Thread: A Politically Incorrect Thanksgiving

A Politically Incorrect Thanksgiving
by A.W.R. Hawkins

11/26/2009

Like so many aspects of Western Civilization, Thanksgiving is being hijacked by liberal multiculturalists intent on turning it into a secular celebration divorced from the spiritual ties that bind the 17th century colonists to 21st century Americans.

But the real history of Thanksgiving is far less secular and much less politically correct than the Left would have us think. It is characterized by references to God, the freedoms he gives us through nature, and the western traditions Americans from all walks of life have defended and espoused.

When the Plymouth colony held a day of Thanksgiving in autumn 1621, they did so believing they had survived the winter of 1620-1621 by God’s providence alone. The cold winds of winter had carried sickness that took its toil on the Pilgrims and those who survived were grateful to God for the fact.


The second Thanksgiving feast, held in the summer of 1623, was a celebration of the benefits the Pilgrims were then enjoying as a result of privatizing their colony according to the laws of nature.

When Plymouth colony was first founded, under the Governorship of John Carver, all land was held in common (think “socialismâ€

A wonderful article. I also believe that God has given our country so many blessings and much to be thankful for............we must not let this anti-Christian administation alter our faith and/or appreciation of God.

Yep, these Cultural Marxists are really trying to do a number on us.

Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who have sought to apply critical theory to matters of family composition, gender, race, and cultural identity within Western society. The phrase refers to any critique of Western culture that has been informed by Marxist thought.

Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist social criticism to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential academic institutions upon Western thought have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School), and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. The latter had been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of cultural Studies.

Background
The Frankfurt School is the name usually used to refer to a group of scholars who have been associated at one point or another over several decades with the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, including Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Jürgen Habermas. In the 1930s the Institute for Social Research was forced out of Germany by the rise of the Nazi Party.

In 1933, the Institute left Germany for Geneva. It then moved to New York City in 1934, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. Its journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was accordingly renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at this moment that much of its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia.

After 1945 a number of these surviving Marxists returned to both West and East Germany. In West Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a revived interest in Marxism produced a new generation of Marxists engaged with analyzing matters such as the cultural transformations taking place under Fordist capitalism, the impact of new types of popular music and art on traditional cultures [1], and maintaining the political integrity of discourse in the "public sphere."[2]

According to UCLA professor and critical theorist Douglas Kellner, "Many 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life.", [3] [4]

Kellner explains:

Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and procreative. Theorists like Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel group in France, Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti, and others in Italy, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham School.[5]

See also: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Critical theory (Frankfurt School), Cultural Bolshevism, Cultural hegemony, Cultural studies, Das Argument (journal), Frankfurt School, Marxism, and Postmodernity
[edit] Critiques of cultural Marxism
[edit] Criticism of Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse's 1954 book Eros and Civilization, has been the subject of considerable controversy. In it he argued for a politics based on the striving towards pleasure. This striving for pleasure would unite individualism, hedonism and absolute egalitarianism, because each individual would equally be able to determine their own needs and desires; thus everyone would be able to satisfy their true desires. Marcuse argues that the moral and cultural relativism of contemporary Western society impedes this egalitarian politics, because it provides no way of distinguishing between an individual's true needs, and false needs manufactured by capitalism. Paul Eidelberg, however, argues that Marcuse himself is a relativist or "nihilist", because Marcuse rejects any transcendent law or morality, and believes that all desires are morally equal. Eidelberg goes on to argue that Marcuse's nihilism leads him to call for a politicized, explicitly left-wing, academy.[6]

[edit] Cultural Marxism as pejorative
Post-World War II, conservatives remained suspicious of socialism and notions of social engineering. Some argued that Cultural Marxists and the Frankfurt School helped spark the counterculture social movements of the 1960s as part of a continuing plan of transferring Marxist subversion into cultural terms in the form of Freudo-Marxism.[7]

Since the early 1990s, paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan and William S. Lind have argued that Cultural Marxism is a dominant strain of thought within the American left, and associate it with a philosophy to destroy Western civilization.[8] Buchanan has asserted that the Frankfurt School commandeered the American mass media, and used this cartel to infect the minds of Americans.[9]

Lind makes a bolder claim when he writes,

"Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious."[10]

Lind is making an explicit charge that changes in language standards in recent decades have made US citizens "afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic" and that such changes can be attributed to the influence of cultural Marxists. [11] Lind's argument linking political correctness in contemporary public speech to the influence of cultural Marxism have been labeled as conspiracy theory by the SPLC.[12]

Conservative scholar Paul Gottfried in his book, The Strange Death of Marxism, states Marxism survived and evolved since the fall of the Soviet Union in the form of cultural Marxism:

Neomarxists called themselves Marxists without accepting all of Marx’s historical and economic theories but while upholding socialism against capitalism, as a moral position …. Thereafter socialists would build their conceptual fabrics on Marx’s notion of “alienation,â€