A Golden Oldie

Back in April, 2006 I wrote a piece titled RCOB™.  It was a fisking of an op-ed by a writer named Nina Burleigh, who I later discovered was the bint who (in)famously said that she'd orally service Bill Clinton "just to thank him for keeping abortion legal."  Ms. Burleigh is an alumnus of the University of Chicago - aka "Mordor on the Lake," and is an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University, home of the Frankfurt School.  She is also National Politics Correspondent for Newsweek.  And, of course, she's not above making it up as she goes, since a 2019 piece she wrote for the Daily Mail had to be retracted and "substantial damages" paid to the person she slandered - Melania Trump.  That was her second retraction.  In 2018 a piece she wrote for Newsweek was retracted when the editors belatedly concluded they couldn't support her allegations that "Russian bots" were responsible for Sen. Al Franken's downfall.

So we have a woman, given her history, who is anti-theist, ultra-feminist, educated at one college with a reputation for neo-marxism, and teaching at another, yet lives in New York City with a second home in upstate New York.  Must be nice.

Let me give you a taste of that older post:

Glenn Reynolds linked to a Salon.com piece by Nina Burleigh:

"I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in?"

Who, indeed? Reader Wagner James Au, who sent the link, writes: "My question is, why do anti-war liberals get so offended when people question their patriotism, when they spend so much time questioning it themselves?"

I read her piece, Country Boy, and my response to it was, almost literally, a RCOB.

Ms. Burleigh and I have worldviews so divergent that we might as well be of different species. There is no common ground upon which we could even begin to attempt rapprochement. And what bothers me most of all is that I see the land that we both live in becoming more and more divided between people like her, and people like me.

Let me fisk, for it is about the only thing I can do to purge myself of the emotions her piece inspired in me:

If you've got a few minutes, go read it.  See if it gives you the same symptoms it gave me.  This is the Left today.  Fourteen years later there are possibly fewer of them, but they are a lot crazier.

Arguing With a Leftist

The writing bug is starting to bite again, so you may see some new content here, including (eventually) a mega-überpost I started back in October of last year, but for now just this little piece.

A few days ago someone at Quora tagged me with the question:

If both conservatives and liberals love USA, why there are such hostility and lack of trust towards each others?

I left an answer, but someone else left this one:

As a former Right turned Left, I assure you all there are smart and well educated people on each side. The difference is largely in an assumption or two.

The Right assumes people deserve and have a right to whatever assets they have, whether earned or given by prior generations. And this includes land, food, natural resources, water, etc.

The Left believes luck plays a big part in how wealth is currently distributed. They believe every human deserves some minimal share of water, food, clean air, and resources required to live. They point out that every business owes some of its success to the hard and soft infrastructure provided by governments.

I think I am being fair to both my former and current views here. All differences in political philosophy derive from the above.

I changed because I figured out I am a Liberal. Imagine a game of Monopoly where one player is given a pile of money, properties, houses and hotels by his father, along with some good game advice. The other players start with a few bucks and don't know what the rules are when they start out. Liberals don't think this is fair, Conservatives do.

I left this comment with the (forlorn) hope that it might generate a debate:

“Liberals don't think this is fair, Conservatives do.”

I disagree. We both agree it’s not fair. The difference is that Conservatives understand that the world is not fair.

“(Liberals) believe every human deserves some minimal share of water, food, clean air, and resources required to live.”

Conservatives know that the world owes us nothing. Liberals think they can make the world fair. All they need is the power to make it so.

Conservatives understand that the kind of power needed to “make the world fair” always ends badly.

Always.

Result? Crickets.  But I'd like to go ahead and unpack this - fairly accurate, I think - definition of the modern-day "liberal," née "Progressive."

The progressive complains that the world is not fair. They're absolutely right - it isn't. They believe that the Right thinks it is fair - we don't, but we understand that all the wishing in the world won't make it fair. Because they think the unfairness can be corrected, and the Right is opposed to making this correction, we're evil. That's where we part company. (There's more to it than that, but this I think is the fundamental disagreement.)  There's a disconnect at the very foundation of the ideological split between the two philosophies, and it goes back decades if not centuries.  After all, Kipling's The Gods of the Copybook Headings was published in 1919, just shortly after the Russian Revolution.

The fundamental split is that one side thinks that - given sufficient power (in the right hands, of course) - the world can be made fair.  That there doesn't need to be winners and losers. (Thus "participation trophies" and sports "games" where no one keeps score.) That it is the job of "society" to make everyone absolutely equal.  The other side believes that the world is fundamentally unfair and it's up to the individual to overcome that inherent unfairness.

Let's look a the literature throughout history.  Kipling in 1919.  Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron from 1961.  George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949).  The Greek fable of the Procrustean Bed from ancient history.  They're all warnings about trying to build Utopia.  What does the Left have?  So far as I can tell, Star Trek from 1966 where they don't use money, everyone has their needs met, and anyone can pursue whatever they like or do nothing at all.  Exactly what Karl Marx promised would be the outcome of Communism in The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867) - two other fantasies.   We saw this most recently in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (AOC) "Green New Deal" where she promised "Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work." (My emphasis.)

Remember Kipling?

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.

Let's return to our new Leftist's assertion:

The Left believes luck plays a big part in how wealth is currently distributed. They believe every human deserves some minimal share of water, food, clean air, and resources required to live. They point out that every business owes some of its success to the hard and soft infrastructure provided by governments.

And:

The Right assumes people deserve and have a right to whatever assets they have, whether earned or given by prior generations. And this includes land, food, natural resources, water, etc.

What are you to assume from this? That the "hard and soft infrastructure provided by governments" unfairly benefits some, no? And therefore those beneficiaries then owe some of their unfairly gained wealth to those not so fortunate. Am I misunderstanding the "logic" here?

As economist Walter Williams has asked, how much of someone else's property is "your fair share"?  Who decides?  As others have asked, why is robbing someone at gunpoint illegal, but threatening someone with arrest by an armed agent of the government if they don't cough up money not?

This goes back to my constant harping on education.  I ran across this cartoon Facebook today:

Between 100 and 200 million, in point of fact.

Like they teach that these days.

Hell, they don't even teach about the Holocaust these days.  Why would they teach about socialism's other lethal failures?  Instead the schools indoctrinate students in Leftism and the result is that a majority of young people today view socialism favorably.  WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. recently wrote "Trump's War on Socialism Will Fail."  Of course it will.  The Long March Through the Institutions has worked out wildly better than either Rudi Dutschke, Antonio Gramsci or any of the members of the Frankfurt School could have imagined. (Two people and one organization that the Millenials don't know anything about, either.)

And we're paying for it now.

Many years ago Chris Byrne wrote "There can be no useful debate between two people with different first principles, except on those principles themselves." As illustrated above, our first principles are completely divergent, and there is no debate - useful or otherwise - anymore. Charles Krauthammer's observation that the Right thinks the Left is stupid, but the Left thinks the Right is evil was correct when he made it back in the 1990's, but today the Right is beginning to wake up to the fact that what the Left wants to accomplish - and is willing to use violence to achieve - is evil. When both sides "other" their opponents, can open warfare be far behind?

More on Destabilization

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams is often an interesting thinker (see his recent post on gun control).  Yesterday he opined on FBI Director James Comey's decision not to recommend charges against Hillary Clinton in the wake of her email server investigation.  Adams made a good point in the opening paragraph:

The primary goal of government is its own credibility.

That notion needs some explaining.

Governments do many things, including building roads, providing social services, defending the homeland, and more. But no matter what the government is trying to accomplish, its macro-responsibility is to maintain its own credibility. Governments without credibility devolve into chaos. Credibility has to be job one.

Consider all the different government systems around the world, and all the different laws they created. The Chinese government is different from the United States government, which is different from Jordan’s government, which is different from Great Britain. But each of those governments is credible to its own people, and that’s the key. The specific laws and the specific forms of government don’t matter too much, so long as the public views its own local system as credible.

This is part of what I spoke of as "trust" in this morning's post. When society loses faith in its government and other institutions, when credibility is gone, societies descend into chaos. He's right about that.

The first comment on my post this morning was from DJ, who asked:

What happens when Hillary Clinton loses the election? Do we have the orderly transition of White House Occupant that we have always had in the past? Does the disorder begin election night, or does it begin when the Electoral Collage announces its results, or does it begin January 20th of next year?

This assumes that Hillary will be on the ballot come November. I'm not saying she won't, I'm just pointing out something. Adams' says that he believes Comey declined to recommend charges because:

The alternative was the head of the FBI deciding for the people of the United States who would be their next president. A criminal indictment against Clinton probably would have cost her the election.

How credible would a future President Trump be if he won the election by the FBI’s actions instead of the vote of the public? That would be the worst case scenario even if you are a Trump supporter. The public would never accept the result as credible.

That was the choice for FBI Director Comey. He could either do his job by the letter of the law – and personally determine who would be the next president – or he could take a bullet in the chest for the good of the American public.

He took the bullet.

I'd like to point out that the Democrats haven't held their convention yet. Neither have the Republicans. And while Comey's action may have deflected attention from Hillary's most prominent scandal, it might very well have instead illuminated it with an arc light.

As I have mentioned on this blog previously, the Democrats aren't shy about kicking anybody to the curb they think is a liability. The precedent for that was Robert "The Torch" Torricelli of New Jersey and the election of 2002. When it became apparent that scandal-plagued Torricelli wasn't going to win his seat in the Senate again, the Democrats kicked him to the curb and - illegally - replaced him on the ticket with Frank Lautenberg, who went on to win. (Hey, it's New Jersey. Whaddaya expect?) IF (and it's a big if) Hillary's numbers decline as precipitously as Torricelli's did, it's entirely plausible that she could be replaced on the ticket with Joe Biden or any number of other people, and it could happen as soon as the convention - which is looking to be as "spectacular" as the 1968 one.

Had Comey recommended charges (and the DOJ obliged), it's a near-certain bet that she would not have been on the ticket come November.  The Democrats would have dumped her like a stained blue dress.  Comey took no "bullet," but he did seriously damage the FBI's  and the Department of Justice's credibility.

But that was just one more straw on an increasingly stressed camel's back.

As Yuri Bezmenov stated in that video I posted this morning, the Left has been carrying out "de-moralization" efforts in this and other Western countries for literally generations.  Read up on The Frankfurt School.  Look into the roots of "political correctness," "critical theory," especially "critical pedagogy," and Deconstruction philosophy.  As Bezmenov noted in 1984, those efforts succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Left, and they continue unchecked today.  "Multiculturalism" is but the most recent "success" in the Balkanization of Western society.

The fact of the matter is, however, there's nobody leading these efforts.  The destruction of Western Civilization has taken on a life of its own, and destabilization will be the result of the Jenga-like random removal of the structural supports of our society in the mindless effort to bring about that promised Utopia and human redemption that is the promised reward for those who agitate for it.

Trust in government is at all-time lows:  trust in law enforcement, trust in courts, trust in legislatures, trust in executive offices.  Trust in media outlets?  It's been declining (along with newspaper circulation) for decades.  On top of that, trust in business (EEEEVIL CORPORATIONS!) is also pretty much gone.  And with multi-culti, trust in our neighbors is dwindling, too.

We're devolving to tribalism, where no one who is not a blood relative is "one of us" anymore.  E Pluribus Unum no more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

How We "Lost the Culture War"

It's been a pretty steady refrain, from Bill Whittle to CNN that the reelection of Barack Obama proves that the Right has "lost the culture war". There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over how this happened, but it's been apparent to me that it started in our public school system, and here's an interesting article to that point.

From City Journal, Spring of 2009 edition, Pedagogy of the Oppressor:

Like the more famous Teach for America, the New York Teaching Fellows program provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually. When I met with a group of the fellows taking a required class at a school of education last summer, we began by discussing education reform, but the conversation soon took a turn, with many recounting one horror story after another from their rocky first year: chaotic classrooms, indifferent administrators, veteran teachers who rarely offered a helping hand. You might expect the required readings for these struggling rookies to contain good practical tips on classroom management, say, or sensible advice on teaching reading to disadvantaged students. Instead, the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

For anyone familiar with American schools of education, the choice wasn't surprising. Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America's teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field.

The odd thing is that Freire's magnum opus isn't, in the end, about education—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.

Read the whole article. If you have children in public school, ask their teachers if they've read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and if so, what they think of it. Remember, this book was mentioned prominently in the "Raza Studies" fight here in the Tucson Unified School District.

Now, here's an interesting coincidence:

As a case in point, consider the career of Robert Peterson. Peterson started out in the 1980s as a young elementary school teacher in inner-city Milwaukee. He has described how he plumbed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, looking for some way to apply the great radical educator’s lessons to his own fourth- and fifth-grade bilingual classrooms. Peterson came to realize that he had to break away from the "banking method" of education, in which "the teacher and the curricular texts have the 'right answers' and which the students are expected to regurgitate periodically." Instead, he applied the Freirian approach, which "relies on the experience of the student. . . . It means challenging the students to reflect on the social nature of knowledge and the curriculum." Peterson would have you believe that his fourth- and fifth-graders became critical theorists, interrogating the "nature of knowledge" like junior scholars of the Frankfurt School.

What actually happened was that Peterson used the Freirian rationale to become his students' "self-appointed political conscience."

AKA, their political officer.

After one unit on U.S. intervention in Latin America, Peterson decided to take the children to a rally protesting U.S. aid to the Contras opposing the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The children stayed after school to make placards:

LET THEM RUN THEIR LAND!
HELP CENTRAL AMERICA DON'T KILL THEM
GIVE THE NICARAGUANS THEIR FREEDOM

Peterson was particularly proud of a fourth-grader who described the rally in the class magazine. "On a rainy Tuesday in April some of the students from our class went to protest against the contras," the student wrote. "The people in Central America are poor and bombed on their heads. When we went protesting it was raining and it seemed like the contras were bombing us."

These days, Peterson is the editor of Rethinking Schools, the nation's leading publication for social-justice educators. He is also the editor of a book called Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, which provides math lessons for indoctrinating young children in the evils of racist, imperialist America.

Rethinking Schools, if you remember, was the source of the piece that inspired my education überpost The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Continuing:

Partly thanks to Peterson's efforts, the social-justice movement in math, as in other academic subjects, has fully arrived (see "The Ed Schools' Latest—and Worst—Humbug," Summer 2006). It has a foothold in just about every major ed school in the country and enjoys the support of some of the biggest names in math education, including several recent presidents of the 25,000-member American Education Research Association, the umbrella organization of the education professoriate. Its dozens of pseudo-scholarly books, journals, and conferences extol the supposed benefits to disadvantaged kids of the kind of teaching that Peterson once inflicted on his Milwaukee fourth-graders.

And now you know why schools can't teach algebra, as detailed in The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Again, read the whole piece. Do you understand now how we "lost the culture"?  And why we aren't going to get it back?

Confidence, Part IV

The worst thing about living in the declining era of a great civilization is knowing that you are. -- Robert A. Heinlein

This is the second essay by the title of Confidence that I have written, the fourth that I am aware of that has been posted to the blogosphere.  The earlier two (not written by me) are no longer available online.  My first one posted February 15 of 2009.  Not a great deal has changed since then, except for the worse.

I strongly recommend you (re-)read that previous piece, but in it I wrote:

It has been an ongoing theme here at TSM since I hit "PUBLISH" on Not with a Bang, but a Whimper? in October of 2003, that things are not going well for the Republic, and they appear to be getting worse. As Bill Whittle said, there's something very wrong with our foundation. The Left exhibits cockroach resilience, while the Right seems ever less willing to even lace up its boots.

--

What I've witnessed over half of my life (the time I've actually been paying attention) and especially the last five and a half years (the time I've been writing about it) is what appears to me to be America's inexorable slide away from our individual "pursuit of happiness" towards a pursuit of collective security in what the populace - what few of them who think about it all all - hopes will be at least a gilded cage. It's the pursuit of an illusion, but it's a pretty illusion.

--

The fault is ours. We let it happen. Too much of the population lost its abiding belief in the Constitution some time long before I was born. I put the date around the Great Depression, with FDR and the New Deal, after the country was prepped and primed by Woodrow Wilson's presidency. With the New Deal we finally reached the point that Tocqueville (maybe) warned us against:

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

The New Deal did exactly that. But entropy can be slow, and the nation had a lot of momentum to overcome. That's been taken care of now, though. The only way to achieve high office in this country now is to be a statist willing to promise redistribution of wealth (though it is generally disguised as "earmarks" and not - usually - blatantly referred to as "spreading the wealth.")

I also quoted Bill Whittle from his piece entitled Confidence:

When all is said and done, Civilizations do not fall because of the barbarians at the gates. Nor does a great city fall from the death wish of bored and morally bankrupt stewards presumably sworn to its defense. Civilizations fall only because each citizen of the city comes to accept that nothing can be done to rally and rebuild broken walls; that ground lost may never be recovered; and that greatness lived in our grandparents but not our grandchildren. Yes, our betters tell us these things daily. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe it.

But we know from history what happens when we do.

Let me list just a few recent books - some less pessimistic than the others - all describing different aspects of the same dark future:



 
Dismantling America - Thomas Sowell, publication date 8/2010




The Secret Knowledge:  On the Dismantling of American Culture - David Mamet, publication date 6/2011




After America: Get Ready for Armageddon - Mark Steyn, publication date 8/2011




Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? - Patrick Buchanan, publication date 10/2011




Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America - Mark Levin, publication date 1/2012




Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 - Charles Murray, publication date 1/2012

A comment from Sailorcurt I saw a few days ago spurred this post. Here it is:

We’ve been on the long slide for a long time. We’re nearing the bottom. We’re WAY past the point of no return.

Romney as the "conservative" alternative demonstrates that more clearly than anything I could articulate.

Basically, our society is headed for the crash and has been for years, the only difference is how fast we get there.

I'm beginning to feel that I'd prefer to get there sooner rather than later. With every generation, our kids are being indoctrinated and brainwashed into further believing that the Government is the answer to all our ills, that human beings, when left to our own devices, will destroy ourselves and the earth, that it is more noble to be cared for and kept than to live in freedom and face all of the risks, benefits, consequences and rewards of same.

Perhaps it's better to keep the "faster" version in charge and let us rush into the void headlong, while there are still at least a few free-thinkers around to give us even a semblance of a chance of getting back on the right track after the dust settles.

Granted, the odds of that happening are extremely slim, but they're better in this generation than they will be in the next, or the next, or the next.

Everything that has a beginning has an end.

The end of our little experiment in liberty is in sight. It is unavoidable at this point IMHO, it’s only a question of how long it takes to get there.

Are we content to keep things as comfortable for ourselves as possible as we trudge slowly toward oblivion? Because that seems to me like what is being advocated by those desperate to get Obama out of office.

Be electing Romney, we'd not be averting, only kicking the can down the road and leaving our mess for someone else to try to clean up.

Again.

And in response to that, Weerd Beard replied:

I couldn’t agree more, Curt!

This kind of sentiment is getting to be more and more common on the blogs and message boards I frequent.

Shortly after reading Sailorcurt's comment, I saw this at Market-Ticker:

Our government with its present infestation of Democrats and Republicans, and the inability to find a single third party that will stand for the end of the stupid when it comes to the policies they espouse, including the one I'm currently involved in quite-heavily, means that we're going to go off the cliff Thelma and Louise style with the entirely-certain outcome.

This was in response to a speech given by Mohamed A. El-Erian, CEO and co-CIO of PIMCO, Pacific Investment Management Company. Mr. El-Erian gave his speech as the "Homer Jones Memorial Lecture" at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

That speech is rather lengthy, but here's what I (and others) think is the key excerpt:

To crystallize our conversation today, allow me to use a very – and I stress very – clumsy sentence to summarize the current state of affairs: In the last three plus years, central banks have had little choice but to do the unsustainable in order to sustain the unsustainable until others do the sustainable to restore sustainability!

(Emphasis in original.) As others have asked, what is the likelihood that our titular "leaders" are any nearer to doing "the sustainable to restore sustainability"?

Zilch, so far as I can see.

Still, there are those who hold out hope. Bill Whittle in his latest Afterburner decries the horrible quality of education our youth have received, but near the end says:

To that one in a hundred of you who's actually angry at how badly you've been ripped off by your educational system, and you're willing to face it, let me say this: It's not over. It's not too late. Our best days are still ahead of us and we're going to do great things, you mark my words. We need you, you one in a hundred.

But in counterpoint, Captain Capitalism's latest video advises How Gen Y is Completely, Hopelessly and Totally Screwed Part 1.

And he has data.

As I noted in the previous piece, I have had a consistent theme at this blog since almost the first post that what is going on, here and in the rest of Western civilization, is a war between two (now three) utterly incompatible philosophies.  Initially the two philosophies were Locke's and Rousseau's - Locke's being one of "Life, liberty, property" and Rousseau's being, not "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" but Marx's 1850 expansion from that to "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The third incompatible philosophy that has been added to the mix is "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet," but the first two are what I will be discussing at the moment. This war has been ongoing pretty much since Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

Lenin himself acknowledged that Communism could not succeed until the Western capitalist nations were overthrown - violently, he emphasized. It was only through violent revolution that the proletariat could bring down the bourgeois, and that is what the true believers in Marxist-Leninist ideology have sought ever since. As others have noted, when World War I did not result in such revolutions except in backwards Russia and instead the citizens of various nations put on the uniforms of their national militaries and went to war to support their governments, many adherents of Marxist-Leninist theology - unable to question the gospel - were forced to ask what caused a delay in the historically inevitable? The Frankfurt School was established to study this problem, answer the question and come up with a solution, and they did.

The problem, they concluded, was that Western capitalism made the proletariat too comfortable to revolt. In order to overcome that, it would be necessary to destroy Western capitalism from the inside. To accomplish this would require a long period of time and take several steps, but True Believers believe in long-range planning. Former soviet propagandist Yuri Bezmenov (aka Tomas Schuman ) explained those steps in 1984 thus:

The first one [is] demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

--

The next stage is destabilization. This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn't matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process [would have gone] that fast.

The next stage, of course, is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now.

And, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have [the so-called] period of normalization. It may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in '68, Comrade Brezhnev said, 'Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized.'

So the professors of the Frankfurt School wrote books explaining what needed to be done, they lectured and they spread their philosophy far and wide, and it took seed.

Not everyone believed fully in the Cause, but enough did, and enough more were blinded by the beautiful utopia promised by that philosophy to embrace enough of it make them want to spread it, too. Bezmenov said:

This was my instruction: try to get into large-circulation, established conservative media; reach filthy-rich movie makers; intellectuals, so-called 'academic' circles; cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruitable people: people who lack moral principles, who are either too greedy or too [much] suffer from self importance. They feel that they matter a lot. These are the people who[m] [the] KGB wanted very much to recruit.

--

They serve [a] purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in [the] United States: all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders. They are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation.

In America his counterparts needn't have bothered. The process was self-sustaining very early on, as he noted himself:

The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years... actually, it's over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

Socialism is extremely attractive to a certain type of intellectual. In fact, Thomas Sowell once said:

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

And they do. So that is why, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, Socialism itself is still being pushed, no matter how many people die to make the lie true.

The first two steps, demoralization and destabilization are brought about through the education system and mass media.  Each are used, as Bezmenov explained, to "change the basic perception and the logic of behavior" of a population, but it goes even further than that.  Remember, Socialism is a class struggle.  The motto of the United States is E Pluribus Unum - "Out of Many, One."  The goal of destabilization then must be balkanization.

Rules for Radicals, the last book published by the first acknowledged "community organizer,"  is the textbook on how to divide a nation, bottom up, from the inside, with the final goal being revolution. Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven developed their strategy to overwhelm the welfare system and cause its collapse. Cloward was also instrumental in the "motor voter" National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Piven has been a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Cloward got his master's degree at Columbia University's School of Social Work - Columbia being the home of the Frankfurt School after it fled Nazi Germany, and Piven received her B.A., M.A. and PhD from the University of Chicago - the city where the Communist Party of the USA first set up its headquarters in 1919.  Saul Alinsky got his Bachelor's in Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

These two schools seem to be the epicenter of the early spread of Socialism among the intellectual elites.  William Ayers - former member of the Weather Underground, "guilty as Hell, free as a bird" in the deaths of (at a minimum) three of his compatriots, and probably of the death of a San Francisco police officer in a "successful" bombing - received his Masters and his Doctorates in Education from Columbia University, and until recently taught Education at the University of Chicago. He's one of the highest-profile Socialists in Education, but a long way from rare.  

It's still going on today.  Zombie put up an interesting piece on a lecture, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, given recently by retired professor H. Douglas Brown of San Francisco State University. You really should peruse it. These are the people, like Bill Ayers, teaching the teachers, and they have been for literally decades. From the comments comes this interesting bit:

My sister was studying to become a high school teacher a couple of years ago and looking through her text books I was amazed to see how prominently Paulo Freire and his theory of "Critical Pedagogy" was emphasized. When I asked her about it, she told me that "critical pedagogy" is the preferred way educators are expected to teach in the L.A. Unified School system. She said they're supposed to teach kids "how to think", not to stuff their heads full of facts and information. When I told her that Freire was a devout Communist she shrugged. Needless to say my sister is a Lefty, so informing her of the fact that Freire was a Communist was like telling her that he cares for humanity.

Freire was, in fact, a Christian Socialist, but a major fan of Marx. The point remains valid, though. From the Freire Project website:

Several notable twentieth century educators and activists influenced and in some cases contributed to the body of research and literature of Critical Pedagogy including John Dewey, Myles Horton, Jonathan Kozol, Michael Apple, W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Paulo Freire, and Augusto Boal, The Frankfurt School of critical theorists developed a unified approach to cultural criticism and seminal contribution to the work of Critical Pedagogy, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and others.

Everyone involved in the Frankfurt School was a big "S" Socialist.

So where am I going with all this?  In 1984 Bezmenov - remember, a propaganda agent of the Soviet Union - stated that "at least three generations of American students" had been the victims of Socialist indoctrination.  We're now twenty-seven years further on - at least one and more like two generations more.  The education system we have now is an utter failure at actually producing educated thinking students, but it has become the ideal machine for producing a demoralized nation.  Our economy, and the economies of the majority of Western nations are at the very edge of destabilization - we're just waiting for the first domino to fall, the first plate to stop spinning and drop from its stick.

When that happens, there will be crisis, and as Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel has told us "You never let a serious crisis to go to waste."  No, someone has to normalize things when that happens.

And there are probably thousands of dedicated Socialists and tens of thousands of their useful idiots out there rubbing their hands in anticipation.  They've worked independently for decades to reach this point. 

I know Louis Farrakhan is.  His is (partially) of that third incompatible philosophy, heavily influenced by the second. Then there are the Anarchists for More Government Cheese, the EarthFirst!ers, and many other groups who are willing to kill and destroy to achieve the Utopia they've been promised.  And that's just on the Left.

Let's face it, after five generations of indoctrination, even Bill Whittle admits that "one in a hundred" is about the best that have escaped, and while they understand that they've been robbed, well they've been robbed.  They realize that they don't possess what they need, but now they have to do the work that twelve years of "education" didn't provide them.  Most of the rest of the population?  They've been prepped to be reliant on the .gov: ignorant, unprepared, incapable of functioning on their own.

And the war is on the "one percenters."

I don't think "our best days are still ahead of us."  I'm in very good company.  I'm aware that Cassandras have been proclaiming the downfall of civilizations since time immemorial, but as Billy Beck once observed, "Sometimes they're right."

Sailorcurt opines:

Perhaps it's better to keep the "faster" version in charge and let us rush into the void headlong, while there are still at least a few free-thinkers around to give us even a semblance of a chance of getting back on the right track after the dust settles.

There's that hope again. Let's parse that sentence. We should "rush into the void headlong" on the off chance that, after we go smash on the bottom, some of the few survivors will be free-thinkers who might get the rest "back on the right track."  Who thinks they'll be the ones prepared for "normalization"?

Who says they won't be around if we try for the soft(er) landing? Tuesday's Quote of the Day was humorous, but it was funny because it was painfully accurate. Like Robb Allen, I'd like to postpone the crash as long as possible, but we're not voting our way out of this.

Maybe Bill Whittle's right. Perhaps the horse might learn to sing.  But the best I can honestly hold out for Billy Beck stated three years ago:

All the political initiative now is with the forces of Amsoc. Where the so-called conservatives have fought generations of piece-meal rear-guard action against the integral resolution of socialism to corrode its worst enemy -- the practical and living ideal of freedom: America -- out of existence, and as they have done so as effects of disintegrated philosophy, the socialists are assuming the commanding heights in full political battle gear.

It is important to understand that this can only and inevitably mean physical battle gear, right in front of your eyes, right here in America. The spirit of this place that was not born of the slave's obeisance will require this government to bare its fangs. I still believe that. The ways in which and the singular souls from which Americans select their values are not yet so beaten to any alien molds so well that they will peaceably stand for the conformations that this government will eventually require and demand -- not "ask".

Regardless, there's Tough History Coming.

No Change in Strategy or Tactics

In the comments to "Freudian Slip Much?" Lyle comments:

Following all your links and watching the videos, it's all "Top down, Bottom up, Inside out". They're prepping their herds for the next step, which is chaos. The people will demand that government take action to do something about it ("Bottom up") then it's "Inside out"-- totalitarian socialism will be offered as the only way out.

The socialist/eugenicists never went away. They just changed tactics.

No. No they didn't. They haven't changed tactics or the overall strategy. What we're witnessing is the culmination of ninety-plus years of ideology playing out. Remember the poster:




That lie has lodged deep in the human psyche for a very long time. Karl Marx codified it in the late 19th Century, and by the turn of the 20th, it had swept across the world.

But at the end of World War I, its adherents were straining to understand why, despite Marx's insistence on communism's historic inevitability, the Proletariat put on the uniforms of their nation's armed forces instead of rising in revolution against the bourgeoisie. In order to answer that question, a group of young Communists formed the Frankfurt School. The answer, they concluded, was that a comfortable proletariat was a non-revolutionary proletariat, and Western civilization produced material comfort. Therefore, Western civilization had to be destroyed, and the best way to do that was from the inside.

The target of this destruction was Western culture, and the vectors for this destruction would be the education system, the arts, and media, aided by the infiltration and destruction of governments. By the 1930's, the seeds were already sown. America's Great Depression had seen to that, and Marx and Engels' ideas had spread worldwide. Many were disillusioned by the perceived failures of capitalism, and the promise of socialism seemed the ideal answer. I am currently reading Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives For A Century, and even I am shocked by how prevalent the acceptance of socialism was as far back as the 20's. Some of the young converts of the 1920's and 30's became the college professors of the 40's and 50's, and by the 1960's they were turning out more converts, fellow travelers and "useful idiots" who were themselves school teachers, playwrights, actors, editors, reporters, etc.

Regardless of the source, the 1985 warning delivered by Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov rings absolutely true to me:

Ideological subversion is the process, which is legitimate, overt, and open; you can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do, all American mass media has to do, is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it. There is no mystery. [It has] nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence-gathering looks more romantic. It sells more deodorants through the advertising, probably. That’s why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond-type of thrillers.

But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’—‘[?]’ in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare.’ What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one [is] demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

We now have a country in which two-thirds of the population believes that "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is part of the Constitution. Where a majority believes "the rich don't pay their fair share" of taxes. We have a country that is progressively balkanized (pun intended) into victim groups to be exploited for political gain. And all of this traces back to the strategies and tactics that sprang from the Frankfurt School and its disciples: "Critical Theory" (Critical Race Theory, Critical Literary Theory, Critical Gender Theory), Political Correctness ("Shut up," they explained...), the Cloward-Piven strategy, etc.

Marx understood and stated plainly that Communism, historically inevitable or not, could only come about through violent revolution, so the conditions for violent revolution had to be fomented. A small, dedicated, ever-changing group of true believers has been working since the turn of the 20th Century to bring Western Civilization to its knees, and it has almost achieved it. The players have changed, but the strategy hasn't.

Nuke the Site from Orbit

It's the only way to be sure.  I've said that repeatedly.

I took a couple of Quotes of the Day from Zombie's five-part piece Ideological War Spells Doom for America's Schoolkids, and now he has a follow-on that caused two readers to send me emails alerting me to its existence.

But I want to take a little different tack on Zombie's latest, How a Teacher's Rally Made Me Anti-Education.

I have stated over the life of this blog that I believe that the education system has been suborned by "true believers" in socialism, Leftism, "progressivism," Marxism, communism, call it what you will. I have stated that these people, without a need of a vast Red conspiracy with monthly planning meetings, naturally gravitate to media and education to spread their faith because they believe they know the truth and it is their self-imposed mission to spread the Gospel. Education and media provide the best path for their evangelism, and while I harp on Antonio Gramsci, I doubt seriously that most of these people have heard of him. Gramsci just wrote about the need to undermine Western culture so that socialism could triumph. He was hardly alone in reaching that conclusion. It didn't take the Frankfurt School to make people spontaneously choose to do the undermining, that group just provided, with Germanic efficiency, an organized agenda for those who were willing to do a little research.

But the amateurs have done very well all on their own.

No, what Zombie's latest photo-essay illustrates is precisely that fact - that de-moralizing indoctrination is very much alive and well in the public education system, far beyond any honest person's ability to deny. Go, look at the pictures. Read the protest signs. Tell me that Marxist ideology has faded away with the fall of the Soviet Union.

No, it still survives in academia. It may very well be taught in your child's school today. It has been going on for so long that for many parents it's the very definition of "right-thinking." Some teachers understand what's been going on, but I believe many if not most of them are among the group that just believe there's no other "right" way to think.

Regardless of whether the effort was coordinated or not, the end result (coming two decades too late for the Soviet Union) is the same - a country at the brink of catastrophe.

Should we, as Zombie says, "destroy education in order to save it"?

I'm afraid it's too late.

And Yet Another

Following up on the previous post, Instapundit links to a piece about playwright David Mamet and his new book on losing his liberal outlook.  Some choice excerpts:

Higher ed, (Mamet) said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—"Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever"—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

"If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we're training ourselves not to see cause and effect," he said. Wasn't there, he went on, a "much more interesting .  .  . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?"

This is the whole strategy of "critical theory" - the Frankfurt school's methodology for using the education system to de-moralize (hypen used intentionally) the population. Thomas Jefferson? He can't be a great man, he was a slave owner and adulterer! Pull the lever!  Writing an essay on economics?  The grader will be a Keynesian, so it had better slant that way!  Pull the lever!

On cognitive dissonance:

"The question occurs to me quite a lot: What do liberals do when their plans have failed? What did the writers do when their plans led to unemployment, their own and other people's? One thing they can't do is admit they failed. Why? To admit failure would endanger their position in the herd."

To admit failure would require them to question their ideology, and that loses them their position in the herd.

In the beginning of Mamet's conversion, his Rabbi sent him books:

One of the first was A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. In it Sowell expands on the difference between the "constrained vision" of human nature—close to the tragic view that infuses Mamet's greatest plays—and the "unconstrained vision" of man's endless improvement that suffused Mamet's politics and the politics of his profession and social class.

"He came back to me stunned. He said, 'This is incredible!' He said, 'Who thinks like this? Who are these people?' I said, 'Republicans think like this.' He said, 'Amazing.' "

I didn't have to be converted by Sowell's magnum opus, but Conflict of Vision's effect on me was similar.

And, of course, the article points out the inevitable herd reaction to Mamet's conversion:

After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.

Read the whole piece.

I think I just added another book onto my pile.

Constructive Criticism

In the comments to Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around, reader and sometimes critic juris_imprudent argued:

Back to Gramsci again Kevin? This fellow will surely go down in history as the most influential man in Western Culture in more than a 1000 years. To a small degree I agree with Markadelphia - this is one of many theories of education. It is a crackpot one no doubt - but then what leftist dogma isn't? But I don't see evidence of growth - hell sixteen (not particularly impressive) schools 40 years after the peak of leftism in the U.S., 20 some years after the fall of communism in the West?

I remember La Raza from when I was in HS in the 70s. It was just as stupid, out of place and non mainstream then. The old radicals carved out a little niche that they still hold onto - big whoop. That does NOT explain the overall decline in education that has taken place since the 50s/early-60s. Nor do I buy into any Gramsci-rooted plot to destroy Western Civ, any more than I buy into Truther, Birther or ChemTrailer folderol.

Everyone has a favorite bogeyman in education. Once it was New Math, then whole language followed by that self-esteem stupidity. A true conservative would argue for the tried and true (all the way back to teaching Latin), but the graduate system of our universities demand new and novel ideas or you just aren't a PhD. So a lot of bad ideas end up getting floated into a lot of areas; education is not immune, and may be more susceptible than others for a number of reasons.

Others rose to my defense, but let me say it myself: Yes, I'm aware that there are many other problems going on in the public education system besides the outright Marxist brainwashing that I illustrated in The George Orwell Daycare Center and Balkanization. I've never denied that, but I've never emphasized it either.

It has been my contention, however, that the root of the decline in America's education establishment does, in fact, go back to the influence of the thoughts that propagated from the Frankfurt School and its disciples. As Unix-Jedi noted one comment further down:

Literacy rates *dropped* after "professional education" took hold. Literacy rates were steady from colonial times up to the 1940s, when they started to drop.
Gee, what changed there?

We had a system that successfully taught literacy and numeracy, and starting sometime in the 1940's our public school system went off the rails. In the 1960's the booster rockets kicked in.

Why?

What influence caused the initial changes that have brought us to where we are today, and why do those in this system fight so hard to prevent fixing the obvious problems?

Continuing my habit of letting other people say things if they can do it better than I, here's Unix-Jedi again:

The educational system as it's currently constituted, with the CLAIMED GOALS IT HAS, has utterly failed. Which means that 1) The stated goals aren't the real goals or 2) it's incapable of meeting the goals. (Conceivably, 3) the goals are unreachable, despite the fact historically they have been met.)

I rule out #3. I'm utterly convinced that at this point #2 is the case, but I'm also convinced that we've reached #2 through decades of effort by a small and ever-changing group of people that embodied #1.

Reader Jason chimed in with this criticism:

I generally like what you have to say, Kevin. But "Gramsci's plan" sounds like fear mongering (almost like the "blood in the streets" fallacies that gun banners used against ccw). I wholeheartedly agree that CP is bad and we should fight against it, but let's not blame all of education's problems on it.

Fair point. It was not my intention to lay all the blame at Gramsci's - one man's - feet, though I acknowledge I can be read that way. I will say again, however, that I do lay the blame for the overwhelming majority of the destruction of America's public education system to the founders of the Frankfurt School and "Critical Theory." It began in the universities, and it has trickled down through them, the Schools of Education, and the state school boards until we have what we've got today.

I do not believe that the people involved think that what they're doing is the deliberate destruction of the public education system, leaving our children illiterate and innumerate. I think the overwhelming majority of them - like Markadelphia, and like Dr. Augustine Romero - believe that what they're doing is truly what's best for the kids in their care.

They're simply unable to recognize that they're wrong. By now, they're the products of their own systems, and in higher academia (as several others have noted) its a self-reinforcing system, continually producing more of the same.

These people end up in charge of the school systems and the systems in charge of the school systems. Teachers who actually teach are, as John Taylor Gatto illustrated, forced out of the system or neutered. Those who contribute to mediocrity (or worse) can't be forced out with high explosives. The rest, as one teacher and fellow blogger put it a while back, are just trying to "save the ones they can."

Markadelphia complains,

These EDU posts, Kevin, serve no purpose nor present any sort of concrete solution whatsoever.

The point of the Education pieces I write is to illustrate that the system is broken beyond repair. It CAN'T. BE. FIXED. It's too entrenched, it's occupied by people who cannot be changed and can't be fired. It's unionized. It's even federally-funded now, and there's an entire Cabinet-level department that since 1980 has spent over $995 billion supposedly to better educate our kids.

Well? Why aren't we getting what we pay for? Are the stated goals the real goals?

I don't think so. Do I think it's all one grand Gramscian conspiracy to destroy Western Civilization? I think at least in part it began that way, but it's taken on a life of its own. Let me rework a classic Demotivator:


How else do you explain, for example, New York's "Rubber Rooms"?

(John Stossel has more on the topic.)

The "concrete solution?" Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

And start over from scratch with schools paid for directly by parents. Hell, there's lots of empty commercial office space available, let's take up Tom McClintock's idea! Disconnect school funding from property values, and make education spending tax-deductible. Close the Department of Education and shut down State involvement in education with the exception (grudgingly) of standards testing.

But for $Diety's sake, don't send your kids to public schools if you can help it. They deserve better.

Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around

As I said in Why I Do This,

He's too perfect an example of the Left in this country not to let him illuminate their failings.

This week he provided yet another example.

In the comments to my post Critical Pedagogy, Marxadelphia responded:

It's a good thing I have the day off today. What a load of lying bullshit. And further proof of ridiculous paranoia. As usual, you start with your belief and then succumb to confirmation bias.

--

These EDU posts, Kevin, serve no purpose nor present any sort of concrete solution whatsoever. They don't even accurately address the actual problems. In essence, they sum up an emotional reaction--one that typifies the right these days--comprised solely of hate, anger and fear combined with a complete lack of factual foundation.

OK, two assertions are made here: One, the post linked is "a load of lying bullshit" and my Education posts "don't even accurately address the actual problems."

Let's investigate those claims, shall we?

The linked piece states:

The Critical Pedagogy Movement is coming to a school near you and it means to change the world.
One child at a time.
Most people have never heard the term, ‘Critical Pedagogy’. That is intentional.
Anyone not involved in the educational community would have little reason to be aware of this leftist theory of education. If it were merely a theory however, there would be little reason for concern.
The primary assumption of critical pedagogy is that disparities between individual and social group outcomes in life are due to entrenched societal oppression. So, if anyone or any group has ‘more’ than another it is because they are either oppressing others or benefiting from the ‘oppression of the masses’.
Thus, all whites benefit from an unjust social system and, as a result are inherently guilty of racism.
Advocates implicitly deny any definition of the ‘pursuit of happiness’, which does not result in equality of outcome. That necessarily limits American’s liberty and their pursuit of happiness to the politically correct calculus of Critical Pedagogy theory.
Pedagogy is defined as ‘the art or profession of teaching’. That definition is sometimes shortened by advocates into ‘the teaching’. The theory of critical pedagogy was first fully developed and then popularized in 1968 by the Brazilian educator and influential theorist Paulo Freire. His seminal work, the Pedagogy [The Teaching] of the Oppressed, was highly influential within the US leftist academic community and in 1969 Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University.
His subsequent work was highly influential with the Bill Ayers of the world. One might think of Paulo Freire as the Saul Alinsky of the US leftist educational community. Critical Pedagogy is the educational arm of the ‘social justice movement’, which is the political arm of “liberation theology”, all of which are aspects of ‘Cultural Marxism’.

OK, there's a pretty firm statement with assertions that a particular person is the focal point in pushing the "Critical Pedagogy" curriculum. A quick Google search on "Critical Pedagogy" brought up a link to the University of Colorado, Denver School of Education and professor Martin Ryder. Among the many links there, directly below one to The Frankfurt School, are several dedicated specifically to Paulo Friere. Nineteen, specifically, more than for any other topic covered on that initial page.

It would appear that the author is on to something, no?

Now, as to the assertion by that author that "The Critical Pedagogy Movement is coming to a school near you and it means to change the world," let's look at a piece I wrote in 2008, Balkanization. That piece was about a particular program that is apparently still running in the Tucson Unified School District schools called "Raza Studies." (The link to the original newspaper stories are broken, so you'll have to take my excerpts at face value.) The story indicates that the program, while "under fire" could grow, and reach younger children.

What is it? It's described as an "ethnic studies" program. "La Raza" in Spanish translates to "The Race" in English.

Raza Studies serves about 500 high school students, who take a four-course block of history, social justice and two Chicano literature classes.

--

It's the end of the school year and Raza Studies students at Tucson High Magnet School are presenting research findings to their principal.

Their PowerPoint presentation is critical of policies toward English learners; some concerns hinge on whether students are funneled to vocational tracks, and some focus on inferior equipment.

Then comes an exploration of classroom décor, with photos of classroom items students consider culturally insensitive.

First up is a baseball poster, which they say should be soccer or rugby to validate other cultures. Next up flashes the Pledge of Allegiance and a patriotic poster featuring the Statue of Liberty, the American flag and an eagle.

"Most of the kids are from a different country, and this is showing them that this is the country that's the greatest and yours doesn't matter," a student maintains.

So they're not teaching math, English, physics, chemistry, anatomy, etc., they're teaching the students to see the world through the lens of oppression, are they not?

Augustine Romero took over as head of ethnic studies two years ago, after running Raza Studies for four years. In his view, the system already divides students by ethnicity.

When he was a senior at Tucson High, his father asked school counselors to make military recruiters stop calling. His counselor couldn't believe Romero planned to go to college.

He proved the counselor wrong, and the 41-year-old just finished his doctorate. "Yes, there are examples of people who have made it, but we've made it by having to work harder than most people because we've had to endure the inequities of the system," he says.

As I said back then, anybody who gets a Ph.D has to work harder than most people, but it would appear that Mr. Romero has an ethnic chip on his shoulder. But here's the kicker:

Romero summons the work of Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire to explain the premise of the program, hauling out a dog-eared and extensively highlighted copy of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." He points to a passage: "This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well."

(My emphasis.) I wonder where Dr. Romero got his Ph.D? Was it one of those schools of Education referred to in Critical Pedagogy, or another? And does it matter?

Here's what a participant in the program, one of the teachers, had to say:

John Ward taught in the department in the 2002-03 school year. Of Latino heritage despite his Anglo-sounding name, Ward was all for more thoroughly integrating the contributions of Mexican-Americans into U.S. history. But once he started teaching, he became concerned about the program's focus on victimization.

"They really wanted to identify the victimizer, which was the dominant group — in this case white America — and they wanted students to have a revolution against upper-class white America," says Ward, who now works as a state auditor.

"They had a clear message that political departments in the U.S. are arms of the dominant culture designed to keep minorities in the ghetto and to keep them downtrodden. They're teaching on the taxpayers' dime that police officers and teachers are trying to keep them down. What a perverse message to teach these kids."

Such messages, he says, won't be found in the program's textbooks, such as "Occupied America."

"The department doesn't look bad on paper. It's what happens verbally that moves the debate from benign to pernicious," Ward says.

The tone worried him: "The students had become very angry by the end of the year. I saw a marked change in them."

Of course this concern was played down by Romero:

Romero says anger is essential for transformation, but insists teachers work to transform that anger into something positive. "For me, there's a real fine line between anger and awareness," he says.

He chalks up the dispute with Ward to politics, saying Ward didn't fit in because he was a conservative while he and the teachers in the department are liberal.

Gee, ya THINK?

Now here's a really interesting part. In a second piece by John Ward himself, we're told:

During the 2002-2003 school year, I taught a U.S. history course with a Mexican-American perspective. The course was part of the Raza/Chicano studies department.

Within one week of the course beginning, I was told that I was a "teacher of record," meaning that I was expected only to assign grades. The Raza studies department staff would teach the class.

I was assigned to be a "teacher of record" because some members of the Raza studies staff lacked teaching certificates. It was a convenient way of circumventing the rules.

I stated that I expected to do more than assign grades. I expected to be involved in teaching the class. The department was less than enthusiastic but agreed.

Immediately it was clear that the class was not a U.S. history course, which the state of Arizona requires for graduation. The class was similar to a sociology course one expects to see at a university.

Where history was missing from the course, it was filled by controversial and biased curriculum.

The basic theme of the curriculum was that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites.

In this narrative, whites are able to maintain their influence only if minorities are held down. Thus, social, political and economic events in America must be understood through this lens.

This biased and sole paradigm justified teaching that our community police officers are an extension of the white power structure and that they are the strongmen used "to keep minorities in their ghettos."

It justified telling the class that there are fewer Mexican-Americans in Tucson Magnet High School's advanced placement courses because their "white teachers" do not believe they are capable and do not want them to get ahead.

Yes, that's right, The MAN wants to keep them DOWN!

Now, let me reiterate my point from Critical Pedagogy: Future teachers are being taught this stuff. They are coming to SCHOOLS NEAR YOU, and bringing it with them. They are INFLICTING IT ON STUDENTS in your school systems - not all schools, and not all students, but it is being spread. It is the outgrowth of the Frankfurt School, and it is part and parcel of Gramsci's plan to destroy Western culture from the inside. And it's working.

So to Marxadelphia's assertion that Critical Pedagogy was "lying bullshit" and "paranoia," I say, "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

I suggest, if you wish to read further, that you read the entire Balkanization post, The George Orwell Daycare Center (bring lunch, it's long), and also I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Site from Orbit . . .

Now there's a "concrete solution"!

Critical Pedagogy

If you have school-age children, you MUST READ THIS. Excerpt:

Some of the basic tenants of critical pedagogy are:

• ALL education is inherently political…
• A social and educational vision of justice and equality should be the foundation for all education
• Race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and physical ability are important domains of oppression
• The purpose of education is the alleviation of oppression and human suffering
• Schools must not hurt students–good schools don’t blame students for their failures
• Good schools don’t judge the beliefs students have about their life’s experiences
• Part of the role of any educator involves becoming a researcher into social oppression
• Education must promote emancipatory change

Sixteen of the top educational schools in America are heavily influenced by Critical Pedagogy and are shaping the future leaders of our educational system. This belief system is now spreading out of the colleges into our K-12 systems and being promulgated by radical teachers as its ‘agents of change’. It’s a well-organized, widespread movement, firmly entrenched in many Universities and its advocates are actively seeking to spread it worldwide.

A quick Google on "critical pedagogy" brings up this link from the University of Denver School of Education. Among the "resources" listed, Rethinking Schools, the source of the article that inspired The George Orwell Daycare Center Überpost, and The Frankfurt School which I and reader Phil B. have had some things to say about.

My only quibble with the piece is that I think it's been going on longer - and more "successfully" - than the author seems to believe.

The linked piece was published in December, part II is here. Read both. Understand what it is that's going on in our public schools, and why.

RCOB™ all over again.

Thanks to Neo-neocon for the pointer.

A Brilliant Bit of Analysis

Reader Phil B. (not Phil R. who attended GBRIV this year, but another Brit reader) has posted a long comment that deserves front-page status. Here it is, in its entirety. Pay particular attention to his analysis of our resident "useful idiot."

I must disagree with Kevin regarding the ability of anyone to convince the voting public that anything to do with guns is acceptable or normal. I personally do not believe that it is possible to peacefully reverse the restrictions and negative image of firearms in the UK for various reasons. Let me start from first principles to outline why I have come to this conclusion.

You must understand the nature of the Politicians, Quangos (Quasi Autonomous Non Governmental Organisations) and the Civil Service (which is neither civil or a servant but a Master). Ministers come and go and are briefed by the civil servants but it is the Civil Service which effectively runs the country.

It is overwhelmingly Marxist/Leninist in its ethos and has been infiltrated so successfully by the left that the average citizen (or even a group of such citizens) does not even understand the rules of the game.

Communism can be simply and easily summarised : “A group of PROFESSIONAL Revolutionaries, taking over the levers of power of a Country and running the country for their own benefit”. How will they mange this? By organisation and eliminating opposition by whatever means is necessary.

Briefly, the left wing intent is to destroy the existing society and replace it with a society of its own design.

Lenin proposed five conditions for successful “Revolution”, namely :

1) The weakening or destruction of the existing State and its institutions

2) The destruction of the existing society so that it can be replaced by the type of society required by the "new" post revolutionary society

3) An inability of the existing institutions to govern or bring about change .

4) The armed forces must be demoralised and rendered ineffective (including the Police).

5) The "proletariat" must be in a mood for change.

He also stated that Freedom and Liberty is precious and therefore must be strictly rationed. All power must be accumulated to the State and freedoms and rights will be permitted ONLY if the State allows.

Once you understand that mindset and these principles, then you can use them as a template to see how many of the trends in society fit the pattern and “advance the cause”. The destruction of marriage, the recent posting on this blog about the way all parents are to be treated as paedophiles, the wrecking of the education system, “equality” legislation, gay and minority rights etc and so forth ad infinitum all assist one or more of the five principles. Try matching the attack to the principle.

Interestingly, Lenin did not prescribe what form the revolution takes or how it is prosecuted. Everyone thinks of the “Revolution” as armed people storming the Winter Palace in St Petersburg (or Leningrad if your atlas is a bit older). However, he also said that ALL aspects of society should be attacked simultaneously and if an opportunity arises to spring the revolution, then it should be taken. If the communists can actually take over the Government of the day and run the country for its own use, then that is also considered as “revolution” and equally valid.

The left wing has infiltrated and hollowed out from within just about every organisation - including the Conservative party (“Right” wing or Republican) which is “Blue Labour” – their policies and attitude is a milder version of the Left policies and attitudes. As a “for example” I will quote from Mary Ellen Synons blog “Euroseptic”

(original here http://synonblog.dailymail.co.uk/2009/11/dave-pétain.html )

Tony Blair promised the British people a referendum on the European Constitution. Then, after the text was renamed the Lisbon Treaty, Blair broke that promise because he said it was no longer a constitution, it was a treaty, and he had only promised a referendum on a constitution.

David Cameron promised the British people a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Now, after the text has been signed by President Klaus of the Czech Republic, Cameron has broken that promise -- he has sent out his Tory spokesmen to say there will not be a referendum because Lisbon is not a treaty, it is now European law, and he only promised a referendum on a treaty.

Do you spot the similarities?

In the UK. The brothers Milliband (both professional politicians who have never had a job outside of Politics) and are the sons of Ralph Milliband, an ardent and active communist, are holders of significant power in the UK. David Milliband is Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Edward Samuel Miliband is Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Ralph Milliband was attacked by David Horowitz in an essay called “The Road to Nowhere” and Kevin blogged this a while back.

Examining the political credentials of the rest of the Government Ministers reveals a similar catalogue of “ex” Marxist/Leninists in significant positions of power and influence.

A revolution? I believe it certainly is and all the conditions listed above have been very largely been achieved.

The Daily Mail newspaper reported that Labour has deliberately encouraged “multiculturism” and unlimited mass immigration to destroy British society and forever change Britain to spite the right wing. As the newspaper concerned has not been sued by the Labour party or the Government or forced to issue a public retraction of the statement that I can only assume that it must be true.

(See here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debat...telling- us.html

and

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/...sed- racism.html for details. )

However, there has been a deafening silence from the rest of the press and as the majority of people rely on the TV for news and the BBC (the state sponsored broadcasting organisation) in particular, very few people are aware of this.

This addresses Point 2 above Examining the relentless attacks on marriage from a myriad of different directions (removing tax breaks for married couples, elevating the “single parent family” by favourable benefits so that it is financially more beneficial for a married couple with children to LIVE APART, the elevation of gay “Marriage” etc.) add to this.

Constant change and bogging people down in pointless activities contributes to points 2 and 3 – Markadelphia is expert at this. Consider the amount of time that the readers of this blog have wasted in rebutting in detail his postings – while you are busy researching facts, carefully editing replies and spending your time and effort concentrating on the garbage he writes, you are not concentrating on other, perhaps much more important things. “Make the enemy do useless things” is one of Sun Tzu’s maxims. And while you are doing this, he, like a butterfly, flutters off onto another topic, equally as pointless and you respond …

What you must bear in mind is that for a professional revolutionary, infiltrated into an organisation, IT IS THEIR FULL TIME JOB to work towards the destruction of society. Kevin, all the rest of the bloggers and I must devote our spare time to this – a revolutionary can work 8 hours a day at the office and then go home to carry on in their leisure time.

My point is that, regardless of your arguments, no matter how detailed your research, no matter how much you can demonstrate that your point of view is reasonable, it will be ignored, dismissed and trivialised. Critical Theory so well developed by the Frankfurt school of Communism will be brought fully to bear to render your arguments invalid (“You are wrong”)

The existing State holds the levers of power and they certainly are not going to give it up – remember, rights will be allowed if the State is convinced that it will not be harmed by the relaxation and can be withdrawn at any time.

You might as well try to persuade by sweet reason a hungry grizzly bear to turn vegetarian and not eat you. It is not interested, its mind is made up and you are wasting your time.

Now, having outlined the methodology of the Left and given some examples to illustrate the way that the left operates, let us examine how they have used Critical Theory in particular to shape the way firearms are viewed in the UK.

Since 1920, the propaganda output by all the British media, both State controlled and privately owned, has been that Guns are evil. Gun “Nuts/Fanatics/Crazy” people have been (and still are) the target of all the insidious destruction of their reputation and character which the left practices so well.

Using Critical Theory, firearms and owners are attacked and trivialised at every opportunity.

Rich, upper class people shooting grouse and pheasants (I am neither rich or upper class but have shot both pheasants and grouse on a very modest budget) can be dismissed using the “Class Enemy” approach and vilified as brainless, moronic bloodthirsty destroyers of the environment (when not clearing the peasants from their land so that a privileged minority can lord it over the country for their own sadistic pleasure, of course).

So inculcated are the populace and so selective are the reports presented by the media (“Look what happens in America” ) that anyone would think that an intelligent, sober, sensible, law abiding person merely touching a gun would instantaneously be transmogrified into a drooling, crazed murdering chimpanzee on acid and not to be trusted with a gun.

The press and media are so left wing leaning and biased against firearms that getting the message out will be virtually impossible.

The Police have actively campaigned for the restriction on firearms since the beginning in 1920. Their mantra is “We wish to reduce the number of firearms in the hands of the population to the absolute minimum” – and if you believe any number north of zero is “the minimum”, then you are as gullible as Markadelphia.

Thanks to the Police, taking anyone to a range to introduce them to the sport is lengthy, tedious, bureaucratic and intended to put people off. Journalists have stated that they want to infiltrate a gun club and “prove” how easy it is to steal a gun. (A few years back, a journalist smuggled a gun into the UK to “prove” how easy it was … and was not prosecuted for breaking the law). The penalties for having a gun stolen are severe and you can bet your bottom dollar that you will never own a gun again. Any Gun Club where the firearm is stolen will be shut down. More ammunition will be provided to “prove” that firearms owners are a danger. As you must vouch for anyone you take to the club, very, very few people will risk things and even fewer clubs will encourage visitors.

Gun ownership is being attacked and strangled from many directions and few people will be willing to risk introducing anyone to a club, or even discuss that they are firearms owners in case loose talk leads to a break in and theft of a firearm.

Samizdata has a blog entry describing the evolution of the “no right to self defence (link here http://www.samizdata.net/blog/ ar...ay_we_were.html ) and it summarises how and why it is impossible to use a legally held firearm in self defence (besides the conditions on the firearms certificate will state “Only to be used on Approved ranges”, or a named piece of land for shooting rabbits etc. so you will be breaking the law by doing so).

So to conclude, the decline in forearms ownership in Britain will only continue, and indeed accelerate as people are forced out of the sport and no new people come into the clubs etc. and those in charge of the system will be quite content to allow this BECAUSE it is what they want. Chairman Mao stated that “Power comes from the barrel of a gun” and there is no way in the world that these people will allow power to be given to the population.

So will there ever be a change in this status? I believe so but as I said at the start of this essay, it will not be PEACEFUL.

There is an interesting book called the War of the Flea by Robert Taber about revolutionary guerrilla warfare. It was published a while ago in the 1960s and the CIA bought up the entire first printing – not because it was so dangerous that the Public couldn’t be allowed access to it but it was so good it was issued as a standard text to their operatives. I often used to see it in second hand bookshops in the UK.

One of the questions Taber asked was “Why do people, when the risks and dangers are so great, both to themselves and their families, resort to armed revolution?”

His answer was quite simple – they cannot get any redress to their grievances either through the ballot box or through the Courts.

In the UK such topics as the Lisbon treaty, law and order, taxation, the deliberate encouragement of immigration to destroy the nature of the country, loss of liberties, ID cards, etc. etc. are occurring at an accelerating rate and the average citizen is bewildered by this. The torrent of legislation and the pettiness and disproportionate penalties for trivial transgressions of the law is proceeding unabated. The labour government, through “Enabling Acts” (i.e. under existing legislation a Minister can introduce a law without it being scrutinised or voted on by parliament) has introduced one new criminal offence for EVERY DAY they have been in power since May 1997. Such legislation has given the state unprecedented power to snoop and spy on the population and now it is more expensive to obey the law than to be a criminal.

The citizens do not understand the rules of the game being played by the left. They try to understand and reason their way to a solution – and while they are trying to address and counter the arguments and problems in detail and try to lobby their “representatives”, they are overwhelmed by the new legislation coming down the pipeline. The representatives will ignore or trivialise the citizens letter or enquiry – they are driving the process – and will divide and conquer using Critical Theory, accusations of Racism, Homophobia, Islamophobia etc. No matter, it helps destroy and fragment society and isolate people, engender suspicion and any “problems” can be sorted later (such as declaring sections of the population as counter revolutionaries, class enemies, etc. The solution involves firing squads or Gulags but it must be kept firmly in mind that the purpose of it all is for a SMALL group of PROFESSIONAL revolutionaries to run the country for THEIR benefit. See any communist country and the way the leaders behave.

Is there any redress through the ballot box? All political parties are singing from the same hymn sheet and Europe is gaining greater and greater (unelected and unaccountable) powers – see the quote by Mary Ellen Synon above.

Is there any chance of the Law Courts siding with the people of the country and reversing the Governments policies? Again, no. Rather they uphold stupid and malicious legislation. And any situation where it costs you more to obey the law than to disregard it is a dangerous situation. Some of the judgements are frankly bizarre and perverse to say the least and discriminate in favour of “minorities” and against the law abiding (as a “for example” search for “Travellers” on the Daily mail website for dozens of examples of this).

The mood of the people when I left in late January 2009 was becoming increasingly frustrated and angry. Society is so fragmented now that there is no longer a sense of national identity and people now have nothing to lose.

If you accept that Taber was correct (regarding ballot boxes and the law courts) then you must conclude that Revolution in the UK is inevitable.

I learned that to avoid trouble, don’t be there when it kicks off and I believe that Britain is heading for a revolution of one form or another because the pressures and change in society are so great that it is at breaking point. What will replace that particular version of society is anyone’s guess but I can guarantee it will be a less benign, harsher and more impoverished existence. Revolutions destroy wealth and stability and I’m getting too old to start from scratch again. That is why I am writing this in New Zealand.

HOW the revolution starts (without guns in the hands of the people it will be difficult, but not impossible) and what direction it takes I would not like to predict. It will be bloody, long and protracted - but sweeping away of the old regime and the replacement with a new form of governance will be something to observe from afar.

You can bet that those people who have put their life on the line to get rid of the corrupt, non representative and self serving system will not meekly hand in their weapons to those in the new authority. Instead, they will be as brutal as the Communists and quite a few of the existing Politicians, Civil Servants and others will meet an untimely end in one form or another.

So is there hope? That’s a strange way of looking at it but perhaps there is.

As usual, you will want to know where the information comes from.

For a concise and easily read summary of the aims and principles of communism, Geoffrey Fairbairn’s “Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare The Countryside Version” is as good as you will get. One chapter on Leninism sums it up completely in 19 pages of a paperback.

Chairman Maos quotes are found in my copy of “Mao Tse Tung – Selected Writings” which is surprisingly readable and well written. Not that I would be persuaded to subscribe to his philosophy.

Lenin’s works are too numerous to list in all their gory detail but the following are worthwhile to understand the way communist organisations are set up, organised and run. Note that Lenin had experience of the Army and organisation so if his writings seem to be written as a military textbook, referring to “This Army”, now you know why. His acceptance and insistence on the use of overwhelming violence stems from his Military Training and may give an insight into the tactics of the left wing political parties. Try these two as a primer.

On Organisation
Selected Works

Incidentally, if Lenin DID write this stuff, he was an excellent technical author ..

Sun Tsu – The Art of War. I prefer the translation by Samuel B Griffiths (a former US Marine) but there are plenty more out there.

The Daily Mail is a large circulation newspaper with over 3 million readers per day (see the Audited Bureau of Circulation Website for exact figures. Make sure you enter the full title as there are thousands of newspapers with Mail as part of the title) and covers some of the stupidities of the various laws passed over the last 13 years. Try entering BNP as a search string in the website and read some of the comments under the articles. Or “Travellers” for the way the law abiding are second class citizens in their own homes.

Samizdata is, I find, patchy and does not cover a single topic (as Kevin's Blog does) but in the right hand sidebar, you can search under TOPICS for self defence etc. Plenty of British points of view.

I've been reposting other people's words a lot recently, but just DAMN! When they're that good, it would be a crime not to.

UPDATE: Phil added this, in comments:

For anyone thinking that I'm paranoid and seeing "Reds under the bed" at every turn, these links should give a ring of truth to the article

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ ...oliticians.html

and

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/...B-45- years.html

It is rare that such information is publicly and explicitly stated which makes it all the more startling.

Those articles are chilling.