A Few Shiny Pebbles

I don’t expect you to listen solely to me about this Culture War. Let’s look at the way in which these problems were viewed by a man who lived under totalitarian regimes, Solzhenitsyn, who knew the evils of these regimes, and who tried to warn Americans. Robert Nisbet, in The Idea of Progress, writes about him:

[Solzhenitsyn] sees the West’s decline as the result largely of loss of faith in its own values and of revolt, on a widening scale, against authority -- the authority of culture and morality, of the values around which the West has been built or toward which it progressed. And without this kind of authority—which is the absolute opposite of power—there cannot be, Solzhenitsyn declares, stability, liberty, or creativity.

Those who believe in the destruction of American values have been zealously active during the last century. There are dozens of anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-religious, anti-family—and so forth—philosophical systems and beliefs that have been written up in scholarly books and used as texts for study throughout the our education system. Many of today’s teachers, professors, social engineers, and politicians were heavily influenced by these teachings during the 1960s and 1970s.

These anti-American ideas can be found throughout educational textbooks that are very popular on campuses in the United States. And it is not just in lecture halls that this information is believed and taught. Those who think that communism and socialism in all their versions are no longer a force in the intellectual world are wrong. The drives for these false utopian views have merely changed form. Look at the ideas in some excerpts from an article I cut out and kept, an item that appeared in one of the premier scientific magazines in the world: “Essay: Marx Wasn’t All Wrong” by Nathan Rosenberg, Scientific American, December 1991, page 158:

Perhaps we should hesitate before consigning Marx to the dustbin of history. Recent events in the Soviet Union are being interpreted as evidence of the final breakdown of Marxism, but one might question such a reading. . . . . Marx’s writings essentially analyze the historical process by which capitalist societies grow and become transformed. Marx needs to be disengaged from the disastrous 20th-century economic experiments with socialism because in his view of history socialism would emerge only out of advanced capitalist societies. Socialism would arise after capitalist societies became wracked by their “internal contradictions.” Socialist societies were destined, according to Marx, not only to resolve the internal contradictions of capitalism but to inherit the immense productive apparatus that mature capitalist societies were incapable of utilizing. When socialism finally appeared on the world stage, it would immediately take possession of a highly productive industrial technology, and it would administer that technology far more capably than the social system that had generated the technology. Thus, in at least one limited but essential respect, the collapse of socialist economies serves to prove that Marx was right, not that he was wrong. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marx may be said to have finessed the “equity versus efficiency” trade-off by assigning to capitalism the historical role of providing efficiency and to a later socialism the role of delivering equity.

Consider these Marxian ideas -- that socialism will come after the capitalist society has set up the technological base; that it is the “internal contradictions” of capitalism that would wrack capitalist societies and cause immense problems in democratic society; that it will rescue a dictatorial, monopolistic capitalist democracy; and that while capitalism will provide efficiency, it will be cruel and unfair, and socialism will come along and deliver fairness and equity to society. What if some students of communism or socialism decided to “push” society along, to magnify what they viewed as capitalist democracy’s evils and to institute a socialist mentality in people in this country in order to make it easier to bring the crisis that socialist theory predicts? What if this “push” was exactly the impetus that has led to so many bad solutions that have made our problems even worse? The students and activists of socialism and other anti-American philosophies would feel that they were doing History’s own work -- and yet it would actually be their handiwork at trying to destroy America that was bringing about the problems. The problems would not be those of capitalist democracy, but rather actually of socialist theory!

This is one of the essential points of my argument. The anti-American activists are trying to slowly change the philosophical views of the people of the United States. They are trying to change these views into views that will make it easier to establish their dream of a communist or socialist government in Washington. Some of these changes they wish—as can be seen by the quotes in my Culture War: Part One—are in the areas of destroying the family, taking all the morality out of sexual behavior, destroying religion and any idea of God, destroying the ideas of competition and excellence, making people afraid of saying things that are not Politically Correct, making people afraid of being destroyed if they behave normally as men and women in the workplace, abolishing private property, turning control of the economy over to the government, ruining small business with regulations, taxes and fees, and mandates, removing all thoughts about JudeoChristian moral responsibility for behavior, changing the schools into systems teaching students little about the history of the world or of America, little about reading, little about writing well, etc., etc., etc.—in short, they wish to produce the kind of country that the socialist and communist philosophers—like Bakunin—would have welcomed, and would have been able to control. Solzhenitsyn was trying to warn us about these changes in the quote above.

At the same time that they are doing this—at the same time that they are causing tremendous problems for our country—and the world—they are claiming that it is the American system of morality, private property, capitalism, religious beliefs, desire for education about our own country and its history, sexual responsibility, striving for excellence, small business, etc., etc., etc., that is the cause of the problems.

Before becoming revolted by the Communists and defecting to the West, Czeslaw Milosz was a member of the Communist Party and represented the USSR as a diplomat. In a book he wrote about his experiences, The Captive Mind, he pointed out how his fellow Communists dealt with this method of predicting a problem will happen to those you are fighting, creating yourself the conditions leading to the problem, and then point to the existence of the problem as demonstration that your predictions about the system you are fighting were true. He showed how the Communists own actions created the ugliness they claimed they were fighting. The Communists practice a form of argument called the Dialectics:

Dialectics: I predict the house will burn; then I pour gasoline over the stove. The house burns; my prediction is fulfilled. Dialectics: I predict that a work of art incompatible with socialist realism will be worthless. Then I place the artist in conditions in which such a work is worthless. My prediction is fulfilled. . . . . The conviction grows that the whole world will be conquered. . . . . Lies are concocted from seeds of truth. The philosophically uneducated bourgeois enemy is despised for his inherited inability to think.

Note that he added “The philosophically uneducated bourgeois [that is, middle class] enemy is despised for his inherited inability to think.” Of course, the middle class is able to think quite well—despite what intellectuals think. But there is a point about the “philosophically uneducated”—one of the important tasks of the teachers who are anti-American is to make certain that their students do not learn anything that might help them see what is really happening with all this. There has been a careful and systematic destruction of the teaching of pro-American Western philosophy, of American history, of valuing American traditions and ideals, and so forth. All too many educators in our public education system and in our collegiate system are deliberately not teaching Western and American history, and deliberately teaching the histories of peoples who live under socialism, communism, and other collectivist forms of government as utopian, and those in capitalistic countries as being victims. A multi-millionaire offered Yale University a $20 million dollar gift to establish a group of classes around Western traditions and history—and Yale refused it!

Like the artist mentioned in the quote, scientists who oppose the idea that human beings are the primary cause of Global Warming, and who oppose the hysterical claims as to the extent of the potential destruction, are being placed in conditions where their opinions are worthless, censured, made to seem monstrous.

This might be a good time to quote from a copy I kept of an article from the February 27, 1975 UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) Daily Bruin. I was a student at UCLA at that time, and I found this article worth cutting out and keeping. The headline reads: “Carmichael urges destruction of capitalism,” by Daily Bruin staff reporter Frank D. Stallworth. A few paragraphs into the feature, Stallworth quotes Stokely Carmichael:

“If people are to ever live in a world of plenty and equality, the people must ultimately destroy the capitalist system because it thrives on greed and exploitation, and causes hardship and deprivation wherever it is allowed to exist.” . . . . [Carmichael’s] chief solution [to the problems of the oppressed masses] was the implementation of scientific socialism as a means of directing people to a clear interpretation of history. “History is a powerful weapon,” said Carmichael. “If I can control your history I can have you fighting against your own interest.”

I have collected many, many articles over time. I thought it important to keep this article, though at the time I didn’t know why. I majored in mathematics, and I knew little about “scientific socialism”, or why anyone would advocate it. I misunderstood what Carmichael was saying, because I thought he meant that he wanted to control the teaching of history so that he could make us go against our own interests. Much later I realized that what he meant was that he wanted to establish “scientific socialism” because capitalism and JudeoChristian and other American values were wrong, and against our interests. History is a powerful weapon! I know ever so much more now, and I now know that it is those who try to implement “scientific socialism” who are the ones who are controlling the study of history to force people to fight against their own true interest. It is the Leftists who are distorting law, justice, truth, morals, marriage, childhood, science, religion, . . . . The socialists, the Leftists, may as well declare: “If I can control your laws I can have you fighting against your own interest.” Or, “If I can control your children, I can have you fighting against your own interest.” Or, “If I can control your science I can have you fighting against your own interest.” Or, “If I can control your belief in God I can have you fighting against your own interest.”

Well, the Leftist, anti-Americancivilization educators are for the most part controlling our education, and the Leftist ideologically-driven scientists are succeeding in controlling our scientific ideas, and the ideologically-driven moralists are trying to control our morals by destroying our religious beliefs—and they do indeed have us fighting against our own interests. Some Leftists are deliberately following the tenets of Leftist ideologies, and millions of other people are following those Leftists without being aware of the source of many of their beliefs. Look at the inner cities. Look at our schools. Look at the problems in morality and values in general. Look at so much that has gone wrong in America. Look at the Leftists in A.N.S.W.E.R., protesting our just War on Terror, and the Leftists in MoveOn.Org, trying to control our political base, and those who are trying to silence the scientists who come out against Al Gore’s version of Global Warming! The Left has convinced too many people to fight against their own interest, and it’s time people started recognizing what their true interest really is.

Along with writing about the War on Terror, it is imperative that we all examine the Cultural War we are fighting at the same time. We need to investigate what is happening, and what it means, and how it is that these two battlefields of ideas are feeding off each other in the attempt to hurt those of us who believe in what America represents.

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