Posted on 04/12/2009 8:32:24 AM PDT by Zionist Conspirator
The distemper of lies, misdirection and tawdry thinking abroad in the world today has now acquired bubonic proportions. This is mainly a a liberal-left phenomenon intent upon a campaign of cultural domination that began with the rainbow revolution of the so-called Woodstock generation and which has finally percolated into every nook and cranny of our daily existence.
In its takeover of our cultural life, the generation of the 60s has adhered loyally to the course of action set down for it by two neo-Marxist philosophers, the Italian New Left prophet Antonio Gramsci and the German emigré Herbert Marcuse, whose doctrines acquired a wide popularity among teachers, students and intellectuals.
In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci argued that in order to change society, one must first change consciousness, which can only be done by seizing control of a nation’s social institutions: schools, churches, government agencies, the academic disciplines, entertainment, the arts and, of course, the media. This is precisely what has happened as Gramsci’s hegemonic idea, in the words of his most famous Elisha, the German agitator Rudy Dutschke, pursues its “long march through the institutions.”
The Left has also prioritized Marcuse’s antinomic concept of “discriminatory tolerance” or “repressive tolerance,” developed in his influential 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, in which he argues that “freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude.” Marcuse urges “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left,” which, as should now be evident, serves to justify repression in order to alter the “social structure” in the direction of a socialist, quasi-totalitarian state—what Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon has dubbed “totalitarian democracy.” In the name of freedom of thought, freedom of thinking is progressively curtailed.
Indeed, given the climate of ritual thinking fostered by our public, political and intellectual institutions, we may have reached a stage in our mental life where we have grown purblind to the world around us, arriving at a state where we either no longer see what we are seeing or cannot intuit what we are not seeing. We need not be prisoners of war, subject to various forms of deprivation and sophisticated techniques of indoctrination, in order to be brainwashed.
We need only surrender our cognitive faculties into the keeping of our cultural gatekeepers and especially to the tender mercies of the conscienceless media, the main source of disinformation today and the principal agent in the propagation of public ignorance. Like the shepherdess Mopsa in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, who “love[d] a ballad in print, for then we are sure they are true,” we accept what we read in the press, hear on the radio and see on the TV news without bringing a tempered skepticism to bear, for we are sure they are true.
Thus the lies multiply like rabbits while the facts grow extinct. The media rendition of Israel’s Gaza war is a perfect example of such mendacity coupled with credulousness. The media screams that Israel has perpetrated a “massacre.” Millions of readers buy into the lie, refusing to credit the facts that do emerge: Hamas receiving a vast electoral majority to pursue its destructive agenda, years of Hamas shelling of Israeli towns, the IDF warning its targets in advance of impending operations, Gazans used as human shields, the bodies of dead terrorists showcased as “civilian” casualties, the use of schools, mosques and private homes as theaters of operation, and all the tedious rest of it.
As if this were not enough, there is even a tendency to disbelieve the very evidence of our senses, a refusal to recognize images that violate our biases. Phillipe Karsenty, head of the Media Ratings website, points out that many viewers of the France 2-TV film showing the death of Mohammed al-Durah, the 12-year-old boy presumably shot by the Israelis, who became a Palestinian and Left icon and whose “death” helped kickstart the Second Intifada, somehow did not see the boy “move, lift his head, arm and leg, and stare at the camera a good 10 seconds after the newscaster tells us ‘the child is dead’.” The “assault on our ability to think,” writes Karsenty, “to criticize, to evaluate, and finally to reject information,” appears to have been largely successful (Pajamas Media, May 23, 2008).
No doubt some viewers wanted so badly to have the youngster killed by the Israelis that they could not see the boy was quite alive, and could not arrive at the obvious conclusion that the entire episode was staged by the Palestinians with the complicity of French TV. Others are only latter-day Mopsas; as the gullible shepherdess says when she and her companions are offered the ballad for sale, “Pray you now, buy it.”
Without doubt, the media have now become the main engine in furthering the Gamscian/ Marcusian project upon a vast population of “true” believers. The impact of the media, today perhaps more effective than ever given the advanced technologies of global instantaneity and the ever-growing persuasive power of the images-laden press, is to zombify the individual mind and render it indistinguishable from the mass. It is no less and possibly even more effective than straight propaganda or the ruthless enforcement of opinion by a state apparatus, since it operates insensibly while posing as the expression of free and independent thought. It is quite terrifying to consider the extent to which we have been dumbed down, stupefied and ultimately “balladized,” becoming prey to a kind of institutionalized naïveté. And this is a great danger, for those who were born yesterday may die tomorrow.
We can no longer postpone an honest reckoning. As Czelaw Milosz remarked in A Philosopher’s Home, “the time had come for liberating ourselves from the rituals of our contemporaries.” We need to acknowledge that the parameters of the sayable have to be broadened or we will choke on our own inhibitions. We need to understand that the ideological credit card on which we draw to pay for our follies is close to being maxed out. And we need to recognize that, although the moon may be waning on diverse Islamic national flags, Islam’s star, also represented on many of these flags, is unmistakably rising.
Ultimately, we would have to somehow free ourselves from the delusion that we are free, that we are really thinking when we are only parroting the cleverly manipulated party lines of the day. Ironically, Marcuse was right, but in precisely the opposite way that he imagined. We have become less rather than more free.
Simply put, we do not see the boy move. We live in the dark, along the entire cultural and cross-cultural spectrum, for, thanks to the processes of miseducation and disinformation to which we are subject, the macular degeneration of the Western mind is well advanced. We have succumbed to that peculiar form of intellectual myopia that Richard Wolin in The Seduction of Unreason describes as a “subconscious ‘will to nonknowledge’: a desire to keep at bay an awareness of unsettling historical complicities, facts, and events.” We tend to proceed more and more on a need to not know basis—or to “know” and believe that which is manifestly not the case. We “buy it” wholesale.
But what those of us whose eyes remain open may be witnessing is a great if flawed civilization imploding in an orgy of self-loathing, mental blurriness, sibylline imaginings of a postnational consensus and systemic Jew-hatred, as well as becoming increasingly susceptible to attack from without. And also from within, now that the outside has successfully infiltrated the inside and the inside has begun to turn against itself.
Good article. Thanks for posting it, ZC.
You're welcome, V998.
The times we live in are positively terrifying.
When Col. Suharto struck the PKI in 1965, 800,000 Communist cadre disappeared, and bodies floated for months in the Andaman Sea.
“It’s communism/nazism all over again.”
Actually, it started in earnest about 50 years ago in America. We’ve been standing around with our collective thumbs up our butts for that long now!
“In 1958, Cleon Skoussen, former FBI agent, revealed in his book, THE NAKED COMMUNIST, the long term goals of the communist agenda. This information is also contained not only in the Congressional Record (August 1963), but also in the Communist Manifesto itself. For the sake of brevity, only a few of those goals are listed here.”
http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/416.html
reference
Cheers! ...and Happy Easter.
Please note that Gramasci listed **SCHOOLS** first! Then conservatives MUST do the same!
*Get your children out of the government K-12 indoctrination camps immediately.
*Work to shut down every government K-12 school in the nation!
*Give every child in the U.S. an opportunity for a tuition-free **CONSERVATIVE** education! Conservative must set up private education foundations. These foundations would award grants to private CONSERVATIVE teachers willing to set up one room schools, mini-schools, and homeschool cooperatives. The foundations would certify the teacher, test the students, and approve the curriculum. Sadly though....It is likely too late! Marxism is our nation's most serious threat. Schools are the Marxists most powerful and important weapon.
The reality is that we’ll never see another truly free, open and honest election in this country until after the next American Civil War and the death of millions. And the America we'll have after that won't be the America we started with - for good or for ill. It was always and ever up to us.
Wake up, people. You’re not going to talk or vote your way out of the tyranny that’s coming. And that’s precisely the point of tyranny, isn’t it? None of us have a Get Out of History Free card, either. None. Your circumstances can change overnight. That's one of the great lessons that so many of us have failed to learn from the history of the twentieth century. Fat, happy, stupid and "it can't happen here," is how most of us are except for the ones who are actually cheering for it to happen here. And then there those of us who see exactly what's going on and are prepared for the eventual outcomes.
Change is coming, oh yes indeed - but it's not what any of that Marxist meat puppet's worshipers bargained for. Rand had it right all these many years ago when she said that there is no personal neutrality today. Time to get off the fence. Time to stand up and be heard. Time to start getting together with like-minded people. Time to organize your list of Things To Do, Places To Go and People To Meet. Because when your favorite websites suddenly go dark, when your cell phones and other comm nets no longer work, when the roadblocks go up, when you hear the knock on the door - then it’ll be too damned late.
It will be too late unless you're willing, like Atlas, to shrug - and then pick up a gun before they come for you. Unless you're willing to take action, you aren't going to get your country back, much less preserve your own freedom and dignity.
So don't just sit there with a pile of ammo and a gun in your closet. Participate in the nearest Appleseed Project shoot and join a community of like minded people turning ammunition into skill. Join up with Glenn Beck's 912Project - a latter-day network of the original Committees of Correspondence - to meet more like-minded folks.
It may be the last chance we're going to get.
Ayn Rand once said, "The world is a beautiful place and worth fighting for. But not without Freedom." Stand with me. Stand with us. But if you think that freedom is passé or over-rated, just wait until you see what your new masters replace it with.
Three good resources:
Anti-Obama bumper stickers and gear.
It's what they fear most - informed, armed and unafraid citizens.
Finally, on the dawn of that "dark modern day" of which Titus Livy spoke over 2000 years ago, when it does all go bad, resolve at least to sell your life dearly. Do your very best to kill every one who comes for you, your family or your means of self-defense. Make them pay. For if you surrender to this evil, not only is your cause lost, but you will also strengthen those who would perpetrate their evil on others. And that's the greatest guilt of all...
Thanks for that post, and the link to the Appleseed Project.
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