Who Placed American Men in a Psychic 'Iron Cage?'

Part II

The Thread of 'Cultural Marxism'

by

Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson

15 May 1998

In Part I of this series, the radical feminist 'thread' of the complex fabric of American civilization was described in terms of its antecedent in the idealist Transcendental generation of the early-to-mid 1800s. In that essay, it was observed that if the 'feminization' of our culture, driven primarily by radical feminists bent on destroying a perceived male-dominated hierarchical culture, were the only aspect of American life that appeared ominous, we could probably rest assured that the cycles of American history would take care of it. But this is not the only linear thread in the complex nonlinear fabric of American civilization. Another such thread, 'cultural Marxism,' interacting with the radical feminist thread, has the potential to drive this chaotic system into a precipitous disintegration.1,2,3,4

This essay is an attempt to describe the effects of 'cultural Marxism' in American life.

Suppose you awakened one morning and realized that TV news, sports, and political pundit personalities, television sitcoms, television and Hollywood movies (plots and leading characters), were dominated by females and minorities of various races and ethnicities. You may have recognized that 'authority figures' are now more likely to be portrayed by women and minorities, than the white male. You would find this image quite commonplace. It is the age in which we live.

Suppose you visited any major university in America and perused the curriculum. You would find a vast spawning ground of non-content subjects and even departments set up to deal with everything from women's studies, to race-based culture studies, to sexual orientation studies, to studies of the popular culture. Yes, the times are-a-changing. Just the natural dynamics of a free society seeking its right to the 'pursuit of happiness.'

Suppose you found that you, your son, or your grandson had just been terminated from his job because the affirmative action policies of the employer demanded a 'remedy' which gave preference to a woman and/or minorities. Or, worse yet, suppose these white Americans of European descent were not even allowed to apply for positions in universities or the workplace reserved specifically for women and/or minorities. Or if allowed to compete, these unfortunates would be at the bottom of the 'preference' scale used to judge entrance. Observing this, you would feel right at home in an America entering the 21st century.

Suppose you asked your children or grandchildren what they were learning in our public schools. You would most likely find that they were being subjected to teaching methods that explore the child's 'feelings,' and build their 'self esteem,' even in such traditional disciplines as math, science, and English. You would also find that their test scores in national aptitude tests are going down -- as they have continuously over the past three decades.

If you have a son or grandson in the U.S. military, you would undoubtedly find him subject to frequent, periodic 'sensitivity training' sessions aimed at purging him of his chauvinist cultural attitudes toward women and minorities -- whether or not he possesses such attitudes.

Suppose you listened to the presidential political 'debates' over the past two election cycles. You undoubtedly would have heard the phrase, 'have the courage to change.' Left unspecified was the direction and nature of such change. It appeared that 'change,' simply for its own sake was good enough. Change is indeed invigorating to those who feel that they are part of a great democratic process and tradition. After all, after having won the Cold War, maybe we can now lead the whole world to freedom!

Suppose you have listened to what serves as foreign policy 'debate' over the past five years. If you listened carefully, you would have heard our leaders claim, '...it's the right thing to do.' This moral justification, without a shred of thought of the long-term consequences, has guided our foreign policy in Bosnia, Somalia, NATO-expansion, and China. Indeed, some believe this moralizing of foreign policy is simply the result of a cult of 'personalizing' everything our political leaders do -- primarily for domestic political advantage.

Suppose you woke up one morning and noticed that one of the most brutalizing professions on earth, that of combat arms, is being treated (by some) as if it were just another bureaucratic job. That is, it is a candidate for the infusion of anyone who simply 'chooses' it. The concept that 'many apply, but few are chosen' is being supplanted by 'let anyone who chooses, serve.' Many of our political leaders are seriously considering opening ground combat arms to women. They have already opened aviation combat arms to women.

If you are one of those who forgot (or never knew) that combat service is an extremely brutal, physically demanding, and mentally punishing profession, you are a candidate for 'having the courage to change.' You are such a candidate in spite of the fact that armies, over many centuries and many civilizations, and, in particular the American military, have discriminated against various groups in their selection of the best 'warriors.' And for good reason. The aged, the infirm, the mentally unsound, the weak, and women have been discriminated against in selection for combat arms. This discrimination is as sound as that by which the human race, early in its evolution, learned to 'discriminate' between predator and prey, friend or foe, and which 'knowledge' set in motion the biological mechanisms of 'fight or flee.' Such 'discrimination' ensured our survival as a species. Discrimination is not necessarily a flawed concept.

If you awoke some morning and realized that many of your fellow Americans believe that it is 'the right thing to do' when the most helpless among us are condemned to death by a 'woman's right to choose,' you might wonder where we are headed as a culture and why.

Finally, you may even become aware that an influential minority of the elite Boomers openly discuss and defend the practice of neonaticide5 (the purposeful killing of an infant soon after birth). According to a distinguished professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "...we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life...What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed?...the right to life must come...from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect on ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die." Of course, under this definition any of us could have been killed, not only shortly after birth, but right up to adolescence or even young adulthood -- subject to a decision by one of the 'anointed' New Totalitarians.

Pinker observes that "...several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons...and thus neonatocide should not be classified as murder." Rational observers6 of this abomination remind us that infanticide is rightly universally treated as a "...greatly aberrant act, the very definition of a moral horror." The point to be made here is that, if we finally awaken one morning and find the New Totalitarians presenting this abhorrence as rational policy for America, we might logically wonder where all of this stuff came from.

Indeed, a thoughtful person should ask himself or herself whether or not all this 'change' from America's traditional culture is simply a random set of events played out by a random set of players, all independent of each other – all disconnected from any central premise or guidance. It is entirely possible that chance is at work here and all of these 'threads' of American culture are the random workings of the human intellect (the pursuit of what is possible, vice what is appropriate) in a free, democratic culture.

But suppose you were to learn that nearly all of the above observations are completely consistent with a 'design' -that is a concept, a way of thinking, and a process for bringing it about. And suppose one could identify a small core group of people who designed just such a concept and thought through the process of infusing it into a culture. Wouldn't you be interested in at least learning about such a core group? Wouldn't you want to know who they were, what they thought, and how they conjured up a process for bringing their thoughts into action? For Americans with even a smidgeon of curiosity, the answer should be a resounding yes!

If such a core group could be found, then it would still depend on your personal 'world view' as to its significance. If you believe in the 'blind watchmaker,' that is, all cosmic and social events are random and guided only by the laws of nature, 'evolutionary' in the sense of competing with other random events for survival in a 'stochastic' world, you may choose to believe that such a core group was meaningless -- it may have existed but so what? It may have been only one of an uncountably large number of such 'groups' in the world's history. And you may believe that any particular group's 'window of opportunity' to influence future generations was passed by and did little to influence the course of America's history.

If you believe, instead, that nature has a 'design,' and that all events can be connected and we humans can make sense out of many of them if we will only 'connect all of the dots,' then you may believe that this small core group has great influence, even today, in American Culture. If this is your world view, you may (but not necessarily) even believe in a 'conspiracy. and 'conspirators' which and who aim to alter our culture on a vast scale.

It is clear, however, that irrespective of one's 'world view,' it is informative to at least know of such a core group (if it, indeed, existed), what it believed, what it set out to accomplish, and what methods it followed to take action on its beliefs.

Just such a core group existed. That is, history identifies a small group of German intellectuals who devised concepts, processes, and action plans which conform very closely to what Americans presently observe every day in their culture. Observations, such as those made at the beginning of this piece, can be directly traced to the work of this core group of intellectuals. They were members of the Frankfurt School, formed in Germany in 1923. They were the forebears of what some proclaim as 'cultural Marxism,' a radical social movement that has transformed American culture.

'Cultural Marxism' and 'critical theory' are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute, modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as the Frankfurt School.7 In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. While here, they migrated to major U.S. universities (Columbia, Princeton, and California at Berkeley). These intellectual Marxists included Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, 'make love, not war,' during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

By promoting the dialectic of 'negative' criticism, that is, pointing out the rational contradictions in a society's belief system, the Frankfurt School 'revolutionaries' dreamed of a utopia where their rules governed.8 "Their Critical Theory had to contain a strongly imaginative, even utopian strain, which transcends the limits of reality." Its tenets would never be subject to experimental evidence. The pure logic of their thoughts would be incontrovertible. As a precursor to today's 'postmodernism' in the intellectual academic community,9 "...it recognized that disinterested scientific research was impossible in a society in which men were themselves not yet autonomous...the researcher was always part of the social object he was attempting to study." This, of course, is the current fetish for the rewriting of history, and the vogue for our universities' law, English literature, and humanities disciplines.

Critical theory rejected the ideal of Western Civilization in the age of modern science, that is, the verification or falsifying10 of theory by experimental evidence. Only the superior mind was able to fashion the 'truths' from observation of the evidence. There would be no need to test these hypotheses against everyday experience.

The Frankfurt school studied the 'authoritarian personality' which became synonymous with the male, the patriarchal head of the American family. A modern utopia would be constructed by these idealistic intellectuals by 'turning Western civilization' upside down. This utopia would be a product of their imagination, a product not susceptible to criticism on the basis of the examination of evidence. This 'revolution' would be accomplished by fomenting a very quiet, subtle and slowly spreading 'cultural Marxism' which would apply to culture the principles of Karl Marx bolstered by the modern psychological tools of Freud. Thus, 'cultural Marxism' became a marriage of Marx and Freud aimed at producing a 'quiet' revolution in the United States of America. This 'quiet' revolution has occurred in America over the past 30 years. While America slept!

What is 'cultural Marxism?' Why should it even be considered when the world's vast experiment with the economic theory of Karl Marx has recently gone down to defeat with the disintegration of Soviet communism? Didn't America win the Cold War against the spread of communism? The answer is a resounding 'yes, BUT. We won the 55-year Cold War but, while winning it abroad, we have failed to understand that an intellectual elite has subtly but systematically and surely converted the economic theory of Marx to culture in American society. And they did it while we were busy winning the Cold War abroad. They introduced 'cultural Marxism' into the mainstream of American life over a period of thirty years, while our attention was diverted elsewhere.

The vehicle for this introduction was the idealistic Boomer elite, those young middle-class and well-to-do college students who became the vanguard of America's counter-culture revolution of the mid-1960s – those draft-dodging, pot smoking, hippies who demonstrated against the Vietnam War and who fomented the destructive (to women) 'women's liberation' movement. These New Totalitarians11 are now in power as they have come to middle-age and control every public institution in our nation. But that is getting ahead of the story.

The cauldron for implementing this witches brew was the elite Boomer generation. The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s was set in motion and guided intellectually by the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School -- Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno and others.12,13 Its influence is now felt in nearly every institution in the U.S. The elite Boomers, throwbacks to the dangerous idealist Transcendental generation of the 1820s, are the 'agents of change,' who have introduced 'cultural Marxism' into American life.

William S. Lind reminds14 us that our nation's story since the 1950s would be "...that of a nation that has decayed and degenerated at a fantastic pace, moving in less than half a century from the greatest country on earth to a Third World nation, overrun by crime, noise, drugs and dirt. The fall of Rome was graceful by comparison. Why did it happen?

Lind relates that over the last forty years, America has been conquered by the same force that earlier took over Russia, China, Germany and Italy. That force is ideology. The ideology that has taken over America goes most commonly by the name of 'Political Correctness.' It is, in fact, 'cultural Marxism,' -- that is, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an ideology with deep roots. It did not begin with the counter-culture revolution in the mid-1960s. Its roots go back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.15 These roots, over time, spread to the writings of Herbert Marcuse.

Herbert Marcuse was one of the most prominent Frankfurt School promoters of Critical Theory's social revolution among college and university students in the 1960s. It is instructive to review what he has written on the subject: "One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society ... there is one thing we can say with complete assurance. The traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution have ended. These ideas are old-fashioned ... what we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system." This sentiment was first expressed by the early 20th century Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci, a young communist who died in one of Mussolini's prisons in 1937 at the age of 46, conjured up the notion of a 'quiet' revolution that could be diffused throughout a culture -- over a period of time – to destroy it from within. He was the first to suggest that the application of psychology to break the traditions, beliefs, morals, and will of a people could be accomplished quietly and without the possibility of resistance. He deduced that16 "The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2,000 years..." and a culture based on this religion could only be captured from within.

Gramsci insisted that alliances with non-Communist leftist groups would be essential to Communist victory. In our time, these would include radical feminist groups, extremist environmental organizations, so-called civil rights movements, anti-police associations, internationalist-minded groups, liberal church denominations, and others. Working together, these groups could create a united front working for the destructive transformation of the old Judeo-Christian culture of the West.

By winning 'cultural hegemony,' Gramsci pointed out that they could control the deepest wellsprings of human thought -- through the medium of mass psychology. Indeed, men could be made to 'love their servitude.' In terms of the preaching of the Frankfurt School, which followed Gramsci's death, resistance to the 'cultural Marxism' could be completely negated by placing the resister in a psychic 'iron cage.' The tools of mass psychology could be applied to produce this result.

The essential nature of Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary strategy is reflected in a 1990s book17 by the American Boomer author, Charles A. Reich, 'The Greening of America.' "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and the culture, and it will change the political structure as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is the revolution of the New Generation." Of course this New Generation would be the author's elite Boomer generation. Indeed, this is the underlying premise of the implementation of 'cultural Marxism' in American society by the 'graduates' of the Frankfurt School. This intellectual foundation is the basis of the mantra of the elite Boomers, who in the 1992 presidential election, asked Americans to 'have the courage to change.'

The Frankfurt School theorized that the authoritarian personality is a product of the patriarchal family. This idea is in turn directly connected to Frederich Engels' 'The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,' which promotes matriarchy. Furthermore, it was Karl Marx who wrote about the radical notion of a 'community of women' in the Communist manifesto. And it was Karl Marx who wrote disparagingly about the idea that the family was the basic unit of society in 'The German Ideology'of 1845.

The 'authoritarian personality' is not to be interpreted primarily as a handbook for the conduct of warfare against prejudice as such, but as a handbook for psychological warfare against the American male for the purpose of rendering him unwilling to defend traditional and formerly held beliefs and values. In other words, the purpose would be to emasculate him. Undoubtedly, this is what the Institute meant by 'psychological techniques for changing personality.'

'The Authoritarian personality,' studied by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s in America, prepared the way for the subsequent warfare against the masculine gender promoted by Herbert Marcuse and his band of social revolutionaries under the guise of 'women's liberation' and the New Left movement in the 1960s. The evidence that psychological techniques for changing personality is intended to mean emasculation of the American male is provided by Abraham Maslow, founder of Third Force Humanist Psychology and promoter of the psychotherapeutic classroom, who wrote that, '...the next step in personal evolution is a transcendence of both masculinity and femininity to general humanness.' The Marxist revolutionaries knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it. They have succeeded in accomplishing much of their agenda.

But how can we claim the 'causes' of the breakdown of our schools, our universities, indeed, the very fiber of our culture were a product of a tiny group of Jewish intellectuals who immigrated from Germany in 1933? Given all of the special-interest groups involved in these activities, how can we trace these 'causes' to the Frankfurt school? Look at some of the evidence.

For example, postmodern reconstruction of the history of Western Civilization (now prevalent in our universities) has its roots in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This rewriting of history by the postmodern scholars in America has only recently come under attack. Keith Windschuttle, in his book, 'Killing of History,' has severely criticized the rush to 'relativism' by historiographers. What is truly astonishing, however, is that 'relativism' has largely supplanted the pursuit of truth as a goal in historical study.18 George G. Iggers' recently published book, 'Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge,' reminds us of the now famous line by Hayden White, a postmodernist, "Historical narratives...are verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found." He quotes other postmodernists, mostly non- historians, who19 "...reinforce the proposition that truth and reality are primarily authoritarian weapons of our times." We now recognize the source of this postmodern assault -- the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School who became experts in criticizing the 'authoritarian personality' in American culture.

Herbert London refutes White's proposition by observing, "...if history is largely invention, who can say with authority that the American Revolution came before the French Revolution?" He observes that evidence has taken a back seat to inventiveness. He thus cuts right to the chase -- the inventions of postmodernism, which are cutting successive generations of Americans off from their culture and their history, evolved directly from the 'cultural Marxist' scholars of the Frankfurt School.

How did this situation come about in America's universities? Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed20 that it slipped past those traditional academics almost unobserved until it was too late. It occurred so 'quietly' that when they 'looked up,' postmodernism was upon them with a vengeance. "They were surrounded by a tidal wave of faddish multicultural subjects such as radical feminism, deconstructed relativism as history and other courses" which undermine the perpetuation of Western Civilization. Indeed, this tidal wave slipped by just as Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School had envisioned -- a 'quiet' revolution. A revolution that could not be resisted by force.

Where can we see other evidence of the teachings of the Frankfurt School in our culture today? One example is the public school system. William Kilpatrick21 observes that our public schools have shifted to a moral 'value neutral' mode of teaching over the past three decades. For students, this has meant wholesale confusion about moral values: learning to question values they have scarcely acquired, unlearning values taught at home, and concluding that questions of right and wrong are always subjective and relative.

The new educational techniques, implemented under a 'values clarification' methodology, incorporated overtones of 'sensitivity training'. An emphasis was placed on one's 'feelings,' which borders on invasion of privacy. For example, a Virginia mother of a third-grade daughter tells22 us that her daughter was "...told to write in a journal five things she couldn't tell her mother." Teaching more resembled psychotherapy than education. This method of teaching in our public schools has created a generation of moral illiterates; students who know their own feelings but don't know their culture.

Parents of public schooled children seldom know that such methods exist. Quite often this is a matter of deliberate policy. In one community, when a teacher asked what she should do if parents objected to the new 'values clarification' program, she was told by a seminar leader,23 "You call it 'life skills' and you do it anyway." In other communities, parents have been forced to sue under the Freedom of Information Act in order to find out what materials were being used in their children's classes. Professor Sidney Simon, who created the 'values clarification' method, boasted24 that as a young teacher at Temple University he "...always bootlegged the values stuff under other titles: I was assigned to teach Social Studies in the elementary school, and I taught values clarification. I was assigned Current Trends in American Education, and I taught my trend." Indeed, the 'cultural Marxists' have taken charge of our public schools. While America slept!

It is if interest to note that the 'sensitivity' training techniques used in our public schools over the past 30 years and which are now employed by the U.S. military to educate the troops about 'sexual harassment' were developed in 1943 by a Frankfurt School protegé. Abraham Maslow is the author25 of 'The Art of Facilitation' which is a manual used during such 'sensitivity' training. Thereby teachers were indoctrinated not to teach but to facilitate. They were to become amateur group therapists. The classroom became the center of self-examination, therapeutic circles where children (and later on, military26 personnel) talked about their own subjective feelings. This technique was designed to convince children they were the sole authority in their own lives.

Parental authority, as well as authoritative teaching, were to be denied since under Critical Theory the young might become authoritarian characters or worse. Through applied mass psychology, the parents were to be convinced that children should make their own decisions so they could be molded into the new American child (Hillary Clinton's 'It Takes a Village to Raise a Child') who would have none of the attributes which the social psychologists considered negative. Techniques for overcoming resistance (by the child and/or the parent), developed mainly in the field of individual psychotherapy, were improved and adopted for use with groups and even for use on a mass scale.

It is important to realize that this movement, 'cultural Marxism,' exists, understand where it came from, and what its objectives were – the complete destruction of Western Civilization in America. That is, these 'cultural Marxists' aimed to destroy, slowly but surely from the bottom up, the entire fabric of American Civilization.

By the end of World War II, almost all the original Frankfurt School members had become American citizens. This meant the beginning of a new English-speaking audience for the school. Now the focus was on American forms of authoritarianism. With this shift in subject matter came a subtle change in the center of the Institute's work. In America, authoritarianism appeared in different forms than its European counterpart. Instead of terror or coercion, more gentle forms of enforced conformism had been developed. According to Martin Jay,27 "Perhaps the most effective of these were to be found in the cultural field. American mass culture thus became one of the central concerns of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s."

The Frankfurt School had devised the concept of designating the opponents of the Marxist social revolution as 'authoritarian characters.' According to available accounts,28 "..there was a meeting of American scholars at a conference on religious and racial prejudice in 1944. Over the next five years, a Frankfurt School team under the direction of Max Horkheimer conducted in depth social and psychological profiles of Americans under a project entitled 'Studies of Prejudice.' One of the results was a book entitled 'The Authoritarian Personality' by Theodor Adorno, et al, that summarized one of the largest public opinion surveys ever undertaken in the United States. It was published in 1950, and conformed to the original Critical Theory in every respect. As a document which testified to the belief system of the Frankfurt School revolutionaries, it was essentially anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-nationalist, anti-patriot, anti-conservative, anti-hereditarian, anti ethnocentric, anti-masculine, anti-tradition, and anti-morality. All of these are elements inherent in Critical Theory."

Since the 1940s, subtle changes appeared in the Frankfurt School's descriptions of their work. For example, the opposite of the 'authoritarian personality' was no longer the 'revolutionary,' as it had been in previous studies aimed at Europeans. In America, it was now the 'democratic' who opposed the 'authoritarian personality.' Thus, their language matched more closely the liberal29 "...New Deal rather than Marxist or radical.." language. Education for tolerance, rather than praxis for revolutionary change, was the ostensible goal of their research. They were cleverly merging their language with the mainstream of liberal left thought in America while maintaining their 'cultural Marxist' objectives.

Toleration had never been an end in itself for the Frankfurt School, and yet the nonauthoritarian (utopian) personality, insofar as it was defined, was posited as a person with a nondogmatic tolerance for diversity.30 This thought is dominant in today's elite Boomer generation, the New Totalitarians.

'Cultural Marxism,' as preached by the Frankfurt School alumni in the U.S. and as followed by the elite Boomers, The New Totalitarians, laid the foundation for and spawned the widely popular, long-term nationwide campaign against prejudice, bigotry and discrimination which was the precursor of the less popular, and potentially destructive concepts of affirmative action, multiculturalism and diversity. Recognize the terms? You can't escape them if you watch national television or read the mainstream press in the U.S. today. They take their roots from the study of anti-semitism and discrimination by the Institute during the 1940s and the systematic insertion of the language of 'discrimination,' civil rights, women's rights and other 'minority' rights into the mainstream of American culture.

According to Raehn,31 "Critical Theory as applied mass psychology has led to the radical deconstruction of gender in the American culture. Following Critical Theory, the distinction between masculinity and femininity will disappear. The traditional roles of mothers and fathers are to be dissolved so that patriarchy will be ended. Children are not to be raised according to their biological differences, but should be free to move in and out of existing genders and gender roles according to their own preferences. This reflects the Frankfurt School rationale for the disintegration of the traditional family."

Thus, one of the basic tenets of Critical Theory was the necessity to break down the contemporary family. The Institute scholars preached that32 "...Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change." The 'generation gap' of the 1960s and the 'gender gap' of the 1990s are two aspects of the attempt by the elite Boomers (taking a page out of 'cultural Marxism') to transform American culture into their 'Marxist' utopia.

The transformation of American culture envisioned by the 'cultural Marxists' is based on matriarchal theory. That is, they propose transforming American culture into a female-dominated one. This is a direct throwback to Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School member who considered matriarchal theory in psychoanalytic terms. In 1933, he wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that matriarchy was the only genuine family type of 'natural society.'

Eric Fromm, another charter member of the Institute, was also one of the most active advocates of matriarchal theory. Fromm was especially taken with the idea that all love and altruistic feelings were ultimately derived from the maternal love necessitated by the extended period of human pregnancy and postnatal care. "Love was thus not dependent on sexuality, as Freud had supposed. In fact, sex was more often tied to hatred and destruction. Masculinity and femininity33 were not reflections of 'essential' sexual differences, as the romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined." This dogma was the precedent for today's radical feminist pronouncements appearing in nearly every major newspaper and TV program, including the television newscasts. For these current day radicals, male and female roles result from cultural indoctrination in America -- an indoctrination carried out by the male patriarchy to the detriment of women. Nature plays no role in this matter.

Raehn reveals34 that Irving Kristol's description35 of womanly traits closely resemble Eric Fromm's justification for a matriarchal society which became an integral part of the social revolutionary process promoted by the 'cultural Marxists.' Raehn builds on the work of Martin Jay36 to reveal the psycho-dynamics of the social revolutionary process of 'cultural Marxism' in our day. He builds a framework for simplifying and understanding this process as follows:

1. Critical Theory and its integral group of sub-theories by its very essence consists of destructive criticism of the social order to foment a non-violent social revolution in America.

2. The social order by definition consists of those in varying levels of position, power and influence which can be simplified into those in the higher order and those in the lower order.

3. A social revolution is by definition an inversion of the social order whereby there is an exchange of position, power and influence between those of the higher order and those of the lower order,

4. For a non-violent social revolution to be successfully executed, those of the higher order must be brought into a psychic condition of voluntary submission to those of the lower order.

5. The creation of this psychic condition means that those of the higher order by their own induced volition become willing to agree to an exchange of position, power and influence with those of the lower order.

6. As the social order is formed in the first place under the prevailing culture set by custom and tradition as inherited wisdom, inversion of the culture itself is required in order to bring about the psychic condition of submission of the higher order.

7. An inversion of the culture really means an inversion of the prevailing belief system whereby the beliefs of those of the higher order are exchanged for beliefs of those of the lower order.

8. The inversion of beliefs means the belief in the authority of those of the higher order to set and enforce standards of thinking and behavior for the society is dissolved in favor of belief in the authority of those in the lower order to think and do as they please.

9. This inversion of the structure of authority really means an inversion of the moral order and so leads to disorder, chaos, and social disintegration.

Raehn states that the reference to higher order and lower order is necessary in this framework since the social revolutionary ideology is one in which women and children are viewed as those of the oppressed lower order while males are viewed as the oppressor higher order. This flows from the original view of the utopian social revolutionaries themselves as those of the oppressed lower order who thereafter identify with those of the lower order of all kinds. This reflects the underlying impulse of the Frankfurt School and their Critical Theory which in their eyes justifies the social revolution.

Indeed, the 'cultural Marxists' have, in the 1990s, melded with radical feminism in the elite Boomer generation, that throwback to the dangerous Transcendentals of the 1820s, to form a caldron of discontent (via Critical Theory -- destructive criticism) in our nation which has the potential to destroy American Civilization.

For example, the combat arms of the U.S. military are the last bastions of male domination in American culture. The matter of women-in-combat37 is not really about gender equity or equal opportunity as is commonly argued. These are only the given reasons. The real reason is to create the psychic condition of submission of the male gender in American culture to the will of the social revolutionaries by depriving higher order males of any authority to set and enforce standards. This functions as a means of transferring authority to the social revolutionaries themselves so they might gain the position of power and influence of the higher order and thereby achieve the exchange that is the aim of the social revolutionary process. The radical feminists and the 'cultural Marxist' revolutionaries are placing women on top in order to set the stage for the destruction of American Civilization.

Indeed, Critical Theory as mass psychology came to be applied against America on a vast scale and with great success. 'The Authoritarian Personality' served to ignite a massive concerted effort by the Marxist revolutionaries in the guise of social psychologists to eliminate 'prejudice' in American life and later 'discrimination.' This concerted effort led to the psychic criminalization of prejudice and discrimination in precisely the same way Karl Marx criminalized the bourgeoisie middle class in Europe. This would later lead to legal criminalization by a series of Federal Laws and Judicial decisions.

The final straw in this process was affirmative action. Tom Chittum, a Vietnam War veteran and spokesman for a growing number of middle-class Americans (especially those who have seen their manufacturing jobs exported to foreign shores via NAFTA and other free-trade mechanisms), tells us that38 "The racist euphemism for [the] systematic dismantling of the rights of [white] English-speaking Europeans [in America] is affirmative action." Indeed, affirmative action has separated white American males of European descent from minorities and women in ways that could lead to violence in America's future -- a violence fed by the same factors that led to the chaotic disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.39

Only recently has a majority of Americans awakened and fought back against this tyranny. California's successful referendum via Proposition 209 to outlaw preferences based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin is an example of this 'awakening.'

The next stage in this applied mass psychology was the psychic criminalization of what the Marxist social revolutionaries termed racism, sexism and anti-Semitism directed against white males. This was a logical outcome of Critical Theory which also inspired Betty Friedan's feminist movement with her book, 'The Feminine Mystique.' Obviously, she understood the revolutionary intent of Herbert Marcuse who proclaimed it on the campuses of American colleges and universities in the mid-1960s. Friedan quotes Eric Fromm in her seminal book40 which initiated the modern feminist movement. Indeed, radical feminism was introduced to 'cultural Marxism' during the 1960s and 1970s.

Virtually everyone in today's America who is familiar with Karl Marx's demonic poetry of destruction, his War Plan of 1843 which revealed his process for the disintegration of the middle class, and his castigation of the family as the basic unit of society as he wrote in 'The German Ideology' of 1845, will find it easy to accept the reality that Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is but a mere transmutation of these ideas.

But in terms of destruction and disintegration, Critical Theory absorbed by the 'change agents' and other social revolutionaries has led them to declare their intent to restructure America. As they proclaim, this means their activities have been directed toward the disintegration of the traditional white male power structure. As anyone with eyes to view present-day television and motion pictures can confirm, this has been largely achieved. In other words, Critical Theory, as applied mass psychology, brought forth a 'quiet' psychic revolution which facilitated an actual physical revolution that has become visible everywhere in the United States of America.

This 'quiet' revolution resulted in a mass conversion of the American people by dialectic stages of operant conditioning by words such as prejudice, discrimination, bigotry, racism, sexism and anti-Semitism that were designed to instill guilt, pity, shame, fear, anger and hatred in the American psyche so that no one would dare oppose the social revolution without being exposed to uncontrollable rage, intimidation, and terror -- this latter being a reflection of Karl Marx's dictum that 'the nation must be taught to be terrified of itself...'

This is the psychic 'iron cage' in which the American male has been placed by the confluence of two dangerous ideologies -- radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism.'

It was the destructive criticism of the primary elements of American culture that inspired the 1960s counter-culture revolution. As the name implies, this false 'spiritual awakening' by the idealist Boomers in their coming-of-age years was an effort to transform the prevailing culture into an inverted or opposite kind of culture that is a necessary prelude to social revolution. Now that these elite Boomers are in positions of power in the United States, they are completing their work of destroying every institution that has been built up over 200 years of American history. Their aim is to destroy any vestige of Western Civilization in American culture.

As Richard Bernstein made clear in his book on multiculturalism,41"...the Marxist revolutionary process for the past several decades in America has centered on race and sex warfare rather than class warfare" as in earlier times. This constitutes a grand scheme to restructure American society. As the social revolutionaries readily proclaim, their purpose is to destroy the hegemonic white male power structure. In order to accomplish this, all barriers to the insertion of women and minorities into this power structure are to be broken down by all means available. Laws and lawsuits against discrimination serve as some of these means. Intimidation and outright terrorization of white males as oppressive racists and sexists are carried out by the mass media and our universities. These are the psycho-dynamics of the revolutionary process that are designed to render psychic decapitation of anyone who might offer effective opposition.

It has been pointed out recently by Steve Forbes, a Republican presidential primary candidate in 1996, that42 "This country's Founders recognized three primal values in the Declaration of Independence, and they ranked them properly: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Forbes observes that if the order of these fundamental human rights is switched putting happiness before liberty or liberty before life -- you end up with moral chaos and social anarchy. This very condition is what Judge Robert H. Bork describes43 as 'modern liberalism.' He identifies the defining characteristics of this ideology as "...'radical egalitarianism' (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and 'radical individualism' (the drastic reduction of limit to personal gratification)." These traits are the ultimate in pure 'pursuit of happiness.' This condition is the ultimate goal of the 'social Marxists' of the Frankfurt School -- a utopian paradise where they and they alone make the rules.

Judge Bork also identifies 'radical feminism' as "...the most destructive and fanatical..." element of this modern liberalism. He further describes radical feminism as "...totalitarian in spirit." This is a refined way of saying that the forces of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' have joined in the elite Boomer generation to set the stage for the destruction of American Civilization.

Most Americans do not yet realize that they are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new social order in the world. These revolutionaries are the New Age elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians.44 They now control every public institution in the United States of America. Their 'quiet' revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearly complete. It was based on the intellectual foundation of the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School. Its completion depends on keeping the American male in his psychic 'iron cage.'

The confluence of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' within the span of a single generation, that of the elite Boomers (possibly the most dangerous45 generation in America's history), has imposed this yoke on the American male. It remains to be seen whether or not he will continue his 'voluntary submission' to a future of slavery in a new American matriarchy, the precursor to a state of complete anarchy and an end to America's experiment with democracy. It may be that the fate of American civilization will depend on his steadfast and possibly violent resistance to the reality of 'cultural Marxism' in our nation.

Indeed, the new elites, the dangerous Boomer generation who are now in control of every American public institution and wield power over all of us, stand at the intersection of two of the most destructive ideologies known to mankind, radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism,' derived from the Frankfurt School. This confluence of ideologies may be more than the experiment with American democracy can withstand. Unless the American male breaks out of his psychic 'iron cage'. The continuation of America's experiment with democracy, a democratic republic, may well depend on whether or not this bondage can be broken. If it can, there is hope for a renewed and stronger America. If it cannot, a chaotic disintegration is in our future.

1 'Chaotic,' as used here, has a specific scientific meaning. For a primer on chaos theory, see Gleick, James, "Chaos: Making a New Science," Viking Press, 1987.

2 For a more detailed mathematical description of chaos theory, along with an exhaustive treatment of the simple but revealing mathematical 'quadratic iterator,' see Pietgen, Heinz-Otto et al, "Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers in Science," Springer-Verlag, 1992.

3 Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069," Quill, William Morrow, 1991. This book, though not intended by its authors, describes American history in terms of a complex, non-linear iterative feedback system -- a system which can be expected to exhibit chaotic behavior in the sense of chaos theory as described in the two previous references.

4 Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell US About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny," Broadway Books, 1997. This book provides a more detailed description of the current epoch in American History than that presented in the previous reference. It focuses on the elite Boomer generation and its role in meeting America's future challenges.

5 Pinker, Steve, "Why They Kill Their Newborns," The New York Times Magazine, 2 November 1997.

6 Kelly, Michael, "Arguing for Infanticide," The Washington Post, 6 November 1997.

7 Raehn, Raymond V., "The Historical Roots of 'Political Correctness,'" Free Congress Foundation, Number 44, June 1997.

8 Jay, Martin, "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950," pp. 77, University of California Press, 1973.

9 Ibid, pp. 81.

10 Ibid, pp. 82.

11 Atkinson, Gerald L., "The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America's Future," Atkinson Associates Press, 1996.

12 Jay, Martin, "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950," University of California Press, 1973.

13 Wiggershaus, Rolf, "The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance," The MIT Press, 1994.

14 Lind, William S., "What is 'Political Correctness?," Essays on our Times, Free Congress Foundation, Number 43, March 1997.

15 Ibid.

16 Thornton, Fr. James, "'Gramscian' Strategy at Work," The New American, pp. 25, 18 September 1995.

17 Reich, Charles A., "The Greening of America," Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1995.

18 London, Herbert, "Discipline of history under assault," The Washington Times, 26 October 1997.

19 Ibid.

20 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Panel on 'Academic Reform: Internal Sources,' National Association of Scholars, NAS Sixth General Conference, 3-5 May

1996.

21 Kilpatrick, William, "Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: And What We Can Do About It," Simon & Schuster, 1992.

22 Innerst, Carol, "The Dumbing Down of America," Part One of a Three-Part Series, The Washington Times, 19 October 1997.

23 Ibid, Kilpatrick, William.

24 Ibid, Kilpatrick, William.

25 Raehn, Raymond V., "Critical Theory: A Special Research Report, 1 April1996.

26 Editorial, "The crying of the admirals," The Washington Times, 3

November 1995. The U.S. Naval Academy has added female 'role models' to

the faculty. In August 1994, the Academy placed a new emphasis on conflict

resolution and consciousness-raising. "As 'Lean On Me' started playing,

Master Chief Liz Johns gave the plebes her final orders: stand in a circle,

sway to the music, sing along, and hug. From the circle came the sharp

sniffle of sobs. The future admirals of America were crying."

27 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 172.

28 Ibid, Raehn, Raymond V.

29 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 227.

30 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 248.

31 Ibid, Raehn, Raymond V.

32 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 135.

33 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 95.

34 Raehn, Raymond V., "Letter to COL Robert L. Maginnis, USA (Ret.), 1 March 1997.

35 Kristol, Irving, "The Feminization of the Democrats," The Wall Street Journal, 9 September 1996. Kristol reported that 50 percent of the delegates to the Democratic Party convention were women. Women were described as tending to be more sentimental, more risk-adverse, less competitive than men, and also more permissive and less judgmental.

36 Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 94-96.

37 Ibid, Raehn, Raymond V., pp. 6.

38 Chittum, Thomas W., "Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America," American Eagle Publications, Inc., 1996.

39 Atkinson, Gerald L., "The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America's Future," Atkinson Associates Press, 1996.

40 Friedan, Betty, "The Feminine Mystique," pp. 278, Dell Publishing, 1963-1983.

41 Bernstein, Richard, "The Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future," Knopf, 1994.

42 Snow, Tony, "Moral of the story: Forbes virtue stance," The Washington Times, 27 October 1997. Mr. Snow reports on an article by Steve Forbes in the November 1997 issue of 'Policy Review' magazine.

43 Bork, Robert H., "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," HarperCollins, 1996.

44 Ibid, Atkinson, Gerald L.

45 Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "Generations: The History of America's Future -- 1584 to 2069," pp. 374-426, William Morrow & Company, 1991.

Do you want to go back to the first essay in this series? If yes, go to Part I of the Resister series of essays.

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