Jim Farmelant
On Thu, 22 Apr 1999 13:08:13 -0400 "Charles Brown"
<CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes:
>The Origins of Political Correctness
>An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind
>
>Delivered 10 July 1998 at AIA"s 13th Annual Summer Conference Held at
>George Washington 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.
>
>(Bill Lind is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the
>Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C.)
>
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