I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Site from Orbit . . .

In 1917 a Marxist revolution did occur in Russia, but it failed to spread to Western Europe, again contradicting orthodox Marxist theory. At the war’s end, Marxist theorists had to confront the question, “What had gone wrong?” Antonio Gramsci of Italy and György Lukács of Hungary believed they had the answer. Gramsci and Lukács argued that Western culture had blinded the working class to its true Marxist class interests. Before a Marxist revolution could take place, Western culture had to be destroyed.

This is from a cite in a much longer discussion of the interesting fact that folks with an inadequate knowledge of their own culture have a great deal of trouble reading and understanding any sort of written words that make reference to that cultural matrix as a matter of course.

I picked a mention of Gramsci, of course, because, besides being a patron saint of Obama’s patron saint, Saul Alinsky, Gramsci is high on my list of the primary reasons our country and culture is in as much trouble as it is today. Gramsci inspired the “Long March Through the Institutions” which has afflicted us to deadly effect since the 1930s, and especially since the New Left of the Sixties grew up and started their dangerously successful attempts to destroy the cultural matrix that made America great.

How can you read or understand anything about slavery in America if you think the Civil War was a matter of evil landowners battling evil capitalists for the right to exploit the survivors? Or, worse, if you haven’t heard of the Civil War at all, and don’t even know it occurred? You’ll have a real problem, then, with a text that makes off-hand reference to “the lessons learned from Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg,” or even, “worthless as a Confederate Dollar.”

How can you make an informed judgment about the core principles of the GOP if you don’t know that the genesis of the party was in opposition to slavery?

Scale these tiny examples up by a couple orders of magnitude, and you begin to understand why America seems to be going further and further off the rails.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Then read the works cited as well. You’ll be far more knowledgeable about the problems we face in trying to set our nation, and the American Dream itself, aright. You’ll also have a much better grasp of potential solutions to that problem.

My thanks to Kevin Baker for drawing my attention to this post, and also for refreshing my memory about his blog, The Smallest Minority, which had somehow fallen off my radar (too many blogs, too little time) and is now back on it - and on my blogroll, as well.

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