The West Has Been Destroyed by Inconsistencies in Its Enlightenment Heritage, Not by Jews.
Paul Craig Roberts
Who destroyed American education? In a recent article, “The Zionist Destruction of American Higher Education,” Ron Unz blames it on the Jews. https://www.unz.com/runz/the-zionist-destruction-of-american-higher-education/ [1]
Clearly they had a hand in it, but was it intentional or a product of intellectual ideas German Jewish Cultural Marxists brought to the US in the 1930s? And how powerful an influence was Cultural Marxism compared to the ideas unfolding from the Enlightenment? I will answer these questions.
But first, Unz’s article is characteristically long, which makes it a struggle for a modern day audience. His article is also mis-titled. His article is about the Trump regime’s completion of the destruction of the First Amendment with the full cooperation of the Congress and judiciary. It is an important article to read, especially for MAGA-Americans who sincerely believe that Trump can restore America while destroying the Constitution.
Unz begins his article with a report of the seizure and abduction in Boston of a doctoral student from Turkey at Tufts University here on a Fulbright Scholarship by six masked agents of Homeland Security. Why and why Homeland Security? Was she engaging in activities that are a threat to the United States? No, a year ago she had coauthored an article for the Tufts student newspaper criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. She was regarded as a danger to Israel, not to the United States. This is a devastating development. The US “justice system” serves Israel at the expense of the US Constitution’s protection of free speech.
If her arrest and deportation had occurred in Israel, we would account for it as just another of never-ending Israeli police state action and consider her lucky not to have been gang-raped by Israeli defense forces and murdered.
But it occurred in America. Unz’s explanation, which I regard as correct as far as it goes, is that the Zionist Israel Lobby’s ability to provide campaign funds to a politician or to his opponent, and The Lobby’s ability to destroy politically those who do not serve Israel, is complete, total. As I have emphasized throughout my life, when money is permitted to be in politics, money determines, not the people’s vote, not truth, not justice. Money makes it impossible for the American government to stand up to Israel. There is only one member of the entire Congress, both House and Senate, who is not a de facto agent of Israel. He gets away with it, because one doesn’t matter. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he was murdered as a demonstration of Israel’s immunity from accountability.
When I was young, Americans understood Jews as pushy people who if you allowed them into your business, country club, or university would soon take over.
In those days prestigious universities, such as Harvard, shied away from Jewish students and faculty. Harvard had a gentile Anglo-Saxon network that placed its graduates easily on roads to success, which was the value of a Harvard degree, and Harvard did not want this network taken over by Jews, which it has been.
Jewish faculty was regarded as unsupportive of Anglo-Saxon America and an honorable conduct of life. One of the academic consequences was that Paul Samuelson, a Jew who was the premier American economist of the postwar 20th century, was unwelcome by the Harvard faculty and took his appointment at MIT.
I was invited to meet Samuelson in his office the morning that I addressed the combined graduate economic faculties, both faculty and graduate students of Harvard and MIT in my invited “State of Economic Science” lecture. Samuelson, whose economics textbook was the foundation of economic education, welcomed me, and expressed interest in hearing about the essence of the new supply-side economics that was combatting stagflation. It was far from a hostile encounter. Later Samuelson wrote in his text book that the supply-side effect was real. The only question was its power.
After I delivered my address and a few feeble replies from the assembled faculties, the Harvard and MIT doctoral students gave me a standing ovation. Impressed, Henry Rosovsky, the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, my former professor at the University of California, Berkeley, tried to get me appointed professor of economics at Harvard. The students were in agreement, but the faculty, frozen in the Keynesian box, wouldn’t hear of it. Nevertheless, Harvard University Press published my peer-reviewed book, The Supply-Side Revolution and saw it through a Chinese language publication.
I mention these incidents only to show that thought gets trapped in boxes and cannot get out. Consequently, bad things happen.
As for the Jewish attack on American education, let me put it in context. For many years Jews were not numerous members of university faculties or student bodies. My impression, which might be wrong, is that the first major introduction of Jewish intellectual force into an Ivy League university was the arrival of the German Frankfurt School at Columbia University in the 1930s as refugees from National Socialist Germany. The Frankfurt School consisted of Jewish Marxists whose agenda was a communist revolution. World War I caused Marxists to write off Marx’s proletariat. The war, contrary to Marxist expectations, failed to cause the proletariats to throw off their nationalist chains and unite against their oppressors. Instead, the proletariats united with their nationalist masters and fought one another.
The Frankfurt school addressed the problem of how the revolution was to be accomplished now that the workers had not thrown off their chains as Karl Marx had predicted they would do. The Frankfurt School’s solution was a “march through the institutions.” Just as Lenin concluded that the Bolsheviks had to take the place of the proletariat if there was to be revolution, the Frankfurt School reasoned that Marxist intellectuals had to subvert the institutions of bourgeois society, and it would then collapse. This gave birth to Cultural Marxism.
It is important to understand that the Frankfurt School did not come here as activists to destroy American education. They came to save their lives and to continue the intellectual tradition of Marxist revolution. They taught that the proletariat had proven itself unreliable and therefore revolution had to be obtained by undermining societal and cultural institutions, the result being the collapse of the belief system and bourgeois society.
I suspect the cultural Marxists were accepted by Columbia University because they were on the cutting edge of left-wing, not Jewish, thinking. It was a left-wing movement whose members happened to be largely Jewish. Over time, the ideas spread and gained academic influence, perhaps not so much from their own power as from another intellectual development that was undermining the belief system in Western Civilization and had been doing so prior to Cultural Marxism.
This far more powerful intellectual force was the unfolding of the logic in the foundation of Western intellectual thought. An inconsistency was present. The Enlightenment secularized morality while at the same time unleashing moral demands on society. But science called into question the validity or reality of moral motives. Scientists couldn’t weigh morality, measure it, calculate its strength, or judge its presence. Morality seemed to vary according to class, race, gender, religion, national interest, and stage of societal and political development, and according to who had the upper hand–“might makes right.” A nymphomaniac does not have the same sexual morality as a puritan.
The consequence of the skepticism of morality is that morality cannot speak in its own name. Before the Enlightenment, societies did hot have the notion of transforming society and achieving social perfection. So the problem did not arise. But with moral demands being placed on society, how could post-Enlightenment morality be expressed?
The answer is by denunciation of existing society and institutions. Morality was expressed by denouncing existing society for its immorality. The liberal reforms all relied on denunciation–slavery, racism, colonialism, exploitation, discrimination, class-based privileges, child labor, restricted franchise, the list goes on. The way society moved forward was not through affirmation of its successes but denunciation of its faults. Over time a denunciatory mind-set emerged. It affected the ways literature, history, politics, anthropology, law, and sociology were taught, and in our days brands math and science as “tools of white supremacy.”
The Jews were not responsible for this. Cultural Marxism fit in with it, but the process would have rolled along strongly without Cultural Marxism.
My Oxford University professor, Michael Polanyi, explained the development of what I will call for now a denunciatory ethic. He explained it in 1960 to an important intellectual conference in Berlin. His explanation is titled “Beyond Nihilism,” and it is published in History and Hope (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Despite the high level of intelligence and education present, there was not enough of either present to understand what Polanyi was explaining. Years ago I worked out a way to explain the contradictions in our intellectual foundations that was less demanding, but, alas, had no success in attracting concern to the issue. Today educational standards are far below those of the persons present at the Berlin conference 65 years ago and of my generation.
Ideas do have consequences, many of which are unintended and unrecognized. As ideas unfold, they affect how we think and act. It is ideas and their consequences that determine history, not conspiracies. Indeed, conspiracies themselves are the consequences of ideas.
As far as I can tell, the serious study of intellectual history no longer exists. Perhaps a course still exists in a university somewhere. If so it is probably conducted in a DEI format exposing serious thought as more tools of white racism.
What is the conclusion of my essay? The conclusion is that the danger we face–all of Western civilization including Russia–is unknown and unrecognized by us and, thereby, has us by the throat as it destroys our belief system.