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Monday, June 11, 2007
Know Your Philosophical Enemy
You’ve often heard the questions—from the writers and commenters here at the esteemed Eternity Road and a lot of other fine web sites, from callers to talk radio shows, even from professional writers and columnists:
Why do academics and journalists constantly attack America for an Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, but say little or nothing about the millions unspeakably brutalized and butchered in Cuba, Red China, Syria and a hundred other hell-holes around the world? Why were the McCarthy hearings more evil and traumatic, and worth miles more celluloid in the Cineplex, than the end of 20 million (or more) human beings starved, tortured and murdered by Stalin and his mafia? How does a Ward Churchill or Leonard Jeffries get tenure at an American university? Why are marriage, the family and Christianity relentlessly caricatured, sneered at and attacked in the news and entertainment media? Why do the public schools teach, as fact, theories and policies that seem designed to damage the government and nation that constructs their classrooms and pays their bills?
Have you ever heard of ‘The Frankfurt School?’ Perhaps one in a hundred Americans, stopped on the street, could tell you the background of the term; but the ideas and theories of this “School” (never called such by it’s “members”) are the ideological basis for all the piles of intellectual excrement that so puzzle that American in the street when he hears snatches of talk on the radio or television, vague references to “Critical Theory,” “Deep Ecology,” “Women’s ways of knowing,” etc. etc. So-called Feminism, the New Left, hell, everything we think of under the umbrella of “The 60s” was given its philosophical base and justification by the thinkers and writers of the Frankfurt School: Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and a handful of others.
In this brief but useful article Charles A. Morse gives us a summary of the points made by Pat Buchanan in his book The Death of the West:
The Frankfort School would patent the familiar “Critical Theory” which was accurately defined by a student as the “essentially destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention, and conservatism.” Under Critical Theory, anything emanating from the west is to be libeled and attacked over and over again while at the same time, anything emerging from a “progressive” country or group is to be applauded including the murder of over 100 million people. All blame for societal and economic ills are to be shifted to the [W]est.
These academics, escapees from Hitler’s Germany given shelter in the United States, used their new positions and influence in academia to attempt to undermine everything their host country stood for. We’re now in our third or fourth generation of professors, social scientists and journalists trained at our major universities by adherents of this “School.” No wonder the United States is held to a different standard; no wonder that so many academics seem intent on biting the hand that feeds them. They’re Cultural Marxists, and they’re in an intellectual war with us bourgeoisie. Nothing would give them more satisfaction than to hollow out the foundation of the most prosperous and free society the world has ever known and bring it crashing down, to be replaced with a Dictatorship of Love that would only need a river of blood to feed it.
If you love your country, your family and your God, you had better get to know your enemy.
(Cross-posted at Illumination, Inc.)
Comments
Interesting information. What I keep wondering is why were we so susceptible? How did a nation, so steeped in traditional values, morals and freedom succumb to this line of thinking? How can we have gotten so out of kilter in essentially one generation?
Posted by on 06/11/2007 at 07:44 PMCollectivism had already become entrenched in the United States by the 1930s. The process had started with the “Progressive” era. (You can think of the “Progressive” era as a time when a self-styled elite tried to turn the United States into a fake European nation.) The standards of the 1930s said “these people are the wave of the future” and that turned them from mere cranks into the shapers of young minds.
Posted by Joseph Hertzlinger on 06/11/2007 at 10:10 PMIt’s the traditional magician’s trick: keep people distracted with one hand while you do the trick with the other. In this case, the distraction was intellectual discussion, which is almost irresistable to an academic or wanna-be academic. A lot of college late-night impromptu talks are debates on endless varieties of trivial topics; it’s the age for debate.
And so you get the poison into the universities, from when it is distributed widely, until you’ve taught the teachers. Once you’ve got the teachers thinking the way you want, you’re solid.
A lot of people have told me I would make a good teacher. I usually tell them that’s nice, but I’ve *seen* the crap people have to go through to be certified, and since I don’t want to be certifiable, I don’t. And yes, it is crap. Groupthink is encouraged— I knew a few people going through education classes that would needle the professors and their fellow students. One was a nice Orthodox Jewish lady who managed to infuriate her entire class by saying that the swastika— without any supporting context— was just a symbol. Everybody else was horrified that she wasn’t deeply offended…
Posted by B. Durbin on 06/11/2007 at 11:48 PMDon’t forget whose social philosophy provided the underpinning of the Frankfurt schools “moral” justification, Auguste Comte.
“Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal”
Posted by Chris Byrne on 06/12/2007 at 02:18 PMI appreciate the useful and perceptive comments. Yes, the 1930s were the perfect time to sell Cultural Marxism in America, and Comte was an important precursor to the Frankfurters. Also Freud, and even back to some of the leading French Revolutionaries.
Posted by Wahrheit on 06/12/2007 at 04:39 PM
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