• In 1987, white criminals chose black victims in 3 percent of violent crimes, while black criminals chose white victims fifty percent of the time.
• When the crime was rape, white criminals chose black women in 0 percent of their assaults, while black criminals chose white women in 28 percent of assaults. Of eighty-three thousand cases of rape, Wilbanks could not find any in which the rapist was white and the victim was black.
• White criminals chose black victims in 2 percent of their robberies ; but black criminals chose white victims in 73 percent of their robberies.40
When Professor Wilbanks’s startling and depressing figures were first reported, there was no refutation, no challenge, no contradiction, simply silence. Ten years later, in 1999, the Washington Times published the findings of a study on interracial crime by the New Century Foundation, which relied on the 1994 Justice Department statistics. The NCF study supported Wilbanks’s findings.
• Blacks had committed 90 percent of interracial violent crimes in 1994.
• As blacks were 12 percent of the population, these figures meant they were fifty times as likely to commit acts of interracial violence as whites.
• Blacks were 100 to 250 times more likely than whites to commit interracial gang rapes and gang assaults.
• Even in the “hate crimes” category—less than 1 percent of interracial crimes—blacks were twice as likely to be the assailant as the victim.41
The NCF study found Asian Americans to be the least violent group, committing violent crimes at only half the rate of white Americans.
These figures must be deeply disheartening to tens of millions of decent African Americans. Yet they do expose as a Big Lie a central tenet of the cultural revolution: the malicious slander that America is a nation where black folks are constantly at risk from the majority. It is in America’s minority communities that crime rates are highest; it is out of those communities that interracial crime comes. We solve nothing by self-deception.
The same apparently holds true for England. Analyzing the figures for interracial crime buried in the Home Office’s “Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System,” columnist John Woods found that of “racially motivated” crimes in 1995, “143,000 were committed against minorities, and 238,000 against white people.” Woods’s conclusion:
If the ethnic minorities comprise 6% of the population of the UK, and are producing 238,000 assaults per year, and the white population, who comprise 94% of the population, are producing 143,000 racial assaults per year, it would appear that, on a per capita basis, the ethnic minorities are producing about 25 times more racial assaults than the white population.42
The New Century Fund is chaired by Jared Taylor, author of Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, a controversial figure in the debate on crime and race. But the NCF statistics are based on Justice Department numbers and track closely the findings of Wilbanks and Woods. They are also unchallenged and almost ignored.
When the Washington Times asked Morgan Reynolds, director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, to comment on the NCF’s study of interracial crime, he shrugged: “It’s an issue that most white scholars ignore, because you can only get into trouble … . It’s no news to anybody who’s pursued the differences of race and crime, but it’s politically incorrect.”43 Crime scholar James Q. Wilson volunteered that racial aspects of crime are “too sensitive” to be publicly discussed.44 But if that is true, why have hate crimes statutes at all?
A CRIME Is a crime and should be punished, no matter the creed or color of the perpetrator. Justice should be color-blind. But this campaign to codify certain crimes as “hate crimes” has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with ideology. Our cultural elite wants Americans to see their country as it does—as a racist land in need of redemption, where white males are the most prevalent and dangerous of criminals. And the truth does not matter: if the rape-murder of a thirteen-year-old boy, or the dragging death of a six-year-old boy by a black ex-con, or a racist atrocity in Wichita does not fit, or worse, contradicts the script, bury the story.
In the catechism of the revolution, the thirty murders of young men by the sadist John Wayne Gacy did not qualify as hate crimes, but had Gacy been beaten up outside a gay bar for propositioning a fraternity boy, that would have qualified. The murder of Dr. King would have qualified as a hate crime, as his killer, James Earl Ray, hated King as a black leader; but the murders of John F. Kennedy by a Castroite and Robert Kennedy by a Palestinian extremist would not.
As the Mass, endless reenactments of the Last Supper, is a sacrament of Catholicism, repeated recitations of the lurid details of hate crimes are a virtual sacrament in the new faith. The prototypical hate crime always has the same plot, hero, villain, and victim: progressives standing up to white bigots on behalf of defenseless minorities. And the search for fresh hate crimes by media that have become the propaganda arm of the revolution never ceases. For each newly discovered hate crime reaffirms an infallible doctrine: deep down America is a homophobic, bigoted nation. Per Ms. Sontag, “Then white race is the cancer of human history.”
But how did this new religion capture a Christian and conservative America of only yesterday? Where did it come from?
FOUR
FOUR WHO MADE A REVOLUTION
Who will free us from the yoke of Western Civilization?1
—Georg Lukacs
Marxist Theoretician
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. 2
—Aldous Huxley
Brave New World
The taproot of the revolution that captured the cultural institutions of the American republic goes back far beyond the 1960s to August 1914, the beginning of the Great War that historian Jacques Barzun calls the “blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction.”
On August 4, 1914, the Social Democrats stood in the Reichstag and, to a man, voted the kaiser’s war credits, joining the orgy of patriotism as the armies of the Reich smashed into Belgium. Marxists were stunned. The long-anticipated European war was to be their time. “Workers of the world, unite!” Marx had thundered in the closing line of his Communist Manifesto. Marxists had confidently predicted that when war came, the workers would rise up and rebel against their rulers rather than fight fellow workers of neighboring nations. But it had not happened. The greatest socialist party in Europe had been converted into a war party, and the workers had thrown down their tools and gone off to fight with songs in their hearts. As historian Barbara Tuchman describes it:
When the call came, the worker, whom Marx declared to have no Fatherland, identified himself with country, not class. He turned out to be a member of the national family like anyone else. The force of his antagonism which was supposed to topple capitalism found a better target in the foreigner. The working class went to war willingly, even eagerly, like the middle class, like the upper class, like the species.3
Marxists had been exposed as fools.
As the horrors of the western front unfolded, they waited. But even Ypres, Passchendaele, and the Somme, where hundreds of thousands of British soldiers went to their deaths over a few yards of mud, did not cause the workers to rise up in the homeland of the Industrial Revolution. Neither the French nor the German working class broke at Verdun. The 1917 mutiny in the French trenches was swiftly put down. New blows came at war’s end.
After the Russian Revolution, Communist coups were attempted in Budapest, Munich, and Berlin. The Bavarian Soviet was quickly crushed by German war veterans. Rosa Luxemburg, who had led the Spartacist uprising, and Karl Liebknecth were clubbed and shot to death in Berlin by Freikorps. The Budapest regime of Bela Kun lasted a few months. The workers failed to rally to the revolutions launched in the
ir name.
Trotsky sought to make the Red Army the spear point of revolution. Invading Poland, he was hurled back at the Vistula by Polish patriots under Marshal Pilsudski. Nothing the Marxists had predicted had come to pass. Their hour had come and gone. The workers of the West, the mythical proletariat, had refused to play the role history had assigned them. How could Marx have been so wrong?
Two of Marx’s disciples now advanced an explanation. Yes, Marx had been wrong. Capitalism was not impoverishing the workers. Indeed, their lot was improving, and they had not risen in revolution because their souls had been saturated in two thousand years of Christianity, which blinded them to their true class interests. Unless and until Christianity and Western culture, the immune system of capitalism, were uprooted from the soul of Western Man, Marxism could not take root, and the revolution would be betrayed by the workers in whose name it was to be fought. In biblical terms, the word of Marx, seed of the revolution, had fallen on rock-hard Christian soil and died. Wagering everything on the working class, the Marxists had bet on the wrong horse.
The first dissenting disciple was the Hungarian Georg Lukacs, an agent of the Comintern, whose History and Class Consciousness had brought him recognition as a Marxist theorist to rival Marx himself. “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution’” said Lukacs. “A worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation, of new ones by the revolutionaries.”4 As deputy commissar for culture in Bela Kun’s regime, Lukacs put his self-described “demonic” ideas into action in what came to be known as “cultural terrorism.”
As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. Women, too, were called to rebel against the sexual mores of the time.5
LUKACS’S PURPOSE IN promoting licentiousness among women and children was to destroy the family, the core institution of Christianity and Western culture. Five decades after Lukacs fled Hungary, his ideas would be enthusiastically embraced by baby boomers in the “sexual revolution.”
The second disciple was Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist who has lately begun to receive deserved recognition as the greatest Marxist strategist of the twentieth century. After Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922, Gramsci fled to Russia. But unlike the “useful idiots” and “infantile left” of Lenin’s derision, such as American writer Lincoln Steffens—“I have been over into the future and it works!”—Gramsci was a sharp observer who saw that Bolshevism did not work. Only through terror could the regime compel obedience. Gramsci concluded that Leninism had failed. The Russian people had not been converted to communism; they loathed it. Their land, faith, families, icons, and Mother Russia all meant far more to the Russian people than any international workers’ solidarity. The Soviets were deluding themselves, Gramsci concluded. The Russian people had not changed. They were obedient only because resistance meant a knock at the door at midnight and a bullet in the back of the neck in the basement of the Lubianka. Even the czar had evoked more love and loyalty than the hated Bolsheviks.
Gramsci concluded it was their Christian souls that prevented the Russian people from embracing their Communist revolution. “The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2000 years,” Gramsci wrote; and a regime grounded in Judeo-Christian beliefs and values could not be overthrown until those roots were cut.6 If Christianity was the heat shield of capitalism, then, to capture the West, Marxists must first de-Christianize the West.
Disillusioned, terrified of Stalin, who had seized power on Lenin’s death and who did not relish independent Marxist thinkers, Gramsci went home to lead the Italian Communist party. Mussolini had another idea. He locked Gramsci up and lost the key. Languishing in prison, near death from tuberculosis, Gramsci was finally freed, but died in 1937 at forty-six. But in his Prison Notebooks he left behind the blueprints for a successful Marxist revolution in the West. Our own cultural revolution could have come straight from its pages. “In the East,” Gramsci wrote of Russia,
the state was everything, civil society was primordial … in the West there was a proper relation between the state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State [in the West] was only the outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.7
Rather than seize power first and impose a cultural revolution from above, Gramsci argued, Marxists in the West must first change the culture; then power would fall into their laps like ripened fruit. But to change the culture would require a “long march through the institutions”—the arts, cinema, theater, schools, colleges, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, and the new electronic medium, radio. One by one, each had to be captured and converted and politicized into an agency of revolution. Then the people could be slowly educated to understand and even welcome the revolution.
Gramsci urged his fellow Marxists to form popular fronts with Western intellectuals who shared their contempt for Christianity and bourgeois culture and who shaped the minds of the young. Message to the comrades: “It’s the culture, stupid!” Since Western culture had given birth to capitalism and sustained it, if that culture could be subverted, the system would fall of its own weight. On the cover of his 1970 runaway bestseller The Greening of America, the manifesto of the counterculture, author Charles Reich parroted Gramsci perfectly:
There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted with violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence … .
This is the revolution of the new generation.8
Gramsci’s idea on how to make a revolution in a Western society has been proven correct. Lenin’s regime shook the world for seventy years, but ultimately his revolution failed, and his regime collapsed. In the end, the Communist party of Lenin and Stalin remained what it had been from the beginning, a conspiracy of political criminals who used Marxist ideas and rhetoric to disguise what they were really about: absolute power. Lenin’s regime died detested and unmourned. But the Gramscian revolution rolls on, and, to this day, it continues to make converts.
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL COMES TO AMERICA
In 1923, Lukacs and members of the German Communist party set up, at Frankfurt University, an Institute for Marxism modeled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. After some reflection, they settled on a less provocative name, the Institute for Social Research. It would soon come to be known simply as the Frankfurt School.
In 1930, a renegade Marxist and admirer of the Marquis de Sade, Max Horkheimer, became its director. Horkheimer, too, had concluded that Marx had gotten it wrong. The working class was not up to its role as the vanguard of the revolution. Already, Western workers were happily moving into the middle class, the detested bourgeoisie. They had failed the Marxists, who would not have been surprised by events on Wall Street in May 1970, when radicals and students protesting Nixon’s Cambodian incursion were beaten up by construction workers of the building trades union of Pete Brennan, whom Nixon would then install as his secretary of labor.
At Horkheimer’s direction, the Frankfurt School began to retranslate Marxism into cultural terms. The old battlefield manuals were thrown out, and new manuals were written. To old Marxists, the enemy was capitalism; to new Marxists, the enemy was Western culture. To old Marxists, the path to power was the violent overthrow of the regime, as in Paris in 1789 and in St. Petersburg in 1917. To the new Marxist, the path to power was nonviolent and would require decades of patient labor. Victory would c
ome only after Christian beliefs had died in the soul of Western Man. And that would happen only after the institutions of culture and education had been captured and conscripted by allies and agents of the revolution. Occupy the cultural institutions of the West, its “fortresses and earthworks,” and the state, the “outer ditch,” would fall without a fight.
For old and new Marxists both, however, the definition of morality remained: what advances the revolution is moral, what obstructs it is not. As Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte writes, Gramsci believed in
“absolute historicism,” meaning that morals, values, truth, standards and human nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are no absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outside of a particular historical context; rather, morality is “socially constructed.”9
When Ronald Reagan famously blurted that the Soviets “reserve to themselves the right to lie, steal and cheat,” he hit on a truth that an honest Marxist would not strenuously contest, though the remark almost caused a collective nervous breakdown at the Department of State.10
ABOUT THIS SAME time, music critic Theodor Adorno, psychologist Erich Fromm, and sociologist Wilhelm Reich joined the Frankfurt School. But, in 1933, history rudely intruded. Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Berlin, and as the leading lights of the Frankfurt School were Jewish and Marxist, they were not a good fit for the Third Reich. the Frankfurt School packed its ideology and fled to America. Also departing was a graduate student by the name of Herbert Marcuse. With the assistance of Columbia University, they set up their new Frankfurt School in New York City and redirected their talents and energies to undermining the culture of the country that had given them refuge.
The Death of the West Page 8