I remind you that Modernism is the predominant philosophy of thought in America. It started in England in the 1500’s, transformed the British economy and was quickly picked up by the French. The Germans toyed with the concept for a while before historical events conspired (French Revolution and Napoleon) to frighten the Germans into a full-blown Counter-Modernist posture.

The next 3-4 generations of mostly German academic thinkers worked on perfecting their body of thought by first confirming the destruction of Reason and Individualism, then adding numerous layers of head-shaking conclusions. The next logical step was to migrate it from its academic towers to the battlefields and marketplaces.

War as A Societal Advancement Tool

Oddly, and this is well documented in the academic writings of the same German thinkers, they viewed war as a preferred way of furthering the development of societies regardless of the cost in human capital. They welcomed the great conflicts of the early 20th century as opportunities to not only advance their German society but prove their socialist theories correct.

WWI was their first major opportunity for the budding socialist nations to defeat the Western free marketers. It didn’t happen that way, though, and Germany was punished severely for her troubles.

Out of the ashes came another attempt to right the German ship of thought. The Socialist Right (Nazi’s) led by Adolf Hitler, worked their way into power and got their tail kicked in WWII. This left the Socialist Left (Soviet Union) to duke it out with the Capitalist West in a winner-take-all Cold War.

Seeds of Destruction

At the conclusion of WWII the Russians and Americans raced to grab as many of the German intellectuals as they could, largely to keep the other guy from obtaining them. America’s efforts at acquiring Germany’s intellectual capital was called Operation Paperclip.

The downside of this program was that these Germans were steeped in the Counter-Enlightenment ideologies, and we placed them in positions of authority in academia, the space program, and other key positions in the late ‘40’s!

The Post-Modern school utilized a) existing pockets of supporters in America and b) the short-comings in the Reasoning model for which its proponents still had no good response, to quickly gain a superior foothold in our universities. In a nutshell, that’s how we lost our higher education system to what would eventually come to be known as the Woke movement.

The Formal Death of Post-Modernism

In 1956 two pivotal things happened. First, Kruschev publicly admitted in a speech that the rumors of tens of millions of deaths at the hands of Joseph Stalin were true. It wasn’t just CIA propaganda. By itself that would have been enough to sign the death warrant of socialism/communism because the numbers/data were already in, but then, Hungary happened.

Hungarian students who were unhappy with the state-sponsored classes they were forced to take, and angered by their post-education prospects at employment staged peaceful protests to effect change.

Hungary was then behind the Iron Curtain, part of the Soviet Bloc, so Hungarian authorities called Moscow for assistance with the student uprisings. Help arrived in the form of military personnel and equipment.

Arrests, interrogations, and torture followed but the nail in the coffin of post-modernism occurred when the tanks were shown rolling over students via live international television! The world witnessed the totalitarian cruelty of the supposedly most compassionate and benevolent societal system ever devised. Post-Modernism died its formal death in 1956.

A Troublesome Corpse

When faced with the obvious empirical evidence (#deaths, #poor, etc), Post-Modern supporters were faced with a philosophical dilemma. The smart ones admitted defeat and moved on with their lives. The remaining supporters who were too vested in the ideology simply backed up to re-strategize new and creative ways to prop up the corpse and sell tickets to the show.

What they needed was an argument that didn’t rely on empirical data. What they decided to do was add the use of rhetorical language as a weapon against Capitalism. Post-Modernism 2.0 (my term) was born and the '60's were right around the corner. This is where society really begin to go off the rails.

And we'll continue this look at the Post-Modern/Woke details of the 20th century in our next post!