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FORUM Commentary The Washington Times The power to destroy with one generation by Gerald L. Atkinson 11 June 2000
The elites of the Baby Boom generation have come to power in America, as every generation eventually does. But this generation is special. Their power elites render it, potentially, the most dangerous generation in our nation's history. This generation learned a powerful, yet destructive, ideology in school. Al Gore's mentor at Harvard began his courses with readings from Karl Marx and ended with Sigmund Freud's sex-based psychology, according to The Washington Post. He ended one lecture with the challenge, "Marx plus Freud equals Truth." Ben Stein remembers days like that at Yale. "We could make the law whatever we wanted it to be," he said recently in Washingtonian Magazine. "The law students took over the classrooms....[We were taught by] 'Fred the Red' Rodell...'Tommy the Commie' Emerson." It's not the Clintons' fault, he explained, its our generation who learned that law is not built on precedent. Rather law is whatever the judge says. Negative examples of this line of thinking abound today. A female Army General, famous for her New Age warfare concept of COOing (Consideration of Others), recently ruined another general's career by claiming he inappropriately touched her four years earlier. One cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point explained why such unprovable accusations are harmful to society. "Like many of my fellows, I came here to learn what it takes to lead men in combat," he said. "Rather than teach us character and a reverence for honesty and integrity, the Academy shoved COO down our throats." At the U.S. Naval Academy civilian professors teach a new brand of ethics in the Leadership Department. This brand seeks to indoctrinate our future core combat naval leadership into accepting the alien concept of women in combat. All this is driving young, morally demanding military officers out of the services. "Young officers are getting out because they feel out of touch with leadership," an internal Army study says. "Many believe there needs to be a clean sweep of senior leadership." These events are, unfortunately, all part of the Boomer generation's rising tide. The wave of Boomers now moving up the beach were influenced by a group of intellectual Marxist revolutionaries, who came to the United States in the 1930s. They spread to several major universities, dissolved moral standards during the counter-culture revolution in the mid-1960s, and are now gone. But their students now seem set to wash over the American culture. The true Marxists, while here, struck a harmonic chord in the hearts of the elites of the idealistic Boomer generation during their young adulthood in the mid-1960s. They are exemplified by Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton -- the icons of Ben Stein's generational description at Yale. Crimson red Al Gore is there too. They now connect to us through every institution in the land, including our military. But how could all of this have come about? Why are the American people so passive in the face of this tyranny? The heart of American educational thought reform can be likened to George Orwell's "1984," Alan C. Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, argues in his best-selling book, "The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses." Political correctness or what many of us call cultural Marxism is not yet the end of human liberty because it "does not have [at present] power commensurate with its aspirations," Mr. Kors writes. Such power is, however, resident on university campuses, where political correctness reigns supreme. However, thought reform is making its way "inexorably to an office near you," Mr. Kors warns. "If we let it occur at our universities and accept it passively in our own domains, then a people who defeated totalitarians abroad will surrender their dignity, privacy and conscience to the totalitarians within." Americans are facing this loss every day in nearly every walk of life. The attempts to change the world view of the populace have become mainstream in America. It all seems to be a huge social-engineering project to change the very nature of our fragile experiment with democracy. We have deceived ourselves. While winning the Cold War abroad, we were slowly and almost imperceptibly, losing a war at home to cultural Marxism. In fact, we are so far behind that many have thrown their hands up in despair and surrendered. They have been rendered passive to the totalitarian impulses of the power elites of the Boomer generation. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- GERALD ATKINSON The writer's most recent book, "From Trust to Terror: Radical Feminism is Destroying the U.S. Navy," was published by Atkinson Associates Press in 1997. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- |