September 9, 2008

Who Stole Our Culture?

(Following are excerpts of chapter 10 written by historian William S.Lind for Dr. Ted Baehr's and Pat Boone's book "The Culture-wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World")

Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes so moms could stay
home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, raditional alues.

Where did it all go? How did that America become the sleazy,
decadent place we live in today -- so different that those who grew up efore the '60s feel like it's a foreign country? Did it just "happen"?

It didn't just "happen". In fact, a deliberate agenda was followed to steal our culture and leave a new and very different one in its place. The story of how and why is one of the most important parts of our nation's history -- and it is a story almost no one knows. The people behind it wanted it that way.

What happened, in short, is that America's traditional culture, which had grown up over generations from our Western European, Judeo-Christian roots, was swept aside by an ideology. We know that ideology best as "political correctness" or "multi-culturalism". It really is cultural Marxism.

Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms goes back to World War I. Cultural Marxism has become the ruling ideology of America's elites. The No. 1 goal of that cultural Marxism, since its creation, has been the destruction of Western European culture and the Christian religion.

In 1917, a Communist revolution occurred in Russia. But attempts to spread that revolution to other countries failed because the workers did not support it.

Marxist theorists had to ask themselves the question: What went
wrong? As good Marxists, they could not admit Marxist theory had been incorrect. Instead, they said that Western European culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true Marxist class interests that a Communist revolution was impossible in West Europe until both could be destroyed. That objective, established as cultural Marxism's goal right at the beginning, has never changed.

A new strategy was laid out for destroying Christianity and Western European culture, one that has proven all too successful. Instead of calling for a Communist revolution up front, as in Russia, Marxists in West Europe should take political power last, after a "long march through the institutions" -- the schools, the media, even the churches, every institution that could influence the culture. That "long march through the institutions" is what America has experienced, especially since the 1960s.

One of its main components was introducing sex education into
schools. Destroying the country's traditional sexual morals would be a giant step toward destroying traditional morals and Christian faith.

In 1923, the Marxists set up a new think tank at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany called The Frankfurt School. Originally it was to be called the "Institute for Marxism", but the cultural Marxists realized they could be far more effective if they concealed their real nature and objectives by calling it a neutral-sounding name, the "Institute for Social Research".

The Institute for Social Research would become the place where
political correctness, as we now know it, was developed. The basic answer to the question "Who stole our culture?" is the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School.

The institute discarded conventional Marxist issues such as the labor movement and pioneered work on further developing cultural Marxism into a full-blown ideology.

They broke with Marx's view that culture was merely part of society's "superstructure", which was determined by economic factors. On the contrary, culture was an independent and very important factor in shaping a society.

Frankfurt School members decided that the key to destroying Western European culture was to cross Marx with Freud. They argued that just as workers were oppressed under capitalism, everyone lived in a constant state of psychological repression. They realized that psychological conditioning offered them a far more powerful tool than just philosophy.

Today, when Hollywood's cultural Marxists want to "normalize"
something like homosexuality (thus "liberating" us from "repression"), they put on television show after television show where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual. Cultural Marxism makes powerful use of tools like radio, film and later television to psychologically condition the public. It is no accident that the entertainment industry is now cultural Marxism's most powerful weapon. That is how psychological conditioning works; people absorb the lessons
the cultural Marxists want them to learn without even knowing they are being taught.

The Frankfurt School was well on the way to creating political
correctness. Then suddenly, fate intervened. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Since the Nazis hated Marxism, the Frankfurt School with its leading members decided to leave Germany and re-established in New York City with help from Columbia University in 1934. Soon, its focus shifted from destroying traditional Western European culture in Germany to doing so in the United States. It would prove all too successful.

The Frankfurt School developed a powerful tool it called "Critical Theory". The theory was to criticize every traditional institution, starting with family, to endless unremitting criticism to bring them down, being careful never to define what it was for, only what it was against (notice current political opposition). Critical Theory is the
basis for the"studies" departments that now inhabit American colleges and universities, the home turf of academic political correctness.

They accuse traditional attitudes to be "prejudice". They
incorporated into their cultural Marxism the "transvaluation of all values". What that means, in plain English, is that all the old sins become virtues, and all the old virtues become sins. Homosexuality is a fine and good thing, but anyone who thinks men and women should have different social roles is an evil "fascist". That is what political correctness now teaches children in public schools all across America.
(The Frankfurt School said it did not matter if school children learned any skills or any facts. All that mattered was that they graduate from the schools with the right "attitudes" on certain questions taught by teachers certified for Cultural Marxism.)

The Frankfurt School again departed from orthodox Marxism, which
argued that all of history was determined by who owned the means of production. Instead, they said history was determined by which groups, defined as men, women, races, religions, etc., had power or "dominance" over other groups. Certain groups, especially white males, were labeled "oppressors", while other groups were defined as "victims". Victims were automatically good, oppressors bad, just by what group they came from,
regardless of individual behavior.

Who would replace the working class as the agents of Marxist
revolution. In the 1950s it was decided it would be a coalition of students, blacks, feminist women and homosexuals -- the core of the student rebellion of the 1960s, and the sacred "victims groups" of political correctness today.

They further took one of political correctness's favorite words,
"tolerance", and gave it a new meaning. They defined "liberating tolerance" as tolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the left, and intolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the right. When you hear the cultural Marxists today call for "tolerance", they mean
"liberating tolerance" (just as when they call for "diversity", they mean uniformity of belief in their ideology.

The student rebellion of the 1960s, driven largely by opposition to the draft for the Vietnam War, gave them a historic opportunity. The Frankfurt School's cultural Marxism was injected into the baby boom generation. Of course, they did not understand what it really was. As was true from the Institute's beginning, the few people "in the know" did
not advertise that political correctness and multi-culturalism were a form of Marxism.

But the effect was devastating: a whole generation of Americans,
especially the university-educated elite, absorbed cultural Marxism as their own, accepting a poisonous ideology that sought to destroy America's traditional culture and Christian faith. That generation, which runs every elite institution in America, leaders of unions, education and government, now wages a ceaseless war on all traditional beliefs and institutions. They have largely won that war. Most of America's traditional culture lies in ruins.

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