The Origins of Political Correctness by Bill Lind

[Faust]

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.

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.

http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html

[Faust]

“Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology

Center for Cultural Conservatism

“Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology

Forward - What is “Political Correctness?” The following book, “Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology, answers that question.

http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essays/A_Foreword.pdf


Introduction & Chapter 1 -As Russell Kirk wrote, one of conservatism’s most important insights is that all ideologies are wrong. Ideology takes an intellectual system, a product of one or more philosophers, and says, “This system must be true.” Inevitably, reality ends up contradicting the system, usually on a growing number of points. But the ideology, by its nature, cannot adjust to reality; to do so would be to abandon the system.

http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essay...hapter_one.pdf

Chapter II - America is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as “Political Correctness.” Political Correctness seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which seeks a radical inversion of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution.

http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essays/C_chapter_two.pdf

Chapter III - On a growing number of university campuses the freedom to articulate and discuss ideas – a principle that has been the cornerstone of higher education since the time of Socrates – is eroding at an alarming rate. Consider just one increasing trend: hundreds (sometimes thousands) of copies of conservative student newspapers have been either stolen or publicly burned by student radicals. In many cases these acts have taken place with the tacit support of faculty and administrators. The perpetrators are rarely disciplined.

http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essay...pter_three.pdf

Chapter IV -Literature is, if not the most important cultural indicator, at least a significant benchmark of a society’s level of civilization. Our nature and environment combine to form each individual mind, which in turn expresses itself in words. Literature, as the words society collectively holds up as exemplary, is then a starting point of sorts – a window into the culture.

http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essay...apter_four.pdf


Chapter V -Perhaps no aspect of Political Correctness is more prominent in American life today than feminist ideology. Is feminism, like the rest of Political Correctness, based on the cultural Marxism imported from Germany in the 1930s? While feminism’s history in America certainly extends longer than sixty years, its flowering in recent decades has been interwoven with the unfolding social revolution carried forward by cultural Marxists.

http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essay...apter_five.pdf

Chapter VI -This is the sixth and final chapter in the Free Congress Foundation’s book on Political Correctness, or – to call it by its real name – cultural Marxism. It is a short bibliographical essay intended not as an exhaustive resource for scholars but as a guide for interested citizens who want to learn more about the ideology that is taking over America.

http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essays/G_chapter_six.pdf


http://www.freecongress.org/

[Faust]

What is the Frankfurt School? © by Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson CDR USN (Ret.)

Copyright 1 August 1999


If you have absorbed any of the background material presented in this series of essays on "'Cultural Marxism' at the U.S. Naval Academy," you should be quite concerned that our future naval officers are being subjected to psychic intimidation and indoctrination by behavioral psychologists and clinicians whose methods descend from Wilhelm Wundt [1]. The 'facilitators' and civilian professors in the 'Leadership and Ethics' program at the Academy are Wundtians all. The 'cultural Marxism' that has invaded our military academies and other military institutions is pervasive. As a result, these future naval officers will not have an understanding of the essence of what they are chosen to protect, that is, American civilization [2] -- the most vital and precious descendent of Western civilization.

One must wonder who 'they' are. Who in America today is at work destroying our traditions, our family bonds, our religious beginnings, our reinforcing institutions, indeed, our entire culture? What is it that is changing our American civilization?

Indeed, a thoughtful person should ask himself or herself whether or not all this 'change' from America's traditional culture is simply a random set of events played out by a random set of players, all independent of each other -- all disconnected from any central premise or guidance. It is entirely possible that chance is at work here and all of these 'threads' of American culture are the random workings of the human intellect (the pursuit of what is possible, vice what is appropriate) in a free, democratic society.

But suppose you were to learn that nearly all of the observations made in this series of essays are completely consistent with a 'design' -- that is a concept, a way of thinking, and a process for bringing it about. And suppose one could identify a small core group of people who designed just such a concept and thought through the process of infusing it into a culture. Wouldn't you be interested in at least learning about such a core group? Wouldn't you want to know who they were, what they thought, and how they conjured up a process for bringing their thoughts into action? For Americans with even a smidgeon of curiosity, the answer should be a resounding yes!

If such a core group could be found, then it would still depend on your personal 'world view' as to its significance. If you believe in the 'blind watchmaker,' that is, all cosmic and social events are random and guided only by the laws of nature, 'evolutionary' in the sense of competing with other random events for survival in a 'stochastic' world, you may choose to believe that such a core group was meaningless -- it may have existed but so what? It may have been only one of an uncountably large number of such 'groups' in the world's history. And you may believe that any particular group's 'window of opportunity' to influence future generations was passed by and did little to influence the course of America's history.

If you believe, instead, that nature has a 'design,' and that all events can be connected and we humans can make sense out of many of them if we will only 'connect all of the dots,' then you may believe that this small core group has great influence, even today, in American Culture. If this is your world view, you may (but not necessarily) even believe in a 'conspiracy. and 'conspirators' which and who aim to alter our culture on a vast scale.

It is clear, however, that irrespective of one's 'world view,' it is informative to at least know of such a core group (if it, indeed, existed), what it believed, what it set out to accomplish, and what methods it followed to take action on its beliefs.

Just such a core group did, indeed, exist. That is, history identifies a small group of German intellectuals who devised concepts, processes, and action plans which conform very closely to what Americans presently observe every day in their culture. Observations, such as those made in this series of essays, can be directly traced to the work of this core group of intellectuals. They were members of the Frankfurt School, formed in Germany in 1923. They were the forebears of what some proclaim as 'cultural Marxism,' a radical social movement that has transformed American culture. It is more commonly known today as 'political correctness.'

'Cultural Marxism' and 'critical theory' are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute, modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as the Frankfurt School [3]. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. While here, they migrated to major U.S. universities (Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and California at Berkeley). These intellectual Marxists included Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, 'make love, not war,' during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

By promoting the dialectic of 'negative' criticism, that is, pointing out the rational contradictions in a society's belief system, the Frankfurt School 'revolutionaries' dreamed of a utopia where their rules governed [4]. "Their Critical Theory had to contain a strongly imaginative, even utopian strain, which transcends the limits of reality." Its tenets would never be subject to experimental evidence. The pure logic of their thoughts would be incontrovertible. As a precursor to today's 'postmodernism' in the intellectual academic community, [5] "...it recognized that disinterested scientific research was impossible in a society in which men were themselves not yet autonomous...the researcher was always part of the social object he was attempting to study." This, of course, is the concept which led to the current fetish for the rewriting of history, and the vogue for our universities' law, English literature, and humanities disciplines -- deconstruction.

Critical theory rejected the ideal of Western Civilization in the age of modern science, that is, the verification or falsifying [6] of theory by experimental evidence. Only the superior mind was able to fashion the 'truths' from observation of the evidence. There would be no need to test these hypotheses against everyday experience.

The Frankfurt school studied the 'authoritarian personality' which became synonymous with the male, the patriarchal head of the American family. A modern utopia would be constructed by these idealistic intellectuals by 'turning Western civilization' upside down. This utopia would be a product of their imagination, a product not susceptible to criticism on the basis of the examination of evidence. This 'revolution' would be accomplished by fomenting a very quiet, subtle and slowly spreading 'cultural Marxism' which would apply to culture the principles of Karl Marx bolstered by the modern psychological tools of Sigmund Freud. Thus, 'cultural Marxism' became a marriage of Marx and Freud aimed at producing a 'quiet' revolution in the United States of America. This 'quiet' revolution has occurred in America over the past 30 years. While America slept!

What is 'cultural Marxism?' Why should it even be considered when the world's vast experiment with the economic theory of Karl Marx has recently gone down to defeat with the disintegration of Soviet communism? Didn't America win the Cold War against the spread of communism? The answer is a resounding 'yes, BUT. We won the 55-year Cold War but, while winning it abroad, we have failed to understand that an intellectual elite has subtly but systematically and surely converted the economic theory of Marx to culture in American society. And they did it while we were busy winning the Cold War abroad. They introduced 'cultural Marxism' into the mainstream of American life over a period of thirty years, while our attention was diverted elsewhere.

The vehicle for this introduction was the idealistic Boomer elite, those young middle-class and well-to-do college students who became the vanguard of America's counter-culture revolution of the mid-1960s -- those draft-dodging, pot-smoking, hippies who demonstrated against the Vietnam War and who fomented the destructive (to women) 'women's liberation' movement. These New Totalitarians [7] are now in power as they have come to middle-age and control every public institution in our nation. But that is getting ahead of the story.

The cauldron for implementing this witches brew were the elites of the Boomer generation. They are the current 'foot soldiers' of the original Frankfurt School gurus. The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s was set in motion and guided intellectually by the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School -- Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, and others [8,9]., Its influence is now felt in nearly every institution in the United States. The elite Boomers, throwbacks to the dangerous idealist Transcendental generation of the mid-1800s, are the 'agents of change,' who have introduced 'cultural Marxism' into American life.

William S. Lind relates [10] that 'cultural Marxism' is an ideology with deep roots. It did not begin with the counter-culture revolution in the mid-1960s. Its roots go back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci [11]. These roots, over time, spread to the writings of Herbert Marcuse.

Herbert Marcuse was one of the most prominent Frankfurt School promoters of Critical Theory's social revolution among college and university students in the 1960s. It is instructive to review what he has written on the subject:

"One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the
whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society ...
there is one thing we can say with complete assurance. The traditional idea of revolution
and the traditional strategy of revolution have ended. These ideas are old-fashioned ...
what we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system."
This sentiment was first expressed by the early 20th century Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci, a young communist who died in one of Mussolini's prisons in 1937 at the age of 46, conjured up the notion of a 'quiet' revolution that could be diffused throughout a culture -- over a period of time -- to destroy it from within. He was the first to suggest that the application of psychology to break the traditions, beliefs, morals, and will of a people could be accomplished quietly and without the possibility of resistance. He deduced that "The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2,000 years..." and a culture based on this religion could only be captured from within.

Gramsci insisted that alliances with non-Communist leftist groups would be essential to Communist victory. In our time, these would include radical feminist groups, extremist environmental organizations, so-called civil rights movements, anti-police associations, internationalist-minded groups, liberal church denominations, and others. Working together, these groups could create a united front working for the destructive transformation of the old Judeo-Christian culture of the West.

By winning 'cultural hegemony,' Gramsci pointed out that they could control the deepest wellsprings of human thought -- through the medium of mass psychology. Indeed, men could be made to 'love their servitude.' In terms of the gospel of the Frankfurt School, resistance to 'cultural Marxism' could be completely negated by placing the resister in a psychic 'iron cage.' The tools of mass psychology could be applied to produce this result.

The essential nature of Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary strategy is reflected in a 1990s book [12] by the American Boomer author, Charles A. Reich, 'The Greening of America.' "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and the culture, and it will change the political structure as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is the revolution of the New Generation." Of course this New Generation would be Reich's elite Boomer generation. And the mantra for these New Age 'foot soldiers' of the Frankfurt School prophets, would be 'have the courage to change [13].'

The Frankfurt School theorized that the 'authoritarian personality' is a product of the patriarchal family. This idea is in turn directly connected to Frederich Engels' 'The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,' which promotes matriarchy. Furthermore, it was Karl Marx who wrote about the radical notion of a 'community of women' in the Communist manifesto. And it was Karl Marx who wrote disparagingly about the idea that the family was the basic unit of society in 'The German Ideology' of 1845.

'The Authoritarian personality,' studied by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s in America, prepared the way for the subsequent warfare against the masculine gender promoted by Herbert Marcuse and his band of social revolutionaries under the guise of 'women's liberation' and the New Left movement in the 1960s. The evidence that psychological techniques for changing personality is intended to mean emasculation of the American male is provided by Abraham Maslow, founder of Third Force Humanist Psychology and a promoter of the psychotherapeutic classroom, who wrote that, '...the next step in personal evolution is a transcendence of both masculinity and femininity to general humanness.' The Marxist revolutionaries knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it. They have succeeded in accomplishing much of their agenda.

But how can we claim the 'causes' of the breakdown of our schools, our universities, indeed, the very fiber of our culture were a product of a tiny group of intellectuals who immigrated from Germany in 1933? Given all of the special-interest groups involved in these activities, how can we trace these 'causes' to the Frankfurt school? Look at some of the evidence.

As an example, postmodern reconstruction of the history of Western Civilization (now prevalent in our universities) has its roots in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This rewriting of history by the postmodern scholars in America has only recently come under attack. Keith Windschuttle, in his book, 'Killing of History,' has severely criticized the rush to 'relativism' by historiographers. What is truly astonishing, however, is that 'relativism' has largely supplanted the pursuit of truth as a goal in historical study [14]. George G. Iggers' recently published book, 'Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge,' reminds us of the now famous line by Hayden White, a postmodernist, "Historical narratives...are verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found." He quotes other postmodernists, mostly non- historians, who [15] "...reinforce the proposition that truth and reality are primarily authoritarian weapons of our times." We now recognize the source of this postmodern assault -- the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School who became experts in criticizing the 'authoritarian personality' in American culture.

Herbert London refutes White's proposition by observing, "...if history is largely invention, who can say with authority that the American Revolution came before the French Revolution?" He observes that evidence has taken a back seat to inventiveness. He thus cuts right to the chase -- the inventions of postmodernism, which are cutting successive generations of Americans off from their culture and their history, evolved directly from the 'cultural Marxist' scholars of the Frankfurt School.

How did this situation come about in America's universities? Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed [16] that it slipped past those traditional academics almost unobserved until it was too late. It occurred so 'quietly' that when they 'looked up,' postmodernism was upon them with a vengeance. "They were surrounded by a tidal wave of faddish multicultural subjects such as radical feminism, deconstructed relativism as history and other courses" which undermine the perpetuation of Western Civilization. Indeed, this tidal wave slipped by just as Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School had envisioned -- a 'quiet' revolution. A revolution that could not be resisted by force.

It is of interest to note that the 'sensitivity training' techniques used in our public schools over the past 30 years and which are now employed by the U.S. military to educate the troops about 'sexual harassment' were developed during World War II and thereafter by Kurt Lewin [17] and his proteges. One of them, Abraham Maslow, was a member of the Frankfurt school and the author [18] of 'The Art of Facilitation' which is a manual used during such 'sensitivity' training. Thereby teachers were indoctrinated not to teach but to 'facilitate.' This manual describes the techniques developed by Kurt Lewin and others to change a person's world view via participation in small-group encounter sessions. Teachers were to become amateur group therapists. The classroom became the center of self-examination, therapeutic circles where children (and later on, military [19] personnel) talked about their own subjective feelings. This technique was designed to convince children they were the sole authority in their own lives.

It is important to realize that this movement, 'cultural Marxism,' exists, understand where it came from, and what its objectives were -- the complete destruction of Western Civilization in America. That is, these 'cultural Marxists' aimed to destroy, slowly but surely from the bottom up, the entire fabric of American Civilization.

By the end of World War II, almost all the original Frankfurt School members had become American citizens. This meant the beginning of a new English-speaking audience for the school. Now the focus was on American forms of authoritarianism. With this shift in subject matter came a subtle change in the center of the Institute's work. In America, authoritarianism appeared in different forms than its European counterpart. Instead of terror or coercion, more gentle forms of enforced conformism had been developed. According to Martin Jay, [20] "Perhaps the most effective of these were to be found in the cultural field. American mass culture thus became one of the central concerns of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s."

Since the 1940s, subtle changes appeared in the Frankfurt School's descriptions of their work. For example, the opposite of the 'authoritarian personality' was no longer the 'revolutionary,' as it had been in previous studies aimed at Europeans. In America, it was now the 'democratic' who opposed the 'authoritarian personality.' Thus, their language matched more closely the liberal [21] "...New Deal rather than Marxist or radical.." language. Education for tolerance, rather than praxis for revolutionary change, was the ostensible goal of their research. They were cleverly merging their language with the mainstream of liberal left thought in America while maintaining their 'cultural Marxist' objectives.

Toleration had never been an end in itself for the Frankfurt School, and yet the non-authoritarian (utopian) personality, insofar as it was defined, was posited as a person with a non-dogmatic tolerance for diversity [22]. This thought is dominant in today's power elite of the Boomer generation, the New Totalitarians.

One of the basic tenets of Critical Theory was the necessity to break down the contemporary family. The Institute scholars preached that [23] "...Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change." The 'generation gap' of the 1960s and the 'gender gap' of the 1990s are two aspects of the attempt by the elite Boomers (taking a page out of 'cultural Marxism') to transform American culture into their 'Marxist' utopia.

The transformation of American culture envisioned by the 'cultural Marxists' is based on matriarchal theory. That is, they propose transforming American culture into a female-dominated one. This is a direct throwback to Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School member who considered matriarchal theory in psychoanalytic terms. In 1933, he wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that matriarchy was the only genuine family type of 'natural society.'

Eric Fromm, another charter member of the Institute, was also one of the most active advocates of matriarchal theory. Fromm was especially taken with the idea that all love and altruistic feelings were ultimately derived from the maternal love necessitated by the extended period of human pregnancy and postnatal care. "Love was thus not dependent on sexuality, as Freud had supposed. In fact, sex was more often tied to hatred and destruction. Masculinity and femininity [24] 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." This dogma was the precedent for today's radical feminist pronouncements appearing in nearly every major newspaper and TV program, including the television newscasts. For these current day radicals, male and female roles result from cultural indoctrination in America -- an indoctrination carried out by the male patriarchy to the detriment of women. Nature plays no role in this matter.

But in terms of destruction and disintegration, Critical Theory absorbed by the 'change agents' and other social revolutionaries has led them to declare their intent to restructure America. As they proclaim, this means their activities have been directed toward the disintegration of the traditional white male power structure. As anyone with eyes to view present-day television and motion pictures can confirm, this has been largely achieved. In other words, Critical Theory, as applied mass psychology, brought forth a 'quiet' psychic revolution which facilitated an actual physical revolution that has become visible everywhere in the United States of America.

It was the destructive criticism of the primary elements of American culture that inspired the 1960s counter-culture revolution. As the name implies, this false 'spiritual awakening' by the idealist Boomers in their coming-of-age years was an effort to transform the prevailing culture into an inverted or opposite kind of culture that is a necessary prelude to social revolution. Now that these elite Boomers are in positions of power in the United States, they are completing their work of destroying every institution that has been built up over 200 years of American history. Their aim is to destroy any vestige of the Anglo-American path [25] taken by Western Civilization in forming the unique American culture.

Most Americans do not yet realize that they are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new social order in the world. These revolutionaries are the New Age elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians [26]. They now control every public institution in the United States of America. Their 'quiet' revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearly complete. It was based on the intellectual foundation of the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School. Its completion depends on keeping the American male in his psychic 'iron cage.'

The confluence of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' within the span of a single generation, that of the elite Boomers (possibly the most dangerous [27] generation in America's history), has imposed this yoke on the American male. It remains to be seen whether or not he will continue his 'voluntary submission' to a future of slavery in a new American matriarchy, the precursor to a state of complete anarchy.

If we allow this subversion of American values and interests to continue, we will (in future generations) lose all that our ancestors suffered and died for. We are forewarned. A reading of history -- it is all in mainstream historical accounts -- tells us that we are about to lose the most precious thing we have -- our individual freedoms.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes:
1) Lionni, Paolo, "Leipzig Connection," Heron Books, 1993. Wundt, in the 1870s, advanced the then-radical notion of man as an 'animal,' not accountable for his conduct, which was said to be caused entirely by forces beyond his control. According to Wundt's thinking, in a human being there is nothing there to begin with but a body, a brain, and a nervous system. Therefore, teachers must try to educate a person by inducing sensations in that nervous system. Through these experiences, the individual will learn to respond to any given stimulus, with the 'correct' response. Thus, a child's actions are thought to be preconditioned and beyond his control, because he is simply a stimulus-response mechanism.
2) Vazsonyi, Balint, "America's 30 Years War: Who is Winning?,' Regnery, 1998.
3) Raehn, Raymond V., "The Historical Roots of 'Political Correctness,'" Free Congress Foundation, Number 44, June 1997.
4) Jay, Martin, "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950," pp. 77, University of California Press, 1973.
5) Ibid, pp. 81.
6) Ibid, pp. 82.
7) Atkinson, Gerald L., "The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America's Future," Atkinson Associates Press, 1996.
8) Jay, Martin, "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950," University of California Press, 1973.
9) Wiggershaus, Rolf, "The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance," The MIT Press, 1994.
10) Lind, William S., "What is 'Political Correctness?," Essays on our Times, Free Congress Foundation, Number 43, March 1997.
11) Ibid.
12) Reich, Charles A., "The Greening of America," Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1995.
13) A phrase commonly heard during the 1992 Presidential campaign.
14) London, Herbert, "Discipline of history under assault," The Washington Times, 26 October 1997.
15) Ibid.
16) Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Panel on 'Academic Reform: Internal Sources,' National Association of Scholars, NAS Sixth General Conference, 3-5 May 1996.
17) Marrow, Alfred Jay, "The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work of Kurt Lewin," Teachers College Press, new York, 1977. Kurt Lewin was a primary figure in the wartime research that was later translated into the techniques used today in 'sensitivity training.'
18) Raehn, Raymond V., "Critical Theory: A Special Research Report, 1 April 1996.
19) Editorial, "The crying of the admirals," The Washington Times, 3 November 1995. The U.S. Naval Academy has added female 'role models' to the faculty. In August 1994, the Academy placed a new emphasis on conflict resolution and consciousness-raising. "As 'Lean On Me' started playing, Master Chief Liz Johns gave the plebes her final orders: stand in a circle, sway to the music, sing along, and hug. From the circle came the sharp sniffle of sobs. The future admirals of America were crying."
20) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 172.
21) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 227.
22) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 248.
23) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 135.
24) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 95.
25) Vazsonyi, Balint, "America's Thirty Years War: Who is Winning?," Regnery, 1998.
26) Ibid, Atkinson, Gerald L.
27) Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "Generations: The History of America's Future -- 1584 to 2069," pp. 382, William Morrow & Company, 1991. "We can foresee a full range of possible outcomes, from stirring achievement to apocalyptic tragedy...Boomers can best serve civilization by restraining themselves (or by letting themselves be restrained by others) until their twilight years, when their spiritual energy would find expression not in midlife leadership [for which they are not equipped], but in elder stewardship."

http://www.newtotalitarians.com/FrankfurtSchool.html







Herbert Marcuse, a countercultural guru of the 1960's, was a member of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, whose activities are discussed extensively in chapter 5 (of Culture of Critique). *In Eros and Civilization Marcuse accepts Freuds theory that Western culture is pathogenic as a result of suppression of sexual urges, paying homage to Freud, who "recognized the work of repression in the highest values of Western civilization - which presuppose and perpetuate unfreedom and suffering.......

Like Marcuse (Erich) Fromm was a member of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. A cornerstone of this approach is to view contemporary society as pathogenic and the development of socialism as ushering in a new era of loving human relationships. *These writer's were highly influential:[/b][/quote]

An extensive review folows showing very convincingly that these attitudes that "if only society would cease attempting to control sexuality, all would be well" were basically at the substance of the 60's "sexual revolution", which in its significant sense was one of social mores.

Whither Judaism and the West, The last chapter of Culture of Critique:
http://www.euvolution.com/articles/lastchap.html

[Faust]

Multiculturalism and Marxism

An Englishman looks at the Soviet origins of political correctness.

by Frank Ellis

"For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying out bullets."

– George Orwell, 1984
No successful society shows a spontaneous tendency towards multiculturalism or multiracialism. Successful and enduring societies show a high degree of homogeneity. Those who support multiculturalism either do not know this or, what is more likely, realize that if they are to transform Western societies into strictly regulated, racial-feminist bureaucracies they must first undermine those societies.

This transformation is as radical and revolutionary as the project to establish Communism in the Soviet Union. Just as every aspect of life had to be brought under political control in order for the commissars to impose their vision of society, the multiculturalists hope to control and dominate every aspect of our lives. Unlike the hard tyranny of the Soviets, theirs is a softer, gentler tyranny but one with which they hope to bind us as tightly as a prisoner in the Gulag. Today's "political correctness" is the direct descendent of Communist terror and brainwashing.

Unlike the obviously alien implantation that was Communism, what makes multiculturalism particularly insidious and difficult to combat is that it usurps the moral and intellectual infrastructure of the West. Although it claims to champion the deepest held beliefs of the West, it is in fact a perversion and systematic undermining of the very idea of the West.


Stalin: the spiritual forebear.
What we call "political correctness" actually dates back to the Soviet Union of the 1920s (politicheskaya pravil'nost' in Russian), and was the extension of political control to education, psychiatry, ethics, and behavior. It was an essential component of the attempt to make sure all aspects of life were consistent with ideological orthodoxy – which is the distinctive feature of all totalitarianisms. In the post-Stalin period, political correctness even meant that dissent was seen as a symptom of mental illness, for which the only treatment was incarceration.

Whites are like the kulaks:
even if they are all innocent they are members
of the class
that is guilty of everything.
As Mao Tse-Tung, the Great Helmsman, put it, "Not to have a correct political orientation is like not having a soul." Mao's little red book is full of exhortations to follow the correct path of Communist thought, and by the late 1960s Maoist political correctness was well established in American universities. The final stage of development, which we are witnessing now, is the result of cross-fertilization with all the latest "isms:" anti-racism, feminism, structuralism, and post-modernism, which now dominate university curricula. The result is a new and virulent strain of totalitarianism, whose parallels to the Communist era are obvious. Today's dogmas have led to rigid requirements of language, thought, and behavior, and violators are treated as if they were mentally unbalanced, just as Soviet dissidents were.

Some have argued that it is unfair to describe Stalin's regime as "totalitarian," pointing out that one man, no matter how ruthlessly he exercised power, could not control all the functions of the state. But, in fact, he didn't have to. Totalitarianism was much more than state terror, censorship, and concentration camps; it was a state of mind in which the very idea of a private opinion or point of view had been destroyed. The totalitarian propagandist forces people to believe that slavery is freedom, squalor is bounty, ignorance is knowledge, and that a rigidly closed society is the most open in the world. And once enough people are made to think this way, it is functionally totalitarian even if a single dictator does not personally control everything.

Today, of course, we are made to believe that diversity is strength, perversity is virtue, success is oppression, and that relentlessly repeating these ideas over and over is "tolerance and diversity." Indeed, the multicultural revolution works subversion everywhere, just as Communist revolutions did: judicial activism undermines the rule of law; "tolerance" weakens the conditions that make real tolerance possible; universities, which should be havens of free inquiry, practice censorship that rivals that of the Soviets. At the same time, we find a relentless drive for equality: the Bible, Shakespeare, and rap "music" are just texts with "equally valid perspectives;" deviant and criminal behavior is an "alternative life-style." Today, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment would have to be repackaged as Crime and Counseling.

In the Communist era, the totalitarian state was built on violence. The purges of the 1930s and the Great Terror (which was Mao's model for the Cultural Revolution) used violence against "class enemies" to compel loyalty. Party members signed death warrants for "enemies of the people" knowing that the accused were innocent, but believing in the correctness of the charges. In the 1930s, collective guilt justified murdering millions of Russian peasants. As cited by Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow (p. 143), the state's view of this class was, "not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything." Stigmatizing entire institutions and groups makes it much easier to carry out wholesale change.


The wisdom of the oppressed.
This, of course, is the beauty of "racism" and "sexism" for today's culture attackers – sin can be extended far beyond individuals to include institutions, literature, language, history, laws, customs, entire civilizations. The charge of "institutional racism" is no different from declaring an entire economic class an enemy of the people. "Racism" and "sexism" are multiculturalism's assault weapons, its Big Ideas, just as class warfare was for Communists, and the effects are the same. If a crime can be collectivized all can be guilty because they belong to the wrong group. When young whites are victims of racial preferences they are to-day's version of the Russian peasants. Even if they themselves have never oppressed anyone they "belong to the race that is guilty of everything."

The purpose of these multi-cultural campaigns is to destroy the self. The mouth moves, the right gestures follow, but they are the mouth and gestures of a zombie, the new Soviet man or, today, PC-man. And once enough people have been conditioned this way, violence is no longer necessary. We reach steady-state totalitarianism, in which the vast majority know what is expected of them and play their allotted roles.

The Russian experiment with revolution and totalitarian social engineering has been fully chronicled by two of that country's greatest writers, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. They brilliantly dissect the methods and psychology of totalitarian control. Dostoevsky's The Devils has no equal as a penetrating and disturbing analysis of the revolutionary and utopian mind. The "devils" are radical students of the middle and upper classes flirting with something they do not understand. The ruling class tries to ingratiate itself with them. The universities have essentially declared war on society at large. The great cry of the student radicals is freedom: freedom from the established norms of society, freedom from manners, freedom from inequality, freedom from the past.

Russia's descent into vice and insanity is a powerful warning of what happens when a nation declares war on the past in the hope of building a terrestrial paradise. Dostoevsky did not live to see the abominations he predicted but Solzhenitsyn experienced them first hand. The Gulag Archipelago and August 1914 can be seen as histories of ideas, as attempts to account for the dreadful fate that befell Russia after 1917.

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is the idea that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation).
Solzhenitsyn identifies education and the way teachers saw their duty as instilling hostility to all forms of traditional authority as the major factors that explain why Russia's youth was seduced by revolutionary ideas. In the West, during the 1960s and 1970s – which can collectively be called "the 60s" – we hear a powerful echo of the collective mental capitulation of Russia that took place in the 1870s and continued through the revolution.

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is the idea that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation). Truth is not something to be established by rational inquiry, but depends on the perspective of the speaker. In the multicultural universe, a person's perspective is "valued" (a favorite word) according to class. Feminists, blacks, environmentalists and homosexuals have a greater claim to truth because they are "oppressed." In the misery of "oppression" they see truth more clearly than the white heterosexual men who "oppress" them. This is a perfect mirror image of the Marxist proletariat's moral and intellectual superiority over the bourgeoisie. Today, "oppression" confers a "privileged perspective" that is essentially infallible. To borrow an expression from Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah, black and feminist activists are "case-hardened against logical argument" – just as Communist true believers were.

Indeed, feminist and anti-racist activists openly reject objective truth. Confident that they have intimidated their opposition, feminists are able to make all kinds of demands on the assumption that men and women are equal in every way. When outcomes do not match that belief, this is only more evidence of white-male deviltry.

One of the most depressing sights in the West today, particularly in the universities and in the media, is the readiness to treat feminism as a major contribution to knowledge and to submit to its absurdities. Remarkably, this requires no physical violence. It is the desire to be accepted that makes people truckle to these middle-class, would-be revolutionaries. Peter Verkhovensky, who orchestrates murder and mayhem in The Devils, expresses it with admirable contempt: "All I have to do is to raise my voice and tell them that they are not sufficiently liberal." The race hustlers, of course, play the same game: Accuse a late-20th century liberal of "racism" or "sexism" and watch him fall apart in an orgy of self-flagellation and Maoist self-criticism. Even "conservatives" wilt at the sound of those words.

Ancient liberties and assumptions of innocence mean nothing when it comes to "racism:" You are guilty until proven innocent, which is nearly impossible, and even then you are forever suspect. An accusation of "racism" has much the same effect as an accusation of witchcraft did in 17th century Salem.

It is the power of the charge of "racism" that stifles the derision that would otherwise meet the idea that we should "value diversity." If "diversity" had real benefits whites would want more of it, and would ask that yet more cities in the U.S. and Europe be handed over to immigrants. Of course, they are not rushing to embrace diversity and multiculturalism; they are in headlong flight in the opposite direction. Valuing diversity is a hobby for people who do not have to endure its benefits.

A multicultural society is one that is inherently prone to conflict, not harmony. This is why we see a huge growth in government bureaucracies dedicated to resolving disputes along racial and cultural lines. These disputes can never be resolved permanently because the bureaucrats deny one of the major causes: race. This is why there is so much talk of the "multicultural" rather than the more precise "multiracial." Ever more changes and legislation are introduced to make the host society ever more congenial to racial minorities. This only creates more demands, and encourages the non-shooting war against whites, their civilization, and even the idea of the West.

How is such a radical program carried forward? The Soviet Union had a massive system of censorship – the Communists even censored street maps – and it is worth noting there were two kinds of censorship: the blatant censorship of state agencies and the more subtle self-censorship that the inhabitants of "peoples democracies" soon learned.

The situation in the West is not so straightforward. There is nothing remotely comparable to Soviet-style government censorship and yet we have deliberate suppression of dissent. Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck, J. Philippe Rushton, Chris Brand, Michael Levin, and Glayde Whitney have all been vilified for their racial views. The case of Prof. Rushton is particularly troubling because his academic work was investigated by the police. The attempt to silence him was based on provisions of Canadian hate speech laws. This is just the sort of intellectual terror one expected in the old Soviet Union. To find it in a country that prides itself on being a pillar of Western liberal democracy is one of the most disturbing consequences of multiculturalism.

A mode of opinion control softer than outright censorship is the current obsession with fictional role models. Today, the feminist and anti-racist theme is constantly worked into movies and television as examples of Bartold Brecht's principle that the Marxist artist must show the world not as it is but as it ought to be. This is why we have so many screen portrayals of wise black judges; street-wise, straight-shooting lady policemen; minority computer geniuses; and, of course, degenerate white men. This is almost a direct borrowing from Soviet-style socialist realism, with its idealized depictions of sturdy proletarians routing capitalist vermin.

Multiculturalism has the same ambitions as Soviet Communism. It is absolutist in the pursuit of its various agendas, yet it relativizes all other perspectives in its attack on its enemies. Multiculturalism is an ideology to end all other ideologies, and these totalitarian aspirations permit us to draw two conclusions: First, multiculturalism must eliminate all opposition everywhere. There can be no safe havens for counter-revolutionaries. Second, once it is established the multicultural paradise must be defended at all costs. Orthodoxy must be maintained with all the resources of the state.

Such a society would be well on its way to becoming totalitarian. It might not have concentration camps, but it would have re-education centers and sensitivity training for those sad creatures who still engaged in "white-male hegemonic discourse." Rather than the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet state we would have a softer version in which our minds would be wards of the state. We would be liberated from the burden of thought and therefore unable to fall into the heresy of political incorrectness.

If we think of multiculturalism as yet another manifestation of 20th century totalitarianism, can we take solace in the fact that the Soviet Union eventually collapsed? Is multiculturalism a phase, a periodic crisis through which the West is passing, or does it represent something fundamental and perhaps irreversible?


An 1896 police photograph of Lenin.
Despite the efforts of pro-Soviet elements, the West recognized the Soviet empire as a threat. It does not recognize multiculturalism as a threat in the same way. For this reason, many of its assumptions and objectives remain unchallenged. Still, there are some grounds for optimism, for example, the speed with which the term "political correctness" caught on. It took the tenured radicals completely by surprise, but it is only a small gain.

In the long term, the most important battleground in the war against multiculturalism is the United States. The struggle is likely to be a slow, frustrating war of attrition. If it fails, the insanity of multiculturalism is something white Americans will have to live with. Of course, at some point whites may demand an end to being punished because of black failure. As Prof. Michael Hart argues in The Real American Dilemma (published by New Century Foundation and available from AR for $11.95, postage paid), there could be racial partition of the United States. We may find that what happened in the Balkans is not peculiar to that part of the world. Race war is not something the affluent radicals deliberately seek but their policies are pushing us in that direction.

I have argued so far that the immediate context for understanding political correctness and multiculturalism is the Soviet Union and its catastrophic utopian experiment. And yet the PC/multicultural mentality is much older. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke offers a portrait of the French radicals that is still relevant 200 years after he wrote it:
"They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery."


Of course, multiculturalism is far from being a solution to racial or cultural conflict. Quite the contrary. Multiculturalism is the road to a special kind of hell that we have already seen in this gruesome 20th century, a hell that man, having abandoned reason and in revolt against God's order, builds for himself and others. Text end.

Frank Ellis is professor of Russian at the University of Leeds in England. E.mail: rusnje@leeds.ac.uk

http://www.amren.com/9911issue/9911issue.html#cover

[OswaldTheOsprey]

Brilliant analysis! The Frankfurt School cultural marxists control academia, the mainstream media, Hollywood and the Democrat Party. Evil personified.

OswaldTheOsprey

[OswaldTheOsprey]

More of the evil.

OswaldTheOsprey

[Faust]

Transcript of the video: Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School Story.

What Was the Frankfurt School?

Produced by the Conservative Citizens' Foundation

Introduction Narrated by William Rolen, M.A
.

Introduction Written by Brent Nelson, Ph.D .

Recently, there has been much discussion in traditionalist circles regarding the Frankfurt School. This was a very influential group of theorists who inspired a particularly successful movement of applied Marxism.

Even in his own lifetime, Karl Marx attempted to apply his theories in revolutionary action. When Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, he was a leader of the Communist League. However, these early communists failed in their revolutionary attempt. Marx fled into exile and wrote Capital (1867) and other works.

The first school of applied Marxism was Revisionist Marxism, founded by Eduard Bernstein. Revisionists advocated revolution through parliamentary gradualism. Their tradition endures in the Social Democratic parties of Western Europe. Marx himself rejected the Social Democrats.

Most famous are the Soviet Marxists, Marxists who as Bolsheviks seized control of Russia in 1917. They are Marxist- Leninists.

The Frankfurt School through its Institut fuer Sozialforschung, founded in 1923 at Germany's University of Frankfurt, developed a type of applied Marxism quite different from Revisionist Marxism and Soviet Marxism. The Frankfurt School developed Freudo-Marxism, a theory which synthesized the theories of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx into one corrosive, subversive force directed against Western Civilization.

Marxism after Marx, who died in 1883, developed in response to the failures of Marx's prophecies. Revisionist Marxism arose when the working class failed to become poorer and more militant, as Marx had predicted. Marx had also predicted that the workers would develop a sense of international solidarity, would come to see that they had no fatherlands. However, when world war erupted in 1914, the workers first saw themselves as Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, etc.

One great triumph for Marxism came out of the first world war: the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The Bolsheviks or Leninists said that the revolution had failed in Western Europe because the capitalists in those nations had bribed their workers with loot stolen from their colonies. If revolution did not arise everywhere, according to Lenin it could only be because of colonialism and imperialism. (In the late 1930's, the term "racism" was added.)

Bolshevism briefly seized power in Hungary and Bavaria in 1919, but soon lost it. In Italy, Marxism suffered an even more stunning defeat: A former revisionist Marxist, Mussolini, became a renegade and developed his own variety of nationalistic socialism, which he called fascism (after the fasces, symbol of state power in ancient Rome). The fascists totally suppressed Marxism.

The founders of the Institut observing fascism in 1923 were quite alarmed. How could the working class go so wrong? Why did so many workers behave in an irrational manner? They concluded that the mass psychology of the workers had to be considered. They believed that the new theory of psychoanalysis, Freudianism, with its emphasis on irrational impulses and drives, would help explain why the workers had accepted fascism.

Although the Frankfurt School had some tenuous links with Soviet Marxism, most notably through Georg Lukacs (born Loewinger), a Stalinist, they largely followed their own line of development. Thus, they were enabled to penetrate into the center of consciousness of the United States through the mass media and certain areas of higher education.

Until 1933, however, the Frankfurt School was active only in Germany. The rise to power of Hitler, another national socialist, whose movement was even more ethnocentric than that of Mussolini, forced the Frankfurt School into exile. They moved en masse to the United States and established the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University.

The members of the Frankfurt School included Nathan Ackerman, Theodor Adorno (born Wiesengrund), Walter Benjamin, Bruno Bettelheim, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Carl Gruenberg, Julian Gumperz, Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Kurt Mandelbaum, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Friedrich Pollock, Ernst Schachtel, Adries Sternheim, and Karl Wittfogel.

Wittfogel, the son of a Lutheran pastor, broke with Marxism after coming to America and testified against the communists before the U. S. Senate. Wittfogel is best known for his brilliant analysis of communism, Oriental Despotism.

Herbert Marcuse probably had the greatest influence. He was the primary theoretician of the New Left. Bruno Bettelheim attained fame as a child psychiatrist. Leo Lowenthal become prominent in mass media studies.

The Institute of Social Research at Columbia was closed in 1950 when Max Horkheimer returned to Germany to play an important role in the denazification program. The re-established Institut largely ended with Horkheimer's death in 1975.

The Frankfurt School developed a theory to explain the workers' acceptance of fascism: The capitalist system developed and sustained a type of family structure, a patriarchal family structure, which produced children with a particular character structure, the authoritarian personality. People who had authoritarian personalities accepted, sustained, even promoted fascism. Fascism was defined to include any manifestation of nationalism, ethnocentrism, racism developed to a point of conscious political expression.

From a Freudo-Marxist standpoint, people with authoritarian personalities were mentally unhealthy. They needed therapy. Since at least ten percent of Americans had authoritarian personalities, it was obvious that mass therapy was needed. This went beyond the Freudian couch and talking cure. The mass therapy was to be carried out through the public education system and the mass media.

The Institute for Social Research was most famous for its Studies in Prejudice. The Authoritarian Personality and Dynamics of Prejudice were the most influential among these. The late Christopher Lasch, who was by no means a rightist, concluded that "The purpose and design of Studies in Prejudice dictated the conclusion that prejudice, a psychological disorder rooted in the `authoritarian' personality structure, could be eradicated only by subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy -- by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum."

Obviously, the Frankfurt School had an impact only because its theorists found thousands of followers in strategic areas of the mass media as well as in higher education. What was involved was too big to be a conspiracy, but so deliberate that it was not simply an outcome of self-generating social forces.

One of Hollywood's favorite themes is the man-made monster or golem. The mass media created the "hippie" as a direct antagonist to the authoritarian personality. The "hippie" is a golem who has served his creators well and who has not slipped out of control. (The "urban militant" has been a less tractable creation.)

It is no accident that now one television program or motion picture after another hammers at the same themes: the stupidity of fathers, the children who know better than their parents, the liberated female who rejects motherhood, above all the responsibility of the white male for all that is wrong with the world.

It is this never-ending psychological warfare waged against the white male which is the enduring legacy of the Frankfurt School. While America's patriots were fixated on the threat posed by the Kremlin, a group of cultural subversives seized control of the nation's opinion-forming apparatus without firing a shot. They deceived many by giving attention to Freudianism. Their successors have moved on to theories of "deconstruction." The theories may change, but the actors remain the same. Their goal remains the same: the gradual but total obliteration of our nation and our people.

Narrator: This program, a television documentary that exposes a band of Marxist Revolutionaries which caused great damage to America. This is the story of the Frankfurt School. Marxism is a vast criminal enterprise which has caused the deaths of over 100 million people around the world. Since Karl Marx proclaimed that criticism was a weapon of destruction, the Frankfort School's Critical Theory has become the doomsday machine of the Marx's war against Christian Civilization. Critical Theory is essentially a tool of hate, which has stirred discontent and violence among groups that consider themselves victims of a hateful system. In truth, such terms as Racism, Sexism, and Chauvinism

are powerful weapons in the Marxist Psychological Warfare against Traditional American Values. Political Correctness, the product of Critical Theory, is really treason against the U S Constitution and against America.

Marxist Theory had predicted that if war came to Europe that the working class in every European country would rise in revolt , but that theory proved wrong. When the First World War began in 1914, the workers loyalty to their country proved stronger than so called, "Class Consciousness." They willingly put on their uniforms French, or German, Austrian or Russian or British and marched off by the millions to fight each other. In 1917, a Marxist Revolution did occur in Russia but it failed to spread to Western Europe. Again, contradicting Orthodox Marxist Theory.

William Lind: At the wars end, Marxist Theorists had to confront the question what had gone wrong. Antonio Gramsci of Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary believed they had the answer. Gramsci and Lukacs argued that Western Culture had blinded the Working Class to its' true Marxist Class interest. Before a Marxist Revolution could take place, Western Culture had to be destroyed.

In 1919, Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist Theorist since Marx himself, ask who will save us from Western Civilization. That same year, 1919, Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary. Where he launched program—culture terrorism. As part that program, Lukacs introduced a radical sex education program into the Hungarian Schools. Political Correctness as we know it was already beginning to take form.

Laszlo Pasztor, Nat. Fed. of American Hungarians: He tried to actually undermine the Unity of the family and that was one of the reasons that he tried to introduce sex education.

Narrator: Laszlo Pasztor, a leader in the Hungarian resistance against the Communist takeover of Hungary after World War II, explains why children were targeted.

Laszlo Pasztor: It's, always, much tougher to convert an adult, you know, to do something he was taught not to do.

Narrator: The Program left great residual effects on Hungary.

Laszlo Pasztor: The only thing that we were permitted to accept was Bela Kun concepts what they were teaching that was it. Free thinking was a very big sin.

Narrator: The Bela Kun government lasted only a few months, in part, because the Hungarian Working Class was outraged at Georg Lukacs assault on traditional Western culture.

But meanwhile in Germany, a new attempt to create a Marxist critique of Western Culture was taking shape. There, the wealthy young son of a millionaire grain trader, Felix Weill wanted to establish a public policy Institute. A think tank to serve as a home for advanced Marxist thought. Modeled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Weill's think tank was originally to be named The Institute for Marxism.

Martin Jay, Chairman of the History Department at Berkeley and author of a history of the Frankfort School, explains why the name was changed to the Institut für Sozialforschung--the Instituted for Social Research.

Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley: I think, they were very interested in trying to avoid being overly labeled so it is a fairly bland name The Institute for Social Research.

Narrator: The Institute was affiliated with Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany and in time, became know simply as the Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt School formally open its' doors on June 22, 1924, but it had already held its' first seminar on theory in Spring of 1923. There almost 2 dozen Marxist Scholars gather for what Weill, the sponsor, called a Marxist Study week. One of the participates was Richard Sorge, later a famous Soviet Spy. Another, Georg Lukacs, Lukacs's writings on culture was the basics for much of the program. Almost, half of the participates in this Marxist Study Week would later be affiliated with the Frankfurt School.

William Lind: Following Lukacs's lead the Frankfort School would be the vehicle that translated Marxism from Economic into Cultural terms. Giving us what we now know as Political Correctness.

Narrator: The Frankfurt School's first director was an Austrian Marxist economist Karl Greenberg. Greenberg principle effect was to firmly establish the institutes Marxist nature. In his inaugural address which open the institutes new building in Frankfurt Greenberg said:

"It has been our intention here from the outset to maintain uniformity in the way, we look at problems and go about solving them. I, too, am one of the opponents of the economic,

social and legal order which has been handed down to us from history and I to am one of the supporters of Marxism. In the new research institute, Marxism will from now on have a home."

Narrator: Under Karl Greenberg, the Frankfurt School worked mostly on economic questions and the labor movement, conventional Marxist subjects. But in 1930, Greenberg was replaced as director by a young Marxist Intellectual with very different ideas—Max Horkheimer.

Horkheimer, quickly, began to use the institute to develop a new Marxism, very different from the Marxism of the Soviet Union.

William Lind: First recognizing, the economic success of Capitalism, Horkheimer announced that revolution was unlikely to come from the working class. The Frankfort School would have to find a substitute.

Martin Jay: Well, this was the great question. The great question is there a surrogate for the working class.

Narrator: The Frankfurt School would not find an answer to this question until the 1960's, but meanwhile, Horkheimer moved to revive Lukacs's work by making the culture not the economy the central Focus of the Frankfurt School's work.

As Martin Jay writes in his, history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination, if it can be said that in the early years of its' history the institute concerned it primarily with an analyzes of the Bourgeois Society Social Economical Substructure. In the years after 1930, its' primary interest lay in it's Cultural Superstructure. Indeed, the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was called into question.

William Lind: The key to the Frankfurt School work on culture was the crossing of Marx with Freud Just as Classical Economical Marxism argued under Capitalism that the working class was oppressed, so the Frankfurt School used Freud to argued that under Western Culture everyone lived in a constant state of psychological repression.

Martin Jay: So that there were radical Freudian during this period in hopes of using Psychoanalyst to end what Reich called sexual alienation, which they saw as significant as economic alienation.

Narrator: The solution according to the Frankfurt School was not just a political revolution, to overthrow capitalism but a social and cultural revolution as well. To further the Institutes work on Cultural issues, Horkheimer brought in some new blood. The new members included a sometimes music critic Theodor Adorno. Martin Jay sees this addition as critical.

Martin Jay: Well, Adorno was perhaps the most efficient and I think, perhaps the, brilliant of the members of all the Frankfurt School.

Narrator: Another new member was Erich Fromm. Fromm a practicing psychoanalysts was noted for his radical Marxist Social Psychology. He Pioneered the concept of sexual liberation and gender politics.

According to Martin Jay, in Fromm's view masculinity and femininity were not reflections of essential sexual differences, they were derived instead from differences in life functions which were in part socially determined.

William Lind: Another piece of Political Correctness was falling into place.

Narrator: In 1932, Herbert Marcuse became a member of the Institute for Social Research. Marcuse would ultimately become the most important member of the Frankfurt School for the development of Political Correctness. In the 1950's and 60's, Marcuse would complete the translation of Marxism into cultural terms and inject it into the new left. Martin Jay sums it up.

Martin Jay: In which, Marcuse in the United States, represented the most radical inclination of the school. In the sense continuing, the work they had done in the 1920's and into the 30's. A work that was inspired by Marx's egalitarian Philosophy. Very interested, in the crisis of both Capitalism and liberal Democracy trying to find alternatives to the working class.

William Lind: As we have seen, the Frankfurt School, Marxist School in origin, wanted to create a cultural revolution against Western Society. In the 1930's, they took their important first step.

Narrator: In the 1930's, the work of Horkheimer , Adorno, Fromm and Marcuse issued in its' first tangible product — Critical Theory.

William Lind: The term Critical Theory is something of a play on words. One is tempted to ask what is the theory. The answer is the theory is too criticizes. Through, unremitting destructive criticism of every institution of Western Society, they hoped to bring that society down. Critical Theory is the bases for Gay Studies, black studies, women studies and various other studies departments found on American University Campuses today. These departments are the home base of Political Correctness.

Narrator: David Horowitz was present at the birth of Campus Political Correctness.

David Horowitz, Pres. Cetr for the Study of Popular Culture: Well, I was a Radical in the 60's. I was a Marxist and you know, my buddies were people like Tom Hayden. I edited the largest magazine of the Left, at the time—The Ramparts.. But the Frankfurt School was important in Marxism, because, they no longer believed really in the future. They believed only in destroying. Destroying Capitalism, destroying, you know, "Bourgeois Democracy" is what we would have called it, and if you look at today's campuses that type of nihilism is really the dominate theme. That is attack America.

Narrator: The Frankfurt School was careful never to define what Critical Theory was for, only what it was against.

Again, Martin Jay the Frankfort School's Semiofficial Historian.

Martin Jay: The Critical Theory itself always felt reluctant about being put into the straight jacket of systemization and define it reduction to a simple definition.

William Lind: Critical Theory, actually, attempted to politicizes logic itself. Horkheimer wrote "Logic is not independent of content" that means an argument is logical if it helps destroy Western Culture. Illogical if it supports it. Such twisted thought lies at the heart of Political Correctness. Now, inoculated into American University Students.

Josh Sterling, Senior Cornell University: When there is 1% of the campus is Conservative and the other 9% and the other 9% of the people who care are incredibly liberal, you are going to get something approaching a Socialist State.

Narrator: But how did the work of a small group of German Marx's intellectuals come to America.

(Hitler speaking German)

Narrator: In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Institute for Social Research fled. It fled to New York City where it was reestablished that same year with help from the President of Columbia University. Once in America, the Frankfurt School, gradually, shifted the focus of its' work from destroying German Society and culture. to attacking the society and culture of its' new place of refuge. Not only did they apply Critical Theory to American Society, they added some new elements. One was the institutes so called Studies in Prejudice which cumulated in 1950 in Theodor Adorno 's immensely influential book The Authoritarian Personality. In it, Adorno argued that the American people posses many Fascist traits and that anyone who supported traditional American Culture was Psychologically unbalanced. It is no accident that today, the politically correct are quick to label their opponents Fascist and suggest that they the need psychological treatment in the form of Sensitivity Training.

(Crowd Shouting Political Slogans)

Narrator: The Frankfurt School even integrated Political Correctness, most fashionable cause, Environmentalism, into their Cultural Marxism. By way of Horkheimer and Adorno's book Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Martin Jay: Well, they were very interested in what was called the domination of nature. Dialectic of Enlightenment,. in particular, moved the emphasis away from economic domination to species domination of the natural world. Including the once again internal nature through Psychoanalytical understanding of repression, so they were very ken on recognizing that we need to have a more nature and a more, let's say, balanced relationship between human kind and the natural world.

Narrator: After World War II, Horkheimer and Adorno return to Germany where the Institute was reestablished at Frankfurt University but not all the old members of the Institute returned. Faithfully, Herbert Marcuse remained in America, eventually, becoming a professor at Brandeis, the University of California at San Diego. Marcuse labored to finish the intellectual work began by Horkheimer, Adorno, and Fromm in the 1930's.

Martin Jay: Marcuse, on the other hand, remained in the United States and during the 50's and 60's developed some of their earlier ideas—Merging Freud and Marx. An interest in ascetics, an interest in culturally, lets say, tendency toward what we would call "negation" which were usable in a campaign to call in question what Tratsky would have called the gemini of Capitalist Bourgeois Culture and Marcuse became the, of course, the so-called "Guru" of the New Left.

Narrator: It was Marcuse who, finally, answered the question proposed by Horkheimer in the early 30's who could substitute for the working class as an agent of revolution.

David Horowitz: So you had to find some new constancy weather it was students or blacks or women or Gays or whatever it was, and Marcuse had a fluid Marxism that fit into this.

Narrator: Martin Jay confirms the roll of the Frankfurt School in creating the victims groups that constitutes the Political Correct Coalition.

Martin Jay: But the Working Class wouldn't the hedge monger role that traditional Marxism had expected from it, so that student, blacks other minority groups, women so forth were, they hoped, at least, able to come together.

Narrator: Of Critical Importance for the injection of the Frankfurt School work into the student rebellion of the 1960's was Marcuse's revival of Fromm's notation of Sexual Liberation.

Martin Jay: Marcuse, however, was the main conduit of new ideas. Marcuse had written one important work in the 1950's called Eros and Civilization a work which attempts to rub Freud against the gain and came up with a radical new Utopian reading of Psychoanalyses and that combined with Norman O'Brown's Life against Death had a great impact on the Counter Culture and emphasizing the Libertine Element.

Narrator: Marcuse's Eros and Civilization condemned all restriction of sexual behavior. Call instead for polymorphic perversity.

Martin Jay: Instead it argued that at certain early development level of the human psyche, there was a potential for sexual expression, sexual pleasure, which had not yet been organized into the resistive notions of heterosexual sexual sexuality and these had some sort of capacity to be reinvigorate.

Narrator: Polymorphic perversity helped open the door to aspects of political correctness such as Gay liberation.

Roger Kimball, Managing Editor, The New Criterion: This was his idea what human society, good human society should be based on, was a certain kind of polymorphic perversity and narcissism which by liberating non-procreative "Eros" was his term. We would find great enlightenment and great happiness. This was suppose to be the key to utopia.

Narrator: David Horowitz ties Eros and Civilization directly into the 60's rebellion he was part of.

David Horowitz: Marxism is a bankrupt creed and was bankrupt by the 50's or earlier. People understood that it didn't work. There was no working class that was going to make a revolution. Capitalism. People were happy with capitalism, basically, because it made sense. It spread more money to more people than any other system in history. So they tried to find other sources of revolutionary energy. One was the idea of sexual repression of 60's. It was a way you can always think of complicated theories to do what they want to do. People wanted to...(beep)...a lot in the 60's, so Herbert Marcuse gave them the intellectual justification to have a lot of sex with a lot of people, a lot of the time. That's what Eros and Civilization, that is the title of his famous book, is about.

Narrator: Marcuse is, also, the source of one of political correctness's most notable characterized. It's told intolerance for any viewpoint but it's own. Marcuse argued that our free American society was actually a deception. That's it's true tolerance is somehow repressive. While he argued for something called "liberating tolerance."

Roger Kimball: And what he meant by that was liberating toleration or liberating tolerance meant intolerance for ideas and movements from the right and tolerance for any idea from the left. It is a recipe, you know, for repression.

Narrator: Even Martin Jay, a great admirer of the Frankfurt School admits to the totalitarian aspect of Marcuse.

Martin Jay: Perhaps his most significant essay in terms of impact. One we haven't even mentioned an essay on "repressive tolerance." Written in the late 60's which argued that because the tolerance of different believes produced no action at all because every believe seemed to be equal to all others. Racist and neo-fascism and militarism were given equal weight to those that were pacifist and emancipatory. This lead, ultimately, to the problems of political correctness and incorrectness in the 1980's. That's if you had a strong notion of who is Politically Correct, you could than be intolerant to those who weren't and sometimes this could be used as a license, by people on the left, to deny free speech to those people they disagreed with.

Narrator: Through these works Marcuse became the main agent of transmission for the Frankfurt School's ideas.

David Horowitz: Marcuse was a tremendously important influence on the thinking of young people in those days. He was one of the spiritual fathers of the movement.

Narrator: And through Marcuse the new left found the rest of the Frankfurt School.

Martin Jay: And then in the 1960's they were rediscovered by students who looked back at the works they had done and rediscovered a source of a nontraditional noncommunist Marxism which they found as an inspiration for the student movement in the 1960's.

Narrator: Jay pays Marcuse the ultimate compliment as a revolutionary.

Martin Jay: He became a kind of celebrity. In Paris, there were banners that said "Marx, Mao and Marcuse" so he was lambent of the liberation with a couple of pretty heavy hitters.

Narrator: And the consequences of the Frankfurt School's work now engulf us all. Martin Jay pays them due credit.

Martin Jay: Well, it's fascinating if you compare them with other figures from the so-called "Western Marxist" tradition, they are perhaps more alive then virtually anybody else.

Narrator: Roger Kimball, although, coming from the opposite Political perspective from Martin Jay agrees.

Roger Kimball: The institution of the ideas of Radical Multiculturalism in the Academy and what you might called it's enforcement wing, namely, the ideology of Political Correctness, testified to the vitality of some of those ideas, some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School.

Narrator: We ask former New Left Leader David Horowitz what the members of the Frankfurt School Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse might think if they could come back and visit one of America's Politically Correct Campuses today.

David Horowitz: While, I am sure thrilled because they would be, you know, gods.

Narrator: Thank you for watching this special program on the Frankfurt School. You have now been awakened to the true Marxist-Frankfurt School conspiracy which has poisoned the minds of millions of Americans and has gradually pushed our once great republic to the brink of totalitarianism.

By exploiting the legal system and the Federal Courts, Frankfurt School operatives have successfully oppressed the White Middle Class and substituted genuine liberties with enforced equality. Federal laws directed against discrimination have penalized White Americans for expressing opinions and beliefs which reflect the intentions of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers who forged a once great Republic.

For more information on the Conservative Citizens' Foundation write to:

Conservative Citizens' Foundation
P.O. Box 221683
St. Louis, MO 63122

or visit our web site at

www.cofcc.org/CCF.htm

http://arcofcc.freeservers.com/Documents/frank.html

[Last Chance Armada]

An excellent article. I suggest making this a sticky.

[Texas Dissident]

Originally Posted by Last Chance Armada

An excellent article. I suggest making this a sticky.

Most assuredly. Done!

[Factotum]

Repressive Tolerance

by [Jew] Herbert Marcuse

1965

This essay is dedicated to my students at [Jew] Brandeis University.

[...]

Democracy is a form of government which fits very different types of society (this holds true even for a democracy with universal suffrage and equality before the law), and the human costs of a democracy are always and everywhere those exacted by the society whose government it is. Their range extends all the way from normal exploitation, poverty, and insecurity to the victims of wars, police actions, military aid, etc., in which the society is engaged--and not only to the victims within its own frontiers. These considerations can never justify the exacting of different sacrifices and different victims on behalf of a future better society, but they do allow weighing the costs involved in the perpetuation of an existing society against the risk of promoting alternatives which offer a reasonable chance of pacification and liberation. Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior--thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives. And to the degree to which freedom of thought involves the struggle against inhumanity, restoration of such freedom would also imply intolerance toward scientific research in the interest of deadly 'deterrents', of abnormal human endurance under inhuman conditions, etc. I shall presently discuss the question as to who is to decide on the distinction between liberating and repressive, human and inhuman teachings and practices; I have already suggested that this distinction is not a matter of value-preference but of rational criteria.

While the reversal of the trend in the educational enterprise at least could conceivably be enforced by the students and teachers themselves, and thus be self-imposed, the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions and movements could only be envisaged as results of large-scale pressure which would amount to an upheaval. In other words, it would presuppose that which is still to be accomplished: the reversal of the trend. However, resistance at particular occasions, boycott, non-participation at the local and small-group level may perhaps prepare the ground The subversive character of the restoration of freedom appears most clearly in that dimension of society where false tolerance and free enterprise do perhaps the most serious and lasting damage, namely in business and publicity. Against the emphatic insistence on the part of spokesmen for labor, I maintain that practices such as planned obsolescence, collusion between union leadership and management, slanted publicity are not simply imposed from above on a powerless rank and file, but are tolerated by them and the consumer at large. However, it would be ridiculous to speak of a possible withdrawal of tolerance with respect to these practices and to the ideologies promoted by them. For they pertain to the basis on which the repressive affluent society rests and reproduces itself and its vital defenses - their removal would be that total revolution which this society so effectively repels.

To discuss tolerance in such a society means to reexamine the issue of violence and the traditional distinction between violent and non-violent action. The discussion should not, from the beginning, be clouded by ideologies which serve the perpetuation of violence. Even in the advanced centers of civilization, violence actually prevails: it is practiced by the police, in the prisons and mental institutions, in the fight against racial minorities; it is carried, by the defenders of metropolitan freedom, into the backward countries. This violence indeed breeds violence. But to refrain from violence in the face of vastly superior violence is one thing, to renounce a priori violence against violence, on ethical or psychological grounds (because it may antagonize sympathizers) is another. Non-violence is normally not only preached to but exacted from the weak--it is a necessity rather than a virtue, and normally it does not seriously harm the case of the strong. (Is the case of India an exception? There, passive resistance was carried through on a massive scale, which disrupted, or threatened to disrupt, the economic life of the country. Quantity turns into quality: on such a scale, passive resistance is no longer passive - it ceases to be non-violent. The same holds true for the General Strike.) Robespierre's distinction between the terror of liberty and the terror of despotism, and his moral glorification of the former belongs to the most convincingly condemned aberrations, even if the white terror was more bloody than the red terror. The comparative evaluation in terms of the number of victims is the quantifying approach which reveals the man-made horror throughout history that made violence a necessity. In terms of historical function, there is a difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practiced by the oppressed and by the oppressors. In terms of ethics, both forms of violence are inhuman and evil--but since when is history made in accordance with ethical standards? To start applying them at the point where the oppressed rebel against the oppressors, the have-nots against the haves is serving the cause of actual violence by weakening the protest against it.

Comprenez enfin ceci: si la violence a commencé ce soir, si l'exploitation ni l'oppression n'ont jamais existé sur terre, peut-être la non-violence affichée peut apaiser la querelle. Mais si le régime tout entier et jusqu'à vos non-violentes pensées sont conditionnées par une oppression millénaire, votre passivité ne sert qu'à vous ranger du côté des oppresseurs.[3]
{translation with help from babelfish: Understand finally this: if violence were to begin this evening, if neither exploitation nor oppression ever existed in the world, perhaps concerted non-violence could relieve the conflict. But if the whole governmental system and your non-violent thoughts are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity only serves to place you on the side of the oppressors.}

The very notion of false tolerance, and the distinction between right and wrong limitations on tolerance, between progressive and regressive indoctrination, revolutionary and reactionary violence demands the statement of criteria for its validity. These standards must be prior to whatever constitutional and legal criteria are set up and applied in an existing society (such as 'clear and present danger', and other established definitions of civil rights and liberties), for such definitions themselves presuppose standards of freedom and repression as applicable or not applicable in the respective society: they are specifications of more general concepts. By whom, and according to what standards, can the political distinction between true and false, progressive and regressive (for in this sphere, these pairs are equivalent) be made and its validity be justified? At the outset, I propose that the question cannot be answered in terms of the alternative between democracy and dictatorship, according to which, in the latter, one individual or group, without any effective control from below, arrogate to themselves the decision. Historically, even in the most democratic democracies, the vital and final decisions affecting the society as a whole have been made, constitutionally or in fact, by one or several groups without effective control by the people themselves. The ironical question: who educates the educators (i.e. the political leaders) also applies to democracy. The only authentic alternative and negation of dictatorship (with respect to this question) would be a society in which 'the people' have become autonomous individuals, freed from the repressive requirements of a struggle for existence in the interest of domination, and as such human beings choosing their government and determining their life. Such a society does not yet exist anywhere. In the meantime, the question must be treated in abstracto--abstraction, not from the historical possibilities, but from the realities of the prevailing societies.

I suggested that the distinction between true and false tolerance, between progress and regression can be made rationally on empirical grounds. The real possibilities of human freedom are relative to the attained stage of civilization. They depend on the material and intellectual resources available at the respective stage, and they are quantifiable and calculable to a high degree. So are, at the stage of advanced industrial society, the most rational ways of using these resources and distributing the social product with priority on the satisfaction of vital needs and with a minimum of toil and injustice. In other words, it is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation. Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.

The question, who is qualified to make all these distinctions, definitions, identifications for the society as a whole, has now one logical answer, namely, everyone 'in the maturity of his faculties' as a human being, everyone who has learned to think rationally and autonomously. The answer to Plato's educational dictatorship is the democratic educational dictatorship of free men. John Stuart Mill's conception of the res publica is not the opposite of Plato's: the liberal too demands the authority of Reason not only as an intellectual but also as a political power. In Plato, rationality is confined to the small number of philosopher-kings; in Mill, every rational human being participates in the discussion and decision--but only as a rational being. Where society has entered the phase of total administration and indoctrination, this would be a small number indeed, and not necessarily that of the elected representatives of the people. The problem is not that of an educational dictatorship, but that of breaking the tyranny of public opinion and its makers in the closed society.

However, granted the empirical rationality of the distinction between progress and regression, and granted that it may be applicable to tolerance, and may justify strongly discriminatory tolerance on political grounds (cancellation of the liberal creed of free and equal discussion), another impossible consequence would follow. I said that, by virtue of its inner logic, withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements, and discriminatory tolerance in favor of progressive tendencies would be tantamount to the 'official' promotion of subversion. The historical calculus of progress (which is actually the calculus of the prospective reduction of cruelty, misery, suppression) seems to involve the calculated choice between two forms of political violence: that on the part of the legally constituted powers (by their legitimate action, or by their tacit consent, or by their inability to prevent violence), and that on the part of potentially subversive movements. Moreover, with respect to the latter, a policy of unequal treatment would protect radicalism on the Left against that on the Right. Can the historical calculus be reasonably extended to the justification of one form of violence as against another? Or better (since 'justification' carries a moral connotation), is there historical evidence to the effect that the social origin and impetus of violence (from among the ruled or the ruling classes, the have or the have-nots, the Left or the Right) is in a demonstratable relation to progress (as defined above)?

With all the qualifications of a hypothesis based on an 'open' historical record, it seems that the violence emanating from the rebellion of the oppressed classes broke the historical continuum of injustice, cruelty, and silence for a brief moment, brief but explosive enough to achieve an increase in the scope of freedom and justice, and a better and more equitable distribution of misery and oppression in a new social system--in one word: progress in civilization. The English civil wars, the French Revolution, the Chinese and the Cuban Revolutions may illustrate the hypothesis. In contrast, the one historical change from one social system to another, marking the beginning of a new period in civilization, which was not sparked and driven by an effective movement 'from below', namely, the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, brought about a long period of regression for long centuries, until a new, higher period of civilization was painfully born in the violence of the heretic revolts of the thirteenth century and in the peasant and laborer revolts of the fourteenth century.[4]

With respect to historical violence emanating from among ruling classes, no such relation to progress seems to obtain. The long series of dynastic and imperialist wars, the liquidation of Spartacus in Germany in 1919, Fascism and Nazism did not break but rather tightened and streamlined the continuum of suppression. I said emanating 'from among ruling classes': to be sure, there is hardly any organized violence from above that does not mobilize and activate mass support from below; the decisive question is, on behalf of and in the interest of which groups and institutions is such violence released? And the answer is not necessarily ex post: in the historical examples just mentioned, it could be and was anticipated whether the movement would serve the revamping of the old order or the emergence of the new.

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and 'philosophies' can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the 'end of ideology', the false consciousness has become the general consciousness--from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities. It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don't have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.

The forces of emancipation cannot be identified with any social class which, by virtue of its material condition, is free from false consciousness. Today, they are hopelessly dispersed throughout the society, and the fighting minorities and isolated groups are often in opposition to their own leadership. In the society at large, the mental space for denial and reflection must first be recreated. Repulsed by the concreteness of the administered society, the effort of emancipation becomes 'abstract'; it is reduced to facilitating the recognition of what is going on, to freeing language from the tyranny of the Orwellian syntax and logic, to developing the concepts that comprehend reality. More than ever, the proposition holds true that progress in freedom demands progress in the consciousness of freedom. Where the mind has been made into a subject-object of politics and policies, intellectual autonomy, the realm of 'pure' thought has become a matter of political education (or rather: counter-education).

This means that previously neutral, value-free, formal aspects of learning and teaching now become, on their own grounds and in their own right, political: learning to know the facts, the whole truth, and to comprehend it is radical criticism throughout, intellectual subversion. In a world in which the human faculties and needs are arrested or perverted, autonomous thinking leads into a 'perverted world': contradiction and counter-image of the established world of repression. And this contradiction is not simply stipulated, is not simply the product of confused thinking or fantasy, but is the logical development of the given, the existing world. To the degree to which this development is actually impeded by the sheer weight of a repressive society and the necessity of making a living in. it, repression invades the academic enterprise itself, even prior to all restrictions on academic freedom. The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values. Scholarship, i.e., the acquisition and communication of knowledge, prohibits the purification and isolation of facts from the context of the whole truth. An essential part of the latter is recognition of the frightening extent to which history is made and recorded by and for the victors, that is, the extent to which history was the development of oppression. And this oppression is in the facts themselves which it establishes; thus they themselves carry a negative value as part and aspect of their facticity. To treat the great crusades against humanity (like that against the Albigensians) with the same impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity means neutralizing their opposite historical function, reconciling the executioners with their victims, distorting the record. Such spurious neutrality serves to reproduce acceptance of the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man. Here, too, in the education of those who are not yet maturely integrated, in the mind of the young, the ground for liberating tolerance is still to be created.

Education offers still another example of spurious, abstract tolerance in the guise of concreteness and truth: it is epitomized in the concept of self-actualization. From the permissiveness of all sorts of license to the child, to the constant psychological concern with the personal problems of the student, a large-scale movement is under way against the evils of repression and the need for being oneself. Frequently brushed aside is the question as to what has to be repressed before one can be a self, oneself. The individual potential is first a negative one, a portion of the potential of his society: of aggression, guilt feeling, ignorance, resentment, cruelty which vitiate his life instincts. If the identity of the self is to be more than the immediate realization of this potential (undesirable for the individual as a human being), then it requires repression and sublimation, conscious transformation. This process involves at each stage (to use the ridiculed terms which here reveal their succinct concreteness) the negation of the negation, mediation of the immediate, and identity is no more and no less than this process. 'Alienation' is the constant and essential element of identity, the objective side of the subject--and not, as it is made to appear today, a disease, a psychological condition. Freud well knew the difference between progressive and regressive, liberating and destructive repression. The publicity of self-actualization promotes the removal of the one and the other, it promotes existence in that immediacy which, in a repressive society, is (to use another Hegelian term) bad immediacy (schlechte Unmittelbarkeit). It isolates the individual from the one dimension where he could 'find himself': from his political existence, which is at the core of his entire existence. Instead, it encourages non-conformity and letting-go in ways which leave the real engines of repression in the society entirely intact, which even strengthen these engines by substituting the satisfactions of private, and personal rebellion for a more than private and personal, and therefore more authentic, opposition. The desublimation involved in this sort of self-actualization is itself repressive inasmuch as it weakens the necessity and the power of the intellect, the catalytic force of that unhappy consciousness which does not revel in the archetypal personal release of frustration - hopeless resurgence of the Id which will sooner or later succumb to the omnipresent rationality of the administered world - but which recognizes the horror of the whole in the most private frustration and actualizes itself in this recognition.

I have tried to show how the changes in advanced democratic societies, which have undermined the basis of economic and political liberalism, have also altered the liberal function of tolerance. The tolerance which was the great achievement of the liberal era is still professed and (with strong qualifications) practiced, while the economic and political process is subjected to an ubiquitous and effective administration in accordance with the predominant interests. The result is an objective contradiction between the economic and political structure on the one side, and the theory and practice of toleration on the other.. The altered social structure tends to weaken the effectiveness of tolerance toward dissenting and oppositional movements and to strengthen conservative and reactionary forces. Equality of tolerance becomes abstract, spurious. With the actual decline of dissenting forces in the society, the opposition is insulated in small and frequently antagonistic groups who, even where tolerated within the narrow limits set by the hierarchical structure of society, are powerless while they keep within these limits. But the tolerance shown to them is deceptive and promotes co-ordination. And on the firm foundations of a co-ordinated society all but closed against qualitative change, tolerance itself serves to contain such change rather than to promote it.

POSTSCRIPT 1968 [back to top]

UNDER the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy, namely, protection of dissent. The progressive historical force of tolerance lies in its extension to those modes and forms of dissent which are not committed to the status quo of society, and not confined to the institutional framework of the established society. Consequently, the idea of tolerance implies the necessity, for the dissenting group or individuals, to become illegitimate if and when the established legitimacy prevents and counteracts the development of dissent. This would be the case not only in a totalitarian society, under a dictatorship, in one-party states, but also in a democracy (representative, parliamentary, or 'direct') where the majority does not result from the development of independent thought and opinion but rather from the monopolistic or oligopolistic administration of public opinion, without terror and (normally) without censorship. In such cases, the majority is self-perpetuating while perpetuating the vested interests which made it a majority. In its very structure this majority is 'closed', petrified; it repels a priori any change other than changes within the system. But this means that the majority is no longer justified in claiming the democratic title of the best guardian of the common interest. And such a majority is all but the opposite of Rousseau's 'general will': it is composed, not of individuals who, in their political functions, have made effective 'abstraction' from their private interests, but, on the contrary, of individuals who have effectively identified their private. interests with their political functions. And the representatives of this majority, in ascertaining and executing its will, ascertain and execute the will of the vested interests, which have formed the majority. The ideology of democracy hides its lack of substance.

In the United States, this tendency goes hand in hand with the monopolistic or oligopolistic concentration of capital in the formation of public opinion, i.e., of the majority. The chance of influencing, in any effective way, this majority is at a price, in dollars, totally out of reach of the radical opposition. Here too, free competition and exchange of ideas have become a farce. The Left has no equal voice, no equal access to the mass media and their public facilities - not because a conspiracy excludes it, but because, in good old capitalist fashion, it does not have the required purchasing power. And the Left does not have the purchasing power because it is the Left. These conditions impose upon the radical minorities a strategy which is in essence a refusal to allow the continuous functioning of allegedly indiscriminate but in fact discriminate tolerance, for example, a strategy of protesting against the alternate matching of a spokesman for the Right (or Center) with one for the Left. Not 'equal' but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality.

Within the solid framework of pre-established inequality and power, tolerance is practiced indeed. Even outrageous opinions are expressed, outrageous incidents are televised; and the critics of established policies are interrupted by the same number of commercials as the conservative advocates. Are these interludes supposed to counteract the sheer weight, magnitude, and continuity of system-publicity, indoctrination which operates playfully through the endless commercials as well as through the entertainment?

Given this situation, I suggested in 'Repressive Tolerance' the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for 'the other side', I maintain that there are issues where either there is no 'other side' in any more than a formalistic sense, or where 'the other side' is demonstrably 'regressive' and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

If the choice were between genuine democracy and dictatorship, democracy would certainly be preferable. But democracy does not prevail. The radical critics of the existing political process are thus readily denounced as advocating an 'elitism', a dictatorship of intellectuals as an alternative. What we have in fact is government, representative government by a non-intellectual minority of politicians, generals, and businessmen. The record of this 'elite' is not very promising, and political prerogatives for the intelligentsia may not necessarily be worse for the society as a whole.

In any case, John Stuart Mill, not exactly an enemy of liberal and representative government, was not so allergic to the political leadership of the intelligentsia as the contemporary guardians of semi-democracy are. Mill believed that 'individual mental superiority' justifies 'reckoning one person's opinion as equivalent to more than one':

Until there shall have been devised, and until opinion is willing to accept, some mode of plural voting which may assign to education as such the degree of superior influence due to it, and sufficient as a counterpoise to the numerical weight of the least educated class, for so long the benefits of completely universal suffrage cannot be obtained without bringing with them, as it appears to me, more than equivalent evils.[5]

'Distinction in favor of education, right in itself', was also supposed to preserve 'the educated from the class legislation of the uneducated', without enabling the former to practice a class legislation of their own.[6]

Today, these words have understandably an anti-democratic, 'elitist' sound--understandably because of their dangerously radical implications. For if 'education' is more and other than training, learning, preparing for the existing society, it means not only enabling man to know and understand the facts which make up reality but also to know and understand the factors that establish the facts so that he can change their inhuman reality. And such humanistic education would involve the 'hard' sciences ('hard' as in the 'hardware' bought by the Pentagon?), would free them from their destructive direction. In other words, such education would indeed badly serve the Establishment, and to give political prerogatives to the men and women thus educated would indeed be anti-democratic in the terms of the Establishment. But these are not the only terms.

However, the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is not a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy. Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination. For this struggle, I proposed the practice of discriminating tolerance. To be sure, this practice already presupposes the radical goal which it seeks to achieve. I committed this petitio principii in order to combat the pernicious ideology that tolerance is already institutionalized in this society. The tolerance which is the life element, the token of a free society, will never be the gift of the powers that be; it can, under the prevailing conditions of tyranny by the majority, only be won in the sustained effort of radical minorities, willing to break this tyranny and to work for the emergence of a free and sovereign majority - minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression.

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/...etolerance.htm