Western Decline and Cultural Marxism

THE CORROSION of Western civilization can be seen in a group of interrelated political events, as exemplified in Canada, my own country: multiculturalism, globalism, “open borders,” the dissolution of nations, my concerns especially since the period of 2008 to 2011, when I was in the Middle East and saw these things from a perspective not possible for the average Canadian.

Most Westerners live in a world of illusion. They might spend their time “catching the news” on a TV set or a computer, but they are unaware that the main news-media are owned by gigantic corporations, which have a hidden globalist agenda. Yet most people nowadays do not often read serious books, and so they have little access to genuine in-depth information. If you push them far enough, they will only say, “Well, I believe. . . .”

What do Canadians think they are learning by having their eyes glued to a TV set? They believe that since Canada has 10 million km2 of land, it can keep bringing in more immigrants for eternity, even though most of the land is uninhabitable, and that with sufficient goodwill one can have infinite growth on a finite planet.

They believe that people of European descent, who composed more than 80 percent of Canada until recent times, are guilty of centuries of rather uncertain crimes, perhaps including the alphabet, education, democracy, modern medicine, and science. They believe the world should be controlled by a benevolent dictatorship, with all history, nationality, parenthood, and even gender scrubbed out of people’s brains.

The most important question, though, is not some vague issue of “ethnicity” but rather that of the political motive for these developments. “Multiculturalism” really means no culture at all, no values, no past, no goals, no hopes, no future. The ultimate message is that Earth should become a terribly crowded but profitable slave planet, and that resistance is useless.

Globalism and Western Decline

Around 4000 B.C. there arose a people, probably living north of the Black Sea, to whom we now refer as the early Indo-Europeans. They were the first people to use iron (versus bronze) weapons, and also the first to use horse-drawn chariots — perhaps indeed the first to domesticate horses for any purpose. After about 1000 B.C. there arose a division between the eastern (Persian) and western Indo-Europeans (Greeks), or, in other words, between the Asians and the Europeans. The Indo-Europeans in Persia were a minority in a sea of Asians and as a result ended up assimilating Asian customs. But the Indo-Europeans in Greece were a majority and thus managed to impose their aristocratic libertarian culture, the idea that the leader cannot be a despot but is first among aristocratic equals. This the world of the Iliad. Herodotus indicates the split in his frequent distinctions between the Persians and the Greeks. He claims that the Persian world was characterized by despotism, while the Westerners, the Greeks, were a people of relative freedom, aristocratic equality, and eventually democracy for all free men, including property-owning farmers.

The people who have that Western legacy, however, are now disappearing from much of Europe and North America. Instead, we have “multiculturalism,” which really means the dismantling of “culture,” the decline of the West. In our schools, young people are now taught to be ashamed of their legacy, and any courses in the social sciences are perverted to show the “guilt” of those who spent thousands of years developing Western civilization. How did these regrettable changes come about?

To answer this question, one must first note that in most Western countries there is no longer a real democracy, but rather a barely disguised one-party system. The elite of the supposed left and right spend their time together — the same restaurants, the same marriages, the same golf courses. For a change of pace they switch to journalism — and so much for freedom of the press. During an election, it would be possible to make a list of all the slogans, mix up those items, and then ask someone to match the slogans with the parties. But it would turn out that the matching could not be done.

Actually there is only one slogan: “Bodies are good for business.” So the population must be kept expanding forever. The price we pay for overpopulation and over-immigration, however, is high unemployment, environmental degradation, inadequate housing, traffic congestion, overloaded social services, high crime-rates, losses of water and farmland, and declining natural resources of all kinds. Overcrowding also leads to mental illness: in an urban environment, our nerves are often like wires that have been tightened to a point where their molecules will no longer hold.

The stage for decline was set by the lowering of intellectual capacity. Most people, unfortunately, don’t react to much of anything anymore. One of the main reasons for this decline is that people don’t really become adults. We have created a world of cultural neoteny — prolonged childish behavior, a milieu of “dumbing down” that stretches from birth to death. “Neoteny” is a biological term referring to remaining juvenile for a long period after birth. Obviously humans do this anyway — it takes years for an infant to turn into an adult. But a great deal of modern political sloganeering has the effect, consciously or otherwise, of keeping people silly and childish for life. Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House was an early look into that, at least in terms of women. Predictions of cultural neoteny can also be seen in Huxley’s Brave New World and in a somewhat grimmer form in Orwell’s 1984. This neoteny is pervasive, but it can be seen in such forms as the decline in literacy and the decline in education.

It’s curious to note, however, that there is a definite substratum of the public that disagrees with official policies. On-line news articles that allow comments from viewers get deluged with people expressing heretical views. Then the comments are shut off, and it’s back to Business as Usual — literally. These dissident members of the general public have rarely been brought together, and each person is largely unaware that there are many others holding the same views. The politically orthodox may be enforcing the rules for most daily conversation, but the disquiet never entirely disappears.

If civilization is defined by the presence of writing, then the decline of Western civilization might be defined by the disappearance of interest in serious texts — from the Iliad onward. People don’t read books as much as they used to. No one seems to feel guilty for the fact that instead of reading a book called X they have merely watched a movie called X, based on the book. Yes, it’s true that a movie sometimes has advantages over print, but in general to make a movie out of a book one has to reduce it to action and dialogue, and all the exposition and analysis has to be removed. The time frame of a movie also means that a great deal of detail will be cut out. Not much meaningful discussion can take place when the person to whom one is speaking is convinced that books and movies are simply different “media” providing the same educational service.

A similar decline can be found in formal education. There was a time when the purpose of a university education was to allow young people to explore the outer regions of space and time. Now it’s just training in how to use a cash register. The lowest clerk in the huge building labeled “administration” has a more pleasant job, and much greater job security, than the average instructor. It’s money that keeps the university churning, apparently, not some vague and pretentious search for wisdom. Teachers are day-laborers, easily replaced, and it takes no great skill to deal with the reading materials supplied by the corporations for their future slaves.

Source: www.sd83.bc.ca/2023/01/18/what-is-sogi-in-schools/

“Education” of the new sort is more form than substance: teachers are so afraid of being accused of heresy that the students are given little real information. The average young person in the modern world spends about twenty thousand hours doing school work, yet nearly all of that is a waste of time, because a job at the end of that road does not require the ability to think in any Platonic or Aristotelian sense. Modern education involves little real learning, and far more time is spent on mere indoctrination.

Any form of “nationalism,” any statement of pride in one’s country, was discredited. Furthermore, any specific form of ethnicity or religion was downplayed. Western culture in general was denigrated, and Westerners were largely associated with colonialism. Reversing colonialism meant celebrating non-Western cultures. The new attitude was that “all cultures are equal.”

By propagating an “underdog” mentality among Westerners, globalists have encouraged the nanny state, with people living in perpetual imbecility and irresponsibility. There is now a strong sense of “wrong,” but especially when these victims look at themselves. They hate their own culture and their own heritage. They live with a sense of guilt and shame, they suffer from self-loathing. They feel a need for self-abasement. They have low self-confidence, low self-assurance, low self-esteem.

Confirmed underdogs have self-destructive attitudes about sexuality, marriage, and the family. To them, a stable marriage, heterosexual and monogamous, is anathema. What better way to prevent the growth of what used to be called a “real man” than to suggest to a young boy that, deep down, he might not be a boy but a girl? (The same in reverse would apply to girls.) And so we create (or imagine) multiple “genders,” “bi-” this and “poly-” that, psychologically disturbed mutations who have no chance of standing up against the totalitarian state. (How odd that no other species of mammal has more than two genders!)

But above all, to be accepted in modern society one must now proclaim that Western culture is guilty of some nameless crime, making it necessary to give preferential treatment to any and all other cultures. Of course, that is a belief with which those “other cultures” are always happy to agree. And once that “guilt” has become established as “fact,” every piece of writing that appears in public must emphasize “multiculturalism” at all costs.

All “respectable” political or religious groups shuffling for power now try to portray themselves as holier, more pious, than the others, but really they all have the same goal: to establish a world government, and to turn the masses into obedient slaves.

The Growth of Cultural Marxism

The moral and intellectual fabric of Western society has been disintegrating for some time. To a large extent the destruction can be blamed on a form of Marxism, socialism, left-wing thinking, “underdog” mentality, which has encouraged the nanny state, with people living in perpetual imbecility and irresponsibility. In the middle of the last century, Marxism never had much luck in intellectual contests among Westerners, so it had to burrow underground, eroding the foundations of modern society and leaving people in a state of perpetual self-doubt and abnegation. This is what is called “cultural Marxism.” Not much of the reality of cultural Marxism is clearly evident: most of it is experienced as a mere premonition, like that of a coming change in the weather.

Cultural Marxism began in the early twentieth century, when Marxism in the usual sense (i.e. economic Marxism) was a failure in Western Europe; in the First World War, for example, most people were far more interested in defending their country than in overthrowing their government. Cultural Marxism arose because, in order to win in the West, Marxists realized they would have to go underground, working on the “culture” rather than openly advocating revolution. The movement began roughly with Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, who claimed that in order for Marxism to succeed in the West, it was vital to destroy the existing culture by sowing the seeds of doubt regarding all traditional Western moral values.

Hence the formation of the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt, and its offspring, some of whom (at various times) were Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm. Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Institute left Germany, finally moving to New York City, where it was affiliated with Columbia University.

In “The Origins of Political Correctness” (version of 2000), William S. Lind breaks cultural Marxism down into five parts:

“Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about . . . the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it — where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say. . . . .

“We call it “Political Correctness”. . . .

“Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. . . . If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious. . . .

“First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses. . . .

“Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology . . . is to take some philosophy and say . . . certain things must be true. . . . That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

“Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Cultural Marxism . . . says that all history is determined by . . . which groups . . . have power over which other groups. . . .

“Third, certain groups . . . are a priori good, and other groups . . . are evil . . . regardless of what any of them do. . . .

“Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. . . . When the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. . . .

“And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. . . . . For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. . . .

“The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish.”

It is commonly assumed that the term “cultural Marxism” is a right-wing invention. As such, it could be described as a form of “paranoid global conspiracy theory,” along with so many other right-wing concepts that are casually dismissed in similar ways. But the term isn’t a right-wing invention at all. The use of the term “cultural Marxism” by leftist academics themselves (with the same definitions as are used by the right wing) is indicated by such authors and book titles as Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain; Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture; Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, Cultural Marxism; and Richard R. Weiner, Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology.

So “cultural Marxism” isn’t a form of “paranoid global conspiracy theory,” since it isn’t paranoid and it isn’t just a theory. But the daily news is so heavy with anti-right-wing judgments that a viewer could could easily give up on trying to find the truth. It’s not surprising that people just accept the claim that cultural Marxism is a figment of the deranged right-wing imagination.

Cultural Marxism is in fact the engine that keeps the whole “multicultural” ship moving along. But even fairly knowledgeable people don’t really think much about that engine, except maybe when they’re lying in their bunks at night and they hear a distant chugging sound.

The attack — by Westerners — on Western beliefs and values never slows down. The “Hippie Revolution,” damaging the lives of so many Baby Boomers, was largely due to the machinations of Benjamin Spock, Noam Chomsky, and Timothy Leary. The Church has reduced itself to infantilism. Ph.D.’s are handed out to students who can only be described as illiterate. Electronic devices destroy our attention span, reduce direct contact among humans, and turn everything into “virtual reality.” Illicit drugs and inadequate diets further reduce our mental capacities.

Sorry — maybe some of this can’t be laid at the feet of poor Karl Marx. Perhaps some of this is just a matter of “lifestyle choice,” to use modern jargon. But is there really a difference?

A related problem that makes cultural Marxism so hard to analyze is that to some extent it’s a group of overlapping activities, not just one, and that’s especially true nowadays. Multiculturalism, sexual deviancy, mass immigration, “sanctuary cities,” aggressive religions, dumbing down, “liberalism” that is not at all liberal, and so on — the modern world has become somewhat shapeless and formless. The trail of Marxism is so long, and goes cold so often.

At times the trail becomes quite ludicrous, with “multiculturalism” itself as an example of that absurdity. The early cultural Marxists hoped to destroy traditional Western culture by flooding it with other cultures. Yet nowadays the photographs in advertising largely portray non-White (non-European, non-Western) people, in spite of the fact that the West is demographically still mostly White. Yet every major bank advertises its services very largely with photographs of happy non-White or multi-racial couples.

But the inclusion of non-Whites is good for business, since such people compose a new and possibly lucrative customer base — “diversity is our strength” is the new chant. So what began in the 1930s as a Marxist tactic has become, many decades later, a marketing ploy by capitalist bankers who would rather die than be regarded as Marxists!

What does the term “left wing” itself really mean? In France long ago, the terms “left” and “right” had precise meanings, based on where one was actually sitting in the Estates General, indicating one’s attitude toward the Revolution. Now perhaps “left wing” means big government, and big spending by that government, but above all it means supporting the “poor” rather than the “rich.” By the “poor” I mean the voters, of course, not the people leading such flocks.

As soon as “guilt” has become established as “fact,” every relevant piece of paper that appears in public must emphasize “multiculturalism” at all costs. Although the terms are used misleadingly, everything must also stress “fairness,” “democracy,” and “equal rights.” The punishment for breaches of “multiculturalism” is swift and merciless, unless one is attacking Christians; Easter seems always ready to disappear from the free calendars handed out by politicians.

There are corollaries to all the above. Leftists must believe in prohibiting the ownership of guns, for example. If people believe they are underdogs, they must also believe they have no right to defend themselves. Only grown-ups should have guns, and leftists know they are not grown-ups.

Most leftists believe all cultures are, in some inexplicable way, equal. In their naivety, they cannot believe that many cultures are cruel and intolerant, locked in the pre-literate mentality of a thousand years ago. Westerners today cannot understand that there can be such vast differences between the mentality of one culture and another. The mainstream news-media foster this misunderstanding by failing to report the shocking statistics of rape, mutilation, murder, and other barbarisms that go on in this world.

Most people have little sense of history, yet cruelty has long been a part of that history. Beginning about 5,000 years ago in the Near East, various civilizations arose in Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and so on. After a war between city-states, it was customary for all the male inhabitants of the losing city to be put to death, and impalement was one of the most common forms of killing. That ancient mentality has not entirely passed away. Yet Westerners like to fool themselves into believing that the entire world consists of people who read glossy magazines and keep up with all the intellectual trends. The reality is that, even in modern times, the counterpart to an act of “tolerance” in one country would just as surely result in a death sentence in another.

Above all, cultural Marxism is an effective means of rationalizing the quest for “the ethnic vote.” The cultural-Marxist dogma plays into an alleged economic need: to increase immigration and thereby sustain a “growing economy.” Yet massive immigration really has little or no benefit to the country, and in fact leads to overcrowding, unemployment, and other social ills. For the rich, on the other hand, massive immigration means more buyers, more workers, and more investors. For politicians, more people means more votes. For religious groups, larger numbers of the “faithful” means a greater chance of pushing out competitors. Yet none of these groups has the good of the country in mind.

In a world of otherwise horrendous overpopulation, we are told that the West itself is headed for demographic collapse, and that we must find out why this is happening. Yet no answer is offered, other than the circular response that the problem is caused by low fertility. At the same time, one gets the feeling that the Westerners in these shrinking countries are being punished for some unnamed sin. Left-wingers are always trying to find ways to justify mass migration and multiculturalism, in the hope that they can dominate a planet of rootless wanderers, people with no culture at all.

But if we choose to have a serious look at the real issues of demographic decline, we can see some important variations. In Europe, it is the eastern countries that are facing the worst decline in population. And it is eastern Europe that is the poorest. In McMafia, Misha Glenny tells us that international “human trafficking” is supplied mostly by women from eastern Europe. This fact is surely connected to another, that women in these countries are choosing not to have children — or rather, they are faced with the near-impossibility of doing so. As I was once told by a white woman, “This isn’t a good world in which to be bringing up children.”

It was eastern Europe that was dominated by Communism. It was eastern Europe that was destroyed by Communism. All of this is the legacy of Karl Marx. Demographic collapse is not a punishment of Westerners for some unnamed sin. The dots are obvious, the connections among them less so. But the more one looks at the picture, the more it comes together.

PG