Where did this terminal cancer, which has weakened American society for
over 10 years, come from? How did we get to the point where our 1st
Amendment rights are literally being eroded out from beneath us? And why
are we intelligent, average, sensible Americans allowing it to happen?
Bill Lind wrote an excellent article back in February 2000, called The
Origins of Political Correctness, from which he lectured at various
Accuracy in Academia conferences during that same year. I will be
borrowing liberally from this work, so when you see words in italics,
those are verbatim from that paper.
Even before the first shots were fired in the American Revolution, we in
this country always took great pride in the fact that we could speak our
minds with impunity. In fact, we’ve taken it for granted so long we’ve
hardly noticed that freedom is all but a thing of the past. Like the
frog placed in a pot of water who didn’t realize the heat was slowly
being turned up and didn’t know he was being cooked until it was too
late, political correctness will be the death of us.
There are some who have pointed out this scourge over the years, but
we’ve apparently been too busy with our day to day lives and concerns to
pay much attention. We’re beginning to listen now! The demand for
political correctness (P.C.) is getting louder and more intrusive than
ever and unless we push back and speak the truth, we will be forced to
live in fear of ‘offending’ the wrong person.
This insidious nonsense is precisely why tens of millions have died
around the world. We see the consequences on the news every day as
hundreds are being slaughtered by their own military and government for
daring to speak out against the repressive society in which they live.
History is witness to those citizens who have been harassed, arrested or
even executed in places like Russia, North Korea, China and even in
Europe and it all started with controlling what the populace could say
publically.
Basically, political correctness is cultural Marxism. Webster’s defines
Marxism as “The political and economic view of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels that society inevitably develops through class struggle from
oppression under capitalism to eventual classlessness.” Political
correctness is a totalitarian ideology.
An ideology posits that due to what a particular philosophy states,
certain things must be true. An example of this would be to say the
entire history of human culture reflects the history of the oppression
of females. It is a gross exaggeration of a basic or partial truth.
Since reality contradicts the basic or partial truth, reality must be
forbidden. Thus, to keep people from speaking out and refuting what they
know reality to be, the power of the state must be put behind the demand
to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian
state.
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 other groups. Nothing else matters.
As classic Marxism philosophy teaches, certain groups are ‘good’ while
others are ‘bad.’ For instance blacks, Hispanic, homosexuals and
feminists are determined to be ‘victims’, and therefore are
automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white
males (and white females) are determined to automatically be evil.
Unfortunately, anyone who currently professes to be a true, practicing
Christian is now considered the cause du jour of all the world’s ills.
Nowhere else is political correctness more prevalent than on America’s
college campuses. Any student or even faculty member who dares cross any
line set by any of the ‘victim’ groups quickly find themselves in hot
water with the ‘intellectual elite.’ Sometimes, the offender is even
subject to formal charges and/or punishments.
As in economic Marxism, the P.C. crowd utilizes the tool of
expropriation for control and growth. Expropriation means taking
someone’s property or depriving them of their possessions, especially
for public use. When political correctness takes over a university
campus, its proponents will 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. In society at large,
Affirmative Action is another perfect example of this tactic.
Both types of Marxism have a method of analysis that manipulates and
provides the answers they want. For P.C., it is deconstruction, or
taking any text, removing all meaning from it and re-inserting any
meaning desired. By doing this, they are able to once again show or
‘prove’ that all history is about which groups have power over which
other groups. This is how the history books in our public school systems
have been re-written to reflect the ‘victimhood’ of certain groups due
to the evil white man taking advantage for his own gain.
Political correctness has a history which, surprisingly, extends much
further back than the 1960’s with its hippies and anti-war movement. It
goes back to the time of WWI. The people espousing economic Marxism were
certain when war came to Europe, as it did in 1914, that the common
people would rise up in their various countries and overthrow their
governments. They figured the general public would feel they had much
more in common with each other across national boundaries than with the
rich and ruling class in their own country. They were wrong.
The people in each country happily backed their individual national
flags and identities and marched off to fight each other. The Marxists
were puzzled because they couldn’t possibly be wrong about their
dazzling ideology so two Marxist theorists put their heads together to
postulate what the problem could be.
Antonio Gramsci, from Italy, thought the workers would never see their
true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they were freed from
Western culture and particularly from the Christian religion because
these two forces blinded them to their potential.
Georg Lukacs, from Hungary, was considered the most brilliant Marxist
theorist since Marx himself and stated in 1919, “Who will save us from
Western Civilization?” When the Bolshevik Bela Kun government was
established the same year, Lukacs became the deputy commissar for
culture. The first thing he did was introduce sex education into
Hungarian schools, which the people were appalled by and, as a result,
they turned against the new government. This was his aim.
In Germany in 1923, Felix Weil, the wealthy, spoiled son of a
millionaire trader became a Marxist and spent a considerable amount of
money sponsoring something called the First Marxist Work Week. He was
concerned about the division of opinions within Marxist ranks and
brought together many of the key German thinkers, including Lukacs, to
work out the differences. He stated, “What we need is a think-tank”,
thus establishing the familiar term which resulted in translating
Marxism from economic to cultural, creating Political Correctness as we
know it today.
That same year, 1923, he endowed the Institute for Marxism, which was
associated with Frankfurt University. However, after realizing it was
not to their advantage to openly proclaim themselves Marxist, they
changed the name to the Institute for Social Research so as to not seem
threatening to the general public.
Weil stated in 1971 that, “I wanted the Institute to become known,
perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism.” The first director
of the Frankfurt School, as the Institute was informally named, was Carl
Grunberg, an Austrian economist. In his opening address, he concluded by
clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific
methodology and that it would be the ruling principle at the Institute.
This never changed.
In 1930, the facility got a new director, Max Horkheimer, whose Marxist
views were thought to be too radical by the mainstream members. The
theorists at the Institute were expelled from the official Marxist
party. Horkheimer’s sin was to combine cultural Marxism with Freudism.
Freud thought everyone lived repressed lives, and Horkheimer and the
Institute combined the two to create a new theory called, Critical
Theory.
Critical Theory is quite simple. It states that the best way to bring
down Western culture and the capitalist order, which represses its
citizens, is to sharply criticize the established order but explicitly
refuse to lay down an alternative. It calls for the most destructive
criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current
order down. Critical Theory is now known as Political Correctness.
Two key members joined the Institute in the 1930’s, Erich Fromm and
Herbert Marcuse, who introduce the need for sexual liberation which is a
strong theme in today’s P.C. thinking.
Horkheimer came up with the idea of environmentalism, also a popular
element in modern thinking today. “Materialism had led to a manipulative
dominating attitude toward nature” and the theme of man’s domination of
nature was a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent
years. He also expressed another criticism of materialism and common
labor with the demand for human, sensual happiness and personal
gratification to which he felt the leaders of government and society
were hostile.
This is about the time these inane ideas were introduced into America
and its universities. In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany and
shut down the Institute for Social Research. Its members fled to New
York City and reestablished the Institute there with help from Columbia
University. Through the 1930’s the members shifted their focus from
German society to directing Critical Theory toward American society.
Some of the members also went to work for the government, including
Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to
the CIA). Others, including Horkheimer moved to…wait for it….Hollywood,
California.
Today’s political correctness matured in the student rebellion of the
1960’s which was largely due to resistance to the military draft and the
Vietnam War in general. The students needed to justify their rage with
some theory that had a somewhat believable rationale to support it.
Herbert Marcuse had remained in America after the Frankfurt School
relocated back to Germany after the war and was available to come to
their rescue.
Marcuse saw the rebellion as a great opportunity to make the work of the
Institute and its theories into the New Left in America. One of his
books virtually became the student rebel’s bible. The book, Eros and
Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, had its Marxist
ideology downplayed, as the theories were disguised in softer language.
Because the youth in the rebellion were not the sharpest tools in the
shed, Marcuse’s book was much easier to understand than classic economic
Marxism and the students lived by its tenets.
See if the following sounds familiar: Under a capitalistic order,
repression is the essence of that order and that results in the person
Freud describes—a person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because
his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can
only destroy the 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 your own thing.’ In that world there
will no longer be work, only play. Sounds eerily like the Occupy
Movement, doesn’t it??
This message for the radicals of the mid-1960’s sounded like nirvana.
They were students and baby boomers who grew 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 understand. He doesn’t require them to
read a lot of heavy Marxism and he 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.” Marcuse is also the genius who
coined the brilliant phrase, “Make love, not war.” Groovy.
He defined ‘liberating tolerance’ as tolerance for anything coming from
the Left and complete Intolerance for anything coming from the Right,
which is the attitude we are contending with today. Add the morality of
the Bible and true Christian living as a target of Critical Theory and
the average, upstanding, hard-working American with good common sense
simply doesn’t stand a chance.
In the last 10 to 15 years, America has undergone the greatest and
direst transformation in its history. We have literally become a country
with an official ideology which is enforced by the power of the state.
For instance, we now have ‘hate crimes.’ Don’t ALL crimes stem from
hate? Must we really have special laws covering this? When will speaking
out become a crime?
Political correctness is here to stay and it will only get stronger as
it seeks to destroy the freedoms our forefathers died to provide as well
as the culture and way of life we have worked so hard for. We had better
wake up and start pushing back for the sake of our children and
grandchildren.
The Bible clearly warns us that these attitudes will be part of the last
days. I guarantee a time will come in this country when anyone who makes
their disagreement with the establishment known publically will be
imprisoned or will simply disappear in the night, as those in Russia,
Germany, China, North Korea and other totalitarian societies have done
over the decades.
Those of you who claim the name of Christ had better get your house in
order while there is still time. I, for one, do not plan on hanging
around to see these things come to pass.