Introduction to the Compendium-Manifesto 2083- page 1 to 66Lugol’s Iodine Free S&H
J.Crow’s® Lugol’s Iodine Solution. Restore lost reserves.
Energy Awareness Course
Use CureZone kode to get a free session!
Original Dr. Hulda Clark
Hulda Clark Cleanses
Lugol’s Iodine Free S&H
J.Crow’s® Lugol’s Iodine Solution. Restore lost reserves.
Energy Awareness Course
Use CureZone kode to get a free session!
Original Dr. Hulda Clark
Hulda Clark Cleanses
Introduction to the Compendium-Manifesto 2083- page 1 to 66
“The men the European public admires most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”
You can see a movie presentation of the compendium by visiting the below links. It will not be available for a long period so consider taking a backup copy of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQOfH8Dj1mw
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v21123164bZCBQeZ8
After years of work the first edition of the compendium “2083 – A European Declaration of Independence” is completed. If you have received this book, you are either one of my former 7000 patriotic Facebook friends or you are the friend of one of my FB friends. If you are concerned about the future of Western Europe you will definitely find the information both interesting and highly relevant.
I have spent several years writing, researching and compiling the information and I have spent most of my hard earned funds in this process (in excess of 300 000 Euros). I do not want any compensation for it as it is a gift to you, as a fellow patriot.
Much of the information presented in this compendium (3 books) has been deliberately kept away from the European peoples by our governments and the politically correct mainstream media (MSM). More than 90% of the EU and national parliamentarians and more than 95% of journalists are supporters of European multiculturalism and therefore supporters of the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe; yet, they DO NOT have the permission of the European peoples to implement these doctrines.
The compendium, - “2083 – A European Declaration of Independence” - documents through more than 1000 pages that the fear of Islamisation is all but irrational.
It covers the following main topics:
1. The rise of cultural Marxism/multiculturalism in Western Europe
2. Why the Islamic colonization and Islamisation of Western Europe began
3. The current state of the Western European Resistance Movements (anti-Marxist/anti-Jihad movements)
4. Solutions for Western Europe and how we, the resistance, should move forward in the coming decades
5. + Covering all, highly relevant topics including solutions and strategies for all of the 8 different political fronts
The compendium/book presents advanced ideological, practical, tactical, organisational and rhetorical solutions and strategies for all patriotic-minded individuals/movements. The book will be of great interest to you whether you are a moderate or a more dedicated cultural conservative/nationalist.Included are also demographical studies, historical statistics, forecasts and insights on various subjects related to the ongoing and future struggle of Europe. It covers most topics related to historical events and aspects of past and current Islamic Imperialism, which is now removed or falsified by our academia by instruction of Western Europe’s cultural relativist elites (cultural relativism=cultural Marxism). It offers thorough analysis of Islam, which is unknown to a majority of Europeans. It documents how the political doctrines known as multiculturalism/cultural Marxism/cultural relativism was created and implemented. Multiculturalists/cultural Marxists usually operate under the disguise of humanism. A majority are anti-nationalists and want to deconstruct European identity, traditions, culture and even nation states.
As we all know, the root of Europe's problems is the lack of cultural self-confidence (nationalism). Most people are still terrified of nationalistic political doctrines thinking that if we ever embrace these principles again, new “Hitler’s” will suddenly pop up and initiate global Armageddon... Needless to say; the growing numbers of nationalists in W. Europe are systematically being ridiculed, silenced and persecuted by the current cultural Marxist/multiculturalist political establishments. This has been a continuous ongoing process which started in 1945. This irrational fear of nationalistic doctrines is preventing us from stopping our own national/cultural suicide as the Islamic colonization is increasing annually. This book presents the only solutions to our current problems.
You cannot defeat Islamisation or halt/reverse the Islamic colonization of Western Europe without first removing the political doctrines manifested through multiculturalism/cultural Marxism…
I have written approximately half of the compendium myself. The rest is a compilation of works from several courageous individuals throughout the world. I originally planned to add a database of high quality graphic illustrations and pictures. However, the document (file) would have been un-practically large which would complicate the process of efficient distribution.
Distribution of the book
The content of the compendium truly belongs to everyone and is free to be distributed in any way or form. In fact, I ask only one favour of you; I ask that you distribute this book to everyone you know. Please do not think that others will take care of it. Sorry to be blunt, but it does not work out that way. If we, the Western European Resistance, fail or become apathetic, then Western Europe will fall, and your freedom and our children’s freedom with it… It is essential and very important that everyone is at least presented with the truth before our systems come crashing down within 2 to 7 decades. So again, I humbly ask you to re-distribute the book to as many patriotic minded individuals as you can. I am 100% certain that the distribution of this compendium to a large portion of European patriots will contribute to ensure our victory in the end. Because within these three books lies the tools required to win the ongoing Western European cultural war.
As already mentioned; the compendium is a compilation of works from multiple courageous individuals throughout the world. I have spent more than three years writing and/or compiling most of the content. None of the other authors have been asked to participate in this project due to practical and security reasons but most of them have made their material available for distribution. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This is the reason why I have decided to allow the content of this compendium to be freely redistributed and translated. Consider it my personal gift and contribution to all Europeans. The sources are not embedded into the document for this reason (easier to use and distribute the various articles). However, it is required that the author(s) are credited when the material is used.
As such, the intellectual property of this compendium belongs to all Europeans across the European world and can be distributed and translated without limitations. Efficient distribution and circulation will be possible if those who agree with at least some of its content, principles or ideas contribute to spread the information. If you are reading this you will know that many people will be interested in obtaining the compendium (3 books). Let’s use this momentum to our advantage as it will surely benefit our struggle.
I’m depending on you to distribute the book or some/all of its content to as many patriotic European political activists as possible. Let them know what is going on and what is required of each and every one of us. After all, we do not only have a right to resist the current development, it is our duty as Europeans to prevent the annihilation of our identities, our cultures and traditions and our nation states! Please contribute to distribute the compendium to as many patriotic minded Europeans as humanly possible in all 26 European countries. This is only be the beginning…!
By including the “legal disclaimer” in ”Book 3; ” will allow everyone to distribute the content without violating any European laws. If you are still in doubt feel free to delete or change the wording in certain chapters before distribution.
Please help to make this book available through various torrents, blogs, websites, on Facebook, on Twitter, on forums and through other arenas. It is truly a one-of-a-kind, unique and great tool that can and should be used by all cultural conservatives in the decades to come.
Priority objective - translating the book to German, French and Spanish.
I highly recommend that especially a French, German and Spanish patriot takes responsibility and ensures that this compendium is either distributed and/or translated to your respective language. It should be distributed to torrents, websites, Facebook groups and other political groups where there are high concentrations of cultural conservatives/nationalists/patriots. I have been unsuccessful to efficiently distribute the compendium to especially French, German and Spanish speaking individuals due to language barriers. It is therefore essential that someone steps up and takes responsibility to distribute it to as many as humanly possible. If you, yourself, are too busy, unavailable or unable to contribute to help translate it, please do contact one of many cultural conservative/nationalist intellectuals/writers/journalists in your country. Contact individuals you know who are not afraid to operate outside the boundaries of political correctness. We, the right wing Resistance Movements of Europe depend on efficient re-distribution of this vital information included in this compendium. The efficient distribution of this book to all nationalists of Europe may significantly contribute to future regime shifts. Because within this compendium lies the tools and knowledge on exactly how to replace our current regimes. I really hope someone will accept this very important task and contribute; because if you won’t, no one will...
Extracting info from the document or convert from a Word file to a PDF file + translation service
It’s easy to convert the document from a Word file to a PDF file or any other format providing you have the Microsoft Word/Office software (preferably Word 2007 or newer). If you do not have this software you can either download the free “Word Viewer” which allows you to view, print and copy Word documents, even if you don’t have Word installed. Just do a search for the key word “Word Viewer” at the following site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads or use the following direct download link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3...
You can also just buy the full Office package or download a free trial from the Microsoft site: http://office.microsoft.com or alternatively, go to one of the following torrent sites to download it for free:
|
1. thepiratebay.org
|
3. torrentreactor.net
|
5. torrentz.com
|
|
2. btscene.com
|
4. extratorrent.com
|
6. btmon.com
|
You must first download a torrent application. The best torrent application (uTorrent) can be downloaded here: www.utorrent.com If you want Word 2007 for longer than the 60 day trial it is likely you will have to download a serial code which allows you to unlock the software permanently or at least extend the trial period for 6-12 months.
I chose to send the compendium as a Word file for the following reason:
1. MS Word is one of the most common and popular software formats
2. Significantly easier to edit the document compared to PDF
3. A Word file is significantly smaller than a PDF file (3,5 MB vs 8-10 MB)
4. The quality of the images are conserved a lot better than in a PDF
5. Distribution: it is easier to avoid spam filters with a file smaller than 5 MB
Since I have chosen to send the document in Word format you can easily extract all information and the images from the Word file. I deliberately avoided locking the document for this reason. If you want to extract the images from word you can do the following:
1. Simply open MS Paint (standard Windows program), copy the image from Word and paste it in Paint. You then save the image in Paint as a jpg or any other format.
It is easy to convert the file, if desired, to a PDF file or any other format. Simply save the Word file as a PDF file. As for extraction from a PDF file; several software programs including newer versions of Adobe Acrobat allow conversion and extraction. Just google the word; “PDF to Word converter” or download the following free converter software: http://www.hellopdf.com/download.php
As for a free and powerful translator service; the google translation service offers a powerful and relatively accurate tool: http://translate.google.com
Display using kindle/nook/iPad
Kindle, nook or iPad is a hardware platform (LCD board) very suitable for reading e-books and other digital media. It costs as little as 100-200 USD on the second hand market. Also, there are other hand held devices like iPhone. All you have to do is select Word as input and kindle/nook/iPad/iPhone as output and transfer the file.
Converting the Word file to paper
Successful self-publishers today leverage the benefits provided by print-on-demand services, where they don’t need to waste money on printing costs or on inventory and stocking fees.
A “print-on-demand” (POD) service, sometimes called publish-on-demand, is a printing technology and business process in which new copies of a book are not printed until an order has been received. Many traditional small presses have replaced their traditional printing equipment with POD equipment or contract their printing out to POD providers.
When customers order their books, self-publishing outlets like Cafepress.com and others (see list) will print on-demand as many book as needed and they will also ship them and get payments for them from those ordering. These self-publishing services accept uploaded digital content such as Word or PDF files. However, due to the controversial nature of the content of this book, the individual that makes the initial arrangement has to be careful and may need to cut away certain chapters before using commercial services such as these.
Self publishing services/books on demand services:
|
lulu.com
|
xlibris.com
|
authorhouse.co.uk
|
unibook.com
|
|
createspace.com
|
webook.com
|
spirepublishing.com
|
createbooks.com
|
|
cafepress.co.uk
|
selfpublishing.com
|
trafford.com
|
booksurge.com
|
|
booksondemand.com
|
infinitypublishing.com
|
lightningsource.com
|
blurb.com
|
Guide to self publishing:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/self-publish-your-book-guide-to-the-best-self-p...
Intro to e-book format:
http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/04/ebook-format-primer.html
Sacrifices made when creating the compendium
I’ve spent a total of 9 years of my life working on this project. The first five years were spent studying and creating a financial base, and the last three years was spent working full time with research, compilation and writing. Creating this compendium has personally cost me a total of 317 000 Euros (130 000 Euros spent from my own pocket and 187 500 Euros for loss of income during three years). All that, however, is barely noticeable compared to the sacrifices made in relation to the distribution of this book, the actual marketing operation;)
The importance of spreading the truth and distribute sound strategies cannot be underestimated as it is at the very core of our current resistance efforts. I do hope you take the time to read it. Several aspects of the work is truly unique and no similar compendium exists today. Don’t let the topics discussed in the books startle you too much. Many of the topics may seem completely absurd or too radical today, but in a couple of decades, you will start to understand its relevancy to our struggle. Nevertheless, if the content freaks you out too much, to a degree where you want to delete it, I would highly recommend you rather save it on a USB flash drive (small memory chip) and place the chip in a safe location. Because it is likely that you will want to read it at some point in time. After all, we can only ignore central aspects of reality for so long.
A message from the author/creator of the compendium
I hope you enjoy this compendium. It currently offers the most comprehensive database of solution oriented subjects. As mentioned, I only ask one thing from you; that you distribute this book to your friends and ask them to forward it to “their” friends, especially to individuals who have a patriotic mindset. Please help us and help yourself, your family and friends by contributing to spread the tools which will ensure our victory; for the truth must be known... It is not only our right but also our duty to contribute to preserve our identity, our culture and our national sovereignty by preventing the ongoing Islamisation. There is no Resistance Movement if individuals like us refuse to contribute...
Multiculturalism (cultural Marxism/political correctness), as you might know, is the root cause of the ongoing Islamisation of Europe which has resulted in the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe through demographic warfare (facilitated by our own leaders). This compendium presents the solutions and explains exactly what is required of each and every one of us in the coming decades. Everyone can and should contribute in one way or the other; it’s just a matter of will.
Time is of the essence. We have only a few decades to consolidate a sufficient level of resistance before our major cities are completely demographically overwhelmed by Muslims. Ensuring the successful distribution of this compendium to as many Europeans as humanly possible will significantly contribute to our success. It may be the only way to avoid our present and future dhimmitude (enslavement) under Islamic majority rule in our own countries.
I have been unable to send this compendium to many people, for various reasons, so I truly hope you will be willing to contribute.
It should be noted that English is my secondary language and due to certain security precautions I was unable to have the documents professionally edited and proof read. Needless to say, there is a potential for improving it literarily. As such, consider it a ”first edition draft”. The responsibility falls upon you now as I will, for obvious reasons, not be able to develop it any further.
Any and all individuals with the appropriate skills are encouraged to contribute to a second edition of this compendium by improving and expanding it where needed.
Sincere and patriotic regards,
Andrew Berwick, London, England - 2011
Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement
With the assistance from brothers and sisters in England, France, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, the US etc.
Introduction to the compendium - “2083” -
The introductory chapter explains how “cultural” Marxism gradually infiltrated our post-WW2 societies. It is essential to understand how it started in order to comprehend our current issues. The chapter was written for the US specifically but applies to Western Europe as well.
One of conservatism’s most important insights is that all ideologies are wrong. Ideology takes an intellectual system, a product of one or more philosophers, and says, “This system must be true.” Inevitably, reality ends up contradicting the system, usually on a growing number of points. But the ideology, by its nature, cannot adjust to reality; to do so would be to abandon the system.
Therefore, reality must be suppressed. If the ideology has power, it uses its power to undertake this suppression. It forbids writing or speaking certain facts. Its goal is to prevent not only expression of thoughts that contradict what “must be true,” but thinking such thoughts. In the end, the result is inevitably the concentration camp, the gulag and the grave.
But what happens today to Europeans who suggest that there are differences among ethnic groups, or that the traditional social roles of men and women reflect their different natures, or that homosexuality is morally wrong? If they are public figures, they must grovel in the dirt in endless, canting apologies. If they are university students, they face star chamber courts and possible expulsion. If they are employees of private corporations, they may face loss of their jobs. What was their crime? Contradicting the new EUSSR ideology of “Political Correctness.”
But what exactly is “Political Correctness?” Marxists have used the term for at least 80 years, as a broad synonym for “the General Line of the Party.” It could be said that Political Correctness is the General Line of the Establishment in Western European countries today; certainly, no one who dares contradict it can be a member of that Establishment. But that still does not tell us what it really is.
We must seek to answer that question. The only way any ideology can be understood, is by looking at its historical origins, its method of analysis and several key components, including its place in higher education and its ties with the Feminist movement.
If we expect to prevail and restore our countries to full freedom of thought and expression, we need to know our enemy. We need to understand what Political Correctness really is. As you will soon see, if we can expose the true origins and nature of Political Correctness, we will have taken a giant step toward its overthrow.
Most Europeans look back on the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in two–parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school. Entertainment was something the whole family could enjoy.
What happened?
If a man of the 1950s were suddenly introduced into Western Europe in the 2000s, he would hardly recognise it as the same country. He would be in immediate danger of getting mugged, carjacked or worse, because he would not have learned to live in constant fear. He would not know that he shouldn’t go into certain parts of the city, that his car must not only be locked but equipped with an alarm, that he dare not go to sleep at night without locking the windows and bolting the doors – and setting the electronic security system.
If he brought his family with him, he and his wife would probably cheerfully pack their children off to the nearest public school. When the children came home in the afternoon and told them they had to go through a metal detector to get in the building, had been given some funny white powder by another kid and learned that homosexuality is normal and good, the parents would be uncomprehending.
In the office, the man might light up a cigarette, drop a reference to the “little lady,” and say he was happy to see the firm employing some coloured folks in important positions. Any of those acts would earn a swift reprimand, and together they might get him fired.
When she went into the city to shop, the wife would put on a nice suit, hat, and possibly gloves. She would not understand why people stared, and mocked.
And when the whole family sat down after dinner and turned on the television, they would not understand how p 0 r n o g r a p h y from some sleazy, blank-fronted “Adults Only” kiosk had gotten on their set.
Were they able, our 1950s family would head back to the 1950s as fast as they could, with a gripping horror story to tell. Their story would be of a nation that had decayed and degenerated at a fantastic pace, moving in less than a half a century from the greatest countries on earth to Third World nations, overrun by crime, noise, drugs and dirt. The fall of Rome was graceful by comparison.
Why did it happen?
Over the last fifty years, Western Europe has been conquered by the same force that earlier took over Russia, China, Germany and Italy. That force is ideology. Here, as elsewhere, ideology has inflicted enormous damage on the traditional culture it came to dominate, fracturing it everywhere and sweeping much of it away. In its place came fear, and ruin. Russia will take a generation or more to recover from Communism, if it ever can.
The ideology that has taken over Western Europe goes most commonly by the name of “Political Correctness.” Some people see it as a joke. It is not. It is deadly serious. It seeks to alter virtually all the rules, formal and informal, that govern relations among people and institutions. It wants to change behaviour, thought, even the words we use. To a significant extent, it already has. Whoever or whatever controls language also controls thought. Who dares to speak of “ladies” now?
Just what is “Political Correctness?” Political Correctness is in fact cultural Marxism (Cultural Communism) – Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. The effort to translate Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with the student rebellion of the 1960s. It goes back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute devoted to making the transition, the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt School). One of its founders, George Lukacs, stated its purpose as answering the question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilisation?” The Frankfurt School gained profound influence in European and American universities after many of its leading lights fled and spread all over Europe and even to the United States in the 1930s to escape National Socialism in Germany. In Western Europe it gained influence in universities from 1945.
The Frankfurt School blended Marx with Freud, and later influences (some Fascist as well as Marxist) added linguistics to create “Critical Theory” and “deconstruction.” These in turn greatly influenced education theory, and through institutions of higher education gave birth to what we now call “Political Correctness.” The lineage is clear, and it is traceable right back to Karl Marx.
The parallels between the old, economic Marxism and cultural Marxism are evident. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, shares with classical Marxism the vision of a “classless society,” i.e., a society not merely of equal opportunity, but equal condition. Since that vision contradicts human nature – because people are different, they end up unequal, regardless of the starting point – society will not accord with it unless forced. So, under both variants of Marxism, it is forced. This is the first major parallel between classical and cultural Marxism: both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness can be seen on campuses where “PC” has taken over the college: freedom of speech, of the press, and even of thought are all eliminated.
The second major parallel is that both classical, economic Marxism and cultural Marxism have single-factor explanations of history. Classical Marxism argues that all of history was determined by ownership of the means of production. Cultural Marxism says that history is wholly explained by which groups – defined by sex, race, religion and sexua| normality or abnormality – have power over which other groups.
The third parallel is that both varieties of Marxism declare certain groups virtuous and others evil a priori, that is, without regard for the actual behaviour of individuals. Classical Marxism defines workers and peasants as virtuous and the bourgeoisie (the middle class) and other owners of capital as evil. Cultural Marxism defines all minorities, what they see as the victims; Muslims, Feminist women, homosexuals and some additional minority groups as virtuous and they view ethnic Christian European men as evil. (Cultural Marxism does not recognise the existence of non-Feminist women, and defines Muslims, Asians and Africans who reject Political Correctness as evil, just like native Christian or even atheist Europeans.).
The fourth parallel is in means: expropriation. Economic Marxists, where they obtained power, expropriated the property of the bourgeoisie and handed it to the state, as the “representative” of the workers and the peasants. Cultural Marxists, when they gain power (including through our own government), lay penalties on native European men and others who disagree with them and give privileges to the ”victim” groups they favour. Affirmative action is an example.
Finally, both varieties of Marxists employ a method of analysis designed to show the correctness of their ideology in every situation. For classical Marxists, the analysis is economic. For cultural Marxists, the analysis is linguistic: deconstruction. Deconstruction “proves” that any “text,” past or present, illustrates the oppression of Muslims, women, homosexuals, etc. by reading that meaning into words of the text (regardless of their actual meaning). Both methods are, of course, phony analyses that twist the evidence to fit preordained conclusions, but they lend a ‘scientific” air to the ideology.
These parallels are neither remarkable nor coincidental. They exist because Political Correctness is directly derived from classical Marxism, and is in fact a variant of Marxism. Through most of the history of Marxism, cultural Marxists were “read out” of the movement by classical, economic Marxists. Today, with economic Marxism dead, cultural Marxism has filled its shoes. The medium has changed, but the message is the same: a society of radical egalitarianism enforced by the power of the state.
Political Correctness now looms over Western European society like a colossus. It has taken over both political wings, left and right. Among so called Western European ”conservative” parties the actual cultural conservatives are shown the door because being a cultural conservative opposes the very essence of political correctness. It controls the most powerful element in our culture, the media and entertainment industry. It dominates both public and higher education: many a college campus is a small, ivy-covered North Korea. It has even captured the higher clergy in many Christian churches. Anyone in the Establishment who departs from its dictates swiftly ceases to be a member of the Establishment.
The most vital question is: how can Western Europeans combat Political Correctness and retake their society from the cultural Marxists?
It is not sufficient just to criticise Political Correctness. It tolerates a certain amount of criticism, even gentle mocking. It does so through no genuine tolerance for other points of view, but in order to disarm its opponents, to let itself seem less menacing than it is. The cultural Marxists do not yet have total power, and they are too wise to appear totalitarian until their victory is assured.
Rather, those who would defeat cultural Marxism must defy it. They must use words it forbids, and refuse to use the words it mandates; remember, sex is better than gender. They must shout from the housetops the realities it seeks to suppress, such as our opposition to Sharia on a national and local level, the Islamisation of our countries, the facts that violent crime is disproportionately committed by Muslims and that most cases of AIDS are voluntary, i.e., acquired from immoral sexua| acts. They must refuse to turn their children over to public schools.
Above all, those who would defy Political Correctness must behave according to the old rules of our culture, not the new rules the cultural Marxists lay down. Ladies should be wives and homemakers, not cops or soldiers, and men should still hold doors open for ladies. Children should not be born out of wedlock. Glorification of homosexuality should be shunned. Jurors should not accept Islam as an excuse for murder.
Defiance spreads. When other Western Europeans see one person defy Political Correctness and survive – and you still can, for now – they are emboldened. They are tempted to defy it, too, and some do. The ripples from a single act of defiance, of one instance of walking up to the clay idol and breaking off its nose, can range far. There is nothing the Politically Correct fear more than open defiance, and for good reason; it is their chief vulnerability. That should lead cultural conservatives to defy cultural Marxism at every turn.
While the hour is late, the battle is not decided. Very few Western Europeans realise that Political Correctness is in fact Marxism in a different set of clothes. As that realisation spreads, defiance will spread with it. At present, Political Correctness prospers by disguising itself. Through defiance, and through education on our own part (which should be part of every act of defiance), we can strip away its camouflage and reveal the Marxism beneath the window-dressing of “sensitivity,” “tolerance,” and “multiculturalism.”
Who dares, wins.
The Historical Roots of “Political Correctness”
Western Europe is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as “Political Correctness.” Political Correctness seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behaviour on all Europeans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which seeks a radical inversion of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution.
Social revolution has a long history, conceivably going as far back as Plato’s Republic. But it was the French Revolution of 1789 that inspired Karl Marx to develop his theories in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia set off a wave of optimistic expectation among the Marxist forces in Europe and America that the new proletarian world of equality was finally coming into being. Russia, as the first communist nation in the world, would lead the revolutionary forces to victory.
The Marxist revolutionary forces in Europe leaped at this opportunity. Following the end of World War I, there was a Communist “Spartacist” uprising in Berlin, Germany led by Rosa Luxemburg; the creation of a “Soviet” in Bavaria led by Kurt Eisner; and a Hungarian communist republic established by Bela Kun in 1919. At the time, there was great concern that all of Europe might fall under the banner of Bolshevism. This sense of impending doom was given vivid life by Trotsky’s Red Army invasion of Poland in 1919.
However, the Red Army was defeated by Polish forces at the battle of the Vistula in 1920. The Spartacist, Bavarian Soviet and Bela Kun governments all failed to gain widespread support from the workers and after a brief time they were all overthrown. These events created a quandary for the Marxist revolutionaries in Europe. Under Marxist economic theory, the oppressed workers were supposed to be the beneficiaries of a social revolution that would place them on top of the power structure. When these revolutionary opportunities presented themselves, however, the workers did not respond. The Marxist revolutionaries did not blame their theory for these failures. They blamed the workers.
One group of Marxist intellectuals resolved their quandary by an analysis that focused on society’s cultural “superstructure” rather than on the economic substructures as Marx did. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs contributed the most to this new cultural Marxism.
Antonio Gramsci worked for the Communist International during 1923-24 in Moscow and Vienna. He was later imprisoned in one of Mussolini’s jails where he wrote his famous “Prison Notebooks.” Among Marxists, Gramsci is noted for his theory of cultural hegemony as the means to class dominance. In his view, a new “Communist man” had to be created before any political revolution was possible. This led to a focus on the efforts of intellectuals in the fields of education and culture. Gramsci envisioned a long march through the society’s institutions, including the government, the judiciary, the military, the schools and the media. He also concluded that so long as the workers had a Christian soul, they would not respond to revolutionary appeals.
Georg Lukacs was the son a wealthy Hungarian banker. Lukacs began his political life as an agent of the Communist International. His book History and Class Consciousness gained him recognition as the leading Marxist theorist since Karl Marx. Lukacs believed that for a new Marxist culture to emerge, the existing culture must be destroyed. He said, “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch,” and, “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”
When he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary in 1919, Lukacs launched what became known as “Cultural Terrorism.” As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Hungarian children were instructed in free love, sexua| intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the out-datedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. Women, too, were called to rebel against the sexua| mores of the time. Lukacs’s campaign of “Cultural Terrorism” was a precursor to what Political Correctness would later bring to Western European schools.
In 1923, Lukacs and other Marxist intellectuals associated with the Communist Party of Germany founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute, which became known as the Frankfurt School, was modelled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. In 1933, when Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled. Most came to the United States.
The members of the Frankfurt School conducted numerous studies on the beliefs, attitudes and values they believed lay behind the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The Frankfurt School’s studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis to criticise the bases of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexua| restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism. These criticisms, known collectively as Critical Theory, were reflected in such works of the Frankfurt School as Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and The Dogma of Christ, Wilhelm’s Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality.
The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950, substantially influenced Western European psychologists and social scientists. The book was premised on one basic idea, that the presence in a society of Christianity, capitalism, and the patriarchal-authoritarian family created a character prone to racial and religious prejudice and German fascism. The Authoritarian Personality became a handbook for a national campaign against any kind of prejudice or discrimination on the theory that if these evils were not eradicated, another Holocaust might occur on the European continent. This campaign, in turn, provided a basis for Political Correctness.
Critical Theory incorporated sub-theories which were intended to chip away at specific elements of the existing culture, including “matriarchal theory,” “androgyny theory,” “personality theory,” “authority theory,” “family theory,” “sexuality theory,” “racial theory,” “legal theory,” and “literary theory.” Put into practice, these theories were to be used to overthrow the prevailing social order and usher in social revolution.
To achieve this, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School recognised that traditional beliefs and the existing social structure would have to be destroyed and then replaced. The patriarchal social structure would be replaced with matriarchy; the belief that men and women are different and properly have different roles would be replaced with androgyny; and the belief that heterosexuality is normal would be replaced with the belief that homosexuality is equally “normal.”
As a grand scheme intended to deny the intrinsic worth of native Christian European, heterosexual males, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School opened the door to the racial and sexua| antagonisms of the Trotskyites. Many believed that oppressed Muslims, non European minorities and others like Feminists and Homosexuals could be the vanguard of a communist revolution in Europe.
Trotsky’s ideas were adopted by many of the student leaders of the 1960s counterculture movement, who attempted to elevate minority revolutionaries to positions of leadership in their movement.
The student revolutionaries were also strongly influenced by the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse preached the “Great Refusal,” a rejection of all basic Western concepts, sexua| liberation and the merits of feminist and black revolution. His primary thesis was that university students, ghetto blacks, the alienated, the asocial, and the Third World could take the place of the proletariat in the Communist revolution. In his book An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse proclaimed his goals of a radical transvaluation of values; the relaxation of taboos; cultural subversion; Critical Theory; and a linguistic rebellion that would amount to a methodical reversal of meaning. As for racial conflict, Marcuse wrote that white men are guilty and that blacks are the most natural force of rebellion.
Marcuse may be the most important member of the Frankfurt School in terms of the origins of Political Correctness, because he was the critical link to the counterculture of the 1960s. His objective was clear: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including morality of existing society…” His means was liberating the powerful, primeval force of sex from its civilised restraints, a message preached in his book, Eros and Civilisation, published in 1955. Marcuse became one of the main gurus of the 1960s adolescent sexua| rebellion; he himself coined the expression, “make love, not war.” With that role, the chain of Marxist influence via the Frankfurt School was completed: from Lukacs’ service as Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Hungarian government in 1919 to Western European and American students burning the flag and taking over college administration buildings in the 1960s. Today, many of these same colleges are bastions of Political Correctness, and the former student radicals have become the faculties.
One of the most important contributors to Political Correctness was Betty Friedan. Through her book The Feminine Mystique, Friedantied Feminism to Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualisation. Maslow was a social psychologist who in his early years did research on female dominance and sexuality. Maslow was a friend of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University and had met Erich Fromm in 1936. He was strongly impressed by Fromm’s Frankfurt School ideology. He wrote an article, “The Authoritarian Character Structure,” published in 1944, that reflected the personality theory of Critical Theory. Maslow was also impressed with the work of Wilhelm Reich, who was another Frankfurt School originator of personality theory.
The significance of the historical roots of Political Correctness cannot be fully appreciated unless Betty Friedan’s revolution in sex roles is viewed for what it really was – a manifestation of the social revolutionary process begun by Karl Marx. Friedan’s reliance on Abraham Maslow’s reflection of Frankfurt School ideology is only one indicator. Other indicators include the correspondence of Friedan’s revolution in sex roles with Georg Lukacs’ annihilation of old values and the creation of new ones, and with Herbert Marcuse’s transvaluation of values. But the idea of transforming a patriarchy into a matriarchy – which is what a sex-role inversion is designed to do – can be connected directly to Friedrich Engels book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. First published in 1884, this book popularised the now-accepted feminist belief that deep-rooted discrimination against the oppressed female sex was a function of patriarchy. The belief that matriarchy was the solution to patriarchy flows from Marx’s comments in The German Ideology, published in 1845. In this work Marx advanced the idea that wives and children were the first property of the patriarchal male. The Frankfurt School’s matriarchal theory and its near-relation, androgyny theory, both originated from these sources.
When addressing the general public, advocates of Political Correctness – or cultural Marxism, to give it its true name – present their beliefs attractively. It’s all just a matter of being “sensitive” to other people, they say. They use words such as “tolerance” and “diversity,” asking, “Why can’t we all just get along?”
The reality is different. Political Correctness is not at all about “being nice,” unless one thinks gulags are nice places. Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order, and, ultimately, a totalitarian state. If anything, the cultural Marxism created by the Frankfurt School is more horrifying than the old, economic Marxism that ruined Russia. At least the economic Marxists did not exalt sexua| perversion and attempt to create a matriarchy, as the Frankfurt School and its descendants have done.
This short essay has sought to show one critical linkage, that between classical Marxism and the ingredients of the “cultural revolution” that broke out in Western Europe in the 1960s. Of course, the action does not stop in the ‘60s; the workings of the Frankfurt School are yet very much with us, especially in the field of education. That topic, and other present-day effects of Frankfurt School thinking, will be further analysed.
Georg Lukacs
• He began his political life as a Kremlin agent of the Communist International.
• His History and Class-Consciousness gained him recognition as the leading Marxist theorist since Karl Marx.
• In 1919 he became the Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun Regime in Hungary. He instigated what become known as “Cultural Terrorism.”
• Cultural Terrorism was a precursor of what was to happen in European and American schools.
• He launched an “explosive” sex education program. Special lectures were organised in Hungarian schools and literature was printed and distributed to instruct children about free love, the nature of sexua| intercourse, the archaic nature of the bourgeois family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children were urged to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the Church, and to ignore precepts of morality. They were easily and spontaneously turned into delinquents with whom only the police could cope. This call to rebellion addressed to Hungarian children was matched by a call to rebellion addressed to Hungarian women.
• In rejecting the idea that Bolshevism spelled the destruction of civilisation and culture, Lukacs stated: “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”
• Lukacs’ state of mind was expressed in his own words:
- “All the social forces I had hated since my youth, and which I aimed in spirit to annihilate, now came together to unleash the First Global War.”
- “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the speech.”
- “The question is: Who will free us from the yoke of Western Civilisation?”
- “Any political movement capable of bringing Bolshevism to the West would have to be ‘Demonic’.”
- “The abandonment of the soul’s uniqueness solves the problem of ‘unleashing’ the diabolic forces lurking in all the violence which is needed to create revolution.”
• Lukacs’ state of mind was typical of those who represented the forces of Revolutionary Marxism.
• At a secret meeting in Germany in 1923, Lukacs proposed the concept of inducing “Cultural Pessimism” in order to increase the state of hopelessness and alienation in the people of the West as a necessary prerequisite for revolution.
• This meeting led to the founding of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University in Germany in 1923 – an organisation of Marxist and Communist-oriented psychologists, sociologists and other intellectuals that came to be known as the Frankfurt School, which devoted itself to implementing Georg Lukacs’s program.
Antonio Gramsci
• He was an Italian Marxist on an intellectual par with Georg Lukacs who arrived by analysis at the same conclusions as Lukacs and the Frankfurt School regarding the critical importance of intellectuals in fomenting revolution in the West.
• He had travelled to the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and made some accurate observations that caused him to conclude that a Bolshevik-style uprising could not be brought about by Western workers due to the nature of their Christian souls.
• Antonio Gramsci became the leader of the Italian Communist Party, which earned him a place in one of Mussolini’s jails in the 1930s, where he wrote Prison Notebooks and other documents.
• These works became available in English to Brits and Americans.
• His advice to the intellectuals was to begin a long march through the educational and cultural institutions of the nation in order to create a new Soviet man before there could be a successful political revolution.
• This reflected his observations in the Soviet Union that its leaders could not create such a new Soviet man after the Bolshevik Revolution.
• This blueprint for mind and character change made Gramsci a hero of Revolutionary Marxism in American education and paved the way for creation of the New American Child in the schools by the education cartel.
• The essential nature of Antonio Gramsci’s revolutionary strategy is reflected in Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions in the past. It will originate with the individual and the culture, and it will change the political structure as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is revolution of the New Generation.”
Wilhelm Reich
• In his 1933 book entitled The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he explained that the Frankfurt School departed from the Marxist sociology that set “Bourgeois” against “Proletariat.” Instead, the battle would be between “reactionary” and “revolutionary” characters.
• He also wrote a book entitled The sexua| Revolution which was a precursor of what was to come in the 1960s.
• His “sex-economic” sociology was an effort to harmonise Freud’s psychology with Marx’s economic theory.
• Reich’s theory was expressed in his words: “The authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in miniature. Man’s authoritarian character structure is basically produced by the embedding of sexua| inhibitions and fear in the living substance of sexua| impulses. Familial imperialism is ideologically reproduced in national imperialism…the authoritarian family…is a factory where reactionary ideology and reactionary structures are produced.”
• Wilhelm Reich’s theory, when coupled with Georg Lukacs’ sex education in Hungary, can be seen as the source for the American education cartel’s insistence on sex education from kindergarten onwards and its complete negation of the paternal family, external authority, and the traditional character structure.
• Reich’s theory encompassed other assertions that seem to have permeated American education:
- The organised religious mysticism of Christianity was an element of the authoritarian family that led to Fascism.
- The patriarchal power in and outside of man was to be dethroned.
- Revolutionary sexua| politics would mean the complete collapse of authoritarian ideology.
- Birth control was revolutionary ideology.
- Man was fundamentally a sexua| animal.
• Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism was in its ninth printing as of 1991 and is available in most college bookstores.
Erich Fromm
• Like Wilhelm Reich, Fromm was a social psychologist of the Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.
• His book Escape from Freedom, published in 1941, is an ideological companion to Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
• Fromm asserted that early capitalism created a social order that resulted in Calvin’s Theory of Predestination, which reflected the principle of the basic inequality of men which was revived in Nazi ideology.
• He asserted the authoritarian character experiences only domination or submission and “differences, whether sex or race, to him are necessarily of superiority or inferiority.”
• He asserted that “Positive Freedom” implies the principle that there is no higher power than the unique individual self; that man is the center and purpose of life; that the growth and realisation of man’s individuality is an end that can be subordinated to purposes which are supposed to have a greater dignity.
• Fromm made the real meaning of this “Positive Freedom” clear in another of his many books – The Dogma of Christ - wherein he describes a revolutionary character such as himself as the man who has emancipated himself from the ties of blood and soil, from his mother and father, and from special loyalties to state, race, party or religion.
• Fromm makes his revolutionary intent very clear in The Dogma of Christ...”We might define revolution in a psychological sense, saying that a revolution is a political movement led by people with revolutionary characters, and attracting people with revolutionary characters.”
Herbert Marcuse
• Like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, Marcuse was an intellectual of the Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.
• He has often been described as a Marxist philosopher, but he was in fact a full-blooded social revolutionary who contemplated the disintegration of Western European and American society just as Karl Marx and Georg Lukacs contemplated the disintegration of German society: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society…there is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended. These ideas are old-fashioned…What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”
• Marcuse published Eros and Civilisation in 1955, which became the founding document of the 1960s counterculture and brought the Frankfurt School into the colleges and universities of Western Europe and America.
• He asserted that the only way to escape the one-dimensionality of modern industrial society was to liberate the erotic side of man, the sensuous instinct, in rebellion against “technological rationality.”
• This erotic liberation was to take the form of the “Great Refusal,” a total rejection of the capitalist monster and its entire works, including technological reason and ritual-authoritarian language.
• He provided the needed intellectual justifications for adolescent sexua| rebellion and the slogan “Make Love, Not War.”
• His theory included the belief that the Women’s Liberation Movement was to be the most important component of the opposition, and potentially the most radical.
• His revolutionary efforts would blossom into a full-scale war by revolutionary Marxism against the European white male in the schools and colleges.
Theodor Adorno
• He was another Marxist revolutionary and a member of the Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.
• Along with others, Adorno authored The Authoritarian Personality, which was published in 1950.
• Adorno’s book was inspired by the same kind of theoretical assertions revealed in the works of Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse based on analytical studies of German society that were begun in 1923.
• The basic theme was the same. There was such a thing as an authoritarian character that was the opposite of the desired revolutionary character. This authoritarian character was a product of capitalism, Christianity, conservatism, the patriarchal family and sexua| repression. In Germany, this combination induced prejudice, anti-Semitism and fascism according to Frankfurt School theory.
• It so happened that most Western Europeans and Americans were products of capitalism, Christianity, conservatism, the patriarchal family, and sexua| repression in their youth. So Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School had a golden opportunity to execute Georg Lukacs’ and Antonio Gramsci’s program for creating social revolution in Western Europe and America instead of Germany.
• They would posit the existence of authoritarian personalities among Western Europeans and Americans with tendencies toward prejudice, and then exploit this to force the “scientifically planned re-education” of Western Europeans and Americans with the excuse that it was being done in order to eradicate prejudice.
• This scientifically-planned re-education would become the master plan for the transformation of Europe’s and America’s system of fundamental values into their opposite revolutionary values in European education so that school children would become replicas of the Frankfurt School revolutionary characters and thus create the New Western Child.
• This can be confirmed by noting that The Authoritarian Personality is the key source of the affective domain of Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives of 1964, which guided the education cartel thereafter.
Political Correctness in Higher Education
On a growing number of university campuses the freedom to articulate and discuss ideas – a principle that has been the cornerstone of higher education since the time of Socrates – is eroding at an alarming rate. Consider just one increasing trend: hundreds (sometimes thousands) of copies of conservative student newspapers have been either stolen or publicly burned by student radicals. In many cases these acts have taken place with the tacit support of faculty and administrators. The perpetrators are rarely disciplined.
While it would be easy to dismiss such demonstrations of tolerance as student pranks, these incidents are the surface manifestations of a more pervasive and insidious trend – a trend that has as its goal the destruction of the liberal arts tradition that has helped create and sustain Western civilisation.
Though some pundits have claimed that the prevalence of the ideological intolerance known as political correctness has been exaggerated, the opposite is closer to the truth. Political correctness has become so deeply ingrained in Western European and American higher education that many campuses are now dominated by an atmosphere of uncertainty and apprehension. An increasing number of dedicated students and faculty members now live in fear that their intellectual pursuit of truth will offend the Grand Inquisitors of political correctness.
The techniques of political correctness are now well known: attacks on the curriculum in the name of “multiculturalism,” the imposition of restrictive and vaguely-worded “speech codes,” and mandatory “sensitivity training” courses for juniors that are little more than systematic efforts at ideological indoctrination. But the influence of political correctness has spread in other disturbing ways.
The Origins of Political Correctness in Higher Education
While the ideology of political correctness is hardly restricted to our campuses, there is no doubt it originated there. The intellectual roots of this phenomenon stretch back over centuries. Ultimately, the origins of PC can be traced to the rise of modern ideology and its quest for power. In contrast to the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions, which stressed man’s need to understand the moral order and conform himself to it, modern ideologies have sought to dominate and control the world. In the twentieth century these ideologies gained political power in Communist states.
But in the West, ideology has not been able to make such a direct assault on our traditions of ordered liberty. Rather, radical intellectuals have sought to undermine the foundations of knowledge itself, concentrating their efforts on the transformation of the university.
The turning point in the academy came in the 1960s, when militant students launched a guerrilla attack on the traditions of Western culture and the liberal arts. Seeing that they could not gain lasting power through demonstrations alone, many of these militants opted to remain “in the system,” going on to become professors themselves. This generation of “Cultural Marxist radicals” has now become the establishment in the vast majority of our institutions of higher learning. As university head masters, deans, and department chairmen, they have set about hiring other ideologues in their own image and have instigated the repressive policies we know as political correctness. These politicised academics will be extremely difficult to dislodge from their current positions of power.
Ideology vs. Liberal Education
The stakes in this war of ideas are high, for they include the very concept of freedom itself. Western Europeans and Americans have always understood the intimate and vital connection between liberal education and political liberty. That is why political correctness is nothing less than a death blow aimed at the heart of our countries.
In his seminal book The Idea of a University, Cardinal John Henry Newman defined the “liberal arts” as a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. By way of contrast, he defined the “servile arts” as those modes of study that serve only specific, immediate ends. The liberal arts are liberating, Newman argued, because they enable men to discover the underlying principles that guide us toward wisdom and virtue.
Were he alive today, Newman would view political correctness as “servile” because its purpose is to advance a political agenda to a position of national power. Militant professors in increasing numbers are shamelessly turning their podiums into pulpits, abandoning the search for objective truth and setting about the task of indoctrinating their students.
The Devastated Curriculum
The proponents of political correctness have concentrated their efforts on the core of a liberal education, the curriculum. Their efforts will radically alter what new generations of Western Europeans and Americans will learn. In this battle the handmaiden of political correctness has been the “multicultural” movement. A number of critics have rightly pointed out that multiculturalism is more than an argument for courses that concentrate on groups that at one time were disadvantaged or oppressed. Rather, multiculturalism involves the systematic restructuring of the curriculum so as to hinder students from learning about the Western tradition. Since the ulterior motive behind political correctness is an attempt to restructure Western European and American society along egalitarian lines, it is imperative for its proponents to instill in the minds of students a thoroughgoing cultural relativism.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the politically correct assault on the curriculum is that it has occurred at many of our elite universities. Take, for example, the case of Stanford University, an institution that has long played a leadership role in American higher education. Stanford eliminated its long-standing Western civilisation requirement in 1988 and replaced it with a multicultural program known as “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” Under this new program freshmen at Stanford can just as easily study Marxist revolutionaries in Central America as they can Plato, Shakespeare, or Newton.
Stanford has also led the movement away from serious study of history. Students at Stanford, like students at all but one of the other top 50 universities in the United States, are not required to take a single course in history. Instead, they are offered a choice of courses under the heading of “American Cultures.” According to one recent graduate at Stanford, it is impossible to fulfill the “American Cultures” requirement by studying Protestantism, Irish Americans, or the American West, while courses that do fulfill the requirement include “Film and Literature: US-Mexico Border Representations” and “Contemporary Ethnic Drama.” Stanford students must also take courses in “World Cultures” and “Gender Studies” that include “Chicana Expressive Culture” and “Misogyny and Feminism in the Renaissance.”
Because elite institutions such as Stanford set an example for the rest of American and European higher education, other universities eagerly adopt these devastating assaults on the curriculum. This “trickle-down” effect will have a long-lasting impact on the way future generations of Western Europeans and Americans will be educated.
Intolerance and the Assault on Freedom
The two pillars that have traditionally sustained the liberal arts are academic freedom and freedom of speech. Without the freedom to pursue the truth and to write and speak freely, authentic scholarship is impossible. But both of these fundamental freedoms have been routinely abrogated by the establishment of speech codes, “sensitivity” classes, and a general atmosphere of fear and intimidation on campus.
For example, younger professors who have not received tenure must not only be careful of what they say, but of what they publish. Ideological university administrators in the 1990s have created an environment dominated by suspicion that is far more intense than anything spawned by anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
The most tragic victims of this age of political correctness are the students. The traditional goal of a liberal arts education – acculturation, whereby students absorb the inherited wisdom of the past – has been set aside. Increasingly, a university education today seems to involve political indoctrination. When all is said and done, political correctness substitutes smug feelings of righteousness for the traditional habits of critical thinking. One distinguished scholar recently lamented that “higher education is increasingly about acquiring attitudes and opinions that one puts on like a uniform.”
Because the academy is a relatively isolated world, it can allow politicised administrators to turn the campus into a laboratory for experiments in social transformation. When critics of political correctness have compared the atmosphere on campus to that of a totalitarian state, liberal pundits have been quick to denounce them as hysterical. Few of these pundits have any first-hand experience of daily life on campus.
Despite the institutional power of the campus radicals, forces are at work seeking to spur authentic academic reform. The academic reform movement relies on the principles of accountability, communication, and a commitment to authentic scholarship. One force of academic reform is a growing demand among parents for greater accountability from colleges and universities. At a time when studies show that students are paying more and learning less than ever before, parents in increasing numbers are becoming discriminating consumers.
Another force is independent student newspapers whose journalists publicise the antics of political correctness on campus. In many universities, campus radicals are still unchallenged in the enclosed world of the university.
However, there are alternatives. Alternative student organisations have identified abuses at all levels of academic life and engaged in investigative journalism that has been remarkably fair and accurate. Perhaps the most well-known “scoop” came from Yale University’s alternative paper, Light & Truth, a publication supported by the Collegiate Network. The editors of Light & Truth discovered that the $20 million gift of alumnus Lee Bass was not being used for its intended purpose of supporting an integrated course in Western civilisation. Their report broke open the scandal, which ended when Yale returned Mr. Bass’s money. The subsequent furor cost Yale a great deal more than Mr. Bass’s $20 million – both in monetary terms and in the loss of confidence of many Yale donors that the current administration can be trusted.
Not all the scandals uncovered by alternative campus papers are of this magnitude, but there are innumerable abuses that can be exposed by investigative student journalism. The law school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, banned representatives of the U.S. military from setting up recruiting tables there, despite receiving federal tax dollars from the Defence Department. An article about this outrageous assault on freedom that ran in both the student-run Carolina Review and in the national student newspaper published by ISI, CAMPUS, raised a hue and cry on and off campus. North Carolina legislators took immediate action and passed a bill prohibiting taxpayer-supported schools from discriminating against the military when prospective employers come to the university.
At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the UWM Times, a conservative student newspaper, revealed that a university administrator had been soliciting signatures for local Democrat candidates for public office, in direct violation of a state law forbidding university employees from engaging in political campaigning. The university refused to reprimand the administrator in question – perhaps because the chancellor himself violated both the state law and his own directive by signing one of the petitions while at work. The story was picked up by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the abuse was brought to an end.
Now that alternative newspapers and organisations dedicated to academic reform are spreading the word, the larger communities that surround our institutions of higher education are getting more involved in serious academic reform. For example, the National Association of Scholars is encouraging university trustees to take a more active and vocal role in opposing the excesses of political correctness. Efforts of this type must be expanded and intensified.
In the long run, the most direct method of defeating the inquisitors of political correctness is simply to stand up to them. Individual acts of defiance often entail serious risks: students can face star-chamber proceedings that are humiliating and demoralising while faculty can lose their bids to receive tenure. But every act of resistance causes a ripple, encouraging others to stand up to ideological intimidation. With the support of a significant number of parents, donors, and alumni, these David’s may yet slay the Goliaths who tower over them.
The Fire of True-Learning
Perhaps the strongest force for true academic reform is that which seeks to defeat the ideological depredations of political correctness by winning the war of ideas. Moreover, some colleges and universities continue to swim against the ideological tides of our time.
One of Edmund Burke’s most famous sayings is that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” For generations, Western Europeans and Americans have treated higher education with awe – a token of their faith in the liberating power of the liberal arts. But in the face of political correctness, it is time for the Western European and American public to temper its respect with a critical sensibility, and to undertake a more direct effort to call academia to account. It is time for good men and women to demand that Western European higher education live up to its best traditions and eschew the tyranny of political correctness.
Literature is, if not the most important cultural indicator, at least a significant benchmark of a society’s level of civilisation. Our nature and environment combine to form each individual mind, which in turn expresses itself in words. Literature, as the words society collectively holds up as exemplary, is then a starting point of sorts – a window into the culture.
Today’s literary field is therefore worth examining for the insights it provides into our current cultural milieu. The contemporary Western European and American literary field is awash in “isms:” Marxism, Freudianism, feminism, and so on. Most of these are the academic cousins of what is called in the common culture “Political Correctness.” Literary theorists take their particular brand of criticism and apply it to literature in an effort to find self-affirmation in a “discovered” meaning of the text. For a feminist critic, for example, no longer does Andrew Marvel’s “Upon Appleton House” have the beauty of the grounds as its theme; it speaks instead of the evils of a patriarchal line of inheritance. These “cultural critics,” so named because they critique literature based on the point of view of a particular culture, arose in the 1960s, but their schools of criticism only truly began to pick up steam with the arrival of the school of deconstruction in the 1970s.
The works of the father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, began to be translated from the French by American professor Gayatri Spivak in the mid-1970s, a time when the U.S. literary scene was ripe for its influence. The economic Marxists were alive and well on Western European and American campuses, and the cultural critics were still being fed by the radicalism of the times. Feminists had gained a foothold in the earlier decade, but they had in their meagre arsenals only a vague feeling of repression. What they lacked was philosophical backing – the courage prompted by having their own logos. The arrival of deconstruction from France provided that philosophy.
At that time, that generation of academics was doing what all academics do, telling the previous generation that it had it all wrong. In this case the rebellion was against the New Critics – so-called even now, decades after their prime. The New Critics specialised in finding the meaning of texts without regard to background information such as authorial intent, a process that had “the text is everything” as its guiding principle.
The new generation of critics set out to turn that principle on its head. Instead of “the text is everything,” the new generation claimed that “everything is text” and turned to analysing anything and everything in relation to the literary work. If a poet wrote a poem that included a female character, the critics would look into the poet’s relationship with his mother, his wife, his sister and so on in an effort to offer up an interpretation of the work. This could have (and often did have) the positive effect of using biographic information to gain new understanding of the work; however, these new interpretations were not attempts to discern the true meaning of the work (as the New Critics had done) or even to discover the author’s intended meaning (as traditional readings attempted). This new generation of critics instead became prime practitioners of what is known in literary circles as “cultural criticism.” They strained to view literature from the “woman’s point of view” or the “victims” or the “radical minority point of view.” Their attempts were not to find meaning – they were influenced too greatly by relativists for that – but to find sexism, racism or “homophobia” in the works of male, European or heterosexual authors.
Derridean deconstruction became a tool for these cultural critics. Simply stated, deconstruction is a school of thought that posits that words have no meaning. Instead, words have “traces” of meaning. The meaning of a word is continually disappearing, leaving us with only the memory, or trace, of what that meaning once was.
Once they realised the power of this school of thought, the cultural critics embraced it readily, for here they discovered a method of attack on the traditional interpretations of literary works. They used deconstruction to remove traditional meaning and replaced it with new meaning. That meaning was the Political Correctness that infests our society today. For example, after the traditional meaning of “How Do I Love Thee?” has been destabilised in the process described above, a feminist critic might come along and - in the absence of a stable traditional interpretation – declare that the poem is “really” concerned with how women in nineteenth-century England were conditioned to see themselves as secondary to men.
The intelligentsia had forgotten its literature in its haste to promote its politics.
Unfortunately, that has not stopped the cultural critics from indoctrinating this new generation in feminist interpretation, Marxist philosophy and so-called “queer theory.” Requirements for reading Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and other dead white males are disappearing, to be replaced by options to take studies in “The Roles of Women in the Renaissance” (an excuse to lament the sexism of the past) or “The Bible as Literature” (a course designed to denigrate the Bible as cleverly crafted fiction instead of God’s truth).
The reliable saviour of the intelligentsia is the common man and his common sense. Common sense dictates that words do mean things, and as deconstruction posits otherwise it will be relegated to the margins of society. Sadly, its effects will linger on – it has given a sense of validity to cultural criticism and established a marketplace for its ideas.
Perhaps no aspect of Political Correctness is more prominent in Western European life today than feminist ideology. Is feminism, like the rest of Political Correctness, based on the cultural Marxism imported from Germany in the 1930s? While feminism’s history in Western Europe certainly extends longer than sixty years, its flowering in recent decades has been interwoven with the unfolding social revolution carried forward by cultural Marxists.
Where do we see radical feminism ascendant? It is on television, where nearly every major offering has a female “power figure” and the plots and characters emphasise inferiority of the male and superiority of the female. It is in the military, where expanding opportunity for women, even in combat positions, has been accompanied by double standards and then lowered standards, as well as by a decline in enlistment of young men, while “warriors” in the services are leaving in droves. It is in government-mandated employment preferences and practices that benefit women and use “sexual harassment” charges to keep men in line. It is in colleges where women’s gender studies proliferate and “affirmative action” is applied in admissions and employment. It is in other employment, public and private, where in addition to affirmative action, “sensitivity training” is given unprecedented time and attention. It is in public schools, where “self awareness” and “self-esteem” are increasingly promoted while academic learning declines. And sadly, we see that several European countries allow and fund free distribution of contraceptive pills combined with liberal abortion policies.
While the radical feminist movement is embraced by present day Political Correctness ideology, derived from cultural Marxism, feminism as such does have earlier roots. Feminism was conceived and birthed in the 1830s, in the generation experiencing the first stage of the industrial revolution. Women, who for centuries had shared the challenges of surviving in an agrarian life, were becoming part of a middle-class gentry with more time and energy to spend writing newspaper articles and novels for their “sisters.” The initial stages of the feminisation of European culture had started.
These feminists, radical in their time, supported women’s rights, egalitarianism, anti-colonialism, pacifism and other causes which we now observe in popular culture. In contrast to today’s radical feminists, social feminists of the 1890s and early 20th century were of a less totalitarian character. They stood for women’s suffrage but also advocated the strengthening of the family.
Today, the feminisation of European culture, moving rapidly since the 1960s continues to intensify. Indeed, the present-day radical feminist assault through support for mass Muslim immigration has a political parallel to the their anti-colonial efforts. This current assault is in part a continuation of a century-old effort to destroy traditional European structures, the very foundation of European culture.
There is no doubt in the media that the “man of today” is expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda. He is a staple of Hollywood, the television network sitcoms and movies, and the political pundits of talk shows. The feminisation is becoming so noticeable that newspapers and magazines are picking up on it. For example, the Washington Times and National Review magazine combined to tell us that “behind the breezy celebration of ‘guy stuff’ in today’s men’s magazine lurks a crisis of confidence. What does it mean to be masculine in the 90s?” It is revealed that today’s men’s magazines (Esquire, GQ, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Men’s Journal, Details, Maxim, Men’s Perspective)”are all geared to a new feminised man….” Some examples? The old masculine attitude toward personal appearance is disappearing. If memory serves, our fathers’ acts of personal upkeep were mostly limited to shaving and putting on a tie. According to Lowry:
It’s hard to imagine [them] interested in articles on ‘A Flat Belly for the Beach’ (Verge), or the three new men’s fragrances for the fall season (GQ), or even ‘The New Fall Suit’ (Esquire). But somewhere along the line men became less concerned with being strong and silent, and more worried about making themselves pretty.
Indeed the feminisation of European culture is nearly completed. And the last bastion of male domination, the police force and the military, is under assault.
If this “feminisation” trend were driven only by radical feminists seeking to pull down a perceived male-dominated hierarchy, there would be more hope that the cycles of history would move Europe toward a stable accommodation between men and women. But the drive is deeper, and it will not be satisfied by any accommodation. The radical feminists have embraced and been embraced by the wider and deeper movement of cultural Marxism. For dedicated Marxists, the strategy is to attack at every point where an apparent disparity leaves a potential constituency of “oppressed” victim groups – Muslims, women etc. Cultural Marxists, men and women, are making the most of it, and the theory developed by the Frankfurt School provides the ideology.
The Frankfurt School theorised that the authoritarian personality is a product of the patriarchal family. This idea is in turn directly connected to Engels’s The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, which promotes matriarchy. Furthermore, it was Karl Marx who wrote in The Communist Manifesto about the radical notion of a “community of women.” He also, in 1845, wrote disparagingly in his The German Ideology of the idea that the family was the basic unit of society.
The concept of the “authoritarian personality” is not just to be interpreted as a model for the conduct of warfare against prejudice as such. It is a handbook for psychological warfare against the European male, to render him unwilling to defend traditional beliefs and values. In other words, the aim was to emasculate him. Undoubtedly the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University meant this, as it used the term “psychological techniques for changing personality.”
The “authoritarian personality,” studied in the 1940s and 1950s by Western Europeans and American followers of the Frankfurt School, prepared the way for such psychological warfare against the male gender role. The aim was promoted by Herbert Marcuse and others under the guise of “women’s liberation” and in the New Left movement in the 1960s. Evidence that psychological techniques for changing personality are intended to focus in particular on the emasculation of the European male has also been provided by Abraham Maslow, founder of “third force humanist psychology” and promoter of psychotherapeutic techniques in public school classrooms. He wrote that “the next step in personal evolution is a transcendence of both masculinity and femininity to general humanness.”
Cultural Marxist stalwarts apparently know exactly what they want to do and how they plan to do it. They have actually already succeeded in accomplishing much of their agenda.
How did this situation come about in European universities? Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed that it slipped past traditional academics almost unobserved until it was too late. It occurred so “quietly” that when they “looked up”, postmodernism was upon them with a vengeance. “They were surrounded by such a tidal wave of multicultural subjects such as radical feminism, deconstructed relativism as history and other courses” which undermine the perpetuation of Western civilisation. Indeed, this tidal wave slipped by just as Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School had envisioned – a quiet revolution propagating a European hate ideology with the goal of destroying Western civilisation and which was: anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-nationalist, anti-patriot, anti conservative, anti-hereditarian, anti-ethnocentric, anti-masculine, anti-tradition, and anti-morality.
“Cultural Marxism,” as preached by the Frankfurt School has thus spurred the widely popular and destructive concepts of “affirmative action,” “multiculturalism” and “diversity.” One can’t escape these terms today. These concepts have destroyed every defensive structure of European society which has laid the foundation for the Islamisation of Europe.
Conclusions
Critical Theory as applied mass psychology has led to the deconstruction of gender in the European culture. Following Critical Theory, the distinction between masculinity and femininity will disappear. The traditional roles of the mothers and fathers are to be dissolved so that patriarchy will be ended. Children are not to be raised according to their biological genders and gender roles according to their biological differences. This reflects the Frankfurt School rationale for the disintegration of the traditional family.
Thus, one of the basic tenets of Critical Theory was the necessity to break down the traditional family. The Frankfurt School scholars preached:
Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change.
The transformation of European culture envisioned by the cultural Marxists goes further than pursuing gender equality. Embodied in their agenda is “matriarchal theory,” under which they purpose to transform European culture to be female-dominated. This is a direct throwback to Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School member who considered matriarchal theory in psychoanalytic terms. In 1933, he wrote in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” that matriarchy was the only genuine family type of “natural society.”
Richard Bernstein has written in his book on multiculturalism, “the Marxist revolutionary process for the past several decades in Europe and America has centered on race and sex warfare rather than class warfare” as in earlier times. This reflects a scheme more total than economics to restructure the society. As the social revolutionaries readily proclaim, their purpose is to destroy the hegemony of white males. To accomplish this, all barriers to the introduction of more women and minorities throughout the “power structure” are to be brought down by all means available. Laws and lawsuits, intimidation, and demonising of white males as racists and sexists are pursued through the mass media and the universities. The psycho–dynamic of the revolutionary process aims for psychic disempowerment – decapitation – of those who oppose.
The US’s founders recognised three primal values in the Declaration of Independence, and they ranked them properly: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If the order of these fundamental human rights is switched – with happiness before liberty or liberty before life – we come to moral chaos and social anarchy.
This very condition is what Judge Robert Bork describes as “modern liberalism.” He defines its characteristics as “‘radical egalitarianism’ (equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and ‘radical individualism’ (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification).”
Judge Bork also identifies radical feminism as “the most destructive and fanatical” element of this modern liberalism. He further describes radical feminism as “totalitarian in spirit.”
Most Western Europeans and Americans do not realise that they, through their institutions, are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the continuing destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new one. The revolutionaries are New Age Elite Boomers. They now control the public institutions in Western Europe and the United States. Their “quiet” revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearing completion. A key, or even a dominant element because purportedly it represents that largest political and social constituency among their potential followers, is feminism. The Marxist movement in its “quiet” cultural latter-day phase is seemingly sweeping all before it. With its sway over the media, fully in the grip of feminism, it is hard to discern the stirrings of a counter-culture. The current cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites, the New Totalitarians, are the most dangerous generation in Western history. Not only have they managed to destroy fundamental structures of European society. They are allowing millions of Muslims to colonise Europe. In just five decades Muslim populations have increased from a few thousand to more than 25 million.Who will rise to challenge Political Correctness? The fate of European civilisation depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism. Even more, they must resourcefully oppose the wider grip of Political Correctness, the cultural Marxism for which radical feminism is only one avenue of attack.
This is the sixth and final chapter in the Free Congress Foundation’s book on Political Correctness, or – to call it by its real name – cultural Marxism. It is a short bibliographical essay intended not as an exhaustive resource for scholars but as a guide for interested citisens who want to learn more about the ideology that is taking over Western Europe and America.
To understand Political Correctness or so called cultural Marxism and the threat it poses it is necessary to understand its history, particularly the history of the institution most responsible for creating it, the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School, or the Institute for Social Research as it was formally known, was established at Frankfurt University in Germany in 1923. This fact alone is important, because it tells us that Political Correctness is not merely a leftover of the European student rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Another fact from that long-ago year, 1923, is equally significant: the intended name for the Frankfurt School was the Institute for Marxism. The Institute’s father and funder, Felix Weil, wrote in 1971 that he “wanted the Institute to become known, and perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism as a scientific discipline…” Beginning a tradition Political Correctness still carries on, Weil and others decided that they could operate more effectively if they concealed their Marxism; hence, on reflection, they chose the neutral-sounding name, the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung). But “Weil’s heartfelt wish was still to create a foundation similar to the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow – equipped with a staff of professors and students, with libraries and archives – and one day to present it to a German Soviet Republic.” In 1933, this disguised “Institute for Marxism” left Germany and reestablished itself in New York City, where in time it shifted its focus to injecting its ideology into Western European and American society.
The most readable English-language history of the Frankfurt School is Martin Jay’s book, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1932 - 1950 (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1973 – new edition in 1996). This book is in print in paperback and can be ordered through any bookstore. The reader should be aware that Jay’s book is, in the words of another work on the Frankfurt School, a “semiofficial” history, which is to say that it is largely uncritical. Like virtually all other English-language authors on the Institute, Jay is on the political left. Nonetheless, the book provides a solid factual introduction to the Frankfurt School, and the reader should have little trouble discerning in it the roots and origins of today’s Political Correctness.
In his first chapter, “The Creation of the Institut für Sozialforschung and Its First Frankfurt Years,” Jay lays bare the Institute’s Marxist origins and nature, and equally its efforts to conceal both: “The original idea of calling it the Institut für Marxismus (Institute for Marxism) was abandoned as too provocative, and a more Aesopian alternative was sought (not for the last time in the Frankfurt School’s history).” Of the Institute’s first director, Carl Grünberg, Jay writes, “Grünberg concluded his opening address by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology. Just as liberalism, state socialism, and the historical school had institutional homes elsewhere, so Marxism would be the ruling principle at the Institut.” Jay’s first chapter also introduces the Institute’s critical shift that laid the basis for today’s Political Correctness, a.k.a. cultural Marxism: “if it can be said that in early years of its history the Institut concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic substructure, in the years after 1930 its prime interest lay in its cultural superstructure.”
The second chapter, “The Genius of Critical Theory,” gets at the heart of the “Critical Studies” departments that now serve as the fonts of Political Correctness on college campuses. All of these are branches and descendants of the Critical Theory first developed in the 1930s by the Frankfurt School. The term “Critical Theory” is itself something of a play on words. One is tempted to ask, “OK, what is the theory?” The answer is, “The theory is to criticise.” Jay writes, “Critical Theory, as its name implies, was expressed through a series of critiques of other thinkers and philosophical traditions…Only by confronting it in its own terms, as a gadly of other systems, can it be fully understood.” The goal of Critical Theory was not truth, but praxis, or revolutionary action: bringing the current society and culture down through unremitting, destructive criticism. According to Jay, “The true object of Marxism, Horkheimer argued (Max Horkheimer succeeded Carl Grünberg as director of the Institute in July, 1930), was not the uncovering of immutable truths, but the fostering of social change.”
The central question facing the Institute in the early 1930s was how to apply Marxism to the culture. The title of Jay’s third chapter gives the answer: “The Integration of Psychoanalysis.” Here, Jay’s book falls down to some extent, in that it does not offer a clear understanding of how the Institute integrated Marx and Freud. The answer appears to be that Freud’s later critiques were made conditional on a capitalist, bourgeois order: a revolutionary, post-capitalist society could “liberate” man from his Freudian repression. Here again one sees key aspects of Political Correctness emerging, including a demand for sexua| “liberation” and the attack on “patriarchal” Western culture.
If the precise nature of the blending of Marx and Freud is left open by Jay, his next chapter makes the blend’s application clear: “The Institute’s First Studies of Authority.” The Institute left Germany for New York in 1933 because the Nazis came to power in Germany. Not surprisingly, one of the Institute’s first tasks in New York was to oppose Nazism. It did so largely by concocting a psychological “test” for an “authoritarian personality.” Supposedly, people with this authoritarian personality were likely to support Nazism. Both the concept and the methodology were doubtful at best. But the Institute’s work laid down an important tool for the left, namely a notion that anyone on the right was psychologically unbalanced. And it marked a key turning for the Institute in the birth of Political Correctness in Western Europe and America, in that the empirical research the studies demanded was done on Western Europeans and Americans. Ultimately, the result was Institute member Theodor Adorno’s vastly influential book, The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950.
Jay’s fifth chapter, “The Institute’s Analysis of Nazism,” continues the theme of the “authoritarian personality.” But his sixth, “Aesthetic Theory and the Critique of Mass Culture,” provides an answer to the question of why most “serious” modern art and music is so awful. It is intended to be. Theodor Adorno was the Institute’s lead figure on high culture – he began life as a music critic and promoter of Schönberg – and his view was that in the face of the “repressiveness” of bourgeois society, art could only be “true” if it were alienating, reflecting the alienated society around it. Jay quotes Adorno: “A successful work is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.”
Adorno despised the new mass culture – film, radio, and jazz – in what seems to be a case of missed opportunity: today, the entertainment industry is the single most powerful promoter of Political Correctness. Another key Frankfurt School figure, Walter Benjamin, did see the potential: “he paradoxically held out hope for the progressive potential of politicised, collectivised art.” At some point, someone – the question of who lies beyond the boundaries of Jay’s book – put Benjamin’s perception together with the Frankfurt School’s general view, which Jay summarises as “the Institut came to feel that the culture industry enslaved men in far more subtle and effective ways than the crude methods of domination practiced in earlier eras.”
In the remainder of the book, Jay traces the (sort of) empirical work of the Institute in the 1940s, which was beset by the same problems as their earlier survey “research,” and follows the Institute in its return to Frankfurt, Germany after World War II. But by this point, the reader will already have the picture. He will have seen how Marxism was translated from economic into cultural terms; discerned the themes of sexua| liberation, feminism, “victims” and so on that make up today’s Political Correctness; and found in Critical Theory the origins of the endless wailing about “racism, sexism and homophobia” that “PC” pours forth. One key piece of history is missing: “an analysis of Marcuse’s influential transmission of the Frankfurt School’s work to a new Western European and American audience in the 1960s,” as Jay puts it in his epilogue. Also, Jay curiously passes over with only the most minimal discussion the effective move of the Institute, in the persons of Horkheimer and Adorno, to Los Angeles during the war. Did the connections they built there play any role in injecting the Frankfurt School’s philosophy into Western European and American film and, after the war, television? Jay does not touch upon the subject.
But for the reader new to the Frankfurt School as the source of today’s Political Correctness, Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination offers a solid base. The book concludes with an extensive (though not annotated) bibliography of works by and about the Frankfurt School.
As to other accessible works about the Frankfurt School, the definitive modern work in German has recently been translated into English: The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance by Rolf Wiggershaus, (translated by Michael Robertson, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, first paperback edition 1995). This covers much of the same ground as Martin Jay’s book, although it also follows the Institute from its post-war return to Germany up to Adorno’s death in 1969. Wiggershaus is more detailed than Jay, and, although he too is on the left politically, he is more critical than Jay. In the book’s Afterword, Wiggershaus offers a brief look (and a hostile one) at some German conservative critiques of the Frankfurt School. A picture emerges that will seem familiar to Western Europeans and Americans entrapped in the coils of Political Correctness:
Since the publication in 1970 of his book The Poverty of Critical Theory, Rohrmoser has promulgated, in constantly varying forms, the view that Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer were the terrorists’ intellectual foster-parents, who were using Cultural Revolution to destroy the traditions of the Christian West. Academics such as Ernst Topitsch and Kurt Sontheimer, who saw themselves as educators and liberal democrats, followed in Rohrmoser’s footsteps. In 1972 Topitsch, a critical rationalist who was Professor of Philosophy in Graz, had stated that behind the slogans of “rational discussion” and “dialogue free of domination” there was being established at the universities “a distinct terrorism of political convictions such as never existed before, even under Nazi tyranny.”
• The Frankfurt School by T.B. Bottomore (Tavistock, London, 1984). Another history written by a sympathiser; you are better off with Jay or Wiggershaus.
• “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’” by Michael Minnicino, in Fidelio, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 1992 (KMW Publishing, Washington, DC) One of the few looks at the Frankfurt School by someone not a sympathiser, this long journal article explains the role of the Institute for Social Research in creating the ideology we now know as “Political Correctness.” Unfortunately, its value is reduced by some digressions that lack credibility.
• Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis (Random House, New York 1974) Angela Davis, a leading American black radical and Communist Party member, was described by Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse as “my best student.” She also studied in Frankfurt under Adorno. This book shows the link between the Institute for Social Research and the New Left of the 1960s through the eyes of a key participant.
• The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism by Andrew Arato (Seabury Press, New York, 1979). The author is, as usual, a sympathiser, but this work shows the key role Lukacs played in the thinking of the Frankfurt School and, later, the New Left.
• The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute by Susan Buck-Morss (Free Press, New York, 1977). An important book on the relationship of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory to the New Left.
• Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas by David Held (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980). Yet another history by a fan of the Frankfurt School, but valuable for its discussion of the impact of Nietzsche on key Frankfurt School figures.
• Adorno: A Political Biography by Lorenz Jager (translated by Stewart Spencer, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004) This recent study of Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School’s most important “creative spirit,” offers a highly readable introduction to the origins of Political Correctness, perhaps the best available to the layman. Lorenz Jager is an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, one of Germany’s most influential newspapers. He is no uncritical admirer of the Frankfurt School, and thus offers a balanced treatment of Adorno instead of the usual hagiography.
Beyond these secondary works lies the vast literature produced by members of the Frankfurt School itself. Some key works were written in English, and many of those written in German are available in translation. As is usually the case with Marxist works, the prose style and vocabulary are often so convoluted as to make them almost unreadable. Further, the refusal of the Frankfurt School to make its own future vision plain led many of its members to write in aphorisms, which adds yet another layer of impenetrableness.
One work, however, is of such importance that it must be recommended despite its difficulty: Eros and Civilisation by Herbert Marcuse (Beacon Press, Boston, first paperback edition in 1974 and still in print). Subtitled A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, this book holds center stage for two reasons. First, it completes the task of integrating Marx and Freud. While the Marxism is sotto voce, the whole framework of the book is in fact Marxist, and it is through the framework that Freud is considered. Second, Eros and Civilisation and its author were the key means of transmission by which the intellectual work of the Frankfurt School was injected into the student rebellion of the 1960s. This book became the bible of the young radicals who took over Western European and America’s college campuses from 1965 onward, and who are still there as faculty members.
In brief, Eros and Civilisation urges total rebellion against traditional Western culture – the “Great Refusal” – and promises a Candyland utopia of free sex and no work to those who join the revolution. About two-thirds of the way through the book, Marcuse offers this summary of its arguments:
Our definition of the specific historical character of the established reality principle led to a re-examination of what Freud considered to be universal validity. We questioned this validity in view of the historical possibility of the abolition of the repressive controls imposed by civilisation. The very achievements of this civilisation seemed to make the performance principle obsolete, to make the repressive utilisation of the instincts archaic. But the idea of a non-repressive civilisation on the basis of the achievements of the performance principle encountered the argument that instinctual liberation (and consequently total liberation) would explode civilisation itself, since the latter is sustained only through renunciation and work (labour) – in other words, through the repressive utilisation of instinctual energy. Freed from these constraints, man would exist without work and without order; he would fall back into nature, which would destroy culture. To meet this argument, we recalled certain archetypes of imagination which, in contrast to the culture-heroes of repressive productivity, symbolised creative receptivity. These archetypes envisioned the fulfilment of man and nature, not through domination and exploitation, but through release of inherent libidinal forces. We then set ourselves the task of “verifying” these symbols – that is to say, demonstrating their truth value as symbols of a reality beyond the performance principle. We thought that the representative content of the Orphic and Narcissistic images was the erotic reconciliation (union) of man and nature in the aesthetic attitude, where order is beauty and work is play.
Marcuse continues after this summary to lay out the erotic content of the “reality beyond the performance principle,” i.e., a new civilisation where work and productivity were unimportant. “The basic experience in this (aesthetic) dimension is sensuous rather than conceptual,” that is, feelings are more important than logic: “The discipline of aesthetics installs the order of sensuousness as against the order of reason.”
“In German, sensuousness and sensuality are still rendered by one and the same term: Sinnlichkeit. It connotes instinctual (especially sexual) gratification… No longer used as a full-time instrument of labour, the body would be re-sexualised… (which) would first manifest itself in a reactivation of all erotogenic zones and, consequently, in a resurgence of pre-genital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy. The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed – an instrument of pleasure. This change in the value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organised, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.”
This in a book which Marcuse dedicated to Sophie Marcuse, his wife of fifty years!
It is easy to see how this message – “If it feels good, do it” – published in 1955 resonated with the student rebels of the 1960s. Marcuse understood what most of the rest of his Frankfurt School colleagues did not: the way to destroy Western civilisation – the objective set forth by George Lukacs in 1919 – was not through abstruse theory, but through sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Marcuse wrote other works for the new generation that spawned the New Left – One Dimensional Man (1964), Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965), An Essay on Liberation (1969), Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972). But Eros and Civilisation was and remains the key work, the one that put the match to the tinder.
Other central works by members of the Frankfurt School include:
• The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno (Harper, New York, 1950). This book is the basis for everything that followed that portrayed conservatism as a psychological defect. It had enormous impact, not least on education theory.
• Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (trans. By John Cumming, Verso, London, 1979). A complex philosophical work written during World War II largely in response to Nazism (and extensively devoted to discussions of anti-Semitism), this work seeks to find a kernel of “liberating” reason in the ruins of the Enlightenment.
• Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life by Theodor Adorno (trans. E.F.N. Jophcott, New Left Books, London, 1974). A book of aphorisms, almost entirely incomprehensible, but the effective conclusion of Adorno’s work.
• Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm (Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1941, still in print in paperback) Fromm was the Institute’s “happy face,” and this book was often required reading at colleges in the 1960s. The thesis is that man’s nature causes him to throw his freedom away and embrace fascism unless he “masters society and subordinates the economic machine to the purposes of human happiness,” i.e., adopts socialism. At this point Fromm was in the process of breaking away from the Institute and his subsequent works cannot be considered as part of the Frankfurt School corpus.
• Eclipse of Reason (Oxford University Press, New York, 1947). Essentially a sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment, the book is heavily the work of Adorno and other Frankfurt School personages, although only Horkheimer’s name appeared on it. Its contents are based on a series of lectures Horkheimer gave at Columbia University in 1944. The prose style is surprisingly readable, but the contents are odd; there is throughout a strong nostalgia, which was normally anathema to the Frankfurt School. The key chapter, “The Revolt of Nature,” reflects a strange Retro anarchism: “The victory of civilisation is too complete to be true. Therefore, adjustment in our times involves an element of resentment and suppressed fury.”
• Critical Theory: Selected Essays by Max Horkheimer (trans. Matthew O’Connell, Seabury Press, New York, 1972). The essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory” is especially important.
This small bibliography will be enough to get an interested reader started; the full literature on and by the Frankfurt School is immense, as the bibliographies in Jay’s and Wiggershaus’s books attest. What has been missing from it, at least in English, is a readable book, written for the layman, that explains the Frankfurt School and its works in terms of the creation of Political Correctness. This short volume is at least a start in filling that gap.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
http://www.freecongress.org/centers/cc/pcessay.aspx
“Who controls the present, controls the past.”
George Orwell
George Orwell
1.1Historical revisionism (negationism)
Historical revisionism is the attempt to change commonly held ideas about the past[1]. Negationism is the denial of historic crimes.
From; Islam and the West, Bernard Lewis:
We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was. All this is very dangerous indeed, to ourselves and to others, however we may define otherness -- dangerous to our common humanity. Because, make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future.
Ironically though, this harsh criticism of state sanctioned revisionism comes from an Armenian Genocide denier who has downplayed the brutality of the Ottoman Empire considerably. However, Lewis is seen as a moderate Orientalist frequently sought by many mainstream policy makers including the current Bush administration. Given the ignorance with which it is treated, the history of the last 1400 year Islamic Jihad against non-Muslims and Europe comprises one of the most radical forms of historical negationism. The First chapter of this book is therefore dedicated in memory of this ongoing Jihad. We must strive to combat and reverse state sanctioned falsification process by preparing for the time when the true history of Islam will be re-introduced. When our current European regimes fall (and our current systems based on multiculturalism will collapse) within the next 150 years it will allow us to once again re-introduce and make use of the true history of Islam, including: Islamic history, Islamic jurisprudence, and true descriptions of Jihad, Dhimmitude and other falsified aspects of Islam. The essential aim of this is to prevent historical amnesia by preserving this true uncensored history.
Since the creation of Islam in the 7th century and to up to this day, the Islamic Jihad has systematically killed more than 300 million non Muslims and tortured and enslaved more than 500 million individuals. Since 9/11 2001, more than 12 000 Jihadi terrorist attacks have occurred around the world which have led to the death of one or more non-Muslims [2] per attack. In other words; there are around 150 deadly Jihadi attacks per month around the world. This trend will continue as long as there are non-Muslim targets available and as long as Islam continues to exist.
I must admit, when I first started the study on Islamic history and Islamic atrocities more than 3 years ago I really had my doubts about the “politically correct” information available. I started to scratch the surface and I was shocked as I uncovered the vast amount of “ugly, unknown” truths concerning Islamic atrocities. There is a common misconception regarding Islam and Christianity. A lot of people believe today that Christianity still is and was as evil as Islam?! I can attest to the fact that this is absolutely incorrect. Jihadi motivated killings, torture and enslavement count for more than 10 times as Christian motivated killings. However, the politically correct Western establishments want us to think otherwise.
The essence of multiculturalism is that all cultures and religions are “equal”. In this context our Western governments launched a great “campaign of deception” against their own people with the goal of creating a falsified version of the Islamic and European Civilisation, in order to make them equal. According to them, this is needed in order to successfully implement multiculturalism. Islamists, Arab Nationalists and Marxist theorists have been at the forefront of falsifying our history since WW2. Especially Edward Said's book Orientalism published in 1978, have been the driving force in this process.
In the past, Europe has had a stereotypical view of Islam just as Islam has had a stereotypical view of us - and these views are largely hostile. For century after century Islam was an enormous threat to what might loosely be called Christendom. It shaped every aspect of European history and was directly responsible for Europe’s colonial empires. Up till around 1750 they were a dangerous and direct competitor to our interests. Gibbon writing in the 1780s was the first to think that the danger had passed. On a local scale the threat lasted even longer. Barbary pirates ravaged the coast of England up till the 1830s carting off coastal villages into slavery and at even later dates on the west coast of Ireland and Iceland. And this was at the height of the British Empire. More than 1,5 million Europeans have been enslaved since the first Jihadi invasion of Andalusia, most of which were brought to North Africa.
Encyclopedia Britannica
Fact: Encyclopedia Britannica was first published in 1768. The contributors often came from other countries and included some of the world's most respected authorities in their fields.
Western state sanctioned negationism or “politically motivated historical revisionism” on the subject of Islam started for the first time in Great Britain in the late 19th century. The process was politically motivated with the goal of creating a good foundation for British-Muslim cooperation and trade.
During the Russo-Turkish War[3], Russia succeeded in defeating the Islamic Ottoman Empire. In 1878, after the “Congress of Berlin[4]”, Disraeli-Great Britain decided to strike a deal with the Ottomans promising to protect them militarily from Russia for “thirty pieces of silver” which in this case was Cyprus. In order to improve British-Ottoman relationships it was decided to introduce a wide scale revision of Encyclopedia Britannica (10th edition and onward) and other source materials which up to then had described Islam, Muslims and Islamic practices as “evil”. This was the beginning of the official European historical falsification process.
To understand this we need to study British-Russian relations:
The super power of the 19th century, Great Britain, waged a "territorial war" with the other potential super power: Russia. Where interests of the two crossed was - Balkans (then under Turkish occupation).
It would be most natural that Russia should have the influence in the area. Most of the subdued Balkan nations (Serbs, Greeks, Rumanians, and Bulgarians) are Eastern Orthodox - like Russians. That did not fit British interests. That is how Britain allied itself with Turkey and invented the myth of the Muslim tolerance.
When Turks cut throats, raped women and stole children of Balkan Christians - it was OK for the Brits - it was an expression of tolerance... As long as Russians did not get influence in the Balkans.
Examples of falsification and apologist rhetoric include:
· Exaggerated claims of Muslim cultural and scientific contributions.
· The Ottoman Empire was tolerant.
· The, “Jewish experience” in the Ottoman Empire “...was a calm, peaceful, and a fruitful one..”.
· Balkan Christian boys could acquire great social advancement through “recruitment” into the Ottoman devshirme system.
· The Armenian Genocide never happened. It was rather a struggle between two peoples for the possession of a single homeland.
· Muslim Andalusia (Moorish Spain) is often pointed out by Muslim apologists as a kind of multicultural wonderland, in which Jews and Christians were permitted by the Islamic government to rise through the ranks of learning and government administration.
· Jihad means personal struggle
· Islam is a religion of peace
· Christianity and Islam are equal in terms of historic atrocities
· Maronite Christians (Lebanese Christians) falsely claim to be victims.
Examples of systematic deletion/ignoration of important issues
The Western European governments have sanctioned deleting and ignoring large chunks of our history, including censorships of school curriculum’s on the following fields:
· Hindu Kush, the largest Genocide in the history of man
· Armenian Genocides
· Greek Genocides
· Assyrian Genocides
· Coptic Genocides
· The past Jihads, torture and enslavement of Christians and other non-Muslim peoples in the Middle East and Asia
· The ongoing Jihads, torture and enslavement of Christian and other non-Muslim peoples or individuals in the Middle East and Asia
· Jus Primae Noctis - Officially sanctioned rape under the Ottoman Empire
· The West’s unwillingness to prevent or defend Christian Lebanon against Jihadi invasions by the Global Islamic Ummah (among them many Muslim countries including Iran, Syria, Egypt, Jordan). This Jihad eventually lead to the fall of the Christian state of Lebanon. In 1911 there were 80% Christians in Lebanon, today there are less than 25% left, a minority who are still being persecuted)
· What the Crusades Were Really Like
· European Slaves, Arab Masters – more than 1,5 million Europeans were enslaved
Examples of anti Western propaganda in our school curriculums
· Falsified information about the Crusades (it was a defensive campaign not offensive)
· Western colonial history (anti Western bias, this (primarily financial exploitation) was nothing compared to the 1400 years of Islamic Jihad which resulted in countless genocides of more than 300 million people, and the enslavement and forceful conversion of more than 300 million)
The above information serves as reminder why Muslim apologists and the European state falsification process has to be fought and defeated.
Unfortunately for us, more than 95% of today’s Journalists, editors, publishers are pro-Eurabians (support European multiculturalism). The same goes for 85% of Western European politicians and more than 90% of EU parliamentarians.
Also, we shouldn’t forget that it’s the EU [5] that is the driving force behind European revisionism on Islam in Europe.
From The Eurabia Code:
Euro-Arab Dialogue Symposia conducted in Venice (1977) and Hamburg (1983) included recommendations that have been successfully implemented…
4. The necessity of cooperation between European and Arab specialists in order to present a positive picture of Arab-Islamic civilisation and contemporary Arab issues to the educated public in Europe.
The Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) is a political, economic and cultural institution designed to ensure perfect cohesion between Europeans and Arabs. Its structure was set up at conferences in Copenhagen (15 December 1973), and Paris (31 July 1974). The principal agent of this policy is the European Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, founded in 1974. The other principal organs of The Dialogue are the MEDEA Institute and the European Institute of Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Cooperation, created in 1995 with the backing of the European Commission.
In an interview with Jamie Glazov of Frontpage Magazine, Ye'or explained how "in domestic policy, the EAD established a close cooperation between the Arab and European media television, radio, journalists, publishing houses, academia, cultural centers, school textbooks, student and youth associations, tourism. Church interfaith dialogues were determinant in the development of this policy. Eurabia is therefore this strong Euro-Arab network of associations - a comprehensive symbiosis with cooperation and partnership on policy, economy, demography and culture."
Eurabia's driving force, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, was created in Paris in 1974. It now has over six hundred members - from all major European political parties - active in their own national parliaments, as well as in the European parliament. France continues to be the key protagonist of this association.
One of the documents Bat Ye'or was kind enough to send me (which she mentions in the French version of her book about Eurabia but not in the English version) is the Common Strategy of the European Council - Vision of the EU for the Mediterranean Region, from June 19th 2000.
It includes many recommendations, such as:
"to elaborate partnership-building measures, notably by promoting regular consultations and exchanges of information with its Mediterranean partners, support the interconnection of infrastructure between Mediterranean partners, and between them and the EU, take all necessary measures to facilitate and encourage the involvement of civil society as well as the further development of human exchanges between the EU and the Mediterranean partners. NGOs will be encouraged to participate in cooperation at bilateral and regional levels. Particular attention will be paid to the media and universities [my emphasis]."
The Strategy also wants to "pursue, in order to fight intolerance, racism and xenophobia, the dialogue between cultures and civilisations."
The Algiers Declaration [11] for a Shared Vision of the Future was made after a Congress held in Algeria in February 2006. The document states that: "It is essential to create a Euro-Mediterranean entity founded on Universal Values" and that "It is crucial to positively emphasise all common cultural heritage, even if marginalised or forgotten." A Common Action Plan draws up a large number of recommendations on how to achieve this new Euro-Mediterranean entity. Among these recommendations are:
· Adapt existing organisations and the contents of media to the objectives of the North- South dialogue, and set up a Euro-Mediterranean journalism centre
· Set up a network jointly managed by the Mediterranean partners in order to develop "a harmonised education system" [A "harmonised education system" between the Arab world and Europe? What does that include? Do I want to know? Will they tell us before it is a fait accompli?]
These agreements, completely rewriting European history books to make them more Islam-friendly and gradually silencing "Islamophobia" as racism, are being implemented even now.
In June 2005 in Rabat [14], Morocco, a conference was held on "Fostering Dialogue among Cultures and Civilisations." The Conference was jointly organised by UNESCO, the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (ISESCO), the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (ALECSO), the Danish Centre for Culture and Development (DCCD) and the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures (Alexandria, Egypt).
Among the recommendations that were raised by Mr. Olaf Gerlach Hansen, Director General of the DCCD: "We are interested in new actions in the media, in culture and in education. These proposals include:
- Concrete initiatives to develop "intercultural competencies" in the training of new generations of journalists - Concrete initiatives for links and exchanges between journalists, editors, media-institutions, which encourage intercultural co-operation" - Concrete initiatives for curriculum development through new educational materials and revision of existing textbooks.
Although not stated directly, one may reasonably assume that among the "negative stereotypes" to be removed from the textbooks used to teach history to European schoolchildren are any and all references to the 1300 years of continuous Jihad warfare against Europe. These recommendations were accepted and incorporated into The Rabat Commitment.
The ECRI called on the EU member states to adopt measures that would effectively outlaw any serious debate about Islam and introduce pro-Muslim "affirmative action." European countries should:
· Modify curricula to prevent "distorted interpretations of religious and cultural history" and "portrayal of Islam on perceptions of hostility and menace";
· Encourage debate in the media on the image which they convey of Islam and on their responsibility to avoid perpetuating prejudice and bias.
“When a land rejects her legends, Sees but falsehoods in the past; And its people view their Sires in the light of fools and liars, 'Tis a sign of its decline and its glories cannot last. Branches that but blight their roots yield no sap for lasting fruits.”
Rudyard Kipling
Europe has its own full-fledged brand of negationism: a movement to deny the large-scale and long-term crimes against humanity committed by Islam. This movement is led by Islamic apologists and Marxist academics, and followed by all the politicians, journalists and intellectuals who call themselves secularists. Similar to the Turkish negationism regarding the Armenian genocide, the European negationism regarding the terrible record of Islam is fully supported by the establishment (The EU, Western European governments). It has nearly full control of the media and dictates all state and government parlance concerning the communal problem (more properly to be called the Islam problem).
Its techniques are essentially the same as those of negationists elsewhere:
1. Head-on denial: The crassest form of negationism is obviously the simple denial of the facts. This is mostly done in the form of general claims, such as: "Islam is tolerant", "Islamic Spain was a model of multicultural harmony", "the anti-Jewish hatred was unknown among Muslims until Zionism and anti-Semitism together entered the Muslim world from Europe". Since it is rare that a specific crime of Islam is brought to the public's notice, there is little occasion to come out and deny specific crimes. Exceptions are the Armenian genocide, officially denied in Turkey and the entire Muslim world.
The Rushdie affair was the occasion for negationism on a grand scale. There happens to be an unambiguous answer to the question: "Is it Islamic to kill those who voice criticism of the Prophet?" According to the media and most experts, the answer was definitely: no. According to the basic traditions of Islam, it was: yes. Mohammed as well as his immediate successors have killed critics, both in formal executions and in night-time stabbings. In Islamic law, the Prophet's example is valid precedent. At most there could be some quarrelling over the procedure: some jurists thought that Rushdie should first be kidnapped to an Islamic country and given a chance to recant before an Islamic court, though the ayatollahs have ruled that no amount of remorse can save Rushdie. If he stands by his book, even the so-called moderates think he must be killed. Islamic law punishes both apostasy and insults to the Prophet with the death penalty: twice there is no escape for Rushdie. Yet, the outside public was told by many experts that killing Rushdie is un-Islamic.
Flat denial will work very well if your grip on the press and education media is sufficient. Otherwise, there is a danger of being shown up as the negationist one really is. In that case, a number of softer techniques are available.
2. Ignoring the facts: This passive negationism is certainly the safest and the most popular. The media and textbook-writers simply keep the vast corpus of inconvenient testimony out of the readers' view. This includes most of the information about the systematic slaughter, torture and enslavement of non-Muslims in historical and present context (including Genocides and Dhimmitude), demographic developments which show the systematic and gradual Muslim takeover of societies (Including Kosovo, Lebanon and now in many Western European countries) and al-Taqiyya/ketman – Ummah - Quranic abrogation and Jihads importance in Islam. Other essential facts are also ignored like Saudi Arabia’s role in spreading traditional Islam (so called Islamic theofascism or Wahhabism which the Eurabians like to refer to it). They have failed to inform the people of Europe that Saudi Arabia have spent more than 87 billion USD abroad the past two decades propagating “true Islam”. The bulk of this funding goes to the construction and operating expenses of thousands of mosques, madrassas and Muslim cultural centers throughout the world. These Islamic institutions are now found in every single country in the West - all over Western Europe.
3. Minimising the facts: If the inconvenient fact is pointed out that numerous Muslim chroniclers have reported a given massacre of unbelievers themselves, one can posit a priori that they must have exaggerated to flatter their patron's martial vanity - as if it is not significant enough that Muslim rulers felt flattered by being described as mass-murderers of infidels.
Apart from minimising the absolute size of Islamic crimes, there is the popular technique of relative minimising: make the facts look smaller by comparing them with other, carefully selected facts. Thus, one can say that "all religions are intolerant", which sounds plausible to many though it is patently false: in the Roman Empire only those sects were persecuted which had political ambitions (Jews when they fought for independence, Christians because they sought to take over the Empire and outlaw all other religions, as they effectively did), while the others enjoyed the status of religio licita; similarly with the Persian Empire and many other states and cultures.
An oft-invoked counterweight for the charge-sheet against Islam, is the fanaticism record of Christianity. It is indeed well-known that Christianity has been guilty of numerous temple destructions and persecutions. But the reason for this fanaticism is found in the common theological foundation of both religions: exclusivist prophetic monotheism. The case against Christianity is at once a case against Islam. Moreover, in spite of its theologically motivated tendency to intolerance, Christianity has had to go through the experience of "live and let live" because in its formative period, it was but one of the numerous sects in the pluralist Roman Empire.
Islam never had this experience, and in order to bring out its full potential of fanaticism, Christianity has needed the influence of Islam on a few occasions. Thus, it is no coincidence that Charlemagne, who defeated the Saxons by force, was the grandson of Charles Martel, who defeated the Islamic army in Poitiers; no coincidence either that the Teutonic knights who forcibly converted the Balts, were veterans of the Crusades, i.e. the campaign to liberate Palestine from Islam; nor is it a coincidence that the Spanish Inquisition emerged in a country that had needed centuries to shake off Islamic oppression. Finally, Christianity is, by and large, facing the facts of its own history, though it’s still struggling with the need to own up the responsibility for these facts.
An even more general way of drowning Islamic fanaticism in relativist comparisons is to point out that after all - every imperialistically motivated war has been less than gentle. That may well be true, but then, we are not setting up cults for the Genghis Khans of this world. A religion should contribute to man's transcending his natural defects like greed and cruelty, and not sanction and glorify them.
4. Whitewashing: When one cannot conceal, deny or minimise the facts, one can still claim that on closer analysis, they are not as bad as they seem. One can call right what is obviously wrong. This can go very far, e.g. in his biography of Mohammed, Maxime Rodinson declared unashamedly that the extermination of the Medinese Jews by Mohammed was doubtlessly the best solution. In numerous popular introductions to Islam, the fact that Islam imposes the death penalty on apostates (in modern terminology: that Islam opposes freedom of religion in the most radical manner) is acknowledged; but then it is explained that "since Islam was at war with the polytheists, apostasy equalled treason and desertion, something which is still punished with death in our secular society". All right, but the point is precisely that Islam chose to be at war with the traditional religion of Arabia, as also with all other religions, and that it has made this state of war into a permanent feature of its law system.
5. Playing up unrepresentative facts: A popular tactic in negationism consists in finding a positive but uncharacteristic event, and highlighting it while keeping the over-all picture out of the public's view. For instance, a document is found in which Christians, whose son has forcibly been inducted in the Ottoman Janissary army, express pride because their son has made it to high office within this army. The fact that these people manage to see the bright side of their son's abduction, enslavement and forced conversion, is then used to prove that non-Muslims were quite happy under Muslim rule, and to conceal the fact that the devshirme, the forcible conversion and abduction of one fifth of the Christian children by the Ottoman authorities, constituted a constant and formidable terror bewailed in hundreds of heart-rending songs and stories.
For another example, negationists always mention cases of collaboration by non-Muslims (German support in the Armenian Genocide etc.) to suggest that these were treated as partners and equals and that Muslim rule was quite benevolent; when in fact every history of an occupation, even the most cruel one, is also the history of a collaboration. As has been pointed out, the Nazis employed Jewish guards in the Warsaw ghetto, disprove the Nazi oppression of the Jews.
6. Denying the motive: Negationists sometimes accept the facts, but disclaim their hero's responsibility for them. Thus, Mohammed Habib tried to exonerate Islam by ascribing to the Islamic invaders alternative motives: Turkish barbarity, greed, the need to put down conspiracies brewing in temples. In reality, those rulers who had secular reasons to avoid an all-out confrontation with the unbelievers were often reprimanded by their clerical courtiers for neglecting their Islamic duty. The same clerics were never unduly worried over possible secular motives in a ruler's mind as long as these prompted him to action against the unbelievers. At any rate, the fact that Islam could be used routinely to justify plunder and enslavement (unlike, say, Buddhism), is still significant enough.
7. Smokescreen: Another common tactic consists in blurring the problem by questioning the very terms of the debate: "Islam does not exist, for there are many Islam’s, with big differences between countries etc." It would indeed be hard to criticise something that is so ill- defined. But the simple fact is that Islam does exist: it is the doctrine contained in the Quran, normative for all Muslims, and in the Hadith, normative for at least all Sunni Muslims. There are differences between the law schools concerning minor points, and of course there are considerable differences in the extent to which Muslims are effectively faithful to Islamic doctrine, and correspondingly, the extent to which they mix it with un-Islamic elements.
8. Blaming fringe phenomena: When faced with hard facts of Islamic fanaticism, negationists often blame them on some fringe tendency, now popularly known as fundamentalism or Wahhabism. This is said to be the product of post-colonial frustration, basically foreign to genuine Islam. In reality, fundamentalists like Maulana Maudoodi and Ayatollah Khomeini knew their Quran better than the self-deluding secularists who brand them as bad Muslims. What is called fundamentalism or Wahhabism is in fact the original Islam, as is proven by the fact that fundamentalists have existed since long before colonialism, e.g. the 13th century theologian Ibn Taimiya, who is still a lighthouse for today's Maudoodis, Turabis, Madanis and Khomeini’s. When Ayatollah Khomeini declared that the goal of Islam is the conquest of all non- Muslim countries, this was merely a reformulation of Mohammed's long-term strategy and of the Quranic assurance that God has promised the entire world to Islam. In the case of communism, one can shift the blame from Marx to Lenin and Stalin, but Islamic terrorism has started with Mohammed himself.
9. Arguments ad hominem: If denying the evidence is not tenable, one can always distort it by means of selective quoting and imputing motives to the original authors of the source material; or manipulating quotations to make them say the opposite of the over-all picture which the original author has presented. Focus all attention on a few real or imagined flaws in a few selected pieces, and act as if the entire corpus of evidence has been rendered untrustworthy. To extend the alleged untrustworthiness of one piece of evidence to the entire corpus of evidence, it is necessary to create suspicion against those who present the evidence: the implication is that they have a plan of history falsification, that this plan has been exposed in the case of this one piece of evidence, but that it is only logical that such motivated history falsifiers are also behind the concoction of the rest of the alleged evidence.
If the discussion of inconvenient evidence cannot be prevented, disperse it by raising other issues, such as the human imperfections which every victim of crimes against humanity inevitably has (Jewish harshness against the Palestinians, Hindu untouchability); describe the demand for the truth as a ploy to justify and cover up these imperfections. If the facts have to be faced at all, then blame the victim. If people ignore or refute your distorted version of history, accuse them of distortion and political abuse of history. Slander scholars whose testimony is inconvenient; impute political or other motives to them in order to pull the attention away from the hard evidence they present.
10. Slogans: Finally, all discussion can be sabotaged with the simple technique of shouting slogans: prejudice, myth, "racism/Islamophobia". Take the struggle from the common battlefield of arguments into the opponent's camp: his self-esteem as a member of the civilised company that abhors ugly things like prejudice and Islamophobia. After all, attack is the best defence.
After summing up the forms of negationism, we have to look into its causes. The following factors come to mind:
1. Orientalism and Islamology: After the medieval Christian pamphlets against "Mohammed the impostor" whose media campaigns ended in the late 19th century, not much has been published schematising the ideological and factual crimes of Islam. Books on, say, "slavery in Islam" are extremely rare: the raw information that could fill such a publication will have to be found in more general publications, in which Islam is only referred to in passing, often without the author's realising the implications for an evaluation of Islam. It is often said (when introducing "refutations of prejudice") that people always associate Islam with intolerance; but finding a book specifically devoted to the subject of Islamic intolerance will be harder. How many tens of millions have been killed by Islam simply because they were non-Muslims? Nobody has yet tabulated the figures available to prepare a general estimate. We can only notice that critical research of Islam is not exactly encouraged, and that there is an increasing tendency to self-censorship regarding Islam criticism. In part, this is due to a much delayed reaction against the long-abandoned Christian polemical approach.
Now that Islamic Studies departments in Europe are increasingly manned by Muslims and sponsored by Islamic foundations and states, the climate for critical studies of Islam is only worsening. When comparing the first (pre-World War 2) edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden, Netherlands) with the new edition, it is striking how critical observations have been ironed out. But even in the past, Islam has enjoyed a rather favourable treatment in academic circles. Thus, about Islamic slavery the prominent Dutch Islamologist C. Snouck-Hurgronje wrote in 1887 (i.e. thirty years after the Americans had waged a war to impose the abolition of slavery in their southern states, and some seventy years after its abolition in the colonies): "For most slaves their abduction was a blessing... They themselves are convicted that it is their enslavement that has for the first time made them human."
The political context of the growth phase of Islamology provides a part of the explanation. Mature colonialism was not waging war against Islam, but sought the co-operation of the established social forces in the colonised populations. The British co-operation with the Indian Muslims is well- known; it is epitomised by the founding in 1906 of the Muslim League, which sought to "inculcate loyalty to the British Empire in the Indian Muslims". In French West Africa, in the same period, Islam was accepted as a factor of social stability, and General Lyautey pursued a dream of a Franco-Islamic synthesis culture in Algeria. In the 1930s, in the last European attempt at fresh colonisation, the Italian Fascists actively supported the spread of Islam in the Horn of Africa. But already since 1853 the colonial powers had been supporting the Caliphate against a Christian power, Russia, esp. in the Crimean War (a mistaken war if ever there was one), and this had strongly contributed to climate of benevolence towards the Muslim culture.
2.Church policy: Christianity has for centuries waged a lively polemic against Islam. Recently, this criticism has subsided. Worse, polemical works by clerics have been withdrawn or kept unpublished (such as, early this century, Father Henri Lammens' paper arguing that Mohammed's revelations were a psychopathological phenomenon). One reason is that the Church is aware of the similarity between Jesus' and Mohammed's missions, so that a criticism of the foundations of Islam may backfire on Christianity. The second reason is the fear that Christians in the Muslim world would have to pay for even ideological attack on Islam (that is why Church polemists save their sharpest words for harmless religions like Hinduism). This fear also motivates other Church policies, such as the non-recognition of the state of Israel.
Meanwhile, the face of the Church has changed. A small but significant event in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was the deletion from the Saints' calendar of Our Lady of the Redemption of Slaves, whose feast was on 24 September. In the Middle Ages, there was a special clerical order and a whole fund-raising network devoted to the redemption ("buying back") of Christian slaves held in Barbary. Until the 19th century, coastal villages in Italy had watchtowers to alarm the people when a ship of the slave-catching Barbarese pirates was in sight. The terror of Islamic slavery was a permanent feature of Christian history from the 7th till the 19th century, but now the Church is working hard to erase this memory.
Today, its pastors are the most fervent pleaders for the rights of Islam. Muslims in Europe are for them a substitute for the disappearing parish members. Separate Christian institutions, whose reason of existence is being questioned, find a new legitimacy in the fact that Islam in its turn is also opening separate schools, charities and even political parties. Islam has become a sister religion regularly praised as a religion of peace.
3.Anti-colonialism: One of the ideological guidelines of anti-colonialism was: "Of the (ex) colonised, nothing but good must be said." Therefore, mentioning the colonialism and mass slavery practised by the Muslims had become undesirable.
Add to this general taboo the warning that Islam criticism effectively implies support to Israel, described by Maxime Rodinson as a "colonial settler-state". If one acknowledges that Islam has always oppressed the Jews, one accepts that Israel was a necessary refuge for the Jews fleeing not only the European but also the Islamic variety of anti-Judaism. Let us not forget that decolonisation was followed immediately by renewed discrimination of and attacks on the Jewish and Christian minorities, and that those Jews who could get out have promptly fled to Israel (or France, in the case of Algeria). It is no coincidence that these Sephardic Jews are mostly supporters of the hard- liners in Israel.
4.The enemy's enemy is a friend: Many people brought up as Christians, or as nominal Hindus, never outgrow their pubescent revolt against their parents' religion, and therefore automatically sympathise with every rival or opponent of the religion they have come to despise. Because Islam poses the most formidable threat, they like it a lot.
5.Leftism: In this century, Islam has come to be advertised as a naturally leftist "religion of equality". This line has been developed by Muslim apologists such as Mohammed Habib, and they have even taken it as a rationalisation of the irrational claim that Mohammed was the "last Prophet": after all, as the "prophet of equality", he had brought the ultimate message upon which no improvement is possible. Sir Mohammed Iqbal, one of the fathers of Pakistan, had claimed that "Islam equals Communism plus Allah". The Iranian Ayatollahs, by contrast, and most of the vocal Muslims after the Soviet-Islamic war in Afghanistan, have restated the orthodox position that Communism is un-Islamic, not only because of its atheism but also because of its rejection of free enterprise; the current claim is that Islam provides a "better form of equality" than Communism.
Even while Communists were slaughtered in Islamic Iran, and even while political analysts classify the Islamist movements as "extreme rightist", most leftists have kept on cultivating some sympathy for Islam. During the Lebanese civil war, they fed us news stories about "leftist Muslims, rightist Christians", "Islamo-progressive, Christiano- reactionnaire".
Negationism in Europe is practised with the most prowess by historians and writers who are under the spell of Marxism. Lenin had wanted to use the Muslims against the French and British colonialists. Modern Leftists with Marxist sympathies see Islam as an ally against Israel and the US.
6.Rightist traditionalism: There is also a rightist sympathy for Islam. An obvious point of agreement is of course anti-Judaism. A subtler basis for sympathy is the so-called traditionalist current, which was represented by the converts Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon, and still has a following: it has been idealising Islam and esp. Sufism as the preserver of the age-old philosophia pernnis against modernity. In Russia, some Slavophile anti-Western groups now seek an alliance with Islam against the impending Americanisation of their society. In the U.S., Christian fundamentalists and Islamic organisations are increasingly creating common platforms to speak out against trends of moral decay (abortion, p 0 r n o g r a p h y, etc.). Some of these phenomena of traditionalist alliance-building are quite respectable, but they are nevertheless conducive to Islam negationism.
7.Economic Liberalists: Liberalists see Muslim immigration as an endless source of cheap labour and seek to defend them as often as they can. In addition, they support EU membership for Turkey.
8.Liberal Islam: In the Islamic world, it is unwise to attack Islam head-on. Yet, sometimes people in those countries feel the need to oppose Islamic phenomena and campaigns, such as the witch-hunt on un-Islamic cultural remnants, violence on the non-Muslims, extreme forms of gender inequality. In order to have a chance, these people have to use Islamic language:
"Mohammed was actually against polygamy", "violence against others is in conflict with the tolerance which Mohammed has taught us", "and respect for other cultures is part of Islamic tradition".
In order to press their humanist point, they have to formally identify with Islam and lie about its contents.
Many Muslims have started to believe their own rhetoric. If you point out to them that the Quran teaches intolerance and war against the unbelievers in the most explicit terms, many of them will sincerely protest, and not know what to say when you show them the Quranic passages concerned. There is no reason to doubt that the Moroccan authoress Fatima Mernissi genuinely believes in her own argument that the Quranic instructions on how to organise your polygamous household are to be read as an abolition of polygamy (albeit in veiled terms, because Allah, the same Allah Almighty who went straight against the prevalent customs of idolatry and pluralism, had to be careful not to offend the spirit of the times). Many nominal Muslims have outgrown Islamic values and developed a commitment to modern values, but their sentimental attachment to the religion imbibed in their childhood prevents them from formally breaking with Islam and makes them paint a rosy picture of it.
Among Muslim spokesmen, is certainly not the fundamentalists who are the most active proponents of negationism. It is liberals like Asghar Ali Engineer who deny that Islam ordains war on the infidels. It is those who are acclaimed by Europeans as being good "secular" Muslims. An Islam that wants to be secular cannot be and is therefore dishonest and untrue to itself. Unfortunately, a tolerant Islam is a contradiction, and the “creation” of a tolerant past for Islam to appease the position of liberal Muslims, is a lie.
9. Muslims differing from Islam: Many people have a Muslim neighbour who is a fine man, and from this empirical fact they conclude: Islam cannot be all that bad considering our friend Mustapha. This one empirical fact gives them a tremendous resistance against all information about Islamic intolerance. People usually reduce the world to their own sphere of experience, and general historical facts of Islamic fanaticism are not allowed to disturb the private experience of good neighbourly relations.
Many nominal Muslims have retained some vague generalities about morality from the Quran, and they normally go by their own conscience and sensibility without ever developing the doctrinally prescribed hostility towards non-Muslims. These good people, although bad Muslims, can ignore but not change Islamic doctrine. They cannot prevent the Quranic message of hatred from infecting at least some of the more susceptible among their brethren and perhaps even their children or grandchildren in the future.
There have certainly been situations where sane Muslims have calmed down their more riotous brethren, and such individuals do make a real difference. We should not make the Islamic mistake of judging people simply by their belonging or not belonging to the Muslim community, rather than by their human qualities. But the fact remains that the presence of a doctrine of intolerance as the official and identity-defining ideology of a community, exerts a constant pressure tending towards separatism and confrontation. The alleviating presence of the humanist factor even within the Muslim community should not be used to deny the ominous presence of Islamic factors.
"Those who deny history are bound to repeat it": While Nazism is simply too stained to get a second chance, Islam is certainly in a position to force unbelievers into Dhimmitude (as is happening in dozens of Muslim countries in varying degrees), and even to wage new jihads, this time with weapons of mass-destruction. Those who are trying to close people's eyes to this danger by distorting or concealing the historical record of Islam are effective accomplices in the injustice and destruction which Islam is sure to cause before the time of its dissolution comes. Therefore, I consider it a duty of all intellectuals to expose and denounce the phenomenon of negationism whenever it is practised.
Another example of falsified history:
H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, (London, 1867-1877) described the Muslim tyranny and barbary in great detail.
100 years later, several Western countries had implemented several reforms of historical falsification already:
Stanley Lane-Poole, Medieval India under Mohammedan Rule, 712-1764, G.P. Putnam's Sons. New York, 1970. p. 9-10 which was very Muslim friendly. Describing the invasions as almost a peaceful and friendly gesture…
The motives of these campaigns must be seen in context. Britain/US/France/Germany was now pro Arab/pro Muslim in the cold war environment where you saw India/Russia/China on the axis of ”evil”. Western historians after 1900 was therefore not allowed to write anything negative about their new Muslim allies. Most of western sources after year 1900 are therefore falsified. The source material is basically a compilation of falsified fairytales with the only objective of appeasing a strategic ally which proved to be an advantage in the war against the Soviets. It’s a well known fact that British (Western historians) before 1900 had a totally different view than post 1900 historians.
Sources:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negationism
2. http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Turkish_War_(1877%E2%80%931878)
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_berlin
5. See: The Eurabia Code
6. Alex Alexiev, "Terrorism: Growing Wahhabi Influence in the United States", Testimony before the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, 26 June 2003.
By Fjordman
Kari Vogt, historian of religion at the University of Oslo, has stated that Ibn Warraq’s book “Why I am Not a Muslim” is just as irrelevant to the study of Islam as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are to the study of Judaism. She is widely considered as one of the leading expert on Islam in Norway, and is frequently quoted in national media on matters related to Islam and Muslim immigration. People who get most of their information from the mainstream media, which goes for the majority of the population, will thus be systematically fed biased information and half-truths about Islam from our universities, which have largely failed to uphold the ideal of free inquiry. Unfortunately, this situation is pretty similar at universities[1] and colleges[2] throughout the West[3].
London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS[4]), scene to a growing number of anti-Semitic incidents from an increasingly pro-Islamic campus, issued a threat to one of its Jewish students to cease his protests against anti-Semitism at the University. Gavin Gross, an American, had been leading a campaign against the deterioration of conditions for Jewish students at SOAS, which is part of the University of London. SOAS had witnessed an escalation of anti-Jewish activity, in both severity and frequency. At the beginning of the year, the Islamic Society screened a video which compared Judaism with Satanism.
Meanwhile, in a move to “promote understanding between Islam and the West,” Saudi Arabia donated about SR13 million to a leading British museum[5]. The officials said the money from Prince Sultan would pay for a new Saudi and Islamic gallery, which would help to portray Islamic culture and civilisation in right perspectives. It would also help fund scholarships for Saudi students at Oxford University.
The Saudis and other oil-rich Arabs are busy buying influence over what Westerners hear about Islam. Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, a member of the Saudi Royal Family, is an international investor currently ranked among the ten richest persons in the world. He is known in the USA for a $10 million check he offered to New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in October 2001 for the Twin Towers Fund. Mayor Giuliani returned the gift when he learned that the prince had called for the United States to “re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.”
Prince Talal is also creating a TV channel, Al-Resalah[6], to target American Muslims. He already broadcasts in Saudi Arabia. In 2005, Bin Talal bought 5.46% of voting shares in News Corp, the parent of Fox News. In December 2005 he boasted to Middle East Online about his ability to change what viewers see on Fox News[7]. Covering the riots in France[8] that fall, Fox ran a banner saying: “Muslim riots.” Bin Talal was not happy. “I picked up the phone and called Murdoch [...] [and told him] these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty,” he said. “Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots.”
A survey conducted by Cornell University found that around half of Americans had a negative view of Islam[9]. Addressing a press conference at the headquarters of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), Paul Findley, a former US Congressman, said that the cancer of anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic sentiments was spreading in American society and required corrective measures to stamp out. It was announced that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) would be launching a massive $50 million media campaign involving television, radio and newspapers. “We are planning to meet Prince Alwaleed ibn Talal for his financial support to our project. He has been generous in the past.”
The World Assembly of Muslim Youth, founded by the nephew of Osama Bin Laden in the US, is sharing offices with the Islamic Society of North America and the Islamic Centre of Canada. WAMY Canada runs[10] a series of Islamic camps and pilgrimages for youth. US Special Agent Kane quoted from a publication prepared by the WAMY that said: “Hail! Hail! O Sacrificing Soldiers! To Us! To Us! So we may defend the flag on this Day of Jihad, are you miserly with your blood?! And has life become dearer to you? And staying behind sweeter?” According to him, 14- to 18-year-olds were the target audience for these teachings.
Harvard University and Georgetown University received $20 million donations[11] from Prince bin Talal to finance Islamic studies. “For a university with global aspirations, it is critical that Harvard have a strong program on Islam that is worldwide and interdisciplinary in scope,” said Steven E. Hyman, Harvard’s provost. Georgetown said it would use the gift – the second-largest it has ever received – to expand its Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Martin Kramer, the author of “Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America,” said: “Prince Alwaleed knows that if you want to have an impact, places like Harvard or Georgetown, which is inside the Beltway, will make a difference.”
Georgetown professor John Esposito, founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, has, probably more than any other academic, contributed to downplaying[12] the Jihadist threat to the West. Kramer states that[13] during his early days in the 1970s, Esposito had prepared his thesis under his Muslim mentor Ismail R. Faruqi, a Palestinian pan-Islamist and theorist of the “Islamisation of knowledge.” During the first part of his career, John L. Esposito never studied or taught at a major Middle East center. In the 80s, he published books such as Islam: The Straight Path, the first of a series of favorable books on Islam. In 1993, Esposito arrived at Georgetown University, and has later claimed the status of “authority” in the field.
In 2003, officials from the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) recognised Esposito[14] as the current “Abu Taleb of Islam” and the Muslim community, not only in North America but also worldwide. In appreciation of his “countless effort towards dispelling myths about Muslim societies and cultures,” Dr. Sayyid Syeed, Secretary General of the ISNA compared the role of Esposito to that of Abu Taleb, Muhammad’s non-Muslim uncle who gave unconditional support to the Muslim community in Mecca at a time when it was still weak and vulnerable.
The rise to prominence of Esposito symbolises the failure of critical studies of Islam – some would argue critical studies of just about anything non-Western – in Western Universities in the 1980s and 90s. Frenchman Olivier Roy as early as 1994 published a book entitled The Failure of Political Islam and wrote of the Middle East as having entered the stage of “post-Islamism.” As Martin Kramer puts it, “the academics were so preoccupied with “Muslim Martin Luthers” that they never got around to producing a single serious analysis of bin Laden and his indictment of America. Bin Laden’s actions, statements, and videos were an embarrassment to academics who had assured Americans that “political Islam” was retreating from confrontation.
At least US Universities are noticing bin Laden now. Bruce Lawrence, Duke professor[15] of religion, has published a book of Osama bin Laden’s speeches and writings. “If you read him in his own words, he sounds like somebody who would be a very high-minded and welcome voice in global politics,” Lawrence said. Lawrence has also claimed that Jihad means “being a better student, a better colleague, a better business partner. Above all, to control one’s anger.”
Others believe we make too much fuss about this whole Jihad business. John Mueller, Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University, in the September 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs[16] asked whether the terrorist threat to the USA had just been made up: “A fully credible explanation for the fact that the United States has suffered no terrorist attacks since 9/11 is that the threat posed by homegrown or imported terrorists – like that presented by Japanese Americans during World War II or by American Communists after it – has been massively exaggerated.” “The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected since 9/11 may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most, and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists.”
Lee Kaplan joined a conference[17] of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, in San Francisco: “Free copies of a glossy newsmagazine called the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs were being distributed to the academics in attendance. Most people, upon seeing the publication, might assume it was similar to Newsweek or Time.” “What most people don’t know is that the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine and Web site – indeed, the entire organisation behind it – are funded by Saudi Arabia, a despotic regime that has been quietly buying its way onto every campus in America, particularly through Middle East Studies centers in the U.S.”
“I met Nabil Al-Tikriti, a professor from the University of Chicago.” “I’d invite those academic Middle East scholars who actually support America’s war effort overseas and security needs here at home. People like Daniel Pipes or Martin Kramer.” I continued, “Why aren’t they here at the MESA Conference?” “They’d be shouted down,” replied Al-Tikriti.
Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald shares his worries about MESA[18]: “As an organisation, MESA has over the past two decades slowly but surely been taken over by apologists for Islam.” “The apologetics consists in hardly ever discussing Jihad, dhimmitude, or indeed even introducing the students to Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira.” “Books on the level of [Karen] Armstrong and Esposito are assigned, and feelgood nonsense like Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World.”
“No member of MESA has done as much to make available to a wide public important new work on Muhammad, on the origins of the Qur’an, and on the history of early Islam, as that lone wolf, Ibn Warraq. No one has done such work on the institution of the dhimmi as that lone louve, Bat Ye’or[19]. It is an astounding situation, where much of the most important work is not being done in universities, because many university centers have been seized by a kind of Islamintern International.”
Hugh Fitzgerald is right. The Legacy of Jihad, one of the most important works on Jihad to appear in recent years, was written by Andrew Bostom, a medical doctor who was dissatisfied with much of the material available on the subject following the terror attacks in 2001. Bat Ye’or, perhaps the leading expert on the Islamic institution of dhimmitude, is self-taught. And Ibn Warraq has written several excellent books on the origins of the Koran and the early days of Islamic history while remaining outside of the established University system. This is all a great credit to them personally, but it is not a credit to the status of Western Universities.
It is difficult to understand why American or Western authorities still allow the Saudis to fund what is being taught about Islam to future Western leaders, years after several Saudi nationals staged the worst terror attack in Western history. The United States didn’t allow Nazi Germany to buy influence at US Universities. Although the Soviet Communists had their apologists in the West as well as paid agents, the US never allowed the Soviet Union to openly sponsor its leading colleges. So why are they allowing Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations to do so? The Saudis are enemies, and should be banned from exerting direct influence over our Universities and major media. It is a matter of national security.
Still, although bribes and Saudi oil money represent a serious obstacle to critical Western studies of Islam, they do by no means make up all of the problems. Quite a few academics are so immersed with anti-Western ideology that they will be happy to bash the West and applaud Islam for free.
Few works have done more to corrupt critical debate of Islam in Western institutions for higher learning during the past generation than the 1979 book Orientalism by Edward Said. It spawned a veritable army of Saidists, or Third World Intellectual Terrorism[20] as Ibn Warraq puts it. According to Ibn Warraq, “the latter work taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity – “were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists, we would be great once more” – encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam.”
“The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have called ‘intellectual terrorism,’ since it does not seek to convince by arguments or historical analysis but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism, Eurocentrism” on anybody who might disagree. “One of his preferred moves is to depict the Orient as a perpetual victim of Western imperialism, dominance and aggression. The Orient is never seen as an actor, an agent with free-will, or designs or ideas of its own.”
Ibn Warraq also criticises Said for his lack of recognition of the tradition of critical thinking in the West. Had he delved a little deeper into Greek civilisation and history, and bothered to look at Herodotus’ great history, Said “would have encountered two features which were also deep characteristics of Western civilisation and which Said is at pains to conceal and refuses to allow: the seeking after knowledge for its own sake.” “The Greek word, historia, from which we get our “history,” means “research” or “inquiry,” and Herodotus believed his work was the outcome of research: what he had seen, heard, and read but supplemented and verified by inquiry.”
“Intellectual inquisitiveness is one of the hallmarks of Western civilisation. As J.M. Roberts put it, “The massive indifference of some civilisations and their lack of curiosity about other worlds is a vast subject. Why, until very recently, did Islamic scholars show no wish to translate Latin or western European texts into Arabic? Why when the English poet Dryden could confidently write a play focused on the succession in Delhi after the death of the Mogul emperor Aurungzeb, is it a safe guess that no Indian writer ever thought of a play about the equally dramatic politics of the English seventeenth-century court? It is clear that an explanation of European inquisitiveness and adventurousness must lie deeper than economics, important though they may have been.”
Martin Kramer points out the irony that novelist Salman Rushdie praised Said’s courage: “Professor Said periodically receives threats to his safety from the Jewish Defense League in America,” said Rushdie in 1986, “and I think it is important for us to appreciate that to be a Palestinian in New York – in many ways the Palestinian – is not the easiest of fates.” But as it happened, Said’s fate became infinitely preferable to Rushdie’s, after Khomeini called for Rushdie’s death in 1989. It was ironic that Rushdie, a postcolonial literary lion of impeccable left-wing credentials, should have been made by some Muslims into the very personification of Orientalist hostility to Islam.”
In his essay The Intellectuals and Socialism, F.A. Hayek noted already decades ago that “Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is a construction of theorists” and intellectuals, “the secondhand dealers in ideas.” “The typical intellectual need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. The class does not consist of only journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists.” It also “includes many professional men and technicians, such as scientists and doctors.”
“These intellectuals are the organs which modern society has developed for spreading knowledge and ideas, and it is their convictions and opinions which operate as the sieve through which all new conceptions must pass before they can reach the masses.”
“The most brilliant and successful teachers are today more likely than not to be socialists.” According to Hayek, this is not because Socialists are more intelligent, but because “a much higher proportion of socialists among the best minds devote themselves to those intellectual pursuits which in modern society give them a decisive influence on public opinion.” “Socialist thought owes its appeal to the young largely to its visionary character.” “The intellectual, by his whole disposition, is uninterested in technical details or practical difficulties. What appeal to him are the broad visions.”
He warns that “It may be that as a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.” “Does this mean that freedom is valued only when it is lost, that the world must everywhere go through a dark phase of socialist totalitarianism before the forces of freedom can gather strength anew?” “If we are to avoid such a development, we must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.”
In his book Modern Culture, Roger Scruton[21] explains the continued attraction of left-wing ideology in this way:
“The Marxist theory is as form of economic determinism, distinguished by the belief that fundamental changes in economic relations are invariably revolutionary, involving a violent overthrow of the old order, and a collapse of the political “super-structure” which had been built on it. The theory is almost certainly false: nevertheless, there is something about the Marxian picture which elicits, in enlightened people, the will to believe. By explaining culture as a by-product of material forces, Marx endorses the Enlightenment view, that material forces are the only forces there are. The old culture, with its gods and traditions and authorities, is made to seem like a web of illusions – ‘the opiate of the people,’ which quietens their distress.”
Hence, according to Scruton, in the wake of the Enlightenment, “there came not only the reaction typified by Burke and Herder, and embellished by the romantics, but also a countervailing cynicism towards the very idea of culture. It became normal to view culture from the outside, not as a mode of thought which defines our moral inheritance, but as an elaborate disguise, through which artificial powers represent themselves as natural rights. Thanks to Marx, debunking theories of culture have become a part of culture. And these theories have the structure pioneered by Marx: they identify power as the reality, and culture as the mask; they also foretell some future ‘liberation’ from the lies that have been spun by our oppressors.”
It is striking to notice that this is exactly the theme of author Dan Brown’s massive international hit The Da Vinci Code from 2003, thought to be one of the ten best-selling books of all time. In addition to being a straightforward thriller, the novel claims that the entire modern history of Christianity is a conspiracy of the Church to cover up the truth about Jesus and his marriage to Mary Magdalene.
Australian writer Keith Windschuttle[22], a former Marxist, is tired of that anti-Western slant that permeates academia: “For the past three decades and more, many of the leading opinion makers in our universities, the media and the arts have regarded Western culture as, at best, something to be ashamed of, or at worst, something to be opposed. The scientific knowledge that the West has produced is simply one of many “ways of knowing.”
“Cultural relativism claims there are no absolute standards for assessing human culture. Hence all cultures should be regarded as equal, though different.” “The plea for acceptance and open-mindedness does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must condemn its own.”
He urges us to remember how unique some elements of our culture are: “The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture.” “But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin.”
The re-writing of Western history has become so bad that even playwright William Shakespeare has been proclaimed a closet Muslim. “Shakespeare would have delighted in Sufism,” said the Islamic scholar Martin Lings, himself a Sufi Muslim. According to The Guardian, Lings argued that Shakespeare’s “work resembles the teachings of the Islamic Sufi sect” in the International Shakespeare Globe Fellowship Lecture at Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre in London. Lings spoke during Islam Awareness Week.
“It’s impossible for Shakespeare to have been a Muslim,” David N. Beauregard, a Shakespeare scholar and co-editor of Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, told. Shakespeare “maintained Roman Catholic beliefs on crucial doctrinal differences.” Beauregard notes that “this is not to say that Shakespeare was occupied with writing religious drama, but only that a specific religious tradition informs his work.”
According to Robert Spencer[23], “Shakespeare is just the latest paradigmatic figure of Western Christian culture to be remade in a Muslim-friendly manner.” Recently the [US] State Department asserted, without a shred of evidence, that Christopher Columbus (who in fact praised Ferdinand and Isabella for driving the Muslims out of Spain in 1492, the same year as his first visit to the Americas) was aided on his voyages by a Muslim navigator. “The state of American education is so dismal today that teachers themselves are ill-equipped to counter these historical fantasies.”
The Gates of Vienna blog[24] quoted a report by The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) on US Universities. Their survey revealed “a remarkable uniformity of political stance and pedagogical approach. Throughout the humanities and social sciences, the same issues surface over and over, regardless of discipline. In courses on literature, philosophy, and history; sociology, anthropology, and religious studies; women’s studies, American studies, [...] the focus is consistently on a set list of topics: race, class, gender, sexuality, and the “social construction of identity”; globalisation, capitalism, and U.S. “hegemony”; the ubiquity of oppression and the destruction of the environment.”
“In class after class, the same essential message is repeated, in terms that, to an academic “outsider,” often seem virtually unintelligible.” “In short, the message is that the status quo, which is patriarchal, racist, hegemonic, and capitalist, must be “interrogated” and “critiqued” as a means of theorising and facilitating a social transformation whose necessity and value are taken as a given.” “Differences between disciplines are beginning to disappear. Courses in such seemingly distinct fields as literature, sociology, and women’s studies, for example, have become mirror images of one another.”
Writer Charlotte Allen commented[25] on how Harvard University President Lawrence Summers caused a storm by giving a speech speculating that innate differences between the sexes may have something to do with the fact that proportionately fewer women than men hold top positions in science. Summers in 2006 announced his intention to step down at the end of the school year, in part due to pressure caused by this speech. “Even if you’re not up on the scientific research – a paper Mr. Summers cited demonstrating that, while women overall are just as smart as men, significantly fewer women than men occupy the very highest intelligence brackets that produce scientific genius – common sense tells you that Mr. Summers has got to be right. Recently, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a vote of no confidence in Mr. Summers. Wouldn’t it be preferable to talk openly about men’s and women’s strengths and weaknesses?”
Yes, Ms. Allen, it would. Summers may have been wrong, but it’s dangerous once we embark on a road where important issues are not debated at all. One of the hallmarks of Western civilisation has been our thirst for asking questions about everything. Political Correctness is thus anti-Western both in its form and in its intent. It should be noted that in this case, Feminists were in the vanguard of PC, the same ideology that has blinded our Universities to the Islamic threat.
It makes it even worse when we know that other Feminists in academia are asserting that the veil, or even the burka, represent “an alternative Feminism.” Dr. Wairimu Njambi is an Assistant Professor of “Women’s Studies” at the Florida Atlantic University. Much of her scholarship is dedicated to advancing the notion that the cruel practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is actually a triumph for Feminism and that it is hateful to suggest otherwise. According to Njambi “anti-FGM discourse perpetuates a colonialist assumption by universalising a particular western image of a ‘normal’ body and sexuality.”
Still, there are pockets of resistance. Professor Sigurd Skirbekk[26] at the University of Oslo questions many of the assumptions underlying Western immigration policies. One of them is the notion that rich countries have a duty to take in all people from other nations that are suffering, either from natural disasters, political repression or overpopulation. According to him, it cannot be considered moral of the cultural, political and religious elites of these countries to allow their populations to grow unrestrained and then push their excess population onto other countries.
Skirbekk points out that European countries have earlier rejected the Germans when they used the argument of lebensraum as a motivation for their foreign policy. We should do the same thing now when other countries invoke the argument that they lack space for their population. According to him, there is plenty of literature available about the ecological challenges the world will be facing in this century. Running a too liberal immigration policy while refusing to confront such unpleasant moral issues is not a sustainable alternative in the long run. We will then only push difficult dilemmas onto future generations.
In Denmark, linguist Tina Magaard[27] concludes that Islamic texts encourage terror and fighting to a far greater degree than the original texts of other religions. She has a PhD in Textual Analysis and Intercultural Communication from the Sorbonne in Paris, and has spent three years on a research project comparing the original texts of ten religions. “The texts in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious beliefs to a larger degree. There are also straightforward calls for terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is a fact we need to deal with.”
Moreover, there are hundreds of calls in the Koran for fighting against people of other faiths. “If it is correct that many Muslims view the Koran as the literal words of God, which cannot be interpreted or rephrased, then we have a problem. It is indisputable that the texts encourage terror and violence. Consequently, it must be reasonable to ask Muslims themselves how they relate to the text, if they read it as it is,” says Magaard.
The examples of Skirbekk, Magaard and others are indeed encouraging, but not numerous enough to substantially change the overall picture of Western academics largely paralysed by Political Correctness and anti-Western sentiments.
Writer Mark Steyn[28] comments on how “out in the real world it seems the true globalisation success story of the 1990s was the export of ideology from a relatively obscure part of the planet to the heart of every Western city.” “Writing about the collapse of nations such as Somalia, the Atlantic Monthly’s Robert D. Kaplan referred to the “citizens” of such “states” as “re-primitivised man.”
“When lifelong Torontonians are hot for decapitation, when Yorkshiremen born and bred and into fish ‘n’ chips and cricket and lousy English pop music self-detonate on the London Tube, it would seem that the phenomenon of “re-primitivised man” has been successfully exported around the planet. It’s reverse globalisation: The pathologies of the remotest backwaters now have franchise outlets in every Western city.”
It is possible to see a connection here. While multiculturalism is spreading ideological tribalism in our universities, it is spreading physical tribalism in our major cities. Since all cultures are equal, there is no need to preserve Western civilisation, nor to uphold our laws.
It is true that we may never fully reach the ideal of objective truth, since we are all more or less limited in our understanding by our personal experiences and our prejudice. However, this does not mean that we should abandon the ideal. That’s what has happened during the past decades. Our colleges aren’t even trying to seek truth; they have decided that there is no such thing as “truth” in the first place, just different opinions and cultures, all equally valid. Except Western culture, which is inherently evil and should be broken down and “deconstructed.” Western Universities have moved from the Age of Reason to the Age of Deconstruction.
While Chinese, Indian, Korean and other Asian Universities are graduating millions of motivated engineers and scientists every year, Western Universities have been reduced to little hippie factories, teaching about the wickedness of the West and the blessings of barbarism. This represents a serious challenge to the long-term economic competitiveness of Western nations. That’s bad, but it is the least of our worries. Far worse than failing to compete with non-Muslim Asians is failing to identify the threat from Islamic nations who want to subdue us and wipe out our entire civilisation. That is a failure we quite simply cannot live with. And we probably won’t, unless we manage to deal with it.
Sources:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1282
1. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/849
2. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1155
3. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1145
4. http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/006260.php
5. http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=62487&d=21&...
6. http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=5418
7. http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=20490
8. http://amconmag.com/2005/2005_12_05/cover.html
9. http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=84122&d=21&...
10. http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=8263
11. http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/009405.php
12. http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/008907.php
13. http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/IslamObscured.htm
14. http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/773
15. http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/008113.php
16. http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901facomment85501/john-mueller/is-there-st...
17. http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/004191.php
18. http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/004791.php
19. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/840
20. http://www.secularislam.org/articles/debunking.htm
21. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1126
22. http://www.sydneyline.com/Adversary Culture.htm
23. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15701
24. http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/06/little-churchills-inhabiting-steril...
25. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/040305d...
26. http://folk.uio.no/sigurds/
27. http://fjordman.blogspot.com/2005/09/islam-is-most-warlike-religion.html
28. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1142
29. http://52.068.4.309plusf24:KWimfhh436383717863МБ
Islam 101 is meant to help people become better educated about the fundamentals of Islam and to help the more knowledgeable better convey the facts to others. With the aim of lending clarity to the public understanding of Islam and of exposing the inadequacy of prevailing views.
Table of Contents
1. The Basics
a. The Five Pillars of Islam
b. The Quran -- the Book of Allah
c. The Sunnah -- the "Way" of the Prophet Muhammad
b. The Quran -- the Book of Allah
c. The Sunnah -- the "Way" of the Prophet Muhammad
i. Battle of Badr
ii. Battle of Uhud
iii. Battle of Medina
iv. Conquest of Mecca
ii. Battle of Uhud
iii. Battle of Medina
iv. Conquest of Mecca
d. Sharia Law
2. Jihad and Dhimmitude
a. What does "jihad" mean?
b. Muslim Scholar Hasan Al-Banna on jihad
c. Dar al-Islam and dar al-harb: the House of Islam and the House of War
b. Muslim Scholar Hasan Al-Banna on jihad
c. Dar al-Islam and dar al-harb: the House of Islam and the House of War
i. al-Taqiyya -- Religious Deception
ii. How al-Taqiyya is a central part of the Islamisation of Europe
iii. Quranic abrogation (Naskh)
d. Jihad Through History
i. The First Major Wave of Jihad: the Arabs, 622-750 AD
ii. The Second Major Wave of Jihad: the Turks, 1071-1683 AD
ii. The Second Major Wave of Jihad: the Turks, 1071-1683 AD
e. The Dhimma
f. Jihad in the Modern Era
f. Jihad in the Modern Era
3. Conclusion
4. Frequently Asked Questions
a. What about the Crusades?
b. If Islam is violent, why are so many Muslims peaceful?
c. What about the violent passages in the Bible?
d. Could an Islamic "Reformation" pacify Islam?
e. What about the history of Western colonialism in the Islamic world?
f. How can a violent political ideology be the second-largest and fastest-growing religion on earth?
g. Is it fair to paint all Islamic schools of thought as violent?
h. What about the great achievements of Islamic civilisation?
b. If Islam is violent, why are so many Muslims peaceful?
c. What about the violent passages in the Bible?
d. Could an Islamic "Reformation" pacify Islam?
e. What about the history of Western colonialism in the Islamic world?
f. How can a violent political ideology be the second-largest and fastest-growing religion on earth?
g. Is it fair to paint all Islamic schools of thought as violent?
h. What about the great achievements of Islamic civilisation?
5. Further Resources
CureZone Newsletter is distributed in partnership with https://www.netatlantic.com
Contact Us - Advertise - Stats
Copyright 1999 - 2024 www.curezone.org
0.547 sec, (15)