Go Pat, Go

CNSNews.com ^ | March 12, 2002 | William S. Lind

[Stand Watch Listen]

Pat Buchanan's new book, The Death of the West, is important for many reasons. It confronts us with the single greatest strategic question of the 21st century: will Western culture still be alive 100 years from now? As The Death of the West illustrates, the answer may be "no." In one hundred years, it may all be lost and gone, everything our ancestors created over the last 3,000 years. Throughout human history, there have been only two cultures that worked, Western and Chinese. The loss of either would impoverish our planet for the rest of the age.

As Pat writes, there are many reasons for the West's downfall. But one of the ways The Death of the West helps us to confront our possible fate is by exposing the cancer in America's body politic: the cultural Marxism created by the Frankfurt School. This self-destructive ideology, usually called "Political Correctness" or "multiculturalism," is the frame of reference for most of the Baby Boom generation, the people who now run the country. Its explicit goal is the destruction of traditional Western culture. What chance of survival does a culture have when its own elites actively seek its destruction?

Why do we call this ideology cultural Marxism? Because the people who invented it were all Marxists, and they regarded it as Marxism -- a different type of Marxism from that found in the old Soviet Union, but Marxism nonetheless. Its history began in the immediate aftermath of World War I, when Marxist theorists had to explain why the war had not brought the general European proletarian revolution Marxism had predicted. According to two of those theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, the reason was Western culture, which had blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interests. Lukacs and Gramsci both argued that before Communism could take power in the West, Western culture had to be destroyed.

Lukacs went on to have a powerful influence on the Frankfurt School, the Marxist think-tank established in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923 and removed to New York City in 1934. The intellectuals of the Frankfurt School -- Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, and Marcuse -- created the cultural Marxism we know as "PC" by crossing Marx with Freud. Marcuse, as one of the chief gurus of the student radicals in the 1960s, injected their poison into an entire generation. And now America's elites are carrying out Lukacs' plan, destroying Western culture from within.

The forces behind "Political Correctness" have one, great vulnerability: almost no one knows that this bilge is really Marxism. If the average American found out, the ideology would be in real trouble. Most Americans know enough history to understand that Marxism is not something you want running your country.

In The Death of the West, in chapter four, "Four Who Made a Revolution," Pat Buchanan reveals the man behind the curtain, the history of cultural Marxism and its creators in the Frankfurt School. That chapter alone should make the book required reading for every American who cares about his country's future. If you don't yet have a copy, then run, don't walk, to your nearest bookstore. And while you are there, buy enough copies for your family and friends. If we all work to get Pat's message out, the West may yet have a chance of survival.

William S. Lind is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.
Free Congress Foundation

[afuturegovernor]

Throughout human history, there have been only two cultures that worked, Western and Chinese

Not to be a wet blanket, but what about the ancient Babylonians, Phoenicians, Perisans, Egyptians, ect.

[Night Hides Not]

You ARE being a wet blanket! Don't you know Pat thought of those other civilizations as the Western Babylonians, the Western Phoenicians, the Chinese Persians, and the Western Egyptians?

Sometimes you just have to read between the lines...