All, I need your help.
I have been attempting to expose to public scrutiny that the American Library Association [ALA] pushes pornography and/or material inappropriate for children on children nationwide. See, for example, the following web site:
But I am often asked just why would people want to push pornography on children? I don't have an answer, yet, and that's why I am writing to you all.
I became aware today of some of the theories of people like Antonio Gramsci. Based on what I heard, I am beginning to entertain the theory the ALA may be acting in accordance with such theories, and that might explain the ALA's prolific porn pushing propensity. I would like your input on this thought.
Some of you have posted on this current thread, "Next Conservatism: What is Cultural Marxism," and some of you have posted on this older thread, "
Who is Antonio Gramsci? You Better Learn!!!" Both of which are illuminating reading. From the former I read:
In 1919, Lukacs asked, "Who will save us from Western civilization?" That same year, when he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, one of Lukacs's first acts was to introduce sex education into Hungary's public schools. He knew that if he could destroy the West's traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture itself.
And from the second I read:
If you understand Gramsci, you will understand the "peculiar" and "weird" theories that are in vogue today. And you will understand that they are not the work of "weird crazy people" but rather of calculating and quite intelligent operatives.
Well it sure is "weird" to push porn on children. And the chief ALA proponent of pushing porn on children has direct ties to the ACLU. But I would like to specifically connect the dots to the ALA, if such a connection exists, so that I can update the web site to include specific information people will need to help them throw off the yoke of the ALA from their schools and libraries.
I will need specific references to appropriate resources. Personal opinions may be useful in explaining things to me but may not carry weight to the public. I want bullet proof sources to prove the ALA's interests in pushing porn on children is related in any way to the theories of Gramsci and the like, if that is the case at all.
You all have taken an interest in this in the past and you all are knowledgeable so please help me to gather this evidence, if any, so that I can update the SafeLibraries.org web site with relevant information that may help turn the public against the ALA, once the public learns the truth about the ALA.
To give you a small head start, besides reading the threads listed above, consider the following:
I hope you are interested in contributing to my efforts as stated. I look forward to your responses. Want to email me directly? Use
info@plan2succeed.org and thank you all very much.
If you understand Gramsci, you will understand the “peculiar” and “weird” theories that are in vogue today. And you will understand that they are not the work of “weird crazy people” but rather of calculating and quite intelligent operatives. Exactly, my friend.
I will need specific references to appropriate resources. Personal opinions may be useful in explaining things to me but may not carry weight to the public. I want bullet proof sources to prove the ALA’s interests in pushing porn on children is related in any way to the theories of Gramsci and the like, if that is the case at all.
Jeepers. Forgive me for saying so, but that this is the very case ought to be obvious to any reasonably well-educated, rational adult. But “specific references to appropriate sources” may not be of much help to you in dealing with this “disease.” And that’s exactly what it is: a disease afflicting the body politic. Like a cancer.
info@plan2succeed.org, I know you said that personal opinions would not be of much help to you in your quest for the restoration of basic sanity in public life. But I will give you mine anyway, and share a recent personal experience with you that seems to illuminate this problem.
The first thing you have to realize is that these people in the ALA, ACLU, et al., do not live in the same world that you and I do. They detest Western civilization and all that it stands for. In particular, they detest all the cultural sources on which Western civilization has historically rested, including the culture of reason that we inherit from the ancient Greek world; and especially Christianity, with its eternal moral law. I even think they detest themselves, when you boil it all down: They revile the culture of Life, together with all its supports (such as family, sexual temperance, personal self-restraint, accountability, and responsibility, etc.). We have to realize that the roots of Western culture are to be found in the cultures of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. Gramsci and his followers (who inherit from Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx — i.e., German intellectuals) are deliberately set on a project of constructing a “second reality” expressly designed to eclipse and finally supplant “first reality,” that historic legacy that has been so spectacularly successful in the flourishing of reason, of the arts and sciences, and of the widespread material prosperity of the West.
What we are speaking about here is — as the ancient Greeks and Romans realized a long time ago — a widespread pneumopathological disorder, or “spiritual disease” that is intimately related to psychopathic disorder. Plato called the disease nosos; Aristotle’s term for it was nosemos; Cicero put his finger on it by calling it the aspernatio rationes, or “contempt for reason.” It is a suicide mission when you boil it all down: It wants to “end history,” and start all over from scratch, on the theory that Man (or at least, “some” men, our would-be self-appointed “saviors”) can do a better job of creating a “just order” than God Himself can. And so the new construction — the second reality — can be built only when reason, God, and history are all “dead.”
So if you’re wondering what the ACLU and ALA, et al., are up to, I’d suggest the above remarks describe precisely the project in which they are constantly, faithfully engaged: The object of their game is to construct a utopian system “so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and then to socialize the inevitable costs of bad behavior. The human person is to be relieved of all responsibility: that is the Endgame. Society at large will thereafter bear all the costs of human failure.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, ’til I’m blue in the face if necessary: When one takes a shot at God, it is always man who must take the bullet. For God is Truth, and the only source of Truth. And the man who does not live in Truth is not truthfully a man.
The key point is: Once reason has been “killed,” then there is no basis for rational argument. So you can look for all the sources, all the facts, all the proofs you want to; but it really won’t do you any good in the end. Dealing with doctrinaire ideologues, you must always be prepared for the situation in which the “goalpost” will be constantly moved. Marx made it very clear: Inconvenient facts are always to be disregarded; and all questioning of “the system” is strictly prohibited.
Maybe these remarks from Eric Voeglin can help to clarify the situation I’m trying to address:
In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists — whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home. And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because their exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence — with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called a Second Reality. The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.
Now for a concrete example from my recent experience. A good friend, a gracious person who is not in any way “evil,” with whom I’ve had a long-standing argument of several years — i.e., the typical evo-crevo “debate” for which FR is famous — took strong umbrage to a remark I made, that Karl Marx was heavily influenced by his understanding of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He told me I was definitely out to lunch on that supposition, since
The Communist Manifesto was published well before
On the Origin of Species. So I just blithely replied, I’ll bet I can find a cite to Darwin in Marx’s
Das Kapital, which was published later. So my friend very kindly provided me a link to
Das Kapital, and I agreed to read it and report back. (Not fun reading at all.) Sure enough, I found a direct cite to Darwin, in Chapter 14, footnote 6. So I did report back with my finding; and he left in a great huff. Haven’t heard from him since. End of our “debate.”
But earlier he had told me that if I could back up my statement that Marx was influenced by Darwin, he’d reconsider his own view of the matter. Obviously, he didn’t really mean what he said.
At the end of the day, what I sought to show him was not that Darwin was a Marxist; but that Marx was a Darwinist. And that is what I actually showed. Apparently, this was just too much for him. End of the “debate.”
Which is why I say: You cannot argue with an “ideologist.” There is no shared basis in reason that can bring the “two sides” together so that the search for Truth can proceed with profit to both parties. The “integrity” of the doctrine is more important than the truth of reality.
To give my friend his due, it may be he is just a more or less innocent victim of the Kultursmog, that reeking, stinking flatulence emitted by Left-Progressive intellectuals which is the very air we breathe these days, owing to the increasing dominance of contemporary American culture by “ivory-tower” academia, Hollywood, and the main-stream media. Reason is the only defense against it; but reason is “on the way out,” you see…. Certainly the public schools no longer emphasize its cultivation in young people. They’re too busy teaching sex-ed and indoctrinating pupils in the fashionable causes preferred by the Gramscis and Marxists of this world, plus “socialization skills,” such as the celebration of multiculturalism. That is to say, the celebration of any “culture” at all, just so long as it isn’t the traditional American one.
If you’re looking for an answer to this problem, the only one I can think of is this: One must learn how effectively to wield the sword of Truth, while at the same time loving and honoring one’s “opponent” — who is also one’s neighbor. That’s a tough challenge, but not an impossible one.
Only Truth and Love can defeat the spreading sickness embedded in our culture. There is no other way.
Well, my two-cents-worth, FWIW. Thank you so very much, info@plan2succeed.org, for pinging me to this thread. Best of luck in all your future endeavors. Please do let me know if I can help out in any way, going forward.
p.s.: You might find a read of Eric Voegelin's A New Science of Politics eminently worthwhile. He performs an excellent "autopsy" of the subjects we have been discussing here.
