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Cultural Marxism
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| Key members of the Frankfurt School |
By Linda Kimball
American Thinker - February 15, 2007
There are two misconceptions held by many Americans. The first is that communism ceased to be a threat when the Soviet Union imploded. The second is that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared as well. "The Sixties are dead," wrote columnist George Will ("Slamming the Doors," Newsweek, Mar. 25, 1991)
Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace' activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and ‘gay' rights groups. All of these groups pursue their piece of the radical agenda through a complex network of organizations such as the Gay Straight Lesbian Educators Network (GSLEN), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, United for Peace and Justice, Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), and Code Pink for Peace.
Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.
Birth of Multiculturalism
In anticipation of the revolutionary storm that would baptize the world in an inferno of red terror, leading to its rebirth as the promised land of social justice and proletarian equality Frederich Engels wrote, "All the...large and small nationalities are destined to perish...in the revolutionary world storm... (A general war will) wipe out all...nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only reactionary classes...but...reactionary peoples." ("The Magyar Struggle," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Jan. 13, 1849)
By the end of WWI, socialists realized that something was amiss, for the world's proletariat had not heeded Marx's call to rise up in opposition to evil capitalism and to embrace communism instead. They wondered what had gone wrong.
Separately, two Marxist theorists -- Antonio Gramsci of Italy and Georg Lukacs of Hungary -- concluded that the Christianized West was the obstacle standing in the way of a communist new world order. The West would have to be conquered first.
Gramsci posited that because Christianity had been dominant in the West for over 2000 years, not only was it fused with Western civilization, but it had corrupted the workers class. The West would have to be de-Christianized, said Gramsci, by means of a "long march through the culture." Additionally, a new proletariat must be created. In his "Prison Notebooks," he suggested that the new proletariat be comprised of many criminals, women, and racial minorities.
The new battleground, reasoned Gramsci, must become the culture, starting with the traditional family and completely engulfing churches, schools, media, entertainment, civic organizations, literature, science, and history. All of these things must be radically transformed and the social and cultural order gradually turned upside-down with the new proletariat placed in power at the top.
The Prototype
In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters.
Hungary's youth, having been fed a steady diet of values-neutral (atheism) and radical sex education while simultaneously encouraged to rebel against all authority, easily turned into delinquents ranging from bullies and petty thieves to sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths.
Gramsci's prescription and Lukacs' plans were the precursor to what Cultural Marxism in the guise of SIECUS, GSLEN, and the ACLU--acting as judicially-powered enforcers--later brought into American schools.
Building a base
In 1923, the Frankfurt School -- a Marxist think-tank-was founded in Weimar Germany. Among its founders were Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno. The school was a multidisciplinary effort which included sociologists, sexologists, and psychologists.
The primary goal of the Frankfurt School was to translate Marxism from economic terms into cultural terms. It would provide the ideas on which to base a new political theory of revolution based on culture, harnessing new oppressed groups for the faithless proletariat. Smashing religion, morals, It would also build a constituency among academics, who could build careers studying and writing about the new oppression.
Toward this end, Marcuse-who favored polymorphous perversion-expanded the ranks of Gramsci's new proletariat by including homosexuals, lesbians, and transsexuals. Into this was spliced Lukacs radical sex education and cultural terrorism tactics. Gramsci's ‘long march' was added to the mix, and then all of this was wedded to Freudian psychoanalysis and psychological conditioning techniques. The end product was Cultural Marxism, now known in the West as multiculturalism.
Additional intellectual firepower was required: a theory to pathologize what was to be destroyed. In 1950, the Frankfurt School augmented Cultural Marxism with Theodor Adorno's idea of the ‘authoritarian personality.' This concept is premised on the notion that Christianity, capitalism, and the traditional family create a character prone to racism and fascism. Thus, anyone who upholds America's traditional moral values and institutions is both racist and fascist. Children raised by traditional values parents, we are told to believe, will almost certainly become racists and fascists. By extension, if fascism and racism are endemic to America's traditional culture, then everyone raised in the traditions of God, family, patriotism, gun ownership, or free markets is in need of psychological help.
The pernicious influence of Adorno's ‘authoritarian personality' idea can be clearly seen in some of the research that gets public money.
"In Aug., 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million tax-payer funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives...suffer from ‘mental rigidity,' ‘dogmatism,' and ‘uncertainty avoidance,' together with associated indicators for mental illness." http://www.edwatch.org/ ‘Social and Emotional Learning" Jan. 26, 2005)
The Orwellian cast of the pathologies named shows how far Gramsci's long march has led us.
A corresponding and diabolically crafted idea is political correctness. The strong suggestion here is that in order for one not to be thought of as racist or fascist, then one must not only be nonjudgmental but must also embrace the ‘new' moral absolutes: diversity, choice, sensitivity, sexual orientation, and tolerance. Political correctness is a Machiavellian psychological ‘command and control' device. Its purpose is the imposition of uniformity in thought, speech, and behavior.
Critical theory is yet another psychological ‘command and control' device. As stated by Daniel J. Flynn, "Critical Theory, as its name implies, criticizes. What deconstruction does to literature, Critical Theory does to societies." (Intellectual Morons, p 15-16)
Critical Theory is an ongoing and brutal assault via vicious criticism relentlessly leveled against Christians, Christmas, the Boy Scouts, Ten Commandments, our military, and all other aspects of traditional American culture and society.
Both political correctness and Critical Theory are in essence, psychological bullying. They are the psycho-political battering rams by which Frankfurt School disciples such as the ACLU are forcing Americans to submit to and to obey the will and the way of the Left. These devious devices are but psychological versions of Georg Lukacs and Laventi Beria's ‘cultural terrorism' tactics. In the words of Beria,
"Obedience is the result of force...Force is the antithesis of humanizing actions. It is so synonymous in the human mind with savageness, lawlessness, brutality, and barbarism, that it is only necessary to display an inhuman attitude toward people to be granted by those people the possessions of force." (The Russian Manual on Psychopolitics: Obedience, by Laventi Beria, head of Soviet Secret Police and Stalin's right-hand man)
Double-thinking ‘fence-sitters', otherwise known as moderates, centrists, and RINOs bear the imprint of these psychological ‘obedience' techniques. These people-in some cases literally afraid of incurring the wrath of name-calling obedience trainers--- have opted to straddle the fence lest they be found guilty of possessing an opinion, one way or another. At the merest hint of displeasure from the obedience-trainers, up goes the yellow flag of surrender upon which it is boldly written:
"I believe in nothing and am tolerant of everything!"
Cultural Determinism
The linchpin of Cultural Marxism is cultural determinism, the parent of identity politics and group solidarity. In its turn, cultural determinism was birthed by the Darwinian idea that man is but a soulless animal and therefore his identity is determined by for example, his skin color or his sexual and/or erotic preferences. This proposition rejects the concepts of the human spirit, individuality, free will, and morally informed conscience (paired with personal accountability and responsibility) because it emphatically denies the existence of the God of the Bible.
Consequently, and by extension, it also rejects the first principles of our liberty enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. These are our "unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Cultural Marxism must reject these because these principles of liberty "are endowed by our Creator," who made man in His image.
Cultural determinism, states David Horowitz, is "identity politics-the politics of radical feminism, queer revolution, and Afro-centrism-which is the basis of academic multiculturalism...a form of intellectual fascism and, insofar as it has any politics, of political fascism as well." (Mussolini and Neo-Fascist Tribalism: Up from Multiculturalism, by David Horowitz, Jan. 1998)
It is said that courage is the first of the virtues because without it fear will paralyze man, thus keeping him from acting upon his moral convictions and speaking truth. Thus bringing about a general state of paralyzing fear, apathy, and submission-the chains of tyranny-is the purpose behind psychopolitical cultural terrorism, for the communist Left's revolutionary agenda must, at all costs, be clothed in darkness.
The antidote is courage and the light of truth. If we are to win this cultural war and reclaim and rebuild America so our children and their children's children can live in a ‘Shining City on the Hill' where liberty, families, opportunity, free markets, and decency flourish, we must muster the courage to fearlessly expose the communist Left's revolutionary agenda to the Light of Truth. Truth and the courage to speak it will set us free.
Additional References
Slouching Toward Gomorrah, by Robert H. Bork
Intellectual Morons, by Daniel J. Flynn
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Linda Kimball writes on culture, politics, and worldview.
