CHAPTER 29: Gnosticism, the Frankfurt School, and Freirean Education Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is by Linda Goudsmit
https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27945/chapter-29-gnosticism-the-frankfurt-school
Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com and website: lindagoudsmit.com
The reader will recognize the unmistakable voice of Gnosticism in ideological Marxism and the myriad Marxist species attacking America and its children in schools today. Political Marxism, which focuses on social agency (an individual’s independent capability or ability to act on one’s own will) and class conflict, was reconstituted as cultural Marxism by the Frankfurt School (Chapter 15). Its members launched the Marxist Cultural Revolution against America in 1935. To understand the foundations of Frankfurt School tactical maneuvers, particularly social change through education, a 2009 article written by Timothy Matthews is very instructive. “The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt“[i] begins with a prescient quote by English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson:
Western civilization at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal growth. But none, like our own, has ever consciously faced the prospect of a fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of social life rests…. Civilization is being uprooted from its foundations in nature and tradition and is being reconstituted in a new organisation which is as artificial and mechanical as a modern factory. —Christopher Dawson. Enquiries into Religion and Culture (1936), p. 259.
Basically, the Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief—or even the hope of belief—that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation that they considered necessary to provoke socialist revolution. Their task, therefore, was as swiftly as possible to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy. To do this they called for the most negative destructive criticism possible [Marxist Critical Theory] of every sphere of life which would be designed to destabilize society and bring down what they saw as the ‘oppressive’ order. Their policies, they hoped, would spread like a virus, ‘continuing the work of the Western Marxists by other means’ as one of their members noted.
To further the advance of their ‘quiet’ cultural revolution—but giving us no idea about their plans for the future—the [Frankfurt] School recommended (among other things):
- The creation of racism offences
- Continual change to create confusion
- The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
- The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority
- Huge immigration to destroy identity
- The promotion of excessive drinking
- Emptying of churches
- An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
- Dependency on the state or state benefits
- Control and dumbing down of media
- Encouraging the breakdown of the family
One of the main ideas of the Frankfurt School was to exploit Freud’s idea of ‘pansexualism’—the search for pleasure, the exploitation of the differences between the sexes, the overthrowing of traditional relationships between men and women. To further their aims, they would:
• attack the authority of the father, deny the specific roles of father and mother, and wrest away from families their rights as primary educators of their children
• abolish differences in the education of boys and girls
• abolish all forms of male dominance—hence the presence of women in the armed forces
• declare women to be an ‘oppressed class’ and men as ‘oppressors’
[German communist political activist Willi] Münzenberg summed up the Frankfurt School’s long-term operation thus: “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.”
The [Frankfurt] School believed there were two types of revolution: (a) political and (b) cultural. Cultural revolution demolishes from within. ‘Modern forms of subjection are marked by mildness’. They saw it as a long-term project and kept their sights clearly focused on the family, education, media, sex and popular culture.
The fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions upon which the whole fabric of society rests, to quote Dawson, is the fundamental transformation of America that Barack Obama promised the nation in 2008. Frankfurt School Marxist Paulo Freire (Chapter 16) is a prime-time player in the transformation of America’s education industry. The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation,[ii] published in 1985, is Freire’s manual for educational deconstruction. Paulo Freire developed a politicized approach to education called critical pedagogy that rejects acquisition of knowledge as the educational objective. Instead, critical pedagogy advocates acquisition of knowledge for the sole purpose of social change.
James Lindsay’s 2022 book, The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of American Education,[iii] is a powerful indictment of Freire’s critical pedagogy. Lindsay’s conclusion is unequivocal in its condemnation of Freirean education:
Our kids currently go to Paulo Freire’s schools. These schools are unambiguously Marxist (unless we split hairs and call them neo-Marxist or Woke Marxist) in their architecture, pedagogy, methods and goals. They have abandoned the idea of educating American children to grow toward becoming successful and prosperous adults in American society because they want to undermine, destroy, and replace American society. Rather than teaching literacy, numeracy, or other educational basics, Freirean schools use subject matter like reading, writing, mathematics, history, social studies, and science lessons to teach Marxist consciousness of one or more forms at a time. As a result of more than a decade of this practice, American schoolchildren are almost universally failing in basic competency in virtually every subject at virtually every grade level. They are more “politically literate,” in the Freirean sense, than ever before, though. There’s no other way to put this than their education has been stolen from them and what replaces it is meant to be weaponized against the society upon which their futures depend….
Freirean education is Marxist education, and it has no place in any American public school system. It is also explicitly religious education, for those who have read Freire and understand just how prominently Liberation Theology (fusion of Marxist Theory and Catholic Theology) features not just in Freire’s underlying thought but in his explicit framing of education. This, rightly understood, makes its inclusion in the American public-school systems a severe First Amendment violation on multiple counts that, so far, goes unrecognized and uncorrected. Because it steals our children’s education from them, it also denies their legally protected right to obtain an education, which is a further potentially actionable violation against them still. Beyond these points, Freirean education is also a failing education….
Freirean education doesn’t work because it cannot work, if “working” in education means educating students. It explicitly and intentionally replaces gaining mastery in any subject with using that subject as a proxy for generating “political literacy,” by which is meant Marxist critical consciousness for engendering a cultural revolution, i.e., Maoist thought reform.
Freirean education is a euphemism for Maoist thought reform, which is a euphemism for brainwashing. To brainwash children is to make them adopt radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible pressure. Freirean education is Marxist brainwashing disguised as education. It uses the same mind-altering strategies against America’s children that were used against American POWs in the Korean War.
In a stunning address to the officers and supervisors of the San Francisco Naval Shipyard in the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory on October 4, 1956, Army psychiatrist Major William E. Mayer presented communism’s new method of absolute control, achieved without violence, called brainwashing. He described the new control technique as “a well-organized educational program.” The title of the address, “Brainwashing: The Ultimate Weapon,”[iv] reveals the power of educational programming.
Major Mayer studied over 4,000 returning prisoners of war from Korea in an attempt to better understand the new technique, and presented his incisive commentary on the new weapon. In his address, he began by comparing brainwashing to any other weapon. “First, it can be dissected, analyzed, taken apart, laid out on a table, understood. As long as you understand it is a weapon and go about it…. Secondly, once we understand this or any other new weapon, we start contriving defenses.”
What puzzled Major Mayer was what distinguished prisoners of war returning from Korea from those returning from previous wars. They were almost totally unable, or unwilling, to communicate with one another:
They were willing to communicate with us, not with each other. They would sit on the ward in the Tokyo Army Hospital—80 men. Eighty who’d spent three years of community captivity who knew each other intimately. You could walk on the ward any time of the day or night and it was silent. They just weren’t talking to one another. And that was a very interesting thing.
So, we started prying and trying to find out why it was. We found there was no buddy system among these people. None to compare with previous wars. We found there’d been no organized resistance of any significant kind. We found there’d been no organized escape committees. We found, in general, an abandonment of any system of internal organization or military justice even approaching in any remote way what had occurred among Americans in previous times of captivity. And so, we set to work to analyze how this had been accomplished. (p. 2)
Using intercepted documents written by Communists about Americans, Mayer and his team uncovered three premises from which the Communists approached their American prisoners. First, Americans are materialistic and opportunistic, and will always make a deal—they have a price. Second, Americans are ignorant about America, so you can teach them what you want them to know. Third, Americans are not a loyal people.
The first thing the Communists did was segregate the leaders. Leadership, which is valued in America, is what Communists call “poisonous individualism.” Mayer provides an astute explanation:
Once they had the leaders segregated, they invoked the techniques which have become universal throughout the Communist world. These techniques, psychologically, are of tremendous interest for the simple reason that they’re all designed with one objective in mind. All of these things are directed at making members of a group stay with a group and yet feel that they are apart, that they are isolated in a very real emotional, or psychological, way from the other members of the group. Now that’s a very important thing to achieve if you want to run a dictatorship. The Communist bugaboo is the counter revolution—meaning, the revolution. And revolutions begin with a conspiracy between two people. They inevitably have to begin that way. And the conspiracy enlarges and more and more people are enlisted, and finally the dictator is overthrown. And so, if you can prevent the first conspiracy between the first two people, you have a kind of social control which you cannot possibly achieve by machine guns or slave camps or torture or anything else. And that’s exactly what these devices are designed to do. Exactly the opposite of what we preach. Exactly the opposite of what we consider to be desirable.
They wanted to separate these men, to put them into solitary confinement cells of their own making, which were psychological in nature rather than steel and concrete. And of course, you can just build and maintain so many steel and concrete solitary confinement cells. But if you can engender this kind of solitary confinement, there is no limit on what you can do. They did this, first of all, by cultivating the typical kind of informing which is absolutely characteristic in every Communist society on earth. I’m sure you’ve read accounts which you’ve probably dismissed as being pretty incredible, of even, in the Communist society reporting things that their parents have done and getting them in trouble with the authority. This isn’t untrue at all. And it isn’t dreamed up as a horror story to make you hate Communism. It is a simple reality of Communist social organization. Informing, in our culture, is the lowest form of human endeavor. The informer meets a horrible end in many cases. Even in childhood informing is looked down upon almost instinctively. The tattletale is the kid who just doesn’t get along. But informing in the Communist society is a social and civic responsibility, and it’s constantly, repeatedly painted as such…. (pp. 3–4)
The social and civic responsibility of informing provided the opportunity for the second technique in Communist brainwashing: self-criticism and confession. If you were a POW who was informed upon, you were not beaten or tortured; instead, you were given the opportunity to confess your transgression:
They simply took you aside into a hut, one man took you, a man not in a military uniform, a young Chinese ordinarily, who was or claimed to be, and evidently was, a graduate of an American university, a man who spoke no Pidgin English, he spoke your kind of English. Maybe he even knew about your home town, he’d been there. And he was a very friendly kind of a guy. And he talked to you in a moderately stern voice and told you that you’d done wrong and they knew it, and they wanted you to confess it. And don’t be afraid to confess, he would say, you’re not in the hands of capitalists now, you’re in the hands of the people. And in our society, when you’ve made a mistake and you recognize it and confess it, recant, criticize your behavior, analyze it, and assert your determination not to repeat it, that’s all we ask. (p. 4)
Mayer describes the process of self-criticism and confession associated with informing. What distinguishes communist self-criticism from introspective American self-criticism is that communist self-criticism is a collective group event, and what is being criticized is an attitude, not an action. This is an extremely important distinction, because attitudes live in the subjective realm of thoughts and feelings.
In America there is a behavioral and legal distinction between thinking and doing. We are constitutionally free to think our thoughts and even speak them, but our actions are legally restricted by laws. In the Communist brainwashing technique, thoughts are treated as behaviors, and thought reform leading to behavior change is clearly the political objective.
Korean POWs were unprepared for this psychological weapon, and so they confessed without understanding its psychological effects. The result was an explosive growth in the informing system, and by the end of the first year in captivity, one in ten Americans were informers. At that point, the prisoners began to distrust each other, and when they were no longer sure who they could trust, they began withdrawing socially and stopped trusting anyone.
During the repatriation process it became painfully clear that the outcomes military analysts had predicted as possible consequences of brainwashing were woefully inaccurate. So, a group of men assembled by President Eisenhower created a military Code of Conduct to be used as a basis for behavior.
Major Mayer moved point-by-point through the six points of the military Code of Conduct, and explained how the lack of application of the Code was directly responsible for the success of the Communist brainwashing technique, and was the source of the puzzling social isolation exhibited by returning Korean POWs.
I have included the original Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States,[v] passed by Executive Order 10631 of President Dwight D. Eisenhower on August 17, 1955, that Mayer referenced:
CODE OF CONDUCT FOR MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES ARMED
FORCES
I
I am an American fighting man. I serve in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.
II
I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command I will never surrender my men while they still have the means to resist.
III
If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.
IV
If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way.
V
When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am bound to give only name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.
VI
I will never forget that I am an American fighting man, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.
——————————————————————————–
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Executive Order 10631—Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/235515
——————————————————————————–
The Code of Conduct applies to all members of the U. S. Armed Forces, at all times.
There are six (6) articles in the Code of Conduct.
The original Code of Conduct was established August 17, 1955 by President Eisenhower.
The legal authority supporting the Code of Conduct is The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ); https://ucmj.us/about-the-ucmj/
Major Mayer’s commentary on the specific points in the Code is instructive, and his description of the devastating psychological effects of Communist brainwashing techniques is particularly relevant today.
In closing, Major Mayer returned to the Code of Conduct and reminded the audience, “The Code is a code of standards of behavior for any fighting man fighting any kind of a battle.” President Eisenhower understood in 1956 that the war was not over because the shooting had stopped. America was still fighting an ideological battle at home that required strict adherence to the Code of Conduct. Mayer explained how adherence to the Code is a matter of discipline, and that our national defense begins with teaching discipline in the family home:
Discipline, somehow, has become synonymous with abandoning your own—your own self-respect. Abandoning your individualism and becoming a helpless machine, a part of the military machine. And that isn’t discipline at all. The only kind of discipline that really exists and really works is an internalized system of values, a set of standards existing within the individual which characterize and guide his behavior whether there’s a cop or a shore patrolman standing there or not. And it’s this kind of discipline we have to seek from people. This is the kind of discipline that makes individuals able to join a team. Individuals able to respond to competent leadership. And individuals able to have the intestinal fortitude necessary to be leaders. To set limits, to award punishment and reward. And that includes even to our children. And naturally, of course, this is where the problem mainly lies.
Discipline is not taught when a kid is 18 years old. It’s taught in homes, and Sunday schools sometimes, in churches. It’s taught partly in the military. It’s taught mainly in the family. It’s taught from the cradle onward or it’s not ever adequately taught at all. It’s taught at parents’ knees, and even possibly across parents’ knees. It has to be taught throughout the educational process. And that educational process includes the training and indoctrination of people who work at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard. And who work in every one of our specialized, highly technical, scientific organizations. We even try to teach this to medical officers and dental officers who come into the Army. But it’s awfully late at that point. We need a lot of help. We need a lot of thought about how to do this. We don’t pretend to have the answers. We know that the Communist is one of the most finely disciplined enemies we have ever encountered. He is not necessarily just blindly disciplined, either. He works at what he’s working at with great intensity and sincerity.
And the solution to—at least suggestions about the solutions would seem to be obvious. We found men with a real system of values who were committed in their thinking. Who had roots, who had loyalties, who actively thought about it, who resisted in some small but symbolic way. These were the men who survived in largest number, who came out almost unscathed from the experience. But the opportunist, the guy who’s trying to look for the easy way, the person who doesn’t believe in the value of work as something in itself, who doesn’t believe in service unless there’s something in it for me—this guy’s a sitting duck. This was demonstrated over and over again. And so, you can solve this problem, you who are parents or school teachers or managers, or supervisors. You can solve it little by little by little. It’s the only way it ever will get solved. (pp. 14–15)
Major Mayer’s address was an appeal to the civilian sector to recognize and actively do its part for national security by strengthening family bonds of loyalty and raising rational, responsible adults who are loyal to America and capable of preserving and protecting our constitutional republic by actively adhering to the Code of Conduct at home and in military service.
The most stunning observation Mayer made was that the key to our defense against brainwashing is recognizing the well-organized educational program as an offensive weapon. Until Freirean education is recognized as an offensive weapon, we cannot mount a defense against the Marxist Cultural Revolution in America today.
Consider the parallels. Students, particularly young children, are basically imprisoned for most of their day in government schools and separated from their leadership––their parents. It is a psychological and emotional vacuum where they are subjected to Freirean critical pedagogy by activist teachers, who have been trained in critical pedagogy and embrace its political objectives of “liberation.” The children are told, “We are here to help you and support you. We understand you and won’t tell your parents.”
Freirean education’s favored topic is race essentialism. Essentialism is the philosophical term that means things have a set of characteristics which make them what they are, and the task of science and philosophy is the discovery and expression of these characteristics. It is the doctrine that essence precedes existence, and provides a convenient foundation for Marxist critical race theorists promoting the fiction that the United States is systemically racist. Revisionist history and distortion of facts are foundational for advancing the Marxist Cultural Revolution in America.
Today, Marxist critical race theory, founded upon race essentialism, is brainwashing American children in anti-American racialism that reduces their identity to either blackness or whiteness. Instead of teaching the common denominator of being American that unifies the nation, children are being divided by race and taught to see the world as literally black and white. Critical race theory is often repackaged and disguised as Social and Emotional Learning (Chapter 20).
Christopher F. Rufo’s “Parental Guidebook, Fighting Critical Race Theory in K–12 Schools“[vi] (Chapter 12) provides a useful definition of critical race theory, and lists nine key concepts to help the reader recognize symptoms of brainwashing in their children.
When your child expresses any variation of the racialist themes below, it is evidence of Marxist brainwashing. Black is used throughout Marxist Critical Theory to include all people of color:
1. Race essentialism = White is bad and black is good
2. Collective guilt = White people are oppressors and black people are oppressed
3. Opposition to equality under the law = Legal equality, nondiscrimination, and colorblindness are “camouflages” to uphold white supremacist structures
4. Opposition to meritocracy = Meritocracy is a mechanism to uphold racist structures
5. Active racial discrimination = The government should actively discriminate against the privileged (white) with racial quotas, race-based benefits, and race-redistribution of wealth
6. Restriction of free speech = The First Amendment advances the interests of white supremacy and systemic racism, and the government should restrict speech that is “racist” or “hateful”
7. Abolition of whiteness = The white race should be abolished
8. Neo-segregation = Races should be segregated with separate graduations, meetings, facilities, living quarters, training programs for whites and blacks
9. Anti-capitalism = America is an “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” that allowed whites to extend domination from slavery to the free-market society. The solution is redistribution of private property and dismantling the system of capitalism
We are a world at war. The American education industry is an instrument of globalism’s war on the nation-state, specifically targeting our children’s minds, because children are the future of every society on Earth. The globalists are exploiting wartime brainwashing techniques to ideologically groom America’s children for their future in the planetary globalist Unistate.
The Marxist enemy is applying the same brainwashing tactics in American schools against children as young as kindergarten that were successfully used by the Communists in Korea against American POWs. If the enemy can brainwash trained soldiers, it can certainly brainwash children.
Only by recognizing critical pedagogy as weaponized education, and its anti-American critical race theory as brainwashing, can we defend and protect our children, ourselves, and our nation. Whether used against adults or children, the military objective of brainwashing is reeducation.
The tactical objective is to eliminate the ability to think critically. The strategic objective is to turn Americans against themselves, their families, and their country. Changing the hearts and minds of Americans is Cultural Revolution—revolution without bullets.
Today’s American parents and grandparents must adapt the Military Code of Conduct to civilian life and apply the Code’s principles. We must stand together and unapologetically defend, preserve, and protect our American way of life in order to overhaul the anti-American education industry.
We must pledge our allegiance to the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands. We do this by getting actively involved in our children’s education. We read what they are reading. We go to their schools and voice our opposition to anti-American lessons. We run for school boards. We attend school board meetings and voice our opposition to anti-American lessons, teachers, principals, and school board members, and we seek their removal when necessary.
The War on America is a war on our children. We must fight on their behalf, because they are helpless to protect themselves.
[i] The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt; http://www.judeochristianamerica.org/ConsReading/The-Frankfurt-School-Timothy-Matthews.pdf
[ii] The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, Paulo Freire, Bergin & Garvey, 1985; https://archive.org/details/politicsofeducat00frei_1
[iii] The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of American Education, James Lindsay, New Discourses, 2022; https://newdiscourses.com/2022/12/introducing-the-marxification-of-education/
[iv] Brainwashing: The Ultimate Weapon; https://usa-anti-communist.com/pdf1/Mayer_Brainwashing_Ultimate_Weapon/Brainwashing_The_Ultimate_Weapon-Major_William_E_Mayer-Oct4_1956.pdf
[v] Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States; https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-10631-code-conduct-for-members-the-armed-forces-the-united-states
[vi] Parental Guidebook, Fighting Critical Race Theory in K–12 Schools; https://christopherrufo.com/p/crt-parent-guidebook
Comments are closed.
