Jessie Jackson: Obama "acting like he's white"

 Anglo this is a good look at political correctness.

 For the first time in our history, Americans
have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they
think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced
as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.

  We have seen other countries, particularly in this century,
where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture
of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as
so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would
be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this
country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading
throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it? 

  We call it "Political Correctness." The name originated
as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to
think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the
great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions
of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world.
It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious. 

  If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically,
we quickly find out exactly what it is. 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.

  First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian
nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on
college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North
Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the
lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists,
or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted "victims"
groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble.
Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges
– some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look
into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a
whole. 

  Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence
of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is
not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this
philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history
of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality
contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to
acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a
lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally
use their ears and eyes to look out and say, "Wait a minute. This isn’t
true. I can see it isn’t true," the power of the state must be put behind
the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian
state. 

  Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness,
like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic
Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of
production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history
is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex,
etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature,
indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing. 

  Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups,
i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups,
i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism
of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only
feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics,
homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims," and therefore
automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white
males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent
of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism. 

  Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation.
When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia,
they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly,
when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate
through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior
qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or
Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated.
And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system
of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the
contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So
expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism. 

  And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically
gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics.
For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially
takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning
desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the
suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All
of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that "all
history is about which groups have power over which other groups." So the
parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar
with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today
as Political Correctness. 

  But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did
not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness
has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware
of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history
goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies
that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down. 

  Marxist theory said that when the general European war
came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe
would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments
– because the workers had more in common with each other across the national
boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling
class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout
Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight
each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social
Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are
only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something
was wrong. 

  Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory.
In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the
theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts
were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising
in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet,
the workers didn’t support them. 

  So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists
went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary.
Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as
defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly
from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion
to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant
Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, "Who will save us from
Western Civilization?" He also theorized that the great obstacle to the
creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself. 

  Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because
when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary
in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he
did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured
that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the
Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else.
But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still
surprised by, that we would consider the "latest thing." 

  In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes
on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that
creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has
created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because
the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of
Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed
by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the
First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German
thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism. 

  And he says, "What we need is a think-tank." Washington
is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they
go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt
University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known
as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning
that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist.
The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out
it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute
for Social Research. 

  Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote
to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as
the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he
said, "I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its
contributions to Marxism." Well, he was successful. The first director
of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening
address, according to Martin Jay, "by clearly stating his personal allegiance
to Marxism as a scientific methodology." Marxism, he said, would be the
ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed. 

  The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional,
but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s
views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people
who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re
still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run
out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, "Hey, this
isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this." 

  Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested
in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic
into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again,
Martin Jay writes, "If it can be said that in the early years of its history,
the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois
society’s socio-economic sub-structure," – and I point out that Jay is
very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic
here – "in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural
superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship
between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory." 

  The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the
radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments,
the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical
Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx
and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The
term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, "What is the theory?"
The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western
culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They
explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t
imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free
society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of
a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian
condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression
– we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing.
It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible
way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we
hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women
and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It
is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

  Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore
Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and
Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness,
and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own
writings calls for a society of "polymorphous perversity," that is his
definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse
in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need
for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do
most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early
30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of
‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were
derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part
socially determined." Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct. 

  Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism.
"Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating
attitude toward nature." That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus
und Moral. "The theme of man’s domination of nature," according to
Jay, " was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent
years." "Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s
were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another
dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness."
In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation,
written in 1936, Horkeimer "discussed the hostility to personal gratification
inherent in bourgeois culture." And he specifically referred to the Marquis
de Sade, favorably, for his "protest…against asceticism in the name of
a higher morality." 

  How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it
flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members
of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In
1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut
down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled
to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with
help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually
through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift
their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism
about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward
American society. There is another very important transition when the war
comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse,
who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some,
including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood. 

  These origins of Political Correctness would probably
not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first
was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by
resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed
theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, "Hell no
we won’t go," they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it.
Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital.
Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the
60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country
today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America
when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And
whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when
it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom,
he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained
here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity
to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the
New Left in the United States. 

  One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually
became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book
was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic
order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A
Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression
is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes
– the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts
are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing
oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido,
in which we have a world of "polymorphous perversity," in which you can
"do you own thing." And by the way, in that world there will no longer
be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s!
They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having
to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here
is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them
to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear
which is essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels good do it," and
"You never have to go to work." By the way, Marcuse is also the man who
creates the phrase, "Make love, not war." Coming back to the situation
people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance
for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from
the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right).
So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.

  In conclusion, America today is in the throws of the greatest
and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological
state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power
of the state. In "hate crimes" we now have people serving jail sentences
for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category
ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone
who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly
what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and
now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political
Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny,
it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to
destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.