The Javelineer

Whittle exposes the despicable Walter Duranty and the deplorable Walter Cronkite, and then ties it all together with the Frankfurt School and Obama’s ideology. It’s a typically adept presentation.

He even talks a bit about Cronkite’s dangerous ambition for world government. Conservatives are waking up.

(h/t insty)

Christopher Hitchens thinks there’s something good about Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism. Why does Trotsky matter? Robert Service explains,

He’s one of the half dozen outstanding Marxist revolutionaries. He helps to make the October Revolution that brings the communists to power in 1917. He’s a leader of the Red Army that fights the civil war, and he’s the intellectual architect of a lot of aspects of Communism that get laid down in the 1920s and still have an impact in the 40s, 50s 60s to the present day.

Video here.

On balance, I think Trostsky was a very bad man, because he advocated very bad politics. Why should you care about Trotsky? After Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico, his followers, the Trotskyites, became the vanguard of Cultural Marxism. This virulent form of communism is the origin of political correctness, and it is the predominate politics advocated on American college campuses.

Cultural Marxism is still a threat. Linda Kimball explains the history and aims of cultural marxists.

Separately, two Marxist theorists-Antonio Gramsci of Italy and Georg Lukacs of Hungary-concluded that the Christianized West was the obstacle standing in the way of a communist new world order.  The West would have to be conquered first.

Gramsci posited that because Christianity had been dominant in the West for over 2000 years, not only was it fused with Western civilization, but it had corrupted the workers class.  The West would have to be de-Christianized, said Gramsci, by means of a “long march through the culture.”  Additionally, a new proletariat must be created.  In his “Prison Notebooks,” he suggested that the new proletariat be comprised of many criminals, women, and racial minorities.

The new battleground, reasoned Gramsci, must become the culture, starting with the traditional family and completely engulfing churches, schools, media, entertainment, civic organizations, literature, science, and history.  All of these things must be radically transformed and the social and cultural order gradually turned upside-down with the new proletariat placed in power at the top.

Cultural marxists aim at nothing less than total destruction of traditional Western culture. Feminism, an illogical and evil philosophy, has been one of the most successful cultural marxist movements. Feminists have convinced most people that Western civilization has been and is preoccupied with oppressing women. That is completely and totally false. But this is prerequisite belief for feminists to destroy the most successful social arrangement in human history: the traditional nuclear family.

Saul Alinsky was a prominent cultural marxist and former Trotskyite. He organized the Chicago political machine. He is an intellectual hero to Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. Alinsky dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals, to Satan as the first Marxist revolutionary. Alinsky, Cloward and Piven, and other cultural marxists advocate a strategy to destroy Capitalism and individual liberty.

This strategy has already wreaked havoc.

Rathke acknowledges his support for the Cloward-Piven Strategy, an approach to radical social and political change articulated by Marxist university professors Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in a 1966 Nation article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” The two academics called for “a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” in an effort to overwhelm the system. [Italics in original.]

The strategy helped to bankrupt New York City in 1975. Years later, the Big Apple’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name.

The push for government control of insurance is undoubtedly the latest attempt to “overwhelm the system.” This precipitates another crisis a few years later. As Obama’s advisor Rahm Emanuel has said, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Saul Alinsky couldn’t have said it better.

As you can see, Trotsky’s influence was wide, deep, and long-lasting. But it wasn’t good. Neither are his followers.

In the 1930s, Walter Duranty travelled to the Soviet Union and witnessed the planned famines that eventually wiped out 20 million kulaks. Instead of reporting the truth, Duranty lied. He promoted an idyllic image of the Soviet Union, even as mass starvation and state terror decimated the Soviet peoples.

Near the end of the Great Depression, Americans read Duranty’s idylls about Soviet life. Seeking jobs and a better life, lured by Duranty’s false dreams, some American leftists emigrated to the Soviet Union. Few of them survived.

William Underhill is the new Walter Duranty.

In an article published in Newsweek this week, William Underhill tells the magazine’s readers that “fears of a Muslim takeover [in Europe] are all wrong.”

The article was published one week after Muslim youths, during consecutive nights of rioting, torched hundreds of cars and burnt the entire business district of the French town of Firminy to the ground.

Perhaps Mr. Underhill was unaware of the events in Firminy, as are many Europeans and even Frenchmen, because the media are loath to report facts like these. In the Fall of 2005, a wave of nightly rioting by young Muslim thugs suddenly disappeared from the news when the press, at the request of the French authorities, stopped reporting about it.

In France, over 750 territorial enclaves have been given up by the state and are no longer controlled by the French authorities. These are the so-called “zones urbaines sensibles” (ZUS, sensitive urban areas). They have even been listed as such on an official website. The ZUS are run by Muslim gangs, while the inhabitants live under a combination of Shariah law and mafia rule.

Warnings concerning the loss of Europe to Islam is referred to by Mr. Underhill as “rabble-rousing stuff” and “alarming and highly speculative projections.” While conceding that “about half of respondents in Spain and Germany [hold] negative views of Muslims,”Newsweek pretends to know better than the 50 per cent of Europeans who feel uneasy about their daily confrontations with men in djellabahs and women in hijabs (if not niqabs and burkas), and with the construction of huge mosques in their home towns.

Read it all. Underhill is a dunderhead.

In The American Spectator, Roger Scruton writes against the pagan youth worship that is the modern university.

The true conservative cause, when it comes to the universities, ought to be the restoration of judgment to its central place in the humanities. And that shows how difficult a task the recapture of the universities will be. It will require a confrontation with the culture of youth, and an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a rite of passage into something better. And the word “better” simply raises the problem all over again. Who has the right to say, that one thing is better than another?

He argues that universities have replaced educated judgement with mere taste. The left have culminated a successful and radical attack against judgement itself.

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