THE RIOTS OF THE ENEMY WITHIN. Keywords: Riots, Hamas-Israel, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Summer of 2020, Frankfurt School, Marcuse, Alinsky, Freire, Zinn, indoctrination, proletariat, the mob, masses, terrorism, Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, Hillary Rodham, Barack Obama
 |
| Columbia anti-Israel riots 2024 |
On a well-worn brick wall of an abandoned educational building that had been prestigious at a time, sometime ago I read the following thought. It was cast on a bronze plaque, tarnished by the weather and the passing of time. It was at the end of a long and dark hallway leading to the restrooms. The academics who put it there had without a doubt forgotten about it. They also forgot to name the origin of the quote, or how old it was, so I cannot tell you where it came from. This is what it said.
“One mistake in the practice of medicine can endanger one life. One mistake in the practice of politics can endanger a whole generation. But one error in the practice of teaching can endanger the lives of thousands of generations.”
 |
| One of many LGBTQ riots |
Consider these recent events in the USA. All had echoes throughout the world. Occupy Wall Street riots (2011), LGBTQ riots under many names since 1969 (2011, 14, 20, 21, 23), The Women´s Marches riots (2017), Defund the Police riots (2014-21), Antifa riots (2017-23 reoccurring), Black Lives Matter riots (2020), Trans riots (2019-22), Keep Roe vs Wade riots and Pro-Abortion riots (Numerous since 2009 to 2020), and Pro-Hamas against Israel riots going on (April 2024). What do they have in common?
 |
| Black Lives Matter riots 2020 |
They are remarkably similar. They are well organized and supported. The presence of young people predominates with a surprising high proportion of women. Universities seem to be the main stages with a not-all student and teacher cast. Professional agitators have been identified. The rioters are well equipped, from banners and posters to quasi-uniforms and anti-riot gear. Their jingles and catchwords are well rehearsed. They promote selected agendas of the political platform of the same party. They appear at the right moment to obliterate any civil discussion of the issue at stake. They claim to be peaceful expressions of the right to free speech but quickly turn violent, which they are prepared for from the start. They seem to receive abundant financial, media and political support. Their real identities and connections are elusive. Is all this a spontaneous coincidence?
No! It is the product of the greatest error in education.
 |
| Pro-Abortion riot |
Is this the first time it has happened?
No! It is just the updated internet version of the riots of the fifties to the seventies, even with a few carbon-copied slogans. The desegregation of education culminated with the approval of the Civil Rights acts, but the process was mired by the Black Panther and radical black Muslim violent movements. With the assassination of Martin Luther King, the peaceful strategy was overtaken by violent mobs that burned down cities into poverty. The sequel that overtook the Civil Rights movement was the Vietnam War against the communist expansion in what had been French Indochina. Anti-war riots were moved to many university campuses and culminated with the death of four students at Kent State in 1970. The big stage was the Cold War. The undercurrent of the Civil Rights movement was the provocation of a racial war. The undercurrent of the student riots was to force the United States out of Vietnam. After the defeat in southeast Asia, the riots became a terrorist attack against President Richard Nixon who had campaigned as anti-communist and for the restoration of law and order.
During the 1970s, protest terrorist bombings were commonplace. Cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco were the target of more than ten radical underground groups. Who remembers the Weather Underground Organization, the New World Liberation Front or the Symbionese Liberation Army? Their cells set off hundreds of bombs during that violent decade. The buildings of Congress were bombed in 1971 and 1976 by communist terrorist cells affiliated to student organizations, such as the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. One of the founders and activist terrorist of the Weather Underground was student William Ayers. Bill Ayers went on to become a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar. He was one of the political sponsors of the young activist Barack Obama when he launched his campaign for the U. S. Senate after teaching at Chicago Law School. One news program reported seeing Ayers giving directions to a group of rioters in the middle of one of the recent campus occupations.
 |
| An LGBTQ+ riot mixed with other causes |
The victory of American liberty during the last decade of the XX century ended the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall. With it, the rioting supported by Marxist-soviet organizations came to a close, at least for a few decades. Simultaneously, the Marxist terrorist guerrillas around the world began to wither as the soviet era ended. The failure that supported their ideas became evident. It had lasted more than a hundred years.
 |
| One of many Women's March riot |
The riots and terrorist activities of the second half of the XX century had also been preceded by an earlier period of conflict. It has the key to the lockbox where the secret has been hiding. One specific moment in history has been designated by the promoters as the reference point. It is celebrated in a great number of countries around the world, and in all labor organizations. It has been renamed International Workers Day on May 1. It commemorates a workers riot in Chicago in which a terrorist bomb killed 67 policemen that had moved to stop it. It was initially just known as the Chicago´s Haymarket riot of 1886.
As a symbol against the United States, The Marxist International Socialist Congress held in Paris in 1889 adopted a resolution for a "great international demonstration" in support of the AFL-American Federation of Labor and the nascent “armies of industrial workers” of America. In 1904, the international communist organizations called for all socialist and communist parties and labor unions of all countries to demonstrate on May 1st. in support of the proletariat’s demands. Even after the soviet era, the military parades in Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing have kept the annual tradition with obvious displays of military defiance.
 |
| Vintage May 1st Labor Day in Moscow |
The rise of the labor movement in the early XX century was accelerated by the economic panics (cycles of recessions and inflations) which led to the declaration of the “death of capitalism” during the Great Depression. The political agitation of the times, and the invasion of many universities by immigrant communist intellectuals that began to teach, ended in the marriage of the labor union movement with the Democratic Party. The policies of the New Deal are what was called “New Economics”. By the end of World War II, more than 12 million workers belonged to unions and the Democratic Party could count on their organizations during elections.
 |
| Vintage style new call to riot by unions |
It was during the period from the May 1 riot, through the Progressive Era, to the New Deal that the elite legacy universities were infiltrated. The most impactful event was the re-establishment of the Frankfurt School at Columbia University. The self-proclaimed social scientists were being persecuted by the National Socialist regime of Germany, not because most of them were Jews, but because they were supporters of the international version of socialism. The institution returned to Germany after the war in 1953, but most members stayed and dispersed throughout the United States. Others, like Habermas, developed their careers in Germany but were visiting professors here. Their activities were in effect an effort to transform Marxism without admitting its failure.
By the end of WW I, many intellectual socialists had concluded their Marxist analytic model had proven insufficient. In economics, they could never resolve the details of their system and their proposals had been disproven by the Austrian School of Economics thinkers like Wieser (1883), Böhm-Bawerk (1896), Mises (1920, 1935), and Hayek (1935). On top of that, the Marxist experiment in Russia had generated a monstruous terrorist state and not the paradise on Earth that was promised. The failure of theory and the evidence of praxis eventually led to the mutation of Marxist economics into Keynesian economics and the appearance of several versions of “mixed economies” as a poor substitute.
 |
| Vintage propaganda- The Founders Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin From rioting to pseudo-science to revolution to state terrorism |
In the other social sciences (sociology, politics, and history), a similar conflict had taken place. The success of the American free enterprise system had matured enough to show that at least two necessary conclusions of the Marxist model were not correct. The first one is that what they called “capitalism” would inevitably lead to a totally monopolized industrial production that generated millions of oppressed armies of alienated workers. The appearance without precedent of the “middle-class” in America proved them wrong. This was supported by the initial rise but continuous decline of the labor movement. The workers faced a competitive environment, they diversified into the service economy, and enjoyed great mobility with a rising quality of life. Up until the current political administration, the proportion of unionized workers had been shrinking. Even with the recent subsidized increases, they do not represent more than 12% of the labor force. Contrary to the original model, the unionization of the government bureaucracy has become a new reality. 36% of the government workers are now unionized. They are not the product of the “conflict of classes”, but of the realization that an army of bureaucrats is a key army of new serfs that vote. They are the soldiers of “the swamp”.
 |
| Teachers unions now are the largest donor to the Democratic Party and elect the Mayors of Chicago, and New York and numerous School Boards |
The Frankfurt School grew out of the Institute for Social Research, the first Marxist think tank that stopped advocating revolution and violence. In 1930, led by Max Horkheimer, the group moved to the United States. They brought with them the methodology labeled “critical theory”. Aside from Horkheimer, notable members of the Frankfurt School's inner circle at various times included Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Leopold Neumann, and Walter Benjamin. Many went on to teach at different colleges. In 1934, the Frankfurt School was reborn at Columbia University where its members began to insert their ideas on American culture. At Columbia they launched the tools they would use to destroy American culture. The school published abundant popular material for the mass market. The first of these was “Critical Theory”.
One example of their success, particularly of Herbert Marcuse, is Angela Davis. Marcuse is considered her mentor and protégé. She traveled on an extended learning tour to East Germany, then in the soviet bloc, and then to Paris during the student revolts. Marcuse is considered by many to be the brain of the New Left that rose in the sixties and her activities illustrate the period, just like those of activist Bill Ayers. She is a longtime member of the Communist Party USA. In early 1968 Davis joined the Black Panther Political Party. Today she is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1994, she received the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies. She has taught at many universities in the United States and abroad. She has been a loud participant in protests about prison reform, women's rights, institutional racism, and the inequities of capitalism. She was also an early feminist, but ended as an advocate for the LGBTQ community, coming out as a lesbian in the late 1990s.
 |
| Angela Davis, Today she is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz |
The new reality since mid-XX century did not fit the old model of the Marxist predictions. What Marx and Engels had created in order to attack the oppressive “capitalism” was in formal logic a typical fallacy of the “straw man”, a fictitious creation you beat up and declare victory. A free enterprise or market economy with a government limited to its fundamental functions is not what their model describes and attacks. If anything, it was the decaying “ancient regime” trying to preserve its privileges as the economy moved from the landed gentry to the industrial period. The United States does not share with Europe that legacy. All the foreign professors did not see the difference. They were tweaking the model to fit reality. The first clue about their change of mindset was abandoning the Marxist term for the same population growth. Their original term was “the proletariat”. Defined from the Latin term for only good enough to have children to engross the wage earners. It has the same root as proliferation.
 |
| Proletariat of the World United |
One of the main concerns of the scholars of the Frankfurt School, especially Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, was the rise of "mass culture." Similar concerns had been expressed by other intellectuals. Some were worried by the possible impact of the growing masses on the structure of society as it had been. Others were interested in how traditional culture might be impacted by the influence of the media on culture. Most were blinded by the erroneous analytic lens of Marxism. The masses had appeared and kept growing as a result of higher standards of living brought about by the more open market economy. As Europe had been losing population to America because of two centuries of endless tribal wars and the violence of multiple terrorist revolutions, the picture in this side of the world was different. With annual population growths reaching during early times 16% per year, the United States was recognized as the land of opportunity. The practical American minds quickly elevated market analysis, mass production of consumer products, and advertising as major business concerns. These topics are totally alien to the Marxist mentality.
A second example of the concerns of intellectuals about the changing cultural landscape was the Italian journalist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). He was critical of what the nationalistic socialists had created in the regime of Mussolini. The third one is the Fabian Society, an English organization of intellectuals established in 1884 to promote “democratic socialism”. It did not attain any significance until WW I, and it became the major influence on the policies of the Labour Party. The following generation of Fabian personalities is familiar to high school students in the United States. Many of their works have been assigned readings for discussion for many generations: H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Charles Marson, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Ramsay MacDonald, and Emmeline Pankhurst.
 |
| Alinsky and Obama depicted as Fabians-Wolfs in sheepskin |
What did these three currents of last-breath Marxism had to accept? First, the original Marxist model cannot be based on the ideas of economic determinism and the collapse of the last stage of what they defined as Capitalism. Self-interest and self-determination are not the same as greed and exploitation. A more mature and open market economy has brought unparalleled prosperity to the world. Second, spontaneous revolutions caused by the class struggles that should end with confrontation of armies of oppressed industrial workers against a handful of greedy monopolies would not happen. American workers prefer living in the suburbs, driving their large pickup trucks, and going fishing or watching sports while enjoying a cold beer. All this new consumption of the masses made possible by using their bottomless credit cards. Credit works only in environments where the future looks good. Striking and violence are not among their top choices. They have not been for nearly a century.
Despite all the evidence, theoretical and practical, the intellectuals did not give up and remained faithful to their secular religion. They found a different avenue: The takeover of “culture”. “Culture shapes the man” has been a belief of the originally Russian psychological school of thought initiated by Pavlov, followed by Vigotsky and in the United States by Watson and Skinner. Parallel to their clinical methods and scientific achievements, the practical applications under the political system are better known as brainwashing, conditioning, reeducation, and psychological torture.
 |
| Teachers are now under the Behavioral Sciences Schools |
The takeover of culture has several barriers. Thus, the strategy requires their destruction: the traditional family and gender roles, the values of the Judeo-Christian religion, and the information systems that preserve and transmit culture. The next stage is to control the “gatekeepers” that disperse culture: universities and school systems, publishing houses, the press and radio which now includes all the new media that has appeared in the last 100 years. It also includes the arts institutions and promoters of cultural events, the movie and TV studios, and finally, government agencies that exercise censorship, licensing or some form of control. The final pieces are the iconic “faces” that will perform before the public. Cleverly, the new internet media has designated them as “influencers”. In the old days, when principles and seemly morally justified causes were involved, they would have been called leaders. Above this process are the ones that steer the process and the ones that finance it. These are called the “anointed” by Thomas Sowell.
I am concerned their objectives are being met before our eyes.
During the same period of the last 150 years, another sociological phenomenon began to be recognized. I personally believe is part of the emergence of the middle class, still misunderstood and misdirected. The first serious study was done in 1885 by Gustave Le Bon. “Psychologie des foules” by the French groundbreaking social psychologist, “is devoted to an account of the characteristics of crowds”, in his words. A newer synonym of crowds is “masses”. His analysis of the riots that accompanied the French Revolution is very revealing of how the Reign of Terror ruled. One of his conclusions reads: The general characteristics of criminal crowds are: “openness to influence, credulity, mobility, the exaggeration of sentiments -good or bad, the manifestation of some form of moral justification…”.
A second analysis was given in “The Rebellion of the Masses” (1990) by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. His point of view is that of the disappearing elite that held to the classical liberal beliefs while in the middle of a political environment in flux. Spain was facing violent riots in favor or against the monarchy, in favor or against republicanism, in favor or against communism. The chaos brought about the Spanish Civil War that resulted in an authoritarian tyranny. Ortega y Gasset’s reflections point to the key role the media has played in creating a new mass-culture of barely educated multitudes that feel empowered to use their recently acquired power. The mass-man feels qualified to have strong opinions about everything and act, regardless of his qualifications. A similar process had just happened in Italy and Germany. The old Prussian-German Empire became constitutional to no avail; its defeat during WW I led to a republic; it was quickly overtaken by socialism which brought about Adolph Hitler by popular election. Italy went through a more chaotic process from monarchy to republic to socialist anarchy, resulting in the rise of Benito Mussolini.
A third study of the masses was provided by Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951). Chapter 10’s title is a summary of our topic, “The Temporary Alliance between The Mob and the Elite”. There is no such thing as “group think”. Socrates warned the mob that voted to condemn him to death by pointing this out. Somebody always does the thinking that moves the mob. Arendt’s warnings are clear: “The mob always will shout for the strong man, the great leader, for the mob hates society from which it feels excluded”.
 |
| Terrorist Bill Ayers giving support and guidance to rioters at his alma mater, U Chicago |
In my opinion, Arendt’s preference for the use of “mob” to substitute crowds, proletariat and masses is revealing of the recognition that the original Marxist view was no longer respected. Arendt was a German Jewish philosopher, lover of Heidegger who became pro-Nazi. She managed to escape on time and wandered around Europe until coming to New York. She took refuge as a teacher at the New School for Social Research, the socialist rival enclave of the Frankfurt School operating in Columbia. Arendt was also a teacher at Yale, Chicago, and Wesleyan. Although she is considered a powerful critic of totalitarianism, she never stopped being a socialist. She was critical of the regimes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, but never accepted the fact that such regimes are the inevitable end of any socialist scheme. Her position was ambivalent, ambiguous, and discreet. She was writing during the era of McCarthyism. Although more serious, her work puts her on the shelf by other contrite-Marxists, such as George Orwell.
The last one is a refreshing new analysis. It takes us away from a particular political vision and back to a more clinical analysis of the behavior of people who conform what has been called the proletariat, the crowds, the masses, and the mob. “De Psychologie van Totalitarisme” (2022) by Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet, a professor at Ghent University, aims at understanding what could be the longest lasting effect of the policies to combat the Covid 19 pandemic. In his words: “The grip of governments on private life was growing tremendously fast. We were experiencing an erosion of the right to privacy, alternative voices were increasingly censored and suppressed, the number of intrusive actions by security forces was rising dramatically, and more”. In Europe, as well as in Asia, there were violent Covid related riots in 2020 and 2021. In the United States, they were anti-lockdown protests promoted by conservative groups that ended up exposing the failed policies of public education promoted by the teachers’ labor unions.
Facing the possibility of the emergence of new totalitarian regimes around the world, Desmet, like Le Bon, follows his quest only to find the same mob playing a key role. Desmet gives us an updated diagnosis. “Dictatorships are based on a primitive psychological mechanism, namely on the creation of a climate of fear amongst the population... Totalitarianism, on the other hand, has its roots in the insidious psychological process of mass formation”.
Desmet’s chapter six, “The Rise of the Masses” has diagnosed four symptoms that lead to the emergence of the mob. “The first condition is generalized loneliness, social isolation, and lack of social bonds among the population... The deterioration of social connectedness leads to the second condition: lack of meaning in life... The third condition is the widespread presence of free-floating anxiety and psychological unease within a population... The fourth condition, in turn, also follows from the first three: a lot of free-floating frustration and aggression. The link between social isolation and irritability is logical and has also been established empirically".
There is one important fact omitted in all the analysis about the appearance of the mob: its size.
The global population grew from 1 billion in 1800 to 1.6 billion a century later. By 2000, it had reached 6.1 billion. In 2024 it is estimated that we will exceed 8.1 billion. It had taken 1,000 years to reach one billion just two centuries ago. The population growth, our survival as a species, is a measure of success, not of failure. We have grown, not just in number, but in longevity and quality of life since the world has increasingly opened to a market economy. During the XX century, 200 million people perished by violence or starvation under the communist regimes. The current population of the United States is estimated at 340 million; 51.5% are women. The population between 10 and 25 years old is 24 million. The adult population between 26 and 64 years old is 172 million. With these statistics in mind, it is evident that the topics to lure women -a single category as birthing people (non-men)- into the mob are explained. It also explains the importance of taking over the education of uninformed, immature minds that are ready to do something relevant. Has it worked?
The tragic truth is that the new education that creates the mob is really indoctrination in what must be considered the gravest intellectual mistake. It began as another moral idea in search of a community organization that would be like paradise on Earth. Supported by the new scientific enthusiasm, it turned into an apparent theory that would be, not only the explanation of history, but also be able to predict the future. Half a century after the young agitators Marx and Engels had called for the workers of the world to rise in revolution, they finally produced a belated construct of economic ideas that almost immediately were found to be in insoluble error. After a hundred years of overwhelming evidence of praxis, any real scientist would have concluded it was time to close the chapter. It is time to bury their works in the shelves of literary creations. The truth behind the mobs is not science; it is a tool to undermine and destroy legitimate authority, attain power, and keep it at any cost.
It was not a famous educator who said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I will have sown will never be uprooted.” It is easy to check out his name, which happens to be false. He used 146 other names. He eventually oversaw the Institute of Pedagogics in the country he ruled. And he ruled over all the teachers. Among his many works, he also created a manual for terrorists. He clearly states the purpose of terrorism is at first to provoke the over-reaction of the authorities which will de-legitimize them and become unpopular. Once in power, terrorism is used by controlling the satisfaction of necessities and raising an army of citizens committed to the revolution. The mob does not exist without agitators and organizers that collect the “useful idiots”, as they have been called by many totalitarian leaders, into the corrals at the campus to practice their jingles and slogans. About the resources for the revolution, he is credited with the phrase “Don’t worry, when we need the ropes, the capitalists will be the first to sell us the ones we will use to hang them”. The name of the agitator was Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov. Most people have heard of him as Lenin.
The role of the agitators, locally known as community organizers or sponsors, is key for a simple reason. There is no such thing as “group-think”. Only individual persons think. The oxymoron phrase was coined by social-psychologist Irving Janis in 1952, which he popularized in 1972 in a book analyzing the fiascos in foreign policy of the United States. Other psychologists empirically proved that there is such phenomenon as subconscious social pressure which leads to conformity to the group as emotional responses and not reason. Agreeing to what someone else has proposed is not thinking. Without the agitators there is no mob.
Following the path of Lenin, and numerous other dark figures labeled as “anarchists” in the past, are other recent figures that need to be highlighted. They complement the list started with Bill Ayers and Angela Davis. They are the byproduct of Marcuse’s teachings in American universities.
 |
| The short guide to the riots |
The first one is Saul D. Alinsky (1909-1972). He has two famous fellow alumni, admirers, and disciples from the University of Chicago: Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama. Alinsky was the “social activist” of the Chicago hoods after the period of organizing the labor unions had ended. He saw the need to take political activism to the hoods around the university. In 1946 he published “Reveille for Radicals” that generated the profession of “community organizer”. The objective seemed simple enough. The waning labor unions of the stockyards and meat packers would not be enough to create the conditions for revolution. He created an institute for organizers that provided the tools for starting protests and riots. In 1971 he launched the strategy we see now with the publication of “Rules for Radicals”. It is a “cleansed” version and a more practical manual. The Marxist ideology is completely concealed as an effort to overcome the barriers of the Mc Carthy era. It is the perfect example of a wolf under a sheep’s skin. It fits the political preoccupations of those times: civil rights and the anti-Vietnam sentiments. His manual of operations is behind every riot we have seen since then, always disguised under some just cause.
The latest apparent expressions of concern about the most recent Palestinian-Israel war, has turned into antisemitism as a local conflict. Alinsky’s manuals are the script we see being performed now at numerous colleges.
 |
| Manual for rioters |
Obama’s professional resume starts with his work as a community organizer in the hoods of Chicago. He learned valuable skills during this time, such as grassroots mobilization, coalition-building, and understanding how to use traditional community associations, like churches and civic clubs, for political purposes. He worked with the Gamaliel Foundation and the Developing Communities Project. His style as president and the legacy of his agenda rival only with the work of his Secretary of State. In 1969, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote her thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky after interviewing the master himself. He took her on a tour of the Community Action Programs he was involved with. Hillary Rodham was living at Park Ridge, her nearby family home. Her thesis titled "There Is Only the Fight…: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model" was sequestered from view by the Clinton government. The thesis lauds him as a Martin Luther King Jr. and a Walt Whitman. She opined his approach to producing change was not as effective as the taking over the institutions of government and work from within.
 |
| Zinn, Author of "A People's History of the United States" |
Howard Zinn (1922-2010), the second one, was a Vietnam war era rioter. He used the HBU Spelman in Atlanta to radiate the unrest we have lately seen in the organizations and institutions that traditionally serve communities of African descent. He was fired from the college for fomenting student activism. He wrote “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), which is just Marxist revisionist pandering and the source and inspiration of the “1619 Project” promoted by The New York Times. Of his book he explained, “I wrote it because after the movements of the sixties people had been radicalized and people became dissatisfied with the traditional history and wanted histories that showed working people and black people and Native Americans and women.” Historical reality and truth disappear when the narrative is fabricated to motivate the activists into further action. The materials of the Zinn Education Project are being widely circulated by teacher’s supervisors in the public schools, particularly the ones serving mostly traditionally black neighborhoods. His revisionist history books have sold more than 2 million copies, infecting the classrooms of the nation with the perpetual imaginary conflict of oppressed against oppressors, just as his colleague Robert L. Heilbronner (1919-2005) did.
That brings me to the last darling of the current movements of political pedagogy. Paulo Freire (1921-1997), although dead now, he became a celebrity in the United States with his 1970 book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. In 2012, the International Socialist Organization, in its publication Socialist Worker.org, made these comments on Freire’s work “In the absence of collective struggle and without the underpinnings of Marxism, it is easy to see Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a set of principles and best practices for individual teachers--guidelines for a "revolution in one classroom." Freire’s work prepares teacher-activists that are working in the classrooms, in stealth not long ago but brazenly open now. They help create what Marxist theory calls “the conditions for revolution”. In his view, each teacher is a revolutionary leader of his oppressed students as he is also oppressed by the dominant class.
 |
| Used extensively in the developing countries, re-packaged as Critical Pedagogy for the United States |
Freire was Brazilian. Born in poverty, he was educated as a lawyer in a Catholic university; he switched to education and devoted his early vocation to teach in impoverished areas of the countryside. He was a member of the Workers Party, of communist affiliation. The military coup d’état of 1964 drove him to exile. His ideas on educational reform influenced the Liberation Theology of the Latin American catholic bishops and he worked internationally for the World Council of Churches. He went on to promote his ideas in Guinea-Bissau, then, just taken over by Marxist guerrillas. In 1969, he joined the faculty at Harvard and became a celebrity of the American New Left. His methods had been used throughout the jungles in Latin America for the indoctrination of young guerrillas by Cuban trainers. They did the same in several African nations. Have you heard of “child soldiers”? Freire’s ideas were also used by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and are currently used in Venezuela. They are behind the educational materials being used in Gaza to teach hate, funded by the United States, and channeled through the international aid lobby. They may be in your neighborhood school already, disguised as something very innocent looking, such as DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The term “implicit bias training”, IBT, and “student agency for social action” are two programs. The first one is to make white students and teachers feel guilty and ashamed. The other one ends up graduating into the mob. Have you heard the recent accusation that made the news that stated, “a two-year-old white child is already racist”? That is IBT, DEI in action. All products of critical theory.
Freire’s methods were repackaged as “Critical Pedagogy” for the USA, a clever title inspired by Marcuse’s work. It is a full course in most graduate programs in Education, including Catholic universities. The teachers’ leftist defiant activism that we have witnessed in the last two years is Freire’s work.
 |
| A comedian and a Vice-President During the interview, Kamala Harris announced that the "peaceful" 2020 riots outside would continue even after she assumed office. They have. Riots outside - politicians inside |
The two strategies of socialism work like a military strategy of double pincers. Think of a crab: a skinny, precise pincer and a huge, blunt, and destructive one. One is the soft pincer of subtle violence you see exercised in the classrooms, the media and in the structures of government that are already taken. The other one, blunt and scary, is the chaos and destruction that brings “our consciousness” to the front of our brain. They riot and burn down the very urban fabric they are supposed to be fighting to save. It is not irony. It is intentional. They want to keep the poverty going. And if a particular cause does not do, any other conflict that creates the opportunity for organized terrorism will do.
 |
| Hillary Rodham and her mentor Saul Alinsky |
Former President Obama as a professional organizer. His Secretary of State and perennial aspirant to the Presidency Hillary Clinton an apologist of Alinsky. The younger son of her running mate Senator Tim Kaine, Linwood Michael Kaine, an Antifa agitator that was involved in a 2017 violent riot that disrupted a campaign rally of her opponent. He was in the customary black uniform and the attack ended with setting off explosives and smoke bombs. Current Vice President Kamala Harris was a sponsor of the bails that freed the 2020 rioters responsible for more than 60 deaths and more than one billion dollars in damages. Senator Bernie Sanders self-declared a Social Democrat that caucuses with the Democratic Party and a perennial proponent of the samo-samo. The bitter troika of the U. S. Representatives of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. And the list goes on at all levels of government throughout the country. The mobs are out. The others are already inside.
What happened to all the “promised lands” of “paradise on Earth” foreseen by the well-intentioned and by the evil planners of the future? “I forgot!” would be an acceptable answer deserving praise in today’s classrooms. George Santayana (1863-1952) considered to be “the first and foremost Hispanic-American philosopher” by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summed it up thus: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. This idea, perhaps his most famous line, appeared in his book “The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense” in 1905. It can also be reversed into “if we want to repeat the past, we must forget it.” Or erase it, I would add.
Check this reminder. It happened before at Columbia!
No comments:
Post a Comment