The Christian Roots of Cultural Marxism

To many conservative Christians the belief system known as Cultural Marxism, like its close cousin, post-modernism, is a hateful ideology bent on destruction of our Christian culture.  To many on the Left the analysis by conservatives of Cultural Marxism is a type of shibboleth denying progressive forces.  Any mention of "Cultural Marxism" is an indication to many on the Left that their interlocutor is really a right-wing extremist, perhaps even a White Supremacist.

It does not help that many of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, who articulated the key ideas of Cultural Marxism, were Jewish, thus adding to the impression on the Left that those who complain about this philosophy are on the Hard Right and inclined towards anti-Semitic conspiracies.  Cultural Marxism being a dog whistle for anti-semites.  Nonetheless the Jewish aspect to Cultural Marxism is important, as will be argued here below.

In the West and indeed in the Orthodox East, we live in a Judaeo-Christian culture and the beliefs and values of Christianity, emerging as it did from the Jewish milieu, still set the paradigm within which our ethics and politics are worked out and discussed.  Cultural Marxism's power is that it touches on many of these deep cultural-values, while denying and attacking the faith upon which these values were founded.

It was Nietzsche, with his attempt to smash our table of values, who identified an inherent tendency to self destruction in Christianity, which he saw as a slavish and Semitic faith (going back to the validation of slaves as chosen people, not subhuman, and their liberation in the story of Exodus).  Other thinkers on the Right, such as Julius Evola utterly rejected the Christian values of compassion and what he saw as a celebration of weakness, looking instead to a religion of heroes as he believed existed in the Aryan world before Christianity.  Yet as Rene Guenon pointed out, the Tradition of our ancestors was to be found passed on to us within our traditional Christian inheritance.

To understand the political extremes of Left and Right, we really need to pay attention to the powerful and fundamental cultural symbol of Christ as the victim.  Nietszche and Evola were right, without Christianity our moral values would not have been centred on the victim.  Instead, more likely we would have looked back to Imperial Rome or even the earlier Dictators, with their symbol - the fasces, which was to give its name to a Twentieth Century ideology.

Cultural Marxism itself is simply what it claims to be.  It extends the Marxist economic critique to all aspects of society.  Thus it is no longer about dividing the world into economic oppressors of the poor in the form of the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat.  Now every relationship is to be understood as one of group oppression.  Just as we are defined by our economic identity in the struggle of economic power, so we belong to groups in our social interactions, either as oppressors or victims.  As men we inevitably oppress women, as Whites we inevitably oppress other ethnic groups, as heterosexuals we oppress people of non-heterosexual inclinations or passions.  From this stems the absurd idea of intersectionality, which leads to the bizarre "oppression Olympics" of groups competing for entitlement to power on the basis of their greater level of victimhood.

Such an ideology is of course destructive, debilitating and depersonalising.  The individual person is defined by his power status as understood by the ideological narrative.  When revealed as it is , the ideology is about nothing more than power.

While so much is wrong with this ideology, we must understand that it is a phenomenon that only a Judaeo Christian society could spawn.  It is a form of heresy and like all heresies there is only a small deviation from truth that leads to major consequences in terms of actions.  For Christ is indeed the victim, Who calls upon us to love the victim.  On this holy weekend we remember Christ as the sacred victim and scapegoat who suffered and died for us.  Weakness, vulnerability and compassion are all emphasised in the heart of the Christian faith as so powerfully attested to by Christ's willing sacrifice upon the Cross.

With the Cultural Marxists however, there is nothing redemptive about being a victim.  Instead dependency and wallowing in a feeling of being oppressed is encouraged, with the consequent resentment that causes.  It therefore takes us far away from the Christian ethos of forgiveness leading to redemption and towards a revolutionary attitude based upon resentment and self righteousness.

And of course, Christians themselves are ideologically defined as oppressors.  This denial of the founding value-system leads to the bizarre situation of Cultural Marxists turning a blind eye to oppression by other faiths, because it is not possible to comprehend in terms of the ideology that other faiths might cause oppression.  Thus Cultural Marxists are quick to defend those who carry our violence against Israel, yet the Muslim oppression of Christians is deliberately ignored.

The importance of the victim in Christianity has degenerated into the fetishization of victimhood.  The distortion from Christianity involves the denial that Christ redeemed us and was victorious on the Cross, but retains the cultural symbol of the victim.  Without that redemption and possibility of eternal life, all is about this passing world.  The victory must be achieved in this world, where victims are only ever victims and have no hope of Paradise, but must instead fight for Utopia politically and even on the street.  That is the original fall from Christian theology and with a centrifugal force the heresy moves the Cultural Marxists farther and farther away from Christian Truth, until they turn on Christianity itself.  Thinkers such as Evola and Nietszche were wrong, Christianity did not contain inherently the seeds of its own destruction.  Instead Cultural Marxism is only possible, as with the Left wing ideas of their day, because of a heretical turn.

That turn had its root in a heterodox over-emphasis in the West on Christ's humanity at the expense of His divinity.  The Catholic Church focused so much on the suffering of Christ as a victim that it forgot His ultimate victory.  The Protestants did not do very much to break away from this fetishization of Christ as a human victim, rather than triumphant Godhead in the flesh.   Our art and iconography powerfully portrays Christ as a dying or even a dead man.  This is so much so that Fyodor Dostoevsky was shaken on his visit to Europe when he saw Holbein's famous painting of Christ dead in the tomb.  As an Orthodox Christian to see Christ in this way had been unthinkable to the Russian writer, who went on to experience a crisis of faith. 

The fetishization of victimhood was to be combined with another reductionist aspect we inflicted upon Christianity - justification by faith alone.  While faith is central on the journey into the full stature of Christ, if it becomes reduced to justification by adherence to specific statements of a creed, the personal interaction and growth is gone.  Being Christian is no longer about becoming a full human being through faith in Christ, but believing a true creed is sufficient.  This is not so very different from what Jordan Peterson describes as ideological possession - belief in the correct ideology covers all sins and justifies the means.  This is why so many Leftists seem to be so insufferably self-righteous, exhibiting the intolerance of Seventeenth Century Puritans.

There was one key ingredient left before the subversion of our Judaeo Christian culture could begin.  To return to our roots - back in the First Century, the Jews rejected Christ for various reasons.  For the Pharisees, His teaching they thought would endanger their uncomfortable compromise with the Roman Empire that allowed them a level of religious autonomy.  Yet there was another element to Jewish society that became embittered by Christ - the Zionists of the time.  Zealots and others foresaw a Messiah who would by military means overthrow the Romans and establish a Kingdom based upon justice for the poor and oppressed.  Christ taught instead an internal change manifested in a life of love.  This caused severe disappointment and the welcomes of Palm Sunday in defiance of the Sanhedrin led to an unholy alliance of Zealot and Pharisee.  It was about political revolution to establish social justice, rather than hoping in faith for Paradise.  One can see that combined with Catholic emphasis on the victim and Protestant justification by faith alone, this Jewish emphasis on political rather than spiritual solutions was another key ingredient.  First came Marxism and then today, with its long march through our institutions we have Cultural Marxism.

We cannot blame true Judaism any more than true Christianity; yet the Western Churches weakly seem to accept the Cultural Marxist narrative and allow Christianity thereby to be dismissed as oppressive and as rigid tradition.  Instead our culture, based fundamentally upon Christianity, must find its voice again, to counter this corrosive ideology of resentment and materialism.  The answer is to be found in the Patristic writings, from Chrysostom to the Cappadocian Fathers - all of whom took the plight of the poor and oppressed very seriously.  Only then will we again understand that while Christ might have appeared as a victim, a stumbling block and foolishness to many, He is the victor over death and the Church is not a powerful and oppressive institution, but His body on earth.




     

ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE LEFT

One of the blind spots for the Left is that it is unable to accept it could be a source of bigotry or racism.  The Left is founded on the idea that it not only has different pragmatic and economic solutions, but that to subscribe to certain economic theories makes one morally superior.  The converse is also assumed, that however hard-working or diligent for the country a conservative is, he is morally bad perhaps even evil.  When coming into contact with decent conservatives, to keep their world-view of their moral superiority holding together, the Leftist will create some explanation, such as that this decent person has been fooled into being a conservative and is really Left wing under the surface.

Yet a perusal of history clearly shows that ideas put forward as progressive in every era have been responsible for more deaths, suffering, hatred and poverty than conservatism ever has been.  From 

Robespierre’s Terror to the Stalinist Gulags, to the economic catastrophe that is Socialist Venezuela (so admired by the current leader of the British Labour Party) it is the Left that has been the political movement most responsible for human suffering.  Nonetheless, when self-righteousness is the key foundation of one’s political involvement, it is an unthinkable thought that one’s beliefs might be the cause of suffering for the people you claim to help.  Thus begins the search for a scapegoat.  It is impossible for the average Leftist to take moral responsibility without his whole Weltanschauung and idea of himself as morally superior to his contemporaries being fatally undermined.

In the Twentieth Century anti-semitism was more associated with the Right and Jewish involvement in politics tended to be participation in Left wing Marxism.  If Nazism can be regarded as right wing, which is debatable given its anti-conservative, revolutionary and avante garde tendencies, that was of course the most egregious example of right-wing anti-semitism.  On the other hand, as Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, the high level of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik movement was disproportionate in comparison to the number of Jewish Russians.  It is also worth mentioning that the involvement of White Russian emigres seeking revenge through the National Socialist movement in Germany is often overlooked.

Nonetheless, anti-semitism has a far more natural home with the Left.  Despite the terrible suffering of the Jewish people most have refused to give in to a victim status that would seem a natural default position given the extent of persecution.  They have not become passive clients of a Leftist narrative that feeds off resentment.  Of course many black people or other ethnic minorities refuse the resentment narrative fed to the them by White Leftists, but the Jewish refusal to give in to victimhood has been phenomenal and brave.  They have succeeded as a community in keeping their traditions alive (something intolerable to the anti-traditionalist Left) and individual Jews have often reached the very top of Western society, giving the lie to the Leftist narrative that our society is based on oppression, rather than the hierarchies of competence identified by Jordan Peterson.

Therefore there are twofold reasons to choose the Jews as scapegoats for the Left:  first they have refused to be compliant with the Marxist post-modern narrative of oppression by a white Anglo-Saxon protestant-establishment.  Secondly, by succeeding in a capitalist system they have become part of the oppressive conspiracy as set out in Left wing narrative.  The irony is of course that not only Karl Marx, but the founders of post-modernism or cultural Marxism were largely Jewish.  This Left wing involvement by some Jews says more about the experience of lacking roots in a society than it does about Western society itself.  This was of course a very important point for the Jewish Catholic writer and philosopher Simone Weil.

Western culture is fundamentally Christian and that means the Jewish religion and Scripture is a core part of our culture and values.  We are a Judaeo Christian culture and it is that culture that the cultural Marxists, post-moderns and Leftists seek to destroy. 

If Western culture is a conspiracy of the capitalist class against the proletariat, it is a very fine line between making that claim and stepping into a dark conspiracy theory about a certain race that is successful in capitalism being behind globalist neoliberal economics. 

Being anti-conservative, whether as an international or national socialist or a post-modern, is about attacking the fundamental values and the fabric of our Christian culture.  That is why Leftists can make common cause with those attacking traditional gender roles and hard-line Islamists who believe in traditional gender roles.  It is not that these different groups have a shared positive cause, they are simply enemies of the Western inheritance.  The Jews are different – their great sin is to succeed as an ethnic minority in this allegedly oppressive society.  The Left has not achieved a claim over their loyalty necessarily – they are not supplicants to the morally-virtuous Left-wing politicians.  Of course this is a gross generalisation, but we must understand that the Left thinks in gross generalisations.  All the way back to Marx, people are not individual persons, but members of a class.  They are reduced to being part of an oppressor or victim class with their personal attributes erased in the eyes of the ideologue.  That of course is very similar to racism.     

It is therefore a very thin line between accepting the Marxist narrative and slipping into anti-semitism.  In the United States the dominance of intersectional theories of oppression places Muslims as a group above Jews.  The problem of anti-semitism in political Islam is therefore being overlooked.  In the United Kingdom the main Left-of-centre parliamentary party has been taken over by Hard-Left anti-parliamentary economic Marxists.  If you believe capitalism is a conspiracy against the poor, it is a very small step to believing Jews are oppressing the people.  We are already seeing serious problems with anti-semitism in the British Labour Party.  The willingness of the American Democratic party to see and hear no evil with regard to political Islam means they too are starting to turn a blind eye to anti-semitism, despite the party’s strong connections with the Jewish community in the United States.

What all this tells us is that the Left cannot reform or be self-reflective or critical unless it accepts being Left wing is not an infallible sign of moral righteousness.  Most politics is just about the mechanics of achieving economic growth for as many people as possible and ensuring civil society survives.  There are different theories as to how this might be done – from wealth creation and trickle-down economics to redistributive taxation.  The moral choice is not whether one is Left or Right, but whether one participates at all.  As long as there is this blindness about its own moral fallibility, the Left will fail to confront its own festering demons of anti-semitism and bigotry.

CONSPIRACY TO SILENCE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

Alex Jones of Infowars has been banned by the tech companies from most social media platforms.  Tommy Robinson, ( whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) the former leader of the EDL and a self-proclaimed campaigner for free speech and against Islamification of Britain (accused by many of simple agitation against Muslims), has been released from prison following his appeal heard before the Lord Chief Justice of England.

What both these political activists have in common is their repeated accusations that the establishment has a Left wing agenda.  These claims have landed them in very hot water.  Of course, it is possible to get bogged down in the legal argument about Tommy Robinson.  It is true that he is only released on bail and that he will have to face court again with regard to the contempt of court accusation.  Nonetheless it was found that his imprisonment was wrong and that the court acted in haste and disproportionately in sentencing him to a custodial sentence for contempt.

Many figures from Right and Left, including Nigel Farage, have suggested that Tommy Robinson went too far in broadcasting outside the court room where men (of Muslim background, which is significant to Tommy Robinson’s argument that the establishment turns a blind eye to Muslim crime) were being tried for the crime of grooming under-age indigenous girls for sex.  Tommy Robinson states he was careful only to read from a published BBC article still in the public domain on his live feed, but many have suggested he was jeopardising the prosecution of the accused.

Alex Jones is also a controversial figure, in particular with his comments on the Sandyhook massacre, for which the parents of the children murdered are suing him.  In his vociferous defence of the right to bear arms he suggested that the massacre might have been a hoax to support a campaign against guns.  Nonetheless, the social media platforms are relying on the vague concept of “hate speech” to remove him from their platforms. 

Of course it is important to understand the exact reasons why Alex Jones has been de-platformed and why Tommy Robinson was imprisoned, but looked at from a broader perspective it seems something very concerning is taking place.  It is something the public in general perceive, despite what they are told by the BBC or CNN – that because these men are on the Right they have been dealt with more harshly by the system.  In that sense what these two men say about the establishment, which might have looked like conspiracy theories before, is now looking more credible.

In the light of the over-reaction to Boris Johnson’s article in which he argued against banning the full-face-veil, yet is being attacked for Islamophobia for colourful comments, it seems a pattern is emerging.  The tension seems at first to be about free speech versus causing offence, but looked at more closely it is actually about protecting certain favoured groups from offence.  Whether it be transgender people, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women or in this case Muslims, there is a special protection given to certain groups in accordance with a specific ideology that dominates the thinking of the Western universities from which our politicians and leaders emerge.  This is what many right-wing internet personalities describe as Cultural Marxism, by which the old Marxist analysis of the rich bourgeoisie having power over their victims the proletariat is replaced by a broader narrative of power and oppression.  Like the Marxists, these new ideologues do not look at people as individuals, but whether they belong to an oppressor or victim class.  For this reason there are no restrictions on causing offence to those in the oppressor class, which is why the general public is right to feel that there is one rule for them and another for us, so to speak.

This is a dangerous and destructive ideology that prevents integration and encourages feelings of resentment and entitlement.  Psychologically, as Dr. Jordan Peterson has made clear, one does far better in life if one takes responsibility for oneself, rather than sinks ever deeper into the resentment and disempowerment caused by such an ideology ( if you are a member of one of the groups classified as oppressed).  However, for the privileged elite who believe in this cultural-Marxist analysis, it has the great advantage of making them feel good and virtuous without the economic and other costs of a real Marxist revolution.

Yet, the recent events relating to Tommy Robinson and Alex Jones suggest this is slightly more sinister (and we do not have to agree with their conspiracy theories to be worried).  When you reduce your analysis of a society to a crude binary battle between oppressor and victim, in which all nuance, individual virtue and ideals are ignored, then that justifies the use of power against your political enemies, who are seen as the enemies of progress and by definition evil oppressors.

Therefore, we need to start to take seriously the possibility that due process and fairness will cease to matter to the powerful Cultural-Marxist Left because they are so sure they are on the side of right and progress.  For that reason, rules and laws may be used simply as tools to silence those perceived as reactionaries.

   

Because this ideology has solidified its view of who is in the oppressor and victim group, adherents are not able to comprehend the possibility that those who were once oppressors could be left behind.  This is why so little has been done about white working-class schoolboys falling behind in education.  It is also why the establishment cannot understand why someone like Tommy Robinson has achieved such a following.  Neither can they imagine that mass immigration could ever be negative on the poor, because any criticism of mass migration is an attack on a group classified as a victim group.

What all this means is that the apparent conspiracy theories advocated by Jones and Robinson are not necessarily crazy at all.  While their specific claims might be questionable, they have been shut down by the powerful.  It was their advocacy of such theories that led to their draconian treatment to a large extent.  They are right to suspect freedom of speech is being shut down, as evidenced by the hysterical reaction to Boris Johnson’s article on the niqab.  These are all consequences of the Manichean and simplistic yet sanctimonious belief-system dominant in our establishment.  Alex Jones and Tommy Robinson, whether you agree with them or not, are really victims of this new oxymoronic phenomenon of liberal totalitarianism.