Cultural Hegemony - Who is Antonio Gramsci?

HEGEMONY:
1. preponderant influence or authority over others; domination
2. the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group

I was listening to a terrific Blog Radio show late last night, Evil Conservative Radio, and wow, did the host put my brain to work.

It has become more than obvious, at least to me anyway, that the DC Progressives  and POTUS are followers of radical ideological beliefs.  Evidence suggests Obama is a Marxist, and it is well documented that he spent years teaching community organizing groups the philosophical recommendations of Saul Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals.  It has also been pointed out by many in the Conservative Media that the Cloward Piven Strategy is in full play.

But what I did not know, is that it would seem the so-called Progressives in the Capitol and the White House are also students of one Antonio Gramsci. Stick with me here, at least through the list below.

Who?

This is likely to be a long blog post, so let me start with Gramsci's points on Cultural Hegemony:

• There is no truth, only competing agendas.
• All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
• There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
• The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
• Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
• The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
• For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
• When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

Does any of this sound like it's being played out in America right now? It sure did to me. It's sick and twisted, but it's what the Progressives are using. I think the more we learn of the tactics used by these people, the more we can educated others on how to expose their agenda.

From a posting on A War of Position:

Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891.  He attended the University of Turin on scholarship and joined the Socialist Party there in 1914.  While in Turin he made a name for himself as a journalist and leader in Turin’s factory council movement.  He joined a Socialist congress walkout and in 1921 helped to form the Communist Party of Italy, which he became leader of.  Between 1922 and 1926, Gramsci and the party struggled against the rise of Italian fascism under Mussolini.  Political repression was rampant and reached a head in 1926 under a new set of emergency laws.  Gramsci was arrested, despite supposed parliamentary immunity, and his trial was little more than a show.  He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.  Gramsci suffered from health complications his entire life and his time in prison aggravated these problems.  Due to the severity of his condition, only eight years after his arrest Gramsci transfered to a guarded hospital in Rome where he spent the last two years of his life before his death in 1937.

Much of Gramsci’s work comes from a series of notebooks he kept while in prison.  The notebooks themselves cover a wide array of topics and their translation and interpretation has been the focus of numerous scholars since their first appearance in 1946.  Of particular interest to me are his writings on domination, hegemony and counter-hegemony.

Can I just point out one thing here? Mussolini didn't like him. Mussolini. Hello?

More:

The traditional Marxist theory of power was a very one-sided one based on the role of force and coercion as the basis of ruling class domination. This was reinforced by Lenin whose influence was at its height after the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Gramsci felt that what was missing was an understanding of the subtle but pervasive forms of ideological control and manipulation that served to perpetuate all repressive structures. He identified two quite distinct forms of political control: domination, which referred to direct physical coercion by police and armed forces and hegemony which referred to both ideological control and more crucially, consent. He assumed that no regime, regardless of how authoritarian it might be, could sustain itself primarily through organised state power and armed force. In the long run, it had to have popular support and legitimacy in order to maintain stability.

By hegemony, Gramsci meant the permeation throughout society of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs and morality that has the effect of supporting the status quo in power relations. Hegemony in this sense might be defined as an 'organising principle' that is diffused by the process of socialisation into every area of daily life. To the extent that this prevailing consciousness is internalised by the population it becomes part of what is generally called 'common sense' so that the philosophy, culture and morality of the ruling elite comes to appear as the natural order of things.

I said this would be a long post.  That's enough for now.  But if you want to know more, just click on any the source links, including this one here regarding the damage to America done by the Gramsci Doctrine from Armed and Dangerous.