Yet another quality read. Those 60’s students from American campuses Kevin Donnelly refers to, are right now, knocking on the door of the White House in the form of Hillary Clinton and it seems that a majority of Americans, having drunk the Kool Aid, are going to let her in. Unbelievable.
“….Globally, Western liberal democracies like Australia and the values and way of life we take for granted are under attack, both in terms of physical terror and violence and the fear that we are no longer… safe.
Since the cultural revolution of the mid-to-late-’60s — the time of the Paris student riots, Vietnam War moratoriums, Woodstock and flower power — the cultural left has embarked on the long march to weaken Western culture.
Drawing on the works of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and French intellectuals like Bourdieu, Althusser and Foucault, the cultural left attacks Western culture for being capitalist, imperialistic, misogynistic and hierarchal.
During the ’60s students on American campuses chanted “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go!’’ and the great works of the Western literary canon and the belief that Western culture made the world a better and safer place were all deconstructed and critiqued.
Australian universities also suffered, as noted by Pierre Ryckmans in his 1996 Boyer Lectures.
Ryckmans argued that undergraduates were no longer culturally literate and universities were no longer true to the ideal of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, wisdom and truth associated with the vision articulated by Cardinal Newman.
Best illustrated by the mistaken concept of multiculturalism, where the argument is that all cultures are equal and that it is wrong to impose Western, liberal beliefs and values, the tenor of the times is one of cultural relativism.
Worse still, many of the cultural left, instead of defending the very culture that ensures their freedom, argue the West is inherently destructive, inequitable and unjust. Marxists argue capitalism is based on greed; ecowarriors that our lifestyle is destroying the environment; and feminists that society is misogynist and patriarchal.
Science, technology and reason, beginning with the Ancient Greek philosophers and brought to fruition with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, are also unique products of Western culture. Scientific reasoning and technology allow planes to safely take off and land, bridges to stay upright, and for the world’s population to experience record levels of health and wellbeing.
While many on the cultural left yearn for the socialist utopia, from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs, the truth is as proven by Orwell’s Animal Farm that capitalism is far superior…”