User talk:WHEELER/Culture defines politics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Culture defines politics is a concept and principle elucidated, in modern times, by Antonio Gramsci (an encapsulation of his theory:) that "the cultural superstructure determines the political and economic base" and not politics from the top, down. (1) The racial stock, religion, physical environment, economics, food, literature, education, etc., are all what produces culture. From these elements from a particular cultural, a particular politic, society and form of government is naturally expressed.
The reverse is also true. By manipulating cultural content, one can change the politics.
A socialist theorist Antonio Gramsci, in the realization of the importance of culture in politics, laid down the philosophical basis for cultural engineering in order to pave the way for socialist government to succeed in an hostile environment. With this principle in mind, revolutionary forces, after WWII have always sought to manipulate cultural factors in order to overthrow the existing political order. This paradigm produces cultural wars which are an expression of political wars.
Contents |
[edit] Classical Antiquity
The first to recognize this principle were the Greeks. They saw how different they were from other people that they had "self government" while the barbarians around them lived in tyranny. Their independent spirit was a cause of their culture. The first recorded mention of this thought is the King of Croesus recorded by Herodotus:
- "But let the Lydians be pardoned; and lay on them this command, that they may not revolt or be dangerous to you; then, I say, and forbid them to possess weapons of war, and command them to wear tunics under their cloaks and buskins on their feet, and to teach their sons lyre-playing and song and dance and huckstering (the word “retail” in one translation). Then, O King, you will soon see them turned to women instead of men; and thus you need not fear lest they revolt."
This is an appeal from King Croesus, the king of the Lydians, a Greek city and people on the West coast of Turkey, to the Persian King. What the defeated king proposes is to inculturate effeminacy in order to make them docile and servile. Here, changing the culture changes the politics.
In 454 B.C., Solon attempted to institute a balanced government on the people of Athens. His form of government, which he attempted to institute from the top, did not last his lifetime. The German Classicist Karl Otfried Müller remarks on the futility of Solon saying, "But the temperature which he chose was too artificial to be lasting; and the constitution of Solon, in its chief points, only remained for a few years."
Whereas in the case of Sparta, Prof. Müller wrote that "the laws of Sparta were considered the true Doric insititutions; and secondly, that their origin was held to be identical with that of the people."
This phenomena that "culture defines politics" was also observed by Socrates and his student Plato, in the book The Republic. The German Classicist Werner Jaeger argues that Socrates and Plato believed that "A state is never power alone, but the spiritual structure of the man whom it represents". (31) The forms of government are physical manifestations of the spiritual condition of the state, which Socrates and Plato saw through the principle of Macrocosm/microcosm. Socrates observed that the "character of the individual passes into the state". In the last chapters of The Republic, Plato writes:
"Must we not acknowledge, I said, that in each of us there are the same principles and habits which there are in the state; and that from the individual they pass into the state?—how else can they come there? (3)
“Do you know, I said, that governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other? For we cannot suppose that States are made of ‘oak and rock’, and not out of the human natures which are in them, and which in a figure turn the scale and draw other things after them? (4)
"...for as the government is, such will be the man." (5)
In their utopian society in The Republic, Socrates concentrates on the education of the young in order to produce the Ideal state. By formulating the cultural currents of the method and subjects for education and environment, Socrates and Plato sought to first create the individual and that in turn would produce the state in question.
This principle was also recognized by the Biblical writer of Sirach: "As the judge of the people is himself, so are his officers; and what manner of man the ruler of the city is, such are all they that dwell therein."(6)
[edit] Modern times
J. S. Mill wrote: "Human beings in society have no properties, but those which are derived from and may be resolved into the laws and the nature of individual man" (7)
Spencer wrote: "Society is created by its units....The nature of its organization is determined by the nature of its units." (8)
Antonio Gramsci wrote: "In a developed society, the passage to socialism occurs neither by putsch nor by direct confrontation, but by the transformation of ideas, which is to say, a slow reshaping of consciousness." He recognized that the violent revolution of a society toward the goal of socialism as advocated by Karl Marx was not effecient. Marx wanted his revolutions to start first in England and Germany. These two countries were impervious to revolution due to the Christian and Classical character of those countries. He proposed that the revolution of socialism can be accomplished by Articulation (sociology).
Antonio Gramsci proposed changing culture by transforming it through government (and its agencies), schools, universities, social sciences, trade unions, churches, and the print and broadcast media. One changes society's culture and values in order to bring about change in politics. Gramsci articulated the importance of Lenin’s "Long march through the institutions". He proposed to substitute spiritual values with materialistic values. He proposed the softening of morals and character for the advancement of socialist principles and government.
In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, the guardian of Marxist teaching, adhered to the principle of revolution by violent overthrow of respective governments. With his death, the Soviet Union professional counterintelligence experts were to recognize the validity of Gramsci's theory. In Gramsci's blueprint, they discovered "counterintelligence formula par excellence". (6) Professional intelligence experts have detailed the various phases of Soviet counterintelligence techniques over the years following Stalin's death.
"As John Dziak sets it out, a whole new intelligence vocabulary had to be developed to cover the intricate activity inspired by Gramsci's mandate. It was, as Dziak phrases it a stylized "Russian and Soviet operational vocabulary used in the integration of varied state security operational activities." (6) New words were coined, "active measures", (aktivnyye meropriyatiya), "disinformation" (dezinformatsiya) and "military deception" (maskirovka) to define the techniques used to undermine their enemy in the Western countries of capitalism for the furtherance of the marxist revolution.
Other words were coined for their work of espionage and cultural transformation techniques. Their entire field of work was employed using "provocation" (provakatsiya), "penetration" (proniknoveniye), "fabrication" (fabrikatsiya), "diversion" (diversiya), "clandestine work" (konspiratsiya), deadly "wet affairs" (mokrye dela), "direct action" (aktivnyye) and other such words.
These were the weapons of war in the Cold War.
The Fabian Society in Britain and the Frankfurt School in America use the methodology advocated by Antonio Gramsci to further their respective agendas.
The American military employ propaganda and "civilian affairs" units in times of war in order to further the military mission through cultural and sociological operations. The Green Berets were started for this express purpose of "winning the hearts and minds" of a people in order to resist enemy infiltration and make populaces favourable to American interests. The CIA learning hard lessons from its diehard enemy the KGB, now employ those same techniques throughout the world today in behalf of the United States in its global agenda in spreading democracy.
[edit] Revolutionary cultural transformation techniques
- Language manipulation
During revolutionary activity, language becomes mutilated. During the Peloponnesian War during which tens of violent revolutions and civil wars erupted, Thucydides records, "Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them". () Isocrates also laments that "Athens has in many respects been plunged into such a state of topsy-turvy and confusion that some of our people no longer use words in their proper meaning but wrest them from the most honourable associations and apply them to the basest pursuits." () The Dialogues of Plato are filled with Socrates questioning people about their use of words. Defintion and consistency in the use of words were important foundations for Socrates.
In modern times, .....
- Obscurantism
- Deconstructionism/Disparagement
Prof. Gene Veith writes that postmodernist criticism purpose is to rewrite the canon of Western Culture. They deconstruct classic authors to reveal their autocratic bourgeoise ideology and, once disparaged, to bring into the canon writers and genres of literature that has been marginalized.
Terms like DWEM, "Dead White European Males", are introduced to influence people to consider their own cultural heritage as useless.
- Incrementalism
Aristotle cautions that constitutional governments are slowly changed through a technique called "incrementalism". Those that seek political change, work in small steps so that their activities are imperciptible by the people.
[edit] Reactionaries to the revolutionary cultural transformation techniques
George Orwell, wrote his fictitious works to expose the attack upon language and meaning; the totalitarian methodology of overturning a culture. He also remarked that, "at any given moment, there is a sort of all-pervading orthodoxy--a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact."
Ayn Rand in her fictiousous works Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, wrote of this paradigm; how certain words were used and only certain persons were promoted and praised by the media. Sublte techniques of word usage are used to manipulate the feelings of the crowd either for something or against something. She decried the assault upon the "enterprising men", the men of capitol, that created business by the demeaning of their labor, ingenuity and creativity by covetous and envious crowds and elites with a political agenda of equality. She outlined in her stories how values are changed to attack men of worth and how societies crumble and deteriorate by the assaults upon capitalism.
[edit] Miscellania
- Captured in 1919 by World War I American Forces from a Communist Party office were documents on how to secure Germany for Communism. The first thing mentioned was "To destroy the ruggedness of the People".
[edit] Related topics
- The Kyklos
- Xenelasia
- Classical definition of republic#Shift in meaning
[edit] References
- The McAlveny Intelligence Advisor, January, l993 pg2-3
- Herodotus Loeb Classical Library Pg 197 Book 1 155-157
- The Republic, Plato, trans. By B. Jowett M.A., Vintage Books, NY. Sec 435; pg 151
- The Republic, Plato, Sec 544; pg 293
- The Republic, Plato, Sec 557; pg 311
- Septuagint, The Book of Sirach 10.2
- Keys of This Blood, pg 253.
- Logic, J. S. Mill, vi 7. 1 as quoted in Plato's Republic, translated by Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 237; pg 379.
- Autobiography, Spencer, ii. pg. 543 as quoted in Plato's Republic, translated by Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 237; pg 379.
[edit] Bibliography
- Works of Antonio Gramsci
- The Keys of This Blood, Malachi Martin, Touchstone (publ. by Simon & Schuster), NY, 1990. chapter entitled, "Antonio Gramsci: The Haunting of East and West".
- John Dziak bio
- Buckle
- Race and Culture, A World View, Thomas Sowell (It is not explicit but the idea is implied.)
[edit] Related Works
- "Socialism In Our Past And Future" an essay by Igor Shafarevich
- From Under the Rubble, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- The Family Under Siege, What the New Social Engineers Have in Mind For You And Your Children, George Grant, Bethany House Publishers, Minneapolis, MN, 1994.
- The War Against the Family, A Parent Speaks Out on the Political, Economic, and Social Policies that Threaten Us All, William D. Gairdner, Stoddart Publishing Co., Toronto, Canada, 1992.
- Modern Fascism, Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, MO, 1993.
- None Dare Call It Treason...25 Years Later, John A. Stormer, Liberty Bell Press, Florissant, Missouri, 1990.
[edit] External Links
- Mixed Government and Classical Pastoralism, David H. Kelly, Professor Emeritus, Department of Classics and General Humanities, Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043.
- Gramsci, A Method To The Madness
