Juan Gonzales from Democracy*Now is at it again. In the video in the article from The Blaze, in which he speaks derisively about the concept of the middle class, you can see infamous Frances Fox-Piven, of both the Cloward-Piven Strategy and more recently, the Occupy movement, sitting on his right.
* On the Marxist-lead redefining of the term Democracy in order to mean a political system that has nothing to do with actual Democracy:http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/03/marxists-hijack-democracy-pretend-that.html
From The Blaze:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/responsibility-for-progressives-to-reject-the-middle-class-tv-host-says-since-they-have-no-relationship-to-the-poor-or-people-of-color/
"Speaking on a panel in Stony Brook, NY, Mr. Gonzales discussed his views on how detrimental the “fixation in American politics with the middle class” is. Gonzales explains:
“The key aspect of constantly raising the middle class in my mind is to exclude the poor and the unemployed from the concept of the people and to exclude immigrant labor from the concept of what American politics is geared to.”
The host of the broadly syndicated television and radio show went on to explain that the major goals of the progressive movement in the future should be the elimination of the “concept” of the middle class in American society.
“The key responsibility for progressives in my mind is to reject this concept of the middle class–from my perspective as a journalist, buying into the middle class paradigm is the beginning of a dulling of the consciousness for working people in America in the 21st Century.”
The middle class has long been a target of the Left. Early Marxists viewed it as a lower-rung variant of the ruling order that would need to be swept away in the establishment of the Classless Society. In the eyes of a true Leftist, the middle class, with its archaic attachment to its individualism, culture, religion, traditions, love of country, and above all, property, has to go. It is a framework that supports to Old Order.
The middle class also tends to possess attributes such as literacy and learning, both of which are anathema to those who seek to overturn the ancien regimes. Their ability to recognize that Marxists may be leading them down a path to utter subjugation was something that needed to be removed.
As Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French writer who penned Democracy in America noted in that work, it is not the lower class that fears upheaval; they tend to have the opinion that their lot can only improve. Neither do the upper classes fear such chaos; they know that they possess vast resources, that they will find a means to retain a satisfactory portion of their holdings, and will likely gain a position of power in the New Order. Tocqueville was adamant that it was the middle class, the group that has just enough (Usually from many years of schooling, frugal living, and hard work) to feel somewhat comfortable yet is constantly poised to lose it all at any given moment, that has the most to fear from an overturning of society.
It is they who will be ordered about by the new ruling elite, those who covet power more than anything else, and will cause the middle class to lose everything.
By Mikhail Bakunin, an early anarchist, writing on Marx and Engels-
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1872/karl-marx.htm
"To me the flower of the proletariat is not, as it is to the Marxists, the upper layer, the aristocracy of labor, those who are the most cultured, who earn more and live more comfortably than all the other workers. Precisely this semi-bourgeois layer of workers would, if the Marxists had their way, constitute their fourth governing class. This could indeed happen if the great mass of the proletariat does not guard against it. By virtue of its relative. well-being and semi-bourgeois position, this upper layer of workers is unfortunately only too deeply saturated with all the political and social prejudices and all the narrow aspirations and pretensions of the bourgeoisie. Of all the proletariat, this upper layer is the least social and the most individualist.
By the flower of the proletariat, I mean above all that great mass, those millions of the uncultivated, the disinherited, the miserable, the illiterates, whom Messrs. Engels and Marx would subject to their paternal rule by a strong government – naturally for the people’s own salvation! All governments are supposedly established only to look after the welfare of the masses! By flower of the proletariat, I mean precisely that eternal “meat” (on which governments thrive), that great rabble of the people (underdogs, “dregs of society”) ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase Lumpenproletariat. I have in mind the “riffraff,” that “rabble” almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, which carries in its inner being and in its aspirations, in all the necessities and miseries of its collective life, all the seeds of the socialism of the future, and which alone is powerful enough today to inaugurate and bring to triumph the Social Revolution."
This attitude found its way into the United States and may have strongly influenced the disastrous shift from teaching children to read by actually utilizing our alphabet to a word-recognition or "sight word" system, one that has created generations of functional illiterates. The poor needed to kept in poverty and ignorance, and the middle class had to be shifted to that level along with them.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/reading_the_contempt_of_socialists.html
-Excerpts form the above-linked post follow:
"One bit of history strikes me forcefully in this context. When the Progressives in this country took control of public education, fighting under the banner of John Dewey's socialist ideas, you might have expected -- or hoped -- that they would use their new power to lift the lower classes to some higher place. They did not.
They had power by the 1930s, and their first big move was to throw phonics out and introduce Whole Word, which requires children to memorize words as diagrams. It seems to me a particularly revealing move. From that time forward, our public schools have churned out more than 50 million functional illiterates. We have one million dyslexics, with some estimates much higher. We have a vast decline in culture, in general knowledge, and in ordinary common sense. (If people still have any of that, it's arguably because they are constantly interacting with movies and TV; most of this so-called entertainment is more sophisticated than most of the so-called education served up in our public schools.)
And all this decline was accomplished by a simple device: our collectivist educators, having climbed their way to the top, refused to let the peasants learn to read.
The Education Establishment pushed Look-say, Sight Words, Whole Language, and Balanced Literacy (all these are the same thing under different names) in an endless rolling barrage unlike anything seen since the trench warfare of World War I. Phonics had to be obliterated. Whole Word had to be enforced, by whatever claims, weird jargon, repackaging, and outright lies were necessary.
So here we are in 2012, and children are still forced to memorize their Dolch words in first grade. What are Dolch words? They are the more common words, named after Edward Dolch, one of the pioneers of Whole Word. Although language and jargon have been changed, the essential gimmick does not change. Kids were made to memorize sight-words in 1935, and they are made to do the same today.
Children still end up reading less fluently, knowing less, and making for a less educated, less independent people.
So I propose that reading theory -- perhaps I should say false reading theory -- provides a miniature diorama of George Orwell's analysis [In linked article]. Our Middle are Socialists, and once they were on the move circa 1931, they showed, at least in education, their true colors. I think it's fair to say that Obama and his far-left friends would like to move to the top. Obviously, this is bad news for the High. But this essay is about the Low. The warning is clear. The Low should not be so foolish as to expect much of anything. The people at the bottom will be kept there, ignorant, on welfare, and for sure hardly literate.
In short, the peasants never get an even break.
In 1911, G. Stanley Hall, one of John Dewey's mentors, went so far as to extol illiteracy: "It is possible, despite the stigma our bepedagogued age puts upon this disability, for those who are under it not only to lead a useful, happy, virtuous life, but to be really well-educated in many other ways."
And so we see that in reading -- theory, methods, and results -- we can read the contempt of Socialists."
-For my posts on the campaign against literacy in the Western world:
http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/01/common-probably-all-too-common-theme-of.html
http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/05/follow-up-on-enforced-illiteracy-in.html
While we are here, a few other nuggets on the attack on the middle class by the Left would be appropriate.
http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/luc/2010/08/false-consciousness-the-middle-class-illusion/
http://www.freedomfirstsociety.org/home/index.php/its-a-conspiracy/70-the-marxist-attack-on-the-american-middle-class.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/marxism_versus_the_middle_class.html
Aside from the obvious such as Marx, Engels, et al, early 20th century Marxists Georg (Correct spelling) Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci were the first to advocate the elimination of the cultural identity of the people of the Western World. They noted that, in order to bring about the Marxist transformation, the people needed to be relieved of everything that connected them with their past and that gave them a sense of personal, group, and national identity. What followed was Cultural Marxism.
The idea was eagerly embraced by Academia. This included sex education that reached down to lower and yet lower grade levels in school and the institutional mockery of Christianity and the consequent elevation of Islam. Any learning about ancient Greece and Rome or the societies that contributed to Western freedoms, such as that of the Anglo-Saxons, had to go. Judaism, with its stress on limited government and personal holiness, was ignored completely unless it concerned their victimization at the hands of rampaging Christians in Czarist or Medieval pogroms. Everything that was done by a Westerner or a Western nation was painted in the poorest light possible and every other nation/culture was made to look brilliant and honorable. Islamic culture, one that has consistently produced societies terribly stagnant in learning (Books and printing presses were quite rare even in the richer Islamic countries), was elevated to a high position at the expense anything Western. All infuences for the rise of learning in Medieval Europe were chalked up to Muslim writers or translators. This ignored the reality that the few Muslims who did engage in such work were often looked upon with suspicion in their own societies and that after they were gone, no other Muslims continued with their work. Both mathematical concepts invented by the Greeks and the Zero and algebra, which were invented by Indians, were generously attributed to Muslims. The involvement of Muslims in the slave trade, which could be considered a near-monopoly at many of its levels, was transferred almost solely to Westerners by Academia. The facts that the enslavement of Europeans by Muslims continued into the 19th century (Barbary pirates) and 20th century (Ottomans) and that slavery still exists in some Islamic societies today were brushed aside.
As I noted in the post on the campaign against literacy, even the very means of learning how to read in the West had to go.
Having created generations of Westerners who know almost nothing about their heritage and may very well be unable to read well enough to become self-taught in any of the above subjects, the Progressives then introduced Multiculturalism. Instead of having the new immigrants assimilate, the newcomers would be encouraged to remain as separate as possible from the culture of the host nation. Creating pockets of semi-foreign groups with no historical consciousnesses of that of the host nation, along with having made the traditional members of that nation bereft of the same knowledge, is an effective way to set the table for a Marxist takeover by electoral means.
No comments:
Post a Comment