textfiles-politics/conspiracyTextFilesRegEx/cncia006.txt

<conspiracyFile>Date: Sun, 8 Jan 1995 <data type="time">08:21:07</data>-0500
From: James Daugherty &lt;jhdaugh@a-albionic.com&gt;
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Carroll Quigley Examined; Multicultural Strategy of Ruling Class?
A-albionic Research Weekly Up-date of January 8, 1995
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<div>Contents<div>
1. Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy: What's going on here? by Daniel Brandt
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2. Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite by Daniel Brandt
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<div>
This article is from NameBase NewsLine, which is distributed to users of
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From NameBase NewsLine, No. 1, April-June 1993:
Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy: What's going on here?
by Daniel Brandt
When Bill Clinton delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic
convention on July 16, 1992, it didn't contain any surprises, nor were any
expected. There were the usual feel-good platitudes: he wanted to talk
with us "about my hope for the future, my faith in the American people,
and my vision of the kind of country we can build.... This election is
about putting power back in your hands and putting the government back on
your side.... It is time to heal America." Any speech writer could have
pulled boiler-plate from the files and pasted together something similar.
Speeches for occasions like this one aren't meant to be long on specifics.
Toward the end of the speech Clinton mentioned that "as a teenager
I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at
Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll
Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest country in the
history of the world because our people have always believed in two
things: that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us
has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so."
This was not the first time that Clinton had paid tribute to the
memory of his Georgetown professor. A few days earlier, a story on
Clinton's background mentioned that he had never forgotten Quigley's last
lecture. "Throughout his career he has evoked [this lecture] in speeches
as the rhetorical foundation for his political philosophy," according to
the Washington Post, which offered another Clinton quotation praising
Quigley's perspective and influence.[1] A kindly old professor appreciated
as a mentor by an impressionable, idealistic student? This is how it was
interpreted by almost everyone who heard it, particularly since Quigley's
name was not exactly a household word.
But in certain rarified circles among conspiracy theorists, Clinton's
reference to Quigley was surprising. Now that Clinton had one foot in the
White House, the conservative Washington Times soon ran an item that tried
to clear matters up. Professor Quigley, according to the Times,
specialized in the history of a secret group of elite Anglo-Americans who
had a decisive influence on world affairs during the first half of this
century. Quigley, in other words, was a conspiracy theorist -- but one who
had an impeccable pedigree as "one of the few insiders who came out and
exposed the Eastern establishment plan for world government." These words
belong to Tom Eddlam, research director for the John Birch Society. As
someone who had sold two of Quigley's books, Eddlam knew plenty about
Quigley. But we can't have a Democratic draft-dodging liberal candidate
who admires a Birch Society conspiracy hero, so the Times quickly resolved
the issue by noting that Quigley wanted the conspiracy to succeed, whereas
the Birchers wanted it to fail.[2] Thus the Times summed matters up, in
six column inches.
Clinton's supporters depict him as an intellectual, someone whose
heroes traffic in solemn ideals. If so, Clinton presumably read Tragedy
and Hope, Quigley's best-known book, which appeared while Clinton was at
Georgetown. At any rate, Quigley's work is well worth looking at, along
with Clinton's early career, for its possible clues to Clinton's thought.
Reading Quigley may turn you into a student of high-level conspiracy,
which is exactly what many influential people around Clinton and elsewhere
say you shouldn't be. Almost all of the 3000 members of the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) will go on record ridiculing any of the conspiracy
theories that, according to all polls, are taken seriously by large
majorities of average people. CFR member Daniel Schorr will tell you again
and again that Oswald was a lone nut, and CFR member Steven Emerson will
write article after article debunking Pan Am 103 and October Surprise
theories. It's not that people in high places know better, it's simply
that they have more to protect and cannot afford to be candid.
As new research is published about the JFK assassination, for
example, it becomes clear that virtually all the high-level players, from
LBJ on down, assumed it was a conspiracy from the moment the shots were
fired. It took until recently for dedicated researchers to dig this fact
out.[3] But thirty years later many journalists still find it useful to
defend the Warren Commission or belittle its critics.
Carroll Quigley was a conspiracy historian, but he was unusual in
that he avoided criticism. Most of his conspiracy research concerned the
role of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Groups in Britain from 1891 through
World War II. His major work, Tragedy and Hope (1966), contains scattered
references to his twenty years of research in this area, but his detailed
history of the Round Table was written in 1949. The major reason he
avoided criticism is because his work wasn't threatening to people in high
places. Quigley's research was too obscure, and too much had happened in
the world since the events he described. Quigley was also an insider, so
his criticisms of the groups he studied are subdued. He did his
undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard, where he received a doctorate
in 1938. He later taught at Princeton and Harvard before settling in at
Georgetown's conservative School of Foreign Service in 1941, where he
remained for the rest of his career. He was a consultant for the Brookings
Institution, the Defense Department, the State Department, and the
Navy,[4] and taught western civilization and history. In 1962 the Center
for Strategic and International Studies was established on the Georgetown
campus, where it maintained close ties with the School of Foreign Service.
CSIS included a number of people on its staff who had high-level CIA
connections. Quigley moved in these circles until his death in 1977:
I know of the operations of this network [the Round Table Groups]
because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two
years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records.
I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of
my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have
objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies,
but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to
remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant
enough to be known.[5]
In his 1949 detailed look at the Cecil Rhodes - Oxford - Alfred
(Lord) Milner - Round Table nexus, published posthumously in 1981 as
The Anglo-American Establishment, Quigley was more forceful with his
criticism. While endorsing this elite's high-minded internationalist
goals, Quigley wrote that "I cannot agree with them on methods," and added
that he found the antidemocratic implications of their inherited wealth
and power "terrifying." This is as tough as he got with his comments:
No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner Group
accomplished in Britain -- that is, that a small number of men should
be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be
given almost complete control over the publication of the documents
relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence
over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and
should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the
teaching of the history of their own period.[6]
Quigley also avoided criticism because his books are the product of
years of painstaking research into primary diplomatic sources. To qualify
as a critic of his analysis, someone would have to duplicate that research
-- and so far no one has. It also helped that Quigley was doing most of
his work at a time when conspiracy theories were considered curious and
quaint, but not threatening. Clinton, at any rate, had no reason to feel
uneasy about citing the virtually unknown Quigley in his convention
acceptance speech.
But serious researchers can hardly afford to pass over Quigley's
potential significance so lightly. The Washington Times, to begin with, is
clearly mistaken to brush Quigley off as simply one more liberal elitist
one-worlder. Certainly he is no streetcorner agitator, whether of the
right or left. But his understated critique of his elite colleagues is
nevertheless a searching one.
In the years following the publication of Tragedy and Hope in 1966,
writers on both the right and left began to recognize this. For example,
New Left writer and activist Carl Oglesby came to realize that some of his
ideas about elite power in the U.S. had been anticipated by Quigley.[7]
On the far right, meanwhile, Quigley found a convert in W. Cleon Skousen,
a former FBI agent who later became a star of the John Birch Society's
lecture circuit. In 1970, Skousen published a book-length review of
Quigley's Tragedy and Hope that was titled The Naked Capitalist. It
quoted so heavily from Quigley's work that Quigley threatened to sue for
copyright infringement.
Skousen chose to emphasize Quigley's mention of subterranean
financial arrangements between certain Wall Street interests and certain
groups on the U.S. left, in particular the Communist Party.[8] Oglesby,
meanwhile, shared Quigley's interest in the challenge posed to Wall
Street's Eastern elite by newer oil and defense-aerospace money
concentrated in the Southwest.[9] But as Oglesby recognized, Quigley's
meticulous research into elite power shaded insensibly over into the study
of "conspiracy":
Am I borrowing on Quigley then to say with the far right that this
one conspiracy rules the world? The arguments for a conspiracy theory
are indeed often dismissed on the grounds that no one conspiracy
could possibly control everything. But that is not what this theory
sets out to show. Quigley is not saying that modern history is the
invention of an esoteric cabal designing events omnipotently to suit
its ends. The implicit claim, on the contrary, is that a multitude of
conspiracies contend in the night. Clandestinism is not the usage of
a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class
in which a thousand hands spontaneously join. Conspiracy is the
normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.[10]
But it's a bad word for polite editors, so the issues surrounding the
"C" word are almost never discussed in print. One needs to tease out
Oglesby's observation that there is a qualitative difference between the
way that the left and right in the U.S. have addressed this issue. Both
tendencies can at least get together on which groups deserve attention:
the Council on Foreign Relations, which became the American branch of the
Round Table in 1919; Bilderberg, which has held secret meetings in Europe
for select participants since 1954; and the Trilateral Commission, a group
that began in 1973 and now has 325 members from Japan, Europe, and America.
CFR consists of Americans only, whereas Bilderberg adds the Europeans and
TC also adds the Japanese. The Americans in Bilderberg and TC are almost
always members of CFR also.
But some leftists and left-liberal sociologists prefer to take the
curse off their interest in such groups by calling their investigations
"power-structure research." The implication seems to be that tracing
interlocking directorates, let's say, belongs to science in a way that
tracing Lee Harvey Oswald's intelligence connections never could. Still,
G. William Domhoff, the most prominent of the "power structure"
researchers, admits that attempting to maintain this quarantine can itself
become unscientific:
Critics of a power elite theory often call it 'conspiratorial,' which
is the academic equivalent of ending a discussion by yelling
Communist. It is difficult to lay this charge to rest once and for
all because these critics really mean something much broader than the
dictionary definition of conspiracy. All right, then, if 'conspiracy'
means that these men are aware of their interests, know each other
personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to
hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate or react to events and
issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR, not to
mention in the Committee for Economic Development, the Business
Council, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence
Agency.[11]
And what makes Domhoff's middle ground on the problem of conspiracy
so difficult to maintain is precisely the existence of inconveniently
concrete cases like Oswald's. If there was a conspiracy and cover-up, then
it was carried out by interested individuals rather than by blind social
forces. The best that Domhoff can do with the JFK assassination is to
ignore it, which he does.
But this won't do for Michael Albert, editor of the leftist Z
Magazine and a Domhoffian "structuralist," who has attempted to finesse
this problem. His argument on the JFK assassination, as best I can
understand it, goes something like this: JFK was a predictable product of
established institutions; these institutions wanted a war in Vietnam; it's
inconceivable that JFK would have disagreed with this because his behavior
was determined (that is, he could not have changed his mind), and
therefore, the assassination of JFK, conspiracy or not, made no difference
to our history and is unimportant. The problem with Albert's approach is
that he's fairly close to vulgar Marxism, which by now has been thoroughly
discredited.
To my thinking, the reason why the JFK assassination is so important
is this: It's one thing to believe that there are rich people who become
richer because their environment tells them to behave that way, and quite
another to believe that there is a powerful, secret government that
doesn't have to play by the rules. If you can prove that the assassination
was a conspiracy, then the first notion becomes silly and insignificant.
Essentially, conspiracy theories restore notions of freedom and
responsibility that have been stripped from from the "value free" social
science establishment. Quigley is between Domhoff and Oglesby on our
spectrum, which is not a left-right spectrum but rather a conspiracy
spectrum. Oglesby deals seriously with the JFK assassination while Quigley
does not. But Quigley at least follows the money trail and believes that
human agency and individual actors are important forces in history.
Domhoff, on the other hand, is more interested in class distinctions and
general behavior.
Skousen is much more conspiratorial than Oglesby. He applies
conspiracy thinking to complex issues where a middle ground would be
productive (such as CFR, Bilderberg, and Trilateralism), and treats them
in an either/or fashion as if they were similar to the JFK assassination.
It doesn't work very well. The New World Order may be a bad idea, but to
assume as a starting point that it's a Communist plot doesn't help us
understand the who or why behind it.
Before returning to Clinton, it will help to fill out our spectrum a
bit. So far we have Domhoff, Quigley, and Oglesby in a line, and Skousen
off further on the pro-conspiracy end. On the anti-conspiracy end we
should add Erwin Knoll, longtime editor of The Progressive. According to
Knoll, "none of the conspiracy theories we have scrutinized meets the test
of accuracy -- or even plausibility -- we normally apply to material
published in The Progressive, so none has appeared in the pages of this
magazine.[12] Knoll's advisory board includes three members of the Council
on Foreign Relations, so this fits okay. There's also Chip Berlet, who
berates unwitting leftists for falling prey to conspiracy theories that
the devious right has conspired to foist on them. He isn't critical of
conspiracy thinking on the basis of the evidence, but waits until the
theorist can be shown to have incorrect political associations.[13] Berlet
doesn't fit anywhere on our spectrum; he's running his own show.
A conspiracy bookseller named Lloyd Miller[14] is farther out than
Skousen. Miller is aware of Quigley and sells his books. While Oglesby is
toying with an American ruling-class Yankee-Cowboy split that goes back a
generation or so, Miller dwells on a split between the Knights of Malta
and the Knights Templar going back to the year 1307. The modern derivative
of this struggle provides his hypothesis that "the overt and covert organs
of the Vatican and British Empire are locked in mortal combat for control
of the world." In Miller's theory, Jesuit-controlled Georgetown is the
Vatican headquarters on the American front, and Quigley is a Vatican agent
exposing the Anglo-American connection. Miller is more sophisticated than
this description allows, but I have difficulties with him. On a case by
case basis, the theory produces as many questions as answers. More
importantly, perhaps, my historical interests and imagination don't extend
much beyond the last 100 years.
Miller is mentioned because there are similarities between his
analysis and the theories of Lyndon LaRouche. For anyone who wants to
figure out what LaRouche is talking about, it is necessary to be
conversant with esoterica concerning Freemasonry, the Knights of Malta,
and British imperialism. The alternative is to see all of the above as
code words for Jews, and LaRouche's enemies -- namely Chip Berlet, Dennis
King, and the Anti-Defamation League -- tend to take this easy way out. I
don't believe that right-wing globalist conspiracy theories in general, or
LaRouche's theories in particular, can be dismissed by claiming that they
are disguised anti-Semitism -- that is to say, code-word versions of the
old international Jewish banking conspiracies. While there is some
anti-Semitism on the right, it is no longer the driving force it might
have once been. Most right-wing theories are more sophisticated than
Berlet, King, or the ADL are ready to believe.
I don't consider any of the people I've mentioned as crackpots,
because I'm convinced that there are vital issues at stake. All of them
are doing their best with checkered evidence, and for the most part I
share their instincts if not always their conclusions. Regardless of where
we decide to place Bill Clinton on the spectrum, which will be discussed
after a review of his career, at least two other former (and future?)
presidential candidates have staked out positions. Ross Perot believes
that there is massive corruption and occasional conspiracies in high
places; he belongs somewhere close to Quigley. Pat Robertson is a less
hysterical version of Skousen, modified for post anti-Communism, and
should also be taken seriously. Along with Ross Perot's movement, some see
Robertson's Christian Coalition as a populist challenge to our one-party
Republocrat system.
Most of Pat Robertson's latest book, The New World Order (1991), is
a popularized yet articulate presentation of recent American history as
controlled by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission,
Bilderberg, the Federal Reserve System, and Wall Street. Several pages
are spent on Quigley's theories, which provide the background for an
understanding of the Rhodes Trust, CFR, and the foundations with their
"One World agenda." Unfortunately, the only mention of this book in the
left press ignores the analytical material that Robertson draws on, and
dismisses "its more bizarre conspiracy theories such as those targeting
mainstream figures as dupes of the Devil."[15]
Yes, Robertson finally couches his theories in a Biblical context
(after keeping the Bible out of it for the first two-thirds of the book),
and most of us don't find the Bible necessary or compelling. But when
leftists skip to the end in order to belittle his critique, at a time
when they have lost the capacity to provide an alternative critique, this
is self-defeating. My main objection to Robertson is that he doesn't
deserve to have a monopoly on these important issues; his vision is too
apocalyptic and too narrow. Unlike the politically-correct "progressive"
press, however, I consider him potentially closer to populism than to
fascism.
Robertson spends several pages recounting the 1976 campaign of Jimmy
Carter, and describes how he concluded that Carter's strings were being
pulled by the same Trilateralists who created him. A similar analysis --
much more detailed and convincing -- can also be found from a leftist
perspective.[16] It wasn't too many years ago, before politically-correct
thinking carried the day, that the left took Trilateralism seriously.
Since 1980, the only left perspective on Trilateralism has been written by
a Canadian professor.[17] His Gramscian categories tend to be academically
overbearing, but he took the trouble to interview 100 Trilateral
Commission members.
The Jimmy Carter story is depressing. Hamilton Jordan reportedly
said, "If, after the inauguration you find Cy Vance as secretary of state
and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say
that we failed." That's exactly what happened, and seventeen other key
members of the administration were also Trilateralists. For his entire
administration, every move on foreign policy was cleared with the
hard-liner Brzezinski.
Robertson's book was written just one year before Clinton's name
became a household word. One wonders how Robertson reacted to Clinton's
reference to Quigley in his acceptance speech. And then what Robertson
thought when he learned that Clinton checked off on almost every group
you care to name: he is a Rhodes Scholar, a CFR member, a Trilateral
Commission member, a Bilderberg participant, and most of his appointees
are at least one of the above. If Clinton's mention of Quigley in July
1992 had been an isolated case, then one might interpret this as simply a
ploy to disguise his elitist loyalties. But Clinton has mentioned Quigley
many times over the years, and I suspect that on this he is sincere. Then
again, it's hard to believe that Clinton is unaware of Quigley's
anti-elitist tendencies. What's going on here?
After shaking John Kennedy's hand, they say that William Jefferson
Clinton never doubted that he was headed for the White House. A band major
in high school, he was favored by his school principal, who encouraged him
to run for class offices and to participate in a leadership program that
sponsored his trip to Washington. He attended Georgetown from 1964-1968,
majoring in international affairs and immediately running for student
office ("Hello, I'm Bill Clinton. Will you help me run for president of
the freshman class?"). When he wasn't listening to Quigley or networking
and glad-handing his way through a student council election, he was
working in the Senate Foreign Relations Office of Senator J. William
Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat and former Rhodes Scholar who started
criticizing the CIA and Vietnam policy in 1966. During his first two
years, Clinton was a trainee in Georgetown's ROTC unit, and could be seen
around campus in Army fatigues.
Between Quigley and his Georgetown connections, Fulbright and his
Rhodes Trust connections, and Clinton's keen interest in his own political
power, it's not surprising that the big, bearded, amiable Clinton became a
Rhodes Scholar in 1968 and went off to spend two years at Oxford. Another
power behind Clinton was Winthrop Rockefeller (1912-1973), two-time
Republican governor of Arkansas, who reportedly functioned as a father
figure. At Oxford, Clinton participated in one or more demonstrations
against U.S. policy in Vietnam in front of the American embassy, and used
his connections to stay out of the draft. After Oxford he went to Yale Law
School. In the fall of 1972 he directed McGovern's campaign in Texas. He
ran for Congress in Arkansas in 1974 after finishing Yale, but barely
lost. Then he taught law in Arkansas until 1976, when he was elected state
attorney general after running unopposed. That year he also headed up the
state campaign for Jimmy Carter. Two years later he won the race for
governor.
The anti-war sentiments among Clinton's Oxford colleagues did not
produce an antipathy toward the CIA. Robert Earl, later an assistant to
Oliver North at the National Security Council, was one of these
colleagues. And while governor, Clinton was aware that an airfield in
Mena, Arkansas played a major role in secret contra logistics involving
gun and drug running. Clinton's security chief is being sued for an
alleged Mena-related frame-up, and many believe that there were cover-ups
by both state and federal agencies.[18]
Bill Clinton is promoted as the first baby boomer and anti-war
activist in the White House. Yet I was also these things, and I cannot
identify with Clinton at all. In order for this piece to make any sense,
it's important that I show how two different anti-war protesters might
have stood together in a demonstration for different reasons, after
arriving from different directions.
To begin with, one has to divide the student movement into two
periods, before and after 1968. This year was pivotal: the McCarthy
campaign, the RFK and MLK assassinations, the police riot in Chicago.
Anti-war protesters on conservative campuses such as my University of
Southern California and Clinton's Georgetown, were almost always bona fide
prior to 1968. There was no percentage in it otherwise, as the polls were
overwhelmingly in favor of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At USC I organized
a peaceful draft card turn-in ceremony in 1968. We were physically ejected
from the campus by fraternity boys, and had to continue in a church across
the street, where the frat rats feared to tread. A poll by our student
newspaper showed that most students agreed with the fraternity. At USC,
and the same was probably true of Georgetown, a student politician
couldn't get more than a handful of votes by taking an anti-war position.
In 1969 everything suddenly changed. Major anti-war organizing
efforts appeared on campus, coordinated through national networks. I
guessed that these new activists, who seemed to come out of nowhere to
organize the Vietnam Moratorium, were former McCarthy-Kennedy campaign
workers. Although I had been co-chairman of our SDS chapter the previous
year, these were all new faces to me. I was astounded and a little
suspicious. Everything had turned around completely: now no student
politician could hope to win without the long hair, the beads and sandals,
and speaking at freshmen orientation by abandoning the lectern and sitting
on the edge of the stage, "rapping" to them movement-style.
When it came time to confront the draft, these same student
politicians used their mysterious connections to get out the easy way.
Sometimes they pulled strings to secure a place in the overbooked National
Guard, but most got out clean. Almost half of all undergraduate men were
released when the first lottery was held at the end of the year, which
of course brought our anti-draft movement to a halt. I now refer to my
1969 experience as the "Sam Hurst syndrome," after the articulate and
good-looking student body president who sat on the edge of the stage and
rode into power on the post-1968 wave. It's my euphemism for slick,
well-disguised self-interest and a great head of hair.
I noticed that new students could not tell the difference between Sam
Hurst's activism and mine. Students with safe lottery numbers sadistically
inquired about my number -- they would find it amusing if my number was
also safe, now that I had been convicted for refusing induction. It was
every man for himself. Then it got worse. By September 1970 the big
movement on campus centered on Timothy Leary's old colleague Richard
Alpert, who now called himself Baba Ram Dass and told overflow crowds that
the best way to do revolution was to sit in the lotus position and do
nothing. Soon Rennie Davis of Chicago Eight fame was spending his time
puppy-dogging a teenaged guru from India. Within another year there was no
discernible movement at all, just embarrassing burnouts like the Weather
Underground and eventually the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped
and brainwashed Patty Hearst.
Bill Clinton is even slicker than Sam Hurst. His anti-war activism,
as well as everything else he did, developed from a focused interest in
his own future. After 1968 it would have been unthinkable for Clinton to
ignore the anti-war movement and face political obsolescence -- not
because of his revulsion over carpet bombing, but because it was time to
hedge his bets. Clinton is not an intellectual, he's merely very clever.
A clever person can manipulate his environment, while an intellectual can
project beyond it and, for example, identify with the suffering of the
Vietnamese people. But this involves some risk, whereas power politics is
the art of pursuing the possible and minimizing this risk. Almost
everything that happened to the student movement is best explained without
conspiracy theories. There are, however, some bits of curious evidence
that should be briefly mentioned. Each of these alone doesn't amount to
much, but taken together they suggest that something more was happening --
the possibility that by 1969 a significant sector of the ruling class had
decided to buy into the counterculture for purposes of manipulation and
control:
* Student leaders James Kunen[19] and Carl Oglesby[20] both report that
in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which
had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with
SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the
upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but
the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war
with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory.
* Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against
those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted
as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he
was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents.[21]
* The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also
evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within
the counterculture.[22]
* Feminist leader Gloria Steinem[23] and congressman Allard Lowenstein
both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the
National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until
exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam
Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.[24]
(In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his
activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton's,
didn't hurt his career either.)
* Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have
been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by
elements of U.S. intelligence.[25]
* The CIA has a long history of infiltrating international
organizations, from labor to students to religion. I submit that
if an anti-war activist was involved in this type of international
jet-setting, the burden is on them to show that they were not
compromised. Clinton comes close to assuming this burden.
The major point here is that by 1969, protest was not necessarily
anti-Establishment. When thousands of students are in the streets every
day, and the troops you sent to Vietnam are deserting, sooner or later
it's going to cut into your profits. If you can't beat them, then you have
to co-opt them. Clinton's mentors and sponsors realized this, Clinton
himself sensed the shift, and until more evidence is available it's fair
to assume that his anti-war activity was at a minimum self-serving, and
perhaps even duplicitous.
How else can we explain why he has recently embraced the very
organizations who got us into Vietnam in the first place? He joined the
Council on Foreign Relations in 1989, attended a Bilderberg meeting in
1991, is currently a member of the Trilateral Commission, and has
appointed numerous Rhodes Scholars, CFR members, and Trilateralists to key
positions. These are the very groups whose historical roots, according to
Quigley, are essentially conspiratorial and antidemocratic. A cynic would
say that Clinton appropriated from Quigley what he needed -- which was a
precise description of where the power is -- and ignored those aspects of
Quigley that did not fit his agenda. He may have read a book or two by
Quigley, but he didn't inhale them.
On February 2, when Clinton's nominee for CIA director was asked some
polite questions, Senator John Chafee (R-RI) joked about what he called
"a Mafia that's taking over the administration."[26] Be sure to smile when
you say that, Senator. The new director, R. James Woolsey, was an early
supporter of the contras and served as defense attorney for Michael Ledeen
and Charles E. Allen, he has Georgetown-CSIS connections, and he's a
Rhodes Scholar, CFR member, and Yale Law School graduate, several years
ahead of Clinton. Yale, of course, is thick with CIA connections.[27] The
new CIA director was close to Brent Scowcroft at the Bush White House, and
is a director of Martin Marietta, the eighth-largest defense corporation,
whose contracts include the MX missle and Star Wars weapons.
It's becoming clear that on inauguration day we merely had a changing
of the guard. But it's still the same old team at headquarters, wherever
that is, and you won't find any television cameras there. Ultimately,
then, Clinton's references to Quigley are worth as much as his anti-war
record. And both are worth nothing at all.
1. David Maraniss, "Bill Clinton: Born to Run...and Run...and Run.
Washington Post, July 13, 1992, p. A1.
2. "Clinton a Bircher?", Washington Times, July 22, 1992, p. A6. For a
more useful discussion of the right and Quigley, see Frank P. Mintz,
The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy and
Culture (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 145-51.
3. This conclusion in inescapable after reading Dick Russell, The Man
Who Knew Too Much (New York: Carroll &amp; Graf, 1992).
4. Who's Who in America, 1976-1977 (Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1976).
5. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
(New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 950.
6. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (New York: Books in
Focus, 1981), pp. xi, 197.
7. Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War (New York: Berkley Publishing,
1977), pp.6-7.
8. Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, pp. 945-9.
9. Ibid., pp. 1245-6.
10. Oglesby, p. 25.
11. G. William Domhoff, "Who Made American Foreign Policy, 1945-1963?" In
David Horowitz, ed., Corporations and the Cold War (New York: Monthly
Review, 1969), p.34.
12. Erwin Knoll, "Memo from the Editor," The Progressive, March 1992,
p. 4.
13. Chip Berlet, Right Woos Left (Political Research Associates, 678
Massachusetts Avenue, Suite 205, Cambridge MA 02139), July 28, 1992,
$6.50.
14. A-albionic Research, P.O. Box 20273, Ferndale MI 48220.
15. Kate Cornell, "The Covert Tactics and Overt Agenda of the New
Christian Right," Covert Action Quarterly, No. 43, Winter 1992-93,
p. 51.
16. Laurence H. Shoup, "Jimmy Carter and the Trilateralists: Presidential
Roots"; Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, "Shaping a New World
Order: The Council on Foreign Relations' Blueprint for World
Hegemony, 1939-1945"; and several other relevant articles. In Holly
Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite
Planning for World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980).
17. Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
18. Association of National Security Alumni, Unclassified, February-March
1992, pp. 6-9.
19. James Simon Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College
Revolutionary (New York: Avon Books, 1970), pp. 130-1.
20. Steve Weissman, Big Brother and the Holding Company (Palo Alto CA:
Ramparts Press, 1974), pp. 298-9.
21. AP in San Francisco Examiner, June 21, 1986.
22. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the
Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
23. Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American
Establishment (New York: Simon &amp; Schuster, 1992), pp. 483-4, 727.
24. Richard Cummings, The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the
Liberal Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
25. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow,
1990), p. 337.
26. Douglas Jehl, "CIA Nominee Wary of Budget Cuts," New York Times,
February 3, 1993, p. A18.
27. Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961
(New York: William Morrow, 1987).
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This article is from NameBase NewsLine, which is distributed to users of
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of ruling class/conspiracy personnel. This 3-megabyte database is
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From NameBase NewsLine, No. 3, October-December 1993:
Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite
by Daniel Brandt
<div>
Opportunity is rapidly vanishing, poorly masked by an institutionalized
preference for diversity. Leftist academics in ivory towers are hooked on
designer victimology but fail to notice the real victims -- the entire
next generation. Meanwhile the rich get richer. Have a nice New World
Order.
<div>
Anyone who follows today's academic debates on multiculturalism, and
by happenstance is also familiar with the power-structure research that
engaged students in the sixties and early seventies, is struck by that old
truism: the only thing history teaches us is that no one learns from
history. By now it's even embarrassing, perhaps because of our soundbite
culture. Not only must each generation painstakingly relearn, by trial and
error, everything learned by the previous generation, but it's beginning
to appear that we have to relearn ourselves that which we knew a scant
twenty years earlier. The debate over diversity is one example of this.
Researchers in the sixties discovered that the ruling elites of the
West mastered the techniques of multiculturalism at the onset of the Cold
War, and employed them time and again to counter the perceived threat from
communism. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was funded first by the
CIA and then, after this was exposed in 1967, by the Ford Foundation. CCF
created magazines, published books, and conducted conferences throughout
the world, in an effort to wean intellectuals to democratic liberalism.[1]
The CIA was also busy in Africa. In an article titled "The CIA as an
Equal Opportunity Employer" that first appeared in 1969 in Ramparts and
was reprinted in the Black Panther newspaper and elsewhere, members from
the Africa Research Group presented convincing evidence that "the CIA has
promoted black cultural nationalism to reinforce neo-colonialism in
Africa." In their introduction they added that "activists in the black
colony within the United States can easily see the relevance to their own
situation; in many cases the same techniques and occasionally the same
individuals are used to control the political implications of
Afro-American culture."[2]
But this is lost history, found today only on dusty library shelves
or buried in obscure databases. None of it is mentioned in the current
debate over diversity, not even in one of the most lucid essays, an
opinion piece by David Rieff that appeared in a recent Harper's.[3] Rieff
paints a picture of multiculturalism and shows, in broad strokes, how
multiculturalism serves capitalism. To appreciate the significance of
multiculturalism we must, as Rieff does, look at the academic arguments
from someplace in the real world, or at least from off campus. But we must
also be aware of our own historical legacy: psychological warfare and the
secret state, the mass media and the culture of spectacle, the role of
foundations, and above all, the interests and techniques of the elite
globalists who won the Cold War.
From the time that this war began in 1947, the Carnegie, Ford, and
Rockefeller Foundations, in cooperation with the CIA, began funding
programs at major U.S. universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Columbia.
They began with an emphasis on Russian studies, but by the mid-1960s these
three foundations and the CIA had a near-monopoly on all international
studies in the U.S.[4] This phenomenon, a big-money, top-down affair born
out of strategic considerations, is the precursor of today's academic
multiculturalism.
Some defenders of academic diversity pretend that the elitist shoe
is on the other foot, and note that their critics are funded by certain
conservative foundations. Sara Diamond tracks the Olin Foundation and
Smith-Richardson money behind Dinesh D'Souza and the National Association
of Scholars (NAS), two of the more vocal critics of multiculturalism.[5]
Diamond points out that the Smith-Richardson Foundation has its own CIA
connections, even though they pale in significance alongside the Carnegie
- Ford - Rockefeller nexus. But Diamond's major error is in framing her
arguments in terms of right and left. This allows the real dynamics to
escape her field of vision.
The ruling elite that finds diversity useful is an elite operating
at a level which transcends right and left. While there is an ideological
right that is battling the left, and while they do enjoy funding from
other conservatives, these folks are not the problem because they do not
have substantial power. Nothing shows this better than the fact that this
ideological right has always been as concerned as the left over the real
source of power, the elite globalists. This began with the Reece Committee
on the role of foundations in 1954, continued through the 1960s with the
John Birch Society's attacks on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),
and later on the Trilateral Commission, and continues today with Pat
Robertson,[6] Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Spotlight, and others. It's not
a right-left problem, but rather a top-bottom problem.[7]
Secondly, whatever the funding enjoyed by D'Souza and NAS, one
must recognize that the ideological right has long been motivated by
a Constitutionally-based, protectionist patriotism that hates big
government. Too often the patriotic component has devolved into what can
only be described as racism and imperialism. But in 1993 they are once
again isolationist, at a time when louder mainstream voices want to assume
the role of the world's policeman. And today the populist, ideological
right (as opposed to the corporate, Republican, elitist right found on the
CFR roster) is also opposed to NAFTA, every bit as firmly as the
trade-union Democrats. The ideological right, in other words, takes ideas
seriously -- a characteristic of those who lack power. It's just possible
that diversity for its own sake deserves to be criticized because it
replaces the search for truth with a situationist relativism based on
personal experience. This too is a consideration that defies simplistic
left-right categories.
For those who feel that the forces behind the debate are instructive,
it's worthwhile noting that the Ford Foundation began supporting feminist
groups and women's studies programs in the early 1970s. Just ten years
earlier they were busy training Indonesian elites (using Berkeley
professors as instructors) to take over from Sukarno,[8] which occurred
soon after a CIA-sponsored coup in 1965 that led to the slaughter of
hundreds of thousands. Did the folks at Ford Foundation have a bleeding
change of heart, or are they continuing the same battle on another front?
It would appear to be the latter. David R. Hunter, considered the
"godfather of progressive philanthropy" by hip heirs such as George
Pillsbury,[9] began his new career co-opting the next generation after
spending four years at the Ford Foundation.[10] The ruling elite knows
exactly what it's doing, and they are remarkably consistent.
When Ramparts blew the whistle on the CIA's domestic cultural
activities in 1967, President Johnson appointed a committee consisting of
elitists Nicholas Katzenbach (Rhodes scholar and former Ford Foundation
fellow), OSS old-boy John Gardner (Carnegie Corporation president,
1955-1965), and CIA director Richard Helms to study the problem. The
Katzenbach Committee reported that they expected private foundations,
which had grown from 2200 in 1955 to 18000 in 1967, to take over
the CIA's funding of international organizations, and recommended a
"public-private mechanism" to give grants openly. Sixteen years later
a Democratic Congress adopted this recommendation by establishing the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED). By now it requires a leap of good
faith to draw distinctions among complicated overlapping networks of CIA
funding, NED funding, and funding by foundations such as Carnegie, Ford,
and Rockefeller. The same people are behind all three, and they seem to
be getting richer every day. They promote the two-party system because
it keeps the rest of us off track.
Consider the issue of women in the workplace. Everyone agrees that
increased opportunities for women are wonderful, but what effect has this
had on family income? Here's the sobering answer, from Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, no less:
The average weekly take home pay of a worker who entered the
workforce in 1989 is $5.68 less today than thirty years ago. This is
also reflected in hourly wages. Compared to 1959, there has been a
slight increase, 60 cents an hour. But hourly wages are down from
their peak in 1973. The 1950s were our boom time. In that one decade
hourly wages grew by 83 cents. It took the following three decades
to add a mere 60 cents. Families made do by doubling up in the
workforce. Between 1955 and 1989 female participation in the work
force rose from <data type="percent" unit="%">35.7%</data> to <data type="percent" unit="%">57.4%</data>. Even so, family income
stayed flat. Median family income in 1973 was $32109. Half a
generation later in 1988 it was, in constant 1988 dollars, $32191 a
gain of $82. We also started the 1980s as the largest creditor nation
in history. We are now the largest debtor.... As a debtor nation, we
must expect that the people we owe money to will be better off than
we are.[11]
More American women are working just to keep the family going, while
more Japanese women can afford to stay home and are choosing to do so. The
flip side of increased opportunities for American women is that they can
no longer choose to stay out of the labor force. As David Rieff asks, "If
multiculturalism is what its proponents claim it is, why has its moment
seen the richest one percent of Americans grow richer and the
deunionization of the American workplace? There is something wrong
with this picture."[12]
Consider, too, the situation of African-Americans. As soon as the
ghettos erupted in the mid-1960s, Johnson's war on poverty began pouring
funds on the flames. This was followed with Nixon's "black capitalism,"
and by the early 1970s affirmative action was institutionalized by edict
from above in both the public sector and in major private corporations
that held government contracts. But twenty years later only the
politicians, pundits, and movie stars pretend that any of this is
significant; it's the Jesse Jacksons and black personalities on television
who justify what they've got by emphasizing how far we've come thanks to
the civil rights struggle. Meanwhile the young in the ghettos, and
increasingly even on campuses, know that these front-office PR slots were
filled long ago. It's not a problem of inequality; for the next generation
there's already a rough equality in anticipated misery. The big problem
is that opportunities are vanishing altogether, without regard to race,
gender, or sexual orientation.
What's left of the left has yet to even acknowledge this, which makes
the proponents of diversity seem irrelevant and even a bit suspicious.
It's as if the multiculturalists are protesting too much. Trapped by the
cognitive dissonance engendered by hard evidence and common sense, their
words lash out reactively in an effort to justify themselves. What else
can they do? As David Rieff notes, their relationship to the real world
is peripheral:
For all their writings on power, hegemony, and oppression, the campus
multiculturalists seem indifferent to the question of where they fit
into the material scheme of things. Perhaps it's tenure, with its way
of shielding the senior staff from the rigors of someone else's
bottom-line thinking. Working for an institution in which neither pay
nor promotion is connected to performance, job security is guaranteed
(after tenure is attained), and pension arrangements are probably the
finest in any industry in the country -- no wonder a poststructuralist
can easily believe that words are deeds. She or he can afford to.[13]
While self-justification may motivate tenured multiculturalists, the
same politics also work well for those who are trying to get there. As any
humanities grad student soon discovers, academia is about specialization,
not about teaching. You need a gimmick. The choreography of the canon
limits the varieties of mental gymnastics during any given academic period
(about ten years), and anyone out of sync is destined for unemployment. By
insisting on diversity as a challenge to the canon, new slots are forced
open for tenure-track spin doctors. Pressure from the administration for
departmental affirmative action dovetails nicely with the fact that only
victims can preach this new canon; presto, tenure at last! Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, who resigned as chair of Emory's women's studies program
because of complaints she wasn't sufficiently radical, admits as much:
In real terms, however, the battle over multiculturalism is a battle
over scarce resources and shrinking opportunities. To recognize this
much does not deny the related battle over national identity, but
does caution us to take the more extreme pronouncements pro and con
with a grain of salt.[14]
Multiculturalism can be an ideology that is used to bludgeon one's
way into tenure, because affirmative action alone is insufficient. The
essence of affirmative action becomes clear after leaving grad school and
spending fifteen years working for small companies as well as several
large corporations. Affirmative action (the PR phrase is "equal
opportunity" and the accurate phrase is "preferential treatment") is a
facade, affecting only the low-level and public-interface positions in
large corporations. After instructing their human resource departments
along federal guidelines, upper management stays the same, secure in the
knowledge that the low-level hires will statistically offset the white
males behind their closed office doors. Feminists call this the "glass
ceiling."
For young white males without exceptional advantages, it's closer to
a glass floor. Math doesn't play language games: if you quota something in
you also quota something out. Someone must pay for the sins of the elite.
When the diversity-mongers target white males, at best they are almost
half correct -- many (not all) older white males have enjoyed advantages.
But then when they make someone pay, they are all wrong: it's always the
young and innocent who bear the brunt of their policies. It would make as
much sense for U.S. institutions to impose sanctions on young women today,
simply because historically they have enjoyed exemption from the military
draft.
The fact that affirmative action appeared so rapidly over twenty
years ago, without opposition from entrenched interests, should have
provided a clue. It may have been designed to defuse civil unrest, but
this remedy was forced from above, not from below. In a poll commissioned
by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, which plans to organize minorities
in support of traditional family values, only <data type="percent" unit="%">36.6%</data> of Hispanics,
<data type="percent" unit="%">37.6%</data> of blacks, and <data type="percent" unit="%">10%</data> of whites agreed with the statement
that "African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities should received
special preference in hiring to make up for past inequalities."[15] The
agenda of victimology, defined by George Will as "the proliferation of
groups nursing grievances and demanding entitlements,"[16] is not an
agenda shared widely off campus.
It appears that those who are most vocal in support of affirmative
action are those, reasonably enough, who are most dependent on it to
maintain their advantage. The ruling elite are experts at manipulating
their own interests; they know how to divide and conquer, which is why
they continue to rule. As inequality becomes increasingly obvious, those
who are less equal begin to see society in terms of "us" and "them." The
dominant culture shades this definition by using the mass media to
emphasize our differences at every opportunity. Conventional wisdom
becomes articulated within narrow parameters, which is another way of
saying that the questions offered for public debate are rigged.
The objective is to define "us" and "them" in ways that do not
threaten the established order. Today everyone can see that there is more
Balkanization on campus, and more racism in society, than there was when
affirmative action began over twenty years ago. And for twenty years now
one can hardly get through the day without being reminded that race is
something that matters, from TV sitcoms all the way down to common
application forms (it would have been unthinkable to ask about one's race
on an application form in the 1960s). We are not fighting the system
anymore, we're fighting each other.
Multiculturalism fails to challenge the underlying assumption of all
affirmative action rationales, namely that opportunities are scarce and
there's not enough for everyone. There is much evidence to substantiate
this, particularly as the U.S. tries to remain competitive in a new global
economy. Perhaps we should take the global perspective seriously and
hunker down for hard times. It's just poor business sense to build a
factory in the U.S. if you can build it in Mexico (2000 have moved
already). In 1983 the cost of an hour's labor time here was $12.26. The
hourly savings for using foreign labor that year amounted to $10.81 in
Mexico, $10.09 in Singapore, $6.06 in Japan, and $10.97 in Korea.[17]
Perhaps America's only potential advantage is the technical lead we
enjoy in certain areas. If we can play this card well, it might partially
compensate for a declining industrial base. Here, too, affirmative action
has it all backwards. A huge pool of talent -- the ones, incidentally,
who have most of the skills needed in a society that wants to emphasize
technical innovation, merit, and quality -- are underemployed and
demoralized by affirmative action policies.
Recent literacy tests by the Education Department, the most
comprehensive in two decades, show that American adults aged 21 to 25
scored significantly lower than eight years ago, and that about 40000000
American adults of all ages have difficulty reading a simple sentence. Men
outscored women in document and quantitative literacy, and white adults
scored significantly higher than any of the other nine racial and ethnic
groups surveyed.[18] Over half of all minorities admitted to college under
affirmative action programs drop out before graduating; <data type="percent" unit="%">30%</data> before
the end of their freshman year.[19] America does not have the time or
resources to bring everyone up to the same level, so instead it appears to
be "dumbing down" our culture by denying opportunities and challenges to
our most capable young people. This attempt at social leveling is a poor
second choice.
None of these dire trends are of any concern to the ruling elites who
have the power to address them. They are citizens of the world, and no one
-- now not even the Soviet bloc -- stands in their way. They have no need
for borders; free trade is what they want and what they will eventually
get. Many on Wall Street prefer unrestricted immigration, which would
drive down wages and fold up our few remaining unions. For ruling elites,
private security provides insulation and "social decay" is just an
irrelevant phrase. A massive amount of money, some $1000000000000, is traded
every day on currency exchanges around the world. On those rare occasions
when money laundering is discovered, the tax man gets too greedy, or
regulators become pesky, one nation can be played off against another. And
there is disturbing evidence that even the CIA operates at the level of
offshore banking and drug-running, presumably after they determine that
their already-bloated budgets, picked from our pockets, simply don't meet
their needs.
The owners of corporate America have the resources to move offshore
or south of the border, while the rest of us are here for the duration. If
we were all tightening our belts together, there might be some basis for
programs designed to redistribute opportunities. But the rich are getting
richer at the same time that they institute policies such as affirmative
action and NAFTA. It doesn't pass the smell test. The campus left speaks
of equality, and then forgets about justice by ignoring economic and class
distinctions. This failure is so fundamental that multiculturalists
should no longer be considered "leftists." As long as they claim this
description, some of us -- those who still feel that elites ought to be
accountable -- are beginning to feel more comfortable as "populists."
Back on campus, the debate rages over the quality of
politically-correct (PC) courses and the propriety of speech codes
designed to penalize so-called "hate" speech. Multiculturalism is
pervasive throughout the humanities, but English and art classes seem
to attract most of the PC professors. At the University of Maryland,
Josephine Withers taught "Contemporary Issues in Feminist Art" in 1993.
Nine of her students, in an effort to propagate the awareness of rape as
a feminist issue, tacked up hundreds of fliers bearing the heading
"Notice: These Men Are Potential Rapists." The names underneath were
chosen arbitrarily from the student directory. Some of those named were
not amused. This is not "hate speech," because in this case the
perpetrators -- the nine women -- are victims of a "male-identified"
culture, and are simply expressing sensitivity to their own
oppression.[20]
For an example of actionable hate speech, we go to the University of
Pennsylvania. The theft of 14000 copies of the student newspaper by black
students unhappy with a white columnist went unpunished at Penn. But a
white male freshman was hauled before the school's judicial board after
yelling "water buffalo" at a group of black sorority sisters creating a
disturbance under his dormitory window.[21]
Some of the steam has gone out of campus speech codes because of
recent court decisions that have declared them unconstitutional. But
political correctness and multiculturalism is still rampant inside some
classrooms. Scholars from NAS have expressed concern over standards of
scholarship and rising campus tensions.[22] Thoughtful progressives like
Barbara Epstein worry that "a politics that is organized around defending
identities ... forces people's experience into categories that are too
narrow."[23] Todd Gitlin, a former 1960s student leader who now teaches
at Berkeley, echoes similar sentiments:
The academic left has degenerated into a loose aggregation of margins
-- often cannibalistic, romancing the varieties of otherness,
speaking in tongues. In this new interest-group pluralism, the
shopping center of identity politics makes a fetish of the virtues
of the minority, which, in the end, is not only intellectually
stultifying but also politically suicidal.... Authentic liberals have
good reason to worry that the elevation of 'difference' to a first
principle is undermining everyone's capacity to see, or change, the
world as a whole.[24]
Even Mother Jones magazine is having second thoughts. Karen Lehrman,
a thirtyish conservative who visited 20 women's studies classes at
Berkeley, Iowa, Smith, and Dartmouth, delivered a withering critique of
course content in a recent issue.[25] The same Mother Jones issue also
tantalizes with a teaser for future articles: "Is Hillary our friend?"
and "Did someone get to Bill?" At this rate the magazine may eventually
(sometime after the next election, naturally) figure out who the Clintons
really represent. Or at least discover that Donna Shalala, FOH (friend of
Hillary) and chancellor of the University of Wisconsin (before Hillary
appointed her HHS secretary), is a member of both the Council on Foreign
Relations and the super-elitist Trilateral Commission (as is Hillary's
husband). Shalala has called for "a basic transformation of American
higher education in the name of multiculturalism and diversity."[26]
The critics of course content object to some of the sensitivity
training programs and techniques that are in vogue on the multicultural
campus. Many universities now require PC sensitivity exposure of some sort
for incoming freshmen. The NAS worries that such programs are making the
situation on campus worse, not better:
'Sensitivity training' programs designed to cultivate 'correct
thought' about complicated normative, social, and political issues do
not teach tolerance but impose orthodoxy. And when these programs
favor manipulative psychological techniques over honest discussion,
they also undermine the intellectual purposes of higher education and
anger those subjected to them. If entire programs of study or
required courses relentlessly pursue issues of 'race, gender, and
class' in preference to all other approaches to assessing the human
condition, one can expect the increasing division of the campus along
similar lines.[27]
Sensitivity training has its roots in the late 1960s, when it became
a business management fad much the way that "total quality" has been the
fad over the past few years. An undergraduate at the time, at least in
California, could usually find a sensitivity course in the business
school. These revolved around personal rather than political sensitivity.
A similar experience might be found in the psychology department, where
one "humanist" might have held out against the behaviorists. In sociology,
a race relations class might sponsor trips to the ghetto, where poverty
program militants would harangue and titillate white sorority sisters by
using foul language.
Ethical questions should be raised when such techniques are applied
with a political agenda. In the late 1960s in California, a group with
liberal Protestant connections calling itself the "Urban Plunge" organized
sensitivity immersions for white liberals from the suburbs. After several
days or more of intensive ghetto exposure organized by charismatic Plunge
staffers, interspersed with group "attack therapy" sessions, many
participants were duly impressed. I attended two or three "Plunges" in
1967-1968 in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In early 1970, when I believed
in pacifism and was appealing a conviction for draft resistance, the Los
Angeles "Plunge" invited me to speak to the weekend participants. I
arrived at the scheduled time and discovered that new techniques were
being used: everyone had been deprived of sleep and food for two days
in an effort to sensitize them to the Third World. Tempers were
understandably short. As I walked in, fists were flying between a staffer
and participant. Disgusted with the whole scene, I immediately walked
back out.
In 1968, despite all the mistakes and stupidity of that era,
victimology as self-justification was not yet in vogue. Poverty program
militants acted more like kings on their own turf than like victims; they
even seemed to enjoy themselves. Women didn't start complaining until a
year or two later. Hispanics were only recently recognized on a par with
blacks, even in the huge barrios of Los Angeles. Draft resisters risked
prison in an effort to stop the machine, and many who served in Vietnam
felt an obligation to society and risked everything. In this social stew
there were many demands for justice but few self-serving claims to
entitlements. Today, however, Lehrman discovers that victimology is all
the rage:
Terms like sexism, racism, and homophobia have bloated beyond all
recognition, and the more politicized the campus, the more frequently
they're thrown around.... [T]hose with the most oppressed identities
are the most respected.... The irony is not only that these students
(who, at the schools I visited at least, were overwhelmingly white
and upper-middle class) probably have not come into contact with much
oppression, but that they are the first generation of women who have
grown up with so many options open to them.[28]
Another sore point for the critics is the moral relativism of today's
multiculturalists, particularly in the humanities. Lehrman complains that
their "post-structuralism" implies that "all texts are arbitrary, all
knowledge is biased, all standards are illegitimate, all morality is
subjective." When it comes to their own Western-culture feminism, however,
the relativism is conveniently forgotten.[29] Mortimer J. Adler feels that
those who assert subjectivism have dug themselves into a philosophical
hole:
For such multiculturalists ... what is or is not desirable is,
therefore, entirely a matter of taste (about which there should be
no disputing), not a matter of truth that can be disputed in terms of
empirical evidence and reasons. We are left with a question that
should be embarrassing to the multiculturalists, though they are not
likely to feel its pinch. When they proclaim the desirability of the
multicultural, they dispute about matters that should not be disputed.
What, then, can possibly be their grounds of preference? Since in
their terms it cannot appeal to any relevant body of truth, what they
demand in the name of multiculturalism must arise from a wish for
power or self-esteem.[30]
Classes on campus that are considered PC tend to be easy credits,
where students grade each other and spend much of their time discussing
personal experiences and writing journals. Indeed, once relativism is
embraced, there's not much to learn that doesn't come from within, so what
else can be done? But then add social pressure to the classroom, so that
certain patterns of experience are validated by one's peers while others
are not. If one's classmates represented a cross-section of society the
effect might even out, but in this rigged environment they all end up
saying the same thing. Thus college becomes a narrowing experience rather
than a broadening experience. Normally this isn't supposed to happen
until grad school.
But perhaps learning has always occurred more frequently outside of
the classroom. In 1968 I noticed from a puff piece in our campus yearbook
that a university trustee, John McCone, was a former CIA director. In the
library there was exactly one book to be found that was critical of the
CIA (The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, published
in 1964) and it included some material on McCone. Then I began looking at
the other University of Southern California trustees, and discovered some
of the people behind Governor Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.
No one ever assigned me readings on power-structure research; the
established order never encourages anyone to research or expose its inner
workings. I became interested on my own, with help from soon-defunct
magazines like Ramparts. (Years later a former postal worker told me that
at his post office, the feds collected lists of Ramparts subscribers.)
When it comes to naming and describing the ruling elite, the facts are
inconvenient for those who are nursing careers. Students at Columbia
published impressive research on the trustees at their university in 1968,
but not a hint of this made it into the major media. It was reported as
long-haired, pot-smoking draft dodgers who spontaneously decided to take
over the campus for no reason at all. Film at eleven.
Professors know little about ruling elites because they do know
how to recognize a career-stopper when they see one. The fact that
administrators are actively promoting multiculturalism should have set
off alarm bells for class-conscious leftists who haven't yet deluded
themselves about the role of the university. This support by the
administration ought to clearly suggest that multiculturalism is endorsed
by the ruling elite because they find it useful.
Donna Shalala, now secretary of Health and Human Services, once
remarked:
The university is institutionally racist. American society is racist
and sexist. Covert racism is just as bad today as overt racism was
thirty years ago. In the 1960s we were frustrated about all this. But
now, we are in a position to do something about it.[31]
She and her CFR and Trilateralist friends must laugh about this in
private, knowing that their policies function like self-fulfilling
prophecies. They also know that any focus on racism and sexism to the
exclusion of class analysis amounts to a cover-up of their own agenda. The
1980s speak for themselves. Ultimately the ruling elites intend nothing
less than the Balkanization of the American middle class. Comparatively
speaking, this class is one of world's few remaining reservoirs of
unprotected, unexploited wealth.
1. Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural
Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York:
Free Press, 1989), 333 pages.
2. Dan Schechter, Michael Ansara, and David Kolodney, "The CIA as an
Equal Opportunity Employer," Ramparts, June 1969, pp. 25-33.
Reprinted with an introduction in Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Karl
van Meter, and Louis Wolf, eds., Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa
(Secaucus NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1979), pp. 50-69.
3. David Rieff, "Multiculturalism's Silent Partner: It's the newly
globalized consumer economy, stupid." Harper's, August 1993,
pp. 62-72.
4. Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of
Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 371 pages; David Horowitz, "Sinews of
Empire," Ramparts, October 1969, pp. 32-42.
5. Sara Diamond, "The Funding of the NAS." In Patricia Aufderheide, ed.,
Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding (Saint Paul MN:
Graywolf Press, 1992), pp. 89-96. This essay first appeared in
Z Magazine, February 1991.
6. Compare Sigmund Diamond's discussion of the Reece Committee in
Compromised Campus and Pat Robertson's discussion of same in The New
World Order (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991).
7. I'm indebted to Ace Hayes for this sentence.
8. David Ransom, "Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia." In
Steve Weissman, ed., The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid
(Palo Alto CA: Ramparts Press, 1975), pp. 93-116.
9. Kathleen Teltsch, "Adviser Helping the Rich Discover Worthy Causes,"
New York Times, 14 October 1984, p. 50.
10. Who's Who in America, 1984-1985 (Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1984).
11. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Deficit by Default" (14th edition of an
annual series beginning with Fiscal Year 1976), July 31, 1990,
pp. xiv - xvii.
12. Rieff, p. 63.
13. Ibid., p. 66.
14. Pat Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding
(Saint Paul MN: Graywolf Press, 1992), p. 232.
15. Ralph Z. Hallow, "Christian Coalition to Court Minorities: Blacks,
Hispanics Back Key Stands," Washington Times, 10 September 1993,
p. A5.
16. George F. Will, "Literary Politics." In Aufderheide, ed., p. 24.
17. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics (Washington:
1985), p. 435, Table 132.
18. Carol Innerst, "America's Illiterates Increasing: Survey Disputes
U.S. Self-Image," Washington Times, 9 September 1993, p. A1, A10.
19. C. Vann Woodward, "Freedom and the Universities." In Aufderheide,
ed., p. 32.
20. Janet Naylor, "'Potential Rapists' Flier Stirs UMd. Flap," Washington
Times, 7 May 1993, p. A1, A7.
21. Carol Innerst, "The Hackney Hubbub: PC Debate at Penn Trails
Clinton's Pick for NEH," Washington Times, 14 June 1993, p. D1, D2.
22. National Association of Scholars, "The Wrong Way to Reduce Campus
Tensions." In Aufderheide, ed., pp. 7-10.
23. Barbara Epstein, "Political Correctness and Identity Politics." In
Aufderheide, ed., pp. 148-54.
24. Todd Gitlin, "On the Virtues of a Loose Canon." In Aufderheide, ed.,
pp. 185-90.
25. Karen Lehrman, "Off Course," Mother Jones, September-October 1993,
pp. 45-51, 64, 66, 68.
26. Shalala is quoted in Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The
Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Vintage Books, 1992),
p. 13.
27. National Association of Scholars, p. 9.
28. Lehrman, pp. 64, 66, 68.
29. Ibid., p. 66.
30. Mortimer J. Adler, "Multiculturalism, Transculturalism, and the Great
Books." In Aufderheide, ed., pp. 59-64.
31. Shalala is quoted in D'Souza, p. 16.
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