EXPOSING AMERICA'S FIFTH
COLUMN:
NAZISM, COMMUNISM, AND ISLAM
PART I
Less Than Three Decades after Weimar
Come with me, back to 1959-1960,
when I was in college. I was
given an opportunity to sneak a
peek at Weimar (a name taken
from the German governmental and
cultural period between the end
of World War I and the final
conversion to Nazism) culture in
America. Our college president
bought in what he called the
“avant-garde,” particularly in
the arts, i.e., a glimpse of
what art and thought would be
like in the near future. At the
time, I was much too naïve and
unsophisticated to analyze
conceptually what I was seeing:
-
A philosopher with a lot of initials and possibly
the last name of Schiller
spoke at convocation. He
was pridefully and
militantly unintelligible.
Nothing he said made any
sense. Although naïve, I
did not make the usual
mistake of assuming he was
“too deep” for me to
understand. I knew that he
simply made no sense,
period.
-
A famous inventor spoke in neologisms. Years
later, when in psychiatry
residency, I reflected on
this inventor’s talk, and I
was struck by how similar
was his language to that of
a schizophrenic.
Eventually, I was told by a
colleague who professed to
know that the inventor was,
in fact, schizophrenic.
-
Plays in the college theatre dispensed with every
rule and custom of drama in
order to be “free” from
displaying anything
recognizable, thus
understandable. No two
productions of the same play
were alike. All of them
were, however, very crude
and vulgar, and nothing
about them made any sense.
-
Then came the piece de resistance as new,
great music. Two men almost
destroyed a grand piano.
They beat on the keys, raked
the strings, pounded the
piano case, and slammed the
bench lid repetitively while
also using sundry other
objects to make what I could
only describe as noise. It
was discordant and
cacophonous in the extreme.
But, you had to see the
accompanying dance group.
Their “dance” was
“choreographed” to the
“music.” Dancers used
“profound symbols” while
running about the stage in a
manner reminiscent of
chickens whose necks have
been wrung. Their “symbols”
consisted of boat cushions
and pieces of picket fence.
The dancers were painted
gray and wore shredded gray
costumes. They danced under
dark gray-blue light so that
their individuality faded
away.
The music and dance were the last of
this “glimpse into the future”
that I could tolerate. During
the music and dance
presentation, I left. I had
seen a living hell of complete
intellectual bankruptcy—of
nihilism--and I wanted none of
it. I went to an empty student
union to join a fellow science
major. I tried to describe what
I had seen, but I convulsed in
laughter for a very long time
instead, guffawing as I had
never done before or since.
I am proud of myself. I knew no
philosophy then, but I had
soundly rejected American Weimar
culture as absurd. In
retrospect, however, I now
realize that this so-called
“avant-garde” exposure was
coming
just 30 years
after the peaking of
Weimar culture. It was coming just 14 years after the end of a world-wide effort to
destroy the Third Reich. It
was just one year away from the era of the 1960s.
What I saw in 1959 at my college, and
much, much worse, you, my
fellow taxpayer, and I must pay
for today through the National
Endowment for the Arts, as well
as the hosts of “educational”
and “research” government grants.
The principles behind what
was avant-garde then are
now revered among the
“intelligentsia” as the ideal:
nihilism.
The Weimar Republic, Weimar Germany,
and Weimar culture disappeared
when Hitler became dictator of
Germany in 1933. The ideas of
Weimar did not go away any more
than Nazism as an ideology went
away in May of 1945. Both came
to America.
So, here in 2004, let us take a
cultural snapshot:
· Painting: All conceivable means of throwing and streaking
paint on canvas, as long as
thought is not involved; animals
“painting”; total disregard
given to new artists whose works
reflect objectivity and values.
· Sculpture: Randomly placed junk, welded in place; human
figures too crude even for
prehistoric artists.
· Literature: A wasteland, a value blank.
·
Music: Nihilistic hip-hop, gangsta rap, heavy metal,
grunge and other productions of
noise, made tolerable only by
listening while in a
drug-induced fog.
· Movies: Rare good ones vastly outnumbered by a plethora of
special effects/action/violence,
without plot or values, spiced
up with sex+sex+sex+foul
language+subhuman behaviors by
nihilistic anti-heroes extolling
raw hedonism.
· Television: Some good dramas outnumbered by anti-valued,
so-called “reality” programs and
endless banality.
· Computer games: Raw hedonism of the extremely nihilistic
variety involving rape, violent
murdering, and destruction for
the sake of destruction.
And, let us not leave out social
institutions:
· Law: Activist judges “creatively interpreting” law and
legal principles in order to
perform social engineering by
nullifying values and valuers,
particularly on the Right.
· Special interests: For example, the American Civil
Liberties Union representing
anyone as long as the issue is
some attack on the values of
America and Americans.
· Primary and secondary education: All out war on American
values, families, cognition, and
morality, using all sorts of
tactics including banning of
Christmas and Halloween, but not
banning extreme violence, gang
behaviors, rapes, drugs,
extortion and theft.
·
Universities and colleges: Ceaseless war on all forms of
achievement such as capitalism,
individualism, rights,
knowledge, America and its
institutions, and even
successful countries such as
Israel.
·
Paris Hilton as cultural poster child.
What I witnessed back in college and
today is the culture-wide
phenomena of the inmates having
escaped, after locking the rest
of us into the asylum. The same
phenomena are literally
permanently “deforming”
America—but to what end?
A New Civil War Approaches
It should frighten the living
hell out of you to realize that,
in America, right now,
you are living in a cultural
milieu horribly similar to that
of the Weimar Republic, which
made the ascendancy of Adolf
Hitler and the Nazis
inevitable. If this does not
frighten you, then ask yourself
whether you can afford to remain
ignorant any longer.
America’s culture today comes
from its fifth column,
made up of America’s Left and
its more recent allies, the
jihadists. This
fifth column
intends to bring down America.
If you do not understand these
groups and processes, you will
live to see America’s collapse
and its conversion to a
totalitarian state, quite
possibly even an Islamic one.
Fortunately, there is a cure.
In this article, I emphasize
the book, Ominous
Parallels: The End of Freedom
in America (by Leonard
Peikoff; Stein and Day; New
York; 1982; ISBN
0-451-62210-3). The author is a
professional philosopher with a
gift that enables him to speak
and write so that intelligent
people, not formally trained in
philosophy, can understand him
and apply what he says directly
to their lives.
This truly great book spells out what
happened to Germany and above
all, WHY it happened. It also
spells out how and WHY America
has been following Germany’s
path and grows dangerously close
to the immediate pre-Hitler
period of the Weimar Republic.
It is these “whys” that make
this book uniquely and extremely
valuable, and it is the quality
of its ideas and their
presentation that separates it
from all other books which have
unsuccessfully tried to account
for the reasons for the rise of
Nazism.
The current Democrat Party of
the USA, straight out of
Ominous Parallels, has
bedded and wedded the new
totalitarians, the ones
described so well by David
Horowitz recently in
Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam
and the American Left
(Regnery; New York; 2004; ISBN
0-89526-076-X). [On this
website, I have recently reviewed the
Horowitz book. BOTH BOOKS
COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER WELL.]
Pre-election and post-election 2004,
mini-instances of “Kristallnacht”
(Crystal Night, when in 1938,
Nazis destroyed stores of Jews,
breaking the plate glass store
fronts) broke out daily in
America, and have been
perpetrated almost 100% by
Democrat Party supporters. All
of these actions protested the
election of President Bush and
those who supported his
reelection: campus
demonstrations, protest marches,
vandalism, personal assaults,
shutting down speakers as well
as calls for revolution,
destruction, and, in effect,
“jihad.” These new
totalitarians want to take by
force what they cannot yet win
by the ballot. Their violence
gets worse by the year as the
nihilism originating from the
university campuses diffuses
throughout faculties and
administrators, and is fully
accepted among impulse-dominated
students who are willing to
vandalize, threaten, and
physically attack other students
who disagree with them. Having
learned nothing from the 2004
election, Democrats are calling
for much more of this nihilism
which the neocommunists, who
dominate that party, have been
inflicting on America.
Some cultural commentators
have referred to the essence of
today’s cultural theme as
“nihilism.” Literally, “nihil”
means “nothing,” and “nihilism”
refers to an ideology embracing
nothing, i.e., nothing-ism. The
Encarta Dictionary
gives four definitions: (1)
total rejection of social mores,
particularly morality and
religion; (2) belief that
nothing is worthwhile, life as
pointless and human values as
worthless; (3) disbelief in
objective truth; and (4) belief
in destruction of authority, the
belief that all established
authority is corrupt and must be
destroyed in order to rebuild a
just society.
These are accurate statements about
nihilism except for the one
referring to the honorable
motive of rebuilding a “just
society.” Nihilists have no
concept of “justice,” and the
society they envision has
nothing in common with justice,
fairness, freedom or any related
concept. What they do is
destroy. They do not want
to build anything because they
are not capable of building
anything; they do not want
anything constructive in life to
exist.
Examples of nihilism abound. Here
are just a few. Singers at
glamorous awards galas routinely
show up looking like homeless
bums needing new clothes, baths,
and shaves. Even, Johnny Cash,
an unquestionably patriotic
American, in his famous ballad,
“Folsom Prison Blues,” expressed
nihilism, about the man who
“shot a man in Reno, just to
watch him die.” Democrats and
the Left do not want our
soldiers to win in Iraq; the
journalistic media love only
bad news about the war, the
economy, or anything else going
wrong for anyone. The Left do
not want America to be
productive, successful, creative
or free. They do not want
citizens to keep the money they
earn. In the 2004 presidential
election campaign, the Democrat
Party and its supporters from
every walk of life manifested
such extreme nihilism that it
caught the attention of every
commentator, each of whom could
only describe it, because none
could explain it. The
predominant attitude among
Democrats and Democrat
supporters was hatred, hatred
for Bush and all Bush stood for,
even the fundamental principle
upon which America was founded.
They even hated their own
candidate, John Kerry, but they
accepted this inept senator,
candidate, and human in hopes he
and they could destroy Bush and
Bush-supporters. They did not
want just to defeat Bush; no,
indeed, they wanted to DESTROY
Bush and what he symbolized:
AMERICA.
American colleges and universities
breed and protect nihilism.
This is hatred of the good for
being good and the overpowering
desire to destroy something
valued (the good) just to
destroy it. THAT IS NIHILISM.
The examples are almost endless
these days.
Islam is nothing if it is not
extreme nihilism. Islamists
want to destroy the world and
rule what is left, in whatever
state of degradation it will be
found after jihad. THAT IS
NIHILISM.
What are the Republicans
doing about this virulently
destructive, anti-American war
being waged on America by the
nihilists? Like the Social
Democrats of the Weimar
government, they are trying to
compromise and “make
nice.” They are paralyzed
by their own desire to
compromise, and by political
correctness and
multiculturalism. The latter
two, as Horowitz points out,
were started and spread here in
America by the Left. The
Republicans feel like
Americans and they want to be
Americans, but the principles
they fall back on are those of
faith, which are not sufficient
in the struggle against the
Left. Faith does not permit
them to understand either the
American Left or the Islamists.
Their militantly
anti-philosophical folksiness
blinds them to the former, and
their reliance on faith over
reason blinds them to the
latter. They are morally
uncertain in the face of their
adversaries who
are morally certain, although very wrong and very evil.
Conservatives, who make up most
of the Republican Party, are
engaged solely in a holding
action against the unholy
alliance between Islam and the
Left. They have been retreating
steadily because they either
know how to win and won’t, or
because they do not know how to
win and refuse to find out.
America may well be headed
for another civil war. For
sure, some of us will not
surrender this country to either
the Left or to the Islamists.
The best possible outcome
of such a civil war would be a
restorative Second American
Revolution, but that requires a
level of philosophical
sophistication like that of our
Founders.
The worst possible outcome
would be the establishment of a
totalitarian state in America.
That could happen here
(recall Sinclair Lewis’,
It Can’t Happen Here),
and, if it does, it will be
based on the principles and
practices existing in American
culture right now. Not
one new principle would be
needed; they go way back--these
are the same principles which
made Hitler possible.
America right now stands
exactly where Weimar Germany did
just before Hitler took over.
The equivalents of his
brown-shirted
Sturmabteilungen (SA) are on
every campus in America. Had
John Kerry been elected, these
“SA” might well have concluded
that they once again had the
“green light,” just as they did
in the Clinton era, as described
by Horowitz. Certainly it is
likely that they would have been
willing to don American
equivalents of the black shirts
of the Schutzstaffeln
(SS). If the cultural drift is
not stopped soon, these
equivalents of the SA will “don
black shirts” in the foreseeable
future.
David Horowitz writes about these new SA and SS of America
as “neocommunists” or
“neocomms,” while Leonard
Peikoff writes about Weimar
Germany pre-Nazis. Please note
that the relationship between
these groups is the fact that
they are two sides of the
same coin. To illustrate,
one German writer compared Nazis
to beefsteaks: brown on the
outside and red on the inside.
Nazis and communists were, and
are, very much alike, having no
fundamental differences, only
superficial differences in
style. Hitler knew how close
the Nazis and communists were,
and upon taking power, he
immediately ordered that any and
all communists seeking to join
the Nazis be immediately
admitted to membership.
The Meaning of Nazism
“Nazi” is a shorthand
designation for
National Socialist German Workers Party, or
NSDAP, as one sees on many of
their banners. Communism is also socialism. The
socialist axis spawns Nazis, all other fascists, communists, social democrats,
and those with similar names.
With these variants of socialism, it is like looking at the
same cake, with each slice
having a different color icing.
Too many people think of Nazism
as totalitarianism of the
right and
communism as totalitarianism of
the left. IT IS ALL LEFT, BABY!
Peikoff reminds us that Nazis were
not a tribe of prehistoric
savages.
“Their crimes were
the official, legal acts and
policies of modern Germany—an
educated, industrialized,
civilized Western European
nation, a nation renowned
throughout the world for the
luster of its intellectual and
cultural achievements.” (15) Furthermore, the Nazis were elected by
Germans of every socio-economic
and educational level: “The Nazis did
not gain power against the
country’s wishes.” (15)
Peikoff quotes from a leading
spokesman of fascism, Alfredo
Rocco,
“For Fascism,
society is the end, individuals
the means, and its whole life
consists in using individuals as
instruments for its social
ends.”
(17) This could
have been said on the floor of
the U. S. Senate or in the 2004
presidential primaries, or,
indeed, in any primary,
secondary, or university
educational institution today,
as an ideal to be
pursued. The only difference
would be the substitution of
some fuzzy term or phrase for
“Fascism.” Fascism is socialism, and “’Socialism’ for
the Nazis denotes the principle
of collectivism as such and its
corollary, statism—in every
field of human action, including
but not limited to economics.” (19)
Intellectual Roots
How, then, did Germany, this
“land of poets and
philosophers,” come to accept
National Socialism so easily?
“The Nazis could
not have won the support of the
German masses but for the
systematic preaching of a
complex array of theories,
doctrines, opinions, notions,
and beliefs. And not one of
their central beliefs was
original… [T]he men in the
streets heard and recognized and
sympathized with and embraced
those beliefs, and voted for
their exponents.” (22)
Germany was indeed ideologically
“ripe.” All of the necessary
intellectual groundwork had been
laid. Nazism came from one
source: Philosophy. The same
philosophy which made Nazism
possible has largely become
America’s philosophy,
progressively replacing the
philosophy of our founding.
Joining forces with these
American Nazis and neocomms are
the Islamists. The many
comments by Islamic leaders
favoring Kerry, including Osama
Bin Laden, should come as no
surprise. The philosophy of
Islam is super-imposable over
Nazism; thus, it is also no
surprise that historically,
Islam has had a strong affinity
for Nazism. Saddam Hussein
studied Hitler’s Germany (as
well as Stalin’s USSR), and his
Ba’ath Party was patterned on
Nazism, as all Ba’ath Parties
have been.
Dr. Peikoff disabuses readers
of erroneous ideas about
philosophy and its value:
-
“To understand the state of a society, one must
discover the extent to which
a given philosophy
penetrates its spirit and
institutions. On this
basis, one can then explain
a society’s collapse—or, if
it still has a chance,
forecast its future. This
is what can make
intelligible the fact of
Hitler’s rise, and the
possibility of America’s
fall.” (140)
“Because philosophy deals with broad abstractions,
most people regard the
subject as detached from
life. They regard
philosophy as they would a
political-party platform—as
a set of floating
generalities unrelated to
action, generalities which
are part ritualistic piety,
part rationalization or
cover-up, and part
rhetorical hot air.” (139)
“In every field, the source [of developments] of
the choices men make, which
rest ultimately on their
basic choices.
Knowingly or not, those
choices flow from men’s
basic ideas and values. The
science of basic ideas is
philosophy.” (Emphasis
mine, 139]
“If a man is skeptical about the role of philosophy
in life, [l]et him observe
the concretes of his
society’s cultural life—its
politics, its economics, its
education, its youth
movements, its art and
religion and science.”
(139)
The intellectual chain of
transmission to Nazi Germany
began with Plato, then Kant, on
to Hegel, and finally to
Hitler. These thinkers were
connected by many lesser links
in the long chain.
Without a doubt, the major blame goes
to the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, who can be
accurately portrayed as the
destroyer of the modern world.
He was the third of the great
philosophers who developed full
systematic philosophies. The
systematic philosophers have had
the greatest influence
throughout history. Plato and
Aristotle were the only others
before Kant.
Kantian apologists abound, trying to
make people think Kant was a
great and benevolent man, but he
must be known by the products of
his philosophy. Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia are his
historical monuments, the
fullest logical consequences of
his philosophy; they were
created by Kant’s intellectual
descendents. Hegel, another
major German philosopher, also
played a very visible role in
Marxism which was a part of
Nazism.
Kant launched the most
successful assault on reason
ever conceived by mankind.
Kant’s explicit intent for
destroying reason was to “save
faith.” He was as effective at
turning men’s minds against
themselves as are the Islamists,
and his intellectual descendents
took his rejection of reason all
the way to 20th
century totalitarianism and the
present state of dominant
European and American
intellectual and cultural
ideas. The “neocommunists,”
about whom Horowitz writes so
eloquently, are also Kant’s
intellectual heirs, and they are
as much Nazis as they are
communists. Cultural nihilism
traces right back to Kant. Kant
was German, and Germany adopted
the essentials of his system.
Weimar Culture was a full
manifestation of Kantianism.
Nazis specifically and
explicitly attacked reason.
They wanted obedience, not
thought. Peikoff quotes Hitler,
“We must distrust
the intelligence and the
conscience and must place our
trust in our instincts.” (46) Hitler
regarded the general population
(“the masses”) with the same
disdain that America’s various
Leftists do: “The masses are
like an animal that obeys its
instincts. The do not reach
conclusions by reasoning.”
(47)
To unseat reason, Kant, much
like Plato had done over 2000
years before, divided reality
into knowable and unknowable
realms. He designated the
world which no one could know
to be the real world,
similar to Plato’s world of
forms. The reality which
humans know and live in,
Kant declared to be unreal,
a fiction created by the minds
of people. Thus, Kant
invalidated man’s mind because
mankind could know only the
“world of appearance,” which was
not real, and could never know
the “real world” which was
unknowable except by faith, not
reason. If trying to make sense
of Kant’s nonsense gives you a
headache, remember that Kant has
given the entire civilized world
two centuries of intractable
migraines of the intellect, and
these notions continue to the
present. Kantianism, however,
is a spent force intellectually;
it persists and continues its
destruction only by passive
acceptance by means of default.
Fortunately, the world is ready
for the antidote.
Kant reduced mankind to the
level of the mindless and
unreasoning, a status known by
every savage and every devout
Muslim.
Kant’s ethics became Nazi
ethics--line, chapter, and
verse. Nazi ethics can be heard
on any street in America today.
Here are some samples: From
Mein Kampf,
“[T]he wishes and
the selfishness of the
individual must appear as
nothing and submit…” i.e., a human
must “…renounce putting
forward his personal opinion and
interests and sacrifice both…”
(68) Said a
popular German slogan of the
time: “Gemeinnutz geht von
Eigennutz” = “The common good
comes before private good.” (69)
“Sacrifice” does not refer to some
action taken by others to
achieve some good end. It means
forsaking something of higher
value for something of lesser
value. To illustrate, the
expression, “The pain of
sacrifice,” has the meaning it
does because giving up the more
valuable thing hurts. In
exactly the same way, “altruism”
in its philosophical meaning
does not mean helping one’s
fellow man out of one's
goodness—no one could object to
that, except nihilists.
“Altruism” here refers to the
obligatory self-sacrificial
service to others as an ethical
primary, including giving up
that of greater value to others
under force—this is the ethics
of totalitarianism, not
fellowship.
Nazism rose, not because of
numbers and actions of
criminals, writes Dr. Peikoff.
“The reason [for
the rise of Hitler] was the
millions of non-thugs in
the land of poets and
philosophers, the decent,
law-abiding Germans who found
hope and inspiration in Hitler,
the legions of unhappy,
abstemious, duty-bound men and
women who condemned what they
saw as the selfishness of the
new Weimar Republic, and who
were eager to take part in the
new moral crusade that Hitler
promised to lead. The reason
was the “good Germans”—above
all, their concept of “the
good.” (70)
Compare Weimar culture to our current
American cultural coarseness,
excesses, and the overwhelmingly
prevalent vulgarities on
television, on CD, on radio, in
films, in music, in computer
games, in books, in classrooms,
and expressed daily by the
legion incivilities and lack of
manners among citizens at
large. They are
indistinguishable in principle.
Look how many “good” Americans
long to escape from the presence
of these “selfish excesses.”
The protestors of these “selfish
excesses,” in large measure,
come from the so-called “Red
States,” i.e., people who
compare favorably to the “good
Germans” described by Dr.
Peikoff.
In this context, “selfish
excesses” cause people to long
for unselfishness and
self-sacrifice as a moral
alternative and ideal, often
seen in religion. However,
today’s self-sacrificial ethics
comes not predominantly
from religion, but from Kant.
Kant picked up the principle
from Augustine and his ilk.
Writes Dr. Peikoff:
“Kant is the first
philosopher of self-sacrifice to
advance this ethics as a matter
of philosophical principle,
explicit, self-conscious,
uncompromised—essentially
uncontradicted by any remnants
of the Greek, pro-self
viewpoint.” (78)
This morality of pre-Nazi and
Nazi Germany walks the streets
of contemporary America and
lives in many households:
“A man is morally
the property of others—of those
others it is his duty to
serve—argue Fichte, Hegel, and
the rest, explicitly or by
implication. As such, a man has
no moral right to refuse to make
the requisite sacrifices for
others. If he attempts it, he
is depriving men of what is
properly theirs, he is violating
men’s rights, their right to his
service—and it is, therefore, an
assertion of morality if others
intervene forcibly and compel
him to fulfill his obligations.
‘Social justice’ in this view
not only allows but demands
the use of force against the
non-sacrificial individual; it
demands that others put a stop
to his evil. Thus has moral
fervor been joined to the rule
of physical force, raising it
from a criminal tactic to a
governing principle of human
relationships. (The religious
advocates of self-sacrifice
accept the same viewpoint, but
name God, not the group, as the
entity whose wishes must be
enforced.)” (91)
Kant’s ethics destroyed individuality
and the human sense of worth,
his sense of self-esteem. When
Kant dispensed with reason, he
reduced man to the level of a
savage. When he enshrined the
ethics of self-sacrifice, he
produced a savage who could now
be ruled. Man had become the
equivalent, via Kant, of the
“good Muslim.” This is why
there is such a sense of
alliance between Nazism and
Islam. With reason and ego
gone, blind force was all that
was left.
~~~~~
EXPOSING
AMERICA'S FIFTH COLUMN:
NAZISM,
COMMUNISM, ISLAM
Part II
(Click here to reach Part I of this article.)
Converting an Entire Culture
What is so frightening is
knowing exactly how America is
being Nazified and watching it
move closer, inch-by-inch, with
so few people either
sufficiently aware of the
process or even giving a damn,
perhaps feeling secure in the
notion that “It can’t happen
here.” Others actively push us
to the left, seeking to destroy
America and take us over.
Here is how it was done in Germany:
“Wherever the German
turned—to the left, to the
right, to the center; to the
decorous voices in parliament or
to the gutters running with
blood—he heard the same
fundamental ideas. They
were the same in politics, the
same in ethics, the same in
epistemology.
“This is how philosophy
shapes the destiny of nations.
If there is no dissent in regard
to basic principles among a
country’s leading philosophic
minds, theirs are the principles
that come in time to govern
every social and political group
in the land. Owing to other
factors, the groups may
proliferate and may contend
fiercely over variants,
applications, strategy; but they
do not contend over essentials.
In such a case, the country is
offered an abundance of
choices—among equivalents
competing to push it to the same
final outcome.
“It is common for observers to
criticize the “disunity” of
Weimar Germany, which, it is
said, prevented the anti-Nazi
groups from dealing effectively
with the threat posed by
Hitler. In fact, the Germans
were united, and this precisely
was their curse: their kind
of unity, their unity on all the
things that count in history,
i.e., on all the ideas.”
(160)
Role of Education
Of all of the ominous
parallels, the most dangerous
comes from education.
“Progressive education” almost
single-handedly took down
Germany, just as it is taking
down America.
Remember that the progressive
education of America came from
John Dewey, one of the founders
of the profoundly destructive
American philosophy of
Pragmatism. Most people say
“pragmatism” and think this
means something good, such as
being practical; however, its
meaning is very different and
very much worse than that.
Dewey came from Kantian and
Hegelian intellectual roots. In
the following quotation, do not
be thrown off the Nazi ideology
by the name of the school, the
“Karl Marx elementary school”;
recall that almost every form of
socialism is interchangeable in
terms of fundamental ideas with
any other form, regardless of
name:
“In the most famous
Progressive institution of the
Weimar era,…, the group (the
child’s peers) became the
arbiter not only of freedom but
also of morality and truth.
Objective standards of
performance were dropped. ‘The
judgment of the group is the
standard by which the work and
conduct of the individual is
measured.’ As to any
nonconformists in attendance,
they soon discovered how much
“peaceful tolerance” they could
expect from their classmates.
In the Karl Marx school, notes
[a writer], ‘anything but
radical socialism among the
pupils was for several years
punished by the other pupils
with violence and boycott.’
“The socialists’ plan for undercutting
the educational establishment
was to replace one set of
Hegelian disciples by another:
to fight brutal, mind-deadening
authoritarianism a la Bismarck
by means of gentle,
mind-deadening subjectivism a la
Dewey; to fight elitist
romanticism by means of
‘democratic’
anti-intellectualism; to
eradicate passionate
collectivism (of a nationalist
variety) by instilling in the
children passionate collectivism
(of a socialist variety).”
(171)
Does this make you think of American
education today? It should.
Consider these also when thinking of
education .
-
“The
harbingers of the era to
come were the university
students.” (218)
“The
Weimar students practiced
everything they had
learned. Believing that
objectivity is impossible,
they did not try to reason
about political questions.” (224) Did you hear even one Kerry supporter able
to articulate any
reason for his
support for Kerry? I heard
nothing but some vaguely
defined FEELINGS.
“Committed to action based
on feeling, they responded
to disagreement by
unstopping their fury.” (224) Bush-supporting students have been mobbed
and beaten, and their signs,
displays, and materials have
recently been literally
destroyed by the unholy
alliance on several
campuses. Leftists have
linked arms with Muslims in
pursuit of the same
nihilistic ends.
Weimar university students,
almost all of whom were
pro-Hitler, disrupted university
classrooms, intimidated
professors and students, and
brawled openly. The
universities ceased to be
centers of learning during the
Weimar years because of their
students. As for the teachers,
they were in fundamental
agreement with the student
thugs. They and the
administrations defended the
students. They took the low
roads of political
correctness and moral
relativism. Does this not
sound familiar to American
campuses? Even by 1922, one
German writer acknowledged, the
German youth were “saturated
with hatred.” (225)
Hatred Prevails
When the abandonment of
reason leapt from the
ideologically corrupt German
schools and universities to
dominate the culture, guess what
prevailed? Emotionality. And,
what was the dominant emotion?
HATE. Think of present
day America as you read this:
“The poor hated the rich, the rich hated
‘the rabble,’ the left hated the
‘bourgeoisie,’ the right hated
the foreigners, the
traditionalists hated the new,
and the young hated everything,
|
