Western Cultural Marxism

 Maoist cultural Marxism is now Western Cultural Marxism.  Critical Marxism criticizes the entirety of the existing society—Marxist conflict analysis.   The working class is no longer the base of the revolution.  Marxists no longer have to be responsible to the working class because they have captured the corporations.  The bosses are no longer the enemy; they’re an opportunity.  To Marxists, the working class is irrelevant.  The energy is in the racial minorities, the sexual minorities, the feminists, the outsiders, and the LGBTQ+.  Marxists have abandoned the working class.  They now rule the culture industry that commoditizes culture and sells it back to the people stripped of what it is.  They sell racial, sexual, gender, sexuality; debased agitprop as if that were actual culture.  It’s all provided as a mockery of what’s really going on.  So, we ended up with Woke.  An identity-based Marxism.  With a whole bunch of – what Germans called “folk.”  LGBTQ is a folk; the Black community is a folk; Antifa is a folk.  They even have flags, carry them as banners, hang them on buildings, and paint them on walls. 

You don’t realize that Mao used identity politics to take over China because the history of Communism is not taught in American schools.  Like the Woke in America today, Mao characterized people into bad and good categories. The young – who believed him - led the Chinese Revolution.  We tell our children that white is bad, but if you become queer, we celebrate you.  In schools, this is done behind the parent’s back.  We are experiencing Maoist techniques to destroy Western culture and control the country.  It’s using American identity politics to subvert American individualism and individual freedom.  We are subjected to middle-level violence by gangs in the streets, ransacking stores, creating “Autonomous zones,” throwing fireworks instead of bombs, stopping traffic and jumping on the roofs of cars, and encouraging hoodlums to sucker-punch pedestrians.  In many major cities, the District Attorney allows criminals back on the street to steal, rob, and assault citizens multiple times, creating a current of fear among the law-abiding population.   

 

There is a sinister similarity between the Cult of Mao and Woke Culture

 The ongoing cultural revolution in much of the West has not yet achieved the absurdity of the Mao religion of 1967–69. Yet so-called “Wokeness” has the characteristics of a religion bent on the extirpation of heretics, as Joseph Bottum, Jamil Jivani, and Michael Vlahos, have observed. No wonder that some of the new religion’s adherents vandalized, desecrated, and burned churches and synagogues.

In America in 2020 as in China in 1966, ultra-left rage mobs have been allowed to riot, assault, loot, and pillage, as David Bernstein describes in “The Right to Armed Self-Defense in the Light of Law Enforcement Abdication.” The modern violent ultra-left is mostly above the law, including pandemic laws against mass gatherings.

As in China, the mobs do not target only the heretics. Anyone can be attacked for no reason at all—the better to terrorize the population into submission. Thus, mobs purporting to care about racial justice demolish apolitical small businesses owned by blacks; business that try to mollify the rioters by putting up signs of political support receive no mercy.

It’s easy to lose one’s livelihood over nothing, like the Hispanic truck driver fired for cracking his knuckles, which a Twitter mob interpreted as a white power symbol. Or for indirectly casting doubt on the mobs; an employee of a data company was fired for retweeting a study showing that peaceful protests are more effective than riots in achieving political objectives. (Both incidents are detailed in Yascha Mounk’s “Stop Firing the Innocent” essay for The Atlantic.) People who dare to criticize Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, Inc.—or who fail to praise it sufficiently—may quickly find themselves unemployed and unemployable.

School curricula and libraries are being “decolonized” by the elimination of classic books such as Mildred Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” a black woman’s history of her family in Jim Crow Mississippi.

Today’s cultural revolution, like Mao’s, is top-down and led by the most privileged university graduates and students. They have worked themselves into self-righteous fury against the unawokened lower classes.

As in 1966, modern iconoclasts deface and destroy all statues with equal zeal: abolitionists, animals, 9/11 firefighters, Indians, Union soldiers in the Civil War, Ulysses Grant, and Abraham Lincoln all get the same treatment as Confederates. Although the destroyers may not have heard of Lin Biao’s exhortation to “Smash the Four Olds,” they implicitly understand that building the “anti-capitalist” new order they want requires the obliteration of the memory of all that come before: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.

An important difference between China in 1966 and the West today is that the rage mobs and their more sedentary allies do not yet control all means of communication—but the space for dissent is considerably narrower than it was just a little while ago. Unlike China, we don’t have a formal Socialist Education Campaign in every classroom—but we have something similar in more and more educational institutions, from pre-schools through university.

And at least in the United States, many do have the practical means to resist mob violence; professor Bernstein’s article collects numerous examples. But the exercise of lawful self-defense may still lead to criminal charges by prosecutors aligned with the extreme left.

China’s Cultural Revolution began to end in 1976 when Mao died, and the pragmatic totalitarians staged a coup that removed the more idealistic totalitarians. Will the people of the Anglosphere have to wait that long, or longer, for rescue? Or will the hundreds of millions of people who don’t support the totalitarian ultra-left emancipate themselves from mental slavery? Will they end the reign of terror of today’s Maoists?

Struggle Sessions

From FIRE: Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Tensions at Yale University hit a boiling point yesterday after an email about Halloween costumes created a week-long controversy on campus.

Students called for the resignation of Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis after she responded to an email from the school’s Intercultural Affairs Council asking students to be thoughtful about the cultural implications of their Halloween costumes. According to The Washington Post, students are also calling for the resignation of her husband, Master of Silliman College, Nicholas Christakis, who defended her statement.

FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff recorded video of students confronting Nicholas Christakis yesterday in the courtyard of the Silliman College dormitory complex at Yale. Lukianoff was on Yale’s campus to speak at a conference on issues related to free speech in higher education.

[Note the synchronized finger snapping - an indication that this is a specific group - a la "Occupy Wall Street" surrounding the professor being "struggled"]

Lots of people on the Right call them “Hothouse Flowers” and “Precious Snowflakes.” That a possibility, but I view them differently.   It's assumed that they are what they claim, emotionally fragile children who need protection from the world around them.

HERE is what they are protesting: a memo about allowing people to wear what they want for Halloween.

Flowers and snowflakes don’t surround a professor at a university and demand an apology for standing up for free expression. They don’t demand his firing. These are not people who are so fragile emotionally that they curl up in a ball because of a word that “triggers” deep seated fears.

These are tough cadres.

They are America's Mao Youth.

They have absorbed an ideology that allows them to give vent to their emotions and ideology.  They can ban conservatives from speaking on campus.  They can destroy newspapers that print ideas with which they disagree.  They can accuse an innocent man of rape, destroy his life and think it's a good thing.  Theirs is an ideology that is quite often blatantly racist, sexist and definitely hostile to their class and ideological enemies.  

We appear to have forgotten the Mao era.  He first proposed “let a hundred flowers bloom.” After enough people believed that it gave them the right to speak out and expose themselves, the hammer fell. Mao’s cadres, often students, participated in “Struggle Sessions” in which the victim was required to admit to his or her "crimes."

From Wikipedia

A struggle session was a form of public humiliation and torture used by the Communist Party of China in the Mao Zedong era to shape public opinion and to humiliate, persecute, or execute political rivals and class enemies. In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit to various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until he or she confessed. Struggle sessions were often held at the workplace of the accused, but were sometimes conducted in sports stadiums where large crowds would gather if the target was famous enough

A Struggle Session:

You Xiaoli was standing, precariously balanced, on a stool. Her body was bent over from the waist into a right angle, and her arms, elbows stiff and straight, were behind her back, one hand grasping the other at the wrist. It was the position known as "doing the airplane." Around her neck was a heavy chain, and attached to the chain was a blackboard, a real blackboard, one that had been removed from a classroom at the university where You Xiaoli, for more than ten years, had served as a full professor. On both sides of the blackboard were chalked her name and the myriad crimes she was alleged to have committed....

The scene was taking place at the university, too, in a sports field at one of China's most prestigious institutions of higher learning. In the audience were You Xiaoli's students and colleagues and former friends. Workers from local factories and peasants from nearby communes had been bused in for the spectacle. From the audience came repeated, rhythmic chants.... "Down with You Xiaoli! Down with You Xiaoli!"

You can almost hear the finger snap, snap, snapping.

We don’t live in a communist dictatorship although college campuses house quite a few of Mao's admirers. But the methods are eerily familiar. People who have committed though crime are not required to “do the airplane” on a college campus .... yet. Instead, they must apologize for speaking banned thoughts, and then they must be fired.

We have imported communist-lite Struggle Sessions to Yale and other American campuses.  They are not brought to you by Hothouse Flowers or Precious Snowflakes but by America's Mao Youth.

"...history’s happy predestination..."

I found this term amusing, and so apt as it applies to the delusions of Obama: the childlike belief that history favors him and his fantasies.

Speaking recently about the Islamic State’s beheading of an American journalist, just before another tee time, President Barack Obama assured the country that “the future is won by those who build and not destroy.”

At a news conference on Thursday Obama admitted in so many words that “We don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with the Islamic State, but he seemed to retain his usual faith in history’s happy predestination nonetheless. He and his Secretary of State have dismissed Russia’s massive land grab as a sign of weakness and an embarrassingly out-dated way of doing things, assurances have been made that all of that even more old-fashioned beheading and crucifying and slaughtering that the Islamic State gang has been up to certainly “has no place in the 21st Century,” and thus far these messes have dominated the news thoroughly enough that no one in the administration has been obliged by the press to explain why another aircraft carrier is needed in the South China Sea. “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” as the president is fond of saying, to the point that he had it woven into the Oval Office carpet, and we are expected to share his confidence that the aphorism will prove true no matter what befuddled efforts America might make.

A couple of smarter fellows over at National Review have already written convincingly about Obama’s childish faith that the good guys always win in the end, no matter how wimpy their good guy ways nor how ruthlessly bad the bad guys might be, but we would add that such fantastical notions are characteristic of modern liberal thinking about almost everything. Not just foreign policy, but economics, social issues, and the very nature of man.

I have written prior to these columns about this very subject:What is it with Obama's blind faith in the inevitable march of history? 

Allow me to quote myself:

Barack Obama gave a speech, the thing he does best, with a ridiculous premise embedded therein, something he does almost every time he opens his mouth. Often it’s fields of straw men he’s destroying. This time he’s referring to that inevitable march of history he and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, is fond of invoking.

It goes something like this:

“This is the 21st Century and X is just not done in this century. So X will inevitably fail.”

The fact that this is the 21st Century was supposed to have stopped Putin from swallowing the Ukraine piece by piece.

In Obama’s last statement in Martha's Vineyard, before heading back to finish his round of golf, was that

"One thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century."

Who is this "We" Mr. Obama? ISIL disagrees. And, in fact, it’s reported to be attracting thousands of young people who have spent most of their lives in the 21st Century. They think ISIL is the path to the future and are willing to die for ISIL and their Muslim faith.

...

Is that reference to the 21st Century a theme that Obama’s speech writers throw in because it polls well. Or is this what the Obama really believes. It would not surprise us because the “March of History™” is a familiar theme in Marxist thought. And versions of Marxism were part of Obama’s formative years before he became President.

Victor Davis Hanson:

He also believes history follows some predetermined course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those he pronounces to be on the “right side of history.” He also chastises others for being on the “wrong side of history” — as if evil is vanished and the good thrives on autopilot.

When in 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the thuggish theocracy, they wanted immediate U.S. support. Instead, Obama belatedly offered them banalities suggesting that in the end, they would end up “on the right side of history.” Iranian reformers may indeed end up there, but it will not be because of some righteous inanimate force of history, or the prognostications of Barack Obama.

Perhaps it's Obama's personal path to the highest office in the land, as totally undeserved as his Nobel Peace Prize, that gives him the feeling that he, like King Canute, controls the tide. There is a sick feeling that the man is not only a deluded narcissist, but a dangerous fool. A belief which seems to conflict with the observation that he is so fundamentally corrupt that he's evil.  But that may be a false choice.  There is no rule that says the deluded cannot be evil.  There are at least three prominent examples in the 20th Century and they ruled Russia, Germany and China.  I am quite sure that the 21st Century will be no different.