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William S. Lind

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William S. Lind
Born (1947-07-09) July 9, 1947 (age 77)
Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Other namesThomas Hobbes
Alma materDartmouth College
Princeton University
OccupationWriter
Known forFourth-generation warfare, conservative commentary

William S. Lind (born July 9, 1947) is an American conservative author, described as being aligned with paleoconservatism.[1] He is the author of many books and one of the first proponents of fourth-generation warfare (4GW) theory and is the Director of The American Conservative Center for Public Transportation.[2] He used the pseudonym Thomas Hobbes in a column for The American Conservative.[3][4]

Early life

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Lind graduated from Dartmouth College in 1969 and from Princeton University in 1971, where he received a master's degree in history.[5] In 1973, having grown tired of doctoral work at Princeton, Lind wrote to Senator Robert Taft Jr., a Republican from Ohio, requesting his help in securing a job with Amtrak.[6] In response, Taft instead offered Lind a job in his office, where he eventually began analyzing defense policy (Taft was a member of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services).[6]

Views on warfare and U.S. military

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In 1989, alongside several U.S. military officers, Lind helped to originate fourth-generation war (4GW) theory.[7]

Lind served as a legislative aide for Taft from 1973 through 1976 and held a similar position with Senator Gary Hart, a Democrat from Colorado, from 1977 to 1986.[citation needed] He is the author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Westview Press, 1985) and co-author, with Hart, of America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform.

Lind has written for the Marine Corps Gazette, Defense and the National Interest, and The American Conservative.[8]

According to the book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by the writer Robert Coram, Lind was doing lectures on maneuver warfare sometimes criticized for having never served in the military and for having "never dodged a bullet, he had never led men in combat, he had never even worn a uniform."[9]

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Lind was the director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. He advocates a Declaration of Cultural Independence by cultural conservatives in the United States and believes that the federal government ceased to represent their interests and began to coerce them into negative behavior and to affect their culture in a negative fashion. The foundation believes that American culture and its institutions are headed for a collapse and that cultural conservatives should separate themselves from that calamity. It also supports setting up independent parallel institutions with a right to secession and a highly decentralized nature that would rely on individual responsibility and discipline to remain intact but prevent the takeover of the institutions by those hostile to cultural conservatism.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

Lind has authored and co-authored (with Paul Weyrich) monographs on behalf of the Free Congress Foundation that attempt to persuade American conservatives to support government funding for mass transit programs, especially urban rail transit. The two men wrote about the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory as being an organized conspiracy against what Lind views as the traditional Christian values of America.[17][18]

Lind was associate publisher of a quarterly magazine called The New Electric Railway Journal from its launch in 1988 to 1996,[19] and from January 1994, he also co-hosted a monthly program about light rail on the National Empowerment Television network; the program used the same name as the magazine.[20]

As a paleoconservative, Lind has often criticized neoconservatives in his commentaries. While not a libertarian, he has also written for LewRockwell.com. He is a self-proclaimed conservative and monarchist.[21][22] He is a staunch supporter of a non-interventionist foreign policy.[23]

In his column of December 15, 2009, Lind announced that he was leaving the staff of the Center unexpectedly and that his series of articles was on hiatus.[24]

Fiction

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Lind also wrote Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War in which a group of "Christian Marines" leads an armed resistance against Cultural Marxism as the US federal government collapses.[25][third-party source needed]

Criticism

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In 2002, Lind promoted and gave a well-received speech at a Holocaust deniers conference, where he accused a small number of all-Jewish leftist intellectuals of poisoning American culture. [26]

In the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report "Reframing the Enemy" (2003), Bill Berkowitz said that Lind was the principal promoter and popularizer of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which claims that a coterie of Jewish-German philosophers, the Frankfurt School, had seized control of American popular culture, and have been systematically subverting Christian churches and ethics within the US. The conspiracists' preoccupation with the Jewishness of most Frankfurt School intellectuals is seen as confirming that Cultural Marxism is an antisemitic canard.[27] The SPLC reported that in 1999 Lind wrote, "The real damage to race relations in the South came, not from slavery, but [from] Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won [the civil war]."[28]

In "The Widening Gap Between the Military and Society" (1997), the journalist Thomas E. Ricks said that Lind's rhetoric of Marxist cultural subversion is different from the "standard right-wing American rhetoric of the '90s" because Lind said that the "next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil."[29] In The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003), Fareed Zakaria said, "There are those in the West who agree with bin Laden that Islam is the reason for the Middle East's turmoil. Preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell Sr., and writers such as Paul Johnson and William Lind have made the case that Islam is a religion of repression and backwardness."[30]

The manifesto of Anders Breivik is built around Lind's theory on cultural Marxism and contains 27 pages taken directly from his writings.[31]

References

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  1. ^ Zúquete, José Pedro (2018). The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe. University of Notre Dame Press. p. ?. ISBN 978-0-26-810424-5.
  2. ^ Lind, William S. "Center for Public Transportation". www.theamericanconservative.com. Archived from the original on May 19, 2019. Retrieved July 8, 2018.
  3. ^ Lind, William S. (June 17, 2009). "Washington's Legitimacy Crisis". The American Conservative. Retrieved May 4, 2015.
  4. ^ Lind, William S. (April 18, 2015). Victoria. Castalia House. ISBN 978-9527065457. Retrieved November 30, 2015.
  5. ^ William S. Lind (2014). "William S. Lind bio". The Notable Names Database.
  6. ^ a b Berkowitz, Bruce (2010). "A Matter of Latitude". The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century. Simon & Schuster.
  7. ^ William S. Lind, Colonel Keith Nightengale (USA), Captain John F. Schmitt (USMC), Colonel Joseph W. Sutton (USA), Lieutenant Colonel Gary I. Wilson (USMCR) (October 1989). "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation". Marine Corps Gazette. Archived from the original on January 18, 2018. Retrieved September 12, 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. ^ Lind, William. A Tea Party Defense Budget, The American Conservative (February 2011)
  9. ^ Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art of War, published 2004 by Back Bay Books, p. 383
  10. ^ Lind, William S. Next Revolution.
  11. ^ Weyrich, Paul. "Letter to Conservatives". National Center for Public Policy Research.
  12. ^ Jay, Martin (Fall 2010). "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe". Salmagundi. Vol. 168/169. pp. 30–40. ISSN 0036-3529. JSTOR 41638676. Archived from the original on November 24, 2011 – via cms.Skidmore.edu.
  13. ^ Jamin, Jérôme (2014). "Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right". In Shekhovtsov, Anton; Jackson, Paul (eds.). The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right: A Special Relationship of Hate. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 84–103. doi:10.1057/9781137396211.0009 (inactive November 1, 2024). ISBN 978-1-137-39619-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
  14. ^ Richardson, John E. (2015). "'Cultural-Marxism' and the British National Party: A transnational discourse". In Copsey, Nigel; Richardson, John E. (eds.). Cultures of Post-War British Fascism. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-53937-7.[page needed]
  15. ^ Jeffries, Stuart (2016). Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. London, England: Verso Books. pp. 6–11. ISBN 978-1-78478-568-0.
  16. ^ Braune, Joan (2019). "Who's Afraid of the Frankfurt School? 'Cultural Marxism' as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory" (PDF). Journal of Social Justice. 9. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 16, 2020. Retrieved September 11, 2020.
  17. ^ William S. Lind (2008). "What is Cultural Marxism". Maryland Thursday Meeting. Archived from the original on April 19, 2015. Retrieved December 12, 2014.
  18. ^ Berkowitz, Bill. "'Cultural Marxism' Catching On". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved June 4, 2024.
  19. ^ Kunz, Richard R. (Spring 1996). "From the Editor: Cutting the Cord". The New Electric Railway Journal, p. 2.
  20. ^ "Watch our trolleys take to the air". The New Electric Railway Journal, Spring 1994, p. 31.
  21. ^ William S. Lind (2006). "The Prussian Monarchy Stuff". LewRockwell.com. Center for Libertarian Studies.
  22. ^ William S. Lind (2006). "Why We Still Fight". LewRockwell.com. Center for Libertarian Studies.
  23. ^ "Addressing Trump's Errant Foreign Policy - The American Conservative". June 26, 2017. Retrieved September 13, 2018.
  24. ^ Lind, William S. (December 15, 2009). "Opinion". Military.com.
  25. ^ "Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation Warfare". Castalia House Publishing. November 14, 2014. Retrieved May 4, 2015.
  26. ^ "Ally of Christian Right Heavyweight Paul Weyrich Addresses Holocaust Denial Conference".
  27. ^ Bill Berkowitz (2003). "Reframing the Enemy". Southern Poverty Law Center.
  28. ^ Chip Berlet (2003). "Into the Mainstream". Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on December 31, 2006. Retrieved May 26, 2007.
  29. ^ Thomas E. Ricks (July 1997). "The Widening Gap Between the Military and Society". The Atlantic.
  30. ^ Zakaria, Fareed. The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003), p. 123.
  31. ^ "Breivik and the Gramscian legacy | The Broker". www.thebrokeronline.eu. August 4, 2011. Retrieved February 2, 2021.
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