Antonio Gramsci - A Perspective

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HISTORICAL ILLITERACY & GRAMSCI LOSS OF CULTURAL HERITAGE By: Albert V. Burns We have mentioned Gramsci in a previous article. In this column we will touch on him briefly as a lead-in to the next two which will deal with him in detail. Many comments are appearing in the national media upon the lamentable lack of knowledge of American history by the youth of this country. A recent column in the Washington Times was titled: "Losing America’s Memory, Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century." This column disclosed the incredible ignorance of American history, not only among today’s college seniors, but even more frightening, many of the teachers, who have been graduated in the past twenty or thirty years, are themselves sadly lacking in knowledge of American history.

The study of the top 55 colleges and universities in the U.S. revealed that not a single one requires a course in American history as a prerequisite for graduation. NOT ONE! The column reported that college seniors could not identify the American General (George Washington) at the battle of Yorktown. Most could not identify words from the Gettysburg Address nor even basic principles of the U.S. Constitution! And THESE are college seniors. Perhaps worse than this lack of ignorance is the fact that when the Founding Fathers of this country are mentioned at all in the "educational establishment" the information supplied is done with derision or outright misinformation. The recent television program about the supposed liaison between Thomas Jefferson and the slave Sally Hemings is a prime example. Was it possible that such a relationship might have existed? Yes! Is it fact? No one knows! There is literally NO VALID scientific evidence to PROVE that THOMAS Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’ children. The DNA study in 1998 simply showed that ONE of at least EIGHT Jefferson males (the President, his brother Randolph, five of Randolph’s sons and a cousin) was probably the father. The real problem here is that the miniseries presented the possibility as a FACT! In the process, it will have destroyed the reputation of Jefferson in the minds of many Americans who accept the story as incontrovertible fact. There is a dangerous trend in the entertainment industry to revise history in the interest of a "better story." A few cases which come to mind are Disney’s "Pocahantas", Oliver North’s "JFK", and Forman’s "Amadeus." All of these seriously distorted or falsified the true facts.

The story of the United States is, possibly, the greatest secular story ever told. The United States was a direct reversal of the millennia long world history of tyranny. No other nation like the United States was ever conceived, let alone brought into existence. Throughout its history, enemies of freedom have tried to find a way to destroy us. It was finally realized that the surest way to subvert this nation would be to separate us from our past. The strength of this nation has depended upon our morality, our faith and our patriotism. To a great extent those factors depend upon an in-depth knowledge of our own history. Eliminate our past and we will have no future. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Socialist earlier in this century, was perhaps the best exponent of the concept that to institute a new culture in a society it was first necessary to destroy the old culture. Churches are changed by having age-old doctrinal and moral teachings modernized and reduced to irrelevancy. Genuine education is gradually replaced with extreme permissiveness, "gutted" curricula and tremendously lowered standards of excellency. The mass media is used for manipulation of public attitudes and for harassing and discrediting traditional standards and institutions. As theologian Harold Brown stated a few years ago, "Culture becomes a vehicle for destroying ideals and ... presenting the young not with heroic examples but with deliberately and aggressively degenerate ones." Marriage and the family are continuously attacked and denigrated. The family is increasingly portrayed as a dangerous place where violence is the NORM. After a few decades of such conditioning, society is transformed and demoralized. The obliteration of all memory of the old culture makes possible the imposition of a wholly new one. As explained by Fr. James Thornton, a Catholic priest, "Just as few Eastern European people retain any memory of what life was like before Communism, so, too, the older America of unregulated lives, honest government, clean cities, crime-free streets, morally edifying entertainment and a family oriented way of life is no longer vivid in the minds of many Americans." We have come a very long way down the road toward the loss of the cultural heritage left to us by our ancestors. Unless Americans at this time realize what has been and is happening, it is just a matter of time until we will have passed the "point of no return!" "Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact." Albert V. Burns writes from Utah and is a regular columnist for the Spanish Fork Press. He has an extensive knowledge of the conspiracy which has been working so hard to destroy this nation and incorporate it into a one world government. He has developed an extensive personal research library and the knowledge to find what he needs, to write his columns. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone. Albert V. Burns can be reached at: [email protected]

Published in the September 3, 2002 issue of Ether Zone. Copyright © 1997 - 2002 Ether Zone.

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ANTONIO GRAMSCI, 1891-1937 THE NEW ORDER By: Albert V. Burns Last week we mentioned Antonio Gramsci very briefly. Because of the tremendous impact which his doctrines have had on the 20th century, it is imperative that society understand exactly how and why that impact has taken place. Gramsci was born in 1891 on the island of Sardinia. Although he came from a humble family, he went on to study philosophy and history at the University of Turin. While there, he was converted to Marxism and helped found the Communist party of Italy. He also founded his own newspaper called The New Order. (Does that sound familiar?)

About this time, Mussolini came to power in Italy and it became dangerous to be an identified Marxist. Gramsci decided to go to Russia to take part in the developing Communist USSR. However, he soon found that this worker’s paradise was not at all what he had expected. He found that there is often a large gap between theory and practice. He observed that there was little or no enthusiasm for the new regime and its "dictatorship of the proletariat." In fact, it was obvious that the only way in which this "ideal society" was maintained was through the use of mass murder, sheer terror and the fear of that dreaded midnight knock on the door. It was also necessary to maintain a virtual flood of propaganda and lies about the glorious new state. It was very disillusioning to Gramsci. When Lenin died and Stalin took over, Stalin started a systematic elimination of his enemies, whether those enemies were real or simply perceived so in Stalin’s imagination. Either way, the result was immediate transport to torture chambers, slave labor camps or the firing squad. Gramsci realized that Russia was not a healthy place for him and he returned to Italy where he was very shortly apprehended and sentenced to a long prison term. He spent nine years in prison before he died of tuberculosis in 1937. During that time he spent his time examining his beliefs and the apparent contradiction between theory and practice he had seen in Russia. He wrote nine volumes of his thoughts on history, Marxist theory and more importantly, Marxist strategy. These books became known as the Prison Notebooks and have been translated into many languages and disseminated all over the world.

The importance of those notebooks CANNOT be overemphasized since they formed the basis of a totally new Marxist strategy which made Lenin’s idea of a spontaneous revolution totally obsolete. This new strategy envisioned a world which would VOLUNTARILY adopt Marxian socialism and would be based upon a realistic view of human psychology and history. Those notebooks contained Gramsci’s evaluation of Marxism and of the very NATURE of mankind and are among the most important thoughts put on paper in this century. Anyone who accepts the idea that "Communism is dead" completely fails to understand the basic nature of our enemies. Communism is not an IDEOLOGY in which one believes. It is a criminal conspiracy in which you enlist. All over the world, Marxist ‘ideology’ has been modified to suit local situations. Both Lenin and Stalin modified Karl Marx’s ideas to suit their own ends. In NO case has Communism ever come to power in a country by any popular revolution. In fact, it should be noted that the ONLY popular revolutions in the 20th century were ANTI-Marxist as in Berlin in 1954 and Hungary in 1956. Wherever Communism came to power, it was only maintained by use of force and incredible levels of killing and terror. This inevitably caused opposition at home and abroad making further extension of Communism very difficult because of growing worldwide opposition. This is, of course, easy for us to see today after some 80 years of history. However, Gramsci realized this at the very birth of Communist hegemony. He recognized that ordinary people had loyalties to God and family which far outweighed any allegiance to class. He realized that civilization and Christianity were so totally bound together that a frontal attack on that society was, at best, useless and, in most cases, counter-productive. He stated that it would be much better to attack existing society much more subtly, gradually transforming the collective consciousness over a period of decades, even generations, from its predominantly Christian view into one which would be more receptive to socialism. This concept was expressed very succinctly, in one line, in Aldous Huxley’s book: Brave New World. In that line, Huxley clearly embodied the concept that Gramsci tried to convey to his fellow Marxists: "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." Consider how well that sentence describes the United States of today with its hordes of bureaucrats dictating virtually all aspects of our daily lives. Sixty years ago, outside of the few who were determined to destroy freedom in this country, no-one in this country could have imagined a day when prayer or religious expression was prohibited on public property, when abortion was considered a "constitutional right," when profanity, pornography, extra marital sex, and open homosexual activity were rampant, when private property is routinely seized on the flimsiest of pretexts, when children are taken from their parents by the state with virtually no recourse, etc.

In the next column, we will examine the methods used to achieve this startling change in the minds and hearts of the American people over the past fifty or sixty years. "Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact." Albert V. Burns writes from Utah and is a regular columnist for the Spanish Fork Press. He has an extensive knowledge of the conspiracy which has been working so hard to destroy this nation and incorporate it into a one world government. He has developed an extensive personal research library and the knowledge to find what he needs, to write his columns. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone. Albert V. Burns can be reached at: [email protected] Published in the September 6, 2002 issue of Ether Zone. Copyright © 1997 - 2002 Ether Zone.

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GRAMSCIAN METHODS BROADLY DEFINED! By: Albert V. Burns Just how do you go about attempting to change a culture which has apparently been inextricably interwoven with Christianity for some 2000 years? Gramsci recognized that it would be necessary to do so before the Marxist-socialists could have any hope of instituting their “New World Order.” (No, President George Bush and Brent Scowcroft did NOT invent that term!)

Before Antonio Gramsci, the traditional Marxist-Leninist attitude had been hostile to all non-Communist organizations, even though those organizations might, themselves, be considered leftist such as trade unions, socialist groups, etc. Gramsci’s methods have brought about a very broad coalition of such diverse groups as “civil rights ” organizations, radical feminists, internationalists, homosexuals, radical environmentalists, anti-police agitators, a bewildering assortment of ultra liberal church groups of many different faiths, etc. Working together these disparate elements have formed a united front working to transform our once solidly JudeoChristian culture into a mere shadow of its former self.

Gramsci taught that they must achieve a “cultural hegemony” even before achieving governmental power. He believed that Marxists must win the hearts and minds of people without their knowledge. He went further and told the Communists that they must abandon their idea of class hatred and work to win over elements in the very bourgeois classes that they wished to subvert. He described this as “the absorption of the elites of the enemy classes.” He recognized that by recruiting the best and brightest of their enemies, they would not only gain new strength for their side, but would at the same time deprive the bourgeois societies of their natural leaders. To achieve these ends, Gramsci admonished the Communists that, in order to gain mastery over the thinking of great masses of people it would be necessary for them OR THEIR SYMPATHIZERS to gain control over the very foundational organs of culture. These organs include churches, education institutions, newspapers, magazines, literature, the visual arts, music, etc. He could not, in the 20's, have foreseen that a tremendous weapon such as television and all the electronic media would come along to aid in the control of people’s minds. He pointed out that you would not have to control ALL the information available to a people if you could gain control over the minds which would be interpreting and disseminating that knowledge. Once that had been achieved, he said, people would no longer be able to fully comprehend the arguments of the opponents to socialism and Marxism. The world we see today gives silent testimony to the correctness of his precepts. The steps necessary to achieve his “cultural hegemony” were diverse but all aimed at undermining our traditional culture. Traditional church teachings were gradually transformed at the seminary level into “social justice” and ideas of “equality” until worship became entertainment and age-old doctrines were modernized to the point of irrelevancy. Our entire educational establishment was attacked, starting at the teacher college level, to “dumb down” the educational process with curricula which were slanted toward socialism and internationalism and with “standards” dramatically reduced or eliminated altogether. The mass media were to be turned into instruments of mind control of the masses and for discrediting all traditional institutions and their leaders. All morality, decency and the age-old virtues were disparaged endlessly. Theologian Harold Brown wrote that culture becomes a means of “destroying ideals and ... presenting the young not with heroic examples but with deliberately and aggressively degenerate ones.” Our greatest leaders: presidents, soldiers, explorers, thinkers, etc. are depicted as having been racist or sexist or Fascist. Our modern youth are presented with an assortment of socialist charlatans, leftist movie celebrities, rock stars, degenerate and incompetent “artists,” and the like as the people they should look up to and emulate. Marriage and the family are continually under attack. The traditional family is held up to ridicule as being a plot by men to dominate women and children. More and more our press tells us that the state must “protect” children from their uncaring or violent parents.

Thus the family, the most basic building block of a cohesive society is being destroyed so that the state may take its place. Government taxation policies enpoverish the traditional family while they subsidize the elevation of extra-marital heterosexual and even homosexual unions. Even the word “family” is gradually being replaced in our mass media with the indeterminate word “household.” Finally, our entire system of law in this country has been gradually changed from being based on English common law and on biblical Christian principles to being based on the personal criteria of unelected federal judges. The principle of “stare decisis,” meaning that prior precedents are used in deciding new cases, has been largely abandoned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Revolutionary change in the interpretation of the Constitution has become so commonplace that our people no longer pay much attention. Where or when the Court cannot re-interpret or distort the clear meaning of the Constitution, it is simply ignored. Does all of this mean that all hope is lost and that we should all simply give up and accede to the loss of our God-given freedoms? Absolutely NOT! In our next column, we will address the question of just how we can all work to re-establish the United States, as envisioned by our Founding Fathers, before it is too late. Related Articles: Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937 Historical Illiteracy & Gramsci "Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact." Albert V. Burns writes from Utah and is a regular columnist for the Spanish Fork Press. He has an extensive knowledge of the conspiracy which has been working so hard to destroy this nation and incorporate it into a one world government. He has developed an extensive personal research library and the knowledge to find what he needs, to write his columns. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone. Albert V. Burns can be reached at: [email protected] Published in the September 10, 2002 issue of Ether Zone. Copyright © 1997 - 2002 Ether Zone.