America was stolen 50 years ago. We just never noticed.

[discocrisco01]

If Saul Alinsky is the ideological father of our current president and his entire administration then, Herbert Marcuse is the Godfather. Never heard of him, you say? Me neither, until tonight. I’d never heard of the Frankfurt School either. But we have heard of a few of the school’s “faculty and ideologues.” And we have certainly felt their impact on our culture.

Herbert Marcuse with Angela Davis
A history lesson

In 1924, group of Jewish communists joined forces and founded The School for Social Research, shortened to The Frankfurt School. They banded together to figure out why the war had not brought about the workers’ revolution in Europe (only in backward Russia) that Marx had promised and that they believed would happen. What did they figure wrong? Instead of rising up against their governments, the workers lined up and fought their nation’s enemies. The workers had been the “standard-bearers of the revolution” for these Frankfurter guys and they had been let down. Now, they set about finding a reason for failure and a new group to pin the revolution on.

The Frankfurt School, Germany. circa 1924
It would take them some 35 years to find that new revolutionary segment.

Unfortunately for most of us, including these kosher Frankfurters, Hitler came along in Germany. Hitler was an avowed anti-Marxist, anti-communist and anti-semite. This school and it’s think-tankers had to go. So guess where they went?

Columbia University in New York, where most of them remained until 1951.

At the time, Marxism was mostly an economic philosophy and these guys just could not admit that capitalism was superior to Marxism. And there was no way they could admit that Marxism was a failure. Two of these brilliant Frankfurters – Antonio Gramsci (Italy) and Georg Lukacs (Hungary) separately came up with the same answer. It was Western culture and Christianity that had blinded the would-be working class revolutionaries. They were reppressed by the West but just didn’t know it.

Read More at http://stopsocialism.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/america-was-stolen-50-years-ago-we-just-never-noticed/

(Personal Note: Start Socialism Is Considered To Be A Wingnut Blog. These guys are real wingnuts. The real fear of the Wingnut crowd is a fear of progressive America where their value system is being threaten)

[Bucky]

1. Who, exactly "stole" the United States in 1959?

Your point is unclear.

[drm604]

12. Evil commies, apparently.

It doesn't seem like they've been very successful.

[Avalux]

2. Oh my.

This should be interesting...

:wtf:

[cliffordu]

3. IBTL IBTT IBanythingelseyougot

:popcorn:

[nebenaube]

4. hey..

At least they are starting to look at the big picture... If they keep digging they just might actually get a better sense of the truth and their own betrayal...

[Warpy]

5. That's true, at least they've discovered their class has been cheated

They're just too damn dumb to realize who's really done the cheating.

[DireStrike]

19. Yeah exactly

There is passion, and not all of it implanted with falsehoods. Most of the politically active people in the country know full well that we are being robbed and beaten down.

Some of us just have to work harder and figure out who is REALLY administering the beatdown. Hint for lurkers: independent reading, and not just of blogs and news sources that agree with you.

[Mari333]

6. I remember reading Gore Vidal, and he stated that after WW2

we had a choice..to be a military industrial society or not..we chose poorly.

[SoCalDem]

9. Eisenhower warned us..n/t

[lpbk2713]

7. Thanks for your input.

Now give me back the previous two minutes of my life. :eyes:

[d_b]

8. lol

"At the time, Marxism was mostly an economic philosophy and these guys just could not admit that capitalism was superior to Marxism. And there was no way they could admit that Marxism was a failure."

that's some deep shit right there.

[grantcart]

10. So that would make Senator Kennedy a patsy?

[Deja Q]

11. Yawn. Go get laid, you'll feel better in the morning.

[mix]

13. Right-wingers think that liberals are fascists, despite all evidence to the contrary...

...it doesn't surprise me that they know nothing about the Frankfurt School either, or about Gramsci and Lukacs, neither of whom were members of that loose intellectual group, ever.

[drm604]

14. So are you supporting this wingnut blog or criticizing it?

Your parenthesized last paragraph makes me think that you are critical of it, but a lot of people won't get that far. Maybe you should make your position clear at the top of your post.

[goddess40]

15. I think it started with Nixon

he was a loose canon and the republican's thought never again. So they pick their puppet to run for office but the real strings are pulled behind the scenes. Out of vanity, Cheney stepped out of the shadows but for the most part the reps have been the same group of men since Nixon.

[Joe Chi Minh]

16. I've told the author his fortune.

[Odin2005]

17. LOL, the Frankfurt School was a fucking joke.

A bunch of ideological True Believers of a secular religion that were trying to save Marxism from being falsified. The Wing-nuts are SCARED of these ivory tower idiots? :rofl:

[fishwax]

24. Frankfurt School thinkers have certainly had influence

but the right-wing genealogies of these movements are always amusingly over the top. :rofl:

[Odin2005]

25. It's hilarious!

I see lots of "intellectually-minded" wing-nuts rant about "cultural Marxists" trying to destroy Western culture. It's pathetic.

These people are afraid of their own shadow.

[DireStrike]

18. "Critical Theory was developed by the school to serve as a way to undermine traditional American..."

So I tried to give the benefit of the doubt. When someone is desperate to show something that they feel is the root cause and the truth, it's worth checking out.

But once I read this line, that was it. If you don't like critical thinking you are not competent to discuss anything, except maybe american idol. Critical thinking is the cornerstone of western civilization since the enlightenment.

[Jim__]

27. There is a difference between Critical Theory and critical thinking.

From wikipedia:

The initial meaning of the term critical theory was that defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of social science in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory: Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Horkheimer wanted to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxian theory, critiquing both the model of science put forward by logical positivism and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and communism. Core concepts are: (1) That critical social theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), and (2) That Critical Theory should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology. Although this conception of critical theory originated with the Frankfurt School, it also prevails among other recent social scientists, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser and arguably Michel Foucault, as well as certain feminist theorists and social scientists.

[DireStrike]

29. Whoops...

I'd never heard of that. That's an awful name for a theory...

[Name removed]

20. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Peace Patriot]

21. Subtract 4 years from that and I would agree. American was stolen 46 years ago,

on November 22, 1963.

Recommended: "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters," by James Douglass.

A very important book.

We've been an increasingly fascist country ever since, preparatory to and epitomized by the Bush Junta--the total breakdown of Constitutional order and all restraints on utter lawlessness and corporate war at the top--and no amount of 'democratic' cosmetics can mask it any more. We are living in Alice's "Wonderland"--an upside down, inside out, backwards, jabberwockey-talking country that sensible people--most Americans--don't recognize as their own, and can't get a rational, reasonable grasp of. Like Alice, they ask reasonable questions--why don't we have decent health care? why did we go to war?--and the answer is the Red Queen painting all the white roses red. That gets you dead roses, but it doesn't matter as long as everybody is forced to see them as RED.

The America of common sense and love of justice and truth and fairness is still there, masked by the insane cartoon of the corpo/fascist 'news' media's hallucination of democracy.

The end date of America's demise, in my opinion--the completion of the fascist project that began with JFK's assassination--was October 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, when the Anthrax Congress decided to fast-track electronic voting machines all over the country, run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by a handful of rightwing corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls.

The jabberwockey became truly lunatic after that, and maybe its madness will somehow spin us back to sanity and reality. I hope it will. But we need to look at the origins of this psyotic "Wonderland" that we are living in, and the assassination of the three great progressive leaders of the 1960s, in the space of five years, is the starting point, in my opinion--the rabbit's hole we fell down and never got out of.

[SOS]

22. Correction: 30 years ago

Not Columbia, but the University of Chicago.
Not Marcuse and Adorno, but Rand, Greenspan, Friedman and Reagan.

The notion that Marcuse had any influence on American political history is ludicrous.

[fishwax]

23. lol -- n/t

[Orsino]

26. Hit 'n' run fail. n/t

[pinto]

28. The blog cited here "stopsocialism" seems a virulently RW / Libertarian screed. If they have a point

to make, it's lost in the anti-Dem rants, Obama as Joker crap, etc. I'll pass.

[Initech]

30. It was actually stolen in the late 30s when Prescott tried to overthrow FDR.

[BOG PERSON]

31. "these guys just could not admit that capitalism was superior to Marxism"

[hileeopnyn8d]

32. I should have stopped

reading at "If Saul Alinsky is the ideological father of our current president", but I didn't and I know better.

[alphafemale]

33. nahnah - nahnah nahnah-nahnah HEYHEyhey - Goodbye!!!

:rofl:

[KoKo]

34. A long time ago I took some classes at the New School for Social Research in NYC!

As a young person escaping the Segregated South..."The New School" was such a breath of fresh air...I have wonderful memories of that time in my life.

Interesting to see your post.

[Warren DeMontague]

35. Did somebody shit in their pants?

Something smells fucking BAD.