Haters of Herbert Marcuse

(the "personification of 'True Evil',
as one writer put it)

Added August 2018: An excellent article examining the lineage of various haters--

• Martin Jay, "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe," in: Salmagundi (Skidmore College quarterly magazine) issue 166/167 or 168/169 (Spr/Sum 2010), link courtesy of web archive) (5 page pdf)
  

• Econospeak blog, Aug. 30, 2015: "Politics of Pastiche: "voters... need someone to fire all the political-correct police","
  Starts with a reference to Norwegian mass shooter Breivik's manifesto blaming Herbert for Political Correctness, and references him again in the context of what Michael Walsh wrote about him in his book In The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West.

Alex Kurtagic, "Forgetting Herbert Marcuse (19 July 1898 - 29 July 1979)" (29 July 2014 [35th anniversary of Herbert's death]), in: wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/ (web archive version, in 2018 the article is available on the red ice.tv site)
This oddly informed but wildly distorting news item ends with: "Like Horkheimer, Marcuse belongs in the eighth circle of hell. His face bears the stigmata of a psyche haunted by hate. Little good came out of this man."
He cites several articles from the Occidental Observer, including this one, which gives a blurb on Eros and Civilization: Elizabeth Whitcombe, "The Difficult Class", The Occidental Observer. 3 August 2009.

American Renaissance blog, May 17, 2014: search results on "Marcuse"

• I have a google news alert on "Herbert Marcuse," and get weekly emails with links to various blogs that mention him. This blog has come up a few times. Its tagline is "There is not a truth exisiting which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.--Thomas Jefferson."
  • The entries themselves don't necessarily mention Herbert, but commenters occasionally do. For instance, below a May 21, 2014 post of this NYT article:
    Jennifer Medina, New York Times, May 17, 2014: Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm.
    bigone4u responded to a comment asking "What happened to liberal support for free expression?" with the remark:
    "Herbert Marcuse. Classic 60s Marxist professor with his article calling for all free speech to be within Marxist boundaries. He inspired a generation of professors, including Obama."
    to which robinbishop34 commented: "Marcuse must be dancing a jig in hell about now."
• Sometimes the comments show up in the search results, but not on the page when one clicks on the link to see the article. Maybe they were deleted but still exist in the search database?
  Some other examples :
• White House Turns to Girls of Color | American Renaissance Nov 12, 2014 ... (With the help of Herbert Marcuse, of course). ... late 1960s using Marcuse's “ Critical Theory” of repeating accusations, insults, until they stick in ... www.amren.com/news/2014/11/white-house-turns-to-girls-of-color/
• The Diversity Illusion | American Renaissance Jun 7, 2013 ... (When did Marcuse advocate “polymorphous perversity” and ... In fact, you could say Marcuse has been poisoning American minds with his ... www.amren.com/features/2013/06/the-diversity-illusion/
  • Dr. X responding to Conrad • 2 years ago And the Frankfurt School has pretty much dominated post-secondary education for the last 50 years. (When did Marcuse advocate "polymorphous perversity" and "repressive tolerance"? 1964???) ... And the U.S. Government and all 50 states have been heavily subsidizing post-secondary education... thus subsidizing cultural Marxism. And at least 2 and maybe 3 generations of ellites have absorbed cultural marxism... ergo, our present situation. 10 • Reply•Share ›
    Avatar Unperson responding to Dr. X • 2 years ago The concept of "repressive tolerance" is from a 1965 essay, but Marcuse's most influential work, Eros and Civilization -- which became the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s -- is even older, first published in 1955. In fact, you could say Marcuse has been poisoning American minds with his subversive Frankfurter nonsense ever since 1934, when the US made the mistake of letting him into the country.
• What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals | American Renaissance Nov 12, 2014 ... This all worked very well into Hebert Marcuse's New Left politics, ... MLK must have taken Marcuse's philosophy of sexual liberation as a ... www.amren.com/news/.../what-an-uncensored-letter-to-m-l-k-reveals/

Salvo magazine, Spring 2012: "The Illusionist: How Herbert Marcuse Convinced a Generation that Censorship Is Tolerance & Other Politically Correct Tricks," by Robin Phillips, at http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo20/herbert-marcuse-censorship-is-tolerance.php

• 'It would be nice if such sophistry had been limited to ancient Greeks. However, the 20th century saw a thinker whose nonsense rivaled and even surpassed anything produced by the sophists. His name was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), the guru of the 1960s counterculture. Marcuse is important, not because he was able to take sophistry to new levels of truth-twisting heights, but because his truth-twisting thought has been formative in defining so much of the collective "common sense" (or more accurately, common nonsense) of our age. How formative? In 1968, when students in Paris revolted, they tore apart the city carrying banners that read "Marx/Mao/Marcuse." In his forward to Marcuse's book Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, Robert Young said that "among pure scholars [Marcuse] had the most direct and profound effect on historical events of any individual in the twentieth century."
  ...
  The historical revisionism reached its height with Marcuse, who established himself as the most well-known member of the movement because of his ability to effectively communicate with the youth. Marcuse was adopted as the intellectual guru of the hippie movement, and he, in turn, provided the younger generation with a steady stream of propaganda to sanctify their rebellious impulses. (It was Marcuse who invented the catchphrase "Make love, not war.") For Marcuse, the only answer to the problem of fascism was communism. "The Communist Parties are, and will remain, the sole anti-fascist power," he declared. For this reason, he urged Americans not to be too hard on the totalitarian experiments of their communist enemies, asserting that "the denunciation of neo-fascism and Social Democracy must outweigh denunciation of Communist policy." - See more at: http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo20/herbert-marcuse-censorship-is-tolerance.php#sthash.wHjAb1N5.dpuf
  ...
  In Eros and Civilization Marcuse wrote that "labor time, which is the largest part of the individual's life time, is painful time, for alienated labor is absence of gratification, negation of the pleasure principle."
  In his book Intellectual Morons, Daniel J. Flynn helpfully compares Marcuse's views on labor with those of Marx:

  Marx argued against the exploitation of labor; Marcuse, against labor itself. Don't work, have sex. This was the simple message of Eros and Civilization, released in 1955. Its ideas proved to be extraordinarily popular among the fledgling hippie culture of the following decade. It provided a rationale for laziness and transformed degrading personal vices into virtues.

This elevation of laziness included self-conscious rejection of the "work" of keeping oneself clean. Thus, Marcuse argued that those who returned to a more primitive state must reject personal hygiene and experience the freedom of embracing a "body unsoiled by plastic cleanliness." Doublespeak Flynn put Marcuse's entire philosophy in a nutshell when he contended that Marcuse "preached that freedom is totalitarianism, democracy is dictatorship, education is indoctrination, violence is nonviolence, and fiction is truth." As this suggests, Marcuse was a genius at "granting positive connotations to negative practices." This trick reached the height of doublespeak when Marcuse preached that tolerance is actually intolerance, and visa verse.
...

American Catholic, Feb. 19, 2012 A.D. [sic]: "In the Birth Control Controversy, the Mocking of Conservative Religious Women by Militant Secularists Will Soon Backfire" by Dave Hartline.
"Families that adhere to the clinically proven facts of Natural Family Planning are treated as if they are some sort of religious nuts. Militant secularists in the corridors of power (Legislative and Fourth Estate) have even thrown out their favorite term “sexually repressed.” Now this term is so widely repeated in our popular culture, perhaps we should examine where it came from. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) of the infamous Marxist “Frankfurt School” came up with the term. Marcuse left pre-World War II Germany and taught at Columbia. Marcuse believed in free love and surmised that the more narcissistic society was with regard to sexual relations, the better the world would become. Before his death, he claimed his prized student was 1960s militant radical Angela Davis. Marcuse was way out in left field in his day and yet the militant secularists in our pop culture have made him seem as mainstream as Dr. Phil. When societies turn away from religion they embrace the crazies like Marcuse; sadly something has to fill the vacuum and it is usually the ideas which come from the half baked among us that do so."

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 76 people in a bombing and a shooting spree in Norway. Hours beforehand, he released a 1500 page manifesto, outlining his thoughts and actions for the world to see. Herbert figures prominently in several places in that manuscript, available as a website ebook (since 2012 on the internet archive), and a 1518-page-pdf (easily searchable). Some excerpts:

p. 17: "The student revolutionaries were also strongly influenced by the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse preached the “Great Refusal,” a rejection of all basic Western concepts, sexual liberation and the merits of feminist and black revolution. His primary thesis was that university students, ghetto blacks, the alienated, the asocial, and the Third World could take the place of the proletariat in the Communist revolution. In his book An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse proclaimed his goals of a radical transvaluation of values; the relaxation of taboos; cultural subversion; Critical Theory; and a linguistic rebellion that would amount to a methodical reversal of meaning. As for racial conflict, Marcuse wrote that white men are guilty and that blacks are the most natural force of rebellion."

p. 21-22: Herbert Marcuse

Like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, Marcuse was an intellectual of the Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.

He has often been described as a Marxist philosopher, but he was in fact a full-blooded social revolutionary who contemplated the disintegration of Western European and American society just as Karl Marx and Georg Lukacs contemplated the disintegration of German society: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society…there is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended. These ideas are oldfashioned… What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”

Marcuse published Eros and Civilisation in 1955, which became the founding document of the 1960s counterculture and brought the Frankfurt School into the colleges and universities of Western Europe and America.

He asserted that the only way to escape the one-dimensionality of modern industrial society was to liberate the erotic side of man, the sensuous instinct, in rebellion against “technological rationality.”

This erotic liberation was to take the form of the “Great Refusal,” a total rejection of thecapitalist monster and its entire works, including technological reason and ritual-authoritarian language.

He provided the needed intellectual justifications for adolescent sexual rebellion and the slogan “Make Love, Not War.”

His theory included the belief that the Women’s Liberation Movement was to be the most important component of the opposition, and potentially the most radical.

His revolutionary efforts would blossom into a full-scale war by revolutionary Marxism against the European white male in the schools and colleges.

p. 35: "One work, however, is of such importance that it must be recommended despite its difficulty: Eros and Civilisation by Herbert Marcuse (Beacon Press, Boston, first paperback edition in 1974 and still in print). Subtitled A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, this book holds center stage for two reasons. First, it completes the task of integrating Marx and Freud. While the Marxism is sotto voce, the whole framework of the book is in fact Marxist, and it is through the framework that Freud is considered. Second, Eros and Civilisation and its author were the key means of transmission by which the intellectual work of the Frankfurt School was injected into the student rebellion of the 1960s. This book became the bible of the young radicals who took over Western European and America’s college campuses from 1965 onward, and who are still there as faculty members."
This is followed by a full page of discussion.

Andrew Breitbart, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World (Grand Central Publishing, 2011): use search in google books, which shows no page numbers, but from a search on amazon.com, the relevant pages are 114, 119-128, 135. Page with screen shots of pp. 119-122, 126. Here a long excerpt:

120: [Marcuse] really hit his stride in 1955, however, with the publication of Eros and Civilization. The book essentially made Wilhelm Reich's case that sexual liberation was the best counter to the psychological ills of society. Marcuse preferred a society of "polymorphous perversity,"--which is Just what it sounds like--people having sex every which way, with whatever,
It wasn't so much the freshness of Marcuse's message that made the difference (it wasn't a fresh message) as his timing--the kids brought up with Fromm and Freud and Spock were coming of age. The misplaced guilt of the Greatest Generation brought forth a new generation free to embrace Marcuse. While similar philosophies of sex had failed in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, by the 1950s the men and women who had suffered through the Great Depression and fought in World War II were determined to raise privileged kids who would never have to actually fight for their country or work for their food. The result was a group of kids ready and able to participate in the sexual revolution promised by the Frankfurt School. Marcuse excused sexual promiscuity as the fulfillment of the need for the people to rise up against Western civilization and to free themselves of the sexual repression it created. Not a hard sell for teenagers.
It was no wonder that in a very real sense, his followers believed they were doing something special when they made love, not war (a slogan attributed to Marcuse himself)--they were using their sexual energy to bind the world together rather than destroy it, as sexual repression would do. While Marcuse may not have been the most important intellectual force behind the Frankfurt School, he was its most devious and effective marketer. The advertising adage "Sex sells" was applied to selling a generation on the idea that their parents' values and ideals were repressive and evil. (Where geographically did Marcuse come to this nihilistic understanding? The picturesque cliffs of La Jolla, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.)
Marcuse carried his "critical theory" in another destructive direction as well: while repeating the Marxist trope that the workers of the world would eventually unite--he saw the third world's "anti-colonial" movements as evidence that Marx was right--he recognized that in the United States there would be no such uprising by the working class. He therefore needed a different set of interest groups to tear down capitalism using his critical theory. And he found those groups in the racial, ethnic, and sexual groups that hated the old order. These victimized interest groups rightly opposed all the beauties of Western civilization "with all the defiance, and the hatred, and the joy of [p. 121] rebellious victims, defining their own humanity against the definitions of the masters."19
Marcuse's mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and "multiculturalism" as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all "victim groups" in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse's theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer's critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement--Gender Studies, LGBT/"Queer" Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these "Blank Studies" brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and placing in their stead a moral relativism that equates all cultures and all philosophies--except for Western civilization, culture, and philosophy, which are "exploitative" and "bad."
Marcuse was widely accepted in the 1960s by the student movement--so much so that students in Paris during the 1968 uprising marched with banners reading "Marx, Mao, and Marcuse."
But he still wasn't winning in America. Marcuse bad a big, big problem: America's founding ideology is still far sexier than that of the Marxists, who insist on a tyrannical state of equality rather than freedom with personal responsibility. Even if Marcuse was promising unending sex, drugs, and rock and roll, most Americans were more interested in living in liberty with their families, in a society that values virtue and hard work rather than promiscuity and decadence.
So Marcuse had to find a way to defy the opposition. He found it in what he termed "repressive tolerance." In 1965, Marcuse wrote an essay by that name in which he argued that tolerance was good only if nondominating ideas were allowed to flourish--and that nondominating ideas could flourish only if dominating ideas were shut down. "[T]he realization of the objective of tolerance," he wrote, "would call for in tolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed." America was experiencing a "repressive tolerance" under which dissenting viewpoints were stifled; what it needed was " partisan tolerance.20 In other words, if you disagreed with Marcuse, you should be forcefully shut up, according to Marcuse. This made political debate very convenient for him and his allies. This totalitarianism is now standard practice on college campuses, in the media, and in Hollywood--the very places that the Frankfurt School sought to control. The First Amendment--the same instrument that allowed the Frankfurt School to land a ll our shores and express their pernicious ideas in freedom--was now curtailed by those who had benefitted from it. Marcuse called for a tyranny [p. 122] of the minority, since the tyranny of the majority could not be overcome without a total shutdown.
There's another name for Marcuse's "partisan tolerance": Political Correctness.
In fact, the term "political correctness" came from one of Marcuse's buddies: Mao Tse-tung. ...

Daniel Henninger, "Hillary Talks About 'It': Would she defend Rush Limbaugh's speech rights against the left?" The Wall Street Journal, editorial, Oct. 11, 2007 (full editorial)

Who threw the first stone in these media-driven bloodlettings? Good question. But to my knowledge the right has no equivalent to "repressive tolerance," the aggressive theory of scorched-earth political argument laid out in the hothouse years of the 1960s by the late left-wing political philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Just last November, in an admiring essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the left polemicist Stanley Fish aptly summed up Marcuse's assertion that "liberal" notions of tolerance for political speech should be overturned. [copy of Fish's Dec. 8, 2006 Chronicle essay; book he discusses]
The rationale for this notion is that standard tolerance is rigged against the left. In practice, tolerance extends only to the ideas and beliefs of the powerful, while it shuts out ideas on behalf of the weak or "marginalized"--the poor, minorities, women and the rest. Mr. Fish says liberals fail to see "the dark side of their favorite virtue."
Prof. Fish has an alternative to traditions of tolerance, and to anyone awash in American politics today it will sound familiar: "That is to say, and Marcuse says it, anything the right does is bad and should not be tolerated; anything the left does is good and should be welcomed." This would explain the emotional intensity and animosity in politics now: The other side no longer deserves minimal respect.
It's not enough to disagree with conservative viewpoints; one has to undermine and delegitimize them. Mock them. Put them beyond the pale. Incidentally, Marcuse, Fish and others on the left who want to "withdraw" tolerance from the speech and ideas of their opponents count centrist Democrats among them. That is what happened to Joe Lieberman.

---

Digital technology now fixes someone's random remark forever in the ozone amber of the Web or YouTube. It's easy to make anything anyone may say, such as "macaca," a weeks-long campaign to diminish or even destroy the sayer. Wherever the nonbeliever Marcuse is now, this tool would have put him in heaven. I find it putting us closer than I'd like to be to an American "Lives of Others," media monitors always listening for the vulnerable spoken word.'
Sen. Clinton this week told the Post, "I intend to build a centrist coalition." That may depend on how one defines centrist. For her progressive bloggers at Media Matters the center on tolerating speech likely falls closer to Prof. Marcuse than John Locke. So which is it? This summer Sen. Clinton said she was a founder of Media Matters, and this week she said she was a centrist. That doesn't compute. Perhaps in a year we'll know which side she's on.

This is good evidence of the continuing relevance of Herbert's notion of repressive tolerance.

David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006), xxxvii f:

Herbert Marcuse, a professor at Brandeis and a veteran of the famed "Frankfurt School" of European Marxism, was another figure whose writings flourished with the new radical presence on university faculties. His famous essay on "Repressive Tolerance," written in 1965, is a justification for the suppression of conservative speech and access to cultural platforms on the grounds that the views of right-wing intellectuals reflect the rule of an oppressive and already dominant social class. Marcuse identified "revolutionary tolerance" as "tolerance that enlarged the range and content of freedom." Revolutionary tolerance [p. xxxvii] could not be neutral towards rival viewpoints. It had to be "partisan" on behalf of a radical cause and "intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive status quo." This was a transparent prescription for not hiring academic candidates with conservative views. In this view, a blacklist was a potential tool of "liberation."

According to Marcuse, normal tolerance "granted to the Right as well as the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity ... actually protects the machinery of discrimination." By this logic, repression of conservative viewpoints was a progressive duty. Evaluating conservative academic candidates on their merits, without regard to their political and social opinions, was to support discrimination and oppression in the society at large.

Marcuse's "dialectical argument" exerted a seminal influence in academic circles in the 1970s and provided a powerful justification for blacklisting conservatives in the name of equality and freedom[56] The same argument would also justify the exclusion of conservative texts from academic reading lists, which is an all too common practice on liberal arts campuses.

(see also: longer excerpt from Horowitz's The Professors with introduction by Harold Marcuse)

http://www.liberallunacy.net/dossiers/HerbertMarcuse.htm
by "Beckwith copyright © 2005" [accessed March 12, 2006, waybackmachine has pages since March 2005, but not this one on Herbert]
offers the following assessment of Herbert (I find that the first two paragraphs actually show a good understanding of Herbert's arguments, while the third goes off the deep end):

Herbert Marcuse believed that people are not free because they function within systems such as the economy. If people were really free, they would be free from these systems. For example, people would only have to work as little as possible to provide for their needs, not an established amount of time. He states that only when people are free from these systems can they determine what they really need or want. Because we are not yet free, we have "false needs". These needs are exemplified by the range of choices which we are offered in our economy. However, each of these choices reinforces the social norms that exist. Because each choice has the same result (reinforcement of social norms), there is no real choice.

Marcuse contended that highly advanced societies are welfare/warfare states. Welfare states restrict freedom because they limit free time, access to necessary goods and services, and citizen's ability to realize true self-determination. The warfare state hinders a true analysis of society because it keeps people focused on fighting the "enemy" instead of focused on internal social problems.

Marcuse argued in his book "Eros and Civilization," that by freeing sex from any restraints, we could elevate the pleasure principle over the reality principle and create a society with no work, only play (Marcuse coined the phrase, "Make love, not war")[note by Harold Marcuse: Herbert did not coin this phrase, although he certainly endorsed and used it]. Marcuse also argued for what he called "liberating tolerance," which he defined as tolerance for all ideas coming from the Left and intolerance for any ideas coming from the Right. In the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief "guru" of the New Left, and he injected the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now America's state ideology.
[note by Harold Marcuse: if it were only so easy to inject cultural Marxism ... but is it really the state ideology of G.W. Bush's United States?]

Ike Morgan, "Western civilization comes under attack,"
Bangor Daily News, Thursday, February 10, 2005
from the page: http://www.bangornews.com/news/templates/?a=108645&z=35

I have often wondered what goes on in the minds of the "blame America first" crowd. Rarely does a day go by without the left and our local peace studies/centers valiantly attempting to convince us that America is what's wrong with the world.
Where did this vision come from and why is it such an integral part of how the left is defined?
After reading Ilze Petersons' Jan. 15-16 op-ed ("People's inauguration builds on peace, human rights"), I think I may have stumbled on an answer. It seems their infatuation with every misdeed of Western civilization comes from the success of a little known weapon of the left called Critical Theory. What is this innocent sounding "theory"?
Critical Theory is best described by one of its adherents, "... it is the essential destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, morality, sexual restraint, patriotism, convention, and conservatism."
Critical Theory has its roots in the Germany of the 1930s. Several members of the avowed Marxist, Frankfurt School, fled to America soon after the rise of Adolf Hitler. Most notable among them was Herbert Marcuse who would soon become the poster boy and influential leader of the "cultural Marxism" movement.
Marcuse and his cohorts were well aware of the failure of old fashion Marxism as a revolutionary approach to transforming a culture. They realized its emphasis on violence and terror to foment revolution and compel strict obedience from the masses did not work. Instead of violent revolution, cultural Marxism seeks victory through the slow destruction of Western culture. Only then will it be possible to peacefully transform existing values with the new values of revolutionary Marxism.
A long, slow process but one that is highly effective.
With the aid of Columbia University, Marcuse and his cronies established the New Frankfurt School in New York City. Years later the ideas of Critical Theory were prevalent at many of the nation's teachers colleges. The 1960s saw the fruition of Critical Theory where traditional values and morals were discarded en mass without consideration of their worth.
In order for Critical Theory to succeed it was necessary to repeat constantly that Western societies (and especially America) are bastions of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and fascism. Petersons and her colleagues at the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine are willing participants in this repetition.
To be successful the cultural institutions must be infiltrated. Theatre, the arts, schools, universities, seminaries, and newspapers become prime targets and eventually succumb to the invasion. Critical Theory ideas have burrowed so deeply into these institutions that one is rarely aware they exist; a ringing in the ears that eventually goes unnoticed.
The constant drumbeat of negativism has a purpose: to promote "cultural pessimism" among people who enjoy the most freedom and prosperity in the history of civilization. Once this "pessimism" takes hold it is easy to instill new values to replace the old.
The time tested traditions of Western civilization that had provided us with the freest, most tolerant nation on Earth are now replaced by nihilistic notions of free love, abortion, euthanasia, drugs, gay marriage, hatred of religion, and divorce.
Political correctness acts as the protector of the ideas. Those who would dare speak out against the new orthodoxy are branded as fascists, or mentally ill. Words of opposition are treated as hate speech. Mandatory "sensitivity training" attempts to fix those with the "wrong" attitude. Repeated opposition to these ideas brings with it charges of racism, sexism, homophobia and a "presumption of guilt."
If there is any doubt that the Peace & Justice Center has bought into this intellectual model one need only visit its Web page (www.peacectr.org) or peruse its many publications.
It does a masterful job of cloaking its real agenda using the usual seductive vocabulary and terminology of the left ("peace," "social justice," etc.), but the cultural Marxist, anti-American, anti-capitalist fervor is ever present.
Calls for revolution, denigration of the military, tired worn out slogans of Marxism and socialism, repeated references to America as "evil," and of course the obligatory picture of the heavily armed American soldier threatening an innocent citizen, all right out of the Critical Theory play book.
These are not evil people and they have every right to believe and say as they wish. But one has to wonder how such a fatalistic vision survives in their minds.

Ike Morgan is a resident of Exeter.

Date: Tuesday, March 29, 2005 12:44 PM +0100
From: "P. Jones" <@yahoo.co.uk>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Herbert Marcuse.

I presume you wrote to me because you would like a response or to engage in dialog about this. I am in fact curious about how people come to hold ideas such as the ones you express.

I seriously doubt that Herbert and the Frankfurt School could have had or will ever have such influence as to bring down Western Civilization As We Know It. Especially when most people have neither read nor heard of what they wrote, and even many of those few who have read their works don't embrace their arguments.

With that said, however, I must say that I would be thrilled if masses of people did indeed read, understand and embrace their analyses. So there is no need for you to feel any pity for me. Nor am I offended that Herbert represents 'True Evil' for you. As far as his ideas about fatherhood (in my case grandfatherhood, actually) go, I have no regrets in that regard.

Your use of words like "Fatherhood," "warped" and "perversion" make me think you see sexual liberation as the main cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and political liberation movements in Asia and third world countries. Is that indeed the case? I would be interested to hear your views at greater length.

sincerely,
Harold Marcuse

James Pinkerton, "Saving Marcia Angell From Herself," Sept. 15, 2004, on the site:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/091504D.html ("Where Free Markets Meet Democracy"), in a rant about Angell's book The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to do About It.
James Pinkerton is a Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. A contributor to Fox News and columnist for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times, Pinkerton is also a member of the Board of Contributors for USA Today. He is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and served as an aide in both the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Marxism, by way of the 20th century "Frankfurt School" -- those 20th century Marxists who fused Marx with Freud to explain how people could happily participate in the evil of capitalism. Herbert Marcuse et al. came up with elaborate theories of "alienation," "false consciousness" and "repressive tolerance," all of which sought to explain why a system so rotten could be so resilient.

Daniel Flynn, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (New York: Crown, 2004), has an entire chapter on Herbert. pdf scan of chap. 2 "The New Left's Pop Philosopher"

interviewed by Chris Banescu on the site: http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15282. [found Oct. 4, 2004 on google news, dated Oct. 6, 2004]. Banescu is an attorney, university professor, and public speaker who manages the conservative site www.OrthodoxNet.com.

Banescu: Which three intellectuals in your book do you think will be the hardest and take the longest to debunk?
Flynn: A lie is easier to counteract than an entire system that embraces dishonesty as an integral part of its program. Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Leo Strauss spawned intellectual movements that incorporate dishonesty as an endorsed method of discourse.
Herbert Marcuse, the guru of the New Left of the 1960s, waged war on language by renaming intolerance as tolerance [full text of 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance"], violence as nonviolence, and dictatorship as democracy. Marcuse’s Newspeak led to the Left rationalizing censorship, acts of violence by radicals, and support of totalitarians like Castro or the Palestinian terrorists—all while claiming to advocate tolerance, non-violence, and democracy.

Flynn's book was also reviewed by Timothy P. Carney on Sept. 28, 2004, on the site:
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=5199:

Just as enlightening as his treatment of the celebrated heroes are his demonstrations that less well-known writers, such as Herbert Marcuse, have provided the foundations of modern leftist orthodoxy despite their unsavory beliefs and evil motives.

James Atticus Bowden, September 8, 2004: "Why They Hated the RNC Convention," at:
http://www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=bowdenja&date=040908
James Atticus Bowden has specialized in inter-disciplinary long range 'futures' studies for over a decade. He is employed by a Defense Department contractor. He is a retired United States Army Infantry Officer. He is a 1972 graduate of the United States Military Academy and earned graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University. He holds two elected Republican Party offices in Virginia.

The Liberals-Democrats-Media are upset, still, about Republicans not following the Democrat script for the Republican National Convention. How unfair. The Republican ‘moderates’ (we Conservatives call them ‘Our’ Liberals) didn’t attack the conservative planks in the platform against partial birth abortion and homosexual marriage or, as we see it – for the sanctity of life and marriage. Furthermore, no Conservative boogie man, except the man who is and will be President of the United States of America, spoke in prime time. The Republicans didn’t get, and clearly aren’t following, the memo on Speech Codes from the Liberals-Democrats-Media.

The basic PC speech code is based on Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance”.
[full text of 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance"] Liberals can say anything because they are PC tolerant. Conservatives can say nothing, unless they agree with the Liberals, because they are PC intolerant – by definition. When Liberals call names, it’s okay. When Conservatives name issues and cite records, it’s hate speech. Actually, anything Conservatives say is hate speech.

2004: James Atticus Bowden, "Ann Coulter and I were Censored," MassNews.com http://www.massnews.com/2004_editions/sound_off/073004_ann_coulter_censored.htm.

• "I agree if we agree on what the terms ‘racist assault’, and ‘belittlement of religious views’ mean. Because every other week another writer condemns and belittles the religious views of Christians. Liberals say tolerance approves calling Christians the Taliban Wing of the Republican Party. Saying the Islamist Terrorists are barbarians is wrong. Illustrating how backward one great civilization is – ist verboten. Describing the wrongs of Western Civilization, especially if you can blame it on Christianity, must be tolerated, no, celebrated. It reminds me of Herbert Marcuse from the 60s and his “Repressive Tolerance” (Google: Herbert Marcuse Repressive Tolerance). Marcuse, a founding father of PC, said “certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.” Space constrains me from the long list of ‘certain’ things, ideas, policies and behaviors the Liberals don’t want to ‘permit’. Christian speech is at the top of the list. Lest anyone not understand which side is to be suppressed, Marcuse added, and the Liberal Media faithfully follows, “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left."

March 23, 2002 [guestbook entry on this site: marcuse.org]:

Name: A defender of Freedom and Liberty, as spelled out inthe Constitution of the United States
From: The United States
LinkIn: Read "Oppressive Tolerance". Was shocked at the hypocracy and search google; found this site.
Website: www.freerepublic.com
Comments: Marcuse was a fascist. He supported an extreme ideology that, simply put, promoted his own thought, and wished to stiffle any an all opposition. Read on:
In their recent book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses, Professor Alan Charles Kors of the University of Pennsylvania and civil liberties attorney Harvey A. Silverglate trace the recent phenomenon of campus speech codes to 1960s Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In “Repressive Tolerance,” a 1965 essay [full text], Marcuse wrote that free expression is actually “repressive.” By his logic, the powerful and wealthy elite keeps the great bulk of the population “manipulated and indoctrinated” so that they “parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters.” In this environment, tolerance of all views serves to entrench the status quo power structure.
“Liberating tolerance,” Marcuse wrote, would consist of “intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.” Assailing the “sacred liberalistic principle of equality for `the other side,” Marcuse advocated “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.” After all, Marcuse opined, “there are issues where . . . there is no 'other side' in any more than a formalistic sense.”
Kors and Silvergate observe that while Marcusian logic has been rejected by the “real world,” it has enveloped the academy. They point to the rise of speech codes on campus. But Marcuse's ideas are even more pervasive in universities: Marcusian logic has invaded the curricula and educational programs of American universities.
This is scary. Thank God he didn't have the power to enforce his views on the rest of us. Funny, too, that here in the USA, he had freedom of speech to deplore freedom of speach!

Was Herbert a capitalist Reagan Republican?

March 27, 2002 [guestbook entry at marcuse.org]
Name: A Concerned Citizen
Comments: Herbert Marcuse was a fraud. When he died he left a $40 million estate that included $10 million in General Dynamics stock. He was no socialist. Socialists are fools. Herbie was a good Reagan Republican.

April 23, 2002 (link to guestbook page)
Name: Peter Marcuse, Herbert's son.
Comments: Regarding the March 27 guestbook entry by “A Concerned Citizen,” my father's estate was worth about 1 percent of that amount [$400,000]. There was no General Dynamics stock in it. Part of what he did leave has gone to help in the publishing of material from his archive in Frankfurt, in the series that is now coming out with Routledge, edited by Doug Kellner. (see Papers page; Nachgelassene Schriften page)
And as far as the claim that Herbert was a Reagan Republican goes, the documentary film *Herbert’s Hippopotamus* has three minutes of wonderful footage from and about governor Reagan’s May 1969 press conference about UCSD and Herbert, starting at minute 25:00 in the 56- minute film. It’s available on the internet at:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/media/herbieshippo.ram
Reagan, who was trying to silence Herbert, certainly didn’t count Herbert among those supporting his agenda!
Where do people get these ideas? It would be interesting to know the source.

Bill Lind, "The Origins of Political Correctness: An Accuracy in Academia Address."
Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Conservative University at American University

And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of "polymorphous perversity," that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute.
...
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of "polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing." And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels good do it," and "You never have to go to work." By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, "Make love, not war." [note by Harold Marcuse: I am fairly sure Herbert did not coin this phrase, but if he did, power to him!] Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s."

• Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (Encounter, 2000). Amazon's Long March page calls him "one of the Right's most articulate writers."
  • pp. 8, 15, 28, 136, 144, 156f, 166-173, 178, 186, 270, 285
  • 8: "The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse was not joking when, in Eros and Civilization--one of many inspirational tracts for the movement--he extolled the salvational properties of 'primary narcissism' as an effective protest against the 'repressive order of procreative sexuality.' 'The images of Orpheus and Narcissus reconcile Eros and Thanatos,' Marcuse wrote." [note on p. 270: 1966 ed. of Eros, p. 164]
  • 15: "In the context of Western societies, 'the long march through the institutions' signified--in the words of Herbert Marcuse--'working against the established institutions while working in them.' It was primarily by this means--by insinnuation and infiltration rather than confrontation--that the countercultural dreams of radicals like Marcuse have triumphed." Bellbottoms, long hair, and incense were dispensable props; crucial was the hedonistic antinomianism they symbolized. ... For examples, you need look no further than the curriculum of your local school or college, at what is on offer at the nearest museum or so-called 'public' radio station: indeed, you need look no further than your workplace, your church (if you still go to church), or your family to see evidence of the damage wrought by the long march of the counterculture."
  • 144: "Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and other prophets of sexual license demonstrated other ways in which intemperate minds enslaved themselves--and many others--through fantasies of absolute freedom."
  • 168: "Brown might agree, but one can hardly imagine him acknowledging the existence of Cuba without first quoting Paracelsus. In other words, both men were political utopians, but Marcuse was more likely to insist on the real-world implications of his thought.
    In a famous review of Love's Body published in Commentary in February 1967, Marcuse accused Brown of systematically 'mystifying' love, politics, and human nature. He was quite right, butthe charge allplies equally to Marcuse. ..."

Kors, Alan Charles and Silverglate, Harvey A., The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 415 pages. [source is again the 'more free speech for white males on campus' site, www.namebase.org]

"Alan Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties attorney in Boston, compiled this comprehensive account of what's been happening on American campuses over the last 15 years. It seems that the First Amendment is out of favor, and campus administrators have instituted kangaroo courts to enforce speech codes that protect the sensitivities of women, minorities, and gays. This has led to numerous prosecutions of straight white males -- both faculty and students -- for speech or expressive behavior that would have been considered legally protected on campuses just 25 years ago. Even today, as soon as one steps off campus, courts are consistently striking down these repressive speech codes. The problem is that students don't have the resources to pursue their rights off campus, which can take years of effort. This book is peppered with dozens of case histories and incidents on dozens of campuses, which are then juxtaposed with First Amendment case law in the real world (off-campus). What's going on here? The authors trace the problem back to Marcuse's theory of "repressive tolerance," which turned into "progressive intolerance." Not likely; it's rather a case of quotas and multiculturalism gone amuck. The "diversity administrators" on campus are buzzword thugs who know little of Marcuse or the 1960s -- sometimes they seem barely even literate."

1968: Commonweal vol. 89, p. 532 , "Herbert Marcuse: Prophet of Violence,"

• Google books search on "guru of the New Left"

1968: .

• .

1968: .

• .

• 1968: Feder, Donald, "Herbert Marcuse: Prophet of Violence," Human Events 28:32 (Aug. 10, 1968), 10 (1 page pdf).
  • Feder was at the time a senior at Boston University and State Chairman of the Massachusetts Young Americans for Freedom, as well as a Human Events summer intern. He went on to become a syndicated columnist at the Boston Herald from 1983 to 2002. Many of his columns from Human Events are available on their website. He later published Who's Afraid of the Religious Right? (Jameson, 1998) and A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America (1993). According to his website, he works as a freelance writer and media consultant and serves as the president of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation.
  • See also his bio at donfeder.com.
  • What follows are the caption and bolded inserts from the 1968 article:
    • Prof. Herbert Marcuse, the German-born political philosopher, has served as a catalyst for much of the current disorder on and off college campuses throughout the world.
    • And what comes after the Revolution? Why, rule by the elite, of course. Marcuse would replace representative democracy with a dictatorship controlled by those who rigidly adhere to his Marxist views. According to the professor, majority rule should be replaced by the "morality" of a presumedly infallible minority and such outmoded middle-class customs as freedom of speech should be abolished.
    • As frightening as it is to read the totalitarian views of Herbert Marcuse, it is even more frightening to see those views used as the basis for the actions of the violence-prone New Left.
    • The leader of these "students" is Danny Cohn-Bendit, another disciple of Marcuse, Cohn-Bendit has stated quite succinctly, "We are not worried about what to build later. For the moment we are concerned with the destruction of the existing system. Destruction for destruction's sake: pure Marcuse.
    • Rudi Dutschke, the extremely radical "sweet demagogue" of the German left, is a strong disciple of Marcuse. [in April 1968 Dutschke had been shot in the head by a right-wing would-be assassin]
  • One can also find a Feder invective against Herbert in his 2007 review of former NYT correspondent Chris Hedges' book American Fascists (p. 6):
    "Surveying the general failure of communist revolutions in the wake of the First World War, Marcuse and his colleagues identified religion and faith-based morality (to which they believed the working class was wedded) as the chief obstacles to achieving a workers’ paradise.
    In his Sixties book “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse describes “toleration” with a twist in the “progressive and humane society” he envisioned. Freedom of expression and assembly would be abolished for all organizations and movements which promote “chauvinism (and) discrimination based on race and religion.” To this, today’s left would add gender and what it terms sexuality.
    Hedges and Marcuse are intellectual twins separated by a few decades.
    The father of political correctness, Marcuse declared: “Certain things cannot be said; certain ideas cannot be expressed; certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.” "
  • See also Feder's April 2009 article " Simian Students Throw Feces at Conservative Speakers" (sounds like the old man's having a though time of it):
    "The left’s double-standard on speech goes back to Herbert Marcuse. A new left icon, Marcuse taught ‘60s radicals that it was their moral duty to censor the right. In his essay, “Repressive Tolerance” (published in 1965), the Marxist scholar explained that because conservatives are “oppressive,” revolutionaries should be “intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” Marcuse’s dictum was a great excuse for cowards and intellectual weaklings unable to deal with opposing views."