A Conversation with Krunoslav Stifter
Krunoslav Stifter is a brilliant scholar and consummate gentleman.
My Conversation with Krunoslav Stifter began when he answered a question that I had posted on Quora, a social media website offering a forum for political and social debate. My question was Do you agree that Marxism is atheism masquerading as political philosophy?
His initial answer is as follows:
lol no. Marxism is not a political philosophy, it an set of ideologies, often inspired by Marxist concepts, which also involves politics, but everything else as well. Its utopian ideology system meaning it acts like a modern religion. Atheism is a moot point, because it simply means not believing in a supernatural deity, or in border sense it means not believing in the supernatural. It tells us nothing about actual belief system.
Marxists are perhaps Godless, but they are far from irreligious and definitely bealive in the supernatural, just not deity. State takes over that role, which is promoted as all powerful, all knowing, infallible and usually there is cult of personality of the ruler involve which is promoted as god like individual, we can see that with Mao, Kims in Korea, Stalin etc.
As for atheism and Marxism link. Let me share some insights.
Atheism (from Greek: a + theos + ismos "not believing in god") refers in its broadest sense to a denial of theism (the belief in the existence of a single deity or deities). Atheism has many shades and types. Some atheists strongly deny the existence of God (or any form of deity) and attack theistic claims. Yet certainty as to the non-existence of God is as much a belief as is religion and rests on equally unprovable claims. Just as religious believers range from the ecumenical to the narrow-minded, atheists range from those for whom it is a matter of personal philosophy to those who are militantly hostile to religion.
“Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance. In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender.” ― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
“The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011
“Marxism is supposed to be a social science designed to see through hypocrisies and denial, but Marxism ended up as a kind of earplug, guaranteed to deafen its disciples.” ― Paul Berman
“The influence that Marxism has achieved, far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects.… In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.” ― Leszek Kołakowski
“Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
“It is quite true that Marx said that religion is the opium of the people. But of course we now know that Marxism is the crack cocaine of the people.”
― Douglas Wilson
“In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism — only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire.” ― Isaac Deutscher, Russia After Stalin
“Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, also called Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go.” ― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
“Hence a communist society would have a new ethical basis. It has been claimed – by Lenin among others – that Marxism is a scientific system, free from any ethical judgements or postulates. These are the essential points of ‘the first Marxism’. It is manifestly not a scientific enterprise in the sense in which we understand science today. Its theories are not derived from detailed factual studies, or subjected to controlled tests or observations.” ― Anonymous
"That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise.” ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
“Kirk defined the ideologue as one who “thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature.” Unleashed during the most radical phase of the French Revolution, the spirit of ideology has metastasized over the past two centuries, wreaking horrors. Jacobinism, Anarchism, Marxism, Leninism, Fascism, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism—all shared the fatal attraction to “political messianism”; all were “inverted religions.” Each of these ideologies preached a dogmatic approach to politics, economics, and culture. Each in its own way endeavored “to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines.” Thus did the ideologue promise “salvation in this world, hotly declaring that there exists no other realm of being.” ― Russell Kirk, The American Cause
Marx’s Brave New World
It is crucial to realize that communism, being a totalitarian ideology, endeavored to change human nature itself. This is clear throughout Marx’s writings. In The German Ideology (1845), Marx and Engels said that in order “for the widespread generation of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause, it is necessary that man himself should suffer a massive change.” This was a change, they said, that could only come through “a practical movement, a revolution.” There must be a literal process of “overthrowing” the old “filthy yoke and … founding a new society only in a revolution.
Human nature itself had to be changed. There had to be a fundamental transformation of human nature. A revolution of (or against, really) human nature.
In that framework, religion was viewed as a dangerous and ubiquitous rival belief system. It was Marxism’s chief competitor for the mind of the working class. The Soviet leadership would want Marxism and the state to be central to all citizens’ lives. Hence, the words of the Communist Manifesto were to be read and learned, drilled and memorized, internalized. Any challenging text, especially an influential one like the Bible, was unwelcome. Religion was perceived as an ever-present, powerful enemy, not to be taken lightly.
Marx was an atheist-utopian who envisioned a “new morality” without God. The path to utopia was a classless albeit godless society. The “classless society”—which would be a “workers’ paradise”—would, said Marx, make its “own history! It is a leap from slavery into freedom; from darkness into light.”
Marx promised nothing less than the creation of a “new world.” His “generation,” he portended, “resembles the Jews whom Moses led out of the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world; it must also perish in order to make room for the people who are fit for a new world.”67 The old world and current generation must perish. It would be the communists who would play the role of sacrificial savior on behalf of a new covenant for the new world.
This kind of utopian idealism is common to the communist left and even much of the wider left, which otherwise proudly touts its cynicism and suspicion, especially of religious people. But when a centralized government looks to corral and herd the collective masses, the hardest left-wing pessimist can morph into the most hopeful idealist. Leftists scoff at the Baptist preacher clinging to his Bible or Catholic grandma clinging to her rosary, but damned if leftists are not equally as faithful when clinging to government as holding the path to salvation. The most doubting and brooding of communists have not been exempt from such full-faith secular idealism.
For that matter, just as Marx was not very impressed with Christians, he also was quite unimpressed with Christianity. And for those modern-day “social justice” Christians who like to invoke communism as somehow consistent with or reflective of Christian social teaching, well, Karl Marx begged to differ. “The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility,” scowled Marx. “The social principles of Christianity are hypocritical. … So much for the social principles of Christianity.”
Not that Marx himself was any less self-absorbed than this alleged Christianity he condemned. “The more of himself that man gives to God,” Marx groaned, “the less he has left in himself.”69 Marx was all about himself, answerable to himself alone.
Georg Jung, a Marx contemporary, a young lawyer, and a member of the Doctors’ Club, said that “Marx calls Christianity one of the most immoral religions.” Jung viewed Marx not as a political revolutionary but a theological-philosophical revolutionary who was attempting to overthrow the entire social system, not just an economic system.
The preceding tells us much about where Karl Marx ended up on the religion question. But where did he start? Was he always an atheist? And did his sojourn involve a detour or two along some highly troubled paths? When did his writings first reveal this ominous turn?
* The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration by Paul Kengo, 2020
“Religion Lies at Our Feet”
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the city of Trier, one of the loveliest, oldest, most tranquil, most peaceful, most religious, and most deeply Catholic cities in Germany (a population that was 90 percent Roman Catholic).
It was hard to find a more Catholic place. The Christian roots of Trier are remarkable. None other than St. Ambrose, the future bishop of Milan who brought Augustine into the faith, was born in Trier in the year 340. The city boasts the oldest church in Germany, dating to AD 320–330. It is said that St. Helena (AD 246/248–330) herself gave a portion of the land to build the church there. She also gave Christians no less than Constantine, her son, the great Roman emperor and protector of Christians. Among the most sacred relics believed to be held at Trier’s grand cathedral is the Seamless Robe of Jesus, also known as the Holy Robe, or Holy Coat, which Christ wore on the way to his crucifixion—the one for which the Roman soldiers had cast lots. According to tradition, St. Helena obtained the robe in the Holy Land around AD 327 and brought it to Germany.
Such is the city of Trier. It is special, long beloved by Christians.
Not surprisingly, Karl Marx’s literary idol Goethe disapproved. “The place is burdened, nay oppressed, with churches and chapels and cloisters and colleges and buildings dedicated to chivalrous and religious orders,” grumbled Goethe upon a visit in 1793, the year the Jacobin guillotine was dropping incessantly upon necks in Catholic France, “and this is to say nothing about the abbacies, Carthusian convents and other institutions which invest and blockade it.”
Only Goethe, and later Marx, could detest Trier.
Karl’s father and mother started their family there. Karl had such a world of promise and decency in front of him. Holiness was fully available at practically every corner.
Marx’s family was Jewish, on both his father’s and mother’s sides. They were not only ethnically Jewish but had a healthy family history of devout Judaism. There had been several rabbis in the recent family history, from the nineteenth century back to at least the late seventeenth century.117 “It would be difficult to find anyone who had a more Jewish ancestry than Karl Marx,” writes biographer David McLellan.118
Under the social pressures of the day, Marx’s father left Judaism and converted to Protestantism at some point in the late 1810s or early 1820s, most likely at the end of 1819.119 It is particularly intriguing that Heinrich chose Protestantism over Catholicism, the latter being a much more common choice for Jews who left Judaism in Catholic Trier, including his brother Cerf. Marx biographer Jonathan Sperber explains that Heinrich was much more liberal, a product of the Enlightenment, who, tellingly, if not fatefully, had read Voltaire aloud to the young Karl.120 He knew Voltaire and Rousseau by heart.121 With the sort of candor and disdainful language his son would use, Heinrich denounced what he called “the Gospels polluted by ignorant priests,” in favor of what Sperber described as “a liberal and Enlightened Protestantism, not entirely separate from Deism, that would be Heinrich Marx’s Christianity of choice.”
Heinrich became Lutheran. It was a choice that allowed him more choices to define his own views. The son would seize upon such choices with wild abandon.
Still, Heinrich at least saw value in believing in God. He advised Karl that “a good support for morality is a simple faith in God. You know that I am the last person to be a fanatic. But sooner or later a man has a real need of this faith, and there are moments in life when even the man who denies God is compelled against his will to pray to the Almighty.”
Heinrich’s wife, Henrietta, was much more reluctant to convert, and thus delayed not only her own conversion but the baptisms of her children as well. Karl was baptized not as an infant, which would have been just about the time that Heinrich converted, but in 1824, the sixth year of his life.
Karl, too, became Lutheran. He kept the faith—even if he was not always devout or clear or particularly orthodox—until probably his late teens and initial college years. He definitely shed his faith during his college years and was unquestionably an atheist by the time he did his dissertation at age twenty-three in 1841. In his dissertation, he approvingly quoted the first century BC Roman philosopher Lucretius’s eulogy for Epicurus, condemning the “burden of oppressive religion,” which “with gruesome grotesqueness frightfully threatened mankind.” Lucretius exalts, “Religion lies at our feet, completely defeated.”
That was the triumph to which Karl Marx thereafter committed himself: religion at our feet. It was a shame, a waste of the richly religious soil he had tread and was raised upon. He would stomp upon that religious bounty rather than feed upon it as nourishment for his troubled soul.
Marx, Luther, and the Reformation
Though this book is not the place to adequately treat the subject, it is noteworthy that Karl Marx seemed to appreciate Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Church. In no way is that observation intended to equate Luther with Marx or his goals, and certainly not with the destruction produced by communism. For starters, Luther was, of course, anything but a godless atheist. Whereas Marx liked what Luther did, or, more specifically, liked the byproduct of what Luther did in terms of undermining the authority of the Church of Rome, Luther surely would not have liked what Marx did, nor the results of Marx’s ideas or communism’s madness.
Marx seems to have appreciated that Luther pulled away from the authority of the Church, which, for Marx, was a crucial step in the ongoing march of the dialectic of history—that is, of advancing and progressing to the next crucial stage in history, according to Marxist theory. He mightily approved of that step, even if he did not necessarily approve of Luther at a spiritual level. This is stated most emphatically by Marx in the long concluding section of his famous 1843 work “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” It was there he described religion as “the opium of the people.” Interestingly, there he also credits Luther, who, he says, “overcame bondage,” specifically that bondage imposed by Rome. “On the eve of the Reformation,” Marx lamented, “official Germany was the most unconditional slave of Rome.” Just as Luther made a crucial break from the religion of Rome, now Marx and his fellow philosophers would make a crucial break in their revolutionary “emancipation.” Stated Marx, “As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher” (emphasis original).
Thus, for Marx, Luther had provided an indispensable service in clearing the path Marx envisioned for history. What the monk began, the philosopher would conclude, although he would extend the path in directions of which Luther never dreamed, even in his worst nightmares.
In an 1854 piece that he wrote for the New York Tribune, approvingly titled “The Decay of Religious Authority,” Marx wrote that the “Protestant Reformation” allowed “the upper classes in every European nation” (here again, Marx viewed nearly everything through the prism of class) to begin to “unfasten themselves individually from all religious belief, and become so-called free-thinkers.” That included statesmen, legalists, and diplomats. He noted that the Protestant Reformation had this effect not only among Catholic nations but even among those nations that adopted Protestantism. The Protestant Reformation that begat Protestantism allowed them all to think for themselves apart from the authority of the Church, the Church founded by Christ. Again, this was a huge historical breakthrough, one which would serve Marx and the furtherance of his vision and ambitions.
Marx’s father liked that Lutheranism allowed him more latitude to think for himself. Karl, too, wanted full freedom for the widest “free-thinking.” Thinking completely apart from the Church of Rome could pave the way for him to open the door to philosophical communism. Breaking with Rome was the break he needed to pursue atheistic communism.
Notably, in that same article for the New York Tribune, Marx offered an insight into his view on the Crusades. The Crusades, greatly misunderstood and maligned to this day, were pursued by various popes, beginning with the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century, as efforts to come to the defense of besieged Christians relentlessly attacked in Christian lands by Muslims in their holy war against “infidels.” Each Crusade had to meet the requirements of Just War theory. The goal was to rescue those Christians and recover land and sites (such as the Holy Sepulchre) that had been theirs until Muslim invaders seized them violently. Karl Marx reversed this entirely, portraying the Crusades as the period “when Western Europe, as late as the eighteenth century, undertook a ‘holy war’ against the ‘infidel’ Turks for the possession of the Holy Sepulchre.” This was a complete and outrageous reversal of which side had persecuted which. Of course, Marx’s misunderstanding of the Crusades is now the consensus of secular leftists today; what is worse, they are not the only ones who subscribe to that view.
Marx’s anti-Catholicism would show up in his writing. He wrote of one political associate, David Urquhart, who, “with his Catholicism, etc. grows more and more disgusting.” Curiously, as the New York Tribune piece suggests, he seemed to have a favorable opinion of Muslims. He praised certain Muslim Arabs, acknowledging a sympathy for their “hatred against Christians and the hope of an ultimate victory over these infidels.”132 Sure, Muslims believed in God, and that, to Marx, was a bad thing, but at least they were against Christians. They had that redeeming quality.
Yet again viewing everything through class and economics, Marx criticized “the monetary system [as] essentially a Catholic institution,” and “the credit system [as] essentially Protestant.” He lamented that the credit system “does not emancipate itself from the basis of the monetary system any more than Protestantism has emancipated itself from the foundations of Catholicism.”
Like his old man, Marx expressed a negative attitude toward Catholics in his midst. Marx would remember the Catholic pupils in his class as a bunch of “peasant dolts,” which Jonathan Sperber says was probably reflective of the opinion of upper-class Protestant classmates.134 I wouldn’t blame them. Karl Marx never needed outside influence to view people as inferior idiots and rabble, or, to borrow one of Marx’s handy phrases of derision, as the “lumpenproletariat.” It came easy to Karl to see others as slack-jawed morons.
* The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration by Paul Kengo, 2020
Regarding atheism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared "Men have forgotten God":
"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."
There is nothing more dangerous than atheist playing god. I am an atheists, but I do not consider myself a God, while communists do.
“Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
"A belief in heaven is an assertion of the immortality of the soul, and the Moral Order of the universe. Without this faith, we'll never see heaven on earth. We're seeing hell instead." - Mike Stone, Restoring Belief in Heaven
“Marxism is supposed to be a social science designed to see through hypocrisies and denial, but Marxism ended up as a kind of earplug, guaranteed to deafen its disciples.” ― Paul Berman
"When God “died” in the 19th century, “social-ism” took the form of materialist scientism (hence the philosopher Eric Voegelin’s observation that under Marxism, “Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come”). It’s worth recalling that both Marx and Engels came to their socialism via their atheism, not the other way around.” ― Jonah Goldberg
“The influence that Marxism has achieved, far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects.… In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.” ― Leszek Kołakowski
“Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
“It is quite true that Marx said that religion is the opium of the people. But of course we now know that Marxism is the crack cocaine of the people.” ― Douglas Wilson
“In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism — only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire.” ― Isaac Deutscher, Russia After Stalin
“Interestingly, Marxism, Communism and its derivative, Socialism, when seen years later in practice, are nothing but state-capitalism and rule by a privileged minority, exercising despotic and total control over a majority which is left with virtually no property or legal rights.” ― Andrew Carrington Hitchcock, The Synagogue Of Satan - Updated, Expanded, And Uncensored
“Therein lies the true essence of Marxism. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ only ever works with a gun in your hand." ― Philip Kerr, Prussian Blue
“Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, also called Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go.” ― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
“Hence a communist society would have a new ethical basis. It has been claimed – by Lenin among others – that Marxism is a scientific system, free from any ethical judgements or postulates. These are the essential points of ‘the first Marxism’. It is manifestly not a scientific enterprise in the sense in which we understand science today. Its theories are not derived from detailed factual studies, or subjected to controlled tests or observations.” ― Anonymous
"That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise.” ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
“Kirk defined the ideologue as one who “thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature.” Unleashed during the most radical phase of the French Revolution, the spirit of ideology has metastasized over the past two centuries, wreaking horrors. Jacobinism, Anarchism, Marxism, Leninism, Fascism, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism—all shared the fatal attraction to “political messianism”; all were “inverted religions.” Each of these ideologies preached a dogmatic approach to politics, economics, and culture. Each in its own way endeavored “to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines.” Thus did the ideologue promise “salvation in this world, hotly declaring that there exists no other realm of being.” ― Russell Kirk, The American Cause
A striking feature of Marx’s writing is his hostility to Christianity and religion. For example, in the preface to his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1843) Marx wrote:
"‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions’."
Although Marxism has failed as a political and economic system, ironically it flourishes as a secular religion. Perhaps Marxism ought to be regarded as the crack cocaine of the Left.
“The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientific method was also ideologically—and even messianically—driven. It ignored scientific data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as “scientific planning.” ― Paul Edward Gottfried
Communism and Terminology
The term communism only became common in the 1840s. Even after that, the word communist—in the sense of emphasizing community and common control—was applied to other kinds of social projects, like experimental communities or communes.
An Evolving Tradition
Communism featured both continuity and change. Additionally, once in power, communist regimes revealed internal contradictions, which stressed their systems. When it comes to communism, five contradictions in particular are notable.
1 - The first has to do with the role of the individual in history. Marx presented a powerful vision of history being made by masses of people. By contrast, individuals played less of a role. However, with communism, it is the case that decisive leaders loom up again and again, starting with Marx himself.
2 - The second contradiction involved geography. Although communism was meant to be global, Marx expected it to evolve first in the most industrially advanced countries. Thus, in the imagination of communists, the real prize was Germany—a leading industrial power. However, against expectations, communism’s greatest influence came in less developed countries, beginning with Lenin’s rise to power in Russia.
3 - A third problem was that communism never entirely settled its relationship to nationalism. Predating communism, nationalism as an ideology was another powerful model of community and an idea about belonging. Marx deplored nationalism; however, communist regimes tried to co-opt nationalist sentiment to use it to reinforce their power. This saw mixed and sometimes contradictory results.
4 - A fourth contradiction was the way in which the communist project turned into a tradition, even when it promised radical breaks with the past. Communism became a tradition full of historical echoes, venerable precedents, time-honored rituals, and original texts that held nearly sacred status.
5 - Finally, a fifth contradiction appeared that had everything to do with commitment to communism as a faith. While it promised scientific certainty and discarded religious dogma, communism also drew on and mobilized faith or even fanaticism. This occurred to the point that many observers have called communism a political religion.
* The Rise of Communism From Marx to Lenin by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
History Is made up of Ideas, says Hegel.
According to Georg Hegel, political ideas are an abstraction from the political life of a society, state, culture, or political movement. Making sense of those ideas, and the institutions or movements they explain, involves examining their history and development. That history is always a story of how we got to where we are now. What we cannot do is look forward to see where history is going.
In Roman mythology, the Owl of Minerva was a symbol of wisdom. For Hegel, the Owl only “takes flight at twilight.” By this he means that understanding can only come retrospectively. Hegel is warning against optimism about developing ideas for where to go next. He is also issuing a subtle warning against his other famous claim that the rise of the modern state is the end of history. It is very easy to see ourselves as the most progressive, enlightened, and rational age ever—after all we believe in open economies, constitutional government, human rights, and democracy. But as we will see in this book, these are not simple ideas, and they are not shared by all societies and people even today.
Religion of Statism
"The State is based on religion. . . . It is only when religion is made the foundation that the practice of righteousness attains stability, and that the fulfillment of duty is secured. It is in religion that what is deepest in man, the conscience, first feels that it lies under an absolute obligation, and has the certain knowledge of this obligation; therefore the State must rest on religion. . . . In this aspect, religion stands in the closest connection with the political principle."
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
G. E W. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.), pp. 50, 51; Philosophy of Mind, part 3 of The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2003), para. 552, p. 283; and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), vol. 1, p. 102.
Editors of Hegel's works in English have not consistently capitalized technical terms like “State,” “Reason,” and “Will” in their texts. The difficulty is, of course, not being able to identify their technical use. All nouns are capitalized in German, and in his narratives, Hegel never specifically signaled their technical use. Below, for the sake of consistency, technical terms will be capitalized throughout (even in English-language texts where they are not). The term “state” presents special problems. It is clear that Hegel spoke of a “proper” state that clearly required capitalization. The difficulty is trying to determine when he was speaking technically of the “Idea of the State” and when he was referring to the empirical states with which we are all familiar. To complicate the issue further, Hegel held that all states had something of the State in them, however transient and distorted—so that in speaking of states, one found embedded in them features of the State.
Hegel’s Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis Model:
A dialectic method of historical and philosophical progress that postulates
(1) a beginning proposition called a thesis, (current system is bad)
(2) a negation of that thesis called the antithesis, and (critique it by showing its contradictions)
(3) a synthesis whereby the two conflicting ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition. (end results, off course socialism and finally communism, as the utopia of the left)
Although this method is commonly referred to as the Hegelian dialectic, Hegel actually attributed the terminology to Immanuel Kant. Moreover, many scholars argue that the dialectic is represented of German idealism as developed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
I keep posting this for those who need to understand where the origins of the leftist religion for the last 200 years are.
"The new philosophy. . . takes the place of religion and has the essence of religion within itself. In truth, it is itself religion."
—Ludwig Feuerbach
"Our religion does not involve a church, because it is more than that. It is a religion unconfined; it is the substance of our very lives."—Moses
Are you factually correct, or politically correct?
“The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world. It is characterized by an amalgam of both sentiments and beliefs that cannot be easily catalogued, though terms like 'progressive,' 'emancipators or 'liberationist' serve to describe it. Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies— leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular. A prevailing spirit is one of intolerance and a grim orthodoxy, precisely caught in the phrase "political correctness.” ― Peter L. Berger
“Political correctness is a war on noticing.”
― Steve Sailer
“The truth has become an insult.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
The problem you can't talk about.... is now two problems. So lets talk about it.
“I think there’s something seriously wrong with a society that thinks it’s wrong to tell the truth, because it could potentially hurt someone’s feelings. You’re not doing anyone any favors if you don’t allow snowflakes to develop coping skills, by shielding them from uncomfortable thoughts.” ― Oliver Markus Malloy
In today western climate the dialectic approach would go something like this...
(1) A preliminary proposition known as a thesis might be (The old judicial system based on individual responsibility and common law)
(2) A critique and negation of that thesis is called the antithesis, and (In the SJW collectivist worldview, one group is more successful/has power because they are more responsible, so instead of looking at it as justice on an individual basis, social justice is about assigning characteristics of the individual to a group, usually against their own approval, and then judging other groups and individuals based on that assumption.)
(3) Finally, conflict between two thesis produce a synthesis, in which opposing ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition (of course, the end results are social justice, socialism, and finally communism, which always ends up being a dystopian, totalitarian, brutal, murdering regime)
4 - Repeat the same process until at the end of history, one day you perfect it and there is no need for further dialects approach. You have reached utopia. And those left standing will be at the right side of history.
Who’s on the Right Side of History?
It has become a commonplace in modern political polemic to talk about being on the right side of history. It is a phrase commonly employed by those who consider themselves “enlightened” or “progressive” and is used to condemn political opponents for being on the wrong side of history, or as being historically incorrect.
As usual, it is important that we define our terms. We cannot address the question of being on the right side of history until we know what we mean by “history” itself. For the “enlightened” and “progressive” person, history is an inexorable ascent from a primitive past to an enlightened future. The past is, therefore, always inferior to the present, as the present will be inferior to the future. This understanding of history was advocated by Hegel (1770-1831) who saw history as the gradual liberation of humanity from ignorance. In a similar way, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) saw history as transitioning from phases marked by relative ignorance to phases of increased enlightenment. Specifically history begins in a mystical era, marked by mysticism and superstition, progresses to a metaphysical era, in which philosophers employ the faculty of reason to try to understand the mysteries of the cosmos, and progresses finally into the scientific age, in which mystery is eradicated and materialism triumphs. Karl Marx (1818-1883) employed and politicized the progressivist understanding of history advocated by Hegel and Comte. For Marx, history should be understood in terms of political and economic determinism. History, for Marx, begins with slave-ownership and then transitions through feudalism and capitalism into the final stability to be found in communism, in which the power of the state will finally give way to some form of economic and political paradise, marked by liberty and justice for all.
Those “progressives” who dismiss their political opponents for being on “the wrong side of history” have accepted and embraced the historical determinism of Hegel, Comte, and Marx, seeing history as a liberating mechanism, moving forward and crushing those reactionaries who get in its way. For such “progressives” the process is inevitable and inexorable and is therefore unstoppable.
The ironic consequence of such a view of history is that it blinds us to history itself, preventing us from ever learning the lessons that history teaches. If the past is inferior to the present, if it is marked by barbarism and ignorance, what can it teach the more “enlightened” present? What can the ignorant and superstitious peasants of the past teach the urbane and sophisticated dwellers in the modernist City of Man? It is no surprise, therefore, that “progressives” advocate the removal of the great works of western civilization from school and college curricula. Not only are the ideas expressed in these great works marked by the ignorance which necessarily blights the past but there is a danger that some people might take them seriously, thereby sinking into ignorance and barbarism themselves. This banning of books is akin to the burning of books, a practice which has characterized every culture in which “progressive” ideas have gained power.
For all of their talk of “tolerance,” the fact is that “progressives” have proven themselves the least tolerant of all people. The “enlightened” and “progressive” ideas that led to the French Revolution led also to the invention of the guillotine as the instrument of the Reign of Terror which followed in the Revolution’s wake. The “enlightened” and “progressive” ideas of Karl Marx led to a plethora of revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all of which descended into violence and terror, killing millions of civilians on a scale that would have been utterly unthinkable in the “unenlightened” past. And yet those who led these revolutions had the same philosophical ideas as today’s “progressives”. They believed the past to be barbaric and that the future would be a paradise, built on the ideas of the self-named Enlightenment. They were on “the right side of history.” As for their millions of victims, such as the Catholic peasants of the Vendée or those who believed in Russian Orthodoxy, they were sacrificed of necessity because they were on “the wrong side of history.” Their deaths were necessary and inevitable because they stood in the way of “progress.”
There is, however, another view of history, which sees history as being human and not as a mere mechanism. It sees history as beginning with the family, not with slavery. It believes that we can learn priceless lessons from the past which enable us to understand the present and the future. It sees the past as characterized by all that is human, by all that is good, bad, and ugly in the human condition. It believes that we have a lot to learn from all that is good, true, and beautiful in the past; from the great philosophers and the great works of art and literature; and from those whose lives were characterized by the love which is inseparable from self-sacrifice. It also believes that we have a lot to learn from the evil and ugliness in the past; from the tyrants who refused the call of love, choosing instead to sacrifice others on the altars erected to their own egos; and from the bad ideas which have had bad consequences, such as the aforementioned ideas of Hegel, Comte, and Marx. It does not believe that the past is a barbarian to be cast aside with contempt, but that it is a wizened old man, showing us the fullness of human experience, enabling us to learn from the mistakes of the past so that we are not doomed to repeat them in the present or the future, and showing us the lives of heroes who laid down their lives for their friends and enemies, inspiring us to do the same.
It can be seen, therefore, that being on the right side of history depends on what we mean by history itself. If history is a mere mechanism of historical determinism, crushing those with “unprogressive” and “unenlightened” ideas, we can only be “right” if we genuflect before the might of the machine. If, on the other hand, it is the witness of human beings interacting with each other through time, teaching us through the consequences of their actions to avoid evil and its destructiveness, and inspiring us to live self-sacrificial lives which make the world better for our neighbours and even our enemies, we will only be on the “right” side of history if we follow the example of the saints and heroes.
To put the matter bluntly, those on the right side of history are those who live good and virtuous lives in the service of objective truth, thereby making the world a better and more beautiful place. Those who treat the past with contempt, refusing to learn its lessons and worshipping the imaginary machine of “progress,” will be the tools of tyranny today as they have been the tools of tyranny in the past. They are not only on the wrong side of history, they are on the wrong side of humanity.
Article Published June 15, 2018 by Joseph Pearce
Who’s on the Right Side of History?
https://intellectualtakeout.org/2018/06/whos-on-the-right-side-of-history/
Hegel and the Dialectic | James Lindsay & Michael O'Fallon | Changing Tides Ep. 3
When most commentators refer to the ideological state that Western civilization finds itself in today, the name most commonly used as the genesis of the rot that has infected our society is Karl Marx. This isn’t wholly wrong, but when an examination of the gradualistic sense of the process which has been used to purposely evolve societal conceptions to the end goal of progressive operational success, the name and the methodologies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel should immediately come to the forefront of discussion.
Join Michael O’Fallon, of Sovereign Nations, and James Lindsay, of New Discourses, for an in-depth discussion of how the Hegelian dialectical process and metaphysics work and slowly drain the color out of life in Western Civilization.
The totalitarian systems that arose in the twentieth century presented themselves as secular. Yet, as A. James Gregor argues in his book, Totalitarianism and Political Religion An Intellectual History, 2001, they themselves functioned as religions. He presents an intellectual history of the rise of these political religions, tracing a set of ideas that include belief that a certain text contains impeccable truths; notions of infallible, charismatic leadership; and the promise of human redemption through strict obedience, selfless sacrifice, total dedication, and unremitting labor. Gregor provides unique insight into the variants of Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism that dominated our immediate past. He explores the seeds of totalitarianism as secular faith in the nineteenth-century ideologies of Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Richard Wagner. He follows the growth of those seeds as the twentieth century became host to Leninism and Stalinism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism―each a totalitarian institution and a political religion.
I replied,
All Marxist are atheists, thus their political philosophy is a façade and masquerade for atheism as the source of political power to defeat western principles derived from Judeo-Christian ethics as espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
The birth of of our Lord, Jesus Christ, brought hope and love to a troubled world - a message that could not resonate more profoundly today.
Krunoslav Stifter answers:
I would like to add few extra distinctions here. While its true that technically Marxist are a rival religion that starts with atheism, not all atheists are Marxists of course. Atheism is a kind of in-between point. This was critical for conquering American society . Instead of violent revolution like in Euro-Asia they had a long march trough the institutions in America.
“It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that "revolution must necessarily begin with atheism." That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008)
Regarding atheism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared "Men have forgotten God":
"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."
There is nothing more dangerous than atheist playing god. I am an atheists, but I do not consider myself a God, while communists do.
Furthermore. ...though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.
“...the working classes—that motor of social transformation which Marx increasingly stipulated for the role of the proletariat; the dispossessed and alienated revolutionary vehicle of his early writings, which later became defined and analysed into the collective worker who 'owner' nothing but his labour power—chains rather than assets. In the event, the working class actually came to fulfill most of the optimistic prognoses of liberal thinkers; they have become largely 'socialized' through access to privilege, consumption, organization, and voting participation, as well as obtaining massive social benefits. They have become supporters of the status quo—not vociferous perhaps, but tacit approvers and beneficiaries none the less.
The ferment today comes from sections of the community to whom political and social thought has never hitherto assigned any specific role; who have hitherto never developed specific political institutions of their own: youth, mostly students; racial minorities, a few dissident intellectuals—these form the new 'proletariat'. The basis of their dissatisfaction is not necessarily and always an objective level of deprivation but rather a mixture of relative deprivation—consciousness of possibilities and of the blockages which prevent their attainment—and above all an articulate dissatisfaction with the society around them. There is no good reason why such groups should not form, and act like, a proletariat in a perfectly Marxist sense. The economic causality collapses; the analysis of a decaying bourgeois society and the determination to overthrow it remain.”
― J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I
“Enrollments in American colleges tripled between 1955 and 1970, what governments failed to foresee was that more young people, plus, more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection. Learning does not easily compartmentalize. How do you prepare students to think for purposes approved by the state, or by their parents, without also equipping them to think for themselves? Youths throughout history had often wished question their elders values. Now, with university educations, their elders had handed them the training to do so. The result was discontent with the world as it was.” ― John Gaddis, The Cold War
“The modern-day ultra-Left ideology of “Cultural Marxism” takes yesterday’s Soviet Marxist-Leninist model and stands it on its head. Revolution on this alternative path no longer envisions a cataclysmic clash between workers and capitalists as the final act. Rather, contemporary revolutionary doctrine is far more dangerous: it is based on a nonviolent, persistent, and “quiet” transformation of American traditions, families, education, media, and support institutions day-by-day. The seizure of political and economic power remains a key objective, but this “final act” is really a first step in transforming the existing cultural order. The political, economic, social, and cultural realities in the early twenty-first century, as compared to the late 1960s may differ in detail, but the over-all progressive-socialist-marxist goal of transforming American culture and destroying the existing form of constitutional democratic government from within remains unchanged.”
“Critical Theory’s (Frankfurt School) coming from influence on the New Left in the late 1960s and 1970s ensured that American society would be infected by this Marxist malignancy. While it addressed many aspects of social structure, Critical Theory, in the final analysis, proposed activities that would transform society into one far more amenable to Marxism. Critical Theory’s “struggle for social change” was an important step in undermining the values, structures, and practices of America’s free market and democratic principles.”
Antonio Francesco Gramsci (1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and communist politician. He wrote on political theory, sociology and linguistics. He attempted to break from the economic determinism of traditional Marxist thought and so is considered a key neo-Marxist. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime.
“Gramsci set out to provide a revolutionary blueprint that would pervert the Roman Catholic Church’s values of goodness and forgiveness into a mind control tool in the hands of the new Marxists. He knew that the working classes were defined by their Christian faith and their Christian culture. Christianity, Gramsci recognized, blocked the way toward uprisings by the workers against the ruling class. No matter how strong might be their oppression, the working classes defined themselves in terms of their Christian faith. Christian culture liberated the working classes against even the most repressive secular abuses. While Gramsci shared the world views of Marx and Lenin concerning a future “workers paradise,” he knew that it had to come about in a wholly different way than through violent revolution. A high priority item for contemporary radical Leftists, therefore, is to destroy religion, a competitor for winning the “hearts and minds” necessary for Marxist revolution. For the Left, worship of God must be replaced by a worship of man, or “secular humanism.”
In the case of new radical left it is the worship of women and secular humanism was replaced by the identity politics.
“What was essential, insisted Gramsci, was to Marxize the INNER man. To secularize him to the point of godlessness. Only when that was done could you successfully dangle the utopia of the ‘Workers’ Paradise’ before his eyes, to be accepted in a peaceful and humanly agreeable manner, without revolution, violence or bloodshed.”
― Robert Chandler, Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, the Global New Left, and Radical Islam
“The call to level the playing field, pushed to its logical conclusion, is a call for the systematic subversion of American individualism and democracy. It is the kitsch marxism of our time.
The belief in the power of "institutional racism" allows black civil rights leaders to denounce America as a "racist" society, when it is the only society on earth-black, white, brown, or yellow whose defining public creed is anti-racist, a society to which black refugees from black-ruled nations regularly flee in search of refuge and freedom. The phantom of institutional racism allows black leaders to avoid the encounter with real problems within their own communities, which are neither caused by whites nor soluble by the actions of whites, but which cry out for attention.
After the class, I went up to the teacher and said that I admired her pedagogy in advising the students that she was not there to tell them what to think, but to teach them how. On the other hand, I thought that assigning an ideological marxist tome as the course's only text worked at cross-purposes with that goal. At once the smile disappeared from her face. She said: "Well, they get the other side from the newspapers." Education like this costs Bates parents thirty thousand dollars each year in tuition alone.” ― David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes
Here is some more James Lindsey on this topic.
Critical Education is Brainwashing
Critical Pedagogy is brainwashing. This isn’t rhetorical flourish or poetic license. The entire school of thought called Critical Pedagogy, which is wholly dominant in all our schools of education and educational institutions now, is brainwashing. It’s easy to see this by considering the words of people who use and promote Critical Pedagogy itself. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay takes you through three such people to make an irrefutable case that Critical Pedagogy really is nothing other than Woke brainwashing.
Is CRT Anti-White?
One of the more important questions about Critical Race Theory, and one of the only ones that still lingers now that we know that it’s Race Marxism, is Is CRT anti-white? The answer seems to be obviously yes, but it’s somehow inadequate or a crude oversimplification. This matters because that crude oversimplification, like most blunt instruments, is both popular and hard to avoid picking up in a fight. The real answer is more no than yes, and getting it straight makes a big difference in how we engage it. Join host James Lindsay in this episode of New Discourses Bullets where it tries to make it more clear.
Critical Pedagogy | The Great Gaslight, Ep. 2 | James Lindsay & Michael O’Fallon
The majority of the conservatives and truly liberal in our nation are focused on the ideological threat posed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education, faith, and in our corporate sector. While understanding and providing solid answers to the claims of CRT is a necessary endeavor, it is important to help understand how these cancerous ideologies have spread throughout our education system. Just as Critical Race Theory approaches the topic of race from the perspective of Critical Theory (neo-Marxism), there is a Critical Theory of Education as well. Because the formal term for a theory of education is “pedagogy,” the application of Critical Theory both to and within education is known as Critical Pedagogy.
William Whitten replies,
Fabulous and fascinating information Krunoslav, thank you.
Krunoslav Stifter Reply
My pleasure. I hope more people learn about these things. We need it. Cheers!
William Whitten
I thoroughly enjoyed your essay Mr. Stifter, as it ends up proving my point in a long and exceptional verbose manner.
Love the James Lindsay lectures!
Krunoslav Stifter
Thank you for having the patience, Cheers!
William Whitten
Do you realize there are 33 other answers to this question and most of them are leftist garbage?
Krunoslav Stifter
Interesting. I didn’t count but I suppose the Marxification process was quite successful. It reminded me about something, let me share two quick videos that might help with this.
Former KGB Agent, Yuri Bezmenov, Warns America About Socialist Subversion
Academic Agent AKA Neema Parvini - Demoralization: What Yuri Bezmenov Didn't Tell You
Roger Scruton: How Socialism got Repackaged into Human Rights
Sep 15, 2019
Sir Roger Scruton made these remarks while delivering an address to the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia’s premier free market think tank. To learn more about the work of the IPA, visit www.ipa.org.au. Sir Roger Vernon Scruton is an English philosopher and writer who specialises in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views. In recent years he taught courses in Buckingham University, Oxford University and University of St. Andrews. In this clip, he talks about human rights and socialism. Complete videos edited with permission
William Whitten
“Former KGB Agent, Yuri Bezmenov, Warns America About Socialist Subversion”
I had seen this video of Griffin interviewing Besmenov years ago. What I have never seen are the second two videos you have offered here.
Now I am well versed in the Neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and have published an outline of the history of this here on Quora:
The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory: Neo-Marxism
The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory: Neo-Marxism
I will note that the Wikipedia entry on the Frankfurt School is a load of bovine excrement. A total misrepresentation of it, calling it a “conspiracy theory”
Thank you for your continuing engagement on these matters.
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Do you agree that Marxism is atheism masquerading as political philosophy?
lol no. Marxism is not a political philosophy, it an set of ideologies, often inspired by Marxist concepts, which also involves politics, but everything else as well. Its utopian ideology system meaning it acts like a modern religion. Atheism is a moot point, because it simply means not believing in a supernatural deity, or in border sense it means not believing in the supernatural. It tells us nothing about actual belief system.
Marxists are perhaps Godless, but they are far from irreligious and definitely bealive in the supernatural, just not deity. State takes over that role, which is promoted as all powerful, all knowing, infallible and usually there is cult of personality of the ruler involve which is promoted as god like individual, we can see that with Mao, Kims in Korea, Stalin etc.
As for atheism and Marxism link. Let me share some insights.
Atheism (from Greek: a + theos + ismos "not believing in god") refers in its broadest sense to a denial of theism (the belief in the existence of a single deity or deities). Atheism has many shades and types. Some atheists strongly deny the existence of God (or any form of deity) and attack theistic claims. Yet certainty as to the non-existence of God is as much a belief as is religion and rests on equally unprovable claims. Just as religious believers range from the ecumenical to the narrow-minded, atheists range from those for whom it is a matter of personal philosophy to those who are militantly hostile to religion.
“Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance. In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender.” ― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
“The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011
“Marxism is supposed to be a social science designed to see through hypocrisies and denial, but Marxism ended up as a kind of earplug, guaranteed to deafen its disciples.” ― Paul Berman
“The influence that Marxism has achieved, far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects.… In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.” ― Leszek Kołakowski
“Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
“It is quite true that Marx said that religion is the opium of the people. But of course we now know that Marxism is the crack cocaine of the people.”
― Douglas Wilson
“In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism — only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire.” ― Isaac Deutscher, Russia After Stalin
“Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, also called Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go.” ― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
“Hence a communist society would have a new ethical basis. It has been claimed – by Lenin among others – that Marxism is a scientific system, free from any ethical judgements or postulates. These are the essential points of ‘the first Marxism’. It is manifestly not a scientific enterprise in the sense in which we understand science today. Its theories are not derived from detailed factual studies, or subjected to controlled tests or observations.” ― Anonymous
"That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise.” ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
“Kirk defined the ideologue as one who “thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature.” Unleashed during the most radical phase of the French Revolution, the spirit of ideology has metastasized over the past two centuries, wreaking horrors. Jacobinism, Anarchism, Marxism, Leninism, Fascism, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism—all shared the fatal attraction to “political messianism”; all were “inverted religions.” Each of these ideologies preached a dogmatic approach to politics, economics, and culture. Each in its own way endeavored “to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines.” Thus did the ideologue promise “salvation in this world, hotly declaring that there exists no other realm of being.” ― Russell Kirk, The American Cause
Marx’s Brave New World
It is crucial to realize that communism, being a totalitarian ideology, endeavored to change human nature itself. This is clear throughout Marx’s writings. In The German Ideology (1845), Marx and Engels said that in order “for the widespread generation of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause, it is necessary that man himself should suffer a massive change.” This was a change, they said, that could only come through “a practical movement, a revolution.” There must be a literal process of “overthrowing” the old “filthy yoke and … founding a new society only in a revolution.
Human nature itself had to be changed. There had to be a fundamental transformation of human nature. A revolution of (or against, really) human nature.
In that framework, religion was viewed as a dangerous and ubiquitous rival belief system. It was Marxism’s chief competitor for the mind of the working class. The Soviet leadership would want Marxism and the state to be central to all citizens’ lives. Hence, the words of the Communist Manifesto were to be read and learned, drilled and memorized, internalized. Any challenging text, especially an influential one like the Bible, was unwelcome. Religion was perceived as an ever-present, powerful enemy, not to be taken lightly.
Marx was an atheist-utopian who envisioned a “new morality” without God. The path to utopia was a classless albeit godless society. The “classless society”—which would be a “workers’ paradise”—would, said Marx, make its “own history! It is a leap from slavery into freedom; from darkness into light.”
Marx promised nothing less than the creation of a “new world.” His “generation,” he portended, “resembles the Jews whom Moses led out of the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world; it must also perish in order to make room for the people who are fit for a new world.”67 The old world and current generation must perish. It would be the communists who would play the role of sacrificial savior on behalf of a new covenant for the new world.
This kind of utopian idealism is common to the communist left and even much of the wider left, which otherwise proudly touts its cynicism and suspicion, especially of religious people. But when a centralized government looks to corral and herd the collective masses, the hardest left-wing pessimist can morph into the most hopeful idealist. Leftists scoff at the Baptist preacher clinging to his Bible or Catholic grandma clinging to her rosary, but damned if leftists are not equally as faithful when clinging to government as holding the path to salvation. The most doubting and brooding of communists have not been exempt from such full-faith secular idealism.
For that matter, just as Marx was not very impressed with Christians, he also was quite unimpressed with Christianity. And for those modern-day “social justice” Christians who like to invoke communism as somehow consistent with or reflective of Christian social teaching, well, Karl Marx begged to differ. “The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility,” scowled Marx. “The social principles of Christianity are hypocritical. … So much for the social principles of Christianity.”
Not that Marx himself was any less self-absorbed than this alleged Christianity he condemned. “The more of himself that man gives to God,” Marx groaned, “the less he has left in himself.”69 Marx was all about himself, answerable to himself alone.
Georg Jung, a Marx contemporary, a young lawyer, and a member of the Doctors’ Club, said that “Marx calls Christianity one of the most immoral religions.” Jung viewed Marx not as a political revolutionary but a theological-philosophical revolutionary who was attempting to overthrow the entire social system, not just an economic system.
The preceding tells us much about where Karl Marx ended up on the religion question. But where did he start? Was he always an atheist? And did his sojourn involve a detour or two along some highly troubled paths? When did his writings first reveal this ominous turn?
* The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration by Paul Kengo, 2020
“Religion Lies at Our Feet”
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the city of Trier, one of the loveliest, oldest, most tranquil, most peaceful, most religious, and most deeply Catholic cities in Germany (a population that was 90 percent Roman Catholic).
It was hard to find a more Catholic place. The Christian roots of Trier are remarkable. None other than St. Ambrose, the future bishop of Milan who brought Augustine into the faith, was born in Trier in the year 340. The city boasts the oldest church in Germany, dating to AD 320–330. It is said that St. Helena (AD 246/248–330) herself gave a portion of the land to build the church there. She also gave Christians no less than Constantine, her son, the great Roman emperor and protector of Christians. Among the most sacred relics believed to be held at Trier’s grand cathedral is the Seamless Robe of Jesus, also known as the Holy Robe, or Holy Coat, which Christ wore on the way to his crucifixion—the one for which the Roman soldiers had cast lots. According to tradition, St. Helena obtained the robe in the Holy Land around AD 327 and brought it to Germany.
Such is the city of Trier. It is special, long beloved by Christians.
Not surprisingly, Karl Marx’s literary idol Goethe disapproved. “The place is burdened, nay oppressed, with churches and chapels and cloisters and colleges and buildings dedicated to chivalrous and religious orders,” grumbled Goethe upon a visit in 1793, the year the Jacobin guillotine was dropping incessantly upon necks in Catholic France, “and this is to say nothing about the abbacies, Carthusian convents and other institutions which invest and blockade it.”
Only Goethe, and later Marx, could detest Trier.
Karl’s father and mother started their family there. Karl had such a world of promise and decency in front of him. Holiness was fully available at practically every corner.
Marx’s family was Jewish, on both his father’s and mother’s sides. They were not only ethnically Jewish but had a healthy family history of devout Judaism. There had been several rabbis in the recent family history, from the nineteenth century back to at least the late seventeenth century.117 “It would be difficult to find anyone who had a more Jewish ancestry than Karl Marx,” writes biographer David McLellan.118
Under the social pressures of the day, Marx’s father left Judaism and converted to Protestantism at some point in the late 1810s or early 1820s, most likely at the end of 1819.119 It is particularly intriguing that Heinrich chose Protestantism over Catholicism, the latter being a much more common choice for Jews who left Judaism in Catholic Trier, including his brother Cerf. Marx biographer Jonathan Sperber explains that Heinrich was much more liberal, a product of the Enlightenment, who, tellingly, if not fatefully, had read Voltaire aloud to the young Karl.120 He knew Voltaire and Rousseau by heart.121 With the sort of candor and disdainful language his son would use, Heinrich denounced what he called “the Gospels polluted by ignorant priests,” in favor of what Sperber described as “a liberal and Enlightened Protestantism, not entirely separate from Deism, that would be Heinrich Marx’s Christianity of choice.”
Heinrich became Lutheran. It was a choice that allowed him more choices to define his own views. The son would seize upon such choices with wild abandon.
Still, Heinrich at least saw value in believing in God. He advised Karl that “a good support for morality is a simple faith in God. You know that I am the last person to be a fanatic. But sooner or later a man has a real need of this faith, and there are moments in life when even the man who denies God is compelled against his will to pray to the Almighty.”
Heinrich’s wife, Henrietta, was much more reluctant to convert, and thus delayed not only her own conversion but the baptisms of her children as well. Karl was baptized not as an infant, which would have been just about the time that Heinrich converted, but in 1824, the sixth year of his life.
Karl, too, became Lutheran. He kept the faith—even if he was not always devout or clear or particularly orthodox—until probably his late teens and initial college years. He definitely shed his faith during his college years and was unquestionably an atheist by the time he did his dissertation at age twenty-three in 1841. In his dissertation, he approvingly quoted the first century BC Roman philosopher Lucretius’s eulogy for Epicurus, condemning the “burden of oppressive religion,” which “with gruesome grotesqueness frightfully threatened mankind.” Lucretius exalts, “Religion lies at our feet, completely defeated.”
That was the triumph to which Karl Marx thereafter committed himself: religion at our feet. It was a shame, a waste of the richly religious soil he had tread and was raised upon. He would stomp upon that religious bounty rather than feed upon it as nourishment for his troubled soul.
Marx, Luther, and the Reformation
Though this book is not the place to adequately treat the subject, it is noteworthy that Karl Marx seemed to appreciate Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Church. In no way is that observation intended to equate Luther with Marx or his goals, and certainly not with the destruction produced by communism. For starters, Luther was, of course, anything but a godless atheist. Whereas Marx liked what Luther did, or, more specifically, liked the byproduct of what Luther did in terms of undermining the authority of the Church of Rome, Luther surely would not have liked what Marx did, nor the results of Marx’s ideas or communism’s madness.
Marx seems to have appreciated that Luther pulled away from the authority of the Church, which, for Marx, was a crucial step in the ongoing march of the dialectic of history—that is, of advancing and progressing to the next crucial stage in history, according to Marxist theory. He mightily approved of that step, even if he did not necessarily approve of Luther at a spiritual level. This is stated most emphatically by Marx in the long concluding section of his famous 1843 work “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” It was there he described religion as “the opium of the people.” Interestingly, there he also credits Luther, who, he says, “overcame bondage,” specifically that bondage imposed by Rome. “On the eve of the Reformation,” Marx lamented, “official Germany was the most unconditional slave of Rome.” Just as Luther made a crucial break from the religion of Rome, now Marx and his fellow philosophers would make a crucial break in their revolutionary “emancipation.” Stated Marx, “As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher” (emphasis original).
Thus, for Marx, Luther had provided an indispensable service in clearing the path Marx envisioned for history. What the monk began, the philosopher would conclude, although he would extend the path in directions of which Luther never dreamed, even in his worst nightmares.
In an 1854 piece that he wrote for the New York Tribune, approvingly titled “The Decay of Religious Authority,” Marx wrote that the “Protestant Reformation” allowed “the upper classes in every European nation” (here again, Marx viewed nearly everything through the prism of class) to begin to “unfasten themselves individually from all religious belief, and become so-called free-thinkers.” That included statesmen, legalists, and diplomats. He noted that the Protestant Reformation had this effect not only among Catholic nations but even among those nations that adopted Protestantism. The Protestant Reformation that begat Protestantism allowed them all to think for themselves apart from the authority of the Church, the Church founded by Christ. Again, this was a huge historical breakthrough, one which would serve Marx and the furtherance of his vision and ambitions.
Marx’s father liked that Lutheranism allowed him more latitude to think for himself. Karl, too, wanted full freedom for the widest “free-thinking.” Thinking completely apart from the Church of Rome could pave the way for him to open the door to philosophical communism. Breaking with Rome was the break he needed to pursue atheistic communism.
Notably, in that same article for the New York Tribune, Marx offered an insight into his view on the Crusades. The Crusades, greatly misunderstood and maligned to this day, were pursued by various popes, beginning with the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century, as efforts to come to the defense of besieged Christians relentlessly attacked in Christian lands by Muslims in their holy war against “infidels.” Each Crusade had to meet the requirements of Just War theory. The goal was to rescue those Christians and recover land and sites (such as the Holy Sepulchre) that had been theirs until Muslim invaders seized them violently. Karl Marx reversed this entirely, portraying the Crusades as the period “when Western Europe, as late as the eighteenth century, undertook a ‘holy war’ against the ‘infidel’ Turks for the possession of the Holy Sepulchre.” This was a complete and outrageous reversal of which side had persecuted which. Of course, Marx’s misunderstanding of the Crusades is now the consensus of secular leftists today; what is worse, they are not the only ones who subscribe to that view.
Marx’s anti-Catholicism would show up in his writing. He wrote of one political associate, David Urquhart, who, “with his Catholicism, etc. grows more and more disgusting.” Curiously, as the New York Tribune piece suggests, he seemed to have a favorable opinion of Muslims. He praised certain Muslim Arabs, acknowledging a sympathy for their “hatred against Christians and the hope of an ultimate victory over these infidels.”132 Sure, Muslims believed in God, and that, to Marx, was a bad thing, but at least they were against Christians. They had that redeeming quality.
Yet again viewing everything through class and economics, Marx criticized “the monetary system [as] essentially a Catholic institution,” and “the credit system [as] essentially Protestant.” He lamented that the credit system “does not emancipate itself from the basis of the monetary system any more than Protestantism has emancipated itself from the foundations of Catholicism.”
Like his old man, Marx expressed a negative attitude toward Catholics in his midst. Marx would remember the Catholic pupils in his class as a bunch of “peasant dolts,” which Jonathan Sperber says was probably reflective of the opinion of upper-class Protestant classmates.134 I wouldn’t blame them. Karl Marx never needed outside influence to view people as inferior idiots and rabble, or, to borrow one of Marx’s handy phrases of derision, as the “lumpenproletariat.” It came easy to Karl to see others as slack-jawed morons.
* The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration by Paul Kengo, 2020
Regarding atheism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared "Men have forgotten God":
"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."
There is nothing more dangerous than atheist playing god. I am an atheists, but I do not consider myself a God, while communists do.
“Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
"A belief in heaven is an assertion of the immortality of the soul, and the Moral Order of the universe. Without this faith, we'll never see heaven on earth. We're seeing hell instead." - Mike Stone, Restoring Belief in Heaven
“Marxism is supposed to be a social science designed to see through hypocrisies and denial, but Marxism ended up as a kind of earplug, guaranteed to deafen its disciples.” ― Paul Berman
"When God “died” in the 19th century, “social-ism” took the form of materialist scientism (hence the philosopher Eric Voegelin’s observation that under Marxism, “Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come”). It’s worth recalling that both Marx and Engels came to their socialism via their atheism, not the other way around.” ― Jonah Goldberg
“The influence that Marxism has achieved, far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects.… In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.” ― Leszek Kołakowski
“Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
“It is quite true that Marx said that religion is the opium of the people. But of course we now know that Marxism is the crack cocaine of the people.” ― Douglas Wilson
“In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism — only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire.” ― Isaac Deutscher, Russia After Stalin
“Interestingly, Marxism, Communism and its derivative, Socialism, when seen years later in practice, are nothing but state-capitalism and rule by a privileged minority, exercising despotic and total control over a majority which is left with virtually no property or legal rights.” ― Andrew Carrington Hitchcock, The Synagogue Of Satan - Updated, Expanded, And Uncensored
“Therein lies the true essence of Marxism. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ only ever works with a gun in your hand." ― Philip Kerr, Prussian Blue
“Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, also called Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go.” ― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
“Hence a communist society would have a new ethical basis. It has been claimed – by Lenin among others – that Marxism is a scientific system, free from any ethical judgements or postulates. These are the essential points of ‘the first Marxism’. It is manifestly not a scientific enterprise in the sense in which we understand science today. Its theories are not derived from detailed factual studies, or subjected to controlled tests or observations.” ― Anonymous
"That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise.” ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
“Kirk defined the ideologue as one who “thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature.” Unleashed during the most radical phase of the French Revolution, the spirit of ideology has metastasized over the past two centuries, wreaking horrors. Jacobinism, Anarchism, Marxism, Leninism, Fascism, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism—all shared the fatal attraction to “political messianism”; all were “inverted religions.” Each of these ideologies preached a dogmatic approach to politics, economics, and culture. Each in its own way endeavored “to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines.” Thus did the ideologue promise “salvation in this world, hotly declaring that there exists no other realm of being.” ― Russell Kirk, The American Cause
A striking feature of Marx’s writing is his hostility to Christianity and religion. For example, in the preface to his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1843) Marx wrote:
"‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions’."
Although Marxism has failed as a political and economic system, ironically it flourishes as a secular religion. Perhaps Marxism ought to be regarded as the crack cocaine of the Left.
“The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientific method was also ideologically—and even messianically—driven. It ignored scientific data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as “scientific planning.” ― Paul Edward Gottfried
Communism and Terminology
The term communism only became common in the 1840s. Even after that, the word communist—in the sense of emphasizing community and common control—was applied to other kinds of social projects, like experimental communities or communes.
An Evolving Tradition
Communism featured both continuity and change. Additionally, once in power, communist regimes revealed internal contradictions, which stressed their systems. When it comes to communism, five contradictions in particular are notable.
1 - The first has to do with the role of the individual in history. Marx presented a powerful vision of history being made by masses of people. By contrast, individuals played less of a role. However, with communism, it is the case that decisive leaders loom up again and again, starting with Marx himself.
2 - The second contradiction involved geography. Although communism was meant to be global, Marx expected it to evolve first in the most industrially advanced countries. Thus, in the imagination of communists, the real prize was Germany—a leading industrial power. However, against expectations, communism’s greatest influence came in less developed countries, beginning with Lenin’s rise to power in Russia.
3 - A third problem was that communism never entirely settled its relationship to nationalism. Predating communism, nationalism as an ideology was another powerful model of community and an idea about belonging. Marx deplored nationalism; however, communist regimes tried to co-opt nationalist sentiment to use it to reinforce their power. This saw mixed and sometimes contradictory results.
4 - A fourth contradiction was the way in which the communist project turned into a tradition, even when it promised radical breaks with the past. Communism became a tradition full of historical echoes, venerable precedents, time-honored rituals, and original texts that held nearly sacred status.
5 - Finally, a fifth contradiction appeared that had everything to do with commitment to communism as a faith. While it promised scientific certainty and discarded religious dogma, communism also drew on and mobilized faith or even fanaticism. This occurred to the point that many observers have called communism a political religion.
* The Rise of Communism From Marx to Lenin by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
History Is made up of Ideas, says Hegel.
According to Georg Hegel, political ideas are an abstraction from the political life of a society, state, culture, or political movement. Making sense of those ideas, and the institutions or movements they explain, involves examining their history and development. That history is always a story of how we got to where we are now. What we cannot do is look forward to see where history is going.
In Roman mythology, the Owl of Minerva was a symbol of wisdom. For Hegel, the Owl only “takes flight at twilight.” By this he means that understanding can only come retrospectively. Hegel is warning against optimism about developing ideas for where to go next. He is also issuing a subtle warning against his other famous claim that the rise of the modern state is the end of history. It is very easy to see ourselves as the most progressive, enlightened, and rational age ever—after all we believe in open economies, constitutional government, human rights, and democracy. But as we will see in this book, these are not simple ideas, and they are not shared by all societies and people even today.
Religion of Statism
"The State is based on religion. . . . It is only when religion is made the foundation that the practice of righteousness attains stability, and that the fulfillment of duty is secured. It is in religion that what is deepest in man, the conscience, first feels that it lies under an absolute obligation, and has the certain knowledge of this obligation; therefore the State must rest on religion. . . . In this aspect, religion stands in the closest connection with the political principle."
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
G. E W. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.), pp. 50, 51; Philosophy of Mind, part 3 of The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2003), para. 552, p. 283; and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), vol. 1, p. 102.
Editors of Hegel's works in English have not consistently capitalized technical terms like “State,” “Reason,” and “Will” in their texts. The difficulty is, of course, not being able to identify their technical use. All nouns are capitalized in German, and in his narratives, Hegel never specifically signaled their technical use. Below, for the sake of consistency, technical terms will be capitalized throughout (even in English-language texts where they are not). The term “state” presents special problems. It is clear that Hegel spoke of a “proper” state that clearly required capitalization. The difficulty is trying to determine when he was speaking technically of the “Idea of the State” and when he was referring to the empirical states with which we are all familiar. To complicate the issue further, Hegel held that all states had something of the State in them, however transient and distorted—so that in speaking of states, one found embedded in them features of the State.
Hegel’s Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis Model
A dialectic method of historical and philosophical progress that postulates
(1) a beginning proposition called a thesis, (current system is bad)
(2) a negation of that thesis called the antithesis, and (critique it by showing its contradictions)
(3) a synthesis whereby the two conflicting ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition. (end results, off course socialism and finally communism, as the utopia of the left)
Although this method is commonly referred to as the Hegelian dialectic, Hegel actually attributed the terminology to Immanuel Kant. Moreover, many scholars argue that the dialectic is represented of German idealism as developed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
I keep posting this for those who need to understand where the origins of the leftist religion for the last 200 years are.
"The new philosophy. . . takes the place of religion and has the essence of religion within itself. In truth, it is itself religion."
—Ludwig Feuerbach
"Our religion does not involve a church, because it is more than that. It is a religion unconfined; it is the substance of our very lives."—Moses
Are you factually correct, or politically correct?
“The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world. It is characterized by an amalgam of both sentiments and beliefs that cannot be easily catalogued, though terms like 'progressive,' 'emancipators or 'liberationist' serve to describe it. Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies— leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular. A prevailing spirit is one of intolerance and a grim orthodoxy, precisely caught in the phrase "political correctness.” ― Peter L. Berger
“Political correctness is a war on noticing.”
― Steve Sailer
“The truth has become an insult.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
The problem you can't talk about.... is now two problems. So lets talk about it.
“I think there’s something seriously wrong with a society that thinks it’s wrong to tell the truth, because it could potentially hurt someone’s feelings. You’re not doing anyone any favors if you don’t allow snowflakes to develop coping skills, by shielding them from uncomfortable thoughts.” ― Oliver Markus Malloy
In today western climate the dialectic approach would go something like this...
(1) A preliminary proposition known as a thesis might be (The old judicial system based on individual responsibility and common law)
(2) A critique and negation of that thesis is called the antithesis, and (In the SJW collectivist worldview, one group is more successful/has power because they are more responsible, so instead of looking at it as justice on an individual basis, social justice is about assigning characteristics of the individual to a group, usually against their own approval, and then judging other groups and individuals based on that assumption.)
(3) Finally, conflict between two thesis produce a synthesis, in which opposing ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition (of course, the end results are social justice, socialism, and finally communism, which always ends up being a dystopian, totalitarian, brutal, murdering regime)
4 - Repeat the same process until at the end of history, one day you perfect it and there is no need for further dialects approach. You have reached utopia. And those left standing will be at the right side of history.
Who’s on the Right Side of History?
It has become a commonplace in modern political polemic to talk about being on the right side of history. It is a phrase commonly employed by those who consider themselves “enlightened” or “progressive” and is used to condemn political opponents for being on the wrong side of history, or as being historically incorrect.
As usual, it is important that we define our terms. We cannot address the question of being on the right side of history until we know what we mean by “history” itself. For the “enlightened” and “progressive” person, history is an inexorable ascent from a primitive past to an enlightened future. The past is, therefore, always inferior to the present, as the present will be inferior to the future. This understanding of history was advocated by Hegel (1770-1831) who saw history as the gradual liberation of humanity from ignorance. In a similar way, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) saw history as transitioning from phases marked by relative ignorance to phases of increased enlightenment. Specifically history begins in a mystical era, marked by mysticism and superstition, progresses to a metaphysical era, in which philosophers employ the faculty of reason to try to understand the mysteries of the cosmos, and progresses finally into the scientific age, in which mystery is eradicated and materialism triumphs. Karl Marx (1818-1883) employed and politicized the progressivist understanding of history advocated by Hegel and Comte. For Marx, history should be understood in terms of political and economic determinism. History, for Marx, begins with slave-ownership and then transitions through feudalism and capitalism into the final stability to be found in communism, in which the power of the state will finally give way to some form of economic and political paradise, marked by liberty and justice for all.
Those “progressives” who dismiss their political opponents for being on “the wrong side of history” have accepted and embraced the historical determinism of Hegel, Comte, and Marx, seeing history as a liberating mechanism, moving forward and crushing those reactionaries who get in its way. For such “progressives” the process is inevitable and inexorable and is therefore unstoppable.
The ironic consequence of such a view of history is that it blinds us to history itself, preventing us from ever learning the lessons that history teaches. If the past is inferior to the present, if it is marked by barbarism and ignorance, what can it teach the more “enlightened” present? What can the ignorant and superstitious peasants of the past teach the urbane and sophisticated dwellers in the modernist City of Man? It is no surprise, therefore, that “progressives” advocate the removal of the great works of western civilization from school and college curricula. Not only are the ideas expressed in these great works marked by the ignorance which necessarily blights the past but there is a danger that some people might take them seriously, thereby sinking into ignorance and barbarism themselves. This banning of books is akin to the burning of books, a practice which has characterized every culture in which “progressive” ideas have gained power.
For all of their talk of “tolerance,” the fact is that “progressives” have proven themselves the least tolerant of all people. The “enlightened” and “progressive” ideas that led to the French Revolution led also to the invention of the guillotine as the instrument of the Reign of Terror which followed in the Revolution’s wake. The “enlightened” and “progressive” ideas of Karl Marx led to a plethora of revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all of which descended into violence and terror, killing millions of civilians on a scale that would have been utterly unthinkable in the “unenlightened” past. And yet those who led these revolutions had the same philosophical ideas as today’s “progressives”. They believed the past to be barbaric and that the future would be a paradise, built on the ideas of the self-named Enlightenment. They were on “the right side of history.” As for their millions of victims, such as the Catholic peasants of the Vendée or those who believed in Russian Orthodoxy, they were sacrificed of necessity because they were on “the wrong side of history.” Their deaths were necessary and inevitable because they stood in the way of “progress.”
There is, however, another view of history, which sees history as being human and not as a mere mechanism. It sees history as beginning with the family, not with slavery. It believes that we can learn priceless lessons from the past which enable us to understand the present and the future. It sees the past as characterized by all that is human, by all that is good, bad, and ugly in the human condition. It believes that we have a lot to learn from all that is good, true, and beautiful in the past; from the great philosophers and the great works of art and literature; and from those whose lives were characterized by the love which is inseparable from self-sacrifice. It also believes that we have a lot to learn from the evil and ugliness in the past; from the tyrants who refused the call of love, choosing instead to sacrifice others on the altars erected to their own egos; and from the bad ideas which have had bad consequences, such as the aforementioned ideas of Hegel, Comte, and Marx. It does not believe that the past is a barbarian to be cast aside with contempt, but that it is a wizened old man, showing us the fullness of human experience, enabling us to learn from the mistakes of the past so that we are not doomed to repeat them in the present or the future, and showing us the lives of heroes who laid down their lives for their friends and enemies, inspiring us to do the same.
It can be seen, therefore, that being on the right side of history depends on what we mean by history itself. If history is a mere mechanism of historical determinism, crushing those with “unprogressive” and “unenlightened” ideas, we can only be “right” if we genuflect before the might of the machine. If, on the other hand, it is the witness of human beings interacting with each other through time, teaching us through the consequences of their actions to avoid evil and its destructiveness, and inspiring us to live self-sacrificial lives which make the world better for our neighbours and even our enemies, we will only be on the “right” side of history if we follow the example of the saints and heroes.
To put the matter bluntly, those on the right side of history are those who live good and virtuous lives in the service of objective truth, thereby making the world a better and more beautiful place. Those who treat the past with contempt, refusing to learn its lessons and worshipping the imaginary machine of “progress,” will be the tools of tyranny today as they have been the tools of tyranny in the past. They are not only on the wrong side of history, they are on the wrong side of humanity.
Article Published June 15, 2018 by Joseph Pearce
Who’s on the Right Side of History?
https://intellectualtakeout.org/2018/06/whos-on-the-right-side-of-history/
Hegel and the Dialectic | James Lindsay & Michael O'Fallon | Changing Tides Ep. 3
When most commentators refer to the ideological state that Western civilization finds itself in today, the name most commonly used as the genesis of the rot that has infected our society is Karl Marx. This isn’t wholly wrong, but when an examination of the gradualistic sense of the process which has been used to purposely evolve societal conceptions to the end goal of progressive operational success, the name and the methodologies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel should immediately come to the forefront of discussion.
Join Michael O’Fallon, of Sovereign Nations, and James Lindsay, of New Discourses, for an in-depth discussion of how the Hegelian dialectical process and metaphysics work and slowly drain the color out of life in Western Civilization.
The totalitarian systems that arose in the twentieth century presented themselves as secular. Yet, as A. James Gregor argues in his book, Totalitarianism and Political Religion An Intellectual History, 2001, they themselves functioned as religions. He presents an intellectual history of the rise of these political religions, tracing a set of ideas that include belief that a certain text contains impeccable truths; notions of infallible, charismatic leadership; and the promise of human redemption through strict obedience, selfless sacrifice, total dedication, and unremitting labor. Gregor provides unique insight into the variants of Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism that dominated our immediate past. He explores the seeds of totalitarianism as secular faith in the nineteenth-century ideologies of Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Richard Wagner. He follows the growth of those seeds as the twentieth century became host to Leninism and Stalinism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism―each a totalitarian institution and a political religion.
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All Marxist are atheists, thus their political philosophy is a façade and masquerade for atheism as the source of political power to defeat western principles derived from Judeo-Christian ethics as espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
The birth of of our Lord, Jesus Christ, brought hope and love to a troubled world - a message that could not resonate more profoundly today.
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· 22h
“Racial stereotyping. For Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, the sin of white racism was stereotyping all black people as inferior. It was a prejudice to be sure, but it was predicated on the assumption that all blacks were the same. King objected to stereotyping because he wanted blacks to be treated as individuals and not reduced exclusively to their racial identity (hence the meaning of his famous statement about the content of one's character taking precedence over the color of one's skin).
The postmodern left turns the civil rights model on its head. It embraces racial stereotyping - racial identity by any other name - and reverses it, transforming it into something positive, provided the pecking order of power is kept in place. In the new moral scheme of racial identities, black inferiority is replaced by white culpability, rendering the entire white race, with few exceptions, collectively guilty of racial oppression. The switch is justified through the logic of racial justice, but that does not change the fact that people are being defined by their racial characteristic. Racism is viewed as structural, so it is permissible to use overtly positive discrimination (i.e., affirmative action) to reorder society." ― Kim R. Holmes, The Closing of the Liberal Mind: The New Illiberalism's Assault on Freedom
“The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world. It is characterized by an amalgam of both sentiments and beliefs that cannot be easily catalogued, though terms like 'progressive,' 'emancipators or 'liberationist' serve to describe it. Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies— leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular. A prevailing spirit is one of intolerance and a grim orthodoxy, precisely caught in the phrase "political correctness.” ― Peter L. Berger
“Political correctness is a war on noticing.”
― Steve Sailer
“The truth has become an insult.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, Dimitry, it is. But it is politically correct.”
“The point of Political Correctness is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself. Tacit collaboration by millions who bite their lip is even more essential than lip service by thousands of favor seekers. Hence, to stimulate at least passive cooperation, the party strives to give the impression that “everybody” is already on its side. ”
― Angelo Codevilla (The Rise of Political Correctness)
Politically correct language is the product and formulation of a militant minority which remains mysteriously unlocatable. It is not the spontaneous creation of the speech community, least of all any particular deprived sector of it. Disadvantaged groups, such as the deaf, the blind, or the crippled (to use the traditional vocabulary), do not speak for themselves, but are championed by other influential public voices.
From its first manifestations in America, political correctness has had a double agenda, being a combination of freedom and constraint. The “political” aspect involved opening up new cultural horizons, but “correctness” brought conformity in accepting new agendas, new limits on freedom of expression, and a general avoidance of certain controversial topics.
The same opposing qualities are encapsulated in the formulations “progressive orthodoxy” and “positive discrimination.” In his survey of 1992, Paul Berman gave a dismal picture of “an atmosphere of campus repression”
On a broader front, Kenneth Minogue argued that “European civilization has been attacked and conquered from within, without anyone quite realizing what has happened. We may laugh at political correctness – some people even deny that it exists – but it is a manacle round our hands” (Minogue, 2001).
More condemning is the view of P. D. James: “I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism” (Paris Review, 1995).
— Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, 1st Edition by Geoffrey Hughes (2011)
“Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.
Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.
The problems on the American left were already manifest by the late 1960s, as college-educated liberals began to lose contact with the
working class for whom they claimed to speak... For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent.
- Camille Paglia
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· 53m
Krunoslav,
I am asking your permission to post our conversation here on my Substack, just as it has progressed here on Quora.
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· 10m
For sure, no problem. More people see it the better. By all means. :) Thank you.
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· Just now
Great Krunoslav! Is there anything in particular you would want to say as per your education and influences?
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· 22h
I would like to add few extra distinctions here. While its true that technically Marxist are a rival religion that starts with atheism, not all atheists are Marxists of course. Atheism is a kind of in-between point. This was critical for conquering American society . Instead of violent revolution like in Euro-Asia they had a long march trough the institutions in America.
“It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that "revolution must necessarily begin with atheism." That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008)
Regarding atheism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared "Men have forgotten God":
"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."
There is nothing more dangerous than atheist playing god. I am an atheists, but I do not consider myself a God, while communists do.
Furthermore. ...though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.
“...the working classes—that motor of social transformation which Marx increasingly stipulated for the role of the proletariat; the dispossessed and alienated revolutionary vehicle of his early writings, which later became defined and analysed into the collective worker who 'owner' nothing but his labour power—chains rather than assets. In the event, the working class actually came to fulfill most of the optimistic prognoses of liberal thinkers; they have become largely 'socialized' through access to privilege, consumption, organization, and voting participation, as well as obtaining massive social benefits. They have become supporters of the status quo—not vociferous perhaps, but tacit approvers and beneficiaries none the less.
The ferment today comes from sections of the community to whom political and social thought has never hitherto assigned any specific role; who have hitherto never developed specific political institutions of their own: youth, mostly students; racial minorities, a few dissident intellectuals—these form the new 'proletariat'. The basis of their dissatisfaction is not necessarily and always an objective level of deprivation but rather a mixture of relative deprivation—consciousness of possibilities and of the blockages which prevent their attainment—and above all an articulate dissatisfaction with the society around them. There is no good reason why such groups should not form, and act like, a proletariat in a perfectly Marxist sense. The economic causality collapses; the analysis of a decaying bourgeois society and the determination to overthrow it remain.”
― J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I
“Enrollments in American colleges tripled between 1955 and 1970, what governments failed to foresee was that more young people, plus, more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection. Learning does not easily compartmentalize. How do you prepare students to think for purposes approved by the state, or by their parents, without also equipping them to think for themselves? Youths throughout history had often wished question their elders values. Now, with university educations, their elders had handed them the training to do so. The result was discontent with the world as it was.” ― John Gaddis, The Cold War
“The modern-day ultra-Left ideology of “Cultural Marxism” takes yesterday’s Soviet Marxist-Leninist model and stands it on its head. Revolution on this alternative path no longer envisions a cataclysmic clash between workers and capitalists as the final act. Rather, contemporary revolutionary doctrine is far more dangerous: it is based on a nonviolent, persistent, and “quiet” transformation of American traditions, families, education, media, and support institutions day-by-day. The seizure of political and economic power remains a key objective, but this “final act” is really a first step in transforming the existing cultural order. The political, economic, social, and cultural realities in the early twenty-first century, as compared to the late 1960s may differ in detail, but the over-all progressive-socialist-marxist goal of transforming American culture and destroying the existing form of constitutional democratic government from within remains unchanged.”
“Critical Theory’s (Frankfurt School) coming from influence on the New Left in the late 1960s and 1970s ensured that American society would be infected by this Marxist malignancy. While it addressed many aspects of social structure, Critical Theory, in the final analysis, proposed activities that would transform society into one far more amenable to Marxism. Critical Theory’s “struggle for social change” was an important step in undermining the values, structures, and practices of America’s free market and democratic principles.”
Antonio Francesco Gramsci (1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and communist politician. He wrote on political theory, sociology and linguistics. He attempted to break from the economic determinism of traditional Marxist thought and so is considered a key neo-Marxist. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime.
“Gramsci set out to provide a revolutionary blueprint that would pervert the Roman Catholic Church’s values of goodness and forgiveness into a mind control tool in the hands of the new Marxists. He knew that the working classes were defined by their Christian faith and their Christian culture. Christianity, Gramsci recognized, blocked the way toward uprisings by the workers against the ruling class. No matter how strong might be their oppression, the working classes defined themselves in terms of their Christian faith. Christian culture liberated the working classes against even the most repressive secular abuses. While Gramsci shared the world views of Marx and Lenin concerning a future “workers paradise,” he knew that it had to come about in a wholly different way than through violent revolution. A high priority item for contemporary radical Leftists, therefore, is to destroy religion, a competitor for winning the “hearts and minds” necessary for Marxist revolution. For the Left, worship of God must be replaced by a worship of man, or “secular humanism.”
In the case of new radical left it is the worship of women and secular humanism was replaced by the identity politics.
“What was essential, insisted Gramsci, was to Marxize the INNER man. To secularize him to the point of godlessness. Only when that was done could you successfully dangle the utopia of the ‘Workers’ Paradise’ before his eyes, to be accepted in a peaceful and humanly agreeable manner, without revolution, violence or bloodshed.”
― Robert Chandler, Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, the Global New Left, and Radical Islam
“The call to level the playing field, pushed to its logical conclusion, is a call for the systematic subversion of American individualism and democracy. It is the kitsch marxism of our time.
The belief in the power of "institutional racism" allows black civil rights leaders to denounce America as a "racist" society, when it is the only society on earth-black, white, brown, or yellow whose defining public creed is anti-racist, a society to which black refugees from black-ruled nations regularly flee in search of refuge and freedom. The phantom of institutional racism allows black leaders to avoid the encounter with real problems within their own communities, which are neither caused by whites nor soluble by the actions of whites, but which cry out for attention.
After the class, I went up to the teacher and said that I admired her pedagogy in advising the students that she was not there to tell them what to think, but to teach them how. On the other hand, I thought that assigning an ideological marxist tome as the course's only text worked at cross-purposes with that goal. At once the smile disappeared from her face. She said: "Well, they get the other side from the newspapers." Education like this costs Bates parents thirty thousand dollars each year in tuition alone.” ― David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes
Here is some more James Lindsey on this topic.
**Critical Education is Brainwashing**
Critical Pedagogy is brainwashing. This isn’t rhetorical flourish or poetic license. The entire school of thought called Critical Pedagogy, which is wholly dominant in all our schools of education and educational institutions now, is brainwashing. It’s easy to see this by considering the words of people who use and promote Critical Pedagogy itself. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay takes you through three such people to make an irrefutable case that Critical Pedagogy really is nothing other than Woke brainwashing.
**Is CRT Anti-White?**
One of the more important questions about Critical Race Theory, and one of the only ones that still lingers now that we know that it’s Race Marxism, is Is CRT anti-white? The answer seems to be obviously yes, but it’s somehow inadequate or a crude oversimplification. This matters because that crude oversimplification, like most blunt instruments, is both popular and hard to avoid picking up in a fight. The real answer is more no than yes, and getting it straight makes a big difference in how we engage it. Join host James Lindsay in this episode of New Discourses Bullets where it tries to make it more clear.
**Critical Pedagogy | The Great Gaslight, Ep. 2 | James Lindsay & Michael O’Fallon**
The majority of the conservatives and truly liberal in our nation are focused on the ideological threat posed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education, faith, and in our corporate sector. While understanding and providing solid answers to the claims of CRT is a necessary endeavor, it is important to help understand how these cancerous ideologies have spread throughout our education system. Just as Critical Race Theory approaches the topic of race from the perspective of Critical Theory (neo-Marxism), there is a Critical Theory of Education as well. Because the formal term for a theory of education is “pedagogy,” the application of Critical Theory both to and within education is known as Critical Pedagogy.
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· 22h
Fabulous and fascinating information Krunoslav, thank you.
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· 22h
My pleasure. I hope more people learn about these things. We need it. Cheers!
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· 23h
I thoroughly enjoyed your essay Mr. Stifter, as it ends up proving my point in a long and exceptional verbose manner.
Love the James Lindsay lectures!
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· 22h
Thank you for having the patience, Cheers!
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· 14h
Do you realize there are 33 other answers to this question and most of them are leftist garbage?
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· 7h
Interesting. I didn’t count but I suppose the Marxification process was quite successful. It reminded me about something, let me share two quick videos that might help with this.
Former KGB Agent, Yuri Bezmenov, Warns America About Socialist Subversion
Academic Agent AKA Neema Parvini - Demoralization: What Yuri Bezmenov Didn't Tell You
Roger Scruton: How Socialism got Repackaged into Human Rights
Sep 15, 2019
Sir Roger Scruton made these remarks while delivering an address to the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia’s premier free market think tank. To learn more about the work of the IPA, visit www.ipa.org.au. Sir Roger Vernon Scruton is an English philosopher and writer who specialises in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views. In recent years he taught courses in Buckingham University, Oxford University and University of St. Andrews. In this clip, he talks about human rights and socialism. Complete videos edited with permission
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· 5h
“Former KGB Agent, Yuri Bezmenov, Warns America About Socialist Subversion”
I had seen this video of Griffin interviewing Besmenov years ago. What I have never seen are the second two videos you have offered here.
Now I am well versed in the Neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and have published an outline of the history of this here on Quora:
The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory: Neo-Marxism
The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory: Neo-Marxism
I will note that the Wikipedia entry on the Frankfurt School is a load of bovine excrement. A total misrepresentation of it, calling it a “conspiracy theory”
Thank you for your continuing engagement on these matters.
Krunoslav Stifter
Definitely. Wikipedia has been for the lack of better word “colonized” in order to decolonize it from the opposition.
Definitely. Very nice overview, in your post, of the Frankfurt School. Thank you for participation as well.
Allow me to share few more resources related to this whole situation that you might find useful in your research as I did in mine and might be able to incorporate it somewhere in your postings.
First recommendation I have is an excellent book about the history of practice and theory of political correctness.
"Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, 1st Edition by Geoffrey Hughes (2011)"
Intro to the book goes as follows, and the book itself uses abundant examples of linguistic engineering by various movements, especially in the dictionary. Colonization of the dictionaries to decolonize it from patriarchy as it were.
For example:
Roger Scruton made a key observation, which is that feminist understood, they cannot win in direct competition with men, so in a sneaky way they saw opportunity in hijacking the language of the society and turning it into a political weapon.
"As far back as 1949 the seminal feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir made this programmatic recommendation: “Language is inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices . . . Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don’t have to break it or try a priori to make it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good” (1972, p. 123)."
And indeed they tried to do this with sex and gender. "During the 1970s American feminists seized on the idea of gender as a social construct, and used it to hide the truth about sex as a biological destiny. By replacing the word “sex” with the word “gender” they imagined that they could achieve at a stroke what their ideology required of them – to rescue sex from biology and to recast it as a complex social choice." (December 2002/January 2003, p. 1)
This led to the creation of a monster. Trans movement which now is the enemy of the very same feminists that created it. Consequences and the danger of letting politically ambitious people play with language. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
"The history of political correctness is more complex, first emerging in Communist terminology as a policy concept denoting the orthodox party line of Chinese Communism as enunciated by Mao Tse-Tung in the 1930s. This we may call the hard political or literal sense. It was then borrowed by the American New Left in the 1960s, but with a more rhetorical than strictly programmatic sense, before becoming adopted and current in Britain. It is essentially a modern coinage by a minority, deriving from politically correct, dating from about 1970.
“Fascism” has followed the same semantic pattern, being transformed from its strict Italian political origins to its broader sense of dictatorship and conformity. Roger Scruton has a notable essay on the topic in Untimely Tracts (1987). Today both “Puritan” and “Fascist” are, of course, highly critical terms. Paul Johnson defined political correctness as “liberal fascism” (cited in Kramer and Kimball, 1995, p. xii).
As political correctness has become more fashionable, so it has become less clearly defined, as is typical with such phrases when their currency broadens. It now covers a whole range of individual, social, cultural, and political issues, and topics as diverse as fatness, appearance, stupidity, diet, crime, prostitution, race, homosexuality, disability, animal rights, the environment, and still others. It has taken on the characteristics of a buzzword, becoming a fashionable phrase without a clear meaning, but one which nevertheless invokes certain clear responses, hostile or positive, depending on context. It is a semantic sign of orthodoxy with not one, but several party lines.
Obviously, not all of these listed issues are of equal social importance, especially in terms of values and morality. Yet often they are accorded similar weight and seriousness. Indeed “diversity,” one of the new key terms in the vocabulary, is stretched to accommodate this range of social problems and agendas.
From its first manifestations in America, political correctness has had a double agenda, being a combination of freedom and constraint. The “political” aspect involved opening up new cultural horizons, but “correctness” brought conformity in accepting new agendas, new limits on freedom of expression, and a general avoidance of certain controversial topics.
One feature of political correctness has been the replacement of cultural élitism by relativism. This is not entirely a bad thing. The days are certainly over when writers could describe themselves, as T. S. Eliot famously did, as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Yet Eliot’s damning comment on “the indomitable spirit of mediocrity” (from his 1949 play The Cocktail Party, Act I, scene ii) surely applies to much modern culture.
As early as 1936, incidentally, George Orwell first referred scathingly to a ‘Mickey Mouse universe’. Today we experience the “Disneyfication” of everything. Moreover, Roger Scruton has recently identified what he calls “absolutist relativism,” pointing out the “deeply paradoxical nature of the new relativism. While holding that all cultures are equal and judgment between them absurd, the new culture . . . is in the business of persuading us that Western culture, and the traditional curriculum are racist, ethnocentric, patriarchal, and therefore beyond the pale of political acceptability” (Scruton, 2007, p. 84)."
Let us briefly consider a fairly recent focused linguistic intervention, the attempt by feminists to alter or enlarge the stock of personal pronouns and to feminize agent nouns like chairman in order to diminish the dominance of the male gender, traditionally upheld in the grammatical dictum that “the male subsumes the female.” Proposals for forms such as s/he were successful in raising consciousness, but produced few long-term survivals.
Forms like wimmin and herstory became objects of satire, while the extensive replacement of man by person aroused some strong reactions: “I resent this ideological intrusion and its insolent dealings with our mother (perhaps I should say ‘parent’) tongue,” wrote Roger Scruton (1990, p. 118). Scruton’s mocking parody “parent tongue” is a response we shall see replicated many times in reactions to politically correct language. Nevertheless, some new forms like chairperson and spokesperson have managed to establish themselves.
Another comparison can be made with radical political discourse. Communism attempted to establish a whole new ideological discourse by means of neologisms like proletariate, semantic extensions like bourgeois, and by co-opting words like imperialist and surplus. Hard-line Communists still call each other “comrade” and refer to “the workers,” “the collective,” “capital,” and the “party line,” terms which are regarded by outsiders (who now form the majority) with irony and humor. For the days and locales when Communists could impose semantic norms on populations have long disappeared. They do however survive and evolve today in contemporary identity politics.
There are three characteristics which make political correctness a unique sociolinguistic phenomenon. Unlike previous forms of orthodoxy, both religious and political, it is not imposed by some recognized authority like the Papacy, the Politburo, or the Crown, but is a form of semantic engineering and censorship not derivable from one recognized or definable source, but a variety. There is no specific ideology, although it focuses on certain inequalities and disadvantaged people in society and on correcting prejudicial attitudes, more especially on the demeaning words which express them.
Politically correct language is the product and formulation of a militant minority which remains mysteriously unlocatable. It is not the spontaneous creation of the speech community, least of all any particular deprived sector of it. Disadvantaged groups, such as the deaf, the blind, or the crippled (to use the traditional vocabulary), do not speak for themselves, but are championed by other influential public voices.
In these respects political correctness has a very different dynamic from the earlier high-profile advocates of, say, feminism or black consciousness in the USA. The feminists of the second wave, such as Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Sontag, were highly articulate, individual, and outspoken controversialists who did not always agree with each other, characteristics shared by Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X. By contrast, the anonymous agenda-manipulators of political correctness are more difficult to identify. These features make the conformity to political correctness the more mysterious.
Paradoxically, political correctness manifested itself rapidly and most strongly, not in political parties, but on university campuses; not in the closed societies of Eastern Europe, but in free Western societies, especially in America, the only country in the world where freedom of speech is a constitutional right. Much play was accordingly made about the rights enshrined in the First Amendment, their “ownership” and their proper application.
In addition to these contemporary issues, it is important to recognize both a historical and a moral dimension, that is, to be aware that political correctness is not an exclusively modern manifestation. Accordingly, it is enlightening to consider some earlier forms of changing orthodoxies and their semantic correlatives, as well as the moral imperatives which these changing orthodoxies have generated. In many ways there has been a continuing dialectic between political orthodoxy and dissent since the sixteenth century, virtually since the invention of printing. Reflection shows that political correctness of one sort or another has been a feature of English society for centuries, certainly since the English Reformation, the first major political change which was not an invasion.
"Paradoxically, political correctness manifested itself rapidly and most strongly, not in political parties, but on university campuses; not in the closed societies of Eastern Europe, but in free Western societies, especially in America, the only country in the world where freedom of speech is a constitutional right.
Politically correct language is the product and formulation of a militant minority which remains mysteriously unlocatable. It is not the spontaneous creation of the speech community, least of all any particular deprived sector of it. Disadvantaged groups, such as the deaf, the blind, or the crippled (to use the traditional vocabulary), do not speak for themselves, but are championed by other influential public voices.
Political correctness is based on various idealistic assumptions on how society should be run, and how people should behave towards each other.
However, a society is necessarily made up of individuals and groups, with different histories, manners, cultures, needs, and expectations. Furthermore, the two societies with which we are mainly concerned, the United States and Britain, are essentially multicultural, as opposed to say, Japan. America was multicultural from the beginning, although the political history has generally emphasized the interests of the white race. The British Isles previously contained the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy and the kingdoms of the Picts, the Scots, and the Irish, subsequently evolving into four independent nations: although the political concept of “Great Britain,” dating from 1704, gave a nominal sense of national unity, there were numerous minorities. The arrival of Commonwealth immigrants from the late 1950s was the beginning of a radical social change. In many ways the impulse behind political correctness in its essential sense of respect derives from an awareness of multiculturalism.
The primary idealistic assumption is that of equality. This is stronger in the American ideology, underpinned by the proposition that “All men are created equal” (in the Declaration of Independence, 1776) than in the British political scheme, which has no written constitution; accommodates monarchy, ranks of nobility, and a class system, admits deference, accepting the more realistic and practical notion that all are equal before the law. A major problem, as always, is how to achieve “equality,” that is, to redress historical inequalities, at a particular moment in time.
As political correctness has become more fashionable, so it has become less clearly defined, as is typical with such phrases when their currency broadens. It now covers a whole range of individual, social, cultural, and political issues, and topics as diverse as fatness, appearance, stupidity, diet, crime, prostitution, race, homosexuality, disability, animal rights, the environment, and still others. It has taken on the characteristics of a buzzword, becoming a fashionable phrase without a clear meaning, but one which nevertheless invokes certain clear responses, hostile or positive, depending on context. It is a semantic sign of orthodoxy with not one, but several party lines.
Obviously, not all of these listed issues are of equal social importance, especially in terms of values and morality. Yet often they are accorded similar weight and seriousness. Indeed “diversity,” one of the new key terms in the vocabulary, is stretched to accommodate this range of social problems and agendas.
From its first manifestations in America, political correctness has had a double agenda, being a combination of freedom and constraint. The “political” aspect involved opening up new cultural horizons, but “correctness” brought conformity in accepting new agendas, new limits on freedom of expression, and a general avoidance of certain controversial topics.
The same opposing qualities are encapsulated in the formulations “progressive orthodoxy” and “positive discrimination.” In his survey of 1992, Paul Berman gave a dismal picture of “an atmosphere of campus repression”
On a broader front, Kenneth Minogue argued that “European civilization has been attacked and conquered from within, without anyone quite realizing what has happened. We may laugh at political correctness – some people even deny that it exists – but it is a manacle round our hands” (Minogue, 2001).
More condemning is the view of P. D. James: “I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism” (Paris Review, 1995).
— Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, 1st Edition by Geoffrey Hughes (2011)
William Whitten
Krunoslav,
You write such informative and fascinating comments that I wish the entire Quora forum could read them … even though the leftists would fail to grasp the wisdom put forth.
DEID (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Delusion.)
Krunoslav Stifter
Thank you. You know what they say. A good book requires a good reader. Hehe.
DEID (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Delusion.)
I like that. Yes. So true. Cheers my friend!
William Whitten
I just received a new answer to my question from a dedicated atheist:
Do you agree that Marxism is atheism masquerading as political philosophy?
Lifelong Atheist, thank God.
“Marxism is an economic, not a political philosophy … and what the hell would either have to do with whether or not one believes in supernatural beings?”
My answer:
William Whitten - 9:20 AM 12/26/2023
“Marxism is an economic, not a political philosophy”~Thompson
Denying the political aspect of Marxism is delusional.
The economy must be imposed politically, by government in order to be established, as history shows in both Maoist Communist China and in Leninist/Stalinist Russia as the former Soviet Union. Both of these attempts at a Communist Utopia failed dramatically becoming utter murderous dystopias.
“what the hell would either have to do with whether or not one believes in supernatural beings?”~ibid
It has to do with the establishment of the United States of America with the Declaration of Independence based on the Judeo-Christian ethic of individual freedom of Liberty as a God given inalienable right.
Krunoslav Stifter
Yes. I would add that, philosophy correctly defined is love of wisdom. And wisdom is what is left when we get rid of personal opinions. Marxism is almost entirely made up of personal opinions. This means that its not philosophy its ideology, and Karl Marx often incorrectly cited by lefties as philosopher, was in fact an ideologue.
Ideologies are essentially a modern form of religion, where instead of deity it centered around an idea or system of ideas. Hence the term -ism, which means doctrine. Commun-ism (community + political doctrine), Marx-ism ( political doctrine inspired by Marx, Karl) etc.
Atheism means simply absence of beliefs in deity, but atheism need not be anti theism.
The danger of the intellect, as far as I can tell, is that it tends towards pride and arrogance. And it also tends to fall in love with its own productions… That’s the totalitarian mentality: “We have a total system and we know how everything works, and we’re going to implement it and that will bring about heaven on earth.” ― Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series 7 - Walking with God, Noah and the Flood
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx: History as religion/ideology
"This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand year reign of freedom. And such is the power of the Idea that he who has recognised it cannot cease to speak of its splendor or to proclaim its all conquering might. . . . He who has once beheld it, to whom in the nightly stillness of his little room it has once appeared in all its brightness, can never abandon it, he must follow where it leads, even to death. . . . And this belief in the all conquering might of the Idea, in the victory of eternal truth, this firm confidence that it can never waver or yield, even if the whole world were to rise against it, that is the true religion . . . the basis of the true positive philosophy, the philosophy of world history."
—Friedrich Engels
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Leninism: Revolution as Religion/ideology
[In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] socialism . . . announced its intention of becoming the religion for the new humanity, and its intrinsic link to religion cannot be doubted. . . . It is a complete dogma, a solution to the question of the meaning of life, the purpose of history. It is the preaching of socialist morality [as well as a] religion of self-deification. . . . The heart of Marxist socialism . . . is neither science nor philosophy but religion.
—Nikolai Berdiaev
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“Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,”
began Kolya in his joke-telling voice.
“Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan.
‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’
‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’
‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’
‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves
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Fascism: The State as Religion
"Religion is not properly something to be added to morality; it is immanent in it and without it there could be no morality. Nor could there be any State."
—Giovanni Gentile
"At the very roots of contemporary history . . . is the universal value and significance of Fascism. . . . [It] brings with it the exaltation, and what is essentially a religion, of the State. . . . The party State of Fascism is an ecclesiastical State, to distinguish it from the indifference of the atheistic and agnostic State."
—Sergio Panunzio
"We want to form a nation; how can we succeed in this, unless we believe in a common purpose, in a common duty . . . a common faith? Your Country should be your Temple. God at the summit, a People of equals at the base. . . . Through you Italy will have, with one only God in the heavens, one only truth, one only faith, one only rule of political life upon earth . . . Authoritative Truth alone can give us salvation. . . . These thoughts contain the germ of the Religion of the Future. . . . [For our] Party is not a political party; it is an essentially religious party. It has its faith, its doctrine, its martyrs . . . and it must have doctrine inviolable, authority infallible, the martyr’s spirit, and call to self-sacrifice."
—Giuseppe Mazzini
"Mazzini’s politics were moral—more than that, religious. . . . One must comprehend his religion, the source of his moral teaching, which rendered effective his political action, providing the leavening of the Risorgimento. . . . Mazzini did not intend to found a new institutional religion, but to make appeal to that religion which is at the heart of us all . . . that inspires us to sacrifice in the service of our life’s mission."
—Giovanni Gentile
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National Socialism: Race as Religion
"The concept of religion is everywhere the same, and because religion performs a necessary function in our consciousness, it will never perish. . . . There is no question that, today, a new religion will emerge out of those elements provided by natural science."
—Ludwig Woltmann1
"A German volkish church is today the desire of millions. . . . The so called Old Testament must be rejected once and for all—to finally renounce the failed efforts of the last fifteen hundred years to render us all spiritually Jews. . . . The longing to provide the soul of the Nordic race expression in the form of a German church is the foremost task of our century."
—Alfred Rosenberg
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"The sacralization of politics became an essential aspect of all the communist regimes that arose during the Cold War and copied the Soviet model . . . . All communist regimes established a compulsory system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that exalted the primacy of the party as the sole and unchallenged depository of power. They all dogmatized their ideology as an absolute and unquestionable truth. They all glorified the socialist homeland and imposed a code of commandments that affected every aspect of existence. They all safeguarded their monopoly of power and truth through a police state and hard line ideological orthodoxy backed by constant surveillance and persecution, which enormously increased the number of human lives sacrificed."
—Emilio Gentile
Although there were important differences between . . . totalitarian regimes, they drew from a common well of enthusiasm, and shared such heretical goals (or rather temptations) as fashioning “new men” or establishing heaven on earth. They metabolised the religious instinct.
—Michael Burleigh
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Also worth nothing is that socialism predates Karl Marx and Marxism, and Marx mocked socialist of the past by calling them “utopian socialists” and he wanted to give his view a sense of legitimacy so he and Engels in particular called it “scientific socialism”, and there is whole essay written by Engels on this term. The idea was to appeal to a sense of objective and impartial ideology ,that does not discriminate but works according to the laws of science.
“Lenin's analysis in The Development of Capitalism in Russia is a kind of profession de foi in a new and powerful idiom. To appeal to the intelligentsia, modern doctrines must combine faith and realism, or science, and Lenin's faith in the correctness of his "science" sustained him through lean years. The notion of faith raises the vexing issue of resemblances between Marxism and earlier Judeo-Christian traditions.
A rough human sense that there will be justice, that wrongs will be righted, that sufferings and humiliations will be revenged, that the rich will not enter either a heavenly kingdom or earthly socialist paradise, underlies a great many religious and secular doctrines, expressed in a variety of "sacred" and "scientific" idioms. Another common denominator of such doctrines is their identification of victims who are chosen to be saved and oppressors who are doomed, whether by God's love and justice or history's dialectic. Needless to say, this kind of hopeful and militant vision, when sustained over a long period of time, yields a history of struggle, frustration, adaptation, sectarianism, and defection. Like their religious predecessors, the new secular movements spread out over a spectrum of positions reflecting defeated expectations, changed historical conditions, and the psychologies of individuals creating the movements' doctrines and strategies.
Lenin's difficulty with Marxian revisionism and those who accorded an important role to liberals is symptomatic of a doctrinal and psychological problem peculiar to Marxism and absent in the old narodnik creed. Marx had revealed the systematic necessity of class exploitation. Capitalism was by its very nature savagely unjust. Since most revolutionaries were not simply thinking machines looking for the most rational foundation for production and distribution but possessed of "religious" attitudes, or, in any case, of a sense of mission, they found in Marx and Engels the description of a morally intolerable system in which the wealth of the few could only be gotten at the expense of the poverty of the many.
On the other hand, Marx posited the necessary contribution of each historical phase to economic and social progress. The bourgeoisie and their liberal institutions could not disappear from history until they had developed the forces of production as far as they could, when the onset of the inevitable and fatal crisis of capitalism would occur.
The bourgeoisie and their liberal institutions could not disappear from history until they had developed the forces of production as far as they could, when the onset of the inevitable and fatal crisis of capitalism would occur. Capitalism was a necessary evil on the way to socialism. But Marx had no blueprint for its many historical variations, only his laws of capitalism and their consequences. Neither he nor Engels had a revolutionary timetable either, and it was possible for their followers to lapse into a purely "scientific" and morally slothful type of Marxism, an academic Marxism without a sense of urgency about revolutionary tasks to be performed.
On the other hand, the most morally mobilized would find ways to hasten capitalism's final hour, even while separating themselves from the narodniki, whose revolutionism was "unscientific." Thus, during a period of mainly doctrinal debates and sectarianism, revolutionaries who were temperamentally quite close to each other engaged in combat; but when the real revolutionary moment arrived, they often found themselves working together.
One of the major weaknesses in Marxism as a doctrine resided in its failure to examine closely the moral characteristics of an immiserated proletariat. The notion that the miserable and oppressed will proceed to create a better world is, of course, inherently problematic.
The nationalities question fit ill with Marxism. It was perhaps even more puzzling than the peasant problem. One could at least delude oneself into believing that the peasant problem was soluble in Marxian terms by extrapolating from economic data, constructing Procrustean sociologies, and predicting the inevitable splitting of the peasants along class lines. But how did one fit nationality into the Marxist scheme?
Of course, according to Marxian theory national boundaries created superficial divisions compared to economic forces and the relations of production, but nationalist passion seemed to inflame people and mobilize them even more than their class interests. World War I would show how ready people were to make sacrifices for the sake of the national or imperial dignity or, in the case of the Slavs of the Russian Empire, for related ethnic groups and coreligionists. Even the discredited Romanov dynasty would be able to rally its people around the war effort—at least at the outset. This was a complication—indeed, as history has showed, a fatal one—for a Marxian socialist with a genuinely internationalist orientation.
In a complex situation, when confronted with new considerations, Koba prefers to bide his time, to keep his peace, or to retreat. In all those instances when it is necessary for him to choose between the idea and the political machine, he invariably inclines toward the machine. The program must first of all create its bureaucracy before Koba can have any respect for it. Lack of confidence in the masses, as well as in individuals, is the basis of his nature. His empiricism always compels him to choose the path of least resistance.
That is why, as a rule, at all the great turning points of history this near-sighted revolutionist assumes an opportunist position, which brings him exceedingly close to the Mensheviks and on occasion places him in the right of them. At the same time he invariably is inclined to favor the most resolute actions in solving the problems he has mastered. Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points. Here an analogy begs to be drawn. The Russian terrorists were in essence petty bourgeois democrats, yet they were extremely resolute and audacious. Marxists were wont to refer to them as "liberals with a bomb." Stalin has always been what he remains to this day—a politician of the golden mean who does not hesitate to resort to the most extreme measures. Strategically he is an opportunist; tactically he is a "revolutionist." He is a kind of opportunist with a bomb.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power
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Another thing often missed is the Russian Nihilist movement in Russia.
The term ’Nihilist’, although it was first used in Russian as early as 1829, only acquired its present significance in Turgenev’s novel Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons) (1862), where it is applied to the central character, Bazarov. Thereafter Nihilism quickly became the subject of polemical debate in the journal press and in works of literature. The Nihilists were the generation of young, radical, non-gentry intellectuals who espoused a thoroughgoing materialism, positivism and scientism. The major theorists of Russian Nihilism were Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Dmitrii Pisarev, although their authority and influence extended well beyond the realm of theory. Nihilism was a broad social and cultural movement as well as a doctrine.
Russian Nihilism negated not the normative significance of the world or the general meaning of human existence, but rather a particular social, political and aesthetic order. Despite their name, the Russian Nihilists did hold beliefs – most notably in themselves and in the power of their doctrine to effect social change. It is, however, the vagueness of their positive programmes that distinguishes the Nihilists from the revolutionary socialists who followed them. Russian Nihilism is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–66 out of which later radical movements emerged; it held the potential for both Jacobinism and anarchism.
Lenin was sympathetic to it, but when he was in exile from Imperialist Russia and found himself in “neutral” Switzerland he was part of socialist party where there was a split between those that wanted communism back in Russia via social democracy / revisionism and those that wanted it via violent revolution, so Lenin adopted Marxism to what Nihilist missed, and it was the moral justification via appeal to scientist and appeal to violet revolution.
The split happen in socialist part and Lenin called his faction Bolsheviks. He also revised and adopted Marxism to what was needed in Russia, and that became a flavor of Marxism known as Marxist-Lenininsm. official ideology of Soviet union.
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“Hence a communist society would have a new ethical basis. It has been claimed – by Lenin among others – that Marxism is a scientific system, free from any ethical judgements or postulates. These are the essential points of ‘the first Marxism’. It is manifestly not a scientific enterprise in the sense in which we understand science today. Its theories are not derived from detailed factual studies, or subjected to controlled tests or observations.” ― Anonymous
"That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise.” ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
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Krunoslav Stifter
“The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientific method was also ideologically—and even messianically—driven. It ignored scientific data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as “scientific planning.” ― Paul Edward Gottfried
That is why today we hear “science is settled”, Trust the science and experts the new priestly class of regime approved gatekeepers.
Scientism is a belief system that holds that the methods and approaches of natural science should be applied to all areas of human inquiry, including social sciences, philosophy, and ethics. It is the view that the natural sciences are the only reliable source of knowledge and that other forms of knowledge, such as religious or spiritual beliefs, are either irrelevant or invalid.
Scientism often emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence, quantitative data, and experimental methods in the pursuit of knowledge. It assumes that all phenomena can be explained through scientific inquiry and that scientific knowledge is the only way to understand reality.
Critics of scientism argue that it is reductionist and ignores the complexities of human experience, such as subjective feelings, values, and beliefs. They also argue that scientism can lead to a narrow and limited understanding of the world, and that it can dismiss important aspects of human experience, such as morality, spirituality, and meaning.
While the scientific method is an important tool for understanding the natural world, scientism can be seen as a flawed approach to knowledge that ignores the richness and complexity of human experience.
Scientism takes Positivism to an extreme by claiming that science alone can produce truth about the world and reality. As such, it is more radical and exclusionary than Positivism. Scientism rejects all philosophical, religious and metaphysical claims to understand reality, since the truth it portends cannot be validated by the Scientific Method. Thus, science is the absolute and only access to truth and reality. Scientism is often seen overstepping the bounds of provable science by applying the Scientific Method to areas that cannot be demonstrated, such as climate change and social science.
With respect to the philosophy of science, the term scientism frequently implies a critique of the more extreme expressions of logical positivism and has been used by social scientists such as Friedrich Hayek, philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, and philosophers such as Mary Midgley, the later Hilary Putnam, and Tzvetan Todorov to describe (for example) the dogmatic endorsement of scientific methods and the reduction of all knowledge to only that which is measured or confirmatory.
More generally, scientism is often interpreted as science applied "in excess". This use of the term scientism has two senses:
1. The improper use of science or scientific claims. This usage applies equally in contexts where science might not apply, such as when the topic is perceived as beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, and in contexts where there is insufficient empirical evidence to justify a scientific conclusion. It includes an excessive deference to the claims of scientists or an uncritical eagerness to accept any result described as scientific. This can be a counterargument to appeals to scientific authority. It can also address attempts to apply natural science methods and claims of certainty to the social sciences, which Friedrich Hayek described in The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952) as being impossible, because those methods attempt to eliminate the "human factor", while social sciences (including his own topic of economics) mainly concern the study of human action.
2. "The belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any philosophical or other inquiry", or that "science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective" with a concomitant "elimination of the psychological [and spiritual] dimensions of experience". Tom Sorell provides this definition: "Scientism is a matter of putting too high a value on natural science in comparison with other branches of learning or culture." Philosophers such as Alexander Rosenberg have also adopted "scientism" as a name for the opinion that science is the only reliable source of knowledge.
It is also sometimes used to describe the universal applicability of the scientific method, and the opinion that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or the most valuable part of human learning, sometimes to the complete exclusion of other opinions, such as historical, philosophical, economic or cultural opinions. It has been defined as "the view that the characteristic inductive methods of the natural sciences are the only source of genuine factual knowledge and, in particular, that they alone can yield true knowledge about man and society". The term scientism is also used by historians, philosophers, and cultural critics to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism with respect to all topics of human knowledge.
For social theorists practising the tradition of Max Weber, such as Jürgen Habermas and Max Horkheimer, the concept of scientism relates significantly to the philosophy of positivism, but also to the cultural rationalization for modern Western civilization.
Scientism is the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.
Which is false.
Technocracy is to the transformation of society as Transhumanism that we see today, is to the transformation of the human condition of people who would live in that society.
Both are underpinned by a religious belief known as Scientism that says that science is a god and that scientists, engineers and technologists are the priesthood that translates findings into practice.
It is a fatal error to equate Scientism with science. True science explores the natural world using the time-tested scientific method of repeated experimentation and validation. By comparison, Scientism is a speculative, metaphysical worldview about the nature and reality of the universe and man’s relation to it.
Scientism refutes traditional religious views, morals and philosophy and instead looks to science as the source for personal and societal moral value.
The relationship between Technocracy and Transhumanism can be seen as early as 1933 when Harold Loeb wrote Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like:
“Technocracy envisages another form of domestication, a form in which man may become more than man… Technocracy is designed to develop the so-called higher faculties in every man and not to make each man resigned to the lot into which he may be born… Through breeding with specific individuals for specific purposes… A technocracy, then, should in time produce a race of men superior in quality to any now known on earth…”
Thus, Loeb saw Technocracy (the society) as producing a superior quality of man by applying advanced technology to the human condition.
The Nature Of Technocracy
Formalized in 1932 by scientists and engineers at Columbia University, the movement defined itself in a 1938 edition of its magazine, The Technocrat:
“Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population… For the first time in human history it will be done as a scientific, technical, engineering problem.”
Indeed, Technocracy was an economic system based on science and social engineering. Technocrats were so certain that their scientific approach was so righteous that there would be no need for any political structures whatsoever:
“There will be no place for Politics, Politicians, Finance or Financiers, Rackets or Racketeers… Technocracy will distribute by means of a certificate of distribution available to every citizen from birth to death.”
Today, Technocracy is embodied in the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset and the various United Nations’ manifestations of Sustainable Development: Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda, New Urban Agenda, etc.
The Nature Of Transhumanism
A philosophical mainstay of modern Transhumanism, Max More, defined it in 1990 as:
“…a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.”
The means to the end is ultimately genetic engineering that takes over and speeds up evolution theory to create humanity 2.0.
Since the advent of CRISPR gene-editing technology, Transhumans have saturated universities and private corporations to modify all categories of living things, including humans.
What is preached as the preservation of biodiversity by the United Nations is really the takeover of genetic material, which was noted as early as 1994, just two years after the debut of Sustainable Development and Agenda 21 at the UN Conference on Economic Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.
The 1994 book, The Earth Brokers, was written by two principal participants in the Rio process who did not blindly swallow what had just happened. They noted two things about the biodiversity convention that 156 nations of the world adopted:
“The convention implicitly equates the diversity of life – animals and plants – to the diversity of genetic codes, for which read genetic resources. By doing so, diversity becomes something modern science can manipulate… the convention promotes biotechnology as being ‘essential for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.’”
Secondly, they noted that “the main stake raised by the biodiversity convention is the issue of ownership and control over biological diversity… the major concern was protection of the pharmaceutical and emerging biological industries.”
It is little wonder today that the pharmaceutical industry is producing gene therapy shots using genetically modified RNA to transform the body’s immune system. They have been working hard since 1992 to advance the technology needed to hijack the human genome and begin the transformative pathway to Humanity 2.0.
However, it is Technocracy that has used its “science of social engineering” techniques to manipulate twenty-two percent of the world’s population into willingly accepting the transhumans’ gene altering injections.
Like all lefty ideologies, its about chasing utopia on earth by defining humans as something they are not and than using power of state to force people into this new ideological form. What could possibly go wrong?
“Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness. …egalitarianism and despotism do not exclude each other, but usually go hand in hand.
To a certain degree, equality invites despotism, because in order to make all members of a society equal, and then to maintain this equality for a long period of time, it is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality in every sector of the society and any aspect of human life: to paraphrase a well-known sentence by one of Dostoyevsky’s characters, ‘We start with absolute equality and we end up with absolute despotism.’ Some call it a paradox of equality: the more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have; the more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality; the more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian.
Liberal democracy is a powerful unifying mechanism, blurring differences between people and imposing uniformity of views, behavior, and language. But it does not require much effort to see that the dialogue in liberal democracy is of a peculiar kind because its aim is to maintain the domination of the mainstream and not to undermine it. A deliberation is believed to make sense only if the mainstream orthodoxy is sure to win politically. Today's 'dialogue' politics are a pure form of the right-is-might politics, cleverly concealed by the ostentatiously vacuous rhetoric of all-inclusiveness.
The illusion they cherish of being a brave minority heroically facing the whole world, false as it is, gives them nevertheless a strange sense of comfort: they feel absolutely safe, being equipped with the most powerful political tools in today's world but at the same time priding themselves on their courage and decency, which are more formidable the more awesome the image of the enemy becomes.
The ideological man is thus both absolutely suspicious and absolutely enthusiastic. There seems to be no idea under the sun that he would not put into question and make an object of derision, skepticism, or contempt, no idea that he would not reduce to an offshoot of hidden instincts, mundane interests, biological drives, and psychological complexes. Hence he is likely to despise reason as an autonomous faculty, to downgrade lofty ideals, and to debunk the past, seeing everywhere the same ideological mystification.
But at the same time, he lives in a constant state of mobilization for a better world. His mouth is full of noble slogans about brotherhood, freedom, and justice, and with every word he makes it clear that he knows which side is right and that he is ready to sacrifice his entire existence for the sake of its victory. The peculiar combination of both attitudes--merciless distrust and unwavering affirmation--gives him an incomparable sense of moral self-confidence and intellectual self-righteousness.”
― Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
“I would rather try to organize politics and political discourse in a way that encouraged engagement on moral and religious questions. …If we attempt to banish moral and religious discourse from politics and debates about law and rights, the danger is we’ll have a kind a vacant public square or a naked public square.
And the yearning for larger meanings in politics will find undesirable expression. Fundamentalists will rush in where liberals fear to tread. They will try to clothe the naked public square with the narrowest and most intolerant moralism.”
*Michael Joseph Sandel is an American political philosopher.
· 5h
Second resource I would like to share, I don't know if you can still find it but its an excellent overview of how American got infected.
(Political Correctness) Continued..... INTRODUCTION: THE DEBATE AND ITS ORIGINS
Second resource I would like to share, I don't know if you can still find it but its an excellent overview of how American got infected.
(Political Correctness) Continued..... INTRODUCTION: THE DEBATE AND ITS ORIGINS
― Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses (1995) by Paul Berman (Editor)
If you can still find it, its an excellent easy to follow read that covers lot of things you would be interested in.
In that book there is a mention of an article I will also link here:
Taking Offense - Thought Police
Is this the new enlightenment on campus or the new McCarthyism?
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term refers to U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting from the late 1940s through the 1950s. It was characterized by heightened political repression and a campaign spreading fear of communist influence on American institutions and of espionage by Soviet agents.
During the McCarthy era, hundreds of Americans were accused of being "communists" or "communist sympathizers"; they became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private industry panels, committees, and agencies. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, academicians, and labor-union activists. Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive or questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person's real or supposed leftist associations or beliefs were sometimes exaggerated. Many people suffered loss of employment or destruction of their careers; some were imprisoned. Most of these punishments came about through trial verdicts that were later overturned, laws that were later declared unconstitutional, dismissals for reasons later declared illegal or actionable, or extra-legal procedures, such as informal blacklists, that would come into general disrepute.
The most notable examples of McCarthyism include the so-called investigations conducted by Senator McCarthy, and the hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
The House Committee on Un-American Activities – commonly referred to as the HUAC – was the most prominent and active government committee involved in anti-communist investigations. Formed in 1938 and known as the Dies Committee, named for Rep. Martin Dies, who chaired it until 1944, HUAC investigated a variety of "activities", including those of German-American Nazis during World War II. The committee soon focused on Communism, beginning with an investigation into Communists in the Federal Theatre Project in 1938. A significant step for HUAC was its investigation of the charges of espionage brought against Alger Hiss in 1948. This investigation ultimately resulted in Hiss's trial and conviction for perjury, and convinced many of the usefulness of congressional committees for uncovering Communist subversion.
HUAC achieved its greatest fame and notoriety with its investigation into the Hollywood film industry. In October 1947, the Committee began to subpoena screenwriters, directors, and other movie-industry professionals to testify about their known or suspected membership in the Communist Party, association with its members, or support of its beliefs. At these testimonies, what became known as "the $64,000 question" was asked: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"
Historian Ellen Schrecker, herself criticised for pro-Stalinist leanings, has written, "in this country, McCarthyism did more damage to the constitution than the American Communist Party ever did.
Newsweek, December 24, 1990
By JERRY ADLER with MARK STARR in Boston, FARAI CHIDEYA in New York, LYNDA WRIGHT in San Francisco, PAT WINGERT in Washington and LINDA HAAC in Durham, N.C.
Perhaps Nina Wu, a sophomore at the University of Connecticut, actually didn't like gays. More likely, she though she was being funny when she allegedly put up a sign on the door to her dorm room listing "people who are shot on sight" -- among them, "preppies," "bimbos," "men without chest hair" and "homos." No protests were heard from representatives of the first three categories, but UConn's gay community was more forthright in asserting its prerogatives. Wu was brought up on charges of violating the student-behavior code, which had recently been rewritten to prohibit "posting or advertising publicly offensive, indecent or abusive matter concerning persons . . . and making personal slurs or epithets based on race, sex, ethnic origin, disability, religion or sexual orientation." Found guilty last year in a campus administration's hearing, Wu was . . . what would you guess? Reprimanded? Ordered to write a letter of apology? No, Wu was ordered to move off campus and forbidden to set foot in any university dormitories or cafeterias. Only under pressure of a federal lawsuit did the university let her move back onto campus this year -- and revise the Code of Student Conduct to make it conform to a higher code, the First Amendment.
There is an experiment of sorts taking place in American colleges. Or, more accurately, hundreds of experiments at different campuses, directed at changing the consciousness of this entire generation of university students. The goal is to eliminate prejudice, not just of the petty sort that shows up on sophomore dorm walls, but the grand prejudice that has ruled American universities since their founding: that the intellectual tradition of Western Europe occupies the central place in the history of civilization. In this context it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she would be expected to "affirm" their presence on campus and to study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke. This agenda is broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists and gays. It is also the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up in the '60s and are now achieving positions of academic influence. If they no longer talk of taking to the streets, it is because they now are gaining access to the conventional weapons of campus politics: social pressure, academic perks (including tenure) and -- when they have the administration on their side -- outright coercion.
There is no conspiracy at work here, just a creed, a set of beliefs and expressions which students from places as diverse as Sarah Lawrence Collage (private liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York) and San Francisco State recognize instantly as "PC" -- politically correct. Plunk down a professor from Princeton, in the University of Wisconsin at Madison, show him a student in a tie-dyed T shirt, with open-tied sandals and a grubby knapsack dangling a student-union-issue, environmentally sound, reusable red plastic cup, and he'll recognize the type instantly. It's "PC Person," an archtype that has now been certified in the official chronicles of American culture, the comic pages. Jeff Shesol, a student cartoonist at Brown, created him as an enforcer of radical cant, so sensitive to potential slights that he even knows the correct euphemism for 9-year-old "girls." He calls them "pre-women."
That is appalling, or would be if it were true. What happened to Nina Wu is in fact appalling, as the university itself seems to have admitted. But so was the incident that led UConn to prohibit "personal slurs" in the first place: a group of white students taunting and spitting at Asian-American students on their way to a dance. If women, gays and racial minorities are seeking special protections, it is because they have been the objects of special attacks. (According to sociologist Howard Ehrlich, each year one minority student in five experiences "ethnoviolent attack," including verbal assaults.) If African-Americans are challenging the primacy of Western civilization, it is because for centuries they were oppressed by it. The oppressed have no monopoly on truth. But surely they have earned the right to critique the society that enslaved them.
The content of PC is, in some respects, uncontroversial: who would defend racism? What is distressing is that at the university, of all places, tolerance has to be imposed rather than taught, and that "progress" so often is just the replacement of one repressive orthodoxy by another.
Shelf struggle: The march of PC across American campuses has hardly been unopposed. On the contrary, it has provoked the most extreme reaction, from heartfelt defenses of the First Amendment to the end-of-the-world angst of a Rabelais scholar whose subject has just been dropped from the freshman lit course in favor of Toni Morrison. Opponents of PC now have their own organization, the National Association of Scholars (based in Princeton, N.J.), "committed to rational discourse as the foundation of academic life." It is supported mostly by conservative foundations, but its 1,400 members include some prominent liberals such as Duke political scientist James David Barber, former chair of Amnesty International USA. Duke is a microcosm of the struggle over PC, which is being fought right down to the shelves in the campus bookstore, and not always entirely by rational disclosure. Barber talked into the political-science section one day last spring and turned on its spine every volume with "Marx" in its title -- about one out of seven by his count, a lot more attention than he thought it warrants -- and angrily demanded their removal. His attempt to organize an NAS chapter at Duke touched off a battle with the influential head of the English department, Stanley Fish, which was extreme even by academic standards of vitriol. Fish called NAS, and by implication its members, "racist, sexist and homophobic." "That," notes one of Barber's allies, "is like calling someone a communist in the McCarthy years."
Opponents of PC see themselves as a beleaguered minority among barbarians who would ban Shakespeare because he didn't write in Swahili. Outnumbered they may be on some campuses, but they are also often the most senior and influential people on their faculties. "We know who's in," says Martin Kilson, a black professor of government at Harvard -- "and it's not women or blacks. That's a damned lie!" And whenever the campus comes into conflict with the power structure of society, it's no contest. Last week a bureaucrat in the Department of Education jeopardized decades of progress in affirmative action by threatening the loss of federal funds to universities that award scholarships specifically for minority students (page 18).
But where the PC reigns, one defies it at one's peril. That was the experience of Prof. Vincent Sarich of the University of California, Berkeley, when he wrote in the alumni magazine that the university's affirmative-action program discriminated against white and Asian applicants. Seventy-five students marched into his anthropology class last month and drowned out his lecture with chants of "bullshit." His department began an investigation of his views and chancellor Chang-Lin Tien invited complaints from students about his lectures. Sarich was left in doubt whether he would be allowed to teach the introductory anthropology course he has taught off and on for 23 years.
Of course, Sarich was not entirely an innocent who blundered into the minefield of campus politics. He holds scientifically controversial views about the relationship of brain size to intelligence, which tend toward the politically unthinkable conclusion that some races could have a genetic edge in intellect. As an anthropologist, Sarich knows exactly what happened to him: he stumbled on a taboo. "There are subjects you don't even talk or think about," Sarich says; among them, "race, gender [and] homosexuality."
Rude comments: It is not just wildly unfashionable views like Sarich's that are taboo. Students censor even the most ordinary of opinions. Nicole Stelle, a Stanford junior, spent this past semester working and studying in Washington, and found it easier to be a liberal in Republican Sen. Robert Dole's office than a conservative in Stanford. "If I was at lunch [in the dorm] and we started talking about something like civil rights, I'd get up and leave . . . I knew they didn't want to hear what I had to say."
PC is, strictly speaking, a totalitarian philosophy. No aspect of university life is too obscure to come under its scrutiny. The University of Connecticut issued a proclamation banning "inappropriately directed laughter" and "conspicuous exclusion of students from conversations." Did someone propose an alcohol-free "All-American Halloween Party" at Madison this fall? The majority faction in the Student Senate rose up in protest: masked students might take advantage of their anonymity to inflict "poking, pinching, rude comments" and suchlike oppressions on women and minorities. When the New York University Law School moot court board assigned a case on the custody rights of a lesbian mother, students forced its withdrawal. "Writing arguments [against the mother's side] is hurtful to a group of people and thus hurtful to all of us," one student wrote. To which Prof. Anthony Amsterdam responded: "The declaration that any legal issue is not an open question in law school is a declaration of war upon everything that a law school is." (The problem was reinstated.) At San Francisco State University, 30 students disrupted the first week of Prof. Robert Smith's course in black politics this fall. They weren't even angry about anything Smith said -- they just were upset that the course had been listed in the catalog under Political Science rather than Black Studies, which they viewed as an attack on SF State's Black Studies department.
One of the most controversial PC initiatives took place at the University of Texas at Austin, where the English faculty recently chose a new reading list for the freshman composition course, which is required for about half the entering undergraduates. Up till now, instructors had been free to assign essays on a range of topics for students to read and discuss. The revised course originally called for all readings to come from an anthology called "Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study," by Paula S. Rothenberg. The selections, some of which are excellent, comprise a primer of PC thought. In the first chapter Rothenberg answers what many white men wonder but few dare ask: why are they the only ones ever accused of racism or sexism? The sine qua non of racism and sexism, Rothenberg explains, is subordination, which in Western society is exercised only by whites over blacks and men over women. Hence reverse racism and sexism by definition do not exist. Due to controversy, however, Rothenberg's book has since been replaced by a series of essays, poems and legal opinions dealing with racism and sexism. Prof. Alan Gribben was one of the minority who objected to this approach to teaching composition. He derided the course as "Oppression Studies." By dictating the content of the readings, he charged, the department "presumes that content is the most important thing about the writing course." But that is just the point: in the context of PC, political content is the most important thing about everything.
What are the underpinnings of this powerful movement, so seemingly at odds with what most Americans believe?
Philosophically, PC represents the subordination of the right to free speech to the guarantee of equal protection under the law. The absolutist position on the First Amendment is that it lets you slur anyone you choose. The PC position is that a hostile environment for minorities abridges their right to an equaled education. "Sure you have the right to speech," says Kate Fahey, an associate dean at Mt. Holyoke College. "But I want to know: what is it going to do to our community? Is it going to damage us?" When a few students last spring mocked Mt. Holyoke's Lesbian/Bisexual Awareness Week by proclaiming "Heterosexual Awareness Week," president Elizabeth Kennan upbraided them for violating the spirit of "community." Unfortunately for the "community," courts have generally held that highly restrictive speech codes are unconstitutional. The sociologist Ehrlich, who has written five books on racial prejudice, also considers them counterproductive. "You have to let students say the most outrageous and stupid things," he says. "To get people to think and talk, to question their own ideas, you don't regulate their speech."
Role models: But solicitude for minorities does not stop at shielding them from insults. Promotion of "diversity" is one of the central tents of PC. Accrediting bodies have even begun to make it a condition of accreditation. Diversity refers both to students and faculty. Of the 373 tenured professors at Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, only two are black. The latest thinking holds that black undergraduates would be less likely to drop out if there were more black teachers available to act as mentors and role models, so the competition for qualified black professors is acute.
The Ford Foundation gave grants totaling $ 1.6 million to 19 colleges and universities this year for "diversity." Tulane received a grant for a program "to focus the attention of . . . administration, faculty and students on the responsibility of each to welcome and encourage all members of the university community regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation or religious beliefs." (Emphasis added.) That is a big responsibility. To political-science professor Paul Lewis, one of the 25 percent of the faculty who dissented from the university's draft "Initiatives for Race and Gender Enrichment," it implies a network of PC spies reporting to the "enrichment-liaison person" in each department. Could a bad grade be construed as failure to encourage? If you don't talk to a woman you dislike, are you guilty of not making her welcome? Tulane president Eamon Kelly calls Lewis's fears "foolishness."
Politically, "Political Correctness" is Marxist in origin, in the broad sense of attempting to redistribute power from the privileged class (white males) to the oppressed masses. But it is Marxism of a peculiarly attenuated, self-referential kind. This is not a movement aimed at attracting more working-class youths to the university. The failure of Marxist systems throughout the world has not noticeably dimmed the allure of left-wing politics for American academics. Even today, says David Littlejohn of Berkeley's Graduate School of Literature, "an overwhelming proportion of our courses are taught by people who really hate the system."
Intellectually, PC is informed by deconstructionism, a theory of literary criticism associated with the French thinker Jacques Derrida. This accounts for the concentration of PC thought in such seemingly unlikely discipline as comparative literature. Deconstructionism is a famously obscure theory, but one of its implications is a rejection of the notion of "hierarchy." It is impossible in deconstructionist terms to say that one text is superior to another.
PC thinkers have embraced this conceit with a vengeance. "If you make any judgment or assessment as to the quality of a work, then somehow you aren't being an intellectual egalitarian," says Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political-science professor at Vanderbilt. At a conference recently she referred to Czeslaw Milosz's book "The Captive Mind" as "classic"; to which another female professor exclaimed in dismay that the word classic "makes me feel oppressed."
Age and beauty: It is not just in literary criticism that the PC rejects "hierarchy," but in the most mundane daily exchanges as well. A Smith College handout from the Office of Student Affairs lists 10 different kinds of oppression that can be inflicted by making judgments about people. These include "ageism -- oppression of the young and old by young adults and the middle-aged"; "heterosexism -- oppression of those of sexual orientations other than heterosexual . . . this can take place by not acknowledging their existence," and "lookism . . . construction of a standard for beauty/attractiveness." It's not sufficient to avoid discriminating against unattractive people; you must suppress the impulse to notice the difference. But the most Orwellian category may be "ableism -- oppression of the differently abled, by the temporarily able." "Differently abled" is a "term created to underline the concept that differently abled individuals are just that, not less or inferior in any way [as the terms disabled, handicapped, etc., imply]." Well, many people with handicaps surely do develop different abilities, but that is not what makes them a category. They lack something other people possess, and while that is not a reason to oppress them, it does violence to logic and language to pretend otherwise. If people could choose, how many would be "differently abled"?
Sex change: It sometimes appears that the search for euphemisms has become the great intellectual challenge of American university life. Lest anyone take offense at being called "old," he or she becomes a "non-traditional-age student." Non-Caucasians generally are "people of color." This should never be confused with "collored people." Dennis Williams, who teaches writing at Cornell, recently wrote an article on affirmative action in which he tweaked the PC with the phrase "colored students." "Students of color sounds stupid," reasoned Williams, who is black. "As language, it's sloganeering. It's like saying 'jeans of blue'." He received no comments on the substance of his article, but he got many complaints about his language -- proving his point, that the form of language is taking precedence over its meaning. No one seems to have suggested renaming the sexes, although there is a movement to change the way they're spelled: in some circles the PC spelling is "womyn," without the "men."
The rejection of hierarchy underlies another key PC tenet, "multiculturalism." This is an attack on the primacy of the Western intellectual tradition, as handed down through centuries of "great books." In the PC view, this canon perpetuates the power of "dead white males" over women and blacks from beyond the grave. It obliges black students to revere the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, who was a literal slave owner. In opposition to this "Eurocentric" view of the world, Molefi Asante, chairperson of African American studies at Temple, has proposed an "Afrocentric" curriculum. It would be based on the thoughts of ancient African scholars (he annexes Pharaonic Egypt for this purpose) and the little-known (to Americans) cultures of modern East and West Africa. This would be one of many such ethnic-specific curricula he foresees in a multicultural America. "There are only two positions," Asante says sweepingly; "either you support multiculturalism in American education, or you support the maintenance of white supremacy."
It is statements like that, of course, that sends members of the National Association of Scholars stomping into bookstores in a rage. To Stephen Balch, president of the organization, it is a dereliction of duty for educators to admit that every culture can be equally valid. Western civilization has earned its place at the center of the university curriculum, not by the accident that most university professors have been white males, but by its self-evident virtue. It has given rise to the single most compelling idea in human history, individual liberty, which as it happens is just now sweeping the entire world.
But Asante is proposing a change in values, not just reading lists. So what if the Western tradition gave rise to individual liberty? Is liberty necessarily a universal value? African cultures, he points out, exalt that familiar ideal: "community."
Right terms: "Community!" "Liberty!" Is there no way out of this impasse? Or are we doomed to an endless tug of war over words between the very people who should be leading us onward to a better life? If two people with as many degrees between them as Fish and Barber can't communicate except by hurtling charges of "racism" and knocking over books in a store, what hope is there for the rest of us? Yet one hears the same thing over and over: I don't know how to talk to African-Americans. I'm scared of saying the wrong thing to women. Whites don't listen. "There are times when I want to be very cautious about offending a feminist colleague, but I can't find the right terms," says Robert Caserio of the University of Utah. And Caserio is an English teacher. The great Harvard sociologist David Reisman recently complained about having to go to "great lengths to avoid the tag 'racist'." He wouldn't be annoyed to have to go to great lengths not to be anti-Semitic!" Harvard's Kilson exploded. And Reisman was once Kilson's mentor!
Yes, of course conflict is inevitable, as the university makes the transition -- somewhat ahead of the rest of society -- toward its multiethnic future. There are in fact some who recognize the tyranny of PC, but see it only as a transitional phase, which will no longer be necessary once the virtues of tolerance are internalized. Does that sound familiar? It's the dictatorship of the proletariat, to be followed by the withering away of the state. These should be interesting years.
CORRECTION: (September 23, 1991)
In our cover story about politically correct thought on campus ("Taking Offense," IDEAS, Dec. 24, 1990), NEWSWEEK stated that "at Sarah Lawrence and a few other places the PC spelling is 'womyn,' without the 'men'." Though some individuals at the college may follow this practice, the school does not, in fact, endorse the alternative spelling of "women.". NEWSWEEK regrets the mistake and any embarrassment it may have caused the college.
Source Article here: Thought Police - Newsweek December 24, 1990
That was written almost 30 years ago. And look at us now. Scary isn't it. From collage campus to the streets to every aspect of our lives.
“This is the culture of the micro-aggression, where people literally seek out opportunities to be offended....Victim status is so desirable that it's constantly faked or exaggerated, and claims that one is not a victim are met with indignation.” ― David French
“Stop telling me I’m oppressed.....I’m not a victim. I don’t know why feminists are so hellbent on characterizing me as one.....Feminists don’t speak for me. They’re not my voice. They’re not my representation. I owe them nothing, except maybe a shred of sympathy. How miserable must they be to see oppression at every turn?...You DON’T speak for me. You DON’T represent me or my concerns....We’re living proof that the modern day feminist movement is a crock. Feminists are victims of their own delusions, and we’ll never buy what they’re selling.” ― Hannah Bleau
“Today's feminism infantilizes women. If feminism is not about freedom, then what the heck is it for? It just becomes a grievance lobby of victimhood games.” ― Janet Albrechtsen
“I didn’t wake up this morning worrying about what protest color I’d wear, or what the world would do without me because I didn’t wake up feeling like the victimhood narrative was a part of my story. Real women don’t have to remind the world every day that history once slighted them.” ― Tomi Lahren
“Another example was relentlessly expressed during Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, and especially since her defeat: the assertion that she was the victim of misogynistic comments and that she lost because she was a woman. None of it is true. But it keeps feminists thinking of women as victims — and people who think of themselves as victims are rendered weak....Modern feminists are afraid of life. They are afraid of differences of opinion, and especially afraid of men.....Feminists are outraged and unduly stressed by much of life itself.” ― Dennis Prager
“When I look at people talking about intersectionality, what I see is the human being magnifying a biological attribute, and then putting them aside, putting them in a corner as victims of oppression....I most certainly don't see myself as a victim.” ― Ayaan Hirsi Ali
“Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. My own analysis using 2005 survey data from Syracuse University shows that about 90 percent of conservatives agree that “While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.” Liberals — even upper-income liberals — are a third less likely to say this.”
― Arthur C. Brooks
“Socialist ideology rationalizes individual failure by laying it at the feet of the system itself, rather than connecting it with its proximate cause, the individual.
People don't often say what they think but rather what they think is permissible. Political correctness is a code to silence dissent as western society is razed. The culture wars will erupt into violence, pitting those who defend western values vs. leftists, their 'allies', and the rulers who want to consign western civilization to oblivion.
First, as I showed in Chapter 5, the term “cultural Marxism” refers to a particular Marxist theory and strategy inaugurated by Antonio Gramsci – working to establish “cultural hegemony” in order to effect socialist revolution.
Second, the substitution of special identity groups advocated for by social justice activists for the working class championed by Marxists does not lead to an identical or nearly identical politics. With the working class as a lever, Marxism proposes to overcome its nemesis – the capitalist class, which maintains the class system, including a class-based system of production and resource allocation.
Social justice, on the other hand, aims at little more than debunking particular identity groups from atop a putative social hierarchy, knocking them from their supposed positions of totemic privilege, and replacing them with members of supposedly subordinated groups.
Third, in Chapter 5, I told why Marxism and postmodernism can’t be equated. I’ll restate it here. While postmodern theory is anti-capitalist, it not only rejects capitalism but also other “totalizing” systems, or “meta-narratives,” including even the major system proposed to counter capitalism – Marxism itself.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage
Political correctness is a poor substitute for critical thinking. – Christine Assange.
· 5h
…and finally I would like to also point out to another stream of ideas that are important for the whole story. The influence and Americanization of Eastern Religions such as Tantra, Yoga etc, really promoted during hipi era and became known in the west as umbrella terms for it, “New Age”. I think its something few talk about , but its important because it provide to American Marxist what Marxist Leninism could not and Christianity denied, but liberalism allowed.
It provided them with concepts of transcendence while keeping all your sins, sex, rock and drugs.
Mind of Christ and the mind of God vs mind of the culture and the spirit of the age.
“We are living in an era when sanity is controversial, and insanity is just another viewpoint – and degeneracy only another lifestyle.” - Thomas Sowell.
“There is nothing that has done more havoc to the rain of revival than the illusion of "modernism and theological liberalism" Liberalism sets itself as another gospel but not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” ― Oluseyi Akinbami
destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
― Gore Vidal
“Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.”
― David Foster Wallace
“AFTER THE ORGY”
"I have a vision for the future where all the necessary sex education will be available for everyone. . . . No one will ever go hungry for sex because there will be sex kitchens all over town serving sex instead of soup. . . . We will learn how to use orgasm to cure disease as some of the ancient Tantrics and Taoists did. . . . In the future, everybody will be so sexually satisfied, there’ll be an end to violence, rape and war. We will establish contact with extra-terrestrials and they will be very sexy." - Annie Sprinkle, (1996) an American sex educator, former sex worker, feminist stripper, pornographic actress, cable television host, porn magazine editor, writer, sex film producer, and sex-positive feminist, which now identifies as ecosexual.
"If it were necessary to characterize the state of things I would say that it is after the orgy. The orgy is . . . the explosive moment of modernity, that of liberation in all domains. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of productive forces, liberation of destructive forces. . . . Today everything is liberated . . . we find ourselves before the question: what are we to do AFTER THE ORGY?" - Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer in The Transparency of Evil (1993)
Contemporary attitudes toward sexuality and its liberation—what Jean Baudrillard has aptly dubbed the “culture of premature ejaculation.” This is a culture rooted in an imagined dialectic of “repression” and “liberation,” or the belief that our sexuality has been suppressed and denied by prudish Victorian values and that we must now free our sexuality through hedonistic enjoyment:
Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation. More and more, all seduction . . . disappears behind the naturalized sexual imperative calling for an immediate relation of a desire. . . . Nowadays one no longer says: “You’ve got a soul and you must save it,” but “You’ve got a sexual nature and you must learn how to use it well.” . . . “You’ve got a libido and you must learn how to spend it.”
Yet this leaves us with the troubling question of just what is there left to do “after the orgy”—after every taboo has been violated, every prohibition transgressed, and every desire satiated.
― Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (2003)
That book about Tantra are one of many, but perhaps the best I’ve found and it helps to explain what articles of Frankfurt Theory are missing to tell the whole story.
I’ll share chapter related to America, Cheers!
CHAPTER 6
The Cult of Ecstasy : Meldings of East and West in a New Age of Tantra
"What I tell you must be kept with great secrecy. This must not be given to just anyone. It must only be given to a devoted disciple. It will be death to any others. If liberation could be attained simply by having intercourse with a Śakti [female partner], then all living beings in the world would be liberated just by having intercourse with women. " ― Kulārṇava Tantra (KT 2.4, 2.117)
"Because the science of Tantra was developed thousands of years ago . . . many of the techniques are not relevant to the needs of the contemporary Western lover. . . . I see no need for repetition of long Sanskrit mantras . . . or the strict ritualization of lovemaking. . . . So while I have retained the Tantric goal of sexual ecstasy, I’ve developed new approaches to make this experience accessible to people today. High Sex weaves together the disciplines of sexology and humanistic psychology to give the Western lover the experience of sexual ecstasy taught by Tantra but using contemporary tools. " ― Margo Anand, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy (1989)
Inspired by the new valorizations of Tantra by Eliade, Zimmer, and more popular authors like Joseph Campbell, Tantra began to enter in full force into the Western popular imagination of the twentieth century. Already in the early 1900s we find the foundation of the first “Tantrik Order in America”—an extremely scandalous, controversial affair, much sensationalized by the American media—and by the 1960s and 1970s, Tantra had become a chic fashion for Western pop stars, as Jimi Hendrix began displaying yantras on his guitar and Mick Jagger produced a psychedelic film, "Tantra: Indian Rites of Ecstacy (1969)", depicting the five M’s, or five forbidden substances of meat [māṃsa], fish [matsya], wine [madya], parched grain [mudrā], and sexual intercourse [maithuna]).
Taking Eliade’s positive reinterpretation a step further, Tantra is now celebrated as a “cult of ecstasy”: an ideal wedding of sexuality and spirituality that provides a much needed corrective to the prudish, repressive, modern West.
In the process, it has also spawned a variety of new spiritual forms, such as American Tantra, neo-Tantra, and even the Church of Tantra (figure 10). At the same time, these transformed versions of Tantra have been reappropriated by Indian authors. In a complex cross-cultural exchange or “curry effect” between India and the West, we not only find neo-Tantric gurus like Osho-Rajneesh, but even a heavy-metal band in Calcutta called “Tantra.” Amid the ever increasing circulation of material and spiritual capital throughout the global marketplace, it seems that Tantra has been exported to the West, where it has been processed, commodified, and reimported by the East in a new form.
An examination of the history of Tantra and its contemporary manifestations shows that it has undergone profound transformations in the course of its long, convoluted “journey to the West” and back. For most contemporary American readers, Tantra is basically “spiritual sex,” the “exotic art of prolonging your passion play” to achieve “nooky nirvana.” This would seem to be an image of Tantra that is very different from that in most Indian traditions, where sex often plays a fairly minor, “unsexy” role and there is typically far more emphasis on guarded initiation, esoteric knowledge, and elaborate ritual detail.
At present there is a profound shift in the imagining of Tantra—a shift from Tantra conceived as dangerous power and secrecy to Tantra conceived as healthy pleasure and liberated openness.
This shift is exemplified by the two epigraphs for this chapter. The first, the quote from the Kulārṇava Tantra, warns of the perils of revealing secrets to the uninitiated masses. Kula practice, it is true, involves rites of sexual intercourse and consumption of wine, but these must occur only in strictly guarded esoteric contexts; in the hands of the uninitiated masses, they would lead to moral ruin and depravity. The contemporary neo-tāntrika, however, takes the opposite position. Jettisoning the old ritual trappings as outdated and irrelevant, the neo-tāntrika takes only the most expedient elements of these age-old techniques, mixes them with contemporary self-help advice, and adapts them to a uniquely late-capitalist consumer audience.
Since at least the time of Agehananda Bharati, most Western scholars have been severely critical of these new forms of pop Tantra or neo-Tantra. This “California Tantra,” as Georg Feuerstein calls it, is “based on a profound misunderstanding of the Tantric path. Their main error is to confuse Tantric bliss . . . with ordinary orgasmic pleasure.” My own view, however, is that “neo” or “California” Tantra is not “wrong” or “false,” any more than the Tantra of the Mahānirvāṇa or other traditions; it is simply a different interpretation for a specific historical situation. As such, the historian of religions must take it very seriously as an example of a new adaptation of a religious form to a new social and political context.
Above all, the popular fascination with Tantra as “spiritual sex” is closely related to the larger preoccupation with sexuality in contemporary culture as a whole, which is now filled with sexual discourse, imagery, and advertising. As Angus McLaren comments, “Today’s media, while claiming to be shocked by the subversiveness of carnal desires, deluge the public with explicit sexual imagery to sell everything from Calvin Klein jeans to Black and Decker power drills. Sexuality. . . has invaded every aspect of public life. Sexual identity has become a key defining category in the twentieth century.”
Yet, as Foucault argues, it is a common misconception to suppose that the history of sex in the West is a progressive narrative of liberation from Victorian prudery. Just as the Victorian age was not simply an era of repression and silence, our own age is perhaps not the age of sexual revolution that we commonly imagine it to be. Our sexual liberation has been accompanied by new forms of regulation, backlash, and conservatism.
What has happened, however, is that we have produced an incredible body of discourse on the subject, a kind of “over-knowledge” or “hyper-development of discourse about sexuality.” Thus it is more useful to think of sexuality as a constructed and contested category, whose boundaries have been renegotiated in each generation. The category of “sexuality” is itself a recent invention, a product of the late nineteenth century, by no means static—ever imagined anew in the changing political contexts of the past one hundred years.
As I will argue in this chapter, the contemporary preoccupation with Tantra has been part and parcel of our larger preoccupation with and anxieties about sexuality, a source of both titillating fascination and moralizing censorship. I will examine three transformations in the transmission of Tantra to the United States: the founding of the scandalous Tantrik Order in America by Pierre Bernard; the “sex magick” of Aleister Crowley and his followers; and the equation of Tantra with sexual liberation during the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. But this preoccupation with Tantric sex has also been reimported by India via a complex feedback loop, through such figures as Osho-Rajneesh, Chogyam Trungpa, and Swami Muktananda. Finally, as we can see in the rapidly proliferating web sites, Tantra appears to have shattered the boundaries between the “spiritual East and the material West.” Today, anyone with a fast modem and Internet access may attend the Church of Tantra, sample the Sensual Spiritual Software System, and discover Ecstasy Online.
These new forms of Tantra are in many ways well suited to our unique socioeconomic context. With its apparent union of spirituality and sexuality, sacred transcendence and material enjoyment, Tantra might well be said to be the ideal religion for contemporary consumer culture—what I would call, adapting Fredric Jameson’s phrase, “the spiritual logic of late capitalism.” Using some insights of Jameson and others, I will argue that there is an intimate relationship between the recent fascination with Tantra and the current socioeconomic situation, which has been variously described as late capitalism, postindustrial capitalism, or disorganized capitalism. It is precisely this kind of “fit” with late-capitalist society—a fit not unlike that of Weber’s Protestant ethic and early capitalism—that characterizes many new appropriations of Tantra. Indeed, Tantra might be said to represent the quintessential religion for consumer capitalist society at the turn of the millennium.
― Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (2003)
TANTRA, AMERICAN-STYLE: FROM THE PATH OF POWER TO THE YOGA OF SEX
"Where can tantra happen? It can only happen in American and Western Europe. . . . Tantrism may happen here and maybe it has started right here in Boulder, Colorado, 80302. " ― Agehananda Bharati, “The Future (if Any) of Tantrism” (1975)
In 1975, at the peak of the New Age movement and when the Naropa Institute was a burgeoning Mecca for Tantric spirituality, Agehananda Bharati made the qualified prediction that the United States might become the new center for the revival of Tantra.
India, he believed, had become so morally repressive that it could no longer provide any space for Tantra; the affluent West alone had the openness and freedom to accommodate Tantra in the modern world. Yet he also warned of the real dangers of this transmission of Tantra to the United States, where it could be (and in his day already was being) all too easily misinterpreted as a simple excuse for self-gratification and hedonism:
It is conceivable that the more affluent . . . of the West, particularly Western Europe and north America, might espouse some form of tantrism. . . . Some steps have been made, but probably in the wrong directions: the frustrated middle aged North American lusting for the mysterious has opened a door for tantrism to enter. However, I feel that this entry is dangerous and . . . that it would have havoc out of tantrism.
It would seem that both Bharati’s prediction and his warning have been realized. The West, particularly America, has indeed become a fertile new land for the spread of Tantra, yet it has also offered new opportunities for its gross misinterpretation and reckless abuse.
The Western appropriation of Tantra had already begun in the late nineteenth century, with the Theosophical Society and Madame Blavatsky’s descriptions of the mysterious “masters” who dwell in forbidden Tibet, the heartland of Vajrayāna Buddhism. The massive text of her Secret Doctrine is alleged to be based on a mysterious Tibetan text discovered by Blavatsky. What is most striking, however, is that Blavatsky did not identify Tibetan Buddhism as “Tantra”; on the contrary, influenced by Orientalist attitudes, she went to some pains to distinguish it from the disreputable tradition of black magic and hedonism known as Tantra.
While Tantra could be understood in a spiritual sense as a form of “white magic,” most of its modern forms are degenerate “necromancy” and “invocations to the demon,” comparable to Western black magic: “The Tantras . . . are the embodiment of ceremonial black magic of the darkest dye. A Tantrika . . . is synonymous with ‘Sorcerer.’ . . . [T]hose Kabalists who dabble in the ceremonial magic described . . . by Eliphas Levi are as full blown Tantrikas as those of Bengal.”
It was not until the beginning of this century, and particularly in the United States, that Tantra was newly appropriated in a positive form in the Western popular imagination. No longer conceived as a religion of black magic and occult power, Tantra began to be identified more and more with the pursuit of sensual pleasure and erotic bliss.
This was above all the case following Richard Burton’s scandalous translation of the classic Indian erotic manual, the Kāma Sūtra, a text that was originally published in 1883 only for private circulation but that was soon pirated and sold widely throughout Europe. The Kāma Sūtra itself, of course, really has nothing to do with “Tantra.” In the Victorian imagination, however, the dark secrets of the Tantras and the tantalizing secrets of the Kāma Sūtra would soon blend together and take on a variety of new forms.
And three of the most interesting of these new forms were perhaps the founding of the first Tantrik Order in America, the spread of Crowleyian “sex magick,” and the “yoga of sex” that emerged with the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.
― Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (2003)
The Omnipotent Oom: Pierre Arnold Bernard and the Tantrik Order in America
Wily con man, yogi, athlete, bank president, founder of the Tantrik Order in America . . . the remarkable “Doctor” Bernard was all of these. He was also the Omnipotent Oom, whose devoted followers included some of the most famous names in America. - Charles Boswell, “The Great Fuss and Fume over the Omnipotent Oom”
I’m a curious combination of the businessman and the religious scholar.
- Pierre Arnold Bernard
Not only was he the first man to bring Tantra to America, but Pierre Bernard was also surely one of the most colorful and controversial figures in early-twentieth-century American history. Described as “both a prophet and showman,” Bernard was a man “who could lecture on religion with singular penetration and with equal facility stage a big circus, manage a winning ball team or put on an exhibition of magic which rivaled Houdini.”
Infamous in the press as “the Omnipotent Oom,” Bernard claimed to have traveled to the mystic Orient in order to bring the secret teachings of Tantra to this country and to found the first “Tantrik Order in America,” in 1906. Surrounded by controversy and slander regarding the sexual freedom he and his largely female followers were said to enjoy, Bernard is in many ways an epitome of Tantra in its uniquely American incarnations.
Virtually nothing is known about Bernard’s early life; in fact, he seems to have gone to some lengths to conceal his real background behind a veil of fictitious identities and false biography, often using the persona of “Peter Coons” from Iowa. Probably born in 1875 to a middle-class family from California, Bernard left home in his teens to work his way to India in order to study the “ancient Sanskrit writings and age old methods of curing diseases of mind and body.” After studying in Kashmir and Bengal, he won the title “Shastri” and was supposedly initiated into the mysteries of Tantric practice. Returning to America, and now introducing himself with the title of “Doctor,” he worked at various odd jobs in California and began to study hypnotism. By 1900, he had become moderately famous as a master of self-hypnosis who could use yogic techniques to place himself in a state simulating death (figure 11). It is also likely that Bernard received instruction in Tantric practice from one Swami Ram Tirath, an Indian yogi who had come to California in the early 1900s, who praised Bernard as a man of “profound learning,” comparable to “the Tantrik High Priests of India.”
In 1904, Bernard established a clinic in San Francisco where he taught his own versions of self-hypnosis and yoga; the clinic eventually became known as the Bacchante Academy. Even by then, Bernard had become something of a scandal in the California press, who charged that the academy “catered to young women interested in learning hypnotism and soul charming—by which they meant the mysteries of the relations between the sexes.”
Sometime in the years 1906–7, Bernard founded the first Tantrik Order in America, with an accompanying journal—the International Journal of the Tantrik Order—whose charter document for initiation reads as follows:
As a tear from heaven he has been dropped into the Ocean of the tantrik brotherhood upon earth and is moored forevermore in the harbor of contentment, at the door to the temple of wisdom wherein are experienced all things; and to him will be unveiled the knowledge of the Most High. . . . Armed with the key to the sanctuary of divine symbolism wherein are stored the secrets of wisdom and power, he . . . has proven himself worthy to be entrusted with the knowledge . . . to soar above the world and look down upon it; to exalt the passions and quicken the imagination . . . to treat all things with indifference; to know that religion is the worship of man’s invisible power . . . to enjoy well-being, generosity, and popularity. . . . He has learned to love life and know death.
After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, Bernard left California and relocated in New York City, where he opened his “Oriental Sanctum” in 1910. Teaching haṭha yoga downstairs and offering secret Tantric initiation upstairs, the Oriental Sanctum quickly became an object of scandal in the New York press: the notorious “Omnipotent Oom” was charged with kidnapping and was briefly imprisoned, though the charges were later dropped. “I cannot tell you how Bernard got control over me,” said one of the alleged kidnappees, Zella Hopp. “He is the most wonderful man in the world. No women seem able to resist him.” Similar controversy surrounded the “New York Sanskrit College,” which Bernard founded a few years later. The press reported “wild Oriental music and women’s cries, but not those of distress.”
By 1918 Bernard and his followers had moved out to a seventy-two-acre estate in Upper Nyack, New York—a former girls’ academy that he renamed the Clarkstown Country Club, making it the site of his own “utopian Tantric community.” A sumptuous property with a thirty-room Georgian mansion, the club was designed to be “a place where the philosopher may dance, and the fool be provided with a thinking cap!”
Eventually, he would also purchase a huge property known as the Mooring and then later open a chain of Tantric clinics, including centers in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City, as well as a Tantric summer camp for men in Long Island. His clinics were well known for attracting the most affluent clients—“mostly professional and business men and women from New York,” including Ann Vanderbilt, Sir Paul Dukes, composer Cyril Scott, and conductor Leopold Stokowski, among others.
According to Town and Country magazine of 1941, “Every hour of the day limousines and taxies drove up to the entrance of the Doctor’s New York clinic. In the marble foyer behind the wrought-iron portal of 16 East 53rd Street, a pretty secretary handled appointments.”
Hence, it is not surprising that Bernard quickly achieved a remarkable degree of wealth, fame, and status: “Almost overnight, Oom found himself showered with more money than he had ever dreamed of and chieftain of a tribe of both male and female followers. . . . This tribe . . . would number well over 200, and would carry on its roster some of the best-known names in America.” And much of the appeal of Bernard’s teachings, as well as the scandal they generated, centered around his views of sexuality.
― Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (2003)
Sex, Secrecy, Slander, and Censorship: Bernard’s Tantric Teachings and Their Reception in the American Popular Imagination
Love, a manifestation of sexual instinct, is the animating spirit of the world.
- Pierre Bernard, “Tantrik Worship: The Basis of Religion” (1906)
Many of Bernard’s Tantric teachings appear to have been surrounded with an aura of secrecy, considered so profound and potentially dangerous that they had to be reserved for the initiated few. Thus the International Journal of the Tantrik Order warns that “whoever has been initiated, no matter what may be the degree to which he may belong, and shall reveal the sacred formulae, shall be put to death.”
According to the police reports from a raid on Bernard’s clinic, entry involved a secret signal and complex series of taps on the bell. There also seems to have been a certain hierarchy of disciples, with the lower-level initiates performing physical exercises downstairs, while the “inner circle”—the “Secret Order of Tantriks”—engaged in the more esoteric rituals upstairs:
Downstairs, they found a bare room where Oom’s physical culture clients, paying $100 bite, toiled through exercises designed to produce the body beautiful. Upstairs . . . on canvas-covered mattresses, Oom’s inner-circle clients participated in secret rites. . . . [T]he upstairs customers, following physical examinations, had to pay large sums and then sign their names in blood before they could be initiated into the cult.
The popular press offered some vivid and probably somewhat fictional accounts of Bernard’s secret Tantric rituals, occult initiations, and arcane esoteric techniques.
During Tantrik ceremonies, Oom sat on his throne wearing a turban, a silken robe and baggy Turkish pants, and flourished a scepter. While so engaged, he invariably smoked one of the long black cigars to which he was addicted. . . . A frequent Tantrik ceremony involved the initiation of new members. “To join the order,” an Oomite later disclosed, “the novitiate must first have confessed all sins, all secret desires, all inner thoughts; must then promise to abide by Doctor Bernard’s orders and . . . take the Tantrik vow.” The novitiate looks upon Doctor Bernard as a high priest—indeed, as a sort of man-god. He kneels before Doctor Bernard and recites: “Be to me a living guru; be a loving Tantrik guru.” Then all present bow their heads as though in church and repeat in unison: “Oom man na padma Oom.” It is sung over and over in a chanting monotone, like the beating of drums in a forest, and is supposed . . . to induce a state of ecstasy.
There does appear to have been some real need for the secrecy in Bernard’s Tantric practice—particularly in the moral environs of early-twentieth-century America. According to the accounts that came out of Bernard’s Nyack Country Club, much of the spiritual practice there centered around full enjoyment of the physical body and complete liberation of sexual pleasure. As we read in the International Journal of the Tantrik Order, the human body is the supreme creation in this universe and the most perfect place of worship—a truly embodied, sensual worship that requires no priesthood or churches of stone: “The trained imagination no longer worships before the shrines of churches, pagodas and mosques or there would be blaspheming of the greatest, grandest and most sublime temple in the universe, the miracle of miracles, the human body.”
Like dance and yoga, sex is thus a spiritual discipline, a means of experiencing the divine within the physical body. “The secret of Bernard’s powers,” one observer comments, was “to give his followers a new conception of love. . . . Bernard’s aims are . . . to teach men and women to love, and make women feel like queens.” (Thus, in his Tantrik journal, Bernard even spells the word tantra in devanāgarī characters comprised of tiny hearts.) As we read in his article “Tantrik Worship,” the sex drive is in fact “the animating spirit of the world.”
The animating impulse of all organic life is the sexual instinct. It is that which underlies the struggle for existence in the animal world and is the source of all human endeavor. . . . That affinity which draws the two sexes together for the . . . production of a new being, that overmastering universal impulse, is the most powerful factor in the human race and has ever been the cause of man’s most exalted thought.
Yet in modern Western culture, the mysteries of sexual love have been stupidly repressed, relegated by self-righteous prudes to the realm of depravity. Today, “matters pertaining to the sexes are generally avoided, and we are taught that the sexual appetite is an animal craving that should be concealed,” such that most Americans now “are blind to the vast importance of the sexual nature” and fail to realize that it is in fact the “wellspring of human life and happiness.” According to one disciple’s account, Bernard was one of the only teachers of that time who recognized the natural beauty and power of sex, which is nothing other than an expression of our union with the divine: “He teaches the Oriental view of love as opposed to the restrained Western idea. Love . . . is akin to music and poetry. It unites men and women with the infinite.”
Bernard’s wife, Blanche de Vries, also became a teacher of Oriental dance and haṭha yoga. She would eventually develop her own sort of “Tantric health system,” which she marketed very profitably to the wealthy New York upper-class society, who were increasingly obsessed by matters of physical health and beauty. Among her more affluent patrons, for example, was Mrs. Ogden L. Mills, a stepdaughter of the Vanderbilt family.
As Mrs. Bernard commented, the Tantric teaching of love is the most-needed remedy to modern America’s social ills, most of which derive from repression, prudery, and self-denial: “Half the domestic tragedies . . . and not a few suicides and murders in America are due to the inherent stupidity of the average Anglo-Saxon man or woman on the subject of love. We will teach them, and make our adventure a great success.”
Apparently, Bernard also believed that for certain individuals (particularly overly repressed women of the Victorian era) more drastic, surgical measures might be needed to liberate their sexual potential. Sexually unresponsive or “desensitized women” could be helped by a form of partial circumcision, in which the clitoral hood was surgically removed—an operation believed to improve female receptivity by exposing the clitoral gland to direct stimulation.
Not surprisingly, the popular press of the day took no end of delight in sensationalizing Bernard’s scandalous Tantric practices and soon dubbed him the “Loving Guru.” Bernard’s clinics represented something terribly shocking yet also tantalizing in the American imagination—something deliciously transgressive, in a world where sex for the sake of procreation within heterosexual marriage was the unassailable pillar of decent society:
“The rites are grossly licentious and . . . a couple skilled in the rites . . . are supposedly able to make love hour after hour without diminution of male potency and female desire.”
It seems inevitable that Bernard’s Tantric clinics would have elicited some complaints from his neighbors and attracted the attention of the authorities. One F. H. Gans, who occupied an apartment across the way, summed up the neighborhood grievance: “What my wife and I have seen through the windows of that place is scandalous. We saw men and women in various stages of dishabille. Women’s screams mingled with wild Oriental music.” In Nyack, where Bernard was a respected citizen, the authorities received a host of complaints about this scandalous Tantric clinic; reluctantly, the state police investigated, and riding into the estate on horseback:
Nyack concluded Oom was running a love cult. The local prudes clucked and gasped their alarm. Oom, obviously, was a danger to the young of the community and would have to be run out of town. But the Nyack police refused to act. Oom was a big taxpayer. So the prudes complained to the New York State Police, then a recently formed, eager-beaver organization. . . . The night they received the complaint, a squad of troopers galloped to Oom’s estate and swung down from their saddles near the main building.
After his rise to celebrity, soon followed by his rapid descent into scandal, Bernard seems to have retired into a relatively quiet later life. Enjoying an affluent lifestyle, Bernard was known for his lavish wedding celebrations, his generous patronage of professional baseball and boxing, and his investment in sporting venues like baseball stadiums and dog tracks. Eventually he assumed a more respectable position in Nyack society, becoming president of the State Bank of Pearl River in 1931. With a fondness for collecting fine automobiles, such as Rolls-Royces, Stutzes, and Lincolns, Bernard is said to have been worth over twelve million dollars at his peak. Remembered as a “curious combination of the businessman and the religious scholar,” he died in New York City in 1955, at the age of 80.
In sum, we might say that the enigmatic and colorful character of Pierre Bernard is important to the history of Tantra for three reasons. First, he was a bold pioneer in the transmission of Tantra to America, where it quickly took root and flourished; second, he was one of the first figures in the larger reinterpretation of Tantra as something primarily concerned with sex and physical pleasure; and finally, like so many later American Tantric gurus, he generated intense scandal and slander from the surrounding society, foreshadowing Tantra’s role in the American imagination as something wonderfully tantalizing and transgressive. As such, Oom’s popular brand of Tantra would help lay the foundation for the new synthesis of Tantra and Western sex magic that later emerged.
― Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (2003)
William Whitten
The Hegelian Dialectic:
Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis
A march through history ending in the totalitarian state.
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