Posted on 01/15/2003 3:04:47 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Bump.
This should be posted annually on FR.
bttt
What You Should Know About Progressives
Once upon a time there lived a noted Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci who had major problems with how Karl Marx hoped to achieve his communist goals. Gramsci believed that using violent revolution to achieve their goal was the wrong way to go about it in literate western societies like the U.S. because they would not support violence to the degree necessary to take over the control of the government. Instead he came up with a new scheme to achieve the goal. His ideas were so contrary to the fascist government of Italy that he spent most of his adult life as a political prisoner where he and his philosophy became a cult figure to the European communists and many U.S. politicians and the so-called intelligentsia of our colleges and universities.
So how come we haven’t heard much about him? Well it is just not politically expedient to mention the name of a noted communist but many of his ideas have become a major goal of the Democratic Party insiders who have discussed and adopted many of these ideas in closed door sessions among the party elite and have become in vogue among the leftist. Balderdash, you say? Ok, let’s look at some of those ideas that Gramsci had and how they have become successful in the U.S. today.
Gramsci understood what Marx did not understand, that economic crises by themselves would not subvert capitalism, because capitalism always managed to overcome the crises and emerge stronger. Gramsci realized the importance of culture and ideology among the masses of western society. By using methods such as the mass media which were subtle and persuasive you could gain the minds of the people and if you had the minds you would also have the bodies.
Gramsci knew that the bond between the rulers and the ruled was what keeps western society together and this bond created the “hegemony.” The problem, he saw, was how to break this “hegemony” and change the minds or the popular consensus, and to change the way institutions work. In short, to make the people question the right of their leader to rule in the accepted way.
To accomplish this requires a whole new system of values, beliefs, and morality. A system where the individuals conformed because the media tells them that is really the only acceptable way to believe because it was fair to all. If one believed differently, then they would be ostracized as “extreme” and uncaring. To accomplish this goal of creating “guilt” he suggested using the traditional intellectuals as “organic intellectuals” that grow with society and becomes its thinking and organizing element. Their role is to act as informal educators in local communities and become one of “us,” not some distant intellectual who is above the rest of us. Of course he included the “idols” of the entertainment world to bolster the effect of the intellectuals.
Once these “organic organizers” which today we call “community organizers” have gained the trust of society they can move on to their second goal of using the schools to perpetuate their ideals. By controlling the schools they can control the curriculum and gain the trust of the children and young adults and mold them into their beliefs.
Finally, once fully organized they could use these people (educators, students, and recent graduates) to engage in incessant political activity and use massive methods of communication. No violent takeover, just unrelenting propaganda to produce a constant clash for supremacy of ideas and a patient but persistent subversion of the building blocks of the old established society. They use “guilt” as the major reason on why you should change your mind
If you look around and listen to the dialog in the media and even small groups you hear things like, “You shouldn’t be so judgmental.”, “You are acting intolerant.”, “That’s stereotyping.”, or the worst, “That’s racist”. What it means in Gramsci terms is, “You must accept our values and not argue. If you don’t then you are not in the mainstream and not using common sense.” Now you know where political correctness comes from!
One might ask why we have schools that push a particular curriculum and seem to ignore parents, why some school budget items make available funds for incredible courses, and why the teacher unions don’t seem to represent the teachers’ true interests. Why have churches become political discourse centers instead of their main purpose? Why do we have a lot of different civil associations that have goals that are destructive and divisive to society as a whole? Why does the media operate as propaganda machines for a certain candidate or ideology rather than just reporting the events?
Gramsci knew the importance of using perceived minorities to create guilt in the masses. The media constantly reminds us of the plight of women, ethnic minorities, gays, and other victims of cultural hegemony. Schools even spend considerable time indoctrinating students in proper speech and thought control and in some cases give college credits for discussion groups on these subjects. They want the students to use this indoctrinated “guilt” against the old school adults so they come around to this newthink. In other words make us feel like we so far out of the mainstream that we are the extremists not them. They even take these things into the courtrooms of our nation. The federal “Violence Against Women Act” produced a Supreme Court case in which a 10-year-old boy was charged with harassing a fifth-grade female classmate.
The modern Gramscians in the U.S. have taken over a once great political party using the guilt of slavery and the apartheid that evolved from it until the 1960’s to corrupt your mind, body, and soul. Through their newspeak and newthink they have slowly tried to discard traditional beliefs that made this country the greatest and most powerful country of all time...A country where the individual freedom and standard of living is so high that millions of immigrants from most of the countries in the world risk their lives and fortunes to live here.
There is hope however. We must keep a balance of power in our government. The leftists hate our true strength which is the division of power, congressional, executive, and judicial, including the local and state governments, and especially the Electoral College. The Electoral College give all states a more equal footing in the executive branch of government. It helps to protect our individual rights from the collective rights of the major minorities. In a country where over 40% of the adults pay no income taxes at all and a large percentage of people work for the government one might ask who is the majority.
For the Gramsci leftists to win they will wage a war of attrition to wear us down. For us to win we must understand their tactics and stop them in their tracks. Of course voting for the anti-leftists is important but between elections we must get involved and take back the organizations and functions of government that they have infiltrated. Go read about what they are really up to in alternate media. The Internet is a Godsend for researching topics. Find out things like what a past major candidate wrote her college thesis about (Hint: The praise of a noted socialist union organizer in Chicago), find out what organizations the young politicians belonged to in their college days, stop the guilt feeling today for supposed activities of the distant past that that you had nothing to do with, and stand up for the conventional values that your parents should have instilled in you.
Don’t get me wrong, we still must have compassion for the have-nots and disabled people but let’s give them a hand up and not just hand-outs. We can win them over to our side by doing the right thing and helping them to become a have-some instead of them harboring envy because they are have-nots. Change can be good but to change as the result of newspeak and newthink propaganda is bad.
We must always remember what made this country, what it is, and what Jefferson and our fore fathers meant when they wrote the “Declaration of Independence”:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...”
When Jefferson stated, “all men are created equal” he didn’t mean guaranteed equality for life with no effort, he meant to begin as an equal—to have an equal opportunity under the law. To fix the contest so everyone finishes equal is to deny human nature. To deny nature is to insure our doom.
I am posting my too long blog entry here because we need to keep this thread alive and let the uninformed understand where “Obamagov” has its roots.
Knowledge of Gramsci and and his schemes should be common, it isn’t. The left has been far more effective at public education than we have, simply by branding us as radicals or comspiracy nuts when we speak out.
*bump for later*
Unfortunately 99% of the press is our enemy. I have tried sending the above to “letters to the editor” in newspapers and the only one that even replied said it was too “in your face” and “antagonistic”. Yet, they daily print the drivel of the “progressives” attacking the Tea Party with sexual slurs or anyone who disagrees with them.
It’s discouraging but I see a ray of hope since the recent elections. Maybe, just maybe, the American citizens are starting to wise up.
It has been nearly 10 years since Tailgunner Joe posted this thread. Read the above and compare those statements to what we are witnessing today in the US.
I first heard of him back in the seventies in a European History course while we were focused on WWI.
It's been many a year, but as I recall he was mentioned due to the influence he had in Italian anti-War circles that were working to undermine the war effort. I'm not sure, but I think he wrote or was quoted in some of the leaflets they passed out encouraging troops to desert or go on strike the way some French units did.
I'm positive he used to be mentioned in several European History courses and someone I knew had to read all about him for one of their courses, but what they call History has changed so much since the seventies that I doubt they bother with the amount of detail that used to be the norm. Now, apparently, they go over various "psychological factors" and sociology while ignoring individuals who made a difference as much as possible.
Most of the folks I know in that age group are already well aware of where things are headed.
Even the idiot leftists know it, they just have had it drummed into their little skulls that the only way to deal it is to be more like Europeans socialists. Now that the EU is going to fall apart over being so Socialist, maybe maybe some of them will wake up. They just can't grasp that just like there isn't always a handy suburban community for a city full of spenders to take over to shore up their tax base, there aren't always economically robust countries to make a "union" with in order to rescue a nation full of reckless spenders.
The thing that amazes me is that there were people talking about the consequences of reducing population growth way back in the seventies and no one cared. I forget the name of the guy, but Buckley had someone on his Sunday show that was saying SS had to be means tested with the income used for the test indexed to inflation way back when Carter was "saving SS" for us. People laughed at the guy because, "oh, population growth will never slow down that much".
And once again, the John Birch Society and their magazine “The New American” are way ahead of the curve. Hmmm, did someone recently hear about ol’ Antonio on the “Woman of Grace” show on EWTN?
thanks for looking this up, for the ping and for the reminder of what the communists are still doing behind the scenes in our government, church and schools.
When Time Warner Cable dropped EWTN, I switched to Direct TV. You don't realize what you have until it's taken away.
Gramsci’s plan - “the long march through the institutions” has been a spectacular success.
Marx’s workers’ uprising and revolution never took place, his idea was a complete failure. Whereas the left has been successful beyond even their own wildest dreams in taking over the institutions, and in so doing controlling our culture and the population.
Are there any of them remaining that the left isn’t in control of?
Long go they took over the media, education, the foundations, entertainment, the agencies... But up until a few years ago one could still say that Sports, the major corporations, the Military and Religion were still bastions of the right. No longer - now they even have a Marxist pope.
I first heard of him in college in the 1970s. But then again, it was Columbia University.
BTTT
None of these links worked... got an “error” on each of them.
yup.
obamas fundamental transformation is almost complete.
amazing that a demented pervert senile fool is the last step in the destruction of a once great republic into the Rrr-Democracy Pirate Party that sells the world into global slavery at the hands of the UN.
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