Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: 'The Origins of Political Correctness'

An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind
Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences 
including the 2000 Consevative University at American University
  Where does all this stuff that you've heard about this morning - the 
victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the 
rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it - where does it 
come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful 
of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to 
be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or 
insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
  We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has 
been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and 
to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that 
people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what 
words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it 
primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole 
society. Were does it come from? What is it?
  We call it "Political Correctness." The name originated as something of a 
joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only 
half-serious. In fact, it's deadly serious. It is the great disease of our 
century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in 
Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of 
ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.
  If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly 
find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It 
is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort 
that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but 
back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness 
with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.
  First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of 
Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college 
campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, 
where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set 
up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local 
black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted "victims" groups that 
PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the 
small legal system of the college, they face formal charges - some 
star-chamber proceeding - and punishment. That is a little look into the 
future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
  Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology 
(I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is 
to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain 
things must be true - such as the whole of the history of our culture is the 
history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality 
must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of 
our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are 
naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to 
look out and say, "Wait a minute. This isn't true. I can see it isn't true," 
the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is 
why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.
  Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic 
Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says 
that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. 
Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is 
determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., 
have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, 
indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.
  Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers 
and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and 
capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness 
certain groups are good - feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist 
women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups 
are determined to be "victims," and therefore automatically good regardless 
of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically 
to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic 
Marxism.
  Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the 
classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they 
expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when 
the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate 
through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with 
superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a 
black or Hispanic who isn't as well qualified, the white student is 
expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is 
a system of expropriation. White owned companies don't get a contract 
because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or 
women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.
  And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the 
answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it's Marxist economics. For 
the cultural Marxist, it's deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes 
any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So 
we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of 
women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts 
simply become grist for the mill, which proves that "all history is about 
which groups have power over which other groups." So the parallels are very 
evident between the classical Marxism that we're familiar with in the old 
Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political 
Correctness.
  But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from 
nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, 
a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small 
group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I 
said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today 
bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.
  Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did 
come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up 
and overthrow their governments - the bourgeois governments - because the 
workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries 
than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their 
own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn't happen. Throughout Europe, 
workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. 
The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic 
Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. 
And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.
  Marxists knew by definition it couldn't be the theory. In 1917, they 
finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was 
working, but it stalled again. It didn't spread and when attempts were made 
to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, 
with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers 
didn't support them.
  So the Marxists' had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on 
it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the 
workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, 
until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the 
Christian religion - that they are blinded by culture and religion to their 
true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist 
theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, "Who will save us from Western 
Civilization?" He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of 
a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.
  Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home 
grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he 
becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was 
introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the 
workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian 
people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had 
already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, 
that we would consider the "latest thing."
  In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of 
translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates 
Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created 
the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very 
wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil 
has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the 
divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First 
Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German 
thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.
  And he says, "What we need is a think-tank." Washington is full of think 
tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a 
ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, 
established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the 
Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning 
that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The 
last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it's a 
form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social 
Research.
  Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the 
author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for 
Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, "I wanted the 
institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to 
Marxism." Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl 
Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to 
Martin Jay, "by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a 
scientific methodology." Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at 
the Institute, and that never changed.
  The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it 
acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer's views were 
very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create 
and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They're still very much 
Marxist in their thinking, but they're effectively run out of the party. 
Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, "Hey, this isn't us, and we're 
not going to bless this."
  Horkheimer's initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and 
the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural 
terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay 
writes, "If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the 
Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society's 
socio-economic sub-structure," - and I point out that Jay is very 
sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I'm not reading from a critic here - 
"in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural 
superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the 
relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory."
  The stuff we've been hearing about this morning - the radical feminism, 
the women's studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black 
studies departments - all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What 
the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 
1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious 
because you're tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to 
criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the 
capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse 
to do that. They say it can't be done, that we can't imagine what a free 
society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we're 
living under repression - the repression of a capitalistic economic order 
which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that 
Freud describes in individuals of repression - we can't even imagine it. 
What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most 
destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the 
current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the 
whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism 
is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 
1960s.
  Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, 
most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse 
introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that's 
the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls 
for a society of "polymorphous perversity," that is his definition of the 
future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 
1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, 
but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see 
in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm's view, 
masculinity and femininity 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." Sex 
is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.
  Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. 
"Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating 
attitude toward nature." That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in 
Materialismus und Moral. "The theme of man's domination of nature," 
according to Jay, " was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School 
in subsequent years." "Horkheimer's antagonism to the fetishization of 
labor, (here's were they're obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) 
expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, 
sensual happiness." In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the 
Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer "discussed the 
hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture." And he 
specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his 
"protest.against asceticism in the name of a higher morality."
  How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our 
universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt 
School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came 
to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for 
Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the 
Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia 
University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, 
though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from 
Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every 
aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. 
There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them 
go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key 
figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including 
Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.
  These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to 
us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student 
rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the 
draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some 
sort. They couldn't just get out there and say, "Hell no we won't go," they 
had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were 
interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not 
light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for 
them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the 
university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School 
relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany 
is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there - when the 
student rebels come into Adorno's classroom, he calls the police and has 
them arrested - Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student 
rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of 
the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United 
States.
  One of Marcuse's books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of 
the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and 
Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays 
the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry 
into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that 
order and that gives us the person Freud describes - the person with all the 
hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can 
envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in 
which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of 
"polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing." And by the 
way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful 
message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They're students, they're 
baby-boomers, and they've grown up never having to worry about anything 
except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way 
they can easily follow. He doesn't require them to read a lot of heavy 
Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, 
"Do your own thing," "If it feels good do it," and "You never have to go to 
work." By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, "Make 
love, not war." Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse 
defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the 
Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the 
Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back 
to the 1930s.
  In conclusion, America today is in the throws of the greatest and direst 
transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a 
country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. 
In "hate crimes" we now have people serving jail sentences for political 
thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever 
further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who 
dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It's exactly 
what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now 
it's coming here. And we don't recognize it because we call it Political 
Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it's not funny, it's 
here, it's growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, 
everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.
http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html
-- 
Give us back our countries: Stop the criminal multiculturalism ideology
enforced upon the white world against the will of its peoples, leading to
mass immigration from the third-world: Mul-cul + pol-corr = lethal mixture
for the white world. And give us back our freedom: Dismantle all
surveillance technology.

> 
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