Anti Communists From The United States

"Marxist Man could not have come upon the earth at a more illogical time. In an age when technological advances have finally made it feasible to adequately feed, clothe and house the entire human race, Marxist Man stands as a military threat to this peaceful achievement. His sense of insecurity drives him to demand exclusive control of human affairs in a day when nearly all other peoples would like to create a genuine United Nations dedicated to world peace and world-wide prosperity. Although man can travel faster than sound and potentially provide frequent, intimate contacts between all cultures and all peoples, Marxist Man insists on creating iron barriers behind which he can secretly work."

"In providing physical needs for your family, don't forget their spiritual needs. We are in an ideological war. From a Marxist viewpoint an atheistic mind is already three-fourths conquered."

"Communist morals follow a simple formula. Anything which Promotes the communist cause is good; anything which hinders it is bad. Upon examination, that philosophy turns out to be a code of opportunism and expediency, or a code of no morals at all. Anyone who does not conform to the dictates of the Party as to what is good for Communism and what is not, is subjected to the most severe penalties under Articles 131 and 133 of the Soviet Constitution. Thus, the perfect example of "class" morality, which the Marxists attribute to the Judaic-Christian code, is to be found right in the Communist plan of action itself."

"Women are used by feminists; blacks are used by Democrats; workers are used by Communists."

"Affluence + secularism = cowardice. Affluence + boredom = Leftism."

"Anti-Zionism is not criticism of Israel. It is a hatred of Israel — a hatred greater than that of any other country and a delegitimization of Zionism, the movement to reestablish the Jewish national home. Imagine someone who argued that the establishment of the Italian state — Italy — was illegitimate and who hated Italy more than any other country in the world yet claimed that he was in no way anti-Italian, as he had Italian friends and loved Italian culture. No one would believe such an absurdity."

"Most Americans no longer know what America stands for. For them, America has become just another country, a place located between Canada and Mexico. But America was founded to be an idea, not another country."

"Truth is a liberal value, and it is a conservative value, but it is not a leftist value."

"The ideas that America should be a 'melting pot' or that all Americans should identify as American are now unutterable in educated company. Indeed, many college campuses do not have an American flag on their campus because some students regard it as 'offensive' — representing imperialism and capitalism."

"I will not end on a happy note, because there isn't one. But neither do I despair. One doesn't fight only when one is optimistic. One fights because it is the right thing to do and because America remains, as Lincoln said, 'the last best hope of earth.'"

"The United States of America fought a horrific civil war that ended slavery. Yes, slavery was the reason for the Civil War."

"The majority of Republicans are not conservative."

"[T]he further left one goes, the more negative the assessment of today's America and the America of the past."

"Of all the world's evils, child abuse may rank as the greatest."

"American values, or Americanism, refers to what I call the "American Trinity": "Liberty," "In God We Trust," and "E Pluribus Unum" ("Out of Many, One"), the three values that appear on all American coins."

"[A] child smacking an adult across the face is not funny. It is, in fact, one of the last things society should tolerate."

"It is small surprise that among tyrannical regimes and their defenders, America and Israel are so often identified as the same enemy. This is not merely a consequence of America's standing along behind Israel; the United States has aided various Arab countries very generously, and it has on some critical occasions backed Arab regimes, such as Nasser's Egypt in 1956 and Saudi Arabia in 1981, against Israel. The hostility is aroused largely because America and Israel represent democracy, equal rights for women, a higher quality of life, and a willingness to confront despotism. That is why the two non-Muslim countries that have suffered the heaviest losses from Islamic suicide murderers are Israel and the United States."

"Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the document that articulated the principle of human rights endowed by the Creator, thereby ultimately ensuring the end of slavery, and led to the establishment of the country that has served as the beacon of hope for people of every race and ethnicity."

"Israel remains an embattled democracy in the midst of authoritarian states, and the birthplace of the kibbutz to which tens of thousands of youth from around the world have turned for a living lesson in human equality."

"Conservatives view America as President Abraham Lincoln viewed it; as the 'Last Best Hope of Earth.'"

"The Left doesn't hate evil, it hates those who hate evil. On the Left there is a subliminal, subconscious deep understanding that they are inadequate to the job of fighting evil. That's why they get so passionate about trivia."

"I'm pro-choice, but I believe that most abortions are immoral. I take the nuanced middle ground."

""I'm a passionate moderate"."

"The moment you meet a person of another religion whom you consider to be as good, as intelligent, and as religious as you are, you will never be the same."

"Nor is it enough to refrain from personally performing an injustice, for in order to be good one must seek out and rectify injustices performed by others."

"If you drop desires, you'll never have a Salk vaccine."

"The insufficiency of defining goodness as not hurting others is clearly demonstrated by the general assessment of the behavior of most Germans under the Nazis. According to this definition, most Germans during the Holocaust were good people, since they did not hurt anyone. Yet most of us do not consider such Germans good people, clearly indicating that we recognize the impossibility of defining a good person as one who does not hurt anyone. You do not have to do something bad in order to do bad; you only have to do nothing."

"A person whose conduct consists of not hurting anyone is not good; such a person is merely not bad. To be a good person involves the active pursuit of good. It is not enough merely to refrain from hurting other human beings; one must intercede on their behalf."

"The foolishness of that comment [equating meat-eating to the Holocaust] is so deep, I can only ascribe it to higher education. You have to have gone to college to say something that stupid."

"I am for no law to be passed to prevent Keith Ellison or anyone else from bringing any book he wants to his swearing-in, whether actual or ceremonial. But neither I nor tens of millions of other Americans will watch in silence as the Bible is replaced with another religious text for the first time since George Washington brought a Bible to his swearing-in"

"[I]f you look at Europe and see a continent adrift, with no identity and no strong values beyond economic equality and possessing little capacity to identify evil, let alone a will to fight it, then you need to start fighting."

"Parsons, who published his first synthesizing works in economics journals, had always seen himself as a synthesizer who might do for sociology what Samuelson did for economics. Why did he fail?Part of the problem was undoubtedly the mind-set of sociologists of his time (and ours), which was to attach political messages to rather pedestrian observational and statistical material, and to reject any notion that there might be a "general theory" of sociology. But part of the problem was also Parsons' failure to articulate the close affinities of biological and economic theory with sociology."

"As an intellectual enterprise, what came to be called ‘‘modernization theory’’ has many of the same positivist traits as Marxism, with which it self-consciously draws a comparison. Indeed, it could be argued that both constitute a form of ‘‘high modernism’’ that emphasize, in a deterministic form, the unity of all modern development, centered on industry and technology. The Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, whose 1937 book The Structure of Social Action inspired most of the postwar modernization theorists, had claimed that an integrated and stable transition to industrial society could only be achieved through changes in political and cultural values. But, unlike Marx, Parsons believed that it was the opportunities for the individual to fit into the structures of society that determined the course of history, not economic developments alone. For Parsons, for MIT’s Daniel Lerner, and for Walt Whitman Rostow – the Harvard professor whose 1960 The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto later became a key text for modernization theory – the form of transition that they described had already taken place, in America. But there were enough ‘‘unsuccessful modernizations’’ – Germany, the Soviet Union, China – to necessitate the search for a grand theory of the road from ‘‘tradition’’ to ‘‘modernity.’’"

"My analysis of Parson's failure, however, was not the reaction of other leading sociologists of the time. Rather, Parsons was bitterly criticized and rejected whole cloth. The offenders---and I here choose my words carefully---were mostly crusading left-wing sociologists who considered sociology an instrument of social change first, and a science only second. They include Alvin Gouldner, Theda Skocpol, George Homans, Lewis Coser, Ralf Dahrendorf, C. Wright Mills, Tom Bottomore, and many others. These pseudo-theorists in fact had no idea what social theory should look like, and railed against Parsons because he did not directly deal with social oppression and his language was not inherently emancipatory. To my mind, this is like criticizing da Vinci's studies of human anatomy because they don't deal with cancer and the plague---infinitely shortsighted and even risible. Habermas and others criticized Parsons on the grounds that systems theory is inherently hostile to action theory. This too is just a terrible mistake, since Parsons' theory of action was from the very first a pillar of his social theory. And what have these critics given us in place of Parsons' core theory? Some entertaining stories and a little credible philosophy, but nothing in the form of social theory."

"Sociology did have a period of core theory consolidation, in the person of Talcott Parsons, whose contributions in the three decades starting in 1937 were systematically geared towards synthesizing the greats of traditional sociology (Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto), as well as indicating precisely how the sister disciplines of psychology, economics, and political science might articulate with core sociological theory. There is no doubt but that Parsons' body of theory is seriously flawed, but there was much more than enough to build on in forging a core sociological theory. Parsons correctly started with the division of social life into roles occupied by actors who internalize the norms and values associated with these roles. However, he made the mistake of identifying the rational actor model of economic theory with Homo economicus, the socially isolated selfish material maximizer. It is true that this is how the rational actor model was depicted in economic theory, but only by happenstance, not intrinsic logicality. Extending the rational actor model to include moral elements as well as material elements, self-regard as well as other-regard, would have given Parsons exactly the tool he needed to create a core sociological theory. However, he did not take this step, probably because (a) Pareto had convinced him that the economics/sociology split was just the norms and values/material self-interest split, and (b) he was a poor mathematician can couldn't handle the sophistication of the rational actor model. So he moved on to structural-functionalism, which is useful and insightful, but quite incapable of supporting an analytically cogent sociology."

"Culture has been distinguished from the other elements of action by the fact that it is intrinsically transmissible from one action system to another from personality to personality by learning and from social system to social system by diffusion. This is because culture is constituted by "ways of orienting and acting," these ways being "embodied in" meaningful symbols."

"I regarded (and regard) Parsons’s work as mostly quite empty of serious content."

"Theory in the social sciences should have three major functions. First, it should aid in the codification of our existing concrete knowledge. It can do so by providing generalized hypotheses for the systematic reformulation of existing facts and insights, by extending the range of implication of particular hypotheses, and by unifying discrete observations under general concepts. Through codification, general theory in the social sciences will help to promote the process of cumulative growth of our knowledge. In making us more aware of the interconnections among items of existing knowledge which are now available in a scattered, fragmentary form, it will help us fix our attention on the points where further work must be done. Second, general theory in the social sciences should be a guide to research. By codification it enables us to locate and define more precisely the boundaries of our knowledge and of our ignorance. Codification facilitates the selection of problems, although it is not, of course, the only useful technique for the selection of problems for fruitful research. Further than this, general theory should provide hypotheses to be applied and tested by the investigation of these problems... Third, general theory as a point of departure for specialized work in the social sciences will facilitate the control of the biases of observation and interpretation which are at present fostered by the departmentalization of education and research in the social sciences."

"Without deliberate planning on anyone's part, there have developed in our type of social system, and correspondingly in others, mechanisms which, within limits, are capable of forestalling and reversing the deep-lying tendencies for deviance to get into the vicious circle phase which puts it beyond the control of ordinary approval-disapproval and reward-punishment sanctions."

"Talcott Parsons, the "incurable theorist" in his own words,... brought together, in a systematic and generalized form, the main outlines of a conceptual scheme of social action and social systems (e.g. 1951). His frame of reference focused on the description of the system of institutionalized roles, motivational process, economic exchange, political power and other Issues that according to his view should be included in a general sociological theory."

"Ideology is a system of beliefs, held in common by the members of a collectivity."

"A social system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the "optimization of gratification" and whose relation to their situations, including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols."

"The most elementary communication is not possible without some degree of conformity to the “conventions” of the symbolic system."

"suggest that we think of theories as spotlight. this imagery is useful. a spotlight will only illuminate so much. with any theory there will always be the things that are left in darkness, still unexamined and unexplained. parsons referred to these as 'residual categories'."

"A social system is a mode of organization of action elements relative to the persistence or ordered processes of change of the interactive patterns of a plurality of individual actors."

"System theories have been applied to a wide spectrum of empirical cases and policy issues. Parsons and his followers, in particular, applied their systems theory to diverse empirical phenomena in sociology as well as in other disciplines: modernization, economics, politics, social order, industrialization and development, Fascism and McCarthyism, international relations, social change and evolution, complex organizations, health care, universities, religion, professions, small groups, and family as well as abstract questions such as the place of norms in maintaining social order both historically and cross-nationally. Marxian theory and dynamic system theories have also been applied to a spectrum of diverse empirical and policy subjects."

"The social system is, thus, a very complex entity. As an organization of human interests, activities and commitments, it must be viewed as a system and in functional perspective. This is the key to its lines of organization, its modes of differentiation, and its integration. Such a system may be considered as both structure and process, in different aspects and for different scientific purposes. Structurally, we have suggested that there is a double basis for systematizing differentiation and variation : that internal to the primary social system itself and that involved in its relations to its primary environments, as analyzed with reference to the general system of action. Processually, the categories of analysis must follow from and integrate with those of structure. I suggest that, given the central position language as definitive of human society, the more differentiated and specialized symbolic media of interchange constitute the master scheme for the systematic analysis of social system processes."

"In a sense the present work is to be regarded as a secondary-study of the work of a group of writers in the field of social theory. But the genus "secondary study" comprises several species; of these an example of only one, and that perhaps not the best known, is to be found in these pages."

"'System' is the concept that refers both to a complex of interdependencies between parts, components, and processes, that involves discernible regularities of relationships, and to a similar type of interdependency between such a complex and its surrounding environment."

"As a formal analytical point of reference, primacy of orientation to the attainment of a specific goal is used as the defining characteristic of an organization which distinguishes it from other types of social systems."