Friday, April 24, 2009

The Roots of Political Correctness

The Origins of Political Correctness is worth reading to understand the radical roots of political correctness (related YouTube video part1, part2, part3):

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.

... (Addressing the problem of why workers resisted Marxism were) Antonio Gramsci in Italy 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. Georg 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.

... 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). ... 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.
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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.
... Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. ... 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.
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Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left.


The summary: Political correctness of today is rooted in the radical feminism, radical identity politics of the New Left of the 1960s, which in turn is rooted in a melange of Marx and Freud that became Critical Theory. Political correctness originated with cultural Marxism.

Rules for Patriots is a category label for items of interest to patriots to understand the way the world is and how patriots can save American civilization. Conservatives and patriots have lost so many battles in the 'culture wars' against the forces of political correctness in large part because they do not know what they up against. Political correctness is being used to change culture by deconstructing western civilization, and to save American civilization and oppose these trends we therefore need to deconstruct the deconstructors.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson you tube - Political Correctness, another God that died.

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