privacy and individualism.’”
This can sometimes amount to virtual brainwashing disguised as
critical thinking. Fonte mentions that at Columbia University,
“new students are encouraged to get rid of ‘their own social and
personal beliefs that foster inequality.’ To accomplish this,
the assistant dean for freshmen, Katherine Balmer, insists that
‘training’ is needed. At the end of freshmen orientation at Bryn
Mawr in the early 1990s, according to the school program,
students were ‘breaking free’ of ‘the cycle of oppression’ and
becoming ‘change agents.’ Syracuse University’s multicultural
program is designed to teach students that they live ‘in a world
impacted by various oppression issues, including racism.’”
John Fonte thinks that the primary resistance to the advance of
cultural Marxism in the USA comes from an opposing quarter he
dubs “contemporary Tocquevillianism.” “Its representatives take
Alexis de Tocqueville’s essentially empirical description of
American exceptionalism and celebrate the traits of this
exceptionalism as normative values to be embraced.” As
Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, Americans today are “just as in
Tocqueville’s time, are much more individualistic, religious,
and patriotic than the people of any other comparably advanced
nation.” “What was particularly exceptional for Tocqueville (and
contemporary Tocquevillians) is the singular American path to
modernity. Unlike other modernists, Americans combined strong
religious and patriotic beliefs with dynamic, restless
entrepreneurial energy that emphasized equality of individual
opportunity and eschewed hierarchical and ascriptive group
affiliations.”
This battle is now being played out in most American public
institutions. “Tocquevillians and Gramscians clash on almost
everything that matters. Tocquevillians believe that there are
objective moral truths applicable to all people at all times.
Gramscians believe that moral ‘truths’ are subjective and depend
upon historical circumstances. Tocquevillians believe in
personal responsibility. Gramscians believe that ‘the personal
is political.’ In the final analysis, Tocquevillians favor the
transmission of the American regime; Gramscians, its
transformation.”
“While economic Marxism appears to be dead, the Hegelian variety
articulated by Gramsci and others has not only survived the fall
of the Berlin Wall, but also gone on to challenge the American
republic at the level of its most cherished ideas. For more than
two centuries America has been an ‘exceptional’ nation, one
whose restless entrepreneurial dynamism has been tempered by
patriotism and a strong religious-cultural core. The ultimate
triumph of Gramscianism would mean the end of this very
‘exceptionalism.’ America would at last become Europeanized:
statist, thoroughly secular, post-patriotic, and concerned with
group hierarchies and group rights in which the idea of equality
before the law as traditionally understood by Americans would
finally be abandoned. Beneath the surface of our seemingly
placid times, the ideological, political, and historical stakes
are enormous.”
Britain’s Anthony Browne writes in The Retreat of Reason of how
the Politically Correct are more intolerant of dissent than
traditional liberals or conservatives, since Liberals of earlier
times “accepted unorthodoxy as normal. Indeed the right to
differ was a datum of classical liberalism. The Politically
Correct do not give that right a high priority. It distresses
their programmed minds. Those who do not conform should be
ignored, silenced or vilified. There is a kind of soft
totalitarianism about Political Correctness.” “Because the
politically correct believe they are not just on the side of
right, but of virtue, it follows that those they are opposed to
are not just wrong, but malign.
In the PC mind, the pursuit of virtue entitles them to curtail
the malign views of those they disagree with.” “People who
transgress politically correct beliefs are seen not just as
wrong, to be debated with, but evil, to be condemned, silenced
and spurned.” “The rise of political correctness represents an
assault on both reason and liberal democracy.” Browne defines
Political Correctness as “an ideology that classifies certain
groups of people as victims in need of protection from
criticism, and which makes believers feel that no dissent should
be tolerated.” He also warns that “Good intentions pave the road
to hell. The world is not short of good intentions, but it is
too often short of good reasoning.”
However, Anthony Browne focuses more in the geopolitical
situation to explain the rise of PC than on Marxist strategies:
“Political correctness is essentially the product of a powerful
but decadent civilisation which feels secure enough to forego
reasoning for emoting, and to subjugate truth to goodness.
However, the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, and those
that followed in Bali, Madrid and Beslan, have led to a sense of
vulnerability that have made people far more hard-headed about
the real benefits and drawbacks of Western civilisation.”
“To some extent, the rise of the eastern powers, China and
India, will ensure in coming decades that western guilt will
shrivel: finally having equal powers to compare ourselves to,
the West will no longer feel inclined to indulge in
self-loathing, but will seek to reaffirm its sense of identity.
(…) in the long-run of history, political correctness will be
seen as an aberration in Western thought. The product of the
uniquely unchallenged position of the West and its unrivalled
affluence, the comparative decline of the West compared to the
East is likely to spell the demise of political correctness.”
Lee Harris in his article “Why Isn’t Socialism Dead?” ponders
whether Socialism isn’t dead because Socialism can’t die. The
Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, has argued in his book,
The Mystery of Capital, that the failure of the various
socialist experiments of the twentieth century has left mankind
with only one rational choice about which economic system to go
with, namely, capitalism. However, says Harris, “the
revolutionary socialist’s life is transformed because he accepts
the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for
all will prevail.” Thus there is “an...analogy between religion
and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the
apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the
individual — a gigantic task.” “It may well be that socialism
isn’t dead because socialism cannot die. Who doesn’t want to see
the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the
downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the
promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what
he needs?”
Maybe Socialism is a bit like the flu: It keeps mutating, and as
soon as your immune system has defeated one strain, it changes
just enough so that your body does not recognize it and then
mounts another attack.
Political Correctness can reach absurd levels. Early in June
2006, Canadian police arrested a group of men suspected of
planning terror attacks. The group was alleged to have been
“well-advanced on its plan” to attack a number of Canadian
institutions, among them the Parliament of Canada, including a
possible beheading of the Prime Minister, and Toronto’s subway.
However, the lead paragraph of newspaper Toronto Star’s story on
the arrests was: “In investigators’ offices, an intricate graph
plotting the links between the 17 men and teens charged with
being members of a homegrown terrorist cell covers at least one
wall. And still, says a source, it is difficult to find a common
denominator.”
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commissioner Mike
McDonell said that the suspects were all Canadian residents and
the majority were citizens. “They represent the broad strata of
our community. Some are students, some are employed, some are
unemployed,” he said. However, there was one common denominator
for the suspects that wasn’t mentioned: They were all Muslims.
The front page article in the New York Times (June 4), too, was
a study in how to avoid using the dreaded “M” word. The
terrorist suspects were referred to as “Ontario residents,”
“Canadian residents,” “the group,” “mainly of South Asian
descent” or “good people.” Everything conceivable, just not as
“Muslims.”
Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair noted proudly during the press
conference following the arrests, “I would remind you that there
was not one single reference made by law enforcement to Muslim
or Muslim community.” Before launching the anti-terror raids,
Canadian police received “sensitivity training” and were
carefully instructed in Islamic traditions such as handling the
Koran, the use of prayer mats, and blowing oneself up in the
course of an arrest. As Charles Johnson of blog Little Green
Footballs noted: “Do the Canadian police extend such
considerations to Christian, Jewish, Hindu or other faiths?
If they don’t, then the Moslems have already won important
recognition as a ‘special’ people.” Commenting on the arrests,
the Globe and Mail stated that “It may have been the most
politically correct terrorism bust in history.” Canada’s secret
security apparatus had been “putting serious effort into
softening its image” among Muslims for much of the previous
years.
The federal government in Canada was considering changes to the
Anti-Terrorism Act to make it clear that police and security
agents did not engage in religious profiling. The Calgary Sun
interviewed a Canadian criminologist, Professor Mahfooz Kanwar,
who stated that “Multiculturalism has been bad for unity in
Canada. It ghettoizes people, makes them believe, wrongly, that
isolating themselves and not adapting to their new society is
OK. It is not.” “Political correctness threatens us because we
can’t fight something we refuse to label and understand.” Kanwar
said the amount of political correctness during the arrests of
17 Muslims in the Toronto area was “sickening.” “Political
correctness has gone too far. Political correctness threatens
our society,” said the Pakistani-born Kanwar. “It is the
responsibility of the minorities to adjust to the majority, not
the other way around,” added Kanwar. Meanwhile, the Canadian
Islamic Congress blamed the Canadian government for not
showering enough money on the problem. They wanted more funding
for research “to scientifically diagnose problems and devise
solutions.”
They also wanted a nation-wide “Smart Integration program,”
whatever that means. Given the fact that Muslims in Canada had
quite recently been pushing for the partial implementation of
sharia laws in the country, one would suspect that “smart
integration” would mean that non-Muslims should demonstrate a
little more appeasement. After all, if Canadian authorities
listen to the advice of their compatriot Naomi Klein, these
planned mass-killings of Canadian civilians were all due to
Canadian racism and because the country wasn’t Multicultural
enough. Muslims want to kill Canadians, Canadians smile back,
tell them how much they “respect” them and ask what more they
can do to please them.
This is what Political Correctness leads to in the end. It’s not
funny and it’s not a joke. Political Correctness kills. It has
already killed thousands of Western civilians, and if left
unchecked it may soon kill entire nations or, in the case of
Europe, entire continents.
As I have stated before, Islam is only a secondary infection,
one that we could otherwise have had the strength to withstand.
Cultural Marxism has weakened the West and made us ripe for a
takeover. It is cultural AIDS, eating away at our immune system
until it is too weak to resist Islamic infiltration attempts. It
must be destroyed, before it destroys us all.
The Leftist-Islamic alliance will have profound consequences.
Either they will defeat the West, or they will both go down in
the fall. We never really won the Cold War as decisively as we
should have done. Marxism was allowed to endure, and mount
another attack on us by stealth and proxy. However, this
flirting with Muslims could potentially prove more devastating
to Marxists than the fall of the Berlin Wall.
As William S. Lind points out: “While the hour is late, the
battle is not decided. Very few Americans realize that Political
Correctness is in fact Marxism in a different set of clothes. As
that realization spreads, defiance will spread with it. At
present, Political Correctness prospers by disguising itself.
Through defiance, and through education on our own part (which
should be part of every act of defiance), we can strip away its
camouflage and reveal the Marxism beneath the window-dressing of
“sensitivity,” “tolerance” and “multiculturalism.”
Political Correctness is Marxism with a nose job.
Multiculturalism is not about tolerance or diversity, it is an
anti-Western hate ideology designed to dismantle Western
civilization. If we can demonstrate this, an important part of
the battle has already been won.
--
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Asianisation of Australia: The Grand Plan
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