David

Karki

Read David's bio and previous columns here

March 3, 2008

The Cold War Never Ended; Media, Education and Hollywood are the New Soviets

We all remember well that November night back in 1989, when the Berlin Wall finally came down. A glorious day most thought would never come, yet it did. And just as quickly, most declared the 45-year-long Cold War over, never to return, what with Marxism soon thereafter losing its top sponsor in the Soviet Union.

What most didn't count on, however, was that the forces of hard leftism would simply regroup and go domestic. Having learned the hard way that the worst thing they could do for their cause was to be overt about it, they settled down to the business of the long slog through America's institutions. Steadily, the four main sources from which most people obtain what passes for information were co-opted and eventually controlled by the left.

And now, the cultural Marxism that they routinely espouse is scarcely noticed and certainly not recognized as such by the masses. Much like the frog-in-a-pot-of-boiling-water analogy, the heat was turned up slowly enough that nobody noticed until they were cooked.

If we are to turn the tide against the forces of collectivism, and stop them from killing the goose that lays the golden eggs with their forcible redistribution of income – which naturally destroys any incentive to invest, work or innovate and multiplies the incentive for sloth, irresponsibility and parasitic living – we must first neutralize these four institutions that the liberal left has turned into de facto propaganda outlets for their worldview. They are:

Mainstream media. To anyone but the hard left, any pretense of the media being anything like Sergeant Joe Friday (“Just the facts, Ma'am”) is laughable. At best, they slant stories to manipulate the outcome of political decisions as they would like to see. At worst, they use their megaphone as a sword or club, to outright damage or destroy those who stand in the way of implementing those outcomes.

But while their ratings have suffered greatly for it and new media outlets like talk radio and Internet blog sites have come about to supply the demand for conservative news that their bias created, the mainstream media continues unabated. And enough of the masses still consume and believe their output to give liberalism the edge.

K-12 public education. Turning your child over to the state to “educate” . . . an idea straight out of Moscow.  And then you wonder why your little one turns you in for not being “green” enough and is an expert at unrolling a condom over a cucumber, but can't make change for a dollar or find his hometown on a map. Obviously, the main purpose of government controlling “education” is to indoctrinate, all the better to keep these young skulls full of mush voting liberal in perpetuity.

Perhaps the single most important thing we could do to jump-start the effort against leftism is to pull children out of public schools. And don't think the teachers' unions and liberal politicians don't know this. Why else do you think they scream bloody murder at the mere thought of losing one dollar, even though in many states they are far and away the single biggest budget item, consuming the majority of the available revenue? Because so long as they have the schools, they have and maintain a power base.

Colleges. And whatever indoctrination K-12 doesn't manage to complete, the college or university does. What were once training schools for ministers in centuries past and should be the most open-for-discussion places we have, are instead hotbeds of radical leftism that squash dissent in the name of political correctness. In many ways, campuses are training grounds for activism rather than institutions of higher learning.

And they get millions of tax dollars, and tens of thousands of tuition dollars to boot. (Yet all those subsidies never get them to lower tuition, meaning that their awful product is way overpriced at the same time.)

Hollywood. Last, there is our ostensible “entertainment” industry. One need only listen to any Academy Award telecast at random from the past few years to know where they're coming from. Or recognize that a billion bucks of potential profit was disregarded rather than distribute Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. The list goes on. Clearly, they are more interested in pushing an agenda than anything else.

It's easy to say that one simply shouldn't consume their product, but when it's everywhere, there aren't many alternatives, and it has the powerful effect on our culture it does, that's easier said than done. And that fact is precisely why they produce what they do.

Only when the avalanche of leftist influence from these institutions is stanched will conservative ideas have a chance to take root. So long as it flows freely, the battle is steeply uphill and we'll likely be outnumbered.

The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union went away nearly 20 years ago, but the ideology that created them is alive and well. One very large battle was won then, but the Cold War is still with us. And will probably remain for a long time to come.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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