Tag: Jesse Jackson

To Be Continued….

Richard Barnes

The blog has gone a bit dormant because I am focused on my mother, who is fast approaching death. 

Happily, she has received many visitors, mostly family in the dozens — children, grandchildren, great grandchildren — which is a great joy to her and to us. She has also received heartwarming messages from old friends in Venezuela.

My sister, Elaine, and her husband, Christopher, have allowed tens of folks — and many children! — to come in and out of their home as they and we continue to care for Mom.

It is not a large home so space, time, and a bit of quiet to sit and “cogitate” for a decent blog post are practically nil, not to mention that my focus is elsewhere at the moment. I must indeed get some work done and I do that in coffee shops nearby before rushing back to the house.

By God’s grace, I will return to the series of posts on the destruction of our roots, the willful dumbing down of generations of Americans, and the old pathways we need to rediscover if we are to avoid oblivion.

For now, I’ll merely acknowledge — because it is so much “in your face” — the almost frantic push for “diversity” or “inclusion”, which is anything but true diversity or inclusion as it so obviously excludes and disparages our heritage in all walks of life: education, commerce, entertainment, professions (including the medical!), and much more.

When one seeks an education, one has to exclude in order to successfully acquire an understanding, however general, of what makes our life in the West worthwhile. What we learn must have a certain unity and design. This was generally the case up to about the time of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go!” Even so, however, the foundations were already being destroyed such that by the time of Jesse Jackson’s demands, only a push was necessary to make it happen.

And what has happened? Education has become a “grab bag” of lesser lights and a perverse denigration of very real if not heroic figures important to our heritage. If educators were honest, they would readily admit that what they are pushing is not “diversity” but rather, another heritage, be it African art, Aztec wonders, or Communist propaganda. That admission would at least have the refreshing quality of candor.

That forthrightness will not become evident with the current motley crew, however. At least not yet. 

Because their true intent is not diversity or inclusion. Their intent is the destruction of our heritage, which is undeniably Western and Christian.

And to fight back, it is necessary to know that heritage, at least in general.

“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”

Richard Barnes

In 1987, about 500 students at Stanford University gathered to protest against Stanford’s Western Culture curriculum. The invited speaker was 1984 and 1988 presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson. After his speech, he joined the students as they marched to present their demands to the faculty senate and chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”

News reports led Americans to understand that what students and men such as Jackson were demanding was simply that undergraduates be exposed to other cultures such as the Sumerian or Inca civilizations or the achievements of Japan or China or the Arabs.

However, as usual, the media’s reporting was mere obfuscation. 

Here is the chant again: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”

This was exactly what had already been happening in Stanford and universities across the land for decades, and would take on added fury thereafter: a bold attack against our culture. This attack was based on neo-Marxist and other radical doctrines (ironically derived from Western sources). And the attack succeeded.

(Paradoxically, the Western Culture class, similar to its predecessor Western Civilization, was the most popular of the classes in Stanford, and was attended by students of all cultural backgrounds. In effect, the protests were actually against fellow students who saw value in learning about their history.)

So, instead of teaching our inherited culture, universities engaged in counter-cultural warfare, teaching gay, feminist, Afrocentric, and myriad more subjects, all designed to demonstrate how such are oppressed and dominated by Western Culture. And now we see the same attacks waged by high school and elementary school teachers.

In other words, academics are now designed to relentlessly bombard upcoming generations with opprobrium against our heritage, our history, and our historical figures. 

This did not start in 1987. I vividly recall a conversation in 1975 wherein a professional colleague slandered George Washington, asserting as fact something he could not possibly know and for which there is not a scintilla of evidence, outside the fervid imaginations of his college’s professoriate. 

In the 1960s radicals in American colleges and universities had fully bought into the assertion that “Western Civilization” was an early 20th-century construct, taught only to justify American entry into Europe’s wars in order to defend “our civilization”. That, in fact, such teaching did not form a part of any curriculum of higher learning prior to World War I.

How intellectuals could affirm such drivel and get away with it will one day be a subject of marvel, I suppose. Akin to how their cerebral forebears fervently believed in bleeding, phrenology, and ouija boards.

A cursory review of the writings and speeches of our colonial and early republic religious and political leaders, as well as great amounts of surviving correspondence from many lesser lights of the era, clearly demonstrates their understanding of our heritage, which was first described as “Christendom” and much later as “Western Civilization”. 

Just to take one example, Jonathan Edwards, the American Puritan minister most associated with the 18th Century Great Awakening in America, preached a series of over 30 sermons on God’s providential dealings with men, which he had intended to develop into book form but died before realizing that intention. Nevertheless, the sermons were published posthumously in the 1770’s as A History of the Work of Redemption, and you can find this work in Banner of Truth and Amazon, should you be so inclined.

In this work, Edward’s integrated landmark moments in the story of Christendom, such as the conversion of Constantine, the fall of Rome, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Guttenburg Press, the Enlightenment deism, and more, and tied these into God’s providential history of His creation. He refuted atheistic Enlightenment narratives by demonstrating God’s work through history and nations. 

Edwards is just one of a great many American founding luminaries who not only possessed a deep knowledge of our heritage and culture, but also taught it to future generations. This is the heritage our academic, communications, corporate, medical, political, and other classes have so casually cast aside.

Nevertheless, as Professor Stanley Kurtz has written, “The Western tradition is the source of our founding principles and constitutional system. That is the most important reason for civic-minded citizens to study it.”

What is that “Western tradition”?

Jesse Jackson in Stanford, 1987, seeking to keep the majority of students from learning our heritage.

Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758