FROM MARXISM-LENINISM TO CULTURAL MARXISM
Written by Vladimir Moss
FROM MARXISM-LENINISM TO CULTURAL MARXISM
Some have seen in the recent defeat of Hilary Clinton in the American election the first significant blow to the “progress” of the juggernaut known as “Cultural Marxism” that is devastating the western world. Be that as it may, it will be worth studying the nature and origins of this movement…
It began as the result of the evident failure of Western Marxism in the years immediately after the First World War. Reflecting on the reasons for this, two prominent Marxist thinkers, Antonio Gramsci and George Lukács, “concluded that the working class of Europe had been blinded by the success of Western democracy and capitalism. They reasoned that until both had been destroyed, a communist revolution was not possible.
“Gramsci and Lukács were both active in the Communist party, but their lives took very different paths.
“Gramsci was jailed by Mussolini in Italy where he died in 1937 due to poor health.
“In 1918, Lukács became minister of culture in Bolshevik Hungary. During this time, Lukács realized that if the family unit and sexual morals were eroded, society could be broken down.
“Lukács implemented a policy he titled ‘cultural terrorism,’ which focused on these two objectives. A major part of the policy was to target children’s minds through lectures that encouraged them to deride and reject Christian ethics.
“In these lectures, graphic sexual matter was presented to children, and they were taught about loose sexual conduct.
“Here again, a Marxist theory had failed to take hold in the real world. The people were outraged at Lukács’ program, and he fled Hungary when Romania invaded in 1919.
“All was quiet on the Marxist front until 1923 when the cultural terrorist turned up for a ‘Marxist study week’ in Frankfurt, Germany. There, Lukács met a young, wealthy Marxist named Felix Weil.
“Until Lukács showed up, classical Marxist theory was based solely on the economic changes needed to overthrow class conflict. Weil was enthused by Lukács’ cultural angle on Marxism.
“Weil’s interest led him to fund a new Marxist think tank—the Institute for Social Research. It would later come to be known as simply The Frankfurt School.” [1]
In the same year of 1923, according to Bernard Connolly, another of the founders of the Frankfurt School, Willi Munzenberg, ”reflected on the failure of the ‘urban proletariat’ to mount successful revolutions in economically advanced countries in the way predicted by Marx. To counter that failure it was necessary, he proclaimed, to ‘organise the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Corrupting the values of Western civilization meant undermining and, ultimately, proscribing all the institutions, traditions, structures and modes of thought (‘tools of oppression’) that underpinned that civilization. Once national sovereignty and political legitimacy were got out of the way, it would be much easier for a central, unaccountable and malign (‘politically correct’) government to proscribe all the other foundations of civilization.”[2]
“In 1930, the school changed course under new director Max Horkheimer. The team began mixing the ideas of Sigmund Freud with those of Marx, and cultural Marxism was born.
“In classical Marxism, the workers of the world were oppressed by the ruling classes. The new theory was that everyone in society was psychologically oppressed by the institutions of Western culture. The school concluded that this new focus would need new vanguards to spur the change. The workers were not able to rise up on their own.
“As fate would have it, the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933. It was a bad time and place to be a Jewish Marxist, as most of the school’s faculty was. So, the school moved to New York City, the bastion of Western culture at the time.
“In 1934, the school was reborn at Columbia University. Its members began to exert their ideas on American culture.
“It was at Columbia University that the school honed the tool it would use to destroy Western culture: the printed word.
“The school published a lot of popular material. The first of these was Critical Theory.
“Critical Theory is a play on semantics. The theory was simple: criticize every pillar of Western culture—family, democracy, common law, freedom of speech, and others. The hope was that these pillars would crumble under the pressure.
“Next was a book Theodor Adorno co-authored, The Authoritarian Personality. It redefined traditional American views on gender roles and sexual mores as ‘prejudice.’ Adorno compared them to the traditions that led to the rise of fascism in Europe.
Is it just a coincidence that the go-to slur for the politically correct today is ‘fascist’?
“The school pushed its shift away from economics and toward Freud by publishing works on psychological repression.
“Their works split society into two main groups: the oppressors and the victims.They argued that history and reality were shaped by those groups who controlled traditional institutions. At the time, that was code for males of European descent.
“From there, they argued that the social roles of men and women were due to gender differences defined by the ‘oppressors.’ In other words, gender did not exist in reality but was merely a ‘social construct.’
“Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany when WWII ended. Herbert Marcuse, another member of the school, stayed in America. In 1955, he published Eros and Civilization.
“In the book, Marcuse argued that Western culture was inherently repressive because it gave up happiness for social progress.
“The book called for ‘polymorphous perversity,’ a concept crafted by Freud. It posed the idea of sexual pleasure outside the traditional norms. Eros and Civilization would become very influential in shaping the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
“Marcuse would be the one to answer Horkheimer’s question from the 1930s: Who would replace the working class as the new vanguards of the Marxist revolution?
“Marcuse believed that it would be a victim coalition of minorities—blacks, women, and homosexuals.
“The social movements of the 1960s—black power, feminism, gay rights, sexual liberation—gave Marcuse a unique vehicle to release cultural Marxist ideas into the mainstream. Railing against all things ‘establishment,’ the Frankfurt School’s ideals caught on like wildfire across American universities.
“Marcuse then published Repressive Tolerance in 1965 as the various social movements in America were in full swing. In it, he argued that tolerance of all values and ideas meant the repression of ‘correct’ ideas.
“It was here that Marcuse coined the term ‘liberating tolerance.’ It called for tolerance of any ideas coming from the left but intolerance of those from the right. One of the overarching themes of the Frankfurt School was total intolerance for any viewpoint but its own. That is also a basic trait of today’s political-correctness believers.
“To quote Max Horkheimer, ‘Logic is not independent of content.’
“The Frankfurt School’s work has had a deep impact on American culture. It has recast the homogeneous America of the 1950s into today’s divided, animosity-filled nation.
“In turn, this has contributed to the undeniable breakdown of the family unit, as well as identity politics, radical feminism, and racial polarization in America."[3]
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Cultural Marxism is closely related to the idea of political correctness. Angelo M. Codevilla explains this important idea in more detail: “The notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as a semi-humorous reminder that the Party’s interest is to be treated as a reality that ranks above reality itself. Because all progressives, Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are perpetually at war against nature’s laws and limits. But since reality does not yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those new realities. Hence, any progressive movement’s nominal goal eventually ends up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movement’s own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world, progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what is correct politically—i.e., what thoughts serve the party’s interest—were correct factually.
“Communist states furnish only the most prominent examples of such attempted groupthink. Progressive parties everywhere have sought to monopolize educational and cultural institutions in order to force those under their thumbs to sing their tunes or to shut up. But having brought about the opposite of the prosperity, health, wisdom, or happiness that their ideology advertised, they have been unable to force folks to ignore the gap between political correctness and reality.
“Especially since the Soviet Empire’s implosion, leftists have argued that Communism failed to create utopia not because of any shortage of military or economic power but rather because it could not overcome this gap. Is the lesson for today’s progressives, therefore, to push P.C. even harder, to place even harsher penalties on dissenters? Many of today’s more discerning European and American progressives, in possession of government’s and society’s commanding heights, knowing that they cannot wield Soviet-style repression and yet intent on beating down increasing popular resistance to their projects, look for another approach to crushing cultural resistance. Increasingly they cite the name of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a brilliant Communist theoretician for whom ‘cultural hegemony’ is the very purpose of the struggle as well as its principal instrument. His writings envisage a totalitarianism that eliminates the very possibility of cultural resistance to progressivism. But owing more to Machiavelli than to Marx or Lenin, they are more than a little complex about the means and are far from identical with the raw sort of power over culture enforced by the Soviet Empire or, for that matter, that is rife among us today…”
Although Gramsci died before the war, he became influential only later. “Gramsci started from mixed philosophical premises. First, orthodox Marxism: ‘There is no such thing as “human nature,” fixed and immutable,’ he wrote. Rather, ‘human nature is the sum of historically determined social relationships.’ The modern prince’s job is to change it. Wholly unorthodox, however, was his scorn for Marxism’s insistence that economic factors are fundamental while all else is superstructural. No, ‘stuff like that is for common folk,’ a ‘little formula’ for ‘half-baked intellectuals who don’t want to work their brains.’ For Gramsci, economic relations were just one part of social reality, the chief parts of which were intellectual and moral…
“Gramsci co-founded Italy’s Communist Party in 1921. In 1926, Mussolini jailed him. By the time he died eleven years later, he had composed twelve ‘prison notebooks.’ In private correspondence, he criticized Stalin’s literary judgment and deemed his attacks on Leon Trotsky ‘irresponsible and dangerous.’ But publicly, he supported every turn of the Soviet Party line—even giving his party boss, Palmiro Togliatti, authority to modify his writings. Imprisoned and in failing health, he was intellectually freer and physically safer than if he had been exposed to the intra-Communist purges that killed so many of his comrades.
“Gramsci’s concept of ‘cultural hegemony’ also swung both ways. Its emphasis on transforming the enemy rather than killing him outright was at odds with the Communist Party’s brute-force approach. His focus on cultural matters, reversing as it did the standard distinction between structure and superstructure, suggested belief in the mind’s autonomy. On the other hand, the very idea of persuading minds not through reasoning on what is true and false, good and bad, according to nature, but rather by creating a new historical reality, is precisely what he shares with Marx and… with the fountainhead of modern thought, Niccolò Machiavelli.
“Gramsci turned to Machiavelli more than to Marx to discover how best to replace the existing order and to secure that replacement. Chapter V of Machiavelli’s The Prince stated that ‘the only secure way’ to control a people who had been accustomed to live under its own laws is to destroy it. But Machiavelli’s objective was to conquer people through their minds, not to destroy them. In Chapter VI of The Prince he wrote that nothing is more difficult than to establish ‘new modes and orders,’ that this requires ‘persuading’ peoples of certain things, that it is necessary ‘when they no longer believe to make them believe by force,’ and that this is especially difficult for ‘unarmed prophets.’ But Machiavelli also wrote that, if such prophets succeed in inculcating a new set of beliefs, they can count on being ‘powerful, secure, honored and happy.’ He clarified this insight in Discourses on Livy Book II, chapter 5: ‘when it happens that the founders of the new religion speak a different language, the destruction of the old religion is easily effected.’ The Machiavellian revolutionary, then, must inculcate new ways of thinking and speaking that amount to a new language. In the Discourse Upon Our Language, Machiavelli had compared using one’s own language to infiltrate the enemy’s thoughts with Rome’s use of its own troops to control allied armies. This is the template that Gramsci superimposed on the problems of the Communist revolution—a template made by one ‘unarmed prophet’ for use by others.
“Machiavelli is the point of departure in a section of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks that describes how the party is to rule as “the modern prince.” But the modern prince’s task is so big that it can be undertaken seriously only by a party (in some 50 references he leaves out the word “Communist”), which he defines as “an organism; a complex, collective element of society which has already begun to crystallize as a collective will that has become conscious of itself through action.” This prince, this party, has to be “the organizer and the active expression of moral and intellectual reform...that cannot be tied to an economic program.” Rather, when economic reform grows out of moral and intellectual reform, from “germs of collective will that tend to become universal and total,” then it can become the basis of the secularization of all life and custom.
“The party-prince accomplishes this by being Jacobin ‘in the historic and conceptual sense.’ Gramsci writes: ‘that is what Machiavelli meant by reform of the militia, which the Jacobins did in the French Revolution.’ The party must gather consensus from each of society’s discrete parts by persuading—inducing—people who had never thought of such things to join in ways of life radically different from their own. The party develops ‘its organized force’ by a ‘minutely careful, molecular, capillary process manifested in an endless quantity of books and pamphlets, of articles in magazines and newspapers, and by personal debates repeated infinitely and which, in their gigantic altogether, comprise the work out of which arises a collective will with a certain homogeneity.’
“Which is it then for Gramsci? Does the party inspire or perhaps cajole consensus—or does it force it? His answer is ambiguous: ‘Machiavelli affirms rather clearly that the state is to be run by fixed principles by which virtuous citizens can live secure against arbitrary treatment. Justly, however, Machiavelli reduces all to politics, to the art of governing men, of assuring their permanent consensus.’ The matter, he writes, must be regarded from the ‘”double perspective”...[that] corresponds to the double nature of Machiavelli’s centaur, beastly and human, of force and consensus, of authority and hegemony... of tactics and strategy.’ Indeed that is Machiavelli’s point: whatever it takes.
“The key to Gramsci’s generalities and subtleties is to be found in his gingerly discussion of the relationship between the party and Christianity. ‘Although other political parties may no longer exist, there will always exist de facto parties or tendencies... in such parties, cultural matters predominate... hence, political controversies take on cultural forms and, as such, tend to become irresolvable.’ Translation: the progressive party-state (the party acting as a government, the government acting as a party) cannot escape the role of authoritative—perhaps forceful—mediator of societal conflicts having to do with cultural matters and must see to it that they are resolved its way.
“Specifically: as Gramsci was writing, Mussolini’s 1929 Concordat with the Vatican was proving to be his most successful political maneuver. By removing the formal enmity between the Church and the post-French-Revolution state, making Catholicism the state religion and paying its hierarchy, Mussolini had turned Italy’s most pervasive cultural institution from an enemy to a friendly vassal. Thousands of priests and millions of their flock would bend thoughts, words, and deeds to fit the party-state’s definition of good citizenship. Gramsci described the post-Concordat Church as having ‘become an integral part of the State, of political society monopolized by a certain privileged group that aggregated the Church unto itself the better to sustain its monopoly with the support of that part of civil society represented by the Church.’ A morally and intellectually compromised Church in the fascist state’s hands, Mussolini hoped and Gramsci feared, would redefine its teachings and its social presence to fascist specifications. The alternative to this subversion—denigrating and restricting the Church in the name of fascism—would have pushed many Catholics to embrace their doctrine’s fundamentals ever more tightly in opposition to the party. The Concordat was the effective template for the rest of what Mussolini called the corporate state.
“Gramsci called the same phenomenon a ‘blocco storico,’ historic bloc, that aggregates society’s various sectors under the party-state’s direction. The intellectuals, said Gramsci, are the blocco’s leading element. In any given epoch they weld workers, peasants, the church, and other groups into a unit in which the people live and move and have their being, and from within which it is difficult if not impossible to imagine alternatives. Power, used judiciously, acts on people the way the sun acts on sunflowers. Within this bloc, ideas may retain their names while changing in substance, while a new language grows organically. As Gramsci noted, Machiavelli had argued that language is the key to the mastery of consciousness—a mastery more secure than anything that force alone can achieve. But note that Machiavelli’s metaphors on linguistic warfare all refer to violence. How much force does it take to make this historic bloc cohere and to keep recalcitrants in it? Gramsci’s silence seems to say; ‘whatever may be needed.’ After all, Mussolini used as much as he thought he needed.
“In sum, Mussolini, not Stalin; forceful seduction, not rape, is Gramsci’s practical advice regarding ‘cultural hegemony.’ Gramsci means to replace Western culture by subverting it, by doing what it takes to compel it to redefine itself, rather than by picking fights with it…”
Following Gramsci’s lead, the post-war Cultural Marxists compelled Western culture to redefine itself – that is, adopt the language and values of “political correctness”. And the storm-centre of this cultural revolution moved, together with the leaders of the Frankfurt school of social philosophy, from Europe to America… Let us briefly take this story up to the present day.
“Beginning in the 1960s, from Boston to Berkeley, the teachers of America’s teachers absorbed and taught a new, CliffsNotes-style sacred history: America was born tainted by Western Civilization’s original sins—racism, sexism, greed, genocide against natives and the environment, all wrapped in religious obscurantism, and on the basis of hypocritical promises of freedom and equality. Secular saints from Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama have been redeeming those promises, placing America on the path of greater justice in the face of resistance from the mass of Americans who are racist, sexist, but above all stupid. To consider such persons on the same basis as their betters would be, as President Obama has called it, ‘false equivalence.’
“Thus credentialed, molded, and opinionated, a uniform class now presides over nearly all federal, and state, government bureaucracies, over the media, the educational establishment, and major corporations. Like a fraternity, it requires speaking the ‘in’ language signifying that one is on the right side, and joins to bring grief upon ‘outsider Americans who run afoul of its members...
“No more than its European counterparts does America’s progressive ruling class offer any vision of truth, goodness, beauty, or advantage to attract the rest of society to itself. Like its European kin, all that American progressivism offers is obedience to the ruling class, enforced by political correctness. Nor is there any endpoint to what is politically correct, any more than there ever was to Communism. Here and now, as everywhere and always, it comes down to glorifying the party and humbling the rest…
“The imposition of P.C. has no logical end because feeling better about one’s self by confessing other people’s sins, humiliating and hurting them, is an addictive pleasure the appetite for which grows with each satisfaction. The more fault I find in thee, the holier (or, at least, the trendier) I am than thou. The worse you are, the better I am and the more power I should have over you. America’s ruling class seems to have adopted the view that the rest of America should be treated as inmates in reeducation camps…”[4]
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Cultural Marxism is also related to another important idea: multiculturism. The Norwegian blogger Hanne Nabintu Herland writes: “Multiculturalism – many cultures living side by side with none of them taking the lead – has in essence turned out quite differently than then utopian dreamers and naïve neo-Marxists initially hoped for when they started out implementing this theory in the 1960’s. Instead, multiculturalism has slowly robbed ordinary Europeans of pride in their own culture, many now feeling discriminated against in their own countries. Today, we watch how the tensions are building up in Europe and clashes happening now on an almost daily basis.
“Over the past decade the opponents of multiculturalism have multiplied. Leading politicians like Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy have all condemned this neo-Marxist strategy of integration that equates the ideals of other cultures with European traditional values in Europe. The idea was that Europeans should not uphold their own cultural roots on their own soil, but instead listen humbly to new immigrants and accept their traditional norms and customs in the name of diversity. Whoever protested, has quickly, over the years been labelled “racist” or “intolerant”, causing the person to quickly be silenced.
“The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida is often called the father of multiculturalism. He developed the theory of deconstruction, implying that power structures come in pair: one weak, the other strong. For example, the pair of man – woman, white – black, European – African/Asian. His desire to tone down the ‘strong in the pair’ was done by giving ‘the weak’ extra rights. Among the many mistakes that the neo-Marxist Derrida did, in his quest to tear down the traditional structures of the European society, was naively believing that ‘Europeans’ are always the strong part and ‘Africans – Asians’ always the weak part in the West. So, his theories legitimized a discrimination against Europe’s population, insinuating that their perspectives are uninteresting and that only the perspectives of ‘the weak’ – that is the non-Western foreigner – had the right to strongly voice his beliefs...”[5
In 2016 the Czech leader Vaclav Klaus expanded on the incipient totalitarianism of the modern European Union: “The fall of communism opened the door for freedom and democracy in our countries. We enjoyed it tremendously and erroneously supposed that freedom is here, and is here to stay. We were wrong. During the 27 years after the fall of communism, we have slowly begun discovering that we live in a world which is different than the one we dreamt of. It became evident that the lack of freedom is not inevitably connected with only one – however evil – form of totalitarian and authoritarian regime, with communism. There are other non-democratic isms and institutional arrangements which lead to similar results and consequences.
“Due to them we live in a far more socialist and etatist, controled and regulated society now than we could have imagined 27 years ago.We feel that we are in number of respects returning back to the arrangements we used to live in the past and which we had considered gone once and for all. I do not have in mind specifically my country but Europe and the Western world as a whole.
“After the fall of communism, my optimism was based on a strong belief in the power of principles of free society, of free markets, of the ideas of freedom, as well as on a belief in our ability to promote and safegard these ideas. Today, coming slowly to the end of the second decade of the 21st century, my feeling is different. Did we have wrong expectations? Were we naive? I don´t think so.
“1. We knew that socialism, or socialdemocratism, or “soziale Marktwirtschaft“ is here, is here to stay and – due to its internal dynamics – would expand;
“2. We were always afraid of the green ideology, in which we saw a dangerous alternative to the traditional socialist doctrine;
“3. We were aware of the built-in leftism of intellectuals. We followed with great concern the “excessive production of under-educated intellectuals” that emerged in the West as a result of the expansion of university education for all;
“4. Communism had been based on an apotheosis of science and on a firmly rooted hope that science would solve all existing human and social problems. To our great regret, the West believed in the same fallacy.
“I can assure you that we were aware of all that in the moment of the fall of communism. We – perhaps – underestimated some other crucial issues:
“- We probably did not fully appreciate the far-reaching implications of the 1960s, the fact that this “romantic” era was a period of the radical and destructive denial of the authority, of traditional values and social institutions;
“- We underestimated that the growing apotheosis of human rights was in fact a revolutionary denial of civic rights and of many liberties and behavioral patterns connected with them. Human rights do not need any citizenship. That is why human-rightism calls for the destruction of the sovereignty of individual countries, particularly in today’s Europe…”[6]
Melanie Phillips sums up the matter well: “As communism slowly crumbled, those on the far Left who remained hostile towards western civilization found another way to realize their goal of bringing it down.
“This was what might be called ‘cultural Marxism’. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.
“The key insight was developed in particular by an Italian Marxist philosopher called Antonio Gramsci. His thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals – who are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.
“Gramsci understood that the working class would never rise up to seize the levers of ‘production, distribution and exchange’ as communism had prophesied. Economics was not the path to revolution.
“He believed instead that society could be overthrown if the values underpinning it could be formed into their antithesis: if its core principles were replaced by those of groups who were considered to be outsiders or who actively transgressed the moral codes of that society.
“So he advocated a ‘long march through the institutions’ to capture the citadels of culture and turn them into a collective fifth column, undermining from within and turning all the core values of society upside-down.
“This strategy has been carried out to the letter.
“The nuclear family has been widely shattered. Illegitimacy was transformed from a stigma into a ‘right’. The tragic disadvantage of fatherlessness was redefined as a neutrally viewed ‘lifestyle choice’.
“Education was wrecked, with its core tenet of transmitting a culture to successive generations replaced by the idea that what children already knew was of superior value to anything the adult world might foist upon them.
“The outcome of this ‘child-centred’ approach has been widespread illiteracy and ignorance and an eroded capacity for independent thought.
“Law and order were similarly undermined, with criminals deemed to be beyond punishment since they were ‘victims’ of society and with illegal drug-taking tacitly encouraged by a campaign to denigrate anti-drugs laws.
“The ‘rights’ agenda – commonly known as ‘political correctness’ – turned morality inside out by excusing any misdeeds by self-designated ‘victim’ groups on the grounds that such ‘victims’ could never be held responsible for what they did.
“Feminism, anti-racism and gay rights thus turned… Christians into the enemies of decency who were forced to jump through hoops to prove their virtue.
“This Through the Looking Glass mind-set rests on the belief that the world is divided into the powerful (who are responsible for all bad things) and the oppressed (who are responsible for none of them).
“This is a Marxist doctrine. But the extent to which such Marxist thinking has been taken up unwittingly even by the Establishment was illustrated by the astounding observation made in 2005 by the then senior law lord, Lord Bingham, that human rights law was all about protecting ‘oppressed’ minorities from the majority…
“When the Berlin Wall fell, we told ourselves that this was the end of ideology. We could not have been more wrong.
“The Iron Curtain came down only to be replaced by a rainbow-hued knuckle duster, as our cultural commissars pulverised all forbidden attitudes in order to reshape western society into a post-democratic, post-Christian, post-moral universe. Lenin would have smiled…”[7]
Or perhaps he would not have been so pleased. For, as Ryszard Legutko writes: “If the old communists had lived long enough to see the world of today, they would be devastated by the contrast between how little they themselves had managed to achieve in their antireligious war and how successful the liberal democrats have been. All the objectives the communists set for themselves, and which they pursued with savage brutality, were achieved by the liberal democrats who, almost without any effort and simply by allowing people to drift along with the flow of modernity, succeeded in converting churches into museums, restaurants, and public buildings, secularizing entire societies, making secularism the militant ideology, pushing religions to the sidelines, pressing the clergy into docility, and inspiring powerful mass culture with a strong antireligious bias in which a priest must be either a liberal challenging the Church or a disgusting villain.”[8]
“Consider the main enemy,” writes Codevilla: “religion. America’s mainline Protestant denominations have long since delivered their (diminishing) flocks to the ruling class’s progressive priorities. Pope Francis advertises his refusal to judge attacks on Western civilization, including the murder of priests. His commitment of the Catholic Church to the building of ‘a new humanity,’ as he put it at July’s World Youth Day in Krakow, opens the Catholic Church to redefining Christianity to progressive missions in progressive terms, a mission already accomplished at Georgetown University, Notre Dame, and other former bastions of American Catholicism now turned into bastions of American progressivism. Evangelical leaders seem eager not to be left behind. Gramsci would have advised that enlisting America’s religious establishments in the service of the ruling class’s larger priorities need not have cost nearly as much as Mussolini paid in 1929. Refraining from frontal challenges to essentials would be enough.
“Instead, America’s progressives add insult to injury by imposing same-sex marriage, homosexuality, ‘global warming,’ and other fashions because they really have no priorities beyond themselves. America’s progressive rulers, like France’s, act less as politicians gathering support than as conquerors who enjoy punishing captives without worry that the tables may turn…”[9]
The latest insult to traditional thinking is self-marriage. Abigail Pesta writes: "Self-marriage is a small but growing movement, with consultants and self-wedding planners popping up across the world. In Canada, a service called Marry Yourself Vancouver launched this past summer, offering consulting services and wedding photography. In Japan, a travel agency called Cerca Travel offers a two-day self-wedding package in Kyoto: You can choose a wedding gown, bouquet, and hairstyle, and pose for formal wedding portraits. On the website I Married Me, you can buy a DIY marriage kit: For $50, you get a sterling silver ring, ceremony instructions, vows, and 24 ‘affirmation cards’ to remind you of your vows over time. For $230, you can get the kit with a 14-karat gold ring.
“‘It's not a legal process — you won't get any tax breaks for marrying yourself. It's more a ‘rebuke’ of tradition, says Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. ‘For generations, if women wanted to have economic stability and a socially sanctioned sex life or children, there was enormous social and economic pressure to do that within marriage,’ she says. ‘Personally, as someone who lived for many years single and then did get married, I know that the kind of affirmation I got for getting married was unlike anything I'd ever had in any other part of my life.’ That, she adds, is ‘incredibly unjust.’"[10]
Here we come back to that passion which unites all the Marxists – old and new, cultural and barbarian: the feeling of burning injustice, of resentment, of envy. This feeling, together with the desire to “rebuke” tradition, shows that Cultural Marxism is the social and political mode of Satan’s protest against God. Only in becoming “cultural”, Marxism has now migrated from a social or political movement to pure individualism, egoism, even infantilism – which must mark the final death of Western civilization…
January 6/19, 2017.
The Theophany of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
[1] Admin 1, “The Birth Of Cultural Marxism: How The “Frankfurt School” Changed America (and the West), Smash Cultural Marxism, January 15, 2017.
[2] Connolly, The Rotten Heart of Europe, London: Faber, 2012, p. x.
[3] Admin 1, op. cit.
[4] Codevilla, “The Rise of Political Correctness”, Claremont Review of Books, November 8, 2016.
[5] Herland, “Multiculturalism as a neo-Marxist, radical invention of the 1960’s is rendering Europe in total chaos”, http://www.hannenabintuherland.com/themiddleeast/hanne-nabintu-herland-multiculturalisms-failure-in-europe/
[6] “The European Freedom Award in the Freedom Endangering European Union”, Hlavni Strana, November 5, 2016, http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/4014.
[7] Phillips, “We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left. They’re back – and attacking us from within”, The Daily Mail, November 9, 2009, p. 14.
[8] Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, 2016, https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-demon-in-democracy.
[9] Codevilla, op. cit.
[10] Pesta, “Why I married myself”, Good Housekeeping, December 21, 2016, http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/relationships/a42034/marrying-yourself-wedding-trend/