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Title: A Warning for Americans: A Message from a South African
Source: sierratimes.com
URL Source: http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/ ... ticles/2001/mar/arrn031201.htm
Published: Apr 10, 2006
Author: Self
Post Date: 2006-04-10 07:00:52 by robnoel
Keywords: None
Views: 942
Comments: 83

People used to say that South Africa was 20 years behind the rest of the Western world. Television, for example, came late to South Africa (but so did pornography and the gay* rights movement).

Today, however, South Africa may be the grim model of the future Western world, for events in America reveals trends chillingly similar to those that destroyed our country.

America's structures are Western. Your Congress, your lobbying groups, your free speech, and the way ordinary Americans either get involved or ignore politics are peculiarly Western, not the way most of the world operates. But the fact that only about a third of Americans deem it important to vote is horrifying in light of how close you are to losing your Western character.

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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 78.

#8. To: robnoel (#0)

LOL!

The end of the Apartheid state is one of the better things that happened to South Afrika.

If they don't like it, they can always go back to Europe.

Fuck this colonial racialist nostalgic windbag.

If South Africa really turned bad, it'd be Zimbabwe.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-10   16:16:40 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

If they don't like it, they can always go back to Europe.

That comment just shows your stupidity.

The same thing could be said to us, here in North America.

Flintlock  posted on  2006-04-10   16:24:22 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Figgers it went right over your head.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-10   16:26:02 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Figgers it went right over your head.

How so?

How is your position any different than the "reconquesta" types who want North America back?

Flintlock  posted on  2006-04-10   16:42:45 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Because no one's leaving. Either here or in SA. In SA whites were a dominant minority. If they hadn't cut a deal with the Blacks 90% of the population, they would've been force to fight or flee.

And diverting this thread from SA to Reconquista is silly.

After all, all the Mexicans here are speaking another European language, Spanish. So, it's like a family brawl here.

And Mexicans aren't a economically dominant minority, like whites in SA.

Silly analogies.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-10   16:47:09 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

And diverting this thread from SA to Reconquista is silly.

Not at all, it's the same thing.

After all, all the Mexicans here are speaking another European language, Spanish. So, it's like a family brawl here.

What does that have to do with anything?

BTW What's your position on "amnesty" for wetbacks?

Flintlock  posted on  2006-04-10   16:52:15 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

I want them all in ASAP with no English requirement.

After all, if it's good for Marriotts and meatpackers I'm AOK with it.

After all, we've been letting them in for a long time now.

Learn Spanish, cracker.

Your daughters will.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-10   16:53:49 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Learn Spanish, cracker.

I already have, how about you?

Flintlock  posted on  2006-04-10   16:57:29 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Me learn Spanish?. Hell, no. Why? The guys from Tipico's Puerto Rican BBQ place understand English just fine.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-10   17:01:38 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

I host a daily two hour show on RBN...I invite you to debate me live on the air your call!...here is the call in # (800) 313-9443...I don't screen calls so feel free anytime you get the courage to call is fine by me.

PS..I'm a Rhodesian was not born in Europe..a real African American if you will

robnoel  posted on  2006-04-10   22:07:32 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

a real African American

LOL! The same as Teresa Kerry. Good for you.

Save me your nostalgia for the ole days. They're gone.

Now deal with reality instead of pining for the fjords!

You don't live in SA nor are you a SouthAfrican; you're supposedly an American now; so deal with stuff here, instead of the lost homeland.

It's gone. If you don't like what happened there, well, you had options. You bugged out.

Let the South Africans deal with their own country.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-11   15:24:53 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Save me your nostalgia for the ole days. They're gone.

Same could be said for the "Republic for which it stands"

robnoel  posted on  2006-04-11   22:44:43 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

OK, but the central theme of America today is nostalgia.

That's funny, because America has lost its "innoncence" more often than a Saudi princess who has had her hymen restored many times in the clinics of Geneva and Switzerland.

Between wiping out the Indians, the Texas Annexation, the Obscenity of Slavery, World War One (The Lusitania, the Zimmerman telegram), Smedley Butler, the Charge on the Washington Mall against the WorldWarOne Veterans, World War 2 (Pearl Harbor), indiscrimate use of Napalm in Korea, McCarthy, overthrowing elected leaders across the world in the 50's including Iran, one that's biting back now BIGTIME, JFK, RFK, MLK, Salting the Sands of Araby with DU, Starving Iraqi children and denying them medication in the 90's, etc etc, where the hell was the damn innocence anyway.

The concept of the American state of innocence is a carefully contrived exercise in wilful ignorance.

The Republic is as it ever was. In a state of flux.

When less than 50% of Americans vote and apathy is paramount, the blame is not in some external boogeymen, but right in the heart of our Republic.

It's not an AutoPilot enterprise, the Republic, it demands citizen participation.

And the immigrants marching in large numbers has shown that they at least understand the power of Direct Action, have acted on it, and if there is no significant backlash will succeed in achieving their goals.

Instead of bitching about them, perhaps we could think of some issue where similar numbers of Americans get worked up enough to do something - Prime Example - the MinuteMen on the Rio Grande and Arizona.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-12   14:13:39 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Based on your above...you did not read my post...here is a example

It is already too late for South Africa, but not for America if enough people strengthen their spine and take on the race terrorists, the armies of the "politically correct" and, most dangerous of all, the craven politicians who believe "compassionate conservatism" will buy them a few more votes, a few more days of peace.

White South Africans, you should remember, have been in that part of Africa for the same amount of time whites have inhabited North America; yet ultimately South Africans voted for their own suicide. We are not so very different from you.

We lost our country through skillful propaganda, pressure from abroad (not least from the U.S.A.), unrelenting charges of "oppression" and "racism," and the shrewd assessment by African tyrants that the white man has many Achilles' heels, the most significant of which are his compassion, his belief in the "equality of man," and his "love your neighbor" philosophy -- none of which are part of the Third World's history.

robnoel  posted on  2006-04-12   16:00:10 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

We lost our country

Your assumptions are erroneous. You did not "lose" your country. SA still exists, albeit in a form that you don't like.

Any state that relies on putting down 90% of its citizens is at best, like SA, a long term anomaly. What is amazing is that such a system lasted for so long, supported by the US. When the US woke up to the inherent obscenity of such a system, the system fell.

Now, all the people of SA are in it together. That's far better than a Lording Privileged Ruling Class based on skin color.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-12   16:11:33 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Your assumptions are erroneous. You did not "lose" your country. SA still exists, albeit in a form that you don't like.

Any state that relies on putting down 90% of its citizens is at best, like SA, a long term anomaly. What is amazing is that such a system lasted for so long, supported by the US. When the US woke up to the inherent obscenity of such a system, the system fell.

Now, all the people of SA are in it together. That's far better than a Lording Privileged Ruling Class based on skin color.

Hmmm.. have you read anything about Abramoff's involvement in SA and some of what took place?? and what is now taking place there?? The people of SA arent in it all together at all.. look to SA and you'll see our future.

Zipporah  posted on  2006-04-12   16:15:06 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Israel and South Africa have had an extremely close relationship, particularly when Apartheid ruled.

SA was considered a bulwark against Communism, and it's internal policies were tolerated by the West, including Israel.

I don't know what Jack did in SA but it's irrelevant. He had fingers in a lot of pies.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-12   16:21:16 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

I don't know what Jack did in SA but it's irrelevant. He had fingers in a lot of pies.

I'm not saying that the prior regime was without fault.. think of a parallel with the situation here in the US.. the leadership was corrupt as you mentioned BUT think again the US and what we're facing.. now.. the protests etc.. the INC is and are communists.. what we're witnessing worldwide is a revolution.. but not of the people.. manipulated and orchestrated And on Abramoff not exactly irrelevant..

From Democracy Now..

"And what does Jack Abramoff have to do with South Africa? In the 1980s, he was head of the pro-apartheid International Freedom Foundation in Washington.

Jack Abramoff. In 1989, Abramoff produced the film Red Scorpion. It was filmed in South African-occupied Namibia, with the cooperation of the notorious apartheid regime. But before that, Abramoff helped launch the pro-apartheid International Freedom Foundation in the mid-1980s. The IFF was promoted as an independent think tank, but it was actually part of an elaborate South African military intelligence operation set up to combat sanctions and undermine Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. While Abramoff headed the IFF in Washington, in South Africa it was run in part by Craig Williamson, a notorious military intelligence officer known for carrying out a series of bombings and assassinations. I asked Allister Sparks to talk about Craig Williamson's record.

ALLISTER SPARKS: Oh, Craig Williamson was one of our more odious intelligence spies. Intelligence? Well, I suppose, it's the right word. He was quite smart the way he went about things. He, first of all, infiltrated student organizations. He went abroad. He operated out of Geneva for a time, working in international students in that field, shopping many of his colleagues. They didn't know. They thought he was a good guy. And, you know, part of the student movement, which was opposed to apartheid, he embedded himself very successfully there.

But then, later, his activities became increasingly horrendous. I mean, he took to planting or sending letter bombs to various people. He was responsible for killing one of the leading white opposition figures, Ruth First, who was married to Joe Slovo. They were both communists, and I suppose it was deemed that that made them fair game. And she was blown up in her office at the University in Maputo. She was killed.

He was also involved in the killing of the family of an Afrikaner, a white Afrikaner dissident named Marius Schoon, whose -- a letter bomb killed his wife, his daughter, and injured a two-year-old boy who was left floundering around in this devastated home for two days before anyone found him. Yeah, that's the record of Craig Williamson.

He also was involved in an organization called Stratcom, which was Strategic Communications, which involved planting smear letters of anti-apartheid activists, or smear stories. Again, there were gullible journalists, or some of them were plants and colleagues of his. And he and his organization succeeded in getting stories published, which discredited, you know, really good brave activists and anybody who was perceived to be anti-government or was in their way or who needed to be discredited. You know, that's his career. That's his record. And you're telling me that Mr. Abramoff was a colleague, was involved with him. "

Zipporah  posted on  2006-04-12   16:28:08 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

So Abramoff supported Apartheid. Or did he? So what? Listen, there is no way you or anyone is going to convince me that Apartheid, a system as morally putrid and utterly devoid of humanity as Mao's genocidal communism was something to be admired. Kinda like the Russians waxing nostalgic for Uncle Joe. Or the Khmer for PolPot. It deserved to go.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-12   16:38:34 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Your problem is never living in the country you pass judgements on it's the same problem Bush is now dealing with in Iraq,there was a very good reason why whites and blacks were seperated but judging by your posts you will never get it... no matter what I say

robnoel  posted on  2006-04-12   16:46:54 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

there was a very good reason why whites and blacks were seperated

Ah, yes. All those wonderful good reasons.

They aren't seperated in the States, at least not formally, why move to a country that finally gave the black man his due rights.

swarthyguy  posted on  2006-04-12   16:50:17 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

Like I said you don't get it and never will you are lost in your own little misguided world...you suffer from buying into the "cultural Marxism"argument...if you seek help you may overcome it...here is your first class

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.

And finally, both 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. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that "all history is about which groups have power over which other groups." So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.

But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.

Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.

Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.

So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. 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?" He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.

Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the "latest thing."

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 initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, "Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this."

Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, "If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure," – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – "in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory."

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.

Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. "Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature." That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. "The theme of man’s domination of nature," according to Jay, " was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years." "Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness." In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer "discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture." And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his "protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality."

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 throws 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.

robnoel  posted on  2006-04-12   17:03:27 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

My point exactly.. it's Marxism at work..

Full Marx for George Bush

the entire article is excellent but these points point to what I was referring to:

"In particular, they reveal that the West has fallen in love with the myth of revolution. If Chairman Mao once said that "Marxism consists of a thousand truths but they all boil down to one sentence: ‘It is right to rebel’," that sentiment now forms a central tenet of Western political orthodoxy. One of the key catchphrases of George Bush’s presidency has been the eminently Trotskyite concept of world revolution: on 6th November 2003, the American president specifically said that, "The establishment of a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution." In his second inaugural speech, on 20th January, Bush announced nothing less than a programme of political emancipation for the whole planet – he said that America was pursuing "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." ......

"The original Marxist plan was for the socialist revolution to engulf the whole planet, and this plan was embraced by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. It famously came up against the buffers of Stalin’s alternative proposal to build socialism in one country first. In exile, Trotsky kept the idea of world revolution going by setting up the Fourth International in 1938. Within two years, Irving Kristol – the man who was later to be the founding father of the neo-conservatism movement which so dominates the Bush administration – joined it. Kristol’s own influence has been immense and his son, William, is now one of America’s most influential neo-cons. But Irving Kristol never renounced or condemned his Trotskyite past: in 1983, he wrote that he was still proud of it."........

""At least one passionate ex-Marxist supporter of Bush has told me, only half in jest: ‘After all, this is the only chance of supporting world revolution that looks like coming my way.’ "

If such comparisons seem outlandish, it is precisely because we in the West have failed to grasp the true nature of Marxism-Leninism. We think of Communism as being all about state ownership of the means of production and central planning: in fact, Karl Marx advocated neither. Instead, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the "soul of Marxism" lies in something called dialectical materialism. Derived from Hegel and ultimately Heraclitus, this doctrine holds that the world is in a constant state of flux, that nothing is absolutely true or false, and that everything is connected to everything else. Permanent revolution is consequently the natural state of reality, and hence of politics. Because flux is the natural state, Marx, Engels and Lenin all reasoned that all fixed forms of political association, i.e. the state, were oppressive, and that men would not be free until the state itself had "withered away."

How was this withering away of the state to occur? For Marx and Engels the answer was clear: world capitalism would do the trick. "...

Zipporah  posted on  2006-04-12   17:08:00 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

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