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Pre-release statement by Robert Green – Out of Prison Today Thursday 17th May 2012

As many of you may be aware, I am due to be released from prison on Thursday 17th May.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all of you who have been so kind as to write tome whilst in prison and for the gifts and generosity.* It is wonderful to be aware of just how many good,humane people there are around the world who have expressed their support, which has been a great comfort,both to me and my loved ones.
It is not possible for me to find the appropriate words of gratitude to you, but I shall never forget.
Most importantly of all, you have expressed how much you care about Hollie and the plight of other defencelesschildren and the disabled, whatever they may be. So many of you have written to your MPs and other influentialfigures to voice your concerns.
I should also like to thank those of you who have joined demonstrations here in Aberdeen and around Britain. Iknow that many have travelled great distances at their own time and expense. It is surely time the authoritieslistened -and acted!
As to the question as to how I have been treated here, I must say that the officers, governors and myfellow-prisoners have unfailingly shown the utmost consideration and courtesy towards me. In fact, I havecome to hold the prison officers here in HMP Aberdeen in high regard for their professionalism and humanity in undertaking their duties, in what is a difficult and sometimes dangerous occupation.
The remarkable Hollie Greig case is now firmly within the public domain and I trust that you will appreciatethat I feel a great responsiblity to my loved ones, so that I shall act now in accordance with professional legal advice, both north and south of the border. I would also ask for some time following my release to be allowed to devote to personsal affairs, which I shall need to attend to following the three months of my incarceration. Of course, I intend to pursue every avenue in order to have my conviction quashed, as I believe that I have been dealt with in a most unfair manner throughout by the Scottish justice system, beginning with my original arreston 12 February 2010.
On that day, I was denied my legal right to have access to legal representation, in contravention of Scotland'sown solemn commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights. The Scottish justice system was severely admonished by the Supreme Court for its systematic failures on this fundamental issue (see the Cadder case).
Finally, since Hollie's case became public, a wide variety of views have been aired and everyone has as muchright to express his or her opinion as I have. Whilst the wider case and those related to it involve manycomplexities, may I leave you with just one simple statement based on fact.
On 8th September 2009, Hollie Greig was formally interviewed, in my presence, by DC Lisa Evans of GrampianPolice. During the interview Hollie described in detail a number of criminal acts perpetrated against her by anumber of named individuals. Grampian Police knew that Hollie's allegations were supported by documentsfrom a number of expert medical and psychological witnesses, prepared independently of each other, sometimes many years apart. In fact, the State regarded the weight of evidence to be sufficiently convincing as to award Hollie £13,500 of public funds, administered by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority in compensation for her suffering as a result of these crimes.
During my trial, officiated by Sheriff Principal Edward Bowen, it was established that the Grampian Police hadnot even questioned a single individual named in Hollie's interview. By contrast, when I made a statement a fewmonths later within which I emphasised Grampian Police's failure, complaints were made against me. Thepolice sprung immediately into action and within six weeks from the beginning of January 2010 had interviewedno less than sixty one witnesses to testify against me.
It is surely not just me who wonders at this wide divergence of attitude by Grampian Police in the pursuit ofhandling criminal complaints. I believe it would make anybody wonder.

Ends
* Regarding the gifts, in a separate note sent the day following the above letter, Robert writes:

A large number of gifts of all kinds have arrived at the prison during my stay and are dealt with by a differentoffice to the one that handles my non-packaged mail. Occasionally, the parcels become detached from the details of the sender so if I have not acknowledged anyone for their tremendous kindness and generosity it is entirely due to these circumstances. Therefore, may I say now a very sincere "thank you" to anyone to whom I have not responded.

Published on 18 Apr 2012 by

Former Economic Hitman John Perkins speaking in Dublin (May 27); Manchester (June 2) & London (June 3). Other Speakers include:
William Engdahl, Thomas Sheridan, Ian Crane & Brian Gerrish
More information at www (dot) EconomicHitman (dot) co (dot) uk

 

 


 

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A Critique of Cultural Marxism:

The Doom of Language;

By Robert F. Beaudine

Frank Taylor; Runnymede Project

Questions & Comments welcome

frankinshropshire@hotmail.co.uk

Frank in red, Robert in black

Conservatism has divided … silently and gradually. On the one hand we have the ‘paleo-conservatives’, who espouse such values as thrift, respect, civil liberty, individualism, respect. restraint, social and personal discipline. On the other, we have the neocons who vaunt aggression, greed, hubris, ostentation, imperialism, waste, elite and oligarchic governance and who are not unduly perturbed by downright fraud, extreme violence and debauchery.

To an extent Conservatism has always been this two horned beast, but the divide is now more marked and polarised than ever. It is also often scarcely acknowledged by those who describe themselves as Conservatives.

The more events develop, the more we see that the true line of demarcation is … and in reality always has been … between those elitists who wish to concentrate and centralise political and economic power, and the true libertarians who wish to devolve and decentralise power. Such a definition cuts diametrically across orthodox left/right political and partydivides. The are many corporatists who define themselves both as ‘left’ or ‘right’. There are many libertarians who also identify themselves by such a polarity.

Typically, for a Conservative writer of a certain ilk, Robert F Beaudine, hops to and fro across this fence. He wants his cake and he wants to eat it. Without actually saying it the article appears to imply a belief in liberty, yet contains the seeds of oligarchy. It espouses ‘individualism’ whilst seeming to be more a call for regimented social uniformity and conformity.

The central dilemma of conservatism is that it has to chose between liberty and oligarchy. A subsidiary dilemma is that it has to chose between individualism and conformity. Such contradiction runs through Beaudine’s article like the logo through a stick of rock.

This article is also an exercise in what can be termed ‘dustbin labelling’. Anything you have been told not to like is thrown into a labelled bin. Thus to the ‘left’ activist, ‘racism’ gets conflated with ‘fascism’, and anything else even vaguely authoritarian. In truth most fascist regimes … the Italian fascists until 1941, the Peronists and Falangists … were not, by the standards of their day, especially racist. It was that one regime … extreme even by fascist standards … stood out. The most racist places of that era … South Africa and the former Confederate States of the USA … were nominally democracies.

Equally many Conservatives will dump anything that smacks of novelty or political heterodoxy into a bin labelled variously ‘communist’ or ‘Marxist’, although they will not have either defined where they themselves stand with regard to the oligarchy/liberty paradox, or read a single word of any Marxist or post-Marxist writer.

This critique is intended to be provocative. I want to start people thinking rather than ritually incanting received nostrums, usually at fourth or fifth hand, about ‘isms’ they have neither studied nor even read, but serve well in keeping us, the Great Unwashed, divided against one another.

I am also am a firm believer in the application of Zeno’s Arrow … where there are several explanations, the simplest and most direct is often the most truthful, and the most useful.

I will reproduce Beaudine’s article in black and my own comments in red.

 

Throughout history, ideas have been used for good or for evil. They have also led to the greatest evil – war. This is reflective in a nation’s language.

By the end of 1932, Germany was in upheaval. The unemployment rate soared to 43%. As the Nazis rose to power, new ideas emerged; new words were introduced; old words were discarded and others changed.“Juden verboten” became a popular phrase as the Juden, the Jews, were blamed for all their ills. They were denied basic rights as citizens, and most activities were verboten.

In 1933, when Adolf Hitler consolidated power with the “Enabling Act,” modern art and architecture were condemned. Many artists fled their homeland, as art became a tool of the regime. The Reichstag was privately mocked as the most expensive glee club, as their members sang paeans to their Fuhrer.

The Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, defined the new order and foretold the consequences, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.”

The regime was “fascist,” a word coined in 1921. This obscured their ideology – “national socialism” – a clever term somewhat palatable to their fellow nationalists in the military and industry. They telescoped this into “Nazi” to further hide its origins from the world.Then scholars claim this was a regime of the far right, they are either duped or dishonest.

Under the Nazis, their prominent leaders were well-read. Goebbels boasted of his library, complete with all the works of Edward Bernays, most notably his Propaganda. He implemented Bernays’ program with great success. When this was discovered after the war, propaganda was redefined as P.R., “public relations.”

Musollini, who even from his early days fantasised about the recreation of the Roman Empire, purloined the fasces symbol from Rome. Thus ‘fascism’ became the term for the binding together of all arms of the state, business corporations, the military and the people into a single ‘organic’ entity. For most of the period history the Nazis were known inside Germany by their initials – NSDAP. Meanwhile, Madison Avenue was implementing Bernays and behavioural psychology with equal gusto, but in the pursuit of a different quarry.

For their fanatical followers and the rest of the masses who decided to stay, anti-intellectualism was decreed. Books were burned, the media censored. French words were purged from their vocabulary. Free speech became dangerous, as even children were spies for the state.

The universities became centers to regiment thought. In a nation acclaimed for its scholarship, this betrays either their madness or a diabolical agenda – the blueprint used by all the totalitarian dictators.

Eventually, many renowned scholars fled and brought their unique heritage to America.

 

Verbal Engineering

 

In 1949, George Orwell, unfurled his vision of a nightmarish future in 1984. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.” Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, learned something about his world: When words are eliminated from the common vocabulary, the thinking of the common people becomes limited.

Later, his novel showed how perceptions are manipulated when the definitions of fundamental words are changed, i.e., peace becomes defense which then becomes war – a classic illustration of Hegel’s dialectic. Here, the thesis – or status quo – refers to the current usage of the word. When it undergoes a slight change in meaning towards its antithesis, a new synthesis is born. If enough incremental changes occur, eventually the antithesis is established.

The representation of history as proceeding by action and reaction … a constant criss-crossing of ideas and events … history as a tennis court … is a fair and accurate one. Paganism gave way to Roman Catholicism, which it turn gave way to Protestantism; small fiefdoms gave way to larger states; conquest and counter-conquest and so forth. You propose, I oppose. That what I propose, itself over time itself generates an opposition. And so on.

Significantly, much of this historical process arises from opposition to power which has become corrupt and abusive; e.g. Simony and Dogmatism within the Roman Church; the abuses of King John; the incessant civil war within the Roman Empire; the economic and political sclerosis of many states such as imperial Spain and Turkey; the corruption of the Venal System of Bourbon France, the reduction of women to second class status … again the list goes on. It seems that a process of entropy … of complacency and hubris leading to corruption and decadence … typically afflicts most post-tribal regimes, and in particular the ruling elites. Out of that the circumstances arise which require the overthrow or replacement of that regime.

This is not simply a matter of Hegel. This dialectical notion is implicit in Newton’s Third Law of Motion. It is also a proposition of binomial logic that from a contradiction all can be deduced. This proposition is one of the building blocks of computer technology. Without it there could neither have been Enigma nor Bletchley Park, nor this computer on which I now write.

Virtually all discourse is intrinsically dialectical, in that it derives from the interplay of opposing ideas. Language always has been a cauldron of antithetical, contradictory and opposing ideas … good/bad; up/down; left/right; hot/cold; late/early … you get the idea. That is much of the purpose of language … it is our primary vehicle for expressing difference. Indeed our entire universe would appear to be bipolar in nature. To oppose this function of language is akin to opposing the weather or the passage of time. In a sense Hegel is fatuous; no more than an over-stylised, pretentious, and overwrought reworking of the blindingly obvious.

Because the term “Hegel’s dialectic” is missing from our common vocabulary, many of us have no awareness of this process in continual motion. Instead, we think every change occurs naturally.

By definition, a change towards the antithesis is adverse to that element of society who would“conserve” the status quo – the conservatives who revere their traditions and institutions.

In today’s world, many of our most important institutions and traditions – and the foundational words associated with them – have been so dramatically engineered towards the antithesis that conservatives no longer support the status quo.

It depends what is meant by ‘status quo’. The status quo as it is? The status quo as it was? The status quo as it ought to be? Is the author saying that we, the Great Unwashed, must continue to respect, obey and look up to our ‘elders and betters’, regardless of how corrupt, violent, greedy, debauched and dysfunctional they become? Although these essay later laments the loss of individualism, this looks more like a call for regimented conformity. You cannot have it both ways.

My own view is that the central axle of any proper and permanent ‘status quo’ is Common Law.

There is nothing new about putting new wine into old bottles. For example much pagan symbolism … the Green Man, the festival dates, the use of sacred water etc. etc. was incorporated into Christian practise during the Dark Ages. Science itself, during much of its developmental period, adopted a large amount of Latin-based terminology. Rome adopted almost entirely the idiom, poetic style, theology and architecture of Greece.

There is no such thing as ‘Cultural Marxism’. Marx was pre-Freudian, if only by a few years. He wrote little about culture, and nothing about linguistics or sexuality. His followers, putative or otherwise, have been re-inventing him ever since, to the point where Marx himself had to disown many of them during his lifetime. After all, Marxism has become a form of secular religion, and in any religion the God must be worshipped even if the credo is written by others. So we have many post-Marxist and neo-Marxist schools such as the Frankfurt School.

The use of the prefix ‘neo’ is worthy of some comment. Again we are talking of putting new wine into old bottles. ‘Neo’ must be equated with ‘not’. It means that the new agenda is slid into the language and lexicon of the old. Thus ‘neo-conservatism’ uses the language and imagery of conservatism whilst pursuing an agenda more reminiscent of fascism, ‘neo-liberalism’ uses the lexicon of libertarian ideas whilst pursuing a corporatist/statist agenda, i.e. ‘not-conservatism’ and ‘not-liberalism’.

Essentially the new thought uses the old lexicon as a peg on which to hand its own ideas, and thus to insert itself into the public mind.

Many people who called themselves ‘Marxist’ but were essentially using Marxist terminology as a peg for their own ideas and thus class as neo-Marxist or post Marxist. These range from the post Stalinist Althusser to Marcuse, who is in reality an anarchist.

Indeed, Leninism itself could stand alone virtually without reference to Marx. His ideas owe far more to Danton and Robespierre than they ever did to Marx. In turn, Stalinism derived from Lenin, but also from Futurism, Fordism, and Modernism … the ultimate vision of machine-man as vassal of the highly centralised super-state.

So what is a paleo-conservative, deeply perturbed by the course to global oligarchy on which we are now set, to make of those Post-Marxists such as Fromm and Marcuse, who rejected Futurism and Fordism and their mechanistic vision of humanity? Indeed there is much in Marcuse’s work on One Dimensional Man which would gain the approval of many dissidents reading a tract such as this, (if they actually bothered to read it) especially as regards the dehumanising effects of vertically stratified, machine based societies, in which the individual is no more than a tiny cog in a vast machine. CRL James used Marxist idiom as a means of peddling his own brand of Caribbean nationalism.

The ‘demonic ideas’ of which Lukacs and Gramsci wrote did not come from within Marxism. The notion that the Frankfurt School invented debauchery is nonsense. Anyone giv ing credence to such nonsense, should at the very least spend some time leafing through some Hogarth cartoons, quite aside from studying a mass of other history. States and societies which are past their creative apogee are usually pretty efficient at debauching themselves without the assistance of any obscure Austrian sects. Such developments have been historically recurrent since long before Marxism.

 

The Philosophical Roots of the Social Sciences

 

Spanning the 18th Century of Western Civilization, the Enlightenment was an intellectual revolution based on reason. It produced two predominant types: Those who rejected all authority outside of reason, including religion and its divine right of kings, and those who remained true to Christianity. Because free speech was not a right, the most radical writers published anonymously.

Science rapidly unraveled the mysteries on Earth and in the sky above, and led to the belief that continued discoveries would enable humanity’s triumph over nature.

This really goes back much further. Aristotle was re-discovered in the libraries of Moslem Spain in the late 12th century. Under this influence doubts arose and questions began to be asked for the first time since the fall of Rome. For good reason the Roman Church had long suppressed literacy and access to knowledge amongst the Great Unwashed as the harbinger of heresy. Chrysostom had rejoiced in the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Roger Bacon became perhaps the first logical positivist and was jailed for his heresy. It took Aquinas to divide the material from the divine, if at the expense of some sophistry.

This also created despair for some Christians. As science flourished, many Medieval “truths,” i.e. the sun revolved around the Earth, had been proved as myths. Some Christians lost their faith. Yet, many leading scientists remained true to their faith. Science had not destroyed the authority of the Bible, only the misinterpretations.

Where there is no doubt there can be no questions. Where there are no questions there can be no answers. Where there none of these there can be no science.

Whilst many may deride Islam, it has always maintained a strict separation between the scientific and the religious. Without Islamic inquiry into mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, logic, etc. much of it taking its cue from the classics, there could have been no European renaissance.

In 1751, the first volume of l’Encyclopedie was published in France. Over the next twenty-one years, twenty-seven more volumes followed, edited by the brilliant French atheists, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Diderot admitted their aim was “to change the way people think.”

There is nothing wrong with ‘changing the way people think’. Indeed it is the very stuff of free speech and free expression. Most discourse concerns changing the way people think, and would be pointless without such an objective.

Yet it is easy to confuse content and method. It is also what the entire principle of freedom of speech and expression is about. You propose. I oppose. This applies to everything from a local dispute over a planning application, or what plants to put in the municipal flower beds to global issues of money, power and war.

The author has to decide whether he is in favour of liberty and individualism, or in favour of rigid regimented conformity. The two notions are antithetical.

The Closing of the American Mind Cultural Marxism: The Doom of Language

 

In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom wrote, “This project was a conspiracy, as d’Alembert said in the Preliminary Discourse of l’Encyclopedie, the premier document of the Enlightenment. It had to be, for, in order to have rulers who are reasonable, many of the old rulers had to be replaced, in particular all those whose authority rested upon revelation. The priests were the enemies, for they rejected the claim of reason and based politics and morals on sacred texts and ecclesiastical authorities.”

In 1798, the British professor, John Robison, wrote in Proofs of a Conspiracy,“A formal and systematic conspiracy against Religion was formed and zealously prosecuted by Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Diderot, assisted by Frederic II, King of Prussia … their darling project was to destroy Christianity and all Religion, and to bring about a total change of Government.”`

These conspirators claimed l’Encyclopediehad assembled all the accumulated knowledge throughout the ages. After initial censorship, it became the foremost reference source for knowledge, which spread their ideas undermining civil and Christian authorities.

A person is as much entitled to be an atheist as they are no being a Jedi, a flat-earthist or a Hindu. Or is the author hankering after the days where worship was compulsory on pain of severe penalties? We are all entitled to the free advocacy of whatever position we hold. That advocacy may well involve changing minds. But if minds were never changed there would be no point to intelligent discourse of any sort. It would be interesting to know Beaudine’s underlying views on freedom of speech, since I detect that the author does not like it very much.

Much of the reaction of that period against religion sprang from the same motivation as the Protestant Reformation … the need to remove theocratic oligarchy and corruption. Even after the Reformation much of Europe remained either under the sway of an unreformed Roman Church or under an Episcopal hierarchy which mimicked many of its forms.

In all this there was a corrupt and unhealthy symbiosis between church and state much as today there is such a corrupt symbiosis between corporation and state. Many chapel protestants and puritans wanted little to do with priests, bishops or governments, and some rejected earthly governance entirely.

That this led to a reaction against religion itself is understandable in the historic context. The problem was that this reaction failed to distinguish between what religion taught and how it was institutionally structured.

Religious and Common Law have many points of commonality … thrift, prudence, fairness, natural justice, modesty, non-violence, restraint, generosity, and so forth. As the Founding Fathers of the US were so eloquently aware, ascription to Common Law does not require ascription to any particular religious faith.

The 19th Century French philosopher and founder of modern sociology, Auguste Comte, embraced Enlightenment thinking, of the type that rejected religion. His philosophy, logical positivism, claimed science as the only reliable approach to truth. Empirical observation leads to verification which leads to truth. Religion had to be abandoned.

The problem with logical positivism is that it is a method which has elevated itself to the status of a philosophy. The method itself is not only valid but necessary to science. Yet, just because a proposition cannot be validated as true, does not mean it is false. Paradoxically it is Physics … the most ‘scientific’ of all sciences … which teaches us that there is still much in the universe that is beyond our understanding and which remains to be discovered and interpreted. There … I have just given you a statement which cannot be validated by either logical analysis or empirical observation. That there is a class of propositions which although cannot be finally validated may nevertheless be true, might be implicit in Godel’s Theorem. Shades again of Aquinas?

American philosopher, Thomas Ellis Katen, explained, “Thus the positivist realm becomes a kingdom of thingdom and an ‘off-limits’ sign is put on areas of life most meaningful to men … when men’s souls cry out for an image of unity, the logical positivistic philosophy offers only further fragmentation.”

The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, offered no help. He upended metaphysics in the late 19th Century and ended Germany’s Western tradition in philosophy. Nietzsche announced to the world that “God is dead!” which gave humanity the freedom to create their own values. He said philosophers had a moral duty to create the new myths for society. He also declared all scientific achievement was the result of a “will to power.”

Nietzsche was a powerful influence on Heidegger, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. He arises again in the form of Leo Strauss. Strauss’s myth-making is much concerned with the maintenance of social cohesion by deliberate creation of ‘enemies’. Yet Denmark, Bhutan, Switzerland, Singapore and Trinidad are amongst a long list of states which get along quite coherently thank you very much, without the need to construct enemies. The danger posed by the neoCon project cannot be overstressed.

Allan Bloom wrote, “The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance.”

 

The Science Behind the Social Sciences

 

The most popular social sciences – sociology and psychology – were conceived as sciences but do not resemble science in its popular conception, except in one respect – revelation was rejected as a source of knowledge.

Each expands with every new theory postulated alone or attached to an observational and/or statistical study. But there is little science underlying all their vast proclamations. Innumerable definitions, generalizations, abstractions, and assumptions mask the truth that most of their causal constructions are hypothetical.

Much experimental method in the ‘social sciences’ works through the ‘null hypothesis’, and uses non-parametric statistics. Because the experimenter is able to determine the level of significance, this effectively enables the experiment to rig the goal posts before the game begins. This results in conclusions being drawn from minuscule samples, which are simply not justified by the sample size, and which are often overturned by later ‘research’.

The motivation behind much ‘research’ in all branches of ‘science’ is to get published and get grants, however pointless, or idiotic the ‘research’..

‘Science’ is no longer concerned with the objective search for truth, but with the objective search for money. Large corporations purchase the ‘science’ which suits their purpose. If Monsanto wants research that says glycophosphates are harmless to bees, it buys that research.

‘Science’ has become a traded commodity, and is as rotten and corrupt as the rest of it.

Zeno’s Arrow must be applied. Is this all down to Karl Marx or is it down to simple corruption, greed and power-lust?

These social sciences were established and staffed by Progressives and became their scholarly haven.

There is nothing wrong with progress, provided that it occurs within the framework of Common Law. It is most unlikely that any advanced society could be held in some rigid static aspic for all time. Hitler intended such a state of affairs for his thousand year Reich. If new ideas or criticism arises is it to be heeded and considered, or is it to be repressed?

The two most influential foundational thinkers were sociologist Max Weber and psychologist Sigmund Freud.

In the German tradition, Max Weber wrote convoluted sentences typically over ten lines long and invented or redefined words. He coined“Protestant ethic” and “lifestyle,” and helped change the definition of“charisma.” With his definition, charismatic authority became the new force for change within any given organization.

I cannot see anything new with such a definition of ‘charisma’.

Weber studied all the great religions, the resulting economies, and the values they promoted. When he claimed that all religions were myths, their values became relative. This led decades later to the Values Clarification approach used in our public schools today.

Weber was an antipositivist who thought ethos must reject what reason demands because of the widespread irrationality of society. In Economy and Society, he wrote, “Under the conditions of mass democracy, public opinion is communal conduct born of irrational ‘sentiments.’ Normally it is staged or directed by party leaders and the press.”

He also wrote, “We know of no scientifically ascertainable ideals. To be sure, that makes our efforts more arduous than in the past, since we are expected to create our ideals from within our breast in the very age of subjectivist culture.”

Freud was also concerned with the irrational. He searched the unconscious for answers to our brutal behaviors. He used the German term for “soul,” but his conception was godless. To Freud religion was myth.

The mechanistic notions of humanity demonstrated by Weber and many others probably owes more to Futurism than to anything in Marx. Modernism and Futurism have been mentioned above. These ideas are generally completely overlooked in discussions of this sort. Yet Marinetti’s ravings in the Futurist Manifesto … the utter subordination of human to machine, war as a desirable means of human cleansing and catharsis, women as inherently inferior creatures … are central to the development of ideas in the 20th century. Some of the Futurist architectural and artistic manifestos are more like excerpts from Mein Kampf. Human are no more than productive machines made of flesh. Corbusier waxed lyrical about ‘machines for living in’. The ghastly concrete abominations spawned by this ideology now scar the planet.

The British psychoanalyst, James Strachey, seemed justified when he mistranslated Freud’s “soul” as “mind” –leading British and American psychologists felt psychology should be categorized as a medical science, and the “soul” was distinctly unscientific. Strachey’s translation redefined Freud with a spurious scientific consistency, typical of Progressive deception.

Sigmund Freud had a poor view of the masses of humanity, with their untreated neuroses and animal instincts. In The Future of an Illusion, he wrote, “Among these instinctual wishes are those of incest, cannibalism, and lust for killing.”

Earlier he wrote, “For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline.”

The entire panoply of consumerism and the advertising industry which supports it, is predicated on the lack of ‘instinctual renunciation’, and deliberately reinforces our appetites, often by playing upon our vulnerabilities. Yet apply Zeno’s Arrow again. Is this Marxism or corporate power?

In 1879, Lord Randolph Churchill gave a speech in his Woodstock constituency in which he attacked the ascendancy of the manufacturers and the middle classes. He told his audience that people would ‘never look up to’ your ‘butcher, baker or candlestick maker’ but that, on the other hand, the ‘upper and lower orders’ are ‘united in a common bond of frank immorality’.

Plus ca change!

He added, “It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognize as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the renunciations on which the existence of civilization depends.”

Freud also claimed that boys grow up with an Oedipus complex and a fear of castration from their fathers, while girls grow up with penis-envy. Much of Freud is in dispute, but nothing can be scientifically proven either way.

When psychologists observe and describe human behavior, they resemble scientists, but when they explain human behavior, they propagate hypothetical opinion.

It did not take Freud, or any other modern scientist, commentator, or pseudo-scientist to realise that there is a dark side to humanity, capable of the most appalling acts. That people have tried to analysis this is both inevitable and understandable. That, after more than a century of such intellectual investigations, matters have got no better, speaks for itself.

Ivan Illich once said that he doubted whether any set of secular institutions could ‘manipulate man towards his own salvation’ when the great religions had failed over millennia.

Several observations are apparent: The more popular psychology becomes, the more widespread our problems have become. The more couples are referred to marriage counselors, the worse our divorce rate gets. Our problems are not being solved by our psychologists or the pop-promoters of this pseudoscience, like Abby and Ann Landers.

During the 1960?s Ivan Illich coined the term ‘iatrogenic’. This means cure induced disease. For example an allopathic therapy results in side effects, which require further drugs and therapy, which create more side effects, which need more drugs and therapy, and so on.

If we broaden Illich’s definition of iatrogenic beyond that medical remit, we can see that most of our social ills are iatrogenic or cure induced. Iatrogenic effects are both highly profitable and highly conducive to bureaucratic empire building. What would the military industrial complex do if there really were an outbreak of world peace? What would all the courts, lawyers, police, judges, probation officers social workers and so forth do if there really were a substantial reduction in crime? What would Big Pharma do if there really were major improvements in public health? We are dealing with a network of institutions with a strong vested interest in not curing what they are purportedly there to cure.

Iatrogenic problems have little, if anything, to do with either Marx nor God, but with a deep and extremely insidious form of institutional corruption. It is more like a latter day form of secular Simony, except that the horse trading is not in ecclesiastical favours and perquisites but in the rewards which emanate from a corporate and bureaucratic elite. Karl Marx, or greed, power, and the promotion of corporate self-interest? Rein de va plus.

There could be a simple reason: If God exists, much of the social sciences become theoretical nonsense, which means society is harmed by their neglect of “the soul”and their mockery of religion.

 

The Frankfurt School

 

Another ominous event occurred in 1933. With the rise of Nazism, the “Frankfurt School” fled Germany, settled in Geneva for a year, and then temporarily relocated to New York City as an affiliate of Columbia University. Founded by Marxists in 1923 as the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University, it was modelled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.

Their philosophy built upon Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and his radical successor, Martin Heidegger, who carried forward much of Nietzsche’s extremism into the 20th Century. Their social sciences relied on Freud and Weber. And they drew upon the revolutionary theories of Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Socialist Georg Lukacs.

I would hardly count either Nietzsche or Heidegger as Marxists! They are more the progenitors of Nazism. Indeed their philosophical roots are to be form in the ‘blood and soil’ nationalism which emerged in 19th century Germany and which provided the feedstock for the Nazi movement..

There is a common idea that ideologies … conservatism, socialism, communism, liberalism, anarchism etc. run along mutually exclusive tramlines, and have no influence on one another. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The latter part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth saw an immense ferment of new ideas. Marxism, and the numerous schools of neo-Marxism are one of many influences. Futurism has already been mentioned as has Psychoanalysis. If we add Modernism, Dadaism, revisionist schools of both Conservatism and Liberalism, Fordism, Fascism, differing versions of Anarchism .. the list goes on … we have quite a witches’ brew. The last century or so has seen an immense ideological cross-fertilisation involving a huge concatenation of ideas.

Much of this ferment contributed to, and was renewed by, the totalitarian nihilism which erupted in the First World War and has carried on, in different forms, since and which was so brilliantly portrayed by the likes of Fritz Laing, Franz Kafka and George Orwell.

Gramsci was shocked that the Bolshevik Revolution didn’t inspire their oppressed fellow workers in Europe to rise up in rebellion. While in a prison cell, he discovered that Judeo-Christian values was the problem and must be destroyed before revolution was possible.

Gramsci called for a methodical approach to infiltrate, capture, and reform education, the press, the cinema, theatre, the government, and the church, what he called “the long march through the institutions.” He said Capitalism had a cultural hegemony through violence and coercion, both political and economic, but also ideologically, which is where the battle lay.

Judging what I read in my inbox every day about foreign wars, the surveillance state, Big Pharma, black prisons, the crushing of ancient civil rights and liberties, the banksters, oligarchic super-fraud, ‘technocratic government’ state snooping, draconian, invasive and oppressive laws, the activities of lobbyists and the media, the pepper-spraying and bludgeoning of passive protesters … the list of abuses is almost endless … that gets pretty close to a ‘hegemony (asserting itself) … through violence and coercion, both political and economic … ‘. Gramsci, Marx et al might well have been right!

Whilst the prescription might be different, I doubt whether those paleoconservatives wishing to re-establish proper liberty and civil governance would differ much from Marx and a number of Post-Marxists in the analysis … if they bothered to read it … of what oligarchies are, how they arise and how they operate.

Lukacs, perhaps the most brilliant Marxist theorist of the 20th Century, was more discerning regarding mass uprisings. All the successful revolutions were engineered by a small cadre of intellectuals. In 1922, he met with the early Frankfurt founders for a week in Ilmenau, Germany. A year later, the Frankfurt School was conceived as a think tank that trained agents of change.

One of the directors, Max Horkheimer, developed Critical Theory as opposed to Traditional Theory. Critical Theory doesn’t offer any solutions. Instead, it criticizes in a concerted attack until it creates an atmosphere of crisis. Crises lead to changes – opportunities to incrementally engineer society towards cultural Marxism.

The Frankfurt elite, Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and later, Jurgen Habermas, used verbal engineering to facilitate their social engineering. They wrote extensive attacks on the Judeo-Christian institutions and traditions, and redefined them as evils.

They rebranded the foundational words. “Private property” and “profit” became selfish pursuits. “Individualism,” “personal industry,” and “self reliance” became oppressive, as the world was divided into two types of people, “oppressors” or “victims.”Religion became the greatest evil – a superstition that led to intolerance and war. Nationalism was the second greatest evil and also led to war.

Crisis cannot occur without genuine grievance. Herein lies the centre of the Conservative paradox. ‘Free market’ ideology tells us that the ability of a individual or a small group of individuals, or institutions to acquire wealth and power must be unlimited.

The result will inevitably be oligopoly. If you permit oligopoly you will get oligarchy as assuredly as night follows day. And in the night that will also inevitably follows that day, we will get corruption, abuse, kleptocracy which will then turn in measured stages to tyranny. That is the eternal nature of oligarchy through the ages.

Where you have oligarchy and/or tyranny such things as ‘self reliance’ and individualism’ become impossible. We all become servants or serfs of our masters.

Therefore economic liberty, in the purest ‘freee market’ sense, becomes incompatible with social and personal liberty, once economic institutions and the individuals who run them, exceed a certain level of size, scope, influence and power. Of course wealth is power.

I do get weary of conservatives who in one moment are acclaiming, with starry eyes the wonders of ‘free markets’ and corporations, yet in the next are fuming and raging against corruption, greed, violence, abuse and debauchery which will inevitably flow from such concentrations of power.

There is a choice between oligarchy and liberty. You cannot have both.

The Frankfurt School studied the psychological techniques of the Nazis. One result, Adorno and three Berkeley scholars wrote The Authoritarian Personality, which was widely acclaimed by our social scientists. It was later debunked as left wing propaganda. Allan Bloom called it meretricious fabrication. Among other theoretical heresies, it redefined fatherhood as tyrannical. This was a triumph for feminism as women became an oppressed class.

Could there be any possible doubt about the inferior status of women over many centuries? No vote, no property rights after marriage, excluded from higher education, excluded from the professions, a widespread acceptance of violence as a husband’s right, and so forth.

Interestingly, Celtic Law and the Celtic Church had a different attitude. At that time, women held senior positions in the tribal or clan hierarchy, could hold property, and could initiate divorce (and recover their share of the marital property) on a wide range of grounds … non consumato, adultery, sodomy, sloth, drunkenness and violence, This situation provided an important reason why Rome crushed the Celtic Church. Ireland was made a fiefdom of England by the English Pope (Adrian IV), and an English King (Henry II) in order to exculpate the ‘pagan and heretical practises’ of the Celtic Church. These two gentlemen have much to answer for.

This verbal engineering set in motion the long march to undermine the love of God, family, and country.

From 1937 to 1941, Adorno worked for the Radio Research Project alongside future president of CBS, Frank Stanton and three other social scientists. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, its purpose was to study the effects of the mass media and develop more effective methods of mass persuasion.

 

Edward Bernays Cultural Marxism: The Doom of Language

 

Meanwhile, Edward Bernays, the premier of propaganda, used his uncle’s psychology – Sigmund Freud’s – coupled with that of B.F. Skinner to create a consumer society. Eventually, the masses became too concerned with their own interests to have time for the deeper concerns, like those of their civilization.

The author might also have mentioned Cattell, a more subtle thinker than Skinner. Behaviourism, as this section illustrates, has a crude but shallow validity. More importantly these ideas became the feedstock of Madison Avenue and the advertising industry.

It was J Walter Thompson, perhaps the greatest of the advertising magnates before Saatchi, and whose agency was world number one for at least three decades, who coined the idea what you do not chose the product … the product chooses you. This was neatly echoed in the film The Devil Wears Prada.

The methods described in this piece would not out of place in any sales and marketing curriculum. Does anyone remember the sales training films of James Fenton … the Man in the White Suit? Again, I apply Occam’s Razor. Is this Marxism or simple corporate greed? What other influences may be at work?

In 1946, Kurt Lewin, the founder of social psychology, laid the foundation for sensitivity training as he pioneered applied psychology. He fine-tuned the methods that overcame the“resistance to change.” This spawned the National Training Laboratories in 1947, located in Bethel, Maine, far from everyone’s comfort zone. In a group setting, the training takes three steps to change the trainee’s perception. First, they attempt to bypass the natural defense mechanisms and dismantle the “mind set” using peer pressure and other psychological techniques. That leads to the change, a transitional period of confusion. Then the new mind set is “freezed” in step three, and comfort levels return to normal.

This training disorients the recipient and then reorients them in a relative world. In 1962, in their manual “Five Issues in Training,” the NTL defined their training as, “coercive persuasion in the form of thought reform or brainwashing.” Since then, the NTL has expanded and developed specialized labs for industry, universities, churches, and community organizers.

Lewin associated with the Frankfurt School scholars, but he was also the director of the Tavistock Clinic in 1932.

 

Tavistock

 

In 1920, the secretive Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology was established in England and soon renamed the Tavistock Clinic. There are few public records – Tavistock was likely a creation of British Intelligence. Some researchers claim that Sigmund Freud was the first director. Certainly, his influence was supreme. They initially specialized in the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers, which revealed insights into humanity’s breaking point and became a topic of intensive research.

In June 1940, John Rawlings Rees, the director of Tavistock Clinic, revealed their agenda in a speech titled, “Strategic Planning for Mental Health.” He said, “We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church; the two most difficult are law and medicine … Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence … If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people, I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity … Let us all, therefore, very secretly be fifth columnitsts.”

“Fifth column” was coined in 1936 and refers to a conspiracy that sympathizes with the enemy and engages in subversion within a society.

In 1947, with a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was created as another agency for change. Their primary interest was applied psychology on a global scale, also called “psy-ops.” They established research facilities at universities and think tanks in the U.S. and across the globe to analyze all the methods of mind control including hypnosis, electromagnetic radiation, psychotherapy, pharmacology, propaganda, and drugs both legal and illegal – they worked with the pharmaceutical giants like Sandoz and Eli Lily. The mind control research behind MK Ultra did not originate in the CIA. The British were actively engaged before the CIA was born, and Tavistock became the bridge between the two intelligence agencies.

In 1955, Bernays wrote The Engineering of Consent which detailed the propaganda campaign that led to a US-engineered coup in Guatemala. This reference book became the Tavistock blueprint to overthrow any country that would not align with their long term goal of one-world-government.

The Tavistock elite analyzed all the media, including radio, music, movies, magazines, pop-art, and TV. In August 1959, Fred Emery, a Tavistock senior staffer, wrote an article titled, Working Hypotheses on the Psychology of Television. He stated, “The psychological after-effects of television are of considerable interest to the would-be social engineer.”

According to Dr. John Coleman, a disgruntled intelligence agent, Tavistock created the love affair between our youth and the Beatles. It is impossible to understand the frenzy and mass hysteria created by the Beatles without knowledge of mass-psychology and mass-manipulation. Coleman claimed the crowds had been tutored by earlier news footage. When the Beatles first arrived in JFK airport in 1964, busloads of girls from a local Bronx school had been paid to scream hysterically. They duplicated this effort for the first few events, and this trend perpetuated, as all good fads do.

If Dr. Coleman is correct, then the amazing coincidences behind America’s early Rock and Roll scene become more logical. As investigative journalist David McGowan has documented, our early musicians all bypassed the three centers of music in Detroit, New York City, and Nashville to assemble in Laurel Canyon in California, where there was no live music scene and no music producers. They eventually created their own scene, most likely with a little help from their friends at Tavistock.

Much work on ‘engineered consent’ was … an still is … geared to the needs of consumer mass marketing. Read Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders … now a sadly forgotten work.

I would discount Coleman completely. His work is packed with assertions for which he offers not a single scintilla of evidence.

There is no doubt that much of the mass hysteria surrounding pop stars in that period was stage managed. It takes only a few managed events to normalise such a reaction. The principle of feedback … as the following sentences acknowledge … is sufficient to create such an effect as is described here.

I think the idea that a psychological research institute could start such a ball rolling is highly fanciful, and sounds like unsubstantiated speculation. It would be most interesting to see what hard evidence there is, and what vectors were actually supposed to have been used by Tavistock to have its will done. Did it send out orders in plain brown envelopes to its operatives in the the music industry?

Given the turmoil and horrors of the twentieth century, irrational bursts of mass hysteria are hardly surprising.

Entertainment also happens to be a hugely profitable industry. No doubt profits were well boosted by these staged events. Again I apply Occam’s Razor. Are we dealing with ‘Marxism’ or simply corporate self interest? Are we dealing with 10% Marxism and 90% Mafia!

More surprisingly – or perhaps not – most of these musicians came from families immersed in military intelligence, including Jim Morrison whose father was an Admiral. (Others included Frank Zappa, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Cory Wells, Mike Nesmith, John Phillips, Cass Elliott, Joni Mitchell, and Jackson Browne, to name a select few.)

So what?

One of the founders of the Rand Corporation, Albert Wohlstetter, also made Laurel Canyon his home and conducted seminars there. The Rand Corporation is a think tank affiliated with Tavistock, not coincidentally.

Perhaps a future social scientist will propose a theory that explains how such a mass awakening occurred at the same time as the arrival of Rock and Roll. This revolutionary music helped radically change an entire generation …and each succeeding one.

 

The Tyranny of the Social Sciences

 

The positivistic philosopher might agree with Henry Ford’s claim that history is bunk, because history cannot be empirically verified. The world historian would disagree. History is much more dangerous – it can be used as an agent for change. History is typically written by the victors. As each succeeding victor revises it, history can lose its validity and become propaganda for the State.

Orwell portrayed this in 1984, when Winston Smith was asked to repeat a Party slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

By 1960, sociology was the most popular course of study in American Universities, and Progressive ideas spread across our campuses.

As our social scientists analyzed new territories, our history had to be radically rewritten. They discovered that our founders were not freedom fighters at all. Sure, they risked the penalties of high treason –hanged until unconscious, then revived, disemboweled, beheaded, cut into quarters, and boiled in oil. But they risked their lives because they were oppressors who longed for power.

As has already been noted, conservatives often talk the language of liberty and individualism , whilst desiring oligarchy, uniformity and conformity.

The Barons who challenged King John, the country squires and renegade aristocrats who challenged the Stuarts, the small town bourgeoise of the ‘Third Estate’ who challenged Louis XVI, and the American land and plantation owners who challenged King George III were emphatically not democrats. These men were already significant fiefs in their own localities. The very idea that the Great Unwashed should have a say in government would be seen by most of these men as profoundly subversive.

Who oppresses is who stands in possession of what Peroux calls the ‘dominant revenue’ (Bill Krehm has written much on this subject). After all these revolutions over the centuries we still confront oligarchy … now that the dominant revenue is derived from the manufacture of ‘broad money’ … the greatest oligarchy of all. The challenge of this generation is to finally complete the millennium long circle of the development of Common Law, with a genuine ‘Twilight of the Gods”.

In America, we didn’t need a bonfire to destroy the books that supported our cultural heritage. Earlier generations had rejected the historical revisions in the 1940’s and 1950’s, but this time the public was too busy to notice.

In 1960, “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” was coined, but no one claimed authorship. It began a few years earlier as a slur among our social scientists. In 1964, WASP was popularized when sociologist E. Digby Baltzell published his critical work “The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America.”

The creation and negativity behind WASP is a manifestation of the language rules that’s become known as political correctness. For decades, political correctness was undefined and remained covert. But its ideology was well-defined. In the Sixties, it helped shape the counter-culture.

The Frankfurt School provided the ideas for the new youth movement, while the Tavistock Institute provided the distractions – movies, music, and drugs. Rock and Roll reinforced their rebellion, gave them a new language, and the freedom from all restraints. It seems Freud was right. The masses have no love for instinctual renunciation.

The Frankfurt alum, Herbert Marcuse, became the most popular thinker of the New Left. As Allan Bloom noted,“Herbert Marcuse appealed to university students in the sixties with a combination of Marx and Freud. In Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man he promised that the overcoming of capitalism and its false consciousness will result in a society where the greatest satisfactions are sexual, of a sort that the bourgeois moralist Freud called polymorphous and infantile.”

But we are dealing with thinkers who rejected Futurism and Fordism and the idea of humankind as a vassal and a machine. The study of the means by which oligarchies propagate and reinforce themselves is essential to all those who genuinely desire liberty and individualism.

In 1965, Marcuse justified intolerance when he wrote Repressive Tolerance: “The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed … what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.” Our universities took it further and refused to hire conservative professors.

In 1946, when Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills translated some of Weber’s essays, “lifestyle” became an American word. Actually, they translated two German words as “lifestyle,” but that’s a semantic issue. In the early 1960’s, “lifestyle” became popular, as it legitimized a variety of once-deviant behaviors. Everyone was free to be whatever they wanted to be. As long as there was a label, there was a valid lifestyle.

Because we no longer study “etymology” – the history of words – we are unaware of the social engineering that results from verbal engineering.

 

Competition and Tolerance American-Style

 

The “inferiority complex” was discovered in 1922 by Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler. It took time to filter into our society. Recently, our community sports directors discovered that “competition” created winners and losers, and being labeled a loser was cruel. So, when many children begin organized sports, some teams no longer keep score, everyone gets a trophy, and no one’s self-esteem is harmed.

Our children’s math scores illustrate this phenomenon. In 2006, they ranked 25th in the world, far from its supremacy. But this doesn’t worry them, because their self-esteem on mathematical matters is supreme. They believe they are brilliant.

When the market place proves their inadequacy, they will instinctively blame the market place as the problem. Their teachers had forewarned them that “Capitalism” was the root of many modern evils: exploitation, materialism, pollution, and greed. Their textbooks depicted a dog-eat-dog kind of “competition.”

Yet ever extreme and relentless ‘competition’ is absolutely central to the entire neo-Con, neo-Liberal corporate globalised project. Which side of the fence are we on here? Cannot humans aim at a higher things than scratching one another’s eyes out over whether an electric toaster or lawnmower has three bells and whistles on it or four? All this ‘competition’ has led to us drowning in debt, stress. waste and junk merchandise.

‘Competition’ is often no more than a cover for corporate, oligarchic governance, with its low-wage, sweat-shop, man machine work, and its ‘race to the bottom.

What is wrong with mutual co-operation? Provided that co-operation takes place on a highly devolved basis, with no state interlocution, and within the framework of Common Law, then life might be a deal calmer and merrier. Humans are village animals. Conviviality and co-operation is natural to us. So let’s live in villages.

What is so often forgotten is that statist notions of ‘socialism’ have hijacked the old idea of the ‘common weal’, which go right back to Saxon times and beyond. Has anyone even heard of allodial tenure?

Finding a sensible point of balance between competition and co-operation is one of the most vexed issues in all politics.

This whole matter revolves around the question … what is the economy for? Is it to provide people with their needs and wishes, or is it some sado-masochistic playground for oligarchs? We have all this technological development, whose stated purpose is to make our lives free from drudgery and toil, yet we now work everf harder, for ever less reward and ever less security. Unless all this frenetic activity is intended to make life better, easier and more comfortable for people, then three centuries of technical innovation becomes more or less pointless.

So, competition – one of the fundamentals of life – has become a negative word among our youth. Its replacement – mediocrity – is the flimsy word building a toppling structure on Socialism.

 

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Cultural Marxism: The Doom of Language

 

It is illogical to instill in our youth a smug overestimation of their abilities and folly to teach them that our fundamental economic system is the problem – unless another result is desired. Charlotte Iserbyt makes a strong case in her aptly titled “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.”

I doubt very much whether there is much, if any, connection, between ‘dumbing down’ and the specific institutional structures of the economy as we have it. The only possibility is that the level of menial work required in a ‘post-industrial’ state, where most skilled production has been outsourced, might require trained apes rather than humans … and with commensurate rewards.

Our youth are also taught to be tolerant of all the different lifestyles. Through public education, our children are exposed to a wide world of varied and vibrant cultures, each with their own values, truths, and ways of life. “Truth” becomes relative, akin to “belief,” which quenches any desire for personal enlightenment because no truth is valid.

At one moment this tract preaches ‘liberty’, at the next it is preaching enforced social uniformity. Are we free to be who we are, and live our lives as we wish or not? I think this is called ‘cognitive polyphasia’. Liberty or uniformity … you cannot have your cake and eat it!

To ensure this lesson is learned, our students endure the psychological training called Values Clarification. The experts claim that students arrive with value confusion. Values Clarification gives children the authority to create their own values from the available array. Whatever they like, they are autonomous, free of parental authority and any traditional values. Vice can become virtue as long as it is valued.

The ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, established the opposite tradition. He searched the world to find the good and the bad in each culture. These truths, he reasoned, would enlighten his own culture. Our educational experts claim this approach is absurd. Because there is no ultimate authority on good and evil, we must respect all ways of life.

 

Political Correctness

 

In the 1930’s, both Stalin and Hitler perfected the language rules of political correctness. People literally risked their lives when they spoke.

I doubt whether Stalin or Hitler originated anything that was not known to Torquemada!

In the early 1990’s, when our media overtly and eagerly adopted the new language rules called “political correctness,” rule violators risked their jobs and suffered the media’s wrath. Patrick Buchanan explained the ideology behind these rules, “Political Correctness is Cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance.”

Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson wrote, “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.”

Multiculturalism is a product of political correctness which breeds diversity and divides our nation. Our cultural melting pot used to meld immigrants into Americans. Today, except for the oppressive ruling class, most citizens define themselves as hyphenated Americans: Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American, Native-American, et cetera. No longer are we united by one language and one culture.

America has always been a country of communities. New York was segregated into Irish, Italian and Jewish communities a hundred years or more ago. Going further back, the religious pioneers who founded the country, and who were often not on especially good terms with one another, lived in more or less exclusive communities.

Our founders envisioned a commonwealth of freedom extending from coast to coast. Commonwealths, by definition, are established for the “common good,” which our founders defined as freedom from tyranny and the protection of unalienable rights – bestowed by God – those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This meant there were natural limits because of natural law.

At last we reach a reasonable diagnosis, except that religious belief is not a necessary condition for the existence of Common Law. There is very little mention of God in the Laws of Ine and Alfred, or in the apocryphal Laws of Molmute. The Charter of Liberties and the Magna Carta again say little on the subject beyond customary references to the Crown, and guarantees of the independence of the English Church.

The equation of problem and solution is far simpler than the author suggests. Our problems stem from oligarchy … the concentration of power into the hands of a tiny minority. The cure lies in;-

The refounding and reforging of Common Law

Money Reform

The radical devolution of political and economic power, with strict ceilings placed upon the size, power and scope of any interest.

The pursuit of the fruits of labor was limited when it infringed upon other’s unalienable rights.

Multiculturalism requires a new definition of “common good,” one for a godless society where rights are granted by governments. The left think tank, Center for American Progress, claims that government is essential when people pursue their dreams. They redefined the common good as governmental policies that benefit everyone while balancing self-interest with the needs of the entire society. Perhaps that explains why Texas removed“the common good” from their public education’s textbooks. The common good has become a progressive term that refers to entitlements for the disadvantaged, but also includes big bailouts for our megacorporations.

 

Higher Education American-Style

 

When our universities openly endorsed political correctness, the free speech of one sector of society was verboten. Constitutional flag-wavers became bigoted chauvinists whose ideas were dangerous and unwelcome –they supported Nationalism and Capitalism and the traditional rule of elite white men. In the reign of tolerance, this was intolerable. The universities banished their ideas.

The two primary goals of all totalitarian states is to reduce independent critical thought, and eliminate individual moral responsibility. Our universities have been instrumental in this success. Over twenty years ago, Bloom lamented,“What happened to the universities in Germany in the thirties is what has happened and is happening everywhere.”

As our universities evolve for the worse, they are becoming irrelevant. In the distant past, “college graduates” had studied the broad spectrum of knowledge –philosophy, theology, history, science and the arts. They had mined the human record for the hidden gems of genius. The great books of the great thinkers were commonly discussed: Homer, Herodotus, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Milton, Luther, Pascal and Descartes, Swift, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Voltaire, even Goethe, to name a few from the olden days.

Yes, the purpose of public education is not to broaden the mind, but to narrow it. The purpose is to turn the human into a productive machine. The subordination of man to machine is all in Marinetti. Yet the influence here derives far more from Futurism and Fordism that Marxism.

Because we’ve eliminated whole branches of learning from our universities, we’ve crippled our awareness. A liberal education used to teach independent thought, which led many students to continue their education throughout their lives, which enhanced their ability to think critically and creatively. This is intolerable today because it would create dissent from the tyranny of public opinion, which destabilizes a totalitarian State.

 

Sex American Style

 

Throughout America’s history, sex outside the marriage was considered immoral. In the Sixties, sex was liberated among our youth. Eventually, much of the rest of society was engineered into acceptance. (Many more qualified writers have detailed the specifics.)

Today, sex is a natural feature of modern life and a popular term of discussion. We have become sophisticated and discuss sex unabashedly in every detail regardless of the company. Something private has been made public and in the process,“love” became “lust.”

Because of this preoccupation, most conversation is spiritually dead, focused on two topics – trivial matters and sex.

Psychologists studied the appeal of the sex story. In the past, men would separate from the women, and a few would entertain the others with their exploits. As genders were redefined, naturally women had to be included, and those with bravado try to outdo the men.

 

The Doom of Language

 

Our most prominent psychologists and sociologists are deliberately engineering our society toward cultural Marxism by changing our most important institutions and traditions – and the associated language. They are creating a culture of hopelessness and despair. They assume when nihilism prevails, we will be ready for their Socialistic solution.

They have used their discoveries to perfect the methods of mass-persuasion and mind control. This is reflective in the ideas and the language they have given us.

Ideas can be more powerful when the masses have no clue, as all the successful dictators have shown. Changes can be manipulated right before their eyes.

When new ideas become popular, words are created to express the changes, while others are modified or discarded. Words change naturally, but sometimes they change deliberately to further a cultural agenda.

Today, “truth” has become relative. Values are “self-actualized.” And Fromm’s “soulless automaton” is epidemic. “Guilt” is no longer a motivation for change. It is unhealthy. Freud’s “sublimation,” with its association with“repression,” was finally freed. “Man” was an animal and had learned to behave like one.

It is probably true that humans are angels in the bodies of wolves. The fact is that debauchery and all that goes with it feeds huge and vastly profitable corporations … booze, casinos, and all manner of titilation in the so-called arts, … movies, music, porno … the list goes on. I don’t see much ‘Marxism’ in any of that. Again, the real equation is 5% Marx and 95% Mafia.

The “soul” has been banished from education, the media, and modern art, and is rarely cultivated. American writer, Saul Bellow, lamented, “We live in a thought-world, and the thinking has gone very bad indeed.”

“Charisma” has changed into its opposite. It used to be a spiritual word derived from the Greek word, “charis,” which means “grace” from God. Sometimes this grace was endowed upon a leader, which enabled him or her to lead with divine sanction and express his views more powerfully.

History is littered with the tyrannies of charismatics who claimed divine provenance, … Akhenaten, Nero, Innocent III, Torquemada, Savanorola, Henry VIII … to name but a few. No more, please!

Today, many of our leaders strive for self-enrichment. Some of these are called charismatic because they stir up our emotions and compel us to follow. They rejected “public servant”in favor of self-service and receive no inspiration from our grace-giving God.

Could there be any more evidence that oligarchy and the inevitable kleptocracy, greed, hubris, corruption, debauchery and tyranny that flows from oligarchy, lies at the root of our problems?

When the common vocabulary is missing the vital words and ideas from the Great Books of genius, awareness will remain narrow. And those who neglect their language and their heritage will be unaware that they are missing anything.

Every word acquired in memory and every etymology studied increase awareness. Every great book that is read enhances awareness. “Orwellian” can be understood superficially by a trip to the dictionary, but the real journey to understanding begins by reading Orwell’s work.

The noble words of our forebears have fallen silent. In the past, inquiring minds would gather together and discuss religion or politics in light of their historical traditions. Today, there is no inquiry, no curiosity, and no shame as these topics are banned from ordinary conversation as controversial.

Our social scientists have long studied human behavior, our language, beliefs, and habits. Some have sold out to industry and use their knowledge to develop better propaganda and advertising campaigns.

Others are more perverse and work with the Progressives of Frankfurt and Tavistock to develop more powerful methods to influence both our behavior and our thinking. They’ve infiltrated our education, our churches, our government, the mass media, even the arts.

Recently, many patriots have been aroused from their sleep and now fight on the political front with some apparent success, but this seems to have little overall effect. As they fight this skirmish, the all-out war rages around them in all the other arenas of life. We might be surrounded, but this is no time for the faint-hearted. There is no time for retreat. Our brave warriors must no longer fight on one front. It is time to engage the whole battlefield with all our might, mind, and spirit, and let our Lord lead us to victory.

In the olden days, the common language was never taken for granted. Many learned to read specifically so they could study the Holy Scriptures. Their lives were much harder, but their minds were more pure. This Book inspired many of the greatest heroes of history. Some were blessed with charisma – in its original sense. If more of us were engaged in the study and contemplation of this Greatest Book, we would produce more leaders who follow them in this greatest tradition. And our nation would once again be blessed.

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