37. Frankfurter Schule ( flarden van het internet)

De Frankfurter Schule is een joodse intellectuele beweging die in 19324 ontstond in Duitsland. In de jaren 30 vluchtten de leden naar Amerika. 
Ze hadden een enorme invloed op het denken van de mensen in de Westerse Wereld.
De studenten-opstanden, de hippy-beweging, de anti-autoritaire beweging, de emancipatie-bewegingen en vooral de politiek-correctheid van de jaren 80 en 90  zijn een gevolg van hun theorieën. 
In essentie was het de FS erom te doen om middels een cultuur van kritiek de oude maatschappij af te breken en te vervangen door.... 
Door wat, dat is nooit zo duidelijk geworden. 
Hoofdzaak was: breek het bestaande af.  Neem alle belemmeringen voor massa-immigratie weg. 






Mooie ( oude) video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SFWCExaZ9k&feature=related


Clara Rising beschrijft 'Polilical Correctness' en de beweging die haar creëerde: de Frankfurter Schule.  ( En waarom die haar creeerde) .


David Horowitz (*), iemand die een grote rol speelde als politiek correct linkse activist is nu een neocon geworden. Volgens Jeff Cohen is hij een van de eerste en belangrijkste moslim-bashers.(*)  
 Hij is misschien oprecht van mening veranderd, maar het is een voorbeeld van het veranderen van de joodse agenda: nu joden de macht hebben bereikt, is het niet langer nuttig om links ( anti-establishment;  do-gooders; verdrijf de huidige machthebbers ten bate van de zwakkeren in de samenleving; etc. etc.) te zijn.  Nu hebben joden de macht, en nu komt Ayn Rand en 'het recht van de sterkste' veel meer positief in het nieuws.  'Links' wordt bespot ( 'Linkschmensch') en krijgt de schuld van alles. 
In Nederland is Leon de Winter een voorbeeld van die veranderende agenda. 


Hier is een radio-interview met Hans Janmaat van pakweg 20 jaar geleden. Als we dat horen, begrijpen we hoe sterk de mensen waren beïnvloed door het politiek correcte denken.  Dit alles is terug te voeren op de Frankfurter  Schule.  ( Janmaat ) 




Enige 'flarden' tekst van het internet: 


In his book "The Culture of Critique", Kevin MacDonald devotes many pages to an analysis of "The Authoritarian Personality", which was written by Adorno. It was part of a series called "Studies in Prejudice," produced by the Frankfurt school, which included titles like "Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder."

In addition to ridiculing patriotism and racial identity, the book's purpose was to make every group affiliation sound as if it were a sign of mental disorder and defective "authoritarian personality." All group loyalties, not only to nation and race, but even close family ties are "prejudice."

It is precisely the kind of group loyalty, respect for tradition, and consciousness of differences central to Jewish identity(*) that was described as mental illness in gentiles. As MacDonald explains, the Frankfurt school never criticized or even described Jewish group identity – only that of gentiles: "behavior that is critical to Judaism as a successful group evolutionary strategy is conceptualized as pathological in gentiles." 

As Christopher Lasch has written, the book leads to the conclusion that prejudice "could be eradicated only by subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy – by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum." 

"Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology."

In the same vein, the French-Jewish "deconstructionist" Jacques Derrida wrote:

"The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue... The idea is to disarm the bombs... of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants..." 

For these Jewish intellectuals, anti-Semitism was also a sign of mental illness.

Needless to say, this project has been successful; anyone opposed to the displacement of whites is routinely treated as a mentally unhinged "hate-monger," and whenever whites defend their group interests they are described as psychologically inadequate. The irony has not escaped Kevin MacDonald: "The ideology that ethnocentrism was a form of psychopathology was promulgated by a group that over its long history had arguably been the most ethnocentric group among all the cultures of the world."

ozconservative.blogspot.com/2009/.../losing-moral-status.html

(*)Should I be ashamed that I want my daughter to marry a Jew and only a Jew? Am I a Nazi for my pride and my conviction? Should I be condemned for wanting to keep that flame of Abraham alive?

On the contrary, I believe it is those who demand that we assimilate, who cannot bear that there be a people who dare stand out from the background, who dare to preserve their heritage and their mission despite every attempt to crush and beat them to the ground—they are the true bigots. They are the ones who are out to destroy the beauty G‑d made in His creation, to destroy the very essence of life.

We are proud to be Jews and we are proud to be proud. We don't wish to be anything else and we don't wish our grandchildren to be anything else. To us, there is nothing more magnificent than to be a Jew and nothing more disastrous than to lose one. Because every Jew is a precious flame, a burning bush that will not be consumed, an eternal torch that no one has the right to extinguish—not even that Jew himself.
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/520294/jewish/Isnt-It-Racist-To-Believe-That-Jews-Are-Special.htm




               ****************************************************************






Voor het geval de site zou verdwijnen heb ik hieronder ( heel klein) het artikel van Clara Rising gecopieerd. 

The Tar Babies

http://www.mediamonitors.net/clararisingbook4.html

by Clara Rising

• Introduction
• Original Sin
• Marxism
• Political Correctness
• The Federal Government
• America’s Tar Baby
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Political Correctness

The year was 1923. The town, Frankfurt, Germany. The people, a group of Marxists who had started an "Institute for Social Research," which came to be known as "The Frankfurt School." Since we know a bit about Marx, the words "social research" have a sinister ring. Would we be correct in mistrusting that "feel good" sound? What does one mean by "social research?" Looking into--prying into human motivations, desires, goals, frustrations, beliefs, hatreds? To what purpose? To change, to manipulate, or just to study? It soon became obvious to the local authorities that the main goal of these "scholars" was the mixing of Freud with Marx, the use of sex as a tool to tamper with the psychological development of young minds. If Marx was right, and society had chained the human animal with its rules and regulations, then Freud was right in releasing those chains and allowing the libido to follow its desires and damn the consequences. In fact, part of this new educational system was devoted to the instruction of just how to enjoy this new "freedom." The result (to be expected by anybody past the age of puberty) was the dumbing-down of Prussian education, and the authorities, who were old enough to understand the pitfalls awaiting such abandonment, would have none of it. This total, all-out assault on biological restrictions would have to wait for a "sexual revolution" to occur across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1960's. A step in that direction came with the advent of Adolph Hitler, when members of the Frankfurt Group fled to the United States and were received with open arms by Columbia University as "Jewish refugees." They were Jewish, but they were also hard-core Marxists dedicated to the destruction of Western culture and their method would be the infiltration of American education as the best way to ruin it.

Their method would be simple. The first item, the liberation of the libido into that never-never land called Instant Gratification, had already proved effective. Communist leadership had long advocated complete "libertinism and promiscuity" to replace marriage and family. As early as 1919 the Soviets issued a decree that women were the property of the state, and one month after delivery, "children will be placed in an institution entrusted with their care and education." Thus the State became the Great Nanny. Now the second phase of the agenda, the assault on individualism, would be easy. Listen to W. Cleon Skousen, in The Naked Communist:

"There is no such thing as a woman being violated by a man; he who says that a violation is wrong denies the October CommunistRevolution. To defend a violated woman is to reveal oneself as abourgeois and a partisan of private property."

I wonder if Patricia Ireland of NOW (National Organization of Women) knows that the revered idea of "sexual equality" is really a Communist undertow dragging everybody--male and female--into a rip tide that will crush us all into an equality, to be sure, but an equality of zero, without value or consequence. If defending a violated woman brands one as "a partisan of private property," we are in a world where people have become things. It is amusing to watch the communists of the 1930's rail against the authoritarian regime of the Nazis and then transfer this animosity to "the authoritarian family" (as a frontal attack against parental authority) when it would be difficult to find, in any level of class or culture, people more "authoritarian" than the communists themselves. (Aye, but it’s impossible to see ourselves as others see us, a poet once wrote.)

Once a person is a thing, it is easy to further reduce its individualism by making it part of a group. "Group therapy" will now have an added purpose: the old Roman military custom of Divide and Conquer. Separate people according to race, religion, inclination, politics, or gender, and fool them with words like "tolerance" and "diversity" and "multiculturalism." If they don’t comply control them with something as old as Original Sin. Make them feel guilty.

Thus we have arrived at the true method behind cultural Marxism: Political Correctness. An elusive, silent, invisible Big Brother lurking in the background of our every move, our every thought. A cultural policeman with the threat of a guillotine in his eye, his every look. Even worse, he is everywhere. Like an evil leprechaun he has invaded every body of every person we know. We recognize his presence instantly, from his effect on the people around us. To understand what I mean, try criticizing the Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians at a bar mitzvah. Dead silence. You are intimidated. You have exhibited Anti-Semitism. You exude a socio-religious moral B.O. that brands you as intolerant, just when you thought you were objecting to intolerance! You have said something not exactly de rigueur. Suddenly the date is 1984, and George Orwell’s Thought Police are dictating, through "doublethink," your every move. You are in an open, hostile sea. Your friends have become sharks, swirling around you, their jaws open, and they mean business. How did all this come to be?

You soon learn that Political Correctness, the splendid stepchild of economic Marxism, stubbornly retains the old battle cries against the ownership of property in the form of class warfare ("Tax cuts for the rich!"). But something more significant has happened. With cultural Marxism the war has turned inward, into our psyches, into our souls. Old-time Marxists are still in a state of denial that the critical center has moved from the pocketbook to the heart. Perhaps this frustration explains the militant resentment of media-savvy liberals such as the Reverend Al Sharpton who, like Bill Press on CNN’s "Crossfire," seem almost trigger-happy in their eagerness for conflict. If you analyze their angry bluster, you may discover just a hint of desperation concealing a defensive posture. They don’t want to admit that the same totalitarian, inhuman agenda of economic Marxism operates in their efforts to "improve" society. If they were really the experts they pretend to be they should have anticipated some objection to their view of Socialist Utopia. People will only tolerate being treated as things for just so long (or things in a group) before they wake up.

Even in the early days, economic Marxism was understandably unpopular with the governments of Europe. In Paris, in 1847, Marx and Engels rashly proclaimed, in their great call-to-arms, The Communist Manifesto, that "the fall of capitalism and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." This fall and victory would be accomplished by one thing and one thing only: REVOLUTIONARY TERROR. Perhaps, carried away as they were by their own exaggerated, inflated opinion of themselves, they had no idea that their rantings contained a logical contradiction. If the fall of capitalism and the victory of the proletariat are indeed "inevitable," then why would you need terrorism? Evidently the authorities realized the danger lurking behind such a conundrum. The two geniuses received orders "at the request of the Prussian government" to leave France. Evidently, they had not learned their lesson. In May, 1848, they went to Cologne and began a daily revolutionary paper they called, ironically, "The Organ of Democracy." When, in November of that year the king of Prussia dissolved the National Assembly, Marx and his friends called for a tax revolt. They were put on trial for high treason. Marx was lucky; he was acquitted by the people he hated so much: a middle-class jury. In May, 1849 he was expelled from Prussian territory. He went back to Paris, but found himself a persona non grata.

The French government gave him the option of either leaving France or settling in a small provincial village. He chose the former, and went to England, where he lived the rest of his life.

Now, with the collapse of communism in Russia and the shambles that economic Marxism has left wherever it has been tried, you would think we could at last bury the matter. Not so. Marxism, as we noted, has just gone underground--or, to be more specific, inward. It has become more personal because it has invaded not only our daily lives, but our thoughts--sometimes, even before we think them. Remember that dead silence at your criticism of Israel? The unspoken message was clear: you suffer from some hidden, deadly disease. You know neither its origin nor its cure. To repeat ourselves, in our confusion, we ask again, "How did this happen?" It has happened by dedicated Marxists posing as university professors or government officials (elected and otherwise) taking aim at specific targets and weaving them into a vast tapestry so cleverly that we no longer recognize them for what they really are. The ultimate goal is the same, the annihilation of capitalism, with variations.

The #1 villain used to be Christianity. Now it is any belief. But, again, with a difference. Now we will REPLACE the belief with something else. As G.K. Chesterton said, "People who no longer believe in God will believe anything." Now we can smear elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary and call it "free speech." Now we can bestow on Communist China "most favored nation status." Are the Chinese communists most favored because we sent them missile technology to enable their missiles to hit us with more accuracy? Or as thanks for allowing us to have such an enormous trade deficit? Now we can destroy the family by allowing homosexuals to "marry" and receive all the financial benefits from that clever arrangement. We can educate our children by providing them with "sex education" in kindergarten and condoms in junior high (Marx would be pleased). Or, even better still, if you are a cultural Marxist, will be the chance to prevent the kid from getting here in the first place--and call it "choice." If you make the decision soon enough you can cut off his arms and legs and pull him out of the "mother’s" body or, if you are an abortionist wanting to make your money an easier way, you can wait until the kid is almost here and, by turning him around so he comes out feet-first, puncture his skull with a scissors, spread it apart to accommodate a tube and vacuum the brains out. Since the skull is still soft, it will collapse and make the whole operation easier and more profitable, for now you can sell the body parts. And we think we live in an "advanced" society! There is some hope, though. If you did that to a dog in this country, you would go to jail.

But let us not get carried away by our own frustration. After all, we want to discover, by a systematic examination of the development of American Marxism, how we got here. And what here really means. It may be that open sea full of not-so-friendly sharks that we found ourselves in at the beginning of this discussion.

For cultural Marxism aims at destroying our MOORINGS. No longer can we depend on a connection with anything remotely resembling humanity--or safety. We are adrift on an angry surge of power, endless, unrelenting, with the mad, mindless agenda which is not human, butcosmic. The method of cultural Marxism is not only to destroy our moorings, but to eradicate every item that even hints at our old life of belief, of love, of commitment, of marriage, of family. The weapon, discovered by the Frankfurt School back in the 30's, is still ready-at-hand and universal. The word is SEX. Uninhibited, "free" ( i.e., totally-without-consequences) sex. Couple that with "women’s liberation" and you have the spectacle in Montreal, on "International Women’s Day," when feminist vandals sacked the city’s Roman Catholic cathedral by smearing paintings with soiled sanitary napkins and hurling used condoms at terrified worshippers, in protest at the Church’s anti-abortion position. Yet nowhere in the Montreal newspaper--except in a tiny notice at the bottom of one page C9--was the atrocity recognized. Thus we meet another Tar Baby, the Media. There is certainly an element of communist hubris in the stances of many TV "reporters" who pose as cultural popes, completely unaware that the centrifugal forces of class envy into which they have plunged ("Let’s get the rich.") might just backfire on their own bloated salaries.

Once you have destroyed belief--or even the memory of a time when we could believe in anything--you can begin to INVENT. The old style Marxism had convenient victims, the workers. Now we need to inventvictims--but always in a group, for we are still dedicated to the death of individualism. Our groups will be women, homosexuals, "people of color." Our method will be simple. We will begin by causing a vague feeling of repression, then replace it with a pseudo-solution which will create an even larger problem. But, you say, we have a relatively affluent society. Good. We can use affluence as a new weapon. For the men, we will make them dissatisfied by showing them on every TV or internet even more affluence. They will feel that they have somehow fallen short. In grasping after this ring on the Wall Street merry-go-round, they will get into the largest personal debt ever recorded in this country. Then they will really be victims. For the women, their victimization will be easy. They already have a biologically built-in problem, with child-bearing and child-rearing. Since any desire is now a right, we will introduce the "right" to "choose."

We will avoid saying "murder" or the fact that the only true moment of choice came nine months before the inevitable. Thus the "women of choice" can become victims of those "pro-lifers"--refusing to think of themselves as "pro-death." And certainly, in these good economic times, smaller families make more "sense." With the death of unwanted children the lust for affluence can know no bounds, can cause bothparents to work to support a "standard" of living--and increase, ironically, the worry, the insecurity. Add to this the injection of "affirmative action," to make the whites feel guilty and the blacks unappreciated. It will all be so easy, because the ground has been plowed and waiting for these new seeds.

The ground has been prepared by that old false hope of Instant Gratification (remember "free" love?). All we have to do now is encourage the purchase of anything and everything advertised on TV--new cars, clothes, cruises, a houseful of toys for our already psychologically overloaded children. Not to worry, say our leaders. Once you comrades are dissatisfied enough, we will be ready with our pseudo-solutions. These will be another form of weapon: "tolerance," "diversity," "multiculturalism," to imply that anybody identifying himself as an "American" must be a fossil. The new wave is international. Boundaries, or any kind, are stupid. We are in a New World Order.Controls over illegal immigration are unnecessary, for nothing is illegal, not even perjury by a president. As for the victims of racism, let’s worship O.J. and call him a victim, despite the fact that he is a millionaire, a football "hero"-- and glory in his victory over justice. Let’s admire Jesse Jackson’s slogan "Keep hope alive," despite our suspicion that he might just be hoping to keep racism alive--as job security. So many questions.

*~*~*~*~*~*

For these questions Political Correctness offers two interesting answers. The first is called "Critical Theory," the second "Deconstruction." Both have to do with literature and language, and the battleground will be in education, more specifically on college campuses, for this is where the founders of "The Frankfurt School" found a home, in the teachers colleges. If you can recruit the teachers, the students will follow.

As we approach an understanding of Critical Theory, it would be well to remember that the nickname given to Marx by his teenage friends was "Destroy."

Even a five-year old knows that the best way to avoid doing something is to criticize it. If he doesn’t like spinach he can find all kinds of things wrong with it. If that doesn’t work he can always spit it out (preferably, if he is determined, in your face).

I think it was Spinoza who said that "It is not things that bother us but our idea of things." If you can change the way you see something, you can change the way you think about it. Once you do that, you can eat the spinach or, when you "grow up" you can even approve of elephant dung on the Virgin Mary, or dead fetuses being carved up for sale. Or you can, with haughty disdain, refuse to see good-or-bad in anything. You can become "amoral," which in this fin-de-siecle has come to mean "cool." A hundred years ago the excuse for such disconnection was called "Art for Art’s Sake." In literature, New Critics prepared the way by finding meaning in texts without regard to background or facts or even the author’s intent. They said "the text is everything." With the advent of Critical Theory, that slogan became "everything is text"--i.e..,everything is up for grabs, open for investigation, for analyzing in relation to the literary work. Thus they intentionally forgot (even if they knew) the author’s biography, loves, hates, or religion. The only relevant item to be considered was one’s own viewpoint, one’s own prejudices. Thus a work could be judged from "the woman’s point of view," or "the gay’s point of view," or "the minority point of view." They were not interested in finding any intent left there by the author but their own vehicles of blame--sexism, racism, or "homophobia" if the author happened to be a white heterosexual male.

Marx was everywhere, although few knew it. Baudelaire (1821-1867), a contemporary of Marx, unconsciously promoted his theories as he flaunted "Bohemian freedom." Sounding like a flower child of the 1960's, he wrote poems with a kind of dandyism that was really a cult of the ego, complete with its own severe laws: to be original, to be independent of every social tie to family, friends, or nation, and above all to despise the bourgeois rabble. As 1900 loomed on the horizon, the effort to chuck the past became a passion. Everything was "New." Oscar Wilde wrote on "The New Remorse." There was a New Spirit, New Humor, New Realism, New Hedonism, New Drama, New Woman, and (does this sound familiar?) The New Age. Most called themselves "symbolists," with an emphasis not on the symbols of things but on the opposite--a conviction that the objective world is not the true reality, but merely a reflection--and a transient reflection, at that--to be caught in the present moment, on the fly, NOW. It was no coincidence, as we shall see in a moment, that these same decades of the 1870's and 1880's saw the great flourishing of Impressionism in painting. The Norton Anthology of English Literature sums up the movement succinctly: "The doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’...really meant art for the sake of the sensations and experience it could induce, with no reference to any standard of morality or utility." Edmund Wilson, inAxel’s Castle, finds something "pathetic-ironic, worldly-aesthetic" in the moods at the end of the nineteenth century. As the new century moved through its first decade, symbolism emerged from its cocoon of implied emotions into the audacious new efforts of the "Imagists" (1909-1917), who admitted bluntly that an image need not be associated with meaning. Poetry for them was designed to suggest, not to state an idea. And sometimes their suggestions were vague, at best. Try reading Ezra Pound. The Imagists have been called "the cult of unintelligibility."

Falling somewhere between symbolism and the imagists was a St. Louis-born American who, when he moved to England, became more British than the Brits. Perhaps there is no writer better qualified to represent a kind of gentleman’s club, watered-down intellectualized Marxism at the beginning of the twentieth century than T.S. Eliot. The dandyism of Baudelaire’s bohemians lives beneath all this posing and prancing, this trailing of arcane quotations (which only the initiated Oxford types would know), much as an art nouveau woman with bobbed hair and a tight-fitting hat (with a little brim) might pull after her a feathered boa as she enters a room. There is, too, more than a hint of the old Marxian despair, minus its crusading energy, to be found in Eliot’s poetry. Now we find a weary, civilized man with a studied languor, a weary sophistication, measuring out, as J. Alfred Prufrock does in his "Love Song," his life with coffee spoons. "I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas," Eliot cries out in rejection to the old Victorian, bourgeois morality. But I find something just a bit phony in all this histrionic debauchery. It tries a bit too hard to avoid, to use Eliot’s phrase in Tradition and the Individual Talent, "any semi-ethical criterion of ‘sublimity.’" The World in Literaturesays of Eliot’s poetry that it contains "more than a little obscurantism." As for the author, he "showed every symptom of being an intellectual snob, supercilious and recondite." Eliot himself, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," seemed to agree:

"Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -- Almost, at times, the Fool."

As impatient as we have been with all this very-proper despair, when we move into the "surrealism" spawned in France between the two world wars we will miss T.S. Eliot at high tea. For we will meet a combination of Dadaism (from "da-da" baby talk) and Freud. We must deal now with "the uncontrolled fantasies and associations of the mind whichrepresent a higher reality (?) than the deliberately manipulated world of practical life"--to quote an insufferably esoteric, hoity-toity entry in The Reader’s Companion to World Literature (the italics and question mark are mine). How does the "modern critic" know that uncontrolled fantasies represent a "higher reality?" Or that everyday life is so degraded that it is merely something manipulated? Evidently, to be acceptable to the academic requirements of "modern poetry" we must enter a dream world of free association and automatic writing and delight in the illogical and the inexplicable. We must tolerate statements such as "elephants are contagious." We have arrived, with that "literary cubist," Gertrude Stein, beyond language. It is time to move to art.

As we have noted, toward the end of Marx’s century, in the 1870's and 1880's, real things became only the transient impression of things, as if a gauzy half-light had been thrown over the scene. It was all very pleasant, all very South-of-France, with girls under parasols strolling through poppies, and a blue glimpse of the Mediterranean through the trees. But even in the "Age of Impressionism," among Monet’s water lilies, there were signs of a harsher reality, an undercurrent of despair on the faces of Dega’s absinthe drinkers and Manet’s isolated waitress at the bar of the Folies-Bergere. As we move closer to the end of the century the artists become preoccupied with a discontent bordering on decadence, hinting at a decline, even a decay, of hope. There is something joyless and oppressive in Toulouse-Lautrec’s "Moulin Rouge (1892). If these are party-goers, excuse me. When the Norwegian Edvard Munch paints "The Scream" in 1893 we experience a premonition of totalitarian terrorism.

But this was only the beginning. At least with Munch and even Picasso, whose women seem to have suffered the slippage of tectonic plates, people were still recognizable. Dali’s drooling watches and endless deserts were, after all, watches and deserts. But it would not be long before artists like Kandinsky and Pollock , by eliminating all resemblance to the physical world, would destroy the perspective that had anchored art to reality since the Renaissance. Now the artist can attack his canvas. He can even roll on it nude! Everything is surface--blobs of color, criss-crossing lines. As the twentieth century moved on, we suffered through cubism (distortion of an object via dislocation of its parts, or superimposition of different views), surrealism (free from reason or any aesthetic or moral purpose), and into "abstract expressionism" (non-specific content). We have finally discovered ourselves in the rarified air of the "mind" of the artist. We are now, as we did with the "Imagist" poets, witnessing another "cult of unintelligibility." It would be but a step to the second effort of Political Correctness, the "Deconstruction" of language.

Here, I think, we don’t even need to seek a definition. In America, from the very beginning of the Clinton administration, the program has been clear. Take a word. Give it a non-meaning, and voila! you have an issue. "Reform" the health-care system really meant "commandeer, dictate,"and all the old Marxist intentions, hiding behind the illusion of words, begin to dig deeper into the national psyche until we no longer recognize a real problem when we see one. The "Growing CRISIS in Health Care" became a battle cry when no war had been declared---indeed, when THERE WAS NO CRISIS. Christian Josi, in his Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Every American Should Know, quotes an article in Parade concerning "Hillarycare" in 1993: "Surveys over the course of a ten-year period report a stable 84% to 88% of respondents expressing satisfaction with the quality of care received from doctors...." Furthermore, nearly three-fourths of all Americans reported that they were "very satisfied" with the availability of health care. Suddenly, once the Political Correctness campaign from the White House cranked up, 60 to 70 percent now believed the system was failing and needed reform. As for health insurance, 64 percent of Americans were under the age of 40, and less likely to need it. First Lady Hillary Clinton was put in charge. She held secret meetings for five months. Even the names of her task force were kept secret. No doctors were invited--a strange omission, given the circumstances, but understandable if, as alleged, the fear of leaks made the whole scene something out of Jekyll Island. Why this fear of leaks? Did they have something momentous to hide? After all, we thought we were dealing with health care, not the hidden wealth of nations. An inkling of an answer surfaced when we learned that the real task force organizer was not Hillary but her husband’s Marx-indoctrinated Oxford friend, Ira Magaziner. As Christian Josi points out, Magaziner was the self-anointed "expert" for everything, from transforming Brown University into a politically correct opinion mill to telling GE how to make refrigerators. In Josi’s words, he was "an upper-management klutz with a spotless record for breaking things that were fixed." But who would know? Her husband the President "shrewdly described Hillarycare as consisting of a consortium of ‘managed competition’ programs." If it sounded like a business corporation, so did the mechanics of the venture.

The primary doctor would be called a "gatekeeper" with an allotted amount of money that could be spent on each patient. Only the gatekeeper could decide whether a patient would be allowed to see a specialist, or get an x-ray. Any funds left over from a patient’s account would contain the "gatekeeper’s" kickback at the end of the year. He would hold the gates, all right, but they would be protecting the doctors’ bank accounts--and his own cut of the profits, not the patient’s health--as the primary consideration. Hillarycare was unveiled in September of 1993, eight months after her husband’s inauguration, despite the warnings of eminent economists that it would cause the largest tax in American history. Hillary was not deterred. In fact, she became a Marxian Joan of Arc, waving the banner of class warfare, attacking the insurance companies and doctors for greed, and the pharmaceutical companies for heartlessly protecting their ill-deserved, obscene profits. Not realizing--or not caring--that the high prices of drugs, hospital beds and doctors’ visits were caused not by the medical profession but by the government, by the cost ceilings created by Medicare. If a procedure has a "benefit" of a thousand dollars, the cost will naturally float to that level. As Walter E. Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University, said of teenage pregnancies in the welfare system: "I don’t know why the American public should be surprised. Whenever the government subsidizes something, it always gets more of it." Each of us has a horror to story to tell of an overcharged visit to an emergency room or an unnecessary procedure costing thousands of dollars. (My own husband was charged $72 for the removal of one eyelash.) With these experiences generating doubt--if not resentment against the freebies, it is not surprising that Hillary’s medical revolution met with less than enthusiasm. For once, the American populace was not fooled: only 15% thought they would be better off , and this government straitjacket was put back in the socialistic junkyard where it belonged, with the other totalitarian daydreams.

But if the fear-driven "crisis" and the feel-good "managed" care misfired, the White House had other ammunition. The first of these is the fact that the American population, from the socialist days of FDR, have been mesmerized and put to sleep by the soothing sounds of "I’ll-take-care-of-you" promises. These are cleverly implicit, though never quite clear enough to be fully understood, in phrases like "Social Security," "Medicare," and "Head Start." Underneath all this wordy window-dressing is the same old ideology of economic Marxism in "PC" clothing--radical egalitarianism enforced by the power of the state. Americans will get used to it, as they have accepted the unconstitutional IRS--a government within a government, with its own judicial system and operating rules that resist any sane interpretation. Soften your proletariat with promises, deductions or "targeted" tax breaks, then control them by penalties--or even prison--if they deviate. Encourage them to jump into thirty-year mortgages, thinking they have an asset instead of a liability with a stranglehold on their future. Mix fear of death or bankruptcy with sticky-sweet pseudo-solutions and unattainable ideals that are a sure setup for psychological or financial disaster, or worse. Follow Marx’s lead by finding victims and beating the drum for racism, women’s rights, or gay rights, and when the blacks start entering the middle class and the women start finding better jobs and the gays get more "rights" than the ordinary citizen, find another victim, someone essentially and intrinsically helpless, and fire away. And, of course, these victims exist--all around us. The CHILDREN. Children without health insurance, with poverty, with parents or without. Unlike the aborted babies, keep these alive, so the poverty pimps can stay in business. Use the word "children" like a mantra, over and over, until they become icons, not unlike the little square symbols in a computer "menu," until they become an "issue."

Remember we are exploring the method used by Political Correctness to destroy language. "Welfare" is one of those feel-good words. With the implication of "Soak the rich" or "Let Uncle Sam take care of you" the word soon loses meaning.

We only have to read a little history. Charles Adams, in his excellent book, Those Dirty Rotten Taxes, remembers the lessons the rulers of Rome learned when they gave free food and entertainment to Romans who chose not to work. Adams writes:

At first, those who qualified numbered about 200,000, and the costswere paid for by the emperor and Roman and provincial taxpayers.

Once word got out, the ranks almost doubled as peasant farmers came to Rome, gave up their farming duties, and joined the rabble.

When Julius Caesar came to rule, he cut the number substantiallythrough an ingenious device. He shipped thousands of the freeloaders to the provinces, where they would have to work--where there was no free lunch. But no emperor could ever get out from under this costlygovernment handout. It contributed to the fiscal troubles of Rome in the centuries to follow, playing no small role in Rome’s prolonged inflation, heavy taxes, decline, and eventual collapse.

Thus the government of Rome was caught in its own trap. It had created a plantation that turned out to be a Tar Baby. Oh when, oh when will we ever learn from history?

Stupidity often starts with honest good intentions. I fully believe that the Great Give-Away Welfare State (the ultimate "state" of the United States?) had its origins in the old chivalrous Christian tradition ofnoblesse oblige, the idea that the "haves"

have an obligation to care for those less fortunate. The knight in armor giving his cloak to the beggar. Only now it is the beggar (the taxpayer) giving his cloak (and much more) to the fatcat politicians. And, to move from this absurdity to a true anachronism, witness the blame game of affluent blacks demanding compensation for slavery! Capitalism has become the Great Grab Bag for soothing the sins of the world--even the sins of our ancestors. Politicians constantly talk about "a level playing field." What do they mean? Communism? Or is this just another "feel good" phrase to avoid the basic fact of capitalism--that everybody wants to get rich! I can still remember that old black man I met once in New Orleans who scratched his gray head, bent over and looked at me with a grin. "Ain’t no po’ man evah give me a job!"

Such wisdom is rare--almost, in this year 2000, prehistoric. Compare that honesty with the recent charade by a president who, in an attempt to avoid the conviction of perjury, rested his whole defense on the meaning of "is." How clever, how absolutely intellectually superior to the rest of us this Marxist trick has lifted Mr. Clinton above the groveling crowd! If we try to understand we find ourselves in a web of deceit. If we try to escape we find ourselves stuck in a maze of irrational muck--a Beltway Tar Baby. If we try to think we will discover that we have lost our minds. But it serves us right. We have allowed ourselves to be thought of as nothing but gullible TV-saturated raw material for the creation of a political agenda passed off as pious charity--Marxism pretending magnanimity. And now we have Vice-President Gore trying to explain his ignorance about a fund-raiser in a Buddhist temple by echoing his President: "It all depends on what you mean by ‘raise.’" Am I being too "mean-spirited?" Before we condemn such criticism to that Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, we need to examine the beginnings of "PC," how it originated, what it hoped to do, and how it hoped to do it.

*~*~*~*~*~*

Like a vampire needing blood to stay alive, Marxism needs revolutions. The French Revolution of 1789 inspired Marx--or perhaps evoked a need in him to satisfy that revenge he spoke of in his Satanic teenage poetry. Yet as hungry as he was for destruction, he was also a pragmatist, cautious enough to realize that his crusade for uplifting humanity would need idealistic followers. He could inspire them with explosive tirades in radical journals, wielding his pen like a sword, while he spent most of his life in London, safely out of harm’s way, gulping his whiskey. Marx died in 1883. One wonders what would have happened to his theories if the Bolsheviks hadn’t conquered the imagination of Russia in 1917. Optimism for communism spread like wildfire across Europe that next year, when World War I ended. In Berlin there was a "Spartacus" uprising. In Bavaria Kurt Eisner created a "Soviet," and in Hungary a "communist republic" (an oxymoron?) was established by Bela Kun in 1919, the year Trotsky’s Red Army invaded Poland. Marx had been dead only twenty-six years. Everything he had preached and worked for seemed about to happen.

Europe was engulfed in a mad dream of egalitarianism which would, its champions hoped, end in anarchy and nihilism. Then, when Trotsky’s army was defeated by Polish forces at the battle of Vistula in 1920, the revolutionaries found themselves in a dilemma. The workers, who were supposed to have answered the call as front line troops, suddenly realized that the promised benefits from all this intellectual talk of social revolution was so much hogwash. They went back to work, where the bread was. And the intellectuals went underground, onto a cultural battlefield which would develop, through the Frankfurt School and its followers, into Political Correctness.

The year Marx died was the year that Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the future philosophic hero of the Nazis, wrote the first part of Also Sprach Zarathustra, with its pulsing, Wagnerian rhythms of destruction, echoing the Twilight of the Gods. Although the influence of Marxism on Nietzsche has received little attention, it would be almost unavoidable for a university, such as the one at Basle where Nietzsche taught, not to have its Marxist advocates, given the Bolshevik upheaval and the unfavorable reactions to democracy (and in Nietzsche’s case, to Christianity) after World War I. Speaking through Zarathustra, Nietzsche urges men to "Live dangerously. Erect your cities beside Vesuvius. Send out your ships to unexplored seas. Live in a state of war." Encouraged by Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea, this timid academic (who was delighted the day a horse threw him, ending his career in the cavalry) cried out for a "Will to War, a Will to Power, a Will to Over-power!" Democracy for Nietzsche meant drift. He admired Russia, calling it the "blond beast of Europe," for it was blessed with a government without "parliamentary imbecility." Out of the vapors of his deranged genius (he died in an asylum) rose the idea of "Superman," a new breed of humanity which would aspire to more cruelty, more evil, through the most important will of all, the Will to Power. When you meet the pups from Marx’s kennel, who would fan out from the Frankfurt School into the United States, it is not too fanciful to recognize a similar, driven will-to-conquer in operation.

The names of the Frankfurt School are barely known, even by those principals and school board members who develop curriculums and follow the dictates of the Great-Schoolmarm-in-the-Sky, the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., where, if their names are not known, their policies and goals have become the New Marxist Bible. These political "educators" keep Marx alive through an unspoken, cleverly concealed agenda. It seems incredible that academic political "scientists" and cultural historians have been so completely fooled. A book review of Francis Wheen’s Karl Marx: A Life in a recent scholarly quarterly treats him as a harmless relic, a closet eccentric whose efforts misfired and are now relegated to the tomb:

"Wheen’s Karl Marx is neither the laboring man’s messiah who founded the revolutionary workers’ movement nor the satanic force who unleashed the horrors of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Having been stripped of this baggage by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of all but a few die-hard communist parties, Marx is now neither prophet nor threat. What is left? A peculiar, frustrated, and generally unhappy 19^th-century intellectual, whose outer world was that of a stolid Victorian bourgeois and whose inner world was defined by ‘paradox, irony, andcontradiction.’"

Well, hardly. The fall of the Berlin wall did not bury Karl Marx, nor did the painful maturing of the "flower children" of the 1960's turn him into an item on a list of dead Victorians. He is alive and well in every protest against the Ten Commandments or prayer in school, in every "black studies"(or "women’s studies") program on college campuses, in every condom handed out in junior high, in every book read by third graders about "Mommie’s girl friend." When I asked a seventh-grade neighbor to name his favorite subject, he said "social studies." When I asked about Thomas Jefferson, he had never heard of him. Nor Ben Franklin. I asked him what he was reading about that week. He said "The Ku Klux Klan."

Marx’s followers have done an excellent job. They are to be congratulated. They, too, are alive and well. They have moved from Europe through the Frankfurt School into the bookstores and schoolrooms of America. It won’t take an infusion of extra brain cells to make the connection between their enthusiastic jihad and their spiritual commander-in-chief. Recognized as the leading Marxist theorist since Marx died, Georg Lukacs, the son of a wealthy Hungarian banker and an agent of the Communist International, published a book calledHistory and Class Consciousness which called for the destruction of society "as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch." According to Raymond V. Raehn, in "The Historical Roots of ‘Political Correctness’" (from Essays of Our Times, published by the Free Congress Foundation), Lukacs, as Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary in 1919, launched his brainchild, "Cultural Terrorism."

Does some of this sound familiar? Radical sex education in public schools, where the children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, and the irrelevance of religion (since it deprived people of pleasure). The rejection of parental and moral authority. The rebellion of women against any sexual restriction. But let Lukacs speak to us in his own words:

"All the social forces I had hated since my youth, and which I aimed in spirit to annihilate, now came together to unleash the First GlobalWar....The abandonment of the soul’s uniqueness solves the problem of "unleashing" the diabolic forces lurking in all the violence which are needed to create a revolution."

The italics are mine. Immediately "diabolic forces" brings us back to Satan. If anyone doubts the kind of program we in the West are up against, let him remember that Lukacs helped found the Frankfurt School for the expressed purpose of the "annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries."

In a secret meeting in 1923, which led to the creation of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University (later called the Frankfurt School), Lukacs introduced the concept of "Cultural Pessimism," designed to increase a state of hopelessness and alienation as a prerequisite for revolution. These boys were not your mild-mannered, soft-spoken professors in leather-elbowed tweed jackets puffing thoughtfully on cozy pipes. They were hard-headed, bullet-proofed mental swat teams who meant business, and all the bra-burning, long-haired blond little girls and their bearded boy friends at Woodstock were so much meat to be ground up to the tune of The Grateful Dead.

But Georg Lukacs was just the beginning. Worse was to come, worse because more subtle, less obvious, more accommodating, sounding downright helpful. About the time that Lukacs was founding the Frankfurt School an Italian named Antonio Gramsci was working for the Communist International in Moscow and Vienna. Later, in the 1930's, he would spend time in one of Mussolini’s jails, where he created his version of revolution in his Prison Notebooks. His revolution would not need violence because the people would be re-created to accept changes. There would be a "New Soviet man" and a "New Child" in a "New Generation." Gramsci would be like a sculptor, shaping his flesh-and-blood robots through a psychological revolution which would become nothing short of an education cartel, a giant brain-washing operation that could soften sinews, tenderize thinking, pour the vitriol of apathy into the vigor, the energy of life itself. Acquiescence to totalitarianism would then be easy--"going along," "not making waves," shutting up. Political Correctness, the modus operandi of the New Marxism, was born. Although one could never accuse those long-haired girls and bearded young men enjoying themselves at Woodstock of "shutting up," still, in their camaraderie and blatant espousing of blacks they were walking the strict lines laid down by Marxism. Without knowing it, these educated children of the ‘60's were following Leon Trotsky, who believed that oppressed blacks could become the vanguard of a Communist revolution in America--not through revolting on their own but through their white supporters, the "counterculture" movement, which could, through guilt over slavery or a mere "in-your-face" personal aggression against accepted norms, elevate black revolutionaries into positions of leadership on campus.

There was another, much more powerful force than sympathy for the underdog to be tapped. That force was sex, as proposed by its god-like guru, Sigmund Freud.

We need look no farther than Freud’s explosive little book, Civilization and its Discontents. His analysis of mankind’s frustrations and their possible solutions leads straight to the bra-burning, Dionysiac excesses, narcissistic libido worship of a generation too affluent to know the hard work that supported their leisure-generated revolt. The only thing that can make character is hardship, the one item parents cannot force themselves to provide their offspring. Being completely ignorant of the bruising effort of a day’s work, they become easy targets for the endearing altruism preached by revolutionaries who need their energy (and their fathers’ wealth) to enhance a Marxist agenda. The marriage of Freud with Marx in this revolutionary effort was to be expected. Just a glance at Civilization and its Discontents provides a running outline of the process. First, Freud says, "Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures." Those measures are art, intoxicating substances, happiness gained through "the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure." (Now we have neuroses passed off as art, drugs as paradise, and promiscuity as love--an unbeatable combination for Freudian happiness!) Religion tries to preach a purpose in life. For Freud there is only one purpose in life: the "pleasure principle." Of necessity, this is anindividual need, a power that civilization has labeled as "brute force." But this force is absolutely essential for the realization of life. Opposed to this internal force is the outward force of civilization, which tries constantly to usurp pleasure’s natural authority by replacing it with the idea of community. But underneath this usurpation lies the essence of Freud’s total philosophy. We only need to read his words:

"This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of acommunity constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions."

The italics are mine. There you have it. This deprivation, which Freud calls "the urge for freedom," becomes a sword which can fight a civilization whose whole purpose is the prevention of an individual from satisfying his erotic, physical and psychological needs--or, as Freud calls it, the individual’s "libidinal development." Thus the libido, that inner energy which is the engine behind instinctual, biological drives, has become a victim of the outward restrictions of civilization. "Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development," he writes.

"Civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct...the non-satisfaction of powerful instincts." Thus Freud has led us to the battlefield of "cultural frustration," which "dominates the social relationships between human beings." The ego is, indeed, "the libido’s original home, and remains to some extent its headquarters." Attached to the ego is also a sadistic instinct, "clearly a part of sexual life, in the activities of which affection could be replaced by cruelty." As for neurosis, Freud regards it "as the outcome of a struggle between the interest of self-preservation and the demands of the libido, a struggle in which the ego had been victorious but at the price of severe sufferings and renunciation." So we are a bundle of hidden resentments caused by the restrictions of civilization against our legitimate, completely innocent libido instincts. Indeed, he writes: "The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization."

So what are we supposed to replace civilization with? When we return to those Marxian devotees from the Frankfurt School, we soon find out. In 1933 Wilhelm Reich urged the economic revolution to turn from the old worker - vs. - capitalist format (which hadn’t worked) to a "sex-economic" sociology. Man is essentially a sexual animal, whose instincts are more powerful than any authoritarian state, and capable of overpowering any external authority, especially the family. Reich’s battleground would be education, insisting on sexual instruction from kindergarten onwards. His 1933 book, Mass Psychology of Fascism, became required reading on college campuses, and as of 1991 was in its ninth printing. Prophetic in its

implications was his The Sexual Revolution, which lent its name to the 60's movement of the abandonment of restraint and the worship of uninhibited individualism.

Like Reich, Erich Fromm came to the United States in the 1930's from the Frankfurt School. He found fertile fields in American colleges. His choice of Escape from Freedom as the title of his 1941 book indicates its contents, the superiority of the individual to any outward authority which pretends to offer freedom, since freedom can only be found in the "natural man" with his "natural instincts." His name tag for this essential cathexis was "Positive Freedom," the clarion call for the realization of man’s individuality as the central purpose of life, that can never be subordinated to any loyalty outside the self--whether that loyalty be to parents, family, race, party, or religion. His Art of Loving had another catchy title, with contents belying love for anybody other than one’s self. Its intent was Marx’s old agenda of destruction, this time the destruction of any social entity operating with compassion and mutual affection. It was a very popular book, and stayed on my own bookshelves for years.

Theodor Adorno was another immigrant to the United States from the Frankfurt School in the 1930's. His propaganda was the same as his co-workers in that zany playground of "social" ideas. With Reich, Fromm and the others, Adorno’s strategic goal was the distrust engendered upon examination of "the authoritarian character" that was imbedded in capitalism, Christianity, the family, conservatism, or any sexual repression that dared assault any libido longing to escape into the ultimate experience of complete abandonment to desire. In The Authoritarian Personality, co-authored in 1950, he established the idea that the authoritarian person was naturally prejudiced, in need of "re-education." Such "re-education" became the motivating force behind his one-man crusade to re-create American replicas of the German students in "the Frankfurt School." Thus transformed into little revolutionaries cleansed of prejudice but replete with a fire-in-the belly determination to overthrow existing morality, the New American Child was born.

We have saved the worst for last. In his masterful essay, "Further Readings on the Frankfurt School" (Part VI of a series on "Political Correctness" published by the Free Congress Foundation), William S. Lind correctly identifies Herbert Marcuse as the high priest of Marxian propaganda in America, a high priest whose ideology has had a profound effect on all aspects of our culture from the time he arrived on these shores in the 1930's to the present day. His Eros and Civilization, which had its first paperback edition in 1974, is still in print. Its subtitle,A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, reveals his agenda. He has set out to integrate Marx’s destruction of idealism with the annihilation of the family through the worship of sexual desire found in the teachings of Freud. As Lind writes, "This book became the bible of the young radicals who took over America’s college campuses from 1965 onward, and who are still there as faculty members." It preaches total rebellion against American society by way of the "Great Refusal," which promises free sex and no work--an unbeatable combination for the average modern teenager (or those "adults" still in moral diapers):

"... instinctual liberation (and consequently total liberation) wouldexplode civilization itself, since the latter is sustained only through renunciation and work (labor)--in other words, through the repressive utilization of instinctual energy. Freed from these constraints, man would exist without work and without order; he would fall back intonature, which would destroy culture."

Thus we would have a new form of civilization, where sensual experience, and not work or productivity, would run things. In 1955 his message, "If it feels good, do it" became the banner for a protest which has now left the streets and the dorms and is firmly planted in the White House. As William Lind says, "Marcuse understood what most of the rest of his Frankfurt School colleagues did not: the way to destroy Western civilization--the objective set forth by George Lukacs in 1919--was not through abstruse theory, but through "sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll." The titles of Marcuse’s other books read like a curriculum for the New Left: One-Dimensional Man (1964), Critique of Pure Tolerance(1965), An Essay on Liberation (1969), and Counter-revolution and Revolt (1972).

But perhaps the most memorable influence of Marcuse came, as Lind said, from his time as a professor, when he "served as the chief guru for the student rebellion of the 1960's." Freud was now completely imbedded in Marxism, or vice versa. Marcuse’s slogan, "Make Love, Not War," became a battle cry not only for the adolescent rebels wanting endless sex, but, as a predictable outcome of such a call-to-arms, the Women’s Liberation Movement, which would develop into the most radical, and most enduring, group of all. The bra-burners are now in full armor, waging war on the European/American white male, and as many of his descendants as they can identify. They occupy positions from the local school boards to the Congress of the United States. In the White House the asbestos-like figure of Hillary Clinton, impervious to morality or criticism, is seeking a seat in the Senate! Daily we witness the charade. When will it end? We know where it began: with Friedrich Engels, that friend of Marx, whose book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, was published in 1884. Engels blamed the male-dominated family structure for all the woes of the oppressed female. Anticipating Freud, he saw in gender roles and differences the discrimination natural to a patriarchal society. His theories blossomed in the Frankfurt School’s promotion of matriarchy as the bedrock effort to upend, invert, and otherwise thoroughly confuse the basic operation of the family. The Frankfurt School brought these ideas to America. Why should we be surprised at Betty Friedan’s "revolution in sex roles" or the latest fad of wife-swapping (or worse) on Jerry Springer’s TV show?

Perhaps even more frightening, because more pervasive and moreencompassing than the destruction of the family, has been the attempt to disrupt, destroy and evaporate the identity of the individual. As with the "sexual revolution" (as old as the destructive Dionysiac rites in Euripides’s play "The Bacchae"), this assault on the individual’s self-identity begins with a natural instinct, in this case, the need to know one’s self, to know one’s origins, one’s blood lines, one’s history. That last word is the clue. If you can destroy--or confuse--history, then you have taken the first step toward destroying the individual--his sense of purpose, his heritage, his life-values. If you can destroy--or confuse--religious symbols, then you can destroy religion. We have mentioned elephant dung on the Virgin Mary. That was no surrealistic fantasy. It actually happened, in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, under the auspices of the taxpayer-sponsored NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) in an exhibit called, appropriately, "Sensation." Not only was the dung on the Virgin Mary--it formed her breasts! As if that were not enough, there was a Virgin Mary with pasted cut-outs of bare bottoms strewn about her body. And manikins of children with genitals sprouting from odd places. When New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani protested he was branded as an enemy of the First Amendment. Since when does free speech represent sacrilege?

But such an effort does not confine itself to New York City. A recent letter to the editor in our local newspaper complained about a ruling by a federal district judge in Kentucky who ruled unconstitutional anyreference to God in the public schools, and ordered all such references removed. Not only the Ten Commandments (which are engraved on the walls at the Supreme Court), but the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Kentucky State Constitution (which dares to be "grateful to Almighty God for the civil, political and religious blessings we enjoy) are "violations of the First Amendment." And now these do-gooders, these politically correct cleansers of the American conscience, have descended on the Confederate flag on the statehouse at Columbia, South Carolina, demanding its removal. It has become an "embarrassment" because, they say, it symbolizes slavery. Jesse Jackson goes even further. For him it is a "swastika." Charley Reese, a syndicated columnist with The Orlando Sentinel, disagrees. For him the war between 1861-1865 was a War for Southern Independence. Casualty figures differ, but I have seen the figure of 680,000 dead from the brutal slaughter we call the "Civil" War. The real tragedy is that the seeds of that nightmare are still with us, and there are enough thoughtless demagogues willing to plant those seeds and nourish them to the ultimate destruction of the only nation on earth founded on the idea of freedom and human dignity.