Kulturekampf means ideological struggle in general, not secular vs. religious squabble. It's been used most recently in the U.S. in reference to consecrative attempts to wipe out what they see as liberal excess, in particular the rhetorical assault on multiculturalism, enlarging the academic canon and the entire trope of "PC crimes."
Here's the American Heritage Dictionary definiition:
1. The struggle (1871–1883) between the Roman Catholic Church and the German government under Bismarck for control over school and ecclesiastical appointments and civil marriage.
2. A conflict between secular and religious authorities: “The 1920s proved to be the focal decade in the Kulturkampf of American Protestantism” (Richard Hofstadter).
My Websters New 20th Century Dictionary uses only the first definition. I've found know definition of it as "ideological struggle generally".
The left has not attempted to "enlarge the academic canon" That could be considered something very near intellectually dishonesty. What they have attempted to do is marginalize the traditional canon and replace it with marginal or tertiary authors from cultures peripheral to the study of western civilization (including a plethora of authors who are openly hostile to American and European civilization and especially to liberal democracy and capitalism) It is their hostility to western, and particularly, American civilization, that drives this program, not a desire to "enlarge" the western canon, which they, for all intents and purposed (according to some 25 years or so of their own writings and speeches), despise.
PC crimes are not anyone's trope, they have been a salient feature of the Left for more than a century and a core technique of the post Sixties Left in enforcing intellectual orthodoxy within those institutions they control (which is, of course, most).
Except for the intentional infection via contaminated blankets, a method used more than once by both the British and the U.S. military (the letters of Lord Amherst are quite interesting in this regard).
You see Blixa, you've swallowed the propaganda whole. You have been indoctrinated, not educated, and you've allowed it to happen of your own free will. There is not a shred of historical evidence regarding the blankets; this is pure conjecture on the part of academic leftists intent on smearing the entire western cultural milieu for which they have no documentary evidence.
As much of the present anti-American, ant-western ideological mythology surrounding the alleged blanket incident stems from the writings of the now disgraced academic fraud Ward Churchill, a little background would be apropos:
Churchill’s tale of genocide by means of biological warfare is shocking, but other historians disagree that it ever happened. It is well-established that a smallpox outbreak did occur in 1837, and that it was probably carried into the region on board the steamboat St. Peter.[10]
None of the sources that Churchill cites make any mention of “a military infirmary…quarantined for smallpox.” None of the sources Churchill cites make any mention of U.S. Army soldiers even being in the area of the pandemic, much less being involved with it in any way. Churchill’s sources—in particular a journal kept by the fur trader Francis Chardon—make it clear that Fort Clark was not an Army garrison. It was a remote trading outpost that was privately owned and built by the American Fur Company, and manned by a handful of white traders.[11] It was not an Army fort, nor did it contain soldiers. Not being an Army fort, it did not contain a “post surgeon” who told Indians to “scatter” and spread the disease.
The only government employee who can be documented as present in the vicinity of the trading post was the local Indian Agent, who according to Chardon did not distribute blankets or anything else at the time of the pandemic, “as he has nothing to give his red children.”[12] The government agent functioned to serve the interests of the trading company, and had no independent incentive to infect the Indians.[13]
Journals and letters written by the fur traders who did man Fort Clark make it clear that they were appalled by the epidemic, in part because they had Indian wives and children and were thus a part of the Indian community.[14] The traders also had economic interests in keeping the Indians healthy. The trader Jacob Halsey—who himself contracted the smallpox—lamented that “the loss to the company by the introduction of this malady will be immense in fact incalculable as our most profitable Indians have died.”[15] The traders would not seem to have any incentive to wage biological warfare on their own families and their “most profitable Indians”, much less put their own lives at risk.
Churchill claims that vaccine was withheld by “the army”, citing Stearns & Stearns.[16] What the Stearns actually wrote was that “great care was exercised in the attempt to eliminate the transfer of the smallpox” by the traders, and that “a physician was dispatched for the sole purpose of vaccinating the affected tribes while the pestilence was at its height.” It is difficult to see how Churchill could have derived his reading of events from the Stearns.[17]
Churchill argues that the “post surgeon” ordered the Indians to scatter, thus strategically spreading the disease. But an eyewitness on the scene—the trader Jacob Halsey—complained in a letter that:
I could not prevent [the Indians] from camping round the Fort—they have caught the disease, notwithstanding I have never allowed an Indian to enter the Fort, or any communication between them & the Sick; but I presume the air was infected with it…my only hope is that the cold weather will put a stop to this disease…pray send some vaccine.[18]
This letter is printed as an appendix to Chardon’s journal, the only primary source that Churchill cites in support of his story.
What if the U.S. Army had been active in the region? Given the opportunity, would Army officers have had any motive to use biological warfare against the Mandans? Five years earlier, in 1832, Congress had passed an act and appropriated funds to establish a program for inoculating Indians on the Missouri River.[19] Given this Congressional mandate to protect Indians from smallpox, given the lack of hostilities between the U.S. military and the Mandans or any other Plains Indians at that time, and given the military’s lack of presence in the area of the Mandans at the time, Churchill’s version of events does not seem plausible, even in the context of counterfactual speculation.
Churchill argues that the disease’s vector was smallpox blankets given as gifts by the Army. None of the sources that Churchill cites mentions gift blankets. Available evidence indicates that the disease’s vector was either the trader Jacob Halsey himself, who arrived on the St. Peter already infected, or an Arikira Indian woman who also arrived on the steamboat in the same condition.[20] The primary source that Churchill cites makes it clear that the local traders considered the disease to be entirely accidental, and as unwelcome by the local whites as by the Indians.
http://www.hal.lamar.edu/~browntf/Churchill1.htm
And for a much more extensive treatment:
http://www.plagiary.org/smallpox-blankets.pdf
http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html
http://listlva.lib.va.us/cgi-bin/Washington.exe ... IST&P=7068
You see, the evidence for this claim is quite weak; purely circumstantial and supported only by a few letters in which the idea is floated between a few people. This is your entire support for the assertion that something actually happened, for which you have no direct evidence at all. This is basically as tenuous as the evidence for George Washington's adultly or the Jefferson/Hemmings claims.
Yes Blixa, you bring hoary leftist tropes here and accuse me of genuflecting to tropes. This is what leftist ideology does to the human mind; removes even the last particle of rationality and replaces within the eviscerated husk an edifice of hubris driven ideological shibboleths supported by precisely the kind of evidentially fuzzy historical urban legends such as the one you have tried for foist here.
This is only one of the many inaccuracies in your statements about early american history. All you know is anti-PC backlash revisionism. Try tearing yourself away from your neocon magazines and immerse yourself in the Western Americana collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale for a while.
Ohhhhhhh...I'm impressed. And if I were to do this, I would find out precisely what (except that the folks, like Ward Chruchill and Howard Zinn, from whence you get most of your historical knowledge, are nothing but intellectual hacks)?
Interesting jab at those bloodsucking Jews here too Blixa. Expose some more of the truth about yourself for us will you?