Continued from Part 2.
The great defeat
Marxism requires the State ownership of and authority to control all means of production. In theory that is the way the State can spread the wealth so that “benefits everyone equally.” Liberal Capitalism proposes to leave the process of spreading the wealth to offer and demand within a highly regulated market, which in reality is biased to favor the great corporations that hold no loyalty to any nation in particular. Fascism offers a mix of both things: a working class that is regimented and left to the care of a select minority of loyal leaders to whom the nation owes complete obedience.
How could it come to pass that the promoters of Marxism were able to devise a way to conquer the culture of the West? Imitating the first Christians in a perverted way they did not use armies, or weapons but they learned to operate the levers of culture promoting new values, new intellectual points of reference, and the resulting new ideas gradually replaced the old.
Karl Marx had a plan to spread and gain acceptance of his ideas. He expected that the workers of the world would unite and aggressively take control of the means of production. Once all the workers of the world were one powerful block it would be easy to control the sources of wealth around the world. Then the workers – seen as eternal victims of capitalist greed and cruelty – would decide their own destiny by means of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” That new order of things would then proceed to build a “worker’s paradise” a society modeled according to Karl Marx’s ideas.
In reality the workers of the world never united. When the Great War came the workers of the world simply stood behind their national leaders and fought for their national interests under their old banners. The war of 1914-1918 was a complete defeat for Marxists because the workers of the world paid no attention to these new ideas and decided to go to war in defense of their traditions, monarchs, churches, etc. paying no attention to the nebulous abstractions of Karl Marx. The Marxist proposal fell into deaf ears. It is true that it was imposed in Russia right after the war but that was not the result of a popular reaction. It was the work of very astute political opportunists that manage to manipulate the chaotic circumstances in Moscow to seize power. There was no marching of the proletariat to impose a classless society, and that did not result in a worker’s paradise either.
A second attempt
The fact that the workers of the world did not have any interest in uniting but were willing to go to war for the traditional national order was a serious defeat for international Marxism but they did not give up. It was obvious that the workers were not going to unite to give them control of the world and a classless society. At this point a new actor enters the scene, Antonio Gramsci who wrote a number of plans while in prison. Those writings were gathered and published as a book titled Quaderni del Carcere [1] where the author presents his idea of “the long march through the institutions.”
Gramsci was very frustrated by the success of Fascism under Benito Mussolini, for the seemingly inexhaustible energy of Capitalism and the meager results that Marxism was obtaining among his compatriots. He concluded that the workers of the world were simply too invested, too immersed in their national cultures and the diffuse abstractions of Marxism were not attractive enough to shake them out of their complacency. Gramsci proposes a different plan: to integrate Marxism into the culture and change the people’s way of thinking from the inside. It was necessary to debilitate patriotism, religion, national traditions, and other elements of the culture that represented an impassable barrier for the Marxists plan of a world revolt.
The focus of Marxism became the mind and motivations of every individual. They concentrated their efforts to infiltrate not factories but schools, universities, newspapers, publishing houses, radio networks, movie studios, and the growing recording industry. The idea was to gradually create a parallel culture that could one day replace the dominant traditional culture. In this way they expected that the majority of the population could embrace the Marxist ideals thus opening the way for the coordinated cultural and political final assault on Christianity.
This is the origin of the silent and systematic erosion of the foundations of Western Civilization that has been taking place in broad daylight for about a century now. The objective of Marxism shifted, they worked to make society more receptive to their ideas. To achieve that goal it was necessary to destroy the then dominant Christian culture.
Religio depopulata
Separated from his religion a man is separated from the community of people that share the same religious identity. Attacking religious practice affects the very core of the individual. The idea is to “deconstruct” man to make him easy to dominate. So that the original Marxist slogan of “unite!” became the exact opposite: “dismember, deconstruct, separate!” Once every man is completely deconstructed, he is not loved by nor he loves anyone. All his civic virtues are neutralized: the patriot, they say, is really a scoundrel; marriage is an invention of oppressive patriarchs; nations are nothing but groups dominated by oligarchs; religion is the opium of the people, etc. The natural solidarity fostered under religious and national association is the great enemy of Marxism. Religion is a particularly big obstacle for those who want to guide the will of the individual as a means of controlling society.
The School of Frankfurt
In 1923 a number of members of the German Communist Party founded an institute in the University of Frankfurt. They called it originally “The Institute for Social Research” and it would become known later as “The School of Frankfurt.”
This was a new generation of Marxists looking to learn from the past mistakes of the movement. Under the direction of Mark Horkheimer they realized that Gramsci was going in the right direction. A head on attack on the institutions was not going to succeed. They had to plan that “long march through the institutions” to have any hopes of strangling the traditional culture and bring down the system from the inside.
They started to work in a program to soften society’s cultural underbelly intending to make collectivism more attractive to the general population. The secondary objectives were no less important: to infiltrate and debilitate religion, to destroy nuclear families, to deny individuals the consolations of traditional society in the same way that was being done in the nascent Soviet Union: free love, no marriage, divorce, abortion, contraception. Lenin’s policies that filled the cities with orphans and abandoned children were producing the kind of individual ready to fall into the hands of the Marxist State to be indoctrinated in exchange for a measure of security: souls that could be bought for a plate of lentils.
About the time the School of Frankfurt evil geniuses were devising methods to whack traditional culture, Adolph Hitler was busy coming to power. Almost all the members of the School of Frankfurt were Jews, and all of them were Communists. The Führer was basically anti-Communist and anti-Semite; he was not the kind of leader they could coexist with. The result was that the group decided to take the next steamboat out of Germany and move to the United States. Notice that they did not go to Russia where their own ideas were being applied. None of these academics decided to go to the Soviet worker’s paradise. Most of them moved to New York or California where a Communist professor can have a nice salary and live well without having to mix with the sweaty proletarians. That is how the School of Frankfurt Marxists established a beachhead in the most capitalistic country in the world.
Cultural terrorism
A prominent member of the School of Frankfurt, György Lukács, is on record saying: “I see the revolution and destruction of society as the only solution. A world-wide overturning of values cannot take place without annihilation of the old values and a creation of new ones.”[2]
Lukács is the creator of the “cultural terrorism” that gave us sexual education at all school levels, used to promote concepts as “free love”, “the obsolete concept of monogamy”, the “irrelevance of religion”, the “archaic nature of the middle class family” and other similar abominations.
The now prevailing culture is calling youth to rebel against traditional morality and the fundamental values of Christianity. Those ideas are the foundation of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960’s. These ideals were embraced without much resistance by the postwar generation that had its natural inhibitions debilitated by alcohol and drugs. Many wonder what happened to the world they grew up in. Well, that world has disappeared; it has been deconstructed and replaced by the social engineers of Cultural Marxism. The notorious Abbie Hoffman said once “we are going to capture your children!” He was not joking. Our children live in intellectual territory occupied by the creators of cultural terrorism. For the first time we live in fear of uttering the wrong words, or mentioning our religion. Simple things like saying “I am a Christian” can result in loss of employment, shunning, even physical violence, or legal action.
The Gramsci legacy
Gramsci died in 1937 but his writings survived and became the strategic plan for the de-Christianizing of the West. “The civilized world has been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2000 years. Any country grounded in Judeo-Christian values cannot be overthrown until those roots are cut. But to cut the roots — to change culture — a long march through the institutions is necessary. Only then will power fall into our laps like a ripened fruit.”
The new libertine generation, enemy of freedom, was more than willing to accept the proposal of Cultural Marxism. The hippie generation fell under the control of manipulators “like a over ripe fruit” as predicted by Gramsci. The Christian cultural armor of Capitalism began to show its first cracks. During the decade of 1960 Christians began to retreat as a cultural revolution advanced crushing every traditional value in its path. Literature, theater, movies were filled with Christian characters presented in the worse possible light, while the devil appeared as a lighthearted likable guy. The Rolling Stones, one of the top popular rock’n roll bands presented a song called “Sympathy for the Devil” and one album called “His Satanic Majesties” – no need to add any more. Pornography became an accepted, popular form of entertainment as new and cheaper forms of production and distribution became available. Certain movies like Erich Segal’s Love Story presented premarital sex not only as a desirable thing but even as a healthy necessity. The response of the Church to this onslaught of immorality was never more than a lukewarm condemnation. In time the distinction between profane and sacred music disappeared and folk bands made their first appearances at religious services. This was the time when Churches were stripped and sold to cover diocesan expenses. The Church surrendered without firing even a symbolic shot. In most countries prayer in school was forbidden, Crucifixes were taken away, the content of the Holy Scriptures was erased from every curriculum, and the works of Christian thinkers were eliminated and no longer mentioned. Prayer was banned in public schools during the Democrat administration of Lyndon Johnson under the excuse that violated a “principle of separation of Church and State” something never mentioned in the United States Constitution. Even that mild “principle” was replaced in practice as the State became more and more hostile towards religion and religious practice. When the government ordered the Churches to remain silent in matters political everyone simply obeyed. No one resisted the clearly unconstitutional nature of that directive coming from mere bureaucrats in the Federal Government.
End of Part 3 – Continues on Part 4
[1] Prison Notebooks.
[2] Quoted by Nelson Hultberg in: Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America; published on The Daily Bell; July 27, 2010. See also Origins of Political Correctness Exposed.
Bibliography
Cultural Marxism (The Corruption of America) a film by James Jaeger.
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, by Roger Scruton.
Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism; by George Gilder.
Wealth, Poverty, and Politics; by Thomas Sowell.
Liberalism: Sin, Inquity, Abomination; by Fr Horacio Bojorge, SJ.
Liberalism Is A Sin; by Fr Felix Sarda y Salvany.
Carlos Caso-Rosendi 
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