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Anti-Capitalist MeetUp ... cultural marxism, the future of a RWNJ delusion

Like Joe McCarthy’s ‘reds under your bed’, the RWNJs got their wearing white before Labor Day over this weekend, unfortunately with casualties.

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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…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.

Now James Alex Fields jr. is their current Horst Wessel, a foot-soldier (they disclaim him, but say he met the dress-code so they gave him a shield) for anti-semitism’s National Vanguard, an American white nationalist organization based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Unlike Dyann Roof, he chose as weapon, the analogy no self-respecting gun control advocate wants to use, a muscle car.

Whose cultural imperialism? The geniuses on the Right needed to invent a meme that could combine the anti-communism of the Cold War and the typical anti-intellectualism of college drop-out pundits like Limbaugh, Beck, and Carlson. They need to believe that an "alt-left” exists, even as we mock RWNJs by uttering it.

Hence “cultural marxism” emerged as an enemy conspiracy theory to offset the burgeoning ignorance now ensconced in the WH with Bannonism and its Millerist self-loathing tendencies. Bannon’s own RW interests in traditionalism are developments of a particular European origin reflected in a number of conservative religious sects.

...Germany pursued "a European cultural front that gravitates around German culture". The Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels set up the European Union of Writers, "one of Goebbels's most ambitious projects for Nazi cultural hegemony. Presumably a means of gathering authors from Germany, Italy, and the occupied countries to plan the literary life of the new Europe, the union soon emerged as a vehicle of German cultural imperialism."[47]

I have written on this topic before, but now it becomes, as undergraduates prepare to be assailed by a continuing structure of educational (symbolic) violence, more crucial that the stupidity of RW memes be addressed.

Entire generations of US undergraduates will have spent their adolescence with full RWNJ media saturation thinking that it’s normal to have a Black President even if the cheaper motels deliberately exclude non-FoxNews channels in their rooms. Hence white identity is being avant-garde, therefore dope.

The millennial cohort does have as it always has a few in their number whose class/gender/race affiliations make reactionary thought attractive. The years of PBO and a “birther” Trump have fostered some even stranger variations on the discourse of “political correctness”.

Combined with the oddly American puritanical nature of repressed sexuality and religious ideologies it is pretty much the same stuff of prior generations, darn those DFHs, everybody “virtue signals”. And Nazi social justice is a social justice, regardless. And tiki torches don’t get manufactured in your local WalMart, you stupid anti-globalist.

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Antonio Gramsci, not Julius EvolaIt begins in the 1910s and 1920s. When the socialist revolution failed to materialise beyond the Soviet Union, Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs tried to explain why. Their answer was that culture and religion blunted the proletariat’s desire to revolt, and the solution was that Marxists should carry out a “long march through the institutions” – universities and schools, government bureaucracies and the media – so that cultural values could be progressively changed from above.

Adapting this, later thinkers of the Frankfurt School decided that the key to destroying capitalism was to mix up Marx with a bit of Freud, since workers were not only economically oppressed, but made orderly by sexual repression and other social conventions. The problem was not only capitalism as an economic system, but the family, gender hierarchies, normal sexuality – in short, the whole suite of traditional western values.

The conspiracy theorists claim that these “cultural Marxists” began to use insidious forms of psychological manipulation to upend the west. Then, when Nazism forced the (mostly Jewish) members of the Frankfurt School to move to America, they had, the story goes, a chance to undermine the culture and values that had sustained the world’s most powerful capitalist nation.

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The studios, desperate to claw back the trust of the American people, turned out a series of propagandist films, I Married a Communist, or I Was A communist for the FBI (which won the 1951 Oscar for Best Documentary).

The vogue for the ideas of theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno in the 1960s counterculture culminated with their acolytes’ occupation of the commanding heights of the most important cultural institutions, from universities to Hollywood studios.

There, the conspiracy says, they promoted and even enforced ideas which were intended to destroy traditional Christian values and overthrow free enterprise: feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism.

And this, apparently, is where political correctness came from. I promise you: this is what they really think.

The thing is, hegemony is as American as apple pie, or most anything else. It’s an immigrant. The sooner idiots of any complexion realize it, the sooner the Democratic experiment can resume. Contrast this notion of political warfare with the current WH.

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The problem is that no government agency—not the State Department, not the Pentagon, and not the CIA—views political warfare as a core mission. This gap is partially filled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute, entities created during the Reagan administration to promote democracy abroad in an overt manner. But these organizations primarily focus on the procedures of democracy—training activists to conduct campaigns and elections—rather than trying to influence substantively who assumes power. That has rightly allowed them to maintain a neutral reputation but also leaves a yawning gap in the U.S. government's capabilities…

"Political warfare" may be an alien-sounding concept in 2013, but that is precisely the problem. The United States will never best its rivals and enemies without enhancing its capacity to exert influence in countries whose futures are up for grabs. That this can be done successfully should be clear from the experience of the Cold War, even if there are many differences between the situation then and now. It is high time to rediscover lost skill sets and get to work countering the attempts of various anti-American actors to shape the world—and in particular the Muslim world—in their own image.

It will be difficult to measure the outcome of a political warfare campaign—hard metrics are easier to come by for kinetic targeting than for political-influence operations, which is why American leaders naturally prefer the former to the latter. But U.S. enemies, from Iran to al-Qaeda, work hard and often effectively to shape public opinion with influence operations, not just with the use of force. Unless the United States counters their efforts in kind, it is likely to find the greater Middle East developing in a dangerous direction.

www.cfr.org/...

 

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This tasteless tweet is how he responds to Charlottesville.
He's even been denounced on DKos: Pathetic Moment from Kos on Twitter

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snoopydawg's picture

@gjohnsit
I did and just couldn't believe the number of people defending his tweet.

Our little corner of the universe got some ink in it. Someone wrote that he had come here to see what we are saying. But he made sure to tell people it wasn't HIS idea to come here, someone else told him to.

He let everyone know that we haven't bought the Russian propaganda and mentioned how ignorant we are for not jumping on the wagon.
Oh well.

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The message echoes from Gaza back to the US. “Starving people is fine.”

@snoopydawg
Ignoring the fact that they are using a term to slander the McResistance that the right-wing created.

But then they don't think "Bernie Bro" is a slander either.

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@gjohnsit
of political insight upon his faithful, though somewhat captive audience. His stalwart belief in what last year's election was about, shall never be shaken by anything so petty and heretical as having lost the damn thing.

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native

Call me, henceforth "Genuine Left.
Try to kick that, Dkos Koolade drunks! I am not an alternative. I am the Real Deal.
Fuckers.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Mark from Queens's picture

@on the cusp
your comment.

The immediate free-association of words that automatically come to my head when thinking of Bernie, in relation to the difference between Us and Them, are "authentic," "genuine," "trustworthy," "honest." And again, before anyone is moved to denigrate him, I use Bernie as a shorthand for us, the Left, C99, BlackLivesMatter, Occupy Wall St, Democratic Socialists of America, etc. Like Occupy, Bernie fundamentally re-focsued the conversation in this country.

Genuine Left. Authentic Left. Yeah, that seems to work.

Good stuff, annieli. Nice h/t to Tim Pool from OWS, the legendary livestreamer. He was a constant presence for all those wildcat OWS marches and risked a lot to bring live footage to the public. Once come up to sing with my band. Think he did "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," which I thought of as a nod to his Chicago hometown natives.

Btw, knew nothing of Gramsci, until a few years ago I went to the Gramsci Monument in the Bronx (you have to see how cool this was; was like Occupy re-created in a housing project) and was bowled over by the whole thing. Opened lots of minds in that area I bet. Speaking of the Bronx and radicalism, here's a story people could get a lift from, "At Home In Utopia."

In the mid-1920s, thousands of immigrant Jewish garment workers catapulted themselves out of the urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources and building cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. Adjacent to the newly opened subway corridor and in the midst of empty fields, they constructed the United Workers Cooperative Colony, a.k.a. “the Coops,” where they practiced the utopian ideals of an equitable and just society.

AT HOME IN UTOPIA captures their epic struggle across two generations as the Coops residents experiment with breaking down barriers of race and ethnicity, and championing radical ideas that would someday transform the American workplace.

Three other large communities—the Amalgamated Houses, built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, the Sholem Aleichem Houses, built by Yiddishists, and the Farband Houses, built by Labor ZIonists —were located near the Coops. But the Coops was the most grassroots and member-driven of the Jewish labor housing cooperatives, with many of the residents practicing—and proselytizing—communists.

As a community, the Coops gave its residents everything they’d ever dreamed possible in their adopted country—green spaces for gardens, sports and children’s play areas; community spaces for meetings, dances, recreation and dozens of clubs that flourished; a library with 20,000 volumes in Yiddish, Russian and English and, most of all, the sense that they lived on the cutting edge of progressive reforms that would inevitably sweep the nation. As part of this agenda, the Coops invited African American families into the complex, fostering lifetime friendships—and even interracial marriage.

Thanks to those who can do bear witnessing the all-you-can-eat Neoliberal trough and occasionally briefing us on their predictable inanities.

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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut

Pluto's Republic's picture

@Mark from Queens

Adjacent to the newly opened subway corridor and in the midst of empty fields, they constructed the United Workers Cooperative Colony, a.k.a. “the Coops,” where they practiced the utopian ideals of an equitable and just society.

The Coops was the most grassroots and member-driven of the Jewish labor housing cooperatives, with many of the residents practicing—and proselytizing—communists.

Somehow, much of Brooklyn was like that, perhaps in a less formal way. The spirit of the Bronx Coops was alive there, nonetheless, in the neighborhoods where Bernie Sanders grew up. It was a naturally coalesced utopia. It was an ad hoc commune with the communards watching over each other, largely the Jews, the Italians, and the Chinese. The occasional gentile child was delighted to snag a weekend job as a Shabbos Goy — as coveted a position as an alter boy.

An older friend, who grew up in that world once told me he didn't know that the Italians weren't Jews until much later. I was surprised because the Italians and Jews were very distinct, culturally, even though they lived in close harmony.

"What did you think the Italians were," I asked?

"I thought they were the 'happy' Jews," he said.

They were the pink diaper babies, perhaps. And the best of the Democrats. I always wanted to live on a commune; to belong to something like that.

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whether the use of the phrase "calling a spade a spade" is racist. I left. There are 1,200 stupid comments. I really don't know which group is the worst: Kos and his fan club, the Hillbots that are just like the Trump supporters, or the Bernie people that stay there sucking up and keeping their backs to the wall.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

@dkmich
My brain began to hurt and threatened to leak out of ears if I didn't stop.

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TheOtherMaven's picture

@dkmich
Twisting and warping everything they see and hear into another "injustice". It never ends, because anything can become an "insult" to an Injustice Collector.

Punchline to an old joke about a group of nuns shocked by the language of some very earthy workers: "Mother Superior, he called a spade a friggin' shovel!"

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

boriscleto's picture

One time policy advisor to Gary Hart...

He holds an imaginary telephone conversation once a year with the Archduke of Austria...

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" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "