The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 23, 2016 1:10 pm

http://www.researchforprogress.us/topic ... l-marxism/

What is “Cultural Marxism”?


The Vast Cultural Marxism Conspiracy Theory

“Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory developed within the US Christian Right in the 1990 as a way to shift from Cold-War anticommunism to a struggle against signs of Collectivism and Moral Decay–including, Labor Unions, Big Government, Abortion Rights, and full rights for the LGBTQ Community.

Discussion of the alleged conspiracy of “Cultural Marxism” can easily be found across a wide range of right–wing groups in the United States (Berkowitz, 2003; Jay 2010). For example, the Westerly Tea Party (2011) has a website for ‘News of interest to and commentary by Tea Party Patriots in Westerly, RI.’ A featured text is ‘Welcome to the Machine: Cultural Marxism in Education’ (Rogér, 2010). The same text is linked to by the Abingdon/Bristol/SW Virginia Tea Party (2011). That website features this statement:

We are called racist. Hatemongers. Right wing nut–jobs. Domestic terrorists. All by our own Department of Homeland Security. We are none of those things. We don’t want to ‘fundamentally change’ America. We want to fundamentally RESTORE our country to the divinely inspired vision that our Founders fought for, risking everything. We are the Tea Party Movement. WE HAVE A LOT TO DO!!! Join us. (Abingdon/Bristol/SW Virginia Tea Party, 2011).

Over at the American Thinker website, Rogér (2010) claims that ‘to the left, cloaked within the progressive movement which has been attacking America since the early 1900s, Western society and capitalism mark the main battlefront.’ According to Rogér, within ‘progressivism hides cultural Marxism, which attacks minds not only through corrupted textbooks, but also through more insidious channels.’ Rogér continues:

Along with the philosophy of John Dewy, cultural Marxism constitutes a currency traded within the education profession. Ayers and other left–dogmatists spread the currency like a virus throughout universities, infecting teachers with Deweyism and cultural Marxism without regard for how the ideologies sicken America. Teachers carry the virus into elementary, middle, and high schools, to inoculate the children of America and guarantee the spread of a cultural disease called progressivism. (Rogér 2010)


Linda Kimball (2007), also an author at American Thinker, warned that ‘The linchpin of Cultural Marxism is cultural determinism, the parent of identity politics and group solidarity.’ Kimball then cites David Horowitz (1998) claiming, cultural determinism 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.’

Shortt (2006) warns that Cultural Marxism is part of ‘the war against Christianity in our’ public schools. Our Lady of the Rosary (2011) sees the ‘phenomena of Cultural Marxism and Political Correctness as a means to undermine Christianity and Western Civilization.’

Islamophobes also use the trope of Cultural Marxism to suggest that the ‘islamization’ of Europe and the United States will destroy Western Christian Civilization (Breivik, 2011; Buchanan, 2011; Farah, 2011; Kupelian, 2011; Mueller, 2007; Terrorism Awareness Project, 2007). Gardell (2011) Ingersoll (2011) and Posner (2011) trace a similar Christian warrior trope to Anders Breivik and his deadly terrorist rampage in Norway (Juergensmeyer 2011).
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 19, 2016 11:10 am

Ernst Nolte’s Revenge

Conflations of Bolshevism and Nazism are the order of the day. Ernst Nolte would be pleased.
by Daniel Lazare

Image
A Jobbik rally in Hungary in 2012.


Ernst Nolte, the Hitler apologist who gave liberal German historians a collective coronary in the 1980s, died this summer in Berlin aged ninety-three.

For a while, Nolte seemed to be the big loser in the famous Historikerstreit, or historians’ dispute, that set German intellectual life ablaze for a few months beginning in June 1986. Ostracized for his thinly veiled efforts to excuse Nazi war crimes, he retreated into a kind of internal exile, ignored by his colleagues and forgotten by the press.

His chief opponent, the social theorist Jürgen Habermas, meanwhile emerged as the hero of the day, the very model of a public intellectual who defends democracy when not holding forth in the lecture hall. It’s not often that the Left emerges victorious, but this was one occasion when it did.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the victory celebration: it began to fade. Nolte was partially rehabilitated fourteen years later when the Deutschland Foundation, which is close to the right wing of the ruling Christian Democrats, gave him its Konrad Adenauer Prize for literature and Horst Möller, director of the respected Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History, seized on the opportunity to praise him for a “life’s work of high rank” and to defend him against “hate-filled and defamatory” efforts to stifle free debate.

Rather than a hero, it seemed that Habermas was now an intellectual bully of sorts. Meanwhile, a watered-down version of Nolte’s thesis has become increasingly dominant thanks to such popular historians as Yale’s Timothy Snyder, author of the bestselling Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, a historian of the gulag.

The neo-Nolteans have been careful to avoid the “causal nexus” that got Nolte in such trouble, the idea that Nazism was an understandable response to Bolshevik atrocities, although one that happened to go overboard. Instead, they skirt causation altogether by arguing that Nazism and Communism interacted in some unspecified way so as to drive one another to unexpected heights.

As Snyder put it in Bloodlands, they shared a “belligerent complicity” and therefore “goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have.” This is not exactly what Nolte said. But it’s close enough since his basic goal was to shift the blame for Nazism onto others, a goal that has been fully achieved in the current ideological climate in which no one is supposed to notice the neo-Nazi militias ranging across the Ukraine or the SS veterans’ parades that are an annual occurrence in the Baltics. Nolte’s death is therefore an occasion to revisit the Historikerstreit to examine what it accomplished, where it went wrong, and why Habermas and his co-thinkers allowed victory to slip through their grasp.

Nolte started the ball rolling with an article in the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on the theme of Nazism as a response to a Communist threat:

Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Was the Gulag Archipelago not primary to Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the “racial murder” of National Socialism?


Nazi mass murders were thus a copy of a Soviet original. As the English historian Richard J. Evans points out, rhetoric like this had been on the upswing since the Christian Democrats wrested control from the center-left Social Democrats in 1982. Franz Josef Strauss, the right-wing Bavarian politician, had taken advantage of the conservative shift to urge Germans to “walk tall” and “emerge from the shadow of the Third Reich” while the FAZ was increasingly opening its pages to the radical right. But as bad as a few far-right cranks might be, an article by a respected academic historian like Nolte — his 1963 study, Fascism in Its Epoch, was internationally known — was worse since it was a sign that the historical profession as a whole was shifting into the “revisionist” camp.

Habermas, a product of the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School, therefore mounted a counterattack not only on Nolte but on other right-wing historians as well. He sailed into the historian Andreas Hillgruber for writing that the German military in 1944–45 was engaged in “desperate and sacrificial efforts . . . to protect the German population in the East from the orgies of revenge by the Red Army.”

He upbraided Michael Stürmer, an academic historian who served as an official adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, for calling for a more patriotic version of German history. And he attacked Nolte not only for suggesting that Bolshevism was the prime mover, but for arguing that a letter that Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organization, wrote in September 1939 stating that Jews the world over sided with Great Britain “could lay a foundation for the thesis that Hitler would have been justified in treating the German Jews as prisoners of war.”

Nolte didn’t say the letter did lay a foundation, merely that it could. Nonetheless, his statement was an affront because it violated what, since the 1960s and ’70s, had been the first rule of West German politics, which is that the Nazis were entirely responsible for their actions and that Germans should not shift the blame onto others, least of all the Jews.

Yet Nolte was now clearly out to “relativize” the Nazis by arguing that they were not the only ones at fault. The upshot would have been a return to the “good Nazi” rhetoric of the late 1940s and early ’50s when Hollywood turned out admiring biopics of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Adenauer assured the Bundesrat that the percentage of accused Nazi war criminals “who are really guilty is so extraordinarily small that the honor of the former German Wehrmacht is not compromised.”

It would have, that is, if Habermas and his co-thinkers had let Nolte get away with it. But they didn’t. Rather, they were able to fend off the assault by pointing out that after years of soul-searching and political debate, it was impossible to turn back the clock. “After Auschwitz we can create our national self-understanding solely by appropriating the better traditions of our critically examined history,” Habermas wrote in the liberal weekly Die Zeit. “Otherwise we cannot respect ourselves and cannot expect respect from others.”

Germans must confront the past ruthlessly and unsparingly if they were to have any future as a liberal society. The point was so obvious, so compelling, so indisputable that there was never really any doubt that the argument would carry the day.

But if that’s the case, why was it subsequently undone? Why was Nolte able to regain his footing to a degree while Habermas seemed to visibly deflate?

The answer has to do with the remedy Habermas put forth. While Germans must wrestle with the past, the ultimate solution, he said, was for West Germany to tie itself ever more securely to the liberal west. As he put it a few weeks into the great debate:

The unconditional opening of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West is the greatest intellectual achievement of our postwar period; my generation should be especially proud of this . . . The only patriotism that will not estrange us from the West is a constitutional patriotism. Unfortunately, it took Auschwitz to make possible . . . binding universalist constitutional principles anchored in conviction.


As sensible as this may seem, there was a problem. If the West is synonymous with liberalism, does that mean that the East is the opposite — intrinsically illiberal and threatening? If so, then perhaps Nolte’s argument that an “Asiatic” bacillus was at the root of it all was not off base.

Moreover, Habermas’s belief in Western liberalism was one of those assumptions that first had to be proved. The Historikerstreit, for example, was essentially an aftershock from the Bitburg furor a year earlier when Helmut Kohl prevailed on Ronald Reagan to lay a wreath at a German military cemetery containing the remains of some forty-nine members of the Waffen-SS. As Habermas wrote in the liberal weekly Die Zeit, the visit was intended to accomplish three things:

The aura of the military cemetery was supposed to waken national sentiment and thereby a “historical consciousness”; the juxtaposition of hills of corpses in the concentration camp and the SS graves in the cemetery of honor, the sequence of Bergen-Belsen in the morning and Bitburg in the afternoon implicitly disputed the singularity of the Nazi crimes and shaking hands with the veteran generals in the presence of the US president was, finally, a demonstration that we had really always stood on the right side in the fight against Bolshevism.


Quite correct. But Reagan was hardly an innocent victim of German wiles. After all, he was a hardened Cold Warrior who, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, had worked hand-in-glove with the FBI to purge Hollywood of Communist influence and, decades later, would resist visiting a German concentration camp on the grounds that unpleasant memories should remain undisturbed. “I don’t think we ought to focus on the past,” he reportedly said. “I want to focus on the future. I want to put that history behind me.” His sentiments were captured in remarks a few months earlier about Americans who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in 1936–39 to defend the Spanish republic: “I would say that the individuals that went over there were, in the opinions of most Americans, fighting on the wrong side.”

The right side was that of Franco. If Hitler had concentrated his fire on the Soviets instead of attacking Britain and France, the right side would presumably have been that of the Nazis. The United States thus stood for the sort of willful forgetfulness and accommodation with fascism that Habermas found so dangerous, yet he embraced it regardless. The result was to tie him hand and foot to the new “hyperpower” as it headed off in an increasingly militaristic direction with the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989–91.

Thus, Habermas supported Operation Desert Storm in 1991 even though, as Perry Anderson noted in the New Left Review, the war was essentially a defense of Saudi oil interests. He endorsed the 1999 NATO air campaign in the Balkans even though the United States was plainly seeking to back Serbia into a corner by presenting it with an ultimatum — the notorious Rambouillet Accords — that it knew it couldn’t accept. He backed the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and only balked at supporting the 2003 Iraq War when Bush and Blair failed to get UN Security Council approval. He championed the European Union and a single currency and was thus flummoxed when an over-extended EU began coming apart at the seams in response to the 2008 financial meltdown, Syriza, Brexit, and the refugee crisis.

The effect has been to paint himself into a corner. Habermas is still everyone’s favorite public intellectual, the recipient of innumerable awards and the subject of gushing profiles in publications like the Nation. But the impression otherwise is of a man adrift. This is especially the case with the European Union, increasingly the object of Habermas’s most fervent hopes.

As he freely confesses, the idea of a Germany that is both powerful and united fills German center-leftists like himself with dread. It means a return to pre-1914 days when Germany was “too weak to dominate the continent, but too strong to bring itself into line,” to quote the historian Ludwig Dehios. Just as liberal redemption lies in the West, the solution to a Germany that is both too big and too small lies in a greater Europe that is increasingly integrated.

“By embedding itself in Europe, Germany was able to develop a liberal self-understanding for the first time,” Habermas wrote recently, the same thing he said thirty years earlier about integration into the US-led international order.

Indeed, he went even farther. Rather than a sovereign Germany, his hope was for Germany to cede aspects of sovereignty to the European Union without the union taking them on itself. The state would fade away at both the national and EU level, not under socialism but amid the greatest wave of speculative mania in capitalist history. This was no less utopian than the notion of finding liberal redemption in the arms of an increasingly illiberal west, which is why it was inevitable that his hopes would eventually crash and burn.

Which brings us to yet another reason why the Historikerstreit would eventually fall short. As the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has observed, Habermas has an issue with capitalism: he doesn’t want to hear about it. Just as he sees the European Union as a device that technocrats can manage provided they have the proper “democratic roots,” he sees Nazism as a largely national problem that Germans can manage provided they dissolve themselves into some larger liberal entity. As admirable as the call for Germany to take responsibility may be, the effect is to play down certain ideological and economic aspects.

One of the curious things about the Historikerstreit, for instance, is why Habermas and his allies failed to challenge the Cold War caricature of Soviet history that was the centerpiece of Nolte’s argument. Both sides took it as a given that the Soviet experience was one big bloodbath from beginning to end — the only question is whether it planted the idea of mass extermination in Hitler’s head or whether he thought it up on his own.

After six months of controversy, it was left to an outsider, an ex-Marxist named Richard Löwenthal, to note in a letter to the FAZ that while the revolution and civil war of 1917–1921 were certainly bloody, there were no “acts of annihilation” until Stalin’s disastrous collectivization campaign in 1929–1933 and the purges in 1936–38. Since this was long after Nazi ideology had taken shape, the idea of a causal connection was spurious on its face.

So why didn’t Habermas point out the obvious? No doubt because he was unwilling to part ways with a US consensus that the Soviet Union was all bad all of the time except for a brief period of dispensation during World War II.

Similarly, his depiction of Nazism as essentially a German problem had the unintended consequence of letting other nations off the hook. So what if aging veterans parading about in their Waffen-SS uniforms were a regular occurrence in the Baltic republics? Since the Balts are not Germans, they can’t be Nazis — can they? What did it matter if statues of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera were proliferating across the Ukraine or if Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán was attempting to rehabilitate Miklos Horthy, the Axis supporter who oversaw the deportation and annihilation of some four hundred thousand Jews? Since only Germans were responsible for Nazi atrocities, the others got a free pass.


Continues at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/erns ... kerstreit/
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 19, 2016 8:42 pm

Managing Disorder

Jerome Roos

We live in a topsy-turvy world. As one widely shared meme recently put it, “everything we feared about communism — that we would lose our houses and savings and be forced to labor eternally for meager wages with no voice in the system — has come true under capitalism.” Far from leading to greater economic and political freedom, as its acolytes and intelligentsia always claimed it would, the ultimate triumph of the neoliberal project has gone hand-in-hand with a dramatic expansion of state surveillance and control. More people are currently under correctional supervision in the United States than were in the Gulags at the height of Stalin’s terror. The NSA’s servers can now capture 1 billion times more data than the Stasi ever could. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, there were 15 border walls worldwide. Today there are 70. In many respects, the dystopian future of the novels and the movies is already here.

In its Faustian bid to restructure entire societies in line with the prerogatives of private profit and endless economic growth, neoliberalism has always placed the iron fist of the state firmly alongside the invisible hand of the market. In the wake of the global financial crisis, however, this collusion between private interests and public authority has been radicalized. Giorgio Agamben writesthat we are witnessing “the paradoxical convergence today of an absolutely liberal paradigm in the economy with an unprecedented and equally absolute paradigm of state and police control.” Tracing the origins of this paradigm back to the emergence of the police and the bourgeois obsession with security in pre-revolutionary Paris, Agamben notes that “the extreme step has been taken only in our days, and it is still in the process of full realization.”

The terror attacks of 9/11 and the fallout of the Great Recession played an important role in catalyzing these developments, speeding up the ongoing de-democratization of the state and casting the fundamentally coercive nature of neoliberalism into ever-sharper relief. The result, for Agamben, has been the rise of a new political formation operating according to a logic of its own:

The state under which we now live is no more a disciplinary state. Gilles Deleuze proposed to call it the État de contrôle, or state of control, because what it wants is not to order and to impose discipline but rather to manage and to control. Deleuze’s definition is correct, because management and control do not necessarily coincide with order and discipline. No one has put it so clearly as the Italian police officer, who, after the Genoa riots in July 2001, declared that the government did not want for the police to maintain order but for it to manage disorder.

The management of disorder — this becomes the main paradigm of government under neoliberalism. Rather than directly confronting the underlying causes of political instability, ecological catastrophe or endemic social ills, the state of control considers it “safer and more useful to try to govern the effects.” And so, instead of fighting the obscene inequalities of wealth and power at the heart of financialized capitalism, it increasingly resorts to policing the precariat. Instead of overturning the social exclusion and economic marginalization of historically oppressed minority groups, it has long since resolved to harass, murder and incarcerate them. Instead of ending poverty and war, it now undertakes to erect new walls and fences to keep out the unwanted migrants and refugees. In short, instead of trying to address the multifaceted conflicts and crises facing humanity at their root causes, the state of control is content just to manage them.

If there is one image that has come to define this emerging paradigm of control, it is the phalanx of militarized riot police — armed with assault rifles and flanked by armored personnel vehicles — squaring off against mostly unarmed local populations in places like Rio de Janeiro, Diyarbakir and Standing Rock. From the visual appearance of the officers to the weapons and tactics deployed on the ground, these images clearly show how the world’s internal spaces of segregation have increasingly begun to resemble an occupied warzone. The resemblance is of course no coincidence: not only does law enforcement receive extensive surplus material from the military-industrial complex, including arms and vehicles that would otherwise have been deployed in actual warzones, but it has also begun to apply military methods of counter-insurgency to the policing of protest and urban space more generally. In fact, two of the four riot squads deployed to Ferguson in 2014 received their training in crowd control from Israeli police, whose skills were honed in the occupied territories of Palestine. Under neoliberalism, in short, the methods of military occupation abroad and of local policing at home are increasingly starting to blend into one.


Continues at: https://roarmag.org/magazine/managing-disorder/
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby dada » Tue Dec 20, 2016 11:33 am

"The management of disorder... Rather than directly confronting the underlying causes of political instability, ecological catastrophe or endemic social ills, the state of control considers it “safer and more useful to try to govern the effects.” [...] In short, instead of trying to address the multifaceted conflicts and crises facing humanity at their root causes, the state of control is content just to manage them."


What other choice does it have? The state of control is the underlying, root cause. What is it going to do, confront itself? The pyramid isn't going to dismantle itself, or turn itself upside-down.

"disorder maintenance and management" sounds like fun. Probably just a boring desk job, though.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 20, 2016 11:48 am

I think it was Chicago's Mayor Daley who originally said- on tape- "The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder."



1968 DNC Police Riot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dUc13EwG4k


dada » Tue Dec 20, 2016 10:33 am wrote:"The management of disorder... Rather than directly confronting the underlying causes of political instability, ecological catastrophe or endemic social ills, the state of control considers it “safer and more useful to try to govern the effects.” [...] In short, instead of trying to address the multifaceted conflicts and crises facing humanity at their root causes, the state of control is content just to manage them."


What other choice does it have? The state of control is the underlying, root cause. What is it going to do, confront itself? The pyramid isn't going to dismantle itself, or turn itself upside-down.

"disorder maintenance and management" sounds like fun. Probably just a boring desk job, though.
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby Searcher08 » Tue Dec 20, 2016 1:55 pm

BLM and SJWs don't give a crap about the violence that impacts black communities when it doesn't come from the police. Doesn't fit the narrative, does it? And that is what counts, the narrative...



Jordan Petersen on class-based guilt
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Dec 20, 2016 2:36 pm

Nice and succinct.

Anonymous asked:
could you talk about why 'cultural marxism' is a conspiracy theory? is it not the same as cultural materialism? because cultural materialism seems like something i mostly agree with?


Image

It’s a term made up by the far-right/literal Nazis in the 50s.

To make the Nazi connection even clearer, “cultural Marxism” is a bare-minimum rebranding of “cultural Bolshevism,” a term literally coined by Hitler to blame the Jews for modern art and subversive politics.


http://lexaproletariat.tumblr.com/post/ ... rxism-is-a
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 02, 2017 1:24 pm

The Frankfurt School claimed to be Marxist, but, as Stuart Jeffries says in Grand Hotel Abyss (Verso, 2016) it “never stooped to revolution.” Theodor Adorno, Marx Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and others associated with it, “were virtuosic at critiquing the viciousness of fascism and capitalism’s Socially eviscerating, spiritually crushing impact on western societies, but not so good at changing what they critiqued.” Their impact on the academic left in Europe and North America was extensive, and, for anyone who thinks changing the world is the point, almost entirely negative. There are many books that try to explain their ideas — a difficult task, given their penchant for impenetrable jargon-laden prose — but Jeffries’ book is a history and group portrait. His title comes from Georg Lukacs, who sarcastically described them as living in a luxury hotel, “equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity.” It’s a valuable introduction to the lives and ideas of an influential group of 20th century philosophers. Recommended for anyone who wants to understand why much of what passed for radical thought in academia in the late 20th century was so obscure and depressing.


http://climateandcapitalism.com/2017/01 ... uary-2017/
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 02, 2017 7:36 pm



If "SJW" like "Cultural Marxist" had a function other than as a made-up insult leveled against purported leftists by Nazis, "Alt-Right" and gullible idiots, maybe you'd have something to say after that.

But I get it, this is more your speed. I'll try to be as gentle as your condition requires.

Searcher08 » Sat Dec 24, 2016 1:57 pm wrote:Humanity and compassion are very precious and need to be rationed to people we find worthy.
If we don't (perhaps by not being vouched for by a person from RI in real life), well, fuck 'em, eh? The most disgusting human who ever walked the Earth. Yeah spot on - we can see his racist homophobic misogynist animal-torturing hate speech attacks in this hideous clip.

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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 12:49 pm

Fascism and the Liberal Imagination

Image
Benito Mussolini during his October 1922 March on Rome.


The path to power for both Italian Fascists and German Nazis was essentially the same: They presented themselves as “revolutionary socialists” in their initial appeals but, finding the political space for such a movement already well occupied on the left by socialists and communists, shifted their appeals and their alliances to the right and center, particularly with business capitalists who financed them, sponsored their activities, and essentially contracted with them to engage in systematic violence against the Left.


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/fasc ... -progress/
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 09, 2017 9:30 am

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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Mon May 08, 2017 9:05 pm

If you stand for nothing...



Unwrapping the 'Cultural Marxism' Nonsense the Alt-Right Loves

SCOTT OLIVER
Feb 23 2017


Image

You might have heard the term thrown around by figureheads of the new radical right. This is what they're talking about and why they're wrong.

(Top photo: People protesting health care reform in the US hold a photo of Andrew Breitbart, who had a few things to say about cultural Marxism. )

On July 22, 2011, in downtown Oslo, the right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik—who once gifted his mother a vibrator—detonated a bomb outside the prime minister's office, killing eight. He then drove 25 miles to Utøya island, where the ruling Labour Party's youth rally was being held, and began an hour-long shooting spree that ended with 69 more dead, most of them teenagers. That morning he had electronically distributed a 1,520-page tract, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, decrying the "rise of cultural Marxism/multiculturalism in the West." Later, he said the massacre had been a way of publicizing his manifesto.

The trope of "cultural Marxism" has been steadily gaining traction among the broad and diverse entity that is the radical right (although, hating diversity, would baulk at you saying so), where it serves as an umbrella term variously responsible for such un-American and anti-Western ills as atheism, secularism, political correctness, gay rights, sexual liberation, feminism, affirmative action, liberalism, socialism, anarchism, and, above all, multiculturalism. The ultimate goal of cultural Marxism, we're led to believe, is to slowly and stealthily dilute and subvert white, Christian Western culture, thereby opening sovereign nations to rule by a one-world corporate government. Whether that's by Jews, lizards, or communists isn't always clear.

So the theory goes that "cultural Marxism" was the master plan of a group of émigré Jewish German academics—widely known today as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory—who fled Nazi Germany in 1936, decamping to New York. What's certainly true is that, in an attempt to understand why the objective conditions of the European proletariat had failed to trigger widespread revolt, they concluded that religion—that great "opium of the people"—and mass culture served to dampen revolutionary fervor and spread "false consciousness." So adding a splash of Freud to their Marxism, the likes of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin trained their eyes on the subtle intertwining of social and psychic/sexual repression, believing that a revolutionary consciousness could be engendered through psychic liberation and more enlightened cultural forms and attitudes.

While these were the staunch views of a handful of left-wing thinkers writing in the middle of the 20th century, it does not follow that they have been the ideological architects of a wholesale takeover of Western culture. Yet those who believe it has already happened end up having to explain how George W. Bush and the neocon hawks somehow served a leftist agenda.

The "cultural Marxist" conspiracy has a slippery genealogy through the American right, beginning with its coinage by Lyndon Larouche in the early 1990s (although Hitler had warned of "cultural Bolshevism" during the 1920s). It passed through various esoteric journals and hard-right think tanks and was picked up by paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan (author of The Death of the West), William S. Lind, and Paul Weyrich, and over the last decade has spread feverishly through the murkier, more hyper-masculinist and libidinally challenged corners of the web. It has been rolled out everywhere from the Daily Mail (whose editor accuses the BBC of cultural Marxism) to the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, from Milo fans to meninists, becoming a staple of permanently livid YouTube ranters. Ubiquitous and almost infinitely flexible, it's the perfect scapegoat, yet betrays not only a mind numbingly ill-informed reading of the Frankfurt School's output, but also a staggeringly stupid grasp of the historical process. (Spoiler: It's the requirements of international capital, not the string-pulling of a few sociologists, that has provided history's chief motor these last few decades.)

"For Breivik, Breitbart, and others, multiculturalism is a strategic goal en route to a globalist superstate"


Continues at: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/unwr ... -alt-right
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 10, 2017 11:36 am

Americanism Personified: Why Fascism Has Always Been an Inevitable Outcome of the American Project

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Fascism, as a conscious and working ideology, was intentionally constructed to serve as a polar opposite to the materialist conception of thinking that scientific socialism (Marxism) was based in. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist, specifically noted this in his Doctrine of Fascism, which he wrote with Giovanni Gentile. Fascism is a collectivist ideology, much like socialism; however, fascism calls on a societal tie that differs greatly from that of socialism. While socialist collectivism is rooted in an inclusive, communal responsibility to have basic material needs met for all, fascist collectivism is rooted in an exclusive, nationalistic responsibility to dominate and conquer peoples who are viewed as not belonging. While socialist collectivism is based in worker-control of the means of production, fascist collectivism is based in a natural adherence to corporatism, which takes form in concentrated control of the means of production (mimicking that of capitalism). While socialism seeks to undermine and ultimately destroy the capitalist system, fascism seeks to fortify the late stages of capitalist accumulation by merging corporate power with the State.

As socialists view the working-class struggle as the primary vehicle to creating self-determination, fascists flatly reject economic (material) motives as a potential driving force for societal change. The authoritarian nature of capitalism is an ideal precursor to fascism. Because of this, fascism seeks to take the reins of the system and use it to carry out its nationalistic project that is based in a form of heritage or national identity as determined by the fascists. The Doctrine of Fascism explains,
"Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, [which posits] the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production. Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society."


The authoritarian nature of capitalism is rooted in its most elemental relationship - that between the owners and the workers - which naturally creates minority class dominance over the majority class. Fascism seeks to transform this class dominance into national dominance. Because of this, parasitic billionaire exploiters of the capitalist class (like Donald Trump) become welcome members of this nationalist project, and exploited workers who embrace fascism are more than willing to overlook the complicity of the creators of their own misery as long as these overseers are willing to repent through an embrace and renewal of ethnic nationalism.

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More at: http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/ameri ... scism.html
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Re: The Reasons Why People Hate Cultural Marxists

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 11, 2017 9:53 am

Theory from the ruins

The Frankfurt school argued that reason is dangerous, mass culture deadening, and the Enlightenment a disaster. Were they right?

Stuart Walton


Its principal theoreticians – a convocation of predominantly Jewish Leftists from well-to-do bourgeois backgrounds that encompassed Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas – produced a body of work of vast interdisciplinary range, embracing philosophy, sociology, social psychology, politics, economics and cultural theory, much of which is still consulted today. The Institute’s first duty was the critical appraisal of existing social reality, and its earliest imperative was to understand why, if the standard Marxist historical prognosis was to be credited, the western European working classes had not emulated their Russian counterparts in overthrowing capitalism in the wake of the Great War, when the old European empires came catastrophically to blows.

Instead of proletarian revolution in the West, what appeared was a fresh consolidation of economic power in the hands of old and new capitalist forces. The continent-wide depression that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929 had been a major destabilising force, but the reign of capital continued unchecked, and against a background of privation and unemployment, sinister new political forces were rallying. Working people were being recruited to the opposite of their own liberation, in the form of mass nationalist movements that would culminate in fascist dictatorships in Italy, Germany, Austria and Spain – and then in a new, more terrible global conflict.

The Frankfurt School’s own story was tragically affected by the spectre of fascism. Not only did these thinkers diagnose the destructive forces at work in the European societies around them, but they exemplified them in their own lives. Closed down during the first year of Nazi rule in Germany in 1933, the Institute’s members were forbidden to teach, and were shortly driven into exile. The diaspora first fled to neutral Switzerland, where an attempt was made to re-establish the Institute in Geneva. Adorno went to Oxford University, where he undertook four years of doctoral research at Merton College. Eventually, the Institute would find a collective refuge in the United States, first in New York and then, from the beginning of the 1940s, in California, in the midst of a community of deracinated European exiles.

The one notable exception was Walter Benjamin, who had been living in indigent isolation in Paris since Germany had succumbed to the Nazis. When Hitler’s forces rolled into France in 1940, Benjamin fled southwards ahead of the advancing occupation, until even sheltering in Provence became fraught with peril. With a small band of refugees, he undertook an arduous crossing of the Pyrenees on foot, hoping to be granted safe passage through Spain and Portugal, and then sail from Lisbon to the American refuge that his colleagues had managed to secure for him. On their arrival in the Catalan harbour town of Portbou, the fugitive group learned that Franco’s Spain had closed its northern border, and that they would likely be returned the next morning to occupied France, and thence to a German concentration camp. Benjamin apparently killed himself in a hotel room with an overdose of morphine, although some believe he was assassinated by local agents of the Soviet secret service, the NKVD.


...If organised forms of political resistance could be efficiently thwarted by such a system, often by subtle assimilation rather than outright suppression, the last barricade against it was the individual’s own refusal to think and respond in the prescribed ways. The hardest task facing any emancipatory politics today is to encourage people to think for themselves, in a way that transcends simple sloganising and the dictates of instrumental reason. True critical thinking requires not just a refusal to identify with the present structures of society and commercial culture, but a deep awareness of the historical tendencies that have brought about the current impasse, and of which all present experience is composed. That impulse, compared to the project of constructively helping the system out of its own periodic crises, retains the spark of a dissidence that might just, one day, throw it into the very crisis that would prompt a general, and genuine, liberation
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https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-frankfur ... vilisation
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