Posted by
shawnlouistickle on Monday, September 14, 2009 12:20:02 AM
Chapter 2:
A Very Select History of Political
Discourse and
The State of Neo-Marxist Propaganda in
the Twenty-First Century
In order to understand the depth and
gravity of the life and death crisis in which the people of the
United States are embroiled, in order to understand who is truly
right and who is truly wrong, and, in order to properly identify
exactly who the enemies are, everyone must consider a bit of the
History of Western Philosophy, and they must also explore the nature
of the enemy's tools and how he collected them.
Socrates
and Plato versus the Sophists
The contest between those evil people
who try to make lies sound like the truth and those persons who seek
the truth and who try to help others find the true and the good--this
contest is nothing new. In ancient Greece during the fourth and
fifth centuries BC, five centuries before the birth of Christ,
Socrates and Plato denounced and demonstrated the dishonesty of what
we still, today, refer to as sophistry. As defined by the Oxford
American Dictionary, the word sophist is a noun and is
defined as "a paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient
Greece, associated in popular thought with moral skepticism and
specious reasoning.” In ancient Greece, there was— quite
literally—a large class of people who made a very good living
teaching their students how to use the powerful tools of rhetoric to
trick the people in their audiences into believing that their lies
were true and into supporting ideas and doing things that no rational
person should support or should do.
Socrates and Plato trained their own
students to analyze the arguments of the sophists so that they could
see for themselves what those arguments really were, to see that they
were lies. Socrates and Plato gave their own students the same tools
that the sophists gave theirs, but Socrates and Plato taught their
students to use those tools in an honest pursuit of the truth. They
showed them the value and importance of truth and showed them how to
determine for themselves the difference between truth and lies and
between good and evil. Socrates and Plato were no more able to
defeat the sophists of their day than I have been able to destroy the
liars of my own time. But, that does not mean that I have to give
up, and it does not mean that I cannot teach my own students to think
for themselves and to discern the difference between a liar and an
honest man. I just pray to my Maker that what happened to Socrates
never happens to me.
The sophists of today often call
themselves philosophers, literary critics, social theorists, college
professors, high school teachers, administrators, public relations
officers, advertising agents, journalists, social workers, priests,
politicians, reformers, and crusaders. In no way, am I suggesting
that all people of those professions are sophists, but I do mean that
the sophists in our society today usually refer to themselves with
some other label and that those labels are often supposed to mean
something other than "liar.” Ironically, these labels are
often supposed to mean something like "truth teller," "good
deed doer," and "trustworthy leader.” Many of the people
in our society who are lovingly educated, carefully trained, and
well-paid to maintain important positions of trust are actually
liars, cheats, and stunningly effective manipulators. They re-write
the rules to suit their own political agendas and their own personal
interests. They will revise the rules of logic and argumentation,
the details of history, the basic spiritual ideals of their own
religion, and the most basic laws and guiding principles of their own
government so that, when they speak to uneducated, poorly trained
fools, those fools actually want to trust them and to believe that
they are guided by the most important, fundamental truths of Western
Civilization. These well-disguised cheats and liars do all of these
things with a clear conscience because they have convinced themselves
that they are doing these evil things for a good reason, for a good
cause. They have convinced themselves that the ends justify the
means, and, in the mean time, most of them make a pretty good living
while they are at it.
Karl
Marx and the Only Interesting Thing about Neo-Marxism
[And,
yes, I do get to decide what is interesting!]
Ironically, in spite of the fact that
neo-Marxism is a good label for the enemy under consideration here,
and in spite of the fact that Karl Marx is a key historical figure in
understanding this whole mess, it is not his interpretation of
history, philosophy, politics, or economics that has shaped our
current situation. It is not really Socialism, Communism, or Marxist
Economics that has spawned this problem. It is the method used by
many Marxists to advance their cause and the remarkable effect of
that method upon the masses that has caused this problem. Every
angry, passionate crusader and do-gooder looks back on the last two
centuries and asks himself the same awful question: "What method
of rapid, radical change works best?” How can I change the world
right now, today and change it into what I want it to be? They look
at the other angry, passionate do-gooders of history and try to
identify the standouts. Many of them have found their guiding models
in the likes of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and Che
Guevara. Current-day radical reformers are drawn to such historical
figures not because their philosophies were actually appealing or
helpful so much as they are drawn to them because of their energy,
their charisma, and their startling successes.
Marx and Marxist experiments of the
past are particularly appealing to those crusaders who are willing to
do anything--no matter how heinous--to get the job done, those people
who truly mean it when they say, "By any means necessary!” To
them, the history of Marxist propaganda and revolution offers near
limitless possibilities. If a man or woman is willing to equivocate,
to lie, to cheat, to steal, to commit mass murder, the tools of
Marxism may actually seem irresistibly appealing. All the radical
liberal crusaders in the United States, they all have their own
special, sacred, beloved causes. In that way, all those crusaders
are very different and have their own unique agendas, but the one
thing that they all have in common is their use of the Marxist
method. They are thoroughly neo-Marxist in that they take a few
basic ideals and techniques from traditional Marxism and apply those
to their own unique agenda, to transforming the world into what they
think it should be. The Church of Global Warming, The Green Party,
Open Border Lovers, Sponsors of Mexican Guest Worker Programs,
Twentieth-Century American Feminism, Qu**r Theory, New Historicism,
Affirmative Action, Multiculturalism, Deconstruction, and all other
forms of radical leftist social engineering have one thing in common.
They all embrace and use the rhetorical and philosophical tools of
Marxism to advance their own particular political agendas, regardless
of whether or not those political agendas have anything in common
with any Marxist ideology.
Nietzsche
Kills God, Transforms Himself into Superman, and Wills Himself to
Power, Leaping Tall Philosophies in a Single Bound
Admittedly, the most infamous ideas
that Nietzsche offered the world are probably those of the Übermensch
and the “Will to Power.” But, only slightly less infamous is
"Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet.”
—God is Dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him [1].
This is the genealogical root of Derrida's "it n'y a pas
de hors-texte"—There is nothing outside of or apart from the
text [2]. This is the beginning of the Deconstruction of Western
Civilization. Quite peculiar considering that Nietzsche himself was
a product of a very refined, cultured, sophisticated civilization and
had a deep and abiding love for some of the finer things in life,
including theatre and music.
Nietzsche also said that Truth lies
beyond the distinction between Good and Evil and that he who is not
the Übermensch,
he who is bound by notions of Good and Evil and by a dead God, is a
slave. In other words, there are two types of people in the world,
the Übermenschen
(the Supermen, Overmen, or Masters) and the Untermenschen
(the Lowermen, Undermen, or Slaves). If you are not the master, then
you are the master’s slave. There is no middle ground and no other
possibilities, and you have to choose to be the master or choose to
be the slave. God is dead to the people of this world--no longer
relevant, no longer meaningful, no longer threatening. Concepts of
good and evil are meaningless and are for the weak and the inferior;
they are for the slaves. The morality of the master, the Übermensch,
is not the same as that of the slave. It is more complex and
sophisticated, more deep and profound, and it is anything but black
and white. The master cannot and should not be bound by the same
rules as the slave. This is how many philosophers and politicians
rationalize having one set of rules for themselves and another set
for everyone else. They are the masters, and everyone else is a
slave to be ruled over and repressed. Which group one will be part
of is completely up to that individual. Does he choose to be the
master or choose to be the slave? Which set of rules will he choose?
The Übermensch
chooses to be the master, chooses his own set of rules and
standards, and, by exercising the strength of his will, he takes a
position of power and influence for himself.
A man must not believe in God if he is
going to define his own morality for himself and for that morality to
be fundamentally different from the morality that he himself
prescribes for other people, the people whom he has decided are not
like him, the people over whom he has chosen to rule. It is
necessary for him to try and kill God and to replace God with
himself. The final arbiter and mediator of right and wrong is
supposed to be God in the form of Jesus Christ. If, instead, a man
makes himself into the final arbiter, then he has attempted to put
himself in the place of God. This is why a neo-Marxist cannot allow
himself to believe in God, for it is absolutely necessary for the
neo-Marxist to be able to put himself in the place of God. If
neo-Marxists were to allow for the existence of God, they would never
be able to do the terrible, evil things that they do. This fact by
itself explains why those of the radical left are so much more likely
to stay home from church on Sunday and to have no use for the Bible,
for Jesus, or for religion in general. If a man defines his own
ethos by
making his number one priority his own will and his own political
agenda, then God will certainly fade into the background of his life.
Those persons who place their own political causes ahead of
everything else in life, those persons have no room left for God.
It is not possible to serve the Green
Party, to serve the Church of Global Warming, to serve the cause of
same-sex marriage, to serve those who pretend that terrorists,
rapists, and murders do not walk freely among the people and, then,
to try and serve God at the same time. This fact would also explain
why those people in churches that have been fully co-opted by the
political agenda of the neo-Marxists, churches like The Episcopal
Church (USA), tend to believe that the Bible is a unique and
beautiful cultural artifact filled with wondrous bits of literature
but not, necessarily, the Word of God. Many people who go to such
churches do not even believe in God themselves. For such people,
going to church is still an important cultural tradition, but, due to
their political ideologies, there is no room in their lives for faith
or for God. They are too busy being all-inclusive, being as diverse
as possible, and being so open-minded that they are not actually
allowed to believe in anything, not even God. According to the
National Study of Youth and Religion conducted in 2005, within the
ranks of The Episcopal Church (USA), 28% of the youth between the
ages of 13 and 17 either do not believe in God or are not sure that
God exists. Amongst all the youth in the same age group, throughout
the USA, including those youth affiliated with no church at all, only
15% of them either do not believe in God or are not sure that God
exists. This means that, if a teen happens to attend an Episcopal
church every Sunday, then he is almost twice as likely to doubt the
existence of God than is the average teenager. Apparently, even the
oldest of established, Christian traditions are not immune to the
ravages of intellectual deceit and spiritual bankruptcy, the
hallmarks of neo-Marxist, leftist political tactics.
Hitler
and How He Came to be Known as the Father of the Big Lie (Große
Lüge)
In 1925, while imprisoned, Adolf Hitler
wrote Mein Kampf,
"My Struggle." In his manifesto, he identified and labeled
the mechanism of political propaganda, calling it “Große
Lüge”—The Big Lie. He used this label for any
political discourse that was not anti-Semitic [3].
This appellation caught on very quickly with many people
around the world, and--more than anything--it has been used by them
to identify the propaganda of their enemies. Even as I write this,
many of the most high profile and influential products of neo-Marxist
indoctrination, also known as journalists, are themselves writing
about George Bush and his newest "Big Lie" concerning the
war in Iraq, writing about how the war against Islamic terrorism is a
"Big Lie" used by evil warmongers to justify whatever
terrible desire that pops into their heads, writing about the "Big
Lie" of free market economic theory, or writing about the "Big
Lie" told by close-minded red necks concerning the illegal-alien
menace.
As the years passed, though, this
mechanism of political propaganda was so very successful and so
simple and easily implemented that the temptation to use the Big Lie
for their own selfish reasons was more than some people could handle.
Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, uses the
term himself in a 1941 article attacking Winston Churchill [4].
Since then, many scholars and analysts--including members of
the intelligence services of the US government--have also operated
upon the assumption that Hitler and Goebbels quietly used the
technique themselves without ever publicly acknowledging it [5].
There have also been many in the neo-Marxist realm who
decided that the unavoidable reality of this phenomenon could be
exploited to advance their own political agendas. Like Hitler, the
neo-Marxists realized that the "Big Lie" works both ways.
It can work for you as well as against you. For people who are
willing to use the Big Lie themselves, it works in two very different
but equally important ways: (1) they use the term "Big Lie"
whenever referring to the ideas of people who disagree with the lies
that they tell themselves, doing so often enough that people in
general get used to associating the ideas of their enemies with the
word "lie"; and (2) they deliver their own lies with the
kind of conviction which ensures that simple-minded people believe
that they are surely telling the truth, and they do so often enough
that most people get used to associating their ideas with the word
"truth."
This simple technique employed
skillfully enough can have a huge impact on a worldwide scale.
Hitler used it, and the result was World War II and genocide. Al
Gore and company have used it, and the result is the Inconvenient
Truth of the Church of Global Warming. Hillary Clinton has been
using it for many years. So far, the result has been Senator
Clinton, and, in the end, the final result was very nearly President
Hillary Clinton. For many years, I felt certain that no one could
rival the Clintons in their expert use of the Big Lie, but that was
before I had the opportunity to watch the ultimate practitioner,
Barack Obama. Having refined his technique into an amazingly
effective science, President Obama’s sophistry has an awe
inspiring, nearly magical quality. Before he is finished telling his
Big Lies, Mr. Obama may well have quadurpeled annual deficit of the
US, doubled the National debt, made energy prohibitively expensive
for a large portion of the population, and seized control of the
entire medical establishment by creating a government-run, universal
healthcare system. In fact, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are
hardly alone in their use of the "Big Lie.” When people in
the USA complain about the fact that most elections seem to boil down
to who spends the most money on advertising, what they are really
complaining about is the fact all people on both sides have given up
any pretense of conducting a real debate and about the fact that all
people on both sides know that the only thing they have to rely on is
the power of the "Big Lie" and its evil effect upon the
poorly educated mass of the population.
It is also important to remember that
the "Big Lie" and Political Correctness are closely
related. The "Big Lie" is the weapon used by the
neo-Marxist Übermenschen to bully the rest of the world into a
Politically-Correct state of submission, a combination of mental
stupor and spiritual terror that makes it impossible for most to
stand up and be heard when they want to shout out, "Liar, liar!
Evil, despicable liar!” --when they all want to shout, "The
truth will set me free!” The "Big Lie" helps to keep the
enemy quiet and keep the enemy on the defensive.
Political
Correctness: One of the Great Evils of Our Time
Use of the concept of political
correctness as a tool by the radical left can be traced to the
earliest applications of Marxism in real-world politics. As early as
the WWI era, political correctness was used as a tool to measure
people's choices and to measure their loyalty to the political agenda
of Marxist governments and to the greater cause of Communist world
domination.
It was certainly practiced in the
earliest days of the Soviet Union, and, under Stalin, the concept was
enshrined in strict laws controlling every form of artistic
expression, making Socialist Realism the only legally sanctioned form
of artistic expression in the Soviet Union. Under this kind of
repression, every artist's work was reviewed by agents of the
government, and censorship was the fate of any work that did not
support and advance the political agenda of the ruling government and
celebrate the greater cause--the world-wide spread of the Marxist,
Communist way of life. Artists who refused to cooperate with the
program of state censorship were often exiled to Siberia, some even
to the wasteland of the Gulag.
Political Correctness also became an
important philosophical ideal in many other Marxist philosophical
schools, including the Cultural Theory of the Frankfurt School, the
members of which lived and worked in Germany before the rise of
Hitler and Nazism. When Hitler came to power, many of them were
forced to flee Germany, and they brought their own Marxist ideals and
political agenda with them to the United States. There, they enjoyed
comfort, safety, and sanctuary in the loving and warm embrace of the
college and university system of this country.
As time went on, many bizarre and
disturbing schools of social theory and cultural criticism began to
take shape in the United States, all of them either openly Marxist
or, slyly, neo-Marxist at their core. One of the most important
ideals that binds all these groups together is their conscious or
unconscious use of this basic Marxist concept of political
correctness. They all operate on the assumption that it is beyond
doubt and beyond any need for debate that their core political values
are actually true. Therefore, anything is justified, righteous, and
celebrated as long as it helps to further the cause of those core
political values and the programs based upon them. Whatever does not
threaten those values is probably alright, but anything that
threatens those core political values is the essence of evil and must
be stopped at all costs. Traditional notions of right and wrong are
completely thrown out, and this new, basic principle replaces them
all. And, apart from those core political values, this is the only
principle that matters.
For this reason, many neo-Marxist
causes like New (or Revisionist) Historicism, Radical American
Feminism, Green Party Environmentalism, and many others are able to
rationalize the most bizarre, obscene, inhumane programs the human
mind could possibly dream up.
These groups use the fear generated by
their neo-Marxist tactics as a weapon to beat their opponents into
submission. This fear is the same fear that I have mentioned
previously. This is the fear that makes people shut up and pretend
that they do not see the dirty, ugly mess in front of them and makes
them pretend that the obvious cause of that mess is some super
mysterious secret beyond the reach of even the most brilliant minds.
It is the very same fear in both cases.
Foucault
Drives Another Nail into the Coffin of Ethos:
Everyone’s
ideology is wrong. Ideologies themselves are wrong. But, my
ideology is alright, and I’m alright. And, geeh, people like me.
Thank you France!
Foucault does what some thought to be
impossible. He sets out to prove very rationally, with flawless
logic, that truth is defined by power. Power is the key to
everything, and he who wields the Power defines the Truth. So, if he
is correct, there is—for all intents and purposes—no such thing
as Truth. Truth is what the guy with the fattest wallet and the
biggest gun says that it is. The scariest part is that he does a
very good job of it, leaving only one possible way out for people
like me—the evidence. Either his evidence is false or his evidence
is insufficient; otherwise, he is right. I, myself, have good reason
to believe that his evidence is insufficient, but there are some
things about which he is certainly right. I will eventually deal
with that problem in greater detail, but not now.
With flawless logic once again,
Foucault goes on to do the same thing to our notions of Author and
Text. He makes them disappear, just like David Copperfield made that
big statue disappear from New York Harbor. In their places, he
attempts to drop the Author Function and the Discursive Space, two
very powerful ideas that profoundly changed many people's notions
about what happens when we write and what happens when we read. The
most difficult thing about this is that the Author Function and the
Discursive Space are quite real and operate exactly as Foucault
describes them, yet there is, in fact, still an author and still a
material artifact created by that author. There still is a text.
Regardless of whether or not we ever meet the author, see him
creating the text, or know for sure that he wrote it, we do still
know that someone wrote it and that it does in fact exist. We can
touch it. We can see it, and we can read it. So, just as in the
case of the Statue of Liberty and of the Truth, the Author and the
Text never actually disappear. They may become more difficult to
see, but they are all still very real and very much there—just like
God.
And, that is, of course, the whole
point. The history of modern and postmodern philosophy is the
history of a war on God and a war on the Word, the Text that God has
authored. What Nietzsche, Foucault, and all others of their kind
want to do is kill God, make Him disappear, go away, and leave them
alone. He makes them feel bad about the fact that they have spent so
much of their lives and their precious time lying to themselves and
lying to world. They all seem to have forgotten what happens when
someone declares war on God. Perhaps, they never got the Word about
Lucifer. Perhaps, the Text of Lucifer’s story was too painful for
them, and they have blocked it from their conscious minds. Perhaps,
that is real reason that so few people even remember Milton’s name,
and even fewer read him.
While lacking in sufficient evidence,
Foucault’s intriguing tower of logic allows him to dismiss the
whole concept of ideological assumptions, moral values, ethics,
ethos.
If power decides which ideology will be the dominate one, then one
ideology is as good as another. The winning ideology is simply the
ideology of those with the most power and the strongest will, so it
is alright to have any ideology you like and to fight in any way that
you like, using any methods that you choose to further that ideology.
To win the cause of your ideology, by any means necessary, is all
that matters. Whether or not your ideology is right, or is the best,
does not matter. Because that which is best is merely what one
defines it to be, what is best becomes meaningless; therefore, what
is best cannot matter—to any one. It is against the rules because
it has been defined out of existence.
With
Delusions of Nietzsche-hood, Derrida and His Faithful Tribe
Deconstruct Reason, Truth, and Sanity, Giving Birth to Modern Moron
Culture. Thanks
again France!
Realizing that there were pure,
pristine, unexplored depths of perversity contained within
Nietzsche’s famous assertion—“Gott ist tot!” —Jacques
Derrida, in his infinite wisdom, decided that we actually needed to
take the whole “God is Dead” thing a step or two further. At
that moment, Derrida decided to advance his own thesis, "it n'ya
pas de hors' texte." There is nothing apart from or outside of
the Text.
Like Foucault, Derrida forces one to
consider the text and to consider reading and meaning. When a person
reads, that person cannot know anything for certain that is outside
the text itself. There is no valid evidence to help one understand
the text that is not contained within the text itself. No one can
assume anything about anything before the reading of the text begins.
No one can assume that he knows the mind of the author, and no one
can assume that the words on the page in front him can actually be
trusted to be the words selected by the original author of the text.
As a method of teaching people to read
a literary text and to interpret it themselves without relying on
someone else to do it for them, this basic assumption works pretty
well. But, when you decide to apply that same principle to human
nature and life in general, it can cause much more trouble than it is
worth. If a person asserts, as does Derrida, that language is not
just how human beings communicate and that it is, in fact, the way in
which people perceive themselves, each other, and everything in the
universe around them, then the assertion that there is no a
priori knowledge of any kind and that there is nothing
apart from or outside of the text becomes overwhelmingly problematic.
For Derrida, language is the way in
which we understand everything, and there is no way that we can
escape that or to get outside of that reality. People live inside
that which is described, circumscribed, and defined by the languages
and the texts that they use, the texts of which we partake, the texts
in which we participate. And, that is the end of it; that is all
people will ever know or be able to know. Anything outside of that
or beyond that is not possible, cannot and should not be considered,
and, therefore, has become irrelevant.
Even though, at first glance, those
conclusions may not seem too bizarre or problematic, they do create
insurmountable difficulties when anyone tries to place into a text or
tries to find anything in a text that is assumed to exist outside of
people’s experience of this world as it is perceived by them
through the medium of language and text. For Derrida, there is, in
fact, nothing outside of language and text. There is no person and
no thing that can transcend that boundary. To do so is not possible
in the human world defined for people by their use of language and
text. Nothing—nada—can
be signified in language if it somehow has an existence outside of,
independent of, before language itself. {There’s got to be a
Hemingway joke in there somewhere!} For those who believe in nothing
outside the realm of their own human experience, this a
priori assumption has become very convenient. It allows
them all to reject anything in which they do not want to believe. It
allows Derrida to say that there is no transcendental signified,
that there is no transcendent, absolute truth. Of course, this
argument becomes a very fancy philosopher’s way of saying “Not
only is God dead; there is no God!” Oh, if Nietzsche were still
alive, I am certain that that argument would give him a warm, fuzzy
feeling down deep inside—perhaps down deep where that chronic,
agonizing ulcer never stopped chewing away at his innards.
Even worse, by turning language—that
which defines everything and the way in which we perceive it—into a
plaything that can be manipulated, equivocated, and twisted into
anything we want it to be, unscrupulous persons do and will continue
to define their own reality for themselves using the language that
they redefine and reconstruct for themselves. They can imagine a new
social world order of utopian scope that contains all of their own
hopes and dreams, and, then, they can, do, and will use that new
language to belittle their enemies, to manipulate the masses, and to
force their own wild fantasies on everyone else including the people
who would rather die than live in their version of utopia. Thus, the
very philosophical solution sold to the world as the remedy for
hegemony, tyranny, and fascism has succeeded only in creating many,
many tiny, petty, fascist philosopher kings who all want to force
their own grand yet conflicting and contradictory brand of utopian
idealism upon the unwilling masses. This chaos is the obvious and
inevitable result of the conscious rejection of the traditional ethos
of Western Civilization, a traditional Judeo-Christian ethos.
Once again, by manufacturing their own faith-replacements, these
persons who claim that there is no God and that human beings are
better off without religion, they themselves have proven that humans
are born with an innate need for faith and morality. By forcing
themselves to give up faith and religion, they have forced themselves
to manufacture a replacement for faith and religion.
Deconstruction eliminates any concern
for truth and eliminates the need for meaning and understanding.
Those things do not really matter because genuine meaning and
understanding are impossible, and those who believe that they can
glean anything from any text are merely venturing out onto a
playground of their own construction with no way of ascertaining
verifiable meaning or understanding. Anything one thinks he
understands after reading a text is still subject to challenge and is
more than anything a product of the reader’s own imagination.
{This paragraph
really needs some work. I will have to fix it later though.}
The
Tribes of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida Have a Three-way Shack-up,
Settle Down, and Give Birth to All Manner of Deformed, Twisted, and
Monstrous Offspring.
There is no God. There is no truth.
Language and text are everything; even though, there might not be any
such thing as author or text. That contradiction, though, is not
problematic because it is all probably meaningless anyway. All
language is subject to construction and deconstruction. According to
the new rules, I am, after all, allowed to make it all up as go
along—remembering, of course, that I must be clever and playful as
I do so. It is actually important to be entertaining. Nonexistent,
transcendent signified forbid, one would never want to waste anyone’s
time by boring them and wasting their precious time by being anything
other than entertaining.
This newly constructed playground of
infinite possibilities has attracted, even helped to create, all
manner of new schools of thought, philosophical and literary in
nature. New
Historicism—With a hot and bloody lust for the
neo-Marxist ideal of political correctness, with a profound
understanding of the bitterness and resentment welling up amongst the
angry followers of the civil-rights movements and the feminist
movements--whose members had all been promised something by their
leaders, something that never materialized, and with the icy-cold
calculation of a Wall-Street investor, Stephen Greenblatt and his
angry, self-righteous, self-important followers gave us New
Historicism and its related ideals, once and for all time, the
history truly written by, for, and according to the winners [6].
Logocentrism—Derrida
and Spivak convince all their wacky friends that logos
is just another kind of bigotry and prejudice [7]. Reason, itself,
is just another unacceptable, a
priori assumption that people have no right to make, an
ideological assumption, used by dead, fat, white guys who wanted to
push all their own personal, random, arbitrary values on other people
in an effort to preserve their own comfortable position in the
hierarchy of the class structure. Phallogocentrism—
Logocentrism develops phallus envy [8]. Derrida, Irigaray, Spivak, and
Lacan make Logocentrism more creepy by far, giving it a phallus. Thank
you, Sigmund! Of course, the implication here is that logocentrism
is the product of a patriarchal, repressive, male-dominated society
and that it has actually been used as a way of excluding women from
the vast market place of ideas. After all, we all know that logos
is a man thing, especially a fat, white, heterosexual, European and
American guy thing. Qu**r
Theory—It’s not only alright to be gay; it’s better
to be gay; and--even though you did not know it--in the past,
everybody was gay, especially Jesus [9].
Remember, thanks to Foucault and
Derrida, it is now alright for me make it up as I go along, as long
as it advances my political agenda, and as long as I have the will
and the power to make it happen. The truth is, after all, what I
define it to be and, then, have to power to force people to believe.
There is no Truth. There is no Author.
There is no Text. Power is everything. Anything I do to advance my
cause is just, because my cause is just, and, while I know there is
no such thing as Good and Evil and there is no Truth, I know my cause
is truly just because, after all, it is my cause. Economics,
Politics, and Power define everything. In other words, I am only as
important as my bank account, and anything I do to make my bank
account bigger is just because I am just, because I am me and I am
always right. For such people, God is truly Dead.
The
Final Product
What we are left with is a nation in
which even the most traditional, logical, and truth-oriented students
and scholars have been thoroughly infected and ravaged by the disease
of absolute relativism and political correctness. The worst part of
all—these people who have made us vulnerable to our enemies
actually have less in common with me than our enemies do. At least
our enemies, who want to murder us, are people who believe in
something and are people who have identified the neo-Marxist, secular
humanists as the real problem. The neo-Marxist, secular humanists
are—at the same time—both the reason the terrorists want to kill
us and the reason that the terrorists will eventually be able to kill
us.
We now live in a society in which a
large percentage of the population uses lies and deceit to advance
their own cause, and, since they see truth to be an illusion, and
since they feel that they have everyone’s best interest in mind,
they still believe that what they are doing is right and just. And,
in that same society, there is an even larger percentage of people
who actually believe that the lies of these people are true and just
and right and that rational, thinking, scholarly, objective people
are false, deceitful, and evil.
NOTES
[1] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die
fröhliche
Wissenschaft. Third Book, Aphorism Section 125. 1882.
[2] Derrida, Jacques. De
La Grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967.
227; Derrida, Jacques. Of
Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. 242.
[3] Hitler, Adolf. Mein
Kampf. Trans. James Murphy and pub. 1939. Project
Gutenberg of Australia. September 2002. 12 September 2009.
<http:// gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt>.
[4] Goebbels, Joseph. “Aus Churhills
Lügenfabrik.” Die
Zeit ohne Beispiel. Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP,
1941. 364-69. Available in English trans. as “Churchill’s Lie
Factory.” German Propaganda Archive at Calvin: Minds in the
Making. 1998. 12 September 2009. <http://www.calvin.edu/academic/
cas/gpa/goeb29.htm>.
[5] Langer, Walter C. “A
Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend.”
Washington, DC: M. O. Branch. Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Declassified 12 March 1968. Photographic facsimiles of all pages
available at the archives of The
Nizkor Project. 12 September 2009.
<http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/
hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/profile-index.html>.
[6] Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Invisible
Bullets.” Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and
Cultural Studies. Ed. Robert
Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman, 1994. 474-506;
Habib, M. A. R. “New Historicism.” A History of Literary
Criticism From Plato to the Present.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 760-771; Abrams, M. H. “New
Historicism.” A Glossary of Literary Terms. 6th
Ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 1993. 248-255.
[7] Habib, M. A. R. “Deconstruction.”
A History of Literary Criticism From Plato to the Present.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 649-666; Abrams, M. H.
“Deconstruction.” A Glossary of Literary Terms. 6th
Ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 1993. 226.
[8] Habib, M. A. R. “Feminist
Criticism.” A History of Literary Criticism From Plato to the
Present. Oxford: Blackwell,
2005. 667-707; Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of
Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge, 2006. 146; Abrams, M. H. “Feminist
Criticism.” A Glossary of Literary Terms. 6th
Ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 1993. 238.
[9] McGowan,
John. “Nussmaum v. Butler: Round One.” Framing Theory's
Empire. Ed. John Holbo. West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press,
2007. 194-200; McGowan, John. “Nussmaum v. Butler: Round Two.”
Framing Theory's Empire. Ed. John Holbo. West Lafayette,
Indiana: Parlor Press, 2007. 201-205.