By Samuel (((Moyn)))

At the chilling climax of William S. Lind’s 2014 novel “Victoria,” knights wearing crusader’s crosses and singing Christian hymns brutally slay the politically correct faculty at Dartmouth College, the main character’s (and Mr. Lind’s) alma mater. “The work of slaughter went quickly,” the narrator says. “In less than five minutes of screams, shrieks and howls, it was all over. The floor ran deep with the bowels of cultural Marxism.”

What is “cultural Marxism”? And why does Mr. Lind fantasize about its slaughter?

Nothing of the kind actually exists. But it is increasingly popular to indict cultural Marxism’s baleful effects on society — and to dream of its violent extermination. With a spate of recent violence in the United States and elsewhere, calling out the runaway alt-right imagination is more urgent than ever.

Originally an American contribution to the phantasmagoria of the alt-right, the fear of “cultural Marxism” has been percolating for years through global sewers of hatred. Increasingly, it has burst into the mainstream. Before President Trump’s aide Rich Higgins was fired last year, he invoked the threat of “cultural Marxism” in proposing a new national security strategy. In June, Ron Paul tweeted out a racist meme that employed the phrase. On Twitter, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s newly elected strongman, boasted of meeting Steve Bannon and joining forces to defeat “cultural Marxism.” Jordan Peterson, the self-help guru and best-selling author, has railed against it too in his YouTube ruminations.

“Cultural Marxism” is also a favorite topic on Gab, the social media network where Robert Bowers, the man accused of shooting 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last month, spent time. Mr. Lind may have only fantasized about mass death as a comeuppance for cultural Marxists, but others have acted on it: In his 1,500-page manifesto, the Norwegian far-rightist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, invoked “cultural Marxism” repeatedly. “It wants to change behavior, thought, even the words we use,” he wrote. “To a significant extent, it already has.”

According to their delirious foes, “cultural Marxists” are an unholy alliance of abortionists, feminists, globalists, homosexuals, intellectuals and socialists who have translated the far left’s old campaign to take away people’s privileges from “class struggle” into “identity politics” and multiculturalism. Before he executes the professors, the protagonist of Mr. Lind’s novel expounds on his theory to their faces: “Classical Marxists, where they obtained power, expropriated the bourgeoisie and gave their property to the state,” he says. “Where you obtained power, you expropriated the rights of white men and gave special privileges to feminists, blacks, gays, and the like.” It is on the basis of this parallel that the novel justifies carnage against the “enemies of Christendom” as an act showing that “Western culture” is “recovering its will.”

Some Marxists, like the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci and his intellectual heirs, tried to understand how the class rule they criticized worked through cultural domination. And today, it’s true that on campus and off, many people are directing their ire at the advantages that white males have historically enjoyed. But neither the defense of the workers nor of other disempowered groups was a conspiracy on its own, and never was there a malignant plot to convert the first into the second — which is what “cultural Marxism” implies. Deployed to avoid claims of injustice, the charge functions to whip up agitated frenzy or inspire visions of revenge.

And while increasingly popular worries about cosmopolitan elites and economic globalization can sometimes transcend the most noxious anti-Semitism, talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable from it. The legend of cultural Marxism recycles old anti-Semitic tropes to give those who feel threatened a scapegoat.

A number of the conspiracy theorists tracing the origins of “cultural Marxism” assign outsize significance to the Frankfurt School, an interwar German — and mostly Jewish — intellectual collective of left-wing social theorists and philosophers. Many members of the Frankfurt School fled Nazism and came to the United States, which is where they supposedly uploaded the virus of cultural Marxism to America. These zany stories of the Frankfurt School’s role in fomenting political correctness would be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals ruling the world that fed the right’s paranoid imagination in prior eras.

The wider discourse around cultural Marxism today resembles nothing so much as a version of the Judeobolshevik myth updated for a new age. In the years after the Russian Revolution, fantasists took advantage of the fact that many of its instigators were Jewish to suggest that people could save time by equating Judaism and communism — and kill off both with one blow. As the historian Paul Hanebrink recounts in an unnerving new study, according to the Judeobolshevik myth, the instigators of communism were the Jews as a whole, not some tiny band of thinkers, conniving as a people to bring communist irreligion and revolution worldwide.

The results of such beliefs weren’t pretty. According to Professor Hanebrink, many aspects of the Judeobolshevik fantasy survived the Holocaust it helped bring about, just with the role of the Jews implied more euphemistically or replaced by new adversaries. As in Judeobolshevism, cultural Marxism homogenizes vast groups of shadowy enemies and assigns them a secret design to upend society. As in Judeobolshevism, those supposedly under threat are invited to identify themselves with “the Christian West” and surge in self-defense before it is too late.

The defense of the West in the name of “order” and against “chaos,” which really seems to mean unjustifiable privilege against new claimants, is an old affair posing as new insight. It led to grievous harm in the last century. And though today’s critics of “cultural Marxism” purport to be very learned, they proceed seemingly unaware of the heavy baggage involved in alleging that conspiracies have ruined the land.

That “cultural Marxism” is a crude slander, referring to something that does not exist, unfortunately does not mean actual people are not being set up to pay the price, as scapegoats to appease a rising sense of anger and anxiety. And for that reason, “cultural Marxism” is not only a sad diversion from framing legitimate grievances but also a dangerous lure in an increasingly unhinged moment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/opinion/cultural-marxism-anti-semitism.html

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37230124)

Lmfao

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37230434)

There is a small minority, it is true, of those who discuss 'cultural Marxism' who are adherents of what I'll call "strong cultural Marxism"; that is, the position that the proponents of cultural Marxism are actively and purposefully coordinating with one another, nationally and globally, to ruin culture, values, truth, beauty, etc. It is this and only this position that Moyn addresses, but of course does not bother to refute:

>>According to their delirious foes, “cultural Marxists” are an unholy alliance of abortionists, feminists, globalists, homosexuals, intellectuals and socialists who have translated the far left’s old campaign to take away people’s privileges from “class struggle” into “identity politics” and multiculturalism.<<

>>But neither the defense of the workers nor of other disempowered groups was a conspiracy on its own, and never was there a malignant plot to convert the first into the second — which is what “cultural Marxism” implies.<<

>>A number of the conspiracy theorists tracing the origins of “cultural Marxism”<<

>>These zany stories of the Frankfurt School’s role in fomenting political correctness would be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals ruling the world that fed the right’s paranoid imagination in prior eras.<<

>>As in Judeobolshevism, cultural Marxism homogenizes vast groups of shadowy enemies and assigns them a secret design to upend society.<<

And so on.

Okay, he has addressed--though curiously not at all bothered to provide evidence against--the position that cultural Marxism is a product of global coordination.

What about what I'll call "weak cultural Marxism" and "mixed cultural Marxism," which are the positions of probably 90-99% of those who take the topic seriously?

Let's call "weak cultural Marxism" the position that a bunch of intellectuals, often Jews, have been carried by unhappy accident, zeitgeist, and structural, cultural pressures like in-group identification to advocating for intellectual positions that have an aggregate, unintended effect of ruining Western civilization.

Let's call "mixed cultural Marxism" the position that while there is no global cultural Marxism conspiracy, it is not as though individual institutions--the rhetoric department at Berkeley, the admissions committee at Yale, and so on--do not coordinate. They absolutely do, and they act with the intent, at a smaller scale, to advance whatever intellectual theory, obtain whatever political goal, or consolidate whatever institutional power they favor.

Neither of these positions--again, positions that, I would contend, most who discuss 'cultural Marxism' hold--require large conspiracy, and they don't even require an active intent to ruin the world. In fact, I think folks who are serious about the topic will admit that, generally, those who are responsible for the intellectual, moral, artistic, etc. degradation of the West are usually acting in good faith; it's just that their values, which by the current generation have been received rather than created, are so bad, and they themselves are so sensitive to being outgrouped because they've been oversocialized, that they cannot help BUT make things worse.

While both weak and mixed cultural Marxism are more common positions than strong cultural Marxism anywhere but /pol/, would Samuel Moyn admit that appearances often deceive in favor of the strong cultural Marxist position? Is it really so inconceivable that someone feels like there is a global, Jewish conspiracy to make America a new Brazil when Hungarian billionaire Jews literally fund psyops to make sure SCOTUS nominees aren't confirmed, such psyops are very nearly successful, and the mainstream Jewish media denies that they happen? I mean, what are we supposed to think a conspiracy looks like?

Anyway. We don't need a precise definition of cultural Marxism (like pornography, we know it when we see it), and we don't need the adherents of cultural Marxism to rise to the level of grand global conspiracy to oppose it, and most of us don't require a conspiracy to believe that what obviously happens at every elite cultural and academic institution in Western civilization can be described. If there were a grand conspiracy, I'm not sure that would even move the needle in terms of what we believe needs to be done. And I think weak, mixed, and strong cultural Marxist theorists are starting to agree on what that might be.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37230623)

cr.

this is just more cutesy, equivocating word-game BS. like 'homegrown' terror (heh), etc.

not to go full nazi, but all of these EXACT same shenanigans -- and the Marxist context -- are given full analysis/exposure in Mein Kampf. same old (((playbook))). so transparent.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37230860)

2) blax

3) trannies

4) muslims

5) gay

6) lesbian

7) women

8) mexicans

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37234987)

http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4103683&mc=7&forum_id=2

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37234155)

"Oh, well, carry on then."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37234162)

*proceeds to pen 5 lengthy, irate paragraphs describing exactly what cultural marxism is and what Gramsci thought*

*places lone Pringle in mouth*

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37230997)

sounds like a 180 book

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37232946)

IT'S AFRAID

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37232983)

So a non-conspiracy is more palatable and completely different?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4132715&forum_id=2#37234137)