Posted on 12/12/2002 6:53:12 PM PST by Remedy
...As laymen and analysts alike have observed over the years, the major foundations — particularly Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and MacArthur — have for decades spent millions of dollars promoting "cutting edge" projects on racial, ethnic, and gender issues. According to author and foundation expert Heather Mac Donald, for example, feminist projects received $36 million from Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, and other large foundations between 1972 and 1992. Similarly, according to a Capital Research Center report by Peter Warren, a policy analyst at the National Association of Scholars, foundations have crowned diversity the "king" of American campuses. For example, the Ford Foundation launched a Campus Diversity Initiative in 1990 that funded programs in about 250 colleges and universities at a cost of approximately $15 million. The Ford initiative promotes what sounds like a Gramscian’s group-rights dream: as Peter Warren puts it, "the establishment of racial, ethnic, and sex-specific programs and academic departments, group preferences in student admissions, group preferences in staff and faculty hiring, sensitivity training for students and staff, and campus-wide convocations to raise consciousness about the need for such programs."
These NGO's and funds all began from the same seed. I see this when I look at the "Timeline For Global Governance" or any site that are funded by the "usual suspects". In opposition, I know there are plenty of conservative, constitutional, liberty minded groups out there (US based) and they may share some common goals in this fight, a move to join forces with a common denominator, would be a great step, however impossible this sounds.
Can it not be prooved that spread of progressivism in our universities has been a long term attack on our sovereignty and not the natural outgrowth of modern intellectual debate among free thinkers?
Americans and freepers who glean more information and send more emails to their officials may be able to temporarily stop bills from passing in congress, but these succsses are not publicized at the college level. Perhaps those of us who are old enough to have received an education before junk science, social studies, gender studies, PC-ness and diversity, etc. replaced the basics, should change our lifestyles and return to school to take on the professors and adminstrators as a vocal, questioning, "paying customer". This might be the best use of those "hours of community service" every American has been asked to volunteer for our country. I don't know. Individualism and isolation seem to be more a curse than a convenience in this age of information with a muzzled press.
It is no secret that the vast majority of American universities are dominated by the left, particularly in subject areas that affect society. Unfortunately, some people still don't think this really matters. So let us review the reasons why it does:
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Communism still exists in a number of countries and a number of "ex Communist" countries are now either relapsing or moving into National Socialism. Communism is spreading into new territory in Latin America. And anyone who thinks that there will be no more wars between great powers is simply practicing the "art" of self delusion. |
"The situation in the universities was appalling. The Marxists and socialists who had been refuted by historical events were now the tenured establishment of the academic world. Marxism had produced the bloodiest and most oppressive regimes in human history--but after the fall, as one wit commented, more Marxists could be found on the faculties of American colleges than in the entire former Communist bloc." — David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, 1997, p. 405
Bureaucratic leftism weakens the nation-state:
Pretending Immigration Isn't an Issue
The shyness of the Republican Party and the Bush Administration about immigration explains why they manifest a deafening silence about Rep. George Gekas's (R-PA) bill (H.R. 5013) called Securing America's Future through Enforcement Reform (SAFER). It's completely in accord with public opinion polls showing that the big majority of the American people want government to reduce the number of legal immigrants, to stop the irresponsible issuance of visas, to deport illegal aliens, and to use U.S. troops to guard our borders (instead of the borders of Eastern Europe). Why
Bureaucratic leftism weakens the nation-state:
New UN Action Plan to Enforce Global Environmental Laws
Heads of State from more than 160 countries are in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the conclusion of the United Nations" (UN) World Summit on Sustainable Development, which aims to use the environment to globally redistribute wealth. South African deputy chief justice Pius Langa explained that environmental rights are human rights, thus there are "social-economic rights directly linked to sustainable development." While the redistribution plan is clear, the process is under development.
U.S. Secretary of State Collin Powell said in a speech last July, "There is growing consensus on sustainable development." Quoting Peruvian Hernando de Soto, Powell added, "The hidden architecture of sustainable development is the law. The law. The law."
Non-governmental organizations including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth International, World Wildlife Fund, and others are in lock step with these leaders demanding "the 0.7% of a country"s GNP target of overseas development aid." Such a commitment by the U.S. would amount to an increase from $15 billion annually to $70 billion.
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about Osama bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalism; less about the contribution of European Marxist postmodernism to bin Laden's thinking.
...A key figure here is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who not only helped shape several generations of European leftists and founded postmodernism, but also was a leading supporter of the Nazis. Heidegger argued for the primacy of "peoples" in contrast with the alienating individualism of "modernity." In order to escape the yoke of Western capitalism and the "idle chatter" of constitutional democracy, the "people" would have to return to its primordial destiny through an act of violent revolutionary "resolve."
...This vision of the postmodernist revolution went straight from Heidegger into the French postwar Left, especially the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, eager apologist for Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution in China. Sartre's prot g , the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon, crystallized the Third World variant of postmodernist revolution in "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961). From there, it entered the world of Middle Eastern radicals. Many of the leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that deposed the modernizing shah and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979 had studied Fanon's brand of Marxism. Ali Shari'at, the Sorbonne-educated Iranian sociologist of religion considered by many the intellectual father of the Shiite revolution, translated "The Wretched of the Earth" and Sartre's "Being and Nothingness into Persian." The Iranian revolution was a synthesis of Islamic fundamentalism and European Third World socialism.
...According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani, Arab leftist intellectuals still see the world very much in 1960s terms. "They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists," he says, "who look at everything through a postcolonial prism."
According to journalist Robert Worth, writing in the New York Times on the intellectual roots of Islamic terror, bin Laden is poorly educated in Islamic theology. A wealthy playboy in his youth, he fell under the influence of radical Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who blended calls for Marxist revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state.
...Wrote Fathi Yakan, "The groundwork for the French Revolution was laid by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the Communist Revolution realized plans set by Marx, Engels and Lenin....The same holds true for us as well."
While Al Fatah occasionally still used the old-fashioned Leninist language of class struggle, the increasingly radical groups that succeeded it perfected the melding of Islamism and Third World socialism.
THE RELATIONSHIP between postmodernist European leftism and Islamic radicalism is a two-way street: Not only have Islamists drawn on the legacy of the European Left, but European Marxists have taken heart from Islamic terrorists who seemed close to achieving the longed-for revolution against American hegemony. Consider Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, two leading avatars of postmodernism. Foucault was sent by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian revolution, Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic saint." The Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of "political spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals to combat capitalist hegemony.
Derrida, meanwhile, reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union by calling for a "new international." Whereas the old international was made up of the economically oppressed, the new one would be a grab bag of the culturally alienated, "the dispossessed and the marginalized": students, feminists, environmentalists, gays, aboriginals, all uniting to combat American-led globalization. Islamic fundamentalists were obvious candidates for inclusion.
... In professorial hands, postmodernism is reduced to a parlor game in which we "deconstruct" great works of the past and impose our own meaning on them without regard for the authors' intentions or the truth or falsity of our interpretations. This has damaged liberal education in America. Still, it doesn't kill people--unlike the deadly postmodernism out there in the world. Heirs to Heidegger and his leftist devotees, the terrorists don't limit themselves to deconstructing texts. They want to deconstruct the West, through acts like those we witnessed on September 11.
What the terrorists have in common with our armchair nihilists is a belief in the primacy of the radical will, unrestrained by traditional moral teachings such as the requirements of prudence, fairness, and reason. The terrorists seek to put this belief into action, shattering tradition through acts of violent revolutionary resolve. That is how al Qaeda can ignore mainstream Islam, which prohibits the deliberate killing of noncombatants, and slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new world, the latest in a long line of grimly punitive collectivist utopias.
(9) The Idea of Transnationalism as a major conceptual tool.
The New American - Rebutting Rockefeller - November 4, 2002
...the growing gap between the rich and the poor in the world today is clearly unjust. It is with this concern in mind that the Earth Charter calls for "the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations."
...What is "fair and just"? Who will decide? In George Orwell's political satire Animal Farm, the animals formed a socialistic society based on the premise that "all animals are equal," but they soon discovered that socialism in practice means that "some animals are more equal than others." And so it is in real life whenever men use the power of government to redistribute the wealth based on their concept of "fair and just."
The New American - The New World Religion - September 23, 2002
...Those decrying the 9th Circuit Court's harmful decisions will take little comfort in learning that senior 9th Circuit Court Judge J. Clifford Wallace (Balancing the Ninth)was among the jurists attending the Johannesburg Summit's Global Judges Symposium. That meeting was hosted by several globalist institutions with a pronounced hostility toward the United States. The participants, which included judges from Communist regimes, pledged to "apply new legal instruments in keeping with the principles of sustainable development," and the international "Rule of Law."
The Rockefeller-Gorbachev Earth Charter effort is already fast at work on that score. Their website declares:
The Earth Charter values and principles must be taught, contemplated, applied and internalized. To this end, the Earth Charter needs to be incorporated into both formal and non-formal education. This process must involve various communities, continue to integrate the Charter into the curriculum of schools and universities, and constitute an ongoing process of life-long learning.
According to the Charter, we must:
The Charter includes much, much more. It ends with this stirring exhortation: "In order to build a sustainable global community, the nations of the world must renew their commitment to the United Nations, fulfill their obligations under existing international agreements, and support the implementation of Earth Charter principles with an international legally binding instrument on environment and development."
The Charter will soon be making its way to schools, city governments, state legislatures, teachers organizations, civic groups, professional associations, judges, and law schools. The aforementioned Global Judges Symposium concluded its summit activities by issuing the so-called Johannesburg Principles on the Rule of Law and Sustainable Development. "We recognize," it states, "the importance of ensuring that environmental law and law in the field of sustainable development feature prominently in academic curricula, legal studies and training at all levels, in particular among judges and others engaged in the judicial process."
"...nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority."
- Strobe Talbott
Deputy Secretary of State, 1994-2001
Court of Injustice (Excerpt) - June 17, 2002
While intoning platitudes about ending impunity and advancing the rule of law, advocates of the UN's new ICC are actually establishing a global kangaroo court.
ICC: Unsafe in Any Form - September 24, 2001
Conservative acquiescence to a supposedly defanged ICC would be a giant step in the direction of world government.
International Court of Criminals - July 3, 2000
However bleak any British dungeons were for the American colonists, the plight of victims who might be brought before the proposed world court would assuredly be infinitely worse.
End of History indeed.
It always seemed to me a silly boast. Communism mutated into what this article talks about...
Thank you so much for the links. I plan to print them all out and GBC-bind them. I should then have a first-class case book on this topic.
Now there's an oxymoron for you...times two.
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