Brian F. Redman 257  Conspiracy for the Day -- August 26, 1993
26 Aug 1993 07:51 Brian F. Redman: Conspiracy for the Day --
August 26, 1993 [Followups to alt.conspiracy]
Conspiracy for the Day -- August 26, 1993
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("Quid coniuratio est?")
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Challenge to Deconstructionism
by Webster G. Tarpley [Excerpts, from the August 9, 1993, issue
of "The New Federalist" ]
^^^^^^^^
Currently, education and intellectual life in the United States
and many other countries are being destroyed by the triple plague
of political correctness, postmodernism, and deconstructionism.
After the collapse of Marxism in much of the world, the forces of
evil in philosophy and epistemology are now increasingly arrayed
under the banner of deconstructionism, which offers a place of
regroupment for fascists, communists, irrationalists, and
bankrupt ideologues of every sort. If you were wondering what the
face of the enemy looked like after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
this is it. The leading purveyor of deconstructionism, the
Frenchman Jacques Derrida, is now unquestionably the most
celebrated and influential academic philosopher in the world
today.
As I will try to show, the continued intellectual hegemony of
deconstructionism in schools and universities amounts to a death
sentence for human civilization as we have known it.
Deconstructionism in the academy and in government is a direct
threat to the lives of a very large portion of the 5.3 billion
human beings now inhabiting this planet.
1. The modern campus is now the bastion of euphemism and absurd
circumlocution. Karl Marx had demagogically promised that his
philosophy would change the world; the deconstructionists only
want to change all the names. There is no more right or wrong,
good or evil, only appropriate and inappropriate. Language is
supposedly being purged of ableism, ageism, borealocentrism,
ethnocentricity, Eurocentricity, hegemonism, heightism,
logocentrism, lookism, phallocentrism, racism, sexism, scentism
and smellism. Nobody is fat; they only possess an alternative
body image. The bald must be called "follicularly challenged" or
"differently hirsute." To be dirty is to be "hygienically
challenged," to be tall is to be "vertically endowed." If you're
old, you become "chronologically gifted." It will be noted that
this supposed rebellion afflicts language with all of the horrors
of the worst Pentagon bureaucratic prose. Think of "collateral
damage" when targets were "serviced" during the Gulf war, killing
innocent civilians. "Ethnic cleansing" is a politically correct
term for genocide. Thus, political correctness offers no hope to
the homeless, but it demands they be called "underhoused,"
"involuntarily undomiciled," or "houseless." The jobless become
"non-renewed." Political correctness is radical nominalism, in
which the verbal signs take the place of ideas and things. As
always, this radical nominalism is never very far from paranoid
schizophrenia, where the victim believes that by changing the
name or sign, he has altered reality itself. As the experience of
Baroque Europe (Lyly, Marino, etc.) shows, such ways of talking
go together with the collapse of civilization.
2. Political correctness insists that everything in human affairs
can be reduced to race, sex (or "gender"), socioeconomic class,
and choice of sexual perversion ("sexual orientation"). *The New
York Times* now recognizes a minimum of five sexes, and the
coprophiles and sadomasochists insist on their rights. The
pessimistic p.c. litany is all strictly determinist, denying
humanity any freedom: You are, they say, what your race, sex,
class, and [sexual orientation] make you. You are a slave to
that; there is no freedom... Here there can be no *imago viva
Dei* to express the creative faculties that all human beings
share.
3. Countries that permit deconstructionists to assume power over
the government (and this has gone quite far in the U.S.A.) are
not likely to survive. Political correctness attempts to define a
"canon" of what is to be studied, seeking to purge the Dead White
European Males (DWEMS) in favor of Rigoberta Menchu, Franz Fanon,
Jean Genet, or Antonin Artaud [BR -- Note, Artaud wrote an
interesting essay titled "Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by the
Society," which I previously posted in 2 parts. I may do a rerun
of the Artaud essay in the future]... This [elimination of DWEMS]
is a demand to wipe out the progress made by science in western
continental Europe, especially Germany, France, Italy, Holland,
etc., since the Italian Golden Renaissance of the 1400s. If
Nicholas Cusanus, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, Monge,
Gauss, Pasteur, Riemann, Cantor, and other Platonics were wiped
out, we could no longer maintain the survival of the 5.3 billion
human beings of today. Without the scientific achievement of
these DWEMS, the relative potential population density of the
world would fall back to the levels of the 1300s, to the time of
the Bubonic Plague. We might go all the way back to the Roman
Empire. Most of the 5.3 billion who manage to hang on today would
be doomed.
-+- Postmodernism -+-
Many people who observe the lunatic pageant of the modern campus
may conclude that the professors and administrators are all
crazy. So they are. But there is a definite method in the
madness, a philosophical system or doctrine which dictates the
specific policy demands of political correctness. One generic
name for this is postmodernism, which claims that the raving
irrationalists Voltaire, Rousseau, and the rest of the
Enlightenment were the Age of Reason, but that now the Age of
Unreason is upon us.
[Deconstructionism] began its triumphal march through American
universities in 1966, when Derrida appeared at Johns Hopkins
University to tell American academics that the structuralism of
Levi-Strauss was dead and that the future belonged to
deconstruction. Derrida is now stronger in the U.S.A. and the
Anglo-American sphere than in France, and dominant in much of
Ibero-America, Francophone Africa and the Middle East, and
eastern Europe. If you want tenure, an endowed chair, a
foundation grant, government financing, you have to learn to talk
the pedantic deconstructionist gibberish.
Deconstructionists are like the cynics and skeptics of the
ancient world in that they, like Diogenes and Pyrrho, refuse to
profess or affirm a doctrine of their own, but only negate the
ideas of others. Deconstruction is very eclectic. Derrida's world
of ideas can be compared to a great sewer into which empty the
various gutters and waste waters of the past two or three
centuries. Each of these channels contributes to the great Cloaca
Maxima of deconstruction. Note that we are here reviewing the
disastrous state of human knowledge as we go towards the year
2000.
-+- Hatred of Reason -+-
Deconstructionism is an attack on Judaeo-Christian western
European civilization powered above all by rage. Derrida hates
and resents reason and creativity, which he identifies with the
"epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these
appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality." (*Of
Grammatology*, p. 13).
Western European culture is guilty of logocentrism, says Derrida.
The western cultural paradigm always aspired to be based on
reason. This must be rejected. The western cultural paradigm also
gives priority to speech, to the spoken word, with most
literature made to be read aloud or even sung, from Plato's
dialogues to Dante and Chaucer to Shakespeare and Schiller. This
is the hated "phonocentrism" which Derrida also wants to get rid
of. Derrida delves into Plato in an attempt to show that the
overtones of the Logos are exclusively paternal and male
dominated, giving rise to the further charge of
phallologocentrism, which soon enough gives rise to the notion of
"phallocentrism" assailed by the maenads of feminist literary
theory.
[Derrida concludes that] the real problem with the West is that
our culture is entirely permeated by what he calls "metaphysics.
"... For Derrida, metaphysics evidently means anything that
cannot be boiled down to sense certainty. Derrida sees
"metaphysics" as the principal enemy to be destroyed. Under the
heading of metaphysics he lumps God, the self or soul or
individual, causality, substance, essence, action, and most other
concepts of any importance. They must go, for reasons that are
never remotely explained.
For Derrida, the author is dead, by definition. He never existed.
The human self and ego have collapsed into an X marking the spot
where they once were... All that Derrida will talk about is a
text, a written text of black on white, with punctuation, type
faces, paragraphs, margins, colphons, logos, copyrights and so
forth... Everything is a written text in the sense that every
thought, utterance or "discourse" is a story that we tell each
other about something which exists in the most detached way in a
written form.
Therefore, says Derrida, there is nothing outside of the text.
Everything is a text. There are no more works of art. All black
writing on white paper is a text -- Shakespeare, the telephone
book, Mickey Mouse, the racing form... all are texts, each one
equivalent to the other.
-+- Deconstructionism's Targets -+-
Deconstructionists can target any of the written documents which
are constituve of civilization itself. Take theology...
Deconstructionist theology is quite a feat, since the ban on
metaphysics means that this will be a theology without God.
[Deconstructionist theologian Mark C. Taylor overcomes this
difficulty as follows:] "One of the distinctive features of
deconstruction is its willingness to confront the death of God
squarely if not always directly...it would not be too much to
suggest that deconstruction is the 'hermeneutic' of the death of
God." Taylor calls for "the death of God, erasure of the self,
and [an] end to history."
Since deconstruction sees all writing as the same, it can also be
unleashed in the field of law, with devastating effect. Listen to
Clare Dalton of the Critical Legal Studies group at Harvard Law
School: "Law," she writes, "like every other cultural
institution, is a place where we tell one another stories about
our relationships with ourselves, one another, and authority."...
Sanford Levinson, professor of constitutional law at the
University of Texas at Austin, chimes in: "The death of
'constitutionalism' may be the central event of our time, just as
the death of God was that of the past century..."
The Clinton White House is redolent of deconstructionism and
political correctness. The Clinton Cabinet is dysfunctional, but
it certainly respects the distributive requirements of
race/sex/class/sexual [orientation]... Donna Shalala of HHS
helped to promulgate a code on offensive speech at the University
of Wisconsin... Vice President Gore's favorite book is reportedly
Thomas Kuhn's *Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, which has
become a manual for New Age paradigm shifters.
We appeal to all of those who share our regard for the potential
of the human mind to join us in exposing and defeating the
deconstructionists.
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