Cultural Change Comes Before Political Change

Assault on the Culture from DHFC on Vimeo.


The Left is winning politically because it has won culturally.

The brilliant Antonio Gramsci, who co-founded the Italian Communist Party in 1921, developed his theory of hegemony: before there could be any radical change or revolution, there had to be first a total change in and control of the culture, so that the new, emerging dominant ideas would lead to the poltical revolution.

The Left has put that into practice, getting control of the media, universities, film industry (particularly Hollywood), education and entertainment sectors and in so doing giving rise to new generations with different ideas.

The real conservatives now must take back the culture or create a parallel one to reach the future generations.

Winning the Culture War —- And the Next Generation, from FrontPage Magazine:

Editor’s note: Below is the video of the panel discussion “Assault on the Culture,” featured at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2013 West Coast Retreat. The event was held February 22nd-24th at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California. A transcript of the discussion follows.

Mark Tapson: As your mutual friend, the late great Andrew Breitbart, was fond of pointing out, politics flows downstream from culture. And the results of the last election confirm that. Conservatives lost last November in the political arena because for decades the radical Left has laid the groundwork for it in the cultural arena.

There’s no way the radical and insubstantial Barack Obama would ever have been taken seriously as a presidential candidate, much less be elected to two terms in the White House, if the Left had not previously and successfully infiltrated the key cultural arenas — education, the news media and entertainment — and spent decades indoctrinating generations. Our task now is to retake the culture or create a parallel one, deprogram that indoctrination, and seduce subsequent generations to a renewed vision of American exceptionalism.

So, gentlemen, what are the symptoms of the assault on the culture? And what is the cure?

We’ll begin with Ron.

Ron Radosh: As the moderator mentioned — I started out, as David did, as a young Marxist. And let me take a page from Marx. Just [as] people have learned that the Left organizes around the Alinsky playbook, here’s another leftist we can learn something from — the brilliant Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who developed a theory of hegemony. He argued that before there could be any radical change or revolution, which is what he desired, there had to be first a total change in and control of the culture, so that the dominant ideas that would emerge would be those that would lead to the potential for revolutionary action.

He was really onto something. He realized correctly that you had to wage what he called, in his Marxist terminology, a war of position to demand and create hegemonic control of the culture, so that the majority of people think alike and then would be ripe for and become vehicles for creating a revolution.

Well, the problem is, in this country — to make it very simple — that even if we win elections — and we are winning it in state and local level, but not in the national level — even if we win elections, the culture is at present controlled by the political Left. Have no doubts about that.

The first thing — look at the polls and the studies that have been done in the past year. I meant to bring it with me, but I can just mention it without reading through what this professor found out, from a very finely tuned study. He studied the majority of liberal arts universities and colleges in the United States. And he found out that almost 80, 90 percent of the faculty define themselves as liberal or radical and on the left. And you can be sure that in the humanities — history, philosophy, political theory — the professors there are almost entirely on the left.

Undoubtedly you’ve all seen the recent studies of how many faculty members in the major Ivy universities gave to the Romney campaign. They looked at Harvard and Princeton and Yale. And I think at Harvard, everybody gave — 98, 99 percent gave to Obama. And there were, I think, two faculty members — two people employed by Harvard — who gave to Romney; one was a janitor.

(Laughter)

So, this is the reality we’re facing.

Now, I was supposed to talk — I’ve been on a one-man campaign. And instead of giving you everything I said — because there’s just no time — all you have to do is blog, put it on Google — Ron Radosh on Oliver Stone. And you will have maybe 10 recent articles come up. And I’ve been on a one-man campaign against what I think is a major turning point in the culture. Starting a few months ago, on the Showtime Network owned by CBS, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick have put together a 10-part documentary series that is now at an end, but you can still watch it on-demand. And that is now going to be shown throughout our high schools and colleges — Oliver Stone’s “Untold History of the United States.”

If you have seen any of it — and I don’t know how many of you want to be masochists and watch it — it is horrendous. It is — and I am not exaggerating — the exact KGB Soviet propaganda history of the United States as it was written by the KGB in the 1950s and ’60s.

Indeed, when I was growing up, the first book that said the United States was the evil power in the world and responsible for the then-ongoing Cold War was a little-known book by a Communist — who was one of the Communist Party members of the United States who infiltrated the OSS during the war and was a top officer in the OSS — a man named Carl Marzani, who was a secret member of the Communist Party and later, we found out, paid by the KGB, and actually a paid agent of theirs — he published a book subsidized by the KGB — this is how he got the money to publish independently — called “We Can Be Friends.”

And that book outlined the theory that the United States — there could’ve been peace with the Soviet Union if the United States had done what Stalin wants. Because Stalin was a good guy. Truman, who then President, was a fascist, which –

(Laughter)

You have to remember, the Communists in America called Harry Truman a fascist. Not even a conservative Republican, but a fascist — creating a fascist America. And he outlined the theory in this book.

And, lo and behold — I watched Oliver Stone’s first five episodes; I couldn’t go beyond that. I know what’s in them; I read the [synopsis] in David Horowitz’s FrontPage. I’m not going to torture myself that much. But I watched the first five. It was exactly the argument, with the same quotations and the same facts, in the same order, as this 1952 book by this Communist KGB agent.

And they are — you have to realize this is a turning point. If something like this had been produced and tried to be shown when John F. Kennedy was President, or in the years after Kennedy — even, I think, when Bill Clinton was President — first they would not have been able to get it aired in a major network. It would’ve been attacked all over as outright distortions of history, as Communist propaganda, as an embarrassment.

What has happened? Just the reverse. They have been touring — up to the present, and still going on every weekend — college after college in the United States, where they speak to thousands of students, show them one episode, and then talk and answer questions. They are getting phenomenal attention. Both of them have been on every major TV and radio talk show you can think of, including, I’m sorry to say, Mike Huckabee, who sang their praises and thanked them for doing such a wonderful job in educating our students in the history of the United States. Either Mike Huckabee is dumb or he just got something handed to him by his staff and didn’t really watch it.

So this is what we’re against. Let me just give you one brief example, because I only have two minutes left. The hero of the Stone TV series is the late Vice President — before that Secretary of Commerce — Vice President and then Secretary of Commerce, who Truman fired for being an appeaser of the Soviets, Henry A. Wallace. The theory of their TV show is that had Henry A. Wallace successfully become President, there would’ve been no Cold War, we would’ve had peace with Russia, we would’ve had total income redistribution, we would have an equitable, fair, social democratic America. And everything would’ve been roses. As it was, this was failed because of the political bosses in the rightwing corporations who fought Wallace and stymied him.

Well, who was Henry Wallace? He was a naïve, classic dupe. And just to give you the one incident that says it all — when he was Secretary of Commerce, still in the President’s cabinet, he had a secret meeting with the head of the KGB, the KGB station chief in Washington, DC. And he went to see Anatoly Gorsky. And he said to him — you know, we’re having an internal battle in the administration. Truman and all these advisors around him want to get tough with the Russians, they want to stand up to Stalin. Can you help me out and give us support and ammunition, so we can defeat these anti-Soviet forces?

And he goes to the KGB station chief to ask for help in settling an internal administration dispute, while he’s in the President’s cabinet. The man, in other words, was either a fool or a traitor, or just a total idiot. Or maybe all three.

And this is the man that students and people in America are being told, week by week, is the unsung hero who should’ve been the President of the United States instead of all the reactionaries who followed him.

We have a fight to wage. It’s a fight to change the culture, to change the way the truth about our past is taught. It’s something that has to be carried out. It is extremely important. And if not, you’re going to see a whole new generation mis-educated, as Stone and Kuznick are doing now, with the most vile, old kind of Communist propaganda. And that will be what they think of the United States. They will come out learning the evil power in the world is the United States. And just as we should’ve appeased the Soviets then, we have to now reach out and honor the wishes of the Islamists who have something to say.

I learned yesterday, the great Iranian-American filmmaker who did — what’s the name of the movie about the woman who was stoned? Stoning of Soraya — he told me yesterday that he spoke to Stone and Kuznick, and they saw his movie. And Stone and Kuznick said to him, to Cyrus — you know, your film is very dangerous, because it would have the effect of turning the American people against radical Islam.

(Laughter)

And he then said to them — what, you’re not against the stoning of women? He said — well, that’s their culture, and who are we to oppose it?

Now, that’s the people we’re dealing with. If we don’t fight this, and develop films like Cyrus’s movie — why can’t we develop a counter-series about the history of the United States to sell to HBO or Showtime that tells that truth about our past, rather than the kind of stuff they’re showing now?

And Howard Zinn was on Fox with his special before he died. Now we have Stone. This could not have happened years ago. These guys would never have got contracts for major television time. And this is a crisis that this has been received well. Look at the rave review it got in the Washington Post. This says something about our culture. It’s a dangerous time, and we have to oppose it.

Thank you.

(Applause)

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