Analyzing the Marxist Left

There is an amazing post today in Belmont Club which is followed by an equally amazing series of incisive comments on the nature of the European left—and by extension, the American left—today. But first, a bit of background is in order. We'll try to be brief, but this stuff is complicated.

It is HazZzMat's ongoing theory that Marxism has become, de facto, the established secular religion of both Europe and the United States, subscribed to by a hard and hardened left that has no respect for any other religion or point of view. Leftists remain determined to impose their social doctrine on everyone and have demonstrated countless times that they are unafraid to destroy whomever and whatever lies in their collective path that might stand in the way of their negative utopian goal, which seems to require that all men and women be made equally miserable in order to achieve "fairness" for all.

Leftist "intellectuals" and theoreticians in Europe and America over the past 50-odd have made stunningly effective use of tactics espoused by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who counseled waging a quiet, gradual revolution that would be accomplished via the slow, thorough evisceration of a country's cultural and political consensus. This revolution was to be waged—and has been waged—by infiltrating and compromising, successively, key organs in the government (such as the Department of State and the Department of Justice); the judiciary itself on all levels; academia; the media; and the written and performing arts.

All these organizations form the bedrock of our national and international political dealings as well as serving as the backdrop and information conduit for transmitting the values of our culture and civilization. Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony proposed a gradual erosion of traditional influence and authority by means of infiltration, co-option, and propaganda. The aim was to replace, quietly and without detection, existing accepted social and cultural norms with Marxist iconography on all levels.

As of 2007, we must conclude that this revolution has been successful to a great degree, as exemplified by the current, nearly infantile grasp that most American and European intellectuals (so-called) seem to have as to the depth and pervasiveness of the global threat posed by the Islamofascists. In other words, when a nation's foreign policy is dictated by fading movie stars with little education beyond high school, that nation has lost its way and is vulnerable to conquest. Which was precisely Gramsci's goal: social conquest without a shot.

Interestingly, the remaining outlier in a liberal nation's culture is organized religion. For the Gramscian stealth revolution to succeed, the influence or organized religion, too—"the opiate of the people"—must also be destroyed. And it generally has been destroyed in the U.S. and Europe, particularly the latter. How? Again, by a slow undermining of accepted dogma and doctrine. Clergy have been corrupted to the point where some mainstream Protestant faiths have, for example, willfully traded a doctrinal belief in Christian charity for the Marxist tenet of income redistribution.

Belief systems such as the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical Christianity that have largely chosen to resist this onslaught are actively attacked and marginalized by taxpayer-subsidized legal organizations with patriotic names, most notably, the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild. Their object is to remove yet another near universal religious and cultural standard from the realm of public discourse. And again, this constant undermining has had the desired effect.

Today's Marxists and closet Marxists stand at a crossroads. But they no longer quite know what to do. They have successfully destroyed existing cultural institutions without having concrete plans to replace them, since their own philosophy has proven manifestly useless and unworkable. So they have morphed, effectively, from socialists into fascists, determined, now running on pure instinct, to impose their will and destroy the Great Satan, the U.S., without really knowing why. In this, they currently perceive the Islamofascists as their allies, since both share a common cultural, political, and economic enemy: the U.S. The problem for the Marxists, though, is this: They seem incapable of understanding that, when they and their allies achieve the desired victory, theirs will be the first throats to be slit.

Some leftists, who, astoundingly, continue to remain leftists, have begun to wake up to the very real mess they have caused by undermining the genuinely progressive tenets of what was once known as Western liberalism. But they still have no idea where to go, and just can't abandon their own dysfunctional belief system.

Which is what gets us to Belmont Club. Wretchard comments on a review of Nick Cohen's new book, entitled "What's Left?" Good question:

Nothing so low as a Fallen Angel. When the Guardian reprinted excerpts of Nick Cohen's book about the Left it faced a storm of commentary from its readers....All I can say is that Cohen barely fails to scratch the surface; in terms of absurdity and tragedy, of the Leftist Deep....But the real power of Cohen's book lies in its portrayal of life in the Left itself. Karen Armstrong called Marxism the last great missionary impulse of Europe. It is possibly Europe's only indigenous world religion. Here is how its devotees lived.

Wretchard then provides an excerpt, which we provide below. Please remember, when you're reading it, that this is not intended by the author of the book as satire:

In the early Seventies, my mother searched the supermarkets for politically reputable citrus fruit. She couldn't buy Seville oranges without indirectly subsidising General Francisco Franco, Spain's fascist dictator. Algarve oranges were no good either, because the slightly less gruesome but equally right-wing dictatorship of Antonio Salazar ruled Portugal. She boycotted the piles of Outspan from South Africa as a protest against apartheid, and although neither America nor Israel was a dictatorship, she wouldn't have Florida or Jaffa oranges in the house because she had no time for then President Richard Nixon or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. ...

Thirty years later, I picked up my mother from my sister Natalie's house. Her children were watching a Disney film; The Jungle Book, I think. 'It's funny, Mum,' I said as we drove home, 'but I don't remember seeing any Disney when I was their age.' 'You've only just noticed? We didn't let you watch rubbish from Hollywood corporations.' ...

I come from a land where you can sell out by buying a comic. I come from the left....I still remember the sense of dislocation I felt at 13 when my English teacher told me he voted Conservative. As his announcement coincided with the shock of puberty, I was unlikely to forget it. I must have understood at some level that real Conservatives lived in Britain - there was a Conservative government at the time, so logic dictated that there had to be Conservative voters. But it was incredible to learn that my teacher was one of them, when he gave every appearance of being a thoughtful and kind man.

The final paragraph rings especially true for Wonker. I recall telling a minority co-worker a number of years ago that I was a conservative Republican. She was quite taken aback, not angrily, however. She was genuinely confused, and said, "But you're so nice, so decent. I can't believe it. Why don't you join us?" As in the example above, it was inconceivable to her that a decent human being could be a Republican and/or a conservative. This is where the Gramscians have brought us today, so thoroughly undermining even civility that a Democrat today finds it impossible to believe that a Republican can even be a human being, let alone a decent one.

Wretchard draws an interesting conclusion to all this. One with which we heartily agree:

It is really impossible to understand the rise of fascism in the world without taking a close look at the single most destructive ideology in modern history. I still remember a close German friend telling me that it was a mistake to imagine that his country's worst export was Hitler. Far from it, he said. That honor was reserved for Karl Marx.

Comments to blogs are often silly and ephemeral, but the comments to this entry in Belmont are especially on target and we'll present a couple of them here. For the rest, please use the link to Belmont that appears earlier in this HazZzMat entry.

Commentator "Meme chose" notes the following:

Socialism in the UK has now become an odd sort of zombie relic. Few people subscribe to its core beliefs, or even take them seriously, but it stumbles on primarily as a tribal phenomenon - the ideology is dead but the tribe still needs it to cohere. As Cohen describes so well, its members would be quite literally lost if they were to abandon it, as he was.

"RWE" observes:

...relative to the oranges issue, [Cohen] still says that while it extended into absurdity, it was still a great thing to grow up in a household where every action was analyzed for its moral implications. And I suppose then after deciding not to buy oranges his Dad went out to sell shoes or play the clarinet or paint houses or whatever he did for a living. There is no indication of an awareness of those, such as the military, who devote - and sometimes give - their lives to a greater cause - but don't give a damn about pissant issues like where the oranges came from.

But we'll let "Cosmo" wrap this up with an appropriate conclusion:

I, too, can attest to the shabby state of grace inhabited not only by portions of the British Left, but enclaves of its American mimics, as well.

Anti-Americanism, in general, and Iraq, in particular seem to be the primary animating impulses, at present, even while the old 'wooden language' of class resentment and redistribution -- leavened with condemnations of 'racism' -- is still spoken.

Funny, but without 9/11 the Western frog was being slowly brought to a boil in a soft-Left broth of multi-culturalism and feminization. It's still going on, but at least some of the frog seems aware of it.

Meanwhile, interestingly, Hugh Hewitt notes painfully that according to a piece in Roll Call (subscription required):

The National Republican Congressional Committee is asking veteran Capitol Hill flacks who now are working in the private sector to volunteer their advice on crafting a communications strategy.

Comments Hugh:

A party punished for insiderism turns to....insiders!

Problem is, the Republican "insiders" don't really have a comprehensive plan for attacking the more effective "insiders" whose activities we've just described here. Neither the NRCC nor the party itself have a clue as to how pervasive the 5th column has become today, and thus has no coherent, comprehensive, long-term strategery for dealing with it. The more immediate problem is, Hillary's up just over the next ridge, and time grows short. Another 50 + years of control by a Democrat Party that was almost completely infiltrated and corrupted by the doctinaire left a generation ago will finish us all off for sure.