Gramsci: A Method to the Madness

by William Norman Grigg

Behind the many maddening attacks on America's popular culture is Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci's strategy for achieving the total state.

In any totalitarian state, the oppressed always outnumber the oppressors. While such regimes are built upon the threat and practice of terror, it is impossible to create institutions of state terror that can control all of the subjects, all of the time.

Thus would-be-tyrants who seek to dominate entire populations must devise some means of inducing their victims to enslave themselves.

Aldous Huxley, author of the classic anti-totalitarian novel Brave New World, explained that the most efficient totalitarian system would be one in which the rulers would "control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."

In Huxley's model of the total state, the population was controlled through the use of sex, drugs, vapid entertainment, government-generated slogans, and manufactured social fads.

Russian anti-Communist Alexander Zinovyev, a world-renowned author, has described how the West, particularly the United States, is descending into a totalitarian culture of the sort predicted by Huxley. "It is enough to switch on the TV set, to go to the movies, to open a best-seller, ...to listen to the ubiquitous music," complained Zinovyen in the July 24, 1999 issue of France's Le Figaro, "and you'll find them propagating the cult of sex, violence and money. Noble slogans about tolerance and respect for others are concealing those three pillars of totalitarian democracy."

Zinovyev, who was persecuted as a dissident under the Brezhnev regime, has a clear understanding of the way in which those intent on total power work to undermine the cultural institutions of a free society. Often, power cannot be seized through the sudden imposition of a total dictatorship; instead, it must be obtained through the process of patient gradualism -- the persistent subversion of vital institutions and the incremental consolidation of power.

These efforts draw upon a blueprint composed by Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, who understood that the creation of the total state requires the seizure of the "mediating institutions" that insulate the individual from the power of the government -- the family, organized religion, and so forth -- and a systematic redefinition of the culture in order to sustain the new political order. The battle cry of Gramsci's disciples is: "Capture the culture!"

In his study The Two Revolutions: Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism, Marxist theoretician Carl Boggs emphasizes that "the transition to socialism must occur on two distinct but interwoven terrains -- the state and the economy.

" Those seeking the triumph of socialist revolution will not prevail by simply overthrowing "the existing state machinery, or [destroying] the old institutions, or even [bringing] into power leaders calling themselves 'communists.' Beneath the level of insurrection and statecraft there must be a gradual conquest of social power, initiated by popular subversive forces emerging from within the very heart of capitalist society."

Rudi Dutschke described this process as "the long march through the institutions" -- the Marxist conquest of universities, schools, the news media, entertainment, churches and other religious bodies, tax-exempt foundations, and other key institutions.

The success of the Gramscian cultural assault upon America was attested to by Michael Walzer in the Winter 1996 issue of the Marxist journal Dissent. As evidence that the revolutionary left is winning the "Gramscian 'war of position,' " Walzer approvingly cited, among other developments: "The visible impact of feminism."
"The effects of affirmative action."
"The emergence of gay rights politics, and ... the attention paid to it in the media."
"The acceptance of cultural pluralism."
"The transformation of family life," including "rising divorce rates, changing sexual mores, new household arrangements --
and, again, the portrayal of all this in the media."
"The progress of secularization; the fading of religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public sphere -- classrooms, textbooks, legal codes, holidays, and so on."
"The virtual abolition of capital punishment."
"The legalization of abortion."
"The first successes in the effort to regulate and limit the private ownership of guns."

All of these developments, Walzer admitted, were imposed upon our society by "liberal elites," rather than being driven "by the pressure of a mass movement or a majoritarian party."

These changes, Walzer observed, "reflect the leftism or liberalism of lawyers, judges, federal bureaucrats, professors, school teachers, social workers, journalists, television and screen writers -- not the population at large."

"Left Wing of the Ruling Class"
The "elites" referred to Walzer also include major tax-exempt foundations that have generously underwritten subversive "change agents" in the United States for decades.

Such foundations are the conduits that link "silk-hat" revolutionaries with street-level radicals in a common assault upon middle-class America. Great care has been taken by the architects of the cultural war to make it appear that the onslaught is a spontaneous revolution arising from the masses.

However, the most radical changes in American society are being imposed from the top down, are lavishly underwritten by the Establishment. It is through this two-pronged "scissors strategy" of pressure from above and pressure from below that the assault on America's cultural institutions has done the most damage.

In his 1968 book The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, New Left radical James Kunen describes how emissaries from Rockefeller interests "offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago."

One of Kunen's radical comrades from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a domestic terrorist network allied with Moscow and Havana, was surprised to learn that "men from Business International Round Tables" had offered to "buy up a few radicals." "These men are the world's leading industrialists," commented Kunen with reference to the SDS's would-be corporate angels. "They are the left wing of the ruling class."

One objective of the Establishment, commented Kunen, was to help the New Left "make a lot of radical commotion so they [the corporate elitists] can look more in the center as they move to the left." [This "pressure from below" tactic should be remembered by the reader the next time he sees the manipulated liberal morons who demonstrate against "corporate globalism," ala Seattle, take to the streets. Their demonstrations are playing right into the hands of the corporate elitists who represent the "pressure from above" segment of the "two-pronged 'scissors strategy' " mentioned above.]

The experiences Kunen describes were by no means unique. Consider onetime student radical Gerry Kirk, whose vita included membership in the SDS, the Black Panthers, the Communist Party, and other subversive organizations. In 1970, one year after his break with the Communist Party, Kirk presented testimony to the House and Senate Internal Security panels regarding the conspiracy's "scissors strategy" at work: "Young people have no conception of the conspiracy's strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below. ... They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they're fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don't realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes."

Building the Culture of Death
The strategy Kirk describes can be seen at work in every significant assault upon America's traditional culture. It is particularly visible in the campaign to overturn legal protection for the unborn and to enshrine the "death ethic" as our society's standard.

The accepted history of the abortion revolution, author Mary Meehan wrote in the Fall 1998 issue of Human Life Review, dictates that all "brave civil libertarians and women's rights advocates, encouraged by liberating currents in the 1960s, dared to raise the abortion issue in public and to prompt serious debate about it. ...The U.S. Supreme Court gave them a huge victory with its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision."

However, Meehan continues, "A wealth of inside information, now available in private and government archives," documents that "abortion supporters received enormous aid from the American establishment or 'power elite.'

"
No name is more prominently associated with the "power elite" than Rockefeller, and from its beginning the American abortion movement profited from Rockefeller largesse. "John D. Rockefeller 3rd and his family, and their foundations provided much of the money" to advance the designs of the eugenicists movement, Meehan observes.

Rockefeller's grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, and his son, John D. Jr., "were members of the American Eugenics Society, and JDR 3rd helped keep the eugenics group afloat financially during the depression." Among the other financial luminaries in the power elite that supported the eugenicist movement were Mary Harriman, widow of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, and George Eastman of Eastman Kodak.

Socialist and anti-Christian agitator Margaret Sanger, founder of the Birth Control League (later re-named Planned Parenthood), shared membership with the Rockefellers in the American Eugenics Society (AES) and benefited greatly from their financial support.

Not only was Sanger a liaison between the power elite and street-level agitators, she was also a conduit between the AES and its counterparts in National Socialist Germany. The April 1933 issue of Sanger's Birth Control Review, which was devoted to the subject of eugenic sterilization, featured an article by Dr. Ernst Rudin, a high official of the Nazi regime. Hitler, Meehan observes, openly admired the AES. When this affinity became a political liability for the AES in the late 1930s, it was John D. Rockefeller 3rds financial support that kept the organization alive. It was at this same time, Meehan notes, that the AES and its allies began to advocate "substantial loosening of anti-abortion laws."

In 1939, the Rockefeller Foundation (which was still financing the pro-Nazi AES) underwrote a secret project called "Studies on American Interests in the War and the Peace." Conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on behalf of the U.S. State Department, this Rockefeller-funded initiative created the framework for what would become the United Nations.

Among the studies prepared for the project was a paper by eugenicist Frank Notestein that called for "propaganda in favor of controlled fertility as an integral part of a public health program." Julian Huxley, the first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), built upon that recommendation in his 1947 book UNESCO: Its Purposes and Its Philosophy.

Although "any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible," wrote Huxley, "it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable."

In 1952, to pave the way for the advent of the "unthinkable," John D. Rockefeller 3rd and AES's Frederick Osborn founded the Population Council. As Mary Meehan points out the work of the Population Council was to convince "government leaders in poor nations that they had a serious population problem" and then show them "how to solve it through population control."

Of course, these "unthinkable" designs were not intended solely for export to other countries. "By the early 1960s," wrote Michael S. Teitelbaum of the CFR's Study Group on Population and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Winter 1992-93 issue of Foreign Affairs, "elite public opinion on population matters -- Republican and Democratic, conservative and liberal alike -- had shifted closer to that advanced by Rockefeller a decade earlier. Key figures in the Kennedy administration initiated the first U.S. foreign policy initiatives on population, in spite of opposition from the Catholic Church.

..." In 1963, according to journalist Benjamin Bradlee, a confidant of JFK, Kennedy told him privately that "he was all for people solving their problems by abortion (and specifically told me I could not use that for publication in Newsweek)."

In the same year, Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher explained to his co-conspirators that laws protecting the unborn could only be changed "inch by inch and foot by foot, but not a mile at a time. ... I am in favor of abortion on demand, but feel from the practical point of view that such a social revolution should evolve by stages."

Legal Demolition
To undertake the task of demolishing laws protecting the unborn, the Rockefeller-led power elite created the National Association for the Reform of Abortion Laws (NARAL, now known as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League).

NARAL co-founder Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who has since become a stalwart pro-life advocate, described the group as "the radicals, the Bolsheviks. We would settle for nothing less than striking down all existing abortion statutes and substituting abortion on demand."

One of NARAL's most successful tactics was "to blame the church for the death of every woman from a botched abortion," recalls Nathanson. "There were perhaps three hundred or so deaths from criminal abortions annually in the United States in the sixties, But NARAL in its press releases claimed to have data that supported a figure of five thousand."

NARAL co-founder Lawrence Lader, a doctrinaire Marxist, was an eager collaborator with the Rockefellers in the assault on the right to life. Lader's background, Dr. Nathanson recalls, "made it ... easy for him to understand the Rockefellers and the other principalities and powers with whom he had to deal. ..." Those anti-life "principalities and powers" began to roll up victories for the death ethic, as new permissive abortion laws were enacted in California, New York, Nevada, and other states.

With the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, all remaining protection for the unborn -- and, as we have recently been reminded, those in the process of being born -- was annihilated. But the grisly, Stalinesque abortion toll, horrifying as it is, is just one aspect of the social revolution brought about by the power elite's eugenicist movement.

In a 1967 Science magazine essay, population control advocate Kinglsey Davis noted that "the conditions that cause births to be wanted or unwanted are beyond the control of family planning ... the social structure and economy must be changed before a deliberate reduction in the birthrate can be achieved."

According to Davis, "changes basic enough to affect motivation for having children would be changes in the structure of the family, in the position of women and in the sexual mores."

He also suggested that governments could manipulate the tax structure to discourage marriage (creating the so-called "marriage penalty"), and that "women could be required to work outside the home, or compelled by circumstances to do so."

In a 1969 memo (which was published in the October 1970 issue of Family Planning Perspectives), Planned Parenthood Vice President Frederick Jaffe elaborated upon Davis's blueprint for a eugenicist social revolution. The memo grouped possible "fertility control" options into four categories: "Social Constraints," "Economic Deterrents/Incentives," "Social Controls," and "Housing Policies."

The category of "Social Constraints" included the "Compulsory education of children," the encouragement of "increased homosexuality," the restructuring of the family by altering the "image of the ideal family" and encouraging women to work outside the home, and -- if all else failed -- the placement of "fertility control agents in [the] water supply." While mass sterilization has not -- yet -- been carried out, all of the other elements of this blueprint have been.

Apostle of Perversion
The role of changing America's "sexual mores" was assigned to sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who in 1948 published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male -- the opening salvo in the "sexual revolution." Underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation and eagerly embraced by strategically placed subversives who had honeycombed American institutions of law and social sciences, the Kinsey report targeted the moral foundations of our culture and opened a Pandora's Box of social evils, including promiscuity, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and the sexual exploitation of children.

In fact, as Dr. Judith Reisman has carefully documented in her two invaluable exposes, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, and Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences, the methods employed by Kinsey and his despicable associates included "scientifically" supervised episodes of child molestation, as well as the use of convicted sex offenders and other deviants as the "representative" sample of American society.

On the basis of this fraudulent "research," Kinsey insisted that, at any given time, 95 percent of adult American males were actively engaged in some form of deviant sexual behavior.

The widely accepted myth that 10 percent of the population is homosexual is the most obvious illustration of Kinsey's influence. However, as Dr. Reisman point[s] out, ... the Kinsey cabal's malign influence extends far beyond the mainstreaming of homosexuality. Kinsey and his accomplices set out with the intention "to topple, or greatly weaken, laws concerning rape, seduction, prostitution, sodomy, bestiality, indecent exposure, incest, bigamy, nudity, obscenity, adultery, fornication, adult-child sex, illicit cohabitation, pornography, smoking opium and other narcotics."

Morris Ernst, Kinsey's lawyer (who was, not surprisingly, affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union), insisted that "virtually every page of the Kinsey Report touches on some section of the legal code." With the help of other Gramsci-style "change agents" who had insinuated themselves into legal and academic institutions, Kinsey and his colleagues were able to decimate scores of "antiquated" laws and social standards. One indication of Kinsey's legal impact, notes Dr. Reisman, "is the fact that Kinsey is the most cited sex scientist by far in Westlaw and the other legal indices."

"It is difficult to exaggerate the horrendous effects of the widespread promotion and acceptance of [Kinsey's] work," comments Dr. Reisman. "Kinsey's 'research' shook America's moral foundations and launched the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s. Its terrible results are obvious in the skyrocketing incidence of all the social pathologies afflicting us today: divorce, abortion, sexual promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, illegitimate births, cohabitation, pornography, homosexuality, sadomasochism, rape, child molestation, sexual crimes of all types, family breakup, [and] endemic violence. ..."

The Feminist Assault
The most obvious and effective assault upon the traditional home is that which has been waged by the feminist movement. This assault -- with the unstinting financial support of the power elite -- has effectively conquered both major political parties.

Although many commentators make great sport of feminism's more visible absurdities, few are willing or able to recognize that modern feminism has its origins in the Soviet-aligned Communist movement.

"While we build the movement uniting women against their oppression, we try to win over the most conscious women to join us in building a revolutionary party that can unite all oppressed sectors of the population," wrote Leon Trotsky in 1917. "The women's liberation movement is a central part of the American socialist revolution in the making."

Betty Friedan, the acknowledged "founding mother" of American feminism, was among the "most conscious women" referred to by Trotsky.

Despite her carefully wrought public image as a typical suburban housewife driven into radical politics by the frustrations of domestic life (which she called a "comfortable concentration camp"), Friedan was a professional propagandist for the Soviet-controlled Communist Party.

Prior to becoming the anointed leader of the "Women's Movement," notes former New Left activist David Horowitz, Friedan was "a Stalinist [and] the political intimate of America's Cold War fifth column. ..."

So strict was Friedan's adherence to the Soviet line that she was among those American Communists who were de facto supporters of Adolf Hitler between August 1939 and June 1941 -- the period of the notorious Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. As Horowitz concludes, Friedan's "interest in women's liberation was just a subtext of her real desire to create a Soviet America."

To Create a Soviet America, it would be necessary to eradicate the traditional family and to supplant the family with the state.

Karl Marx called for the "abolition of the family" in the Communist Manifesto. "Marx was on to something more profound than he knew when he observed that the family contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wider scale within the society and the state," wrote Friedan's disciple Shulamith Firestone in her 1970 tract The Dialectic of Sex. "[u]nless revolution uproots the basic organization, the biological family ... the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated."

"Feminism is not just an issue or a group of issues," wrote feminist revolutionary Ellen Willis in the November 14, 1981 issue of The Nation. "It is the cutting edge of a revolution in cultural and moral values. ... The objective of every feminist reform, from legal abortion ... to child-care programs, is to undermine traditional family values. ..."


The uprooting of traditional family institutions is also a goal of the homosexual revolution, which -- like the feminist movement -- has its origins in the Marxist Left and has been nurtured by the power elite.

The American "gay rights" movement was inaugurated by the Mattachine Society, founded in the 1950s by Marxists Harry Hay and Rudi Gernreich. The ongoing and shockingly successful campaign to normalize homosexuality is the product of a cunning strategy that uses the mass media, especially entertainment, and other Establishment-controlled institutions to re-educate the public in favor of the unmentionable vice.

That strategy was outlined, with stunning candor, in After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90's, by homosexual activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. Taking a page from Gramsci (and Goebbels), the authors urged that the Lavender Lobby mount a full-scale propaganda war to bring about the "conversion" of America through a "planned psychological attack."

Through such means, the authors predicted, Americans would be "cured" of their opposition to homosexual perversion, "whether they like it or not."

Myth of Inevitability
Many of the problems afflicting America do not reflect the march of impersonal, irreversible "social progress," or the process of irresistible social decay. Instead, they reflect the destructive accomplishments of a long-term conspiracy against American society -- a Gramscian assault upon all of the vital institutions that prevent the erection of the total state.

Gramsci referred to these institutions as "fortresses and earthworks" to be overcome. However, those who love freedom should consider these besieged institutions -- the family, traditional religion, [Helleno-Christian] morality -- as "layers of strength" that have remarkable resiliency and must be restored. But the work of restoration cannot be effective unless a sufficient number of [people who care] come to understand the conspiratorial origins of our culture war.

Such an understanding helps dispel the despair that besets good people when they succumb to the illusion that our cultural decline is somehow pre-ordained, and that nothing can be done to arrest it.

Understanding the covert machinations of our enemies is also necessary in order to anticipate their moves and organize effective resistance -- and it is only through organized, principled defense of our heritage of liberty that the culture war can ultimately be won.
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Source The New American. Vol. 16, No. 22. pp 10 - 14.
For more on Gramsci see Gramsci's Grand Plan. and Gramsci And The U. S. Body Politic.

For a source that gives the reader a good account of Gramsci's views on the importance of "Cultural Hegemony," see Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings. edited by David Forgacs & Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. translated by William Boelhower. H.U.P. Cambridge, Mass. 1985.

See also Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. ed.& trans. by Hoare and Smith. Int'l Publishers. New York, 1999.

For an eye-opening example of how the Gramscian method is being applied in Greece via the cesspool that "Greek" television programming has become, see How the "Grekili" Stole Christmas.

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