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    The (re)birth of the term "cultural Marxism": William Lind's "The Roots of Political Correctness" Archived Message

    Posted by brooks on August 26, 2019, 7:17 pm

    As has been pointed out this alt right propaganda meme is suspiciously similar to the Nazi's term "cultural Bolshevik" used in the 30s to attack modernist art movements in Germany. I thought this passage from Max Blumenthal's excellent new book "The Management of Savagery" that I'm just reading was very interesting. It relates to the origin of the adoption of this phrase by today's political reactionaries and charlatans like Steve Bannon and ...some others familiar to this board.

    excerpt:

    Though Breitbart cultivated a moderate image, promoting black and gay conservatives wherever he could find them, he and Bannon were united by an obsessive resentment of an ideology they described as “cultural Marxism”. The two had been heavily influenced by a short documentary produced by the right-wing Free congress Foundations and called "The Roots of political Correctness". The film was produced by William Lind, an iconoclastic right wing intellectual and military theorist. A subscriber to the “retroculture” movement, which emphasized rejecting modern tech culture and postmodern thought, Lind struck a strong contrast with Breitbart, the perpetually wired social media savvy online impresario. Lind lived in Cleveland, Ohio, in the home where his parents raised him, and worked without email, a cell phone or even a computer. There he produced all of his writing on an IBM electric typewriter that he regularly repaired with tweezers and a hammer. Lind told me his lifestyle was “a response to the catastrophe brought on by cultural Marxism of the generation of elites in the 1960s. We have to go back to the way we used to live, and we know it works.”

    Lind’s documentary on political correctness charted the origin of cultural Marxism back to a collection of mostly Jewish socialist intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany following Hitler’s rise to power. Calling themselves the Frankfurt School, these academics brought to American shores "the vehicle that translated Marxism from economic to cultural terms, giving us what we now know as political correctness…a cultural revolution against Western society,” Lind said.

    The Frankfurt Group’s landmark studies of authoritarianism in America encouraged the standard bearers of political correctness to label their opponents as fascists and to subject them to psychological therapy in the form of “sensitivity training,” Lind’s documentary alleged. Amid the 1960s counterculture, they provided the inspiration for the birth of critical theory, the postmodern academic trend that took the form of courses in gender studies, black studies and gay studies. Lind and his collection of talking heads, including the radical leftist-turned-far-right provocateur David Horowitz, positied this development as nothing short of an anti-American plot.

    Having given up on the American working class as a revolutionary vanguard, according to Lind, the Frankfurt Group turned instead to victimized minority groups – gays, blacks, women and immigrants – as its vanguard. Political correctness was their enforcement method, enabling them to impose “radical multiculturalism” on white men and shatter the foundations of traditionally Judeo-Christian Western societies. The narrative rang true to a new generation of campus conservatives gripped with the sense that they were under siege by intolerant leftists.

    Together, Bannon and Breitbart aimed to give birth to an alternative right united by the resentment of political correctness, concepts like “safe spaces” and hypersensitive liberal “snowflakes.” They ingested identity politics and spit it out in reactionary form, helping to spawn a movement that upheld the straight white male as the persecuted target of the elitist establishment. “With cultural Marxism, the left created a white political consciousness, and very few whites are going to vote for the left now,” Lind reflected to me. “The identity politics has screwed them.”

    .......

    Bannon clearly sought to transplant the clash of civilizations narrative into domestic politics, with Musilim immigrants and their “cultural Marxist” defenders as targets of a reborn “alt-right.” In a 2011 radio appearance, he spun out an apocalyptic scenario that bore echoes of Bin Laden’s grand narrative but also recalled neoconservative visions of a Fourth World War: against radical Islam, we’re in a 100-year war.”

    That year, events aligned in favour of Bannon and his ideological fellow travellers, fanning the flames of Islamophobia to unprecedented heights.


    Max Blumenthal, The Management of Savagery, pp 133-135, 136




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