Quote of the Day – Vanderleun Edition

What the Chinese emperors once did to women’s feet we can now do to human souls and we’re not outsourcing. The binding that cripples the soul begins in the early indoctrination of kindergarten, where they learn all they need to know and then stop learning much of anything else. To make sure it sticks, the indoctrination is repeated for as long as they remain soaking in the thick multicutural, transnationalist, progressive soup of our educational system:

“The New York Times, Grievance Groups, Government, Diversity = Good” vs “The Great Books, Individualism, Responsibility, America = Bad.”

That’s pretty much it these days. Rinse and repeat that mantra like a Hari Krishna on crack and you too can actually succeed in school right up to a Ph.D. in “Diversity Studies.”

Obama: Imaginary Friend of Democrats, American Digest

No Change in Strategy or Tactics

In the comments to “Freudian Slip Much?” Lyle comments:

Following all your links and watching the videos, it’s all “Top down, Bottom up, Inside out”. They’re prepping their herds for the next step, which is chaos. The people will demand that government take action to do something about it (“Bottom up”) then it’s “Inside out”– totalitarian socialism will be offered as the only way out.

The socialist/eugenicists never went away. They just changed tactics.

No. No they didn’t. They haven’t changed tactics or the overall strategy. What we’re witnessing is the culmination of ninety-plus years of ideology playing out. Remember the poster:

That lie has lodged deep in the human psyche for a very long time. Karl Marx codified it in the late 19th Century, and by the turn of the 20th, it had swept across the world.

But at the end of World War I, its adherents were straining to understand why, despite Marx’s insistence on communism’s historic inevitability, the Proletariat put on the uniforms of their nation’s armed forces instead of rising in revolution against the bourgeoisie. In order to answer that question, a group of young Communists formed the Frankfurt School. The answer, they concluded, was that a comfortable proletariat was a non-revolutionary proletariat, and Western civilization produced material comfort. Therefore, Western civilization had to be destroyed, and the best way to do that was from the inside.

The target of this destruction was Western culture, and the vectors for this destruction would be the education system, the arts, and media, aided by the infiltration and destruction of governments. By the 1930’s, the seeds were already sown. America’s Great Depression had seen to that, and Marx and Engels’ ideas had spread worldwide. Many were disillusioned by the perceived failures of capitalism, and the promise of socialism seemed the ideal answer. I am currently reading Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives For A Century, and even I am shocked by how prevalent the acceptance of socialism was as far back as the 20’s. Some of the young converts of the 1920’s and 30’s became the college professors of the 40’s and 50’s, and by the 1960’s they were turning out more converts, fellow travelers and “useful idiots” who were themselves school teachers, playwrights, actors, editors, reporters, etc.

Regardless of the source, the 1985 warning delivered by Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov rings absolutely true to me:

Ideological subversion is the process, which is legitimate, overt, and open; you can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do, all American mass media has to do, is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it. There is no mystery. [It has] nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence-gathering looks more romantic. It sells more deodorants through the advertising, probably. That’s why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond-type of thrillers.

But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’—‘[?]’ in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare.’ What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one [is] demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people… the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

We now have a country in which two-thirds of the population believes that “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is part of the Constitution. Where a majority believes “the rich don’t pay their fair share” of taxes. We have a country that is progressively balkanized (pun intended) into victim groups to be exploited for political gain. And all of this traces back to the strategies and tactics that sprang from the Frankfurt School and its disciples: “Critical Theory” (Critical Race Theory, Critical Literary Theory, Critical Gender Theory), Political Correctness (“Shut up,” they explained…), the Cloward-Piven strategy, etc.

Marx understood and stated plainly that Communism, historically inevitable or not, could only come about through violent revolution, so the conditions for violent revolution had to be fomented. A small, dedicated, ever-changing group of true believers has been working since the turn of the 20th Century to bring Western Civilization to its knees, and it has almost achieved it. The players have changed, but the strategy hasn’t.

Brilliant!

Dr. Sanity has a timely repost of the explanation behind the different ways the Right and the Left deal with shame and guilt. Excerpt:

“Conservatives believe they have better ideas. Leftists believe they are better people.”

This is extremely relevant to a discussion about the differences between the Democratic Party culture (which has become primarily, though not exclusively, influenced by the political left) and the Republican Party culture (which is predominantly influenced by conservative ideas and values).

Eventually for the shame-avoidant person, reality itself must be distorted in order to further protect the self from poor self-esteem. Blaming other individuals or groups for one’s own behavior becomes second nature, and this transfer of blame to someone else is an indicator of internal shame.

Go, RTWT.

Quote of the Day

…many people in the international media, international agencies, and international NGOs (not to mention academia) are reluctant to face up to the crimes committed by Communism in the name of equality. To do so might call into question the weight attached by them to equality as the most important social value and undermine the multicultural faith that evil is predominantly the product of inequality, racism, ethnic hatred, or religious fanaticism. That cannot be permitted, so such crimes must be either ignored or mislabeled. And, of course, the remaining Communist regimes in the world are only too happy to cooperate in characterizing the killing fields as the products of irrational paranoia on the part of Pol Pot and his gang rather than the perfectly rational result of the quest for perfect equality. — Douglas B. Levene, Reflections on Cambodia, National Review Online

Time for this picture again:

Remember: The slaughter isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Barsoom!

I caught John Carter at the last matinee this afternoon.  I have not read the Burroughs novels, so I had very little preconception walking in to the theater that was not part of the trailers I had seen.  My take on it:  four out of five stars.  The suspension of disbelief was not onerous (yes, I’ve studied physics and the leaps were just not plausible, but I was able to go along for the ride anyway.)  I thoroughly enjoyed it, and will be seeing it again with my wife.  Generally, action movies give her motion sickness, but we’ve discovered that if she views them in 3-D, they don’t.  (I would expect the opposite, but hey, whatever works.)

One other comment:  Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) – WOOF!