The Surprising Origins of Critical Race Theory

By L.K. Samuels

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been cited as an offshoot of Karl Marx’s theory of class struggle, which was designed to pit one class against another so as to foment worker-led revolutions. It is also widely accepted that the Marxian Frankfurt School in Germany reworked Marx’s “social conflict theory” in the 1950s by adding “race” to their long list of “oppressed” minorities. But historically, the Frankfurt School theorists were latecomers to the racial theory table. They were not the originators of Critical Race Theory. A revolutionary socialist movement had already existed decades before in Germany. These racial justice warriors sought to pit one race against another and encourage the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor. They called themselves German National Socialists.

After World War II, the Frankfurt School intellectuals and academics began to plagiarize the “racial struggle” and “victimhood” theories that had originated with Nazi theorists in the mid-1920s. It is true that the Nazi theorists, many with Marxist leanings, were less sophisticated in their racial superiority approach. But their long-term goals on racial disparity and struggle were remarkably similar.

The National Socialists, like the Marxian Frankfurt School leaders, dedicated themselves to fighting racial oppression imposed by other advantaged races. But in the case of the Nazis, they identified the “oppressed race” as the Aryan and German people and the “oppressor race” as the Jews. They believed that the Jews controlled the world as members of a wealthy and privileged race that supposedly mistreated the so-called Aryan races. 

To demean the so-called “Jewish oppressors,” the National Socialists taught German children that the Jews, Jewish-run banks, and capitalists were persecuting the German nation and its people. This “oppressor versus oppressed” narrative is pure classical Marxism, which had devastating effects across the annals of modern history. Such racist nonsense divides society, creating hostile tribalism and unending ethnic violence.

Of course, this racial struggle was exactly what the Nazi propagandists intended in their effort to purge certain “oppressor” races. They wanted only one race to exist in German-controlled lands. That is why Critical Race Theory is so poisonous. Its endgame almost always results in horrific final solutions to punish so-called privileged and oppressor races.

The march towards securing superiority over an oppressor race began in earnest after the Nazis nationalized most German schools in 1933.  School administrators quickly inserted racist policies into newly rewritten textbooks and school policies. With the assistance of the National Socialist Teachers League, (the official Nazis teacher’s union), students were inundated with racial theories that invaded most disciplines. Nazi party officials promoted the Führer’s Volksgemeinschaft concept of equality, which included social engineering, social justice, racial tribalism, national collectivity, and social Darwinism. But their biggest mission was to implant biased ethnic-racial studies into Germany’s classrooms.

According to Richard J. Evans in The Third Reich in Power 1933-1939, Nazi educators and administrators from the Education Ministry mandated that the topics of “racial biology” and “racial science” be inserted into almost every school course across Germany. Biology was heralded as the key to understanding and identifying racial differences. The National Socialists even developed a racial-social arithmetic for their textbooks to indoctrinate students. For example, this racial mathematics used formulas to design calculations that would determine how many blond Aryans lived in a German population.

The German language did not escape this politicization of education.  Language had to focus on speech patterns to provide a racial background that would subliminally implant German schoolchildren with the racial-socialist ideology of Nazism.  The study of geography had to bow to a racial makeover that required Nazi ideology to be more compatible with heroism, home, and race. Amazingly, Nazi educators even found ways to link climate to race.

Not surprisingly, such old-style racism is now returning to our world, mostly voiced by progressives, the woke mob, and Black Lives Matter. Similar to the National Socialists, this orthodoxy is a hodgepodge of social justice, oppressor-versus-oppressed victimhood, and racial tribalism. A German poster from 1933 highlights the Nazi’s dedication to a socially just racial state, proclaiming, “Because Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich wants social justice, big Jewish capitalism is the worst enemy of this Reich and its Führer.”

A number of present-day “anti-racist” activists are emulating the National Socialists’ pogrom policies. For instance, co-founder of Black Lives Matter in Toronto, Yusra Khogali, called for the extermination of certain races. Taking jabs at white privilege and oppressor races and gender, she mused in 2016 that she had an urge “to kill men and white folks.” Moreover, she tweeted that “white skin is subhuman.” Hitler and his Nazi horde spouted the same “subhuman” accusations against Jews, and eventually acted upon their convictions in the Holocausts.

The origins of Critical Race Theory have a dark history.  Why would anyone justify racism, racial superiority, or racial inferiority in today’s world? Such inflammatory rhetoric has never led to racial or social equality. CRT must be discarded into the ashbin of history, along with any resurgence of National Socialism and its socialist-racist narratives.

L.K. Samuels is the author of Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum (2019)

Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00089

americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/the_surprising_origins_of_critical_race_theory.html

The favorite trick of the Left - Cultural Marxism

Cultural Marxism. The favorite trick of the Left is to redefine words and language so they can talk about their ideology in public without alarming those who don't understand what they are really saying. They don't believe in equality as an aspirational value. They believe in elevating or suppressing groups disproportionately according to an arbitrary interpretation of how oppressed or privileged a particular groups history is, not in fact, but in their twisted intersectional revisionist version. Cultural Marxism begs for itself the privilege of becoming its own tyranny. The issue is never the issue. It's about power and control.

Pete Buttigieg's father was a Marxist professor lauded the Communist Manifesto

The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.

Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel's more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.

He was an adviser to Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that published articles “that seek to discuss, elaborate, and/or extend Marxian theory,” and a member of the editorial collective of Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern theory, literature, and culture. He spoke at many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other gatherings of prominent Marxists.

In a 2000 paper for Rethinking Marxism critical of the approach of Human Rights Watch, Buttigieg, along with two other authors, refers to "the Marxist project to which we subscribe."

Editor-in-Chief Hugo Gurdon on the benefits of Washington Examiner magazine

In 1998, he wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about an event in New York City celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. He also participated in the event.

"If The Communist Manifesto was meant to liberate the proletariat, the Manifesto itself in recent years needed liberating from Marxism's narrow post-Cold War orthodoxies and exclusive cadres. It has been freed," he wrote.

"After a musical interlude, seven people read different portions of the Manifesto. Listening to it read, one could not help but be struck by the poignancy of its prose," he wrote. The readers "had implicitly warned even us faithful to guard against conferring upon it the status of Scripture, a repository of doctrinal verities."

“Equity, environmental consciousness, and racial justice are surely some of the ingredients of a healthy Marxism. Indeed, Marxism's greatest appeal — undiminished by the collapse of Communist edifices — is the imbalances produced by other sociopolitical governing structures,” Buttigieg wrote.

Paul Kengor, a professor at Grove City College and an expert in communism and progressivism, said Buttigieg was among a group of leftist professors who focused on injecting Marxism into the wider culture.

"They’re part of a wider international community of Marxist theorists and academicians with a particular devotion to the writings of the late Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who died over 80 years ago. Gramsci was all about applying Marxist theory to culture and cultural institutions — what is often referred to as a 'long march through the institutions,' such as film, media, and especially education," Kengor told the Washington Examiner.

Pete Buttigieg, an only child, shared a close relationship with his father. In his memoir Shortest Way Home, Pete called his dad a “man of the left, no easy thing on a campus like Notre Dame’s in the 1980s.”

He wrote that while he did not understand his parents’ political discussions as a young child, “the more I heard these aging professors talk, the more I wanted to learn how to decrypt their sentences, and to grasp the political backstory of the grave concerns that commanded their attention and aroused such fist-pounding dinner debate.”

Pete wrote that his dad was supportive when he came out as gay. He and his husband bought a house in South Bend around the corner from his parents, which gave the couple “a good support network despite our work and travel schedules” when they decided to get a dog.

The elder Buttigieg was best known as one of the world’s leading scholars of Gramsci.

Gramsci thought cultural change was critical to dismantling capitalism. Nevertheless, although critical of certain aspects of Bolshevism, Gramsci endorsed Vladimir Lenin’s “maximalist” politics and identified within the Leninist faction of the Italian communists. He went to Moscow in 1922 as the official representative of the Italian Communist Party and returned home to lead the resistance against Italy’s Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, on the orders of Lenin, while his new wife and children stayed in the USSR.

Those efforts landed Gramsci in an Italian prison, where he lived much of his brief life, which ended in 1937 at the age of 46. Yet his time behind bars was also some of his most prolific, leading to a collection of essays called the Prison Notebooks. Buttigieg completed the authoritative English translation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and his articles on Gramsci have been translated into five languages.

Buttigieg was a founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society, an organization that aims to “facilitate communication and the exchange of information among the very large number of individuals from all over the world who are interested in Antonio Gramsci's life and work and in the presence of his thought in contemporary culture.”

In 2013, Buttigieg spoke at a $500,000 outdoor New York City art installation honoring Gramsci.

Buttigieg died just days after Mayor Pete announced his 2020 presidential exploratory committee.

Lis Smith, communications adviser for Buttigieg’s presidential exploratory committee, declined to comment on how his father influenced his political beliefs or on Pete Buttigieg's thoughts on Marxist thinkers such as Gramsci.

Pete Buttigieg said in an MSNBC interview on March 20 that he considers himself a capitalist but that the system needs changes.

“The biggest problem with capitalism right now is the way it's become intertwined with power and is eroding our democracy,” Buttigieg said, noting the influence of big businesses in government.

A self-described progressive, Buttigieg has called to abolish the Electoral College system, supports a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and thinks that climate change is a national security threat.

In another MSNBC interview in February, Buttigieg said that socialism “is a word in American politics that has basically lost all meaning” and “has been used as a kill switch to stop an idea from being talked about.”

After his son won his mayoral election in 2011, Joseph Buttigieg told the Notre Dame student newspaper that he never expected him to run for office.

“I know Peter has been interested in politics for a long time,” Buttigieg said. “At home we always discussed government affairs, but never in that way … I’m very pleased because he’s doing something he genuinely likes."