Books, Knowledge, History, Memories… How Erasing Them Changes Cultures, Countries, The World - Updated

By Marion Algier – AskMarion

A little while back, I wrote about how our children and future generations can’t miss or value what they don’t know, what they don’t understand and what they never even learned or heard about.  This is obviously common sense as well as the basis for the American Progressive movement, which has roots in Socialism, Fabianism, Marxism and a long list of other “isms” whose leaders all knew if you can strip away people’s allegiance to Country, Family and Religion you can reprogram the upcoming youth and the disenfranchised to follow the newest version of the power elitists’ plan whatever it is… right now it is globalism, and our government is full of Progressives who have been united in the dumbing down and manipulation of the populace of America for several generations now.

When you talk to Millenials most don’t know much about history, American or otherwise, most don’t go to church, and most don’t even know much about the background of their own families which generally includes a lack of solid holiday and personal traditions.

Then we, people who know history, love America and the Constitution, go to church or synagogue etc., and who value and want to pass on their family, American, and religious values and holiday traditions scratch our heads when younger people don’t understand why those are important; why they only read escapist and fictional (often dark) books and movies… if they read at all; and why they don’t believe in God or think it is a big deal when a Christmas Tree, Menorah, or worse yet a copy of our Constitution or the Ten Commandments can no longer be displayed in public buildings or the local town square.

We, from the ‘The Greatest Generation’ to the Baby-boomers to the parents right now missed the boat.  Everyone was too busy to notice that what made America great and what kept us free and united was being stripped out of our educational system, our activities and our daily lives and was being replaced my mind-numbing activities that were often more fun or just distracting yet often smattered with underlying anti-traditional messages or Propaganda… a book (Kindle)…  by Edward Bernays that is a must read for everyone.  We stopped talking to each other about things that matter and we stopped passing on to the each next  generation what was important to us both personally and collectively, but the Progressives were busy filling the vacuum.  And with all the new media, what mattered most has virtually been lost, re-written or replaced in the minds and lives of many in the present and will be lost to most in future generations.

Instead of teaching our children how to dream, how to think critically, how to search for knowledge, how to believe in things that are not always tangible tangible (from God to Santa Claus) and how to find the magic in the every day things of life, like bookstores, by both sharing from each of our hearts, histories and memories and by being an example, we are relegating our children to learn from educators who think individual and critical thinking are passé, from an American media who promote sex, violence and propaganda for our government, and from each other… a generation raised on social media, video games and often with little ‘live’ social interaction.  And instead of promoting our kids to develop their imaginations, which can lead to the development of future writers, movie-makers, inventors and even scientists, we are stifling their creativity by putting them into socialistic-style schools which promote conformity so everyone will think, act and be alike, so not to hurt anyone’s feelings. And we are robbing children as young as kindergartners of their time of innocence and beauty and replacing it with sex-education (awareness) classes that produce confusion and ugliness for psyches far too young to have to deal with that topic.

Recently I came across the article Views – The Wonders of Bookstores (below) by novelist Richard Russo.  It is this kind of love for knowledge, tradition (including types of medium) and special places and memories that we are no longer cultivating:

Local hero Three Lives & Company has been charming readers since 1978. [Photo: Christopher L. Smith]

Novelist Richard Russo pays homage to the shop where he fell in love with reading — and to the crucial role bookstores can still play in our lives.

The first great bookstore in my life wasn’t really a bookstore. Alvord and Smith was located on North Main Street in Gloversville, N.Y., and if memory serves, they referred to themselves as stationers. I don’t recall the place being air-conditioned, but it was always dark and cool inside, even on a sweltering summer day. In addition to a small selection of books, the store sold stationery, diaries, journals, and high-end fountain and ballpoint-pen sets, as well as drafting and art supplies. The shelves went up and up the walls, and I remember wondering what was in the cardboard boxes beyond my reach. The same things on the shelves below? Other, undreamed-of wonders? Alvord and Smith was a store for people who—though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time—had aspirations beyond life in a grungy mill town. It was never busy.

Because she worked all week, my mother and I ran errands on Saturday mornings, and Alvord and Smith was usually our first stop. There, I’d plop down on the floor in front of the bottom two shelves where the children’s books were displayed: long, uniform phalanxes of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, as well as the lesser-known but, to my mind, superior Ken Holt and Rick Brant series. I can still remember the thrill of coming upon that elusive number 11 or 17 in my favorite series, the one I’d been searching for for years, now magically there, where it hadn’t been the week before, filling me with wonder at the way the world worked, how you had to wait to the point of almost unbearable longing for the good stuff in life.

Coming out of Alvord and Smith, blinking in the sunlight, you could see all the way down Main Street to South Main, where the gin mills and pool hall were. Outside these stood dusky, shiftless, idle men, flexing at the knees and whistling at the pretty women who passed by. Occasionally my father was among them. Later, when I turned 18, I would join him in those same dives. Like the stationery store, they were cool and dark and mysterious, and for a while I preferred them, though I never really belonged. That’s what I’d felt as a boy, sitting on the floor at Alvord and Smith, touching, lovingly, the spines of books: Here was a place I belonged.

Many people love good bookstores, but writers? We lose our heads over them. We tell stories about them. We form lifelong attachments to our favorites. We do not hate e-books—well, okay, some of us do—but we owe our careers, at least my generation of writers do, to the great independents, so many of them long gone now. Those that remain gamely continue to fight the good fight, even as customers increasingly treat their stores as showrooms, then go home and surrender to the online retailer’s chilly embrace. They point and click and, without meaning to, undermine the next generation of writers and the one after that. Because it’s independent booksellers who always get the word out (as they did for me).

I’m an old fart, of course, more at home with paper and print than touch screens, and yes, I agree with those who argue that in the end it’s more about the message than the medium. But to me bookstores remain places of wonder. Like libraries, they’re the physical manifestation of the world’s longest, most thrilling conversation. The people who work in them will tell you who’s saying what. If you ask, they’ll tell you what Richard Russo’s up to in his new one, but more important, they’ll put in your hand something you just have to read, by someone you’ve never heard of, someone just entering the conversation, who wants to talk to you about things that matter.

Excerpted from My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers). Richard Russo’s latest book is Elsewhere: A Memoir (Kindle).

Online media… from novels to textbooks can be lost, changed and rewritten over-night.  In fact at many of the colleges and universities, the professors now have the ability to edit the books online that they assign to their students without notice.  That should be frightening to everyone!  Instead of teaching from original sources we are allowing liberal professors, or professors of any bent, to re-write any authors’ works.

And what about photos… How many people do you know that no longer print their photos and somewhere along the way have lost every single one because they weren’t backed up?

And the art of letter writing, keeping journals or even sending a quick handwritten note with a card or photo is almost extinct.  Yet how many beautiful and tragic histories would we not know if someone hadn’t kept a bundle of love letters (Kindle) or found the diary of a little girl named Anne Frank (Kindle)?

What if over night the grids we are all connected to mysteriously go off line, through a manmade or natural disaster?  What would you have left if every form of media and communication you have and had was on your computer, your phone, your a kindle type device?  Verses… what would you have left is you had printed photos, printed books, handwritten letters and journals?  It is certainly something to ponder!!  One only needs to watch Mad Max (Trilogy) or The Book of Eli [Blu-ray] to promote that thought process…

If you look at every aspect of American life, you will see the changes and many not for the better. It has been a process that has been going on for a long time, but with the election of Obama and the appointments of his like minded-administration, the process has been accelerated not only in speed, but into a final phase. Below is just a short reminder list or where we are and what has changed:

• Dad: Are You Part of “The Great Conversation”?
• Did You Know… the Founding Fathers and God
• Degradation of cultural standards, religion, tradition, and moral decency are always at the heart of cultural decline…
• American Traditions
• God Rest Ye Merry Merchants – Christmas: An American Holiday and Tradition to Love and Preserve
• Obama’s Ramadan Dinner… Traditional Easter Celebrations and National Prayer Breakfast Pretty Much Scrapped!
• Psychological covert war on hip-hop (on the whole entertainment industry) and on American Culture
• Mind Control Theories and Techniques Used By Mass Media
• COMMON CORE: Prediction, Propaganda or Indoctrination. “the government of United States is currently revisiting” the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution
• America – 14 Months Later

Things we thought to be impossible in America are now daily events and the window to change all this is becoming ever smaller!  For anyone who doesn’t believe that just checkout these Headlines from the past 24-hour news cycle:

• Priorities…  Not ready for Primetime ObamaCare site is up as well as Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move site… But the Amber Alert Site is/was down
• Yes to Pro-Immigration Rally at D.C. Mall with for Pay for Federal Workers, but ‘NO’ to Vets at Memorials; Just Like NO Permit to Bikers on 9/11 (Or So They Said) Just Wanting to Ride Through When Muslim Rally OK… But Flopped
• ObamaCare… And So It Begins: Exchange Leaks Private Information of 2,400 People in Minnesota
• Feds evict elderly couple from their home, cite shutdown
• Ohio School District That Was Forced to Permanently Remove Jesus Portrait Will Also Have to Pay Nearly $100K in Damages, Legal Fees
• Media blackout: One of Obama’s DREAMERS charged with raping a young girl
• The House already passed a Bill to Pay Our Troops on Time that would have covered survivor benefits that Harry Reid and Obama Declined, Now the Administration says that Military Death Benefits Are on Hold… Again Falsely Pointing at Toward the Opposition… Mr. President, “What Happened to the Buck Stops Here?”
• And Then There Was the Most Unpresidential and Untruthful Speech/Presser by Obama on the Shutdown…  But Admitting That His Whole Tactic Was About Turning Up the Heat on Republicans and Making Them Look Bad…  Thankfully that just might be backfiring!  Boehner says there will be negotiations! (Here are some negotiating suggestions.)

Yet most people, unless they watch Fox Cable News, Fox Cable Business News, TheBlazeTV (on TV or online) or get the information from the blogs and Internet.  It has gotten so bad that even liberal Jon Stewart said on Obamacare’s Sebelius: ‘Maybe She is Just Lying to Me!?!’ Ya think?

And if there is any hope of turning this cycle around it lies in the laps of grandparents, concerned parents do know and see what is going on, patriotic American willing to stand up at every opportunity, history buffs, educators who haven’t been brainwashed and pulled into the Common Core myth and the religious community who need to engage our youth, our children and adults willing to listen immediately.

Technorati Tags: Books,Bookstores,Tradition,Values,Culture,Society,Remembering,Memories,allegiance,Progressivism,Past,Love,Traditionalists,America,Freedom,Quaint,AskMarion,Traditions,Conversation,Propaganda,Sources,brainwashing,Medium,Writers,Professors,Common-Core,Educate Yourself,Childrhood,History,Rewritten-History,Communication,Connections,Dumbing-Down,Original-Sources

Juan Williams: Songs of the Summer of 1963 . . . and 2013

Rap songs celebrating tattooed thugs make a sad contrast with the sweet music of the March on Washington

By  JUAN WILLIAMS  - WSJ

Fifty years after the March on Washington, mystical memories of that seminal moment in the civil-rights era are less likely to focus on movement politics than on the great poetry and great music.

The emotional uplift of the monumental march is a universe of time away from today's degrading rap music — filled with the n-word, bitches and "hoes" — that confuses and depresses race relations in America now.

The poetry of Aug. 28, 1963, is best on view when Martin Luther King Jr. went off his speech script and started using a musical, chanting reprise — "I have a dream." The transforming insight born of the power of the interracial gathering at that time of turmoil, combined with the power of the spoken word, created an emotional message that still grips the American mind.

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood," King said, in verse that somehow spanned a history of slavery and the Founding Fathers' uniquely American promise of equality.

"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. I have a dream today!"

Getty Images  -  The March on Washington, Aug. 28, 1963

That poetry rose above the reality that as King spoke the civil-rights movement was stalled. Few schools had integrated after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision nine years earlier. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act was stuck in Congress. NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been killed in June. After a violent April in Alabama, in which protest marchers were beaten and set upon by police dogs, an estimated 15,000 more civil-rights activists had been arrested at protests across the country that summer.

King sailed past all those sad realities to invoke his soaring vision of the nation at racial peace. When he finished speaking, the crowd spontaneously broke into singing "We Shall Overcome," holding hands and swaying as if in communal prayer.

That sense of unity, promise and purpose was also evident in the music of the march. It's music that still stirs emotions to this day.

Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind," written in 1962, hit No. 2 on the Billboard charts just before the crowd gathered in Washington. When the folk-music trio Peter, Paul and Mary sang the song for the 250,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial that day, it became an interracial anthem for change. The song itself drew inspiration from two others: The lyrics brought to mind Woody Guthrie's "Bound for Glory," which included an allegory about newspapers blowing down city streets, and its melody came from a slave protest song called "No More Auction Block."

And so they sang in Washington: "Yes, how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free? Yes, how many times can a man turn his head, pretending that he just doesn't see? The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind, the answer is blowin' in the wind."

Sam Cooke, the black gospel and rhythm-and-blues singer began performing the Dylan song immediately after the march. He had been working on a song about the hurt he felt as a black man living with racism yet also with hope for better times. In December 1963, Cooke recorded "A Change Is Gonna Come." The song became a hit on black radio, another anthem of yearning for a nation without racial rancor.

"I go to the movie and I go downtown, somebody keep telling me don't hang around," Cooke wrote. "It's been a long time coming but I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will."

The next year, in 1964, Curtis Mayfield—also openly inspired by the music of the march—wrote an even more hopeful song: "People Get Ready." It, too, picked up on a frequent image of American folklore, the train of salvation.

Just as Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash had sung "This Train's Bound for Glory," Mayfield, a black Chicago singer steeped in church gospel music and the blues, sang about faith in the American struggle for racial justice.

"People get ready, there's a train a comin'; you don't need no baggage you just get on board . . . there ain't no room for the hopeless sinner who would hurt all mankind just to save his own. Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner. For there's no hiding place against the Kingdom's throne."

The uplifting lyrics made "People Get Ready" one of the earliest hits on both black and white radio. Bob Marley later used some of the words in his poignant song "One Love." Bruce Springsteen used the song as a healing anthem at concerts after the 9/11 terror attacks.

The songs by Dylan, Cooke and Mayfield have been ranked 14th, 12th and 24th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of greatest songs of all time. All three have roots in the March on Washington.

Now, half a century after the lyrical promise of that inspiring music and poetry, there is the inescapable and heartbreaking contrast with the malignant, self-aggrandizing rap songs that define today's most popular music.

In Jay-Z's current hit, "Holy Grail," he sings about "psycho bitches" and uses the n-word seven times while bragging that he is "Living the life . . . Illest [n-word] alive." Another top rapper, Lil Wayne, released a song in the spring with an obscenity in the title, using the n-word repeatedly and depicting himself as abusing "hoes" and "bitches."

Similar examples abound in the rap-music world and have persisted for years with scarcely any complaint from today's civil-rights leaders. Their failure to denounce these lyrics for the damage they do to poor and minority families—words celebrating tattooed thugs and sexually indiscriminate women as icons of "keeping it real" — is a sad reminder of how long it has been since the world heard the sweet music of the March on Washington.

Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill. He is the author of "Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965" (Kindle). (Viking, 1987).  A version of this article appeared August 27, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Songs of the Summer of 1963 . . . and 2013.

Technorati Tags: Juan Williams,music,choices,entertainment,tatoo,n-word,MLK,Black Community,culture,society,Misogyny,remembering,looking back,rap-music,wake-up America,civil rights,race relations,divide and conquer,parenting,power of the purse,civil-rights,Fox News,War on Woman,rappers,inspirational,freedom,degrading rap music

Lesbian Activist’s Surprisingly Candid Speech: Gay Marriage Fight Is a ‘Lie’ to Destroy Marriage

Video:  Lesbian Activist’s Surprisingly Candid Speech: Gay Marriage Fight Is a ‘Lie’ to Destroy Marriage

Update: During today’s Glenn Beck Radio Show, Mr. Beck spotlighted this story in conjunction with his thoughts on gay marriage. Watch that segment below.

TheBlaze: A 2012 speech by Masha Gessen, an author and outspoken activist for the LGBT community, is just now going viral and it includes a theory that many supporters of traditional marriage have speculated about for years: The push for gay marriage has less to do with the right to marry – it is about diminishing and eventually destroying the institution of marriage and redefining the “traditional family.”

Image: YouTube

The subject of gay marriage stirs powerful reactions on both sides of the argument. There are those who argue that legalizing it would diminish traditional marriage. And those advocating for gay marriage have long stated that the issue will not harm traditional marriage. Ms. Gessen’s comments on the subject seem to contradict the pro-gay-marriage party lines.

Gessen shared her views on the subject and very specifically stated;

• “Gay marriage is a lie.”
• “Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there.”
• “It’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.” (This statement is met with very loud applause.)

As mentioned above, Gessen also talked about redefining the traditional family. This may have something to do with the fact that she has “three children with five parents”:

“I don’t see why they (her children) shouldn’t have five parents legally. I don’t see why we should choose two of those parents and make them a sanctioned couple.”

The entire presentation is here, but the most curious portion starts about six minutes into the the audio:

The excerpt above was recorded on May 19, 2012 when Ms. Gessen appeared at the Sydney Writer’s Festival on a panel titled, “Why Get Married When You Can Be Happy?” She has been speaking on the subject of gay marriage, gay divorce, her curious custody situation and more for many years.

Here is the video from Monday’s Glenn Beck Radio Show.

Technorati Tags: TheBlaze,LGBT,activism,Beck,Glenn Beck,Gay Marriage,destruction of Marriage,Christians,wake-up America,stand-up America,fundamental transformation of America,dumbing down of America,traditional family,the plan,manipulation of the public,the goal,morals,family,society,religion,NWO,gay community,Masha Gessen,sheeple,guilt,political correctness,the agenda,the real agenda,culture

Mark Levin: Our Society is being “Driven into Decline by the Statists who are Devouring our Society” – Audio 3/22/13

Video: Mark Levin: Our Society is being "Driven into Decline by the Statists who are Devouring…

Technorati Tags: Mark Levin,you be the judge,society,decline

Social Degeneration - Parts 1 & 2

Someone at long last has had the courage to tell the plain, honest truth about race.

After mobs of young blacks rampaged through Philadelphia committing violence -- as similar mobs have rampaged through Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee and other places -- Philadelphia's black mayor, Michael A. Nutter, ordered a police crackdown and lashed out at the whole lifestyle of those who did such things.

"Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt," he said. "If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. He added: "You have damaged your own race."

While this might seem like it is just plain common sense, what Mayor Nutter said undermines a whole vision of the world that has brought fame, fortune and power to race hustlers in politics, the media and academia. Any racial disparities in hiring can only be due to racism and discrimination, according to the prevailing vision, which reaches from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Just to identify the rioters and looters as black is a radical departure, when mayors, police chiefs and the media in other cities report on these outbreaks of violence without mentioning the race of those who are doing these things. The Chicago Tribune even made excuses for failing to mention race when reporting on violent attacks by blacks on whites in Chicago.

Such excuses might make sense if the same politicians and media talking heads were not constantly mentioning race when denouncing the fact that a disproportionate number of young black men are being sent to prison.

The prevailing social dogma is that disparities in outcomes between races can only be due to disparities in how these races are treated. In other words, there cannot possibly be any differences in behavior.

But if black and white Americans had exactly the same behavior patterns, they would be the only two groups on this planet that are the same.

The Chinese minority in Malaysia has long been more successful and more prosperous than the Malay majority, just as the Indians in Fiji have long been more successful and more prosperous than the indigenous Fijians. At various places and times throughout history, the same could be said of the Armenians in Turkey, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Parsees in India, the Japanese in Brazil, and numerous others

There are similar disparities within particular racial or ethnic groups. Even this late in history, I have had northern Italians explain to me why they are not like southern Italians. In Australia, Jewish leaders in both Sydney and Melbourne went to great lengths to tell me why and how the Jews are different in these two cities.

In the United States, despite the higher poverty level among blacks than among whites, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994. The disparities within the black community are huge, both in behavior and in outcomes.

Nevertheless, the dogma persists that differences between groups can only be due to the way others treat them or to differences in the way others perceive them in "stereotypes."

All around the country, people in politics and the media have been tip-toeing around the fact that violent attacks by blacks on whites in public places are racially motivated, even when the attackers themselves use anti-white invective and mock the victims they leave lying on the streets bleeding.

This is not something to ignore or excuse. It is something to be stopped. Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia seems to be the first to openly recognize this.

This needs to be done for the sake of both black and white Americans -- and even for the sake of the hoodlums. They have set out on a path that leads only downward for themselves.

Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.

That includes a pattern of violent attacks on whites in public places in Chicago, Denver, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as blacks in schools beating up Asian classmates -- for years -- in New York and Philadelphia.

These attacks have been accompanied by explicitly racist statements by the attackers, so it is not a question of having to figure out what the motivation is. There has also been rioting and looting by these young hoodlums.

Yet blacks have no monopoly on these ugly and malicious episodes. Remarkably similar things are being done by lower-class whites in England. Anybody reading "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple will recognize the same barbaric and self-destructive patterns among people with the same attitudes, even though their skin color is different.

Anyone reading today's headline stories about young hoodlums turning the streets of London into scenes of shattered and burning chaos, complete with violence, will discover the down side of the brotherhood of man.

While the history and the races are different, what is the same in both countries are the social policies and social attitudes long promoted by the intelligentsia and welfare state politicians.

A recent study in England found 352,000 households in which nobody had ever worked. Moreover, two-thirds of the adults in those households said that they didn't want to work. As in America, such people feel both "entitled" and aggrieved.

In both countries, those who have achieved less have been taught by the educational system, by the media and by politicians on the left that they have a grievance against those who have achieved more. As in the United States, they feel a fierce sense of resentment against strangers who have done nothing to them, and lash out violently against those strangers.

During the riots, looting and violence in England, a young woman was quoted as saying that this showed "the rich" and the police that "we can do whatever we want." Among the things done during these riots was forcing apparently prosperous looking people to strip naked in the streets.

The need to bring people down in humiliation that marked the mass violence against the Armenians in Turkey nearly a century ago, and that later marked the Nazi persecutions of the Jews in Germany, is still alive and well in people who resent those who have achieved more than they have.

A milder but revealing episode in England some time back involved burglars who were not content to simply steal things but also vented their hostility by scrawling on the wall: "RICH BASTARDS."

In the United States, young black thugs attacked whites with baseball bats and took their belongings in Denver, while voicing their hatred of whites. But it is all a very similar attitude to what has been found in other countries and other times.

Today's politically correct intelligentsia will tell you that the reason for this alienation and lashing out is that there are great disparities and inequities that need to be addressed.

But such barbarism was not nearly as widespread two generations ago, in the middle of the 20th century. Were there no disparities or inequities then? Actually there were more.

What is different today is that there has been -- for decades -- a steady drumbeat of media and political hype about differences in income, education and other outcomes, blaming these differences on oppression against those with fewer achievements or lesser prosperity.

Moreover, there has been a growing tolerance of lawlessness and a growing intolerance toward the idea that people who are lagging need to take steps to raise themselves up, instead of trying to pull others down.

All this exalts those who talk such lofty talk. But others pay the price -- and ultimately that includes even those who take the road toward barbarism.

Please come back for the conclusion…

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of The Housing Boom and Bust.

Related:

Political Correctness

Multiculturalism

High School Principal With Principles

The Left’s Race Card

Intellectuals and Society

There has probably never been an era in history when intellectuals have played a larger role in society. When intellectuals who generate ideas are surrounded by a wide range of others who disseminate those ideas-- whether as journalists, teachers, staffers to legislators or clerks to judges-- the influence of intellectuals on the way a society evolves can be huge. Trying for years to understand the nature of that influence eventually led me to write the book "Intellectuals and Society," which has just been published.

Intellectuals generate ideas and ideas matter, whether those ideas are right or wrong, and they matter far beyond the small segment of society who are intellectuals. Ideas affect the fate of whole nations and civilizations. Nowhere is that more true than in our own times, when some people make suicidal attacks to kill strangers who have done nothing to them, as on 9/11, because the attackers are consumed with a set of ideas-- a vision-- and driven by the emotions generated by those ideas and that vision.

Whether in war or peace, and whether in economics or religion, something as intangible as ideas can dominate the most concrete things in our lives. What Karl Marx called "the blaze of ideas" has set whole nations on fire and consumed whole generations.

Those whose careers are built on the creation and dissemination of ideas-- the intellectuals-- have played a role in many societies out of all proportion to their numbers. Whether that role has, on net balance, made those around them better off or worse off is one of the key questions of our times.

The quick answer is that intellectuals have done both. But certainly, for the 20th century, it is hard to escape the conclusion that intellectuals have on net balance made the world a worse and more dangerous place. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the 20th century was without his supporters, admirers or apologists among the leading intellectuals-- not only within his own country, but in foreign democracies, where intellectuals were free to say whatever they wanted to.

Given the enormous progress made during the 20th century, it may seem hard to believe that intellectuals did so little good as to have that good outweighed by particular wrong-headed notions. But most of those who promoted the scientific, economic and social advances of the 20th century were not really intellectuals in the sense in which that term is most often used.

eam of human beings flying, were by no means intellectuals. Nor were those who conquered the scourge of polio and other diseases, or who created the electronic marvels that we now take for granted.

All these people produced a tangible product or service and they were judged by whether those products and services worked. But intellectuals are people whose end products are intangible ideas, and they are usually judged by whether those ideas sound good to other intellectuals or resonate with the public.

Whether their ideas turn out to work-- whether they make life better or worse for others-- is another question entirely.

The ideas that Karl Marx created in the 19th century dominated the course of events over wide portions of the world in the 20th century. Whole generations suffered, and millions were killed, as a result of those ideas. This was not Marx's intention, nor the intentions of many supporters of Marxian ideas in countries around the world. But it is what happened.

Some of the most distinguished intellectuals in the Western world in the 1930s gave ringing praise to the Soviet Union, while millions of people there were literally starved to death and vast numbers of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.

Many of those same distinguished intellectuals of the 1930s were urging their own countries to disarm while Hitler was rapidly arming Germany for wars of conquest that would have, among other things, put many of those intellectuals in concentration camps-- slated for extermination-- if he had succeeded.

The 1930s were by no means unique. In too many other eras-- including our own today-- intellectuals of unquestionable brilliance have advocated similarly childish and dangerous notions. How and why such patterns have existed among intellectuals is a challenging question, whose answer can determine the fate of millions of other people.

by Thomas Sowell - a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of The Housing Boom and Bust