Thursday, February 02, 2006

Culture Wars 101: Mini Manifesto

HazZzmat was started by two bloggers, Wonker and Luther, as an experiment back in August 2005. Wonk and Luther are both writers who, like many other writers, make most of their real money elsewhere, Wonk in journalism and government contracting, and Luther—well we won't blow his cover right now, but he is known in theater and poetry circles.

HazZzmat was essentially founded to open up a conservative front in the culture wars which most certainly do exist even though our friends on the left prefer to divert attention away from them. The culture wars, over the last roughly half-century or so, have been the weapon of choice for the dead-end left to alter, very quietly and over a long period of time, the culture and traditions of the US and the West in such a way as to accomplish socialism without having to fire a shot. When what is socially and culturally acceptable to most of the populace has been successfully altered to accept a secularist, atheist, and socialist point of view, the battle is done and the war is over.

HazZzmat is dedicated to exposing leftist propaganda and funding primarily as it pertains to cultural traditions and the arts; and most particularly to the spoken and written word which are subtly being manipulated in order to define deviancy down in the social and judicial realms, while severing all ties with the largely European, Anglo-Saxon, and Judaeo-Christian traditions that form the basis for our democracy. When successive generations of the young are brought up and educated with little understanding of who and what they are or of what their place is in the context of world history, they become much easier to convince and manipulate, since they no longer have the cultural and historical grounding that used to form the basis for a social contract that united us all.

No other blog, save for FrontPageMag on occasion (which often explores this phenomenon in the intellectually hostile university environment), focuses on this because most individuals on the right, being interested primarily in the worlds of business and engineering, simply do not make the connection with how important controlling the cultural fabric really is. Our aim is to fix that, but this will take time.

We see the violent political polarization in the US today as more of a result of culture wars rather than the political ones. But the culture wars go on just beneath the surface and are thus hard to detect. Repubs, as we have suggested, are uncomfortable with them and Dems refuse to acknowledge that they exist for the obvious reason that they've been so successful in winning battles when they remain undetected.

But the undeniable fact is that since at least 1968, and in some quarters far earlier, the remnants of 1930s Popular Front leftists, reinvigorated by the debacle of Vietnam, the Johnson defeat, and the Nixxon resignation, adopted the tactics of the relatively unknown Italian Communist theoretician, Antonio Gramsci, and quietly began to infilitrate the government, the judiciary, academia, media, and the arts in order to control the cultural, sociological, and legal norms and standards in this country.

Some of the stealth-left's aims have included packing the judiciary with leftists in order to put them in a position to legislate leftist agendas by judicial fiat as well as ripping organized religion out of the cultural and political fabric (and hence the recent fury over the Roberts and Alioto nominations to the Supreme Court); controlling university humanities and arts faculties to preach and propagandize far left theories and insulate students from competing points of view; and using the media to regulate just who can get through to the American people (like Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill) and who cannot (like nearly anybody on the right).

These new new leftists have been quite successful to this point, because their stealth tactics still have yet to be fully parsed by conservatives, who, like the Ferengi on Star Trek (the series' snide inside joke on Republicanism, BTW), cannot recognize the real power that's excercised by people and organizations not known for making a profit.

However, the Gramscian left hadn't counted on the rise of the Internet and the increasing ability of suppressed points of view to go around the organized conduits. They're now in a last-ditch effort to prevent their positions from being engulfed and overrun. HazZzmat is here to expose them and their tactics as well as helping our readers to reconnect to the great legal and cultural traditions whose voices have been gradually but successfully silenced over the last half-century.

We'll do this with fairly long discussions on topics of the day that shed light on how informational manipulation is occurring as well as promoting individuals and websites, and sometimes individual artists, who are, in spite of daunting obstacles and lack of recognition, trying to connect America once again to the cultural and legal traditions that have made our country great.

While we generally label ourselves as conservatives, we are, in fact, more like old fashioned liberals who want to maintain and grow the best in our culture while making sure that everyone who wants access can have it. We don't mind new stuff or innovations, either, as long as they give a courteous hat-tip to their forbears. We believe in the concepts of good and bad, and thus we support, for example, reasonable community and artistic standards. But we oppose those who try to do away with either by using honorable and established institutions in such a way as to undermine those institutions.

We always invite reasonable comments, and will answer them if and when we can (since we, like most bloggers, actually owe our employers a bit of work for the paycheck). But vulgar, nasty, ad hominem stuff will get flushed. Comments are "open" now in the sense that folks don't have to register, and we prefer to keep it that way. But if things get too ugly, we might have to clean 'em up.

One final note: while we occasionally say nasty things about public figures who deserve it, we generally prefer to criticize statements, philosophy, and logic or its lack thereof. Problem with most discourse today is that it tends to deal with the individual, which is a surface approach that doesn't require much more thinking than that employed by schoolkids taunting a weakling in the playground during recess. We prefer to engage the fallacies or phony dialectic at the root of our opponents' thinking, as the ad hominem stuff is the best way to evade a real debate—which, we think, is why our lefty friends prefer this mode of attack. They don't have any new ideas. They simply prefer to hate ours.

Also, critics to the contrary, we actually have a pretty sunny attitude and a pretty good sense of humor. Thus, a good bit of our commentary is seasoned with a healthy dash of hyperbole.

Enjoy. And welcome.

No comments: