“Cultural Marxism” – the alleged conspiracy of alleged secret Marxists allegedly trying to destroy Western Civilization through Political Correctness and feminism and racial equality – is a favorite boogeyman of the far right.
That includes, of course, large sections of the “Red Pill” world. Roosh V’s Return of Kings site publishes reactionary diatribes with titles like Cultural Marxism Produces Matriarchy and Tactics For The War Against Cultural Marxism In 2015; Heartiste rails against the alleged evils of “cultural Marxism, feminism, equalism, and … racial self-annihilationism.”
Though Cultural Marxism does not, you know, exist, the far-right obsession with it has made inroads amongst Men’s Rights Activists and #GamerGaters as well.
The Spearhead wrote about “the Menace of Cultural Marxism” as far back as 2009; more recently, British MRA Angry Harry has blamed it for what he sees as a cultural assault on “white heterosexual men.” A Voice for Men’s “Resident Historian” Robert St. Estephe, meanwhile, warns that “Cultural Marxism (“Feminism”) is About Destruction,” and that its insidious strategy “absolutely requires the destruction of the family and the emergence of authoritarian indoctrination of children.” And the MRA-adjacent right-wing videoblogger Bernard Chapin can’t shut up about it.
Among #GamerGaters the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory is if anything even more prevalent. The bumbling would-be documentarian duo behind The Sarkeesian Effect are making Anita S’s alleged Cultural Marxism a big part of their story. (It’s a longtime obsession of the Anton LaVey-looking Davis Aurini; his shaggy collaborator Jordan Owen is still reading up on it.)
And on Twitter, #GamerGate footsoldiers warn anyone who will listen about the (cultural) red menace.
https://twitter.com/GibberAUS/status/559114680204275713
https://twitter.com/RearAdmiralGate/status/557926692636086272
@RearAdmiralGate Cult Marxists are driving policy & helping to write legislation,enshiring Cultural Marxism into law #GamerGate
— EscapeVelocity (@EscapeVelo) January 20, 2015
@crecenteb All of them. I don't care to play video games or read reviews that seek to indoctrinate me using Cultural Marxism.
— GamerGate TRUTH (@GamerGate_TRUTH) January 20, 2015
I should probably mention that the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory is virulently anti-Semitic, with side orders of misogyny, white supremacy, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and assorted other more specialized bigotries. For many of those on the far right, including numerous Manospherians, these are features, not bugs; they’re always happy for more excuses to rail against the Jews.
But not all #GamerGaters and Men’s Rights Activists are literally Nazis; indeed, many of them, including some who have embraced the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory, like to think of themselves as liberals or even leftists. Some even profess great love for people of color, gay and trans folk, and many of the other groups that the far right loves to vilify – #NotYourShield and all.
If you know one of these people, you might want to point them in the direction of Bill Berkowitz’ still-relevant 2003 history of the CM conspiracy theory in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, making clear how thoroughly anti-Semitic it’s been from the start.
But there’s an even easier way to reveal just how horrible most of those obsessed with the alleged dangers of cultural commies destroying the world really are: do a Google image search for “cultural marxism.”
Your results will be filled with some of the most vile propaganda this side of posters actually put out by the Nazis during their time in power. You will also see posters actually put out by the Nazis during their time in power, posted online by people who think that the Nazis had some pretty good ideas, if you think about it.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are some of the pics that came up in my results. I didn’t have to sift through pages of results to find examples this bad; these images are actually rather typical, and I’ve left out some of the worst. (You may recognize the “Happy Merchant,” #GamerGate’s favorite anti-Semitic caricature, in several of the pics below.)
#GamerGaters and MRAs: when you embrace the CM conspiracy theory, you’re getting into bed with the people who made these pictures.
[CONTENT WARNING: Every kind of bigotry you can think of.]
Also Jews were forbidden to own property, so finance was one of the few trades available to them where assets could be kept liquid and freely transferred around or hidden. No doubt that fueled quite a bit of anti-semitic paranoia.
The conspiracy theories really got going with the Rothschilds, who genuinely did control much of the world’s money supply at one point (they were the precursors to the IMF). Nazi Germany seized much of the family assets, so the family isn’t nearly as powerful as it once was, but a lot of those pins-and-arrows charts still point to them as the master puppeteers who manipulate governments and currencies behind the scenes.
@Leum,
“Racial” hatred of Jews came into being during the 19th century. Obviously, Religious-based hatred far predates that – it entered Xtianity by the 2nd century and well before Christians had state-power on their side. Technically, Antisemitic means the race-based hatred and not the religious based hatred.
The truth is that it goes back even farther. There was real antipathy towards Jews in the ancient Greek speaking Mediterranean on account of the way traditional Jews rejected some aspects of the Hellenistic culture. (Funnily, this was NOT behind the acts of Antiochus IV despite the widespread misperception). Many Greeks saw this as fundamentally anti-social and had a grudge about it of the “What? You think you’re better than us?” form. In Alexandria and parts of Syria there were occasional full-scale murderous riots by Greeks against Jews (and, also, by Jews against Greeks). Josephus speaks of a town where, upon hearing of the revolt in Judea, the Greek population seized the pretext to massacre the Jewish inhabitants – masking a criminal acting out of old hatreds behind a charade “sign of loyalty” to Ceaser.
Although I guess Antisemitism has evolved to mean all the hatreds at the moment.
If Feminism is Cultural Marxism, then is Anti-Feminism Cultural Fascism?
Love it, particularly how he flat-out admits that he has not changed at all since he was a small child.
Hey, I’ve seen some people post some blog relevant stuff in the comments before, so it’s alright if I’m out of topic, right?
I was just linked that: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2tzjih/cosplaying_vivian_james_at_magfest_a_tale_of
I could hardly believe how malicious/oblivious one had to be to write a post like that. That guy went to a gaming con broadcasting hostility to a large portion of gamers, and then claims martyrdom when people were upset! Are they just completely devoid of self-awareness? Or just trolling? Not sure which is worse, if one is ready to make people who spent lots of money travelling to a con feel unsafe all the time they’re there just to troll, it’s as bad as meaning it!
I always wondered what nazism repeated as farce would look like. Now I have seen those cartoons and it seems incredibly pathetic.
I’m reminded of an exchange I had with an earnest Marxist* at college. He was explaining how the Right was winning (this was in the early 1980s) because the different factions worked together on common goals, whereas the Left was preoccupied with internecine conflicts over ideology and tactics. I commented that I’d read the same thing in a party newspaper recently. Really? he asked, which one? Spartacist Youth League, I said.
Fuckin’ Trots! he snarled.
On the peculiar elasticity of the term as used in the OP, there’s Orwell in his essay on politics and language, observing that ‘fascist’ had ceased to have any meaning in propaganda beyond ‘someone with whom the speaker disagrees’. And that was eighty years ago.
Sorry, forgot the footnote
*That may be redundant.
Wow. Those memes are disgusting.
Just, that first one. So, if you believe that the Jews and the leftists and the Marxists and the Illumanati and the reverse vampires and what-have-you are conspiring together for world domination, how on earth is encouraging necrophilia going to accomplish that goal? In what way is necrophilua going to accomplish world domination?
I seriously can’t help but think the people who make these kind of memes, as well as believe this bullshit, spend way too much time on the internet and have disconnected from reality altogether.
Despite all the stories I hear about all the militant Dworkinites, white genocide, how political correctness is “destroying” our culture – I never come across any of these things in person. It doesn’t help the first of the three always involves a university campus or being right next to one (it’s never anywhere else) and the latter two being cases of people demonizing changes they happen to just not like. Of course, they want to feel like crusaders of justice than just admit they’re bigoted pieces of shit – since that kind of honest would come from being self-aware.
White people are still around and still pretty powerful, and it seems to me that “political correctness” hasn’t stopped the waves of shock-for-the-sake-of-shock bullshit that nonetheless permeates in stand-up comedy, comicbooks, videogames, and movies.
It’s just like that hub-bub over the all-female main cast being announced for the new Ghostbusters movie: is one movie with a prominent female cast really going to “ruin” movies? The majority of roles in movies tend to be for men and a popular franchise, The Avengers, is made up mostly of male characters and one token female member. Four of those characters had movies centered on them, even multiple ones, whereas we’ve yet to even see an announcement for a Black Widow. I mean, why not? Scarlet Johansson is a highly desirable actress whose already had the main role in a number of other films, including more recently, and yet no one at Marvel has considered making her the main character in a film?
It really is a case of taking shit for granted, since the only time these numbskulls make such complaints is when some go out of their way to make a TV show or movie or comic more culturally inclusive to add – y’know – some much-needed variety to an otherwise heavily monochromatic selection.
Not only have proponents of the “cultural Marxism” myth never read Marx, but they have never read a single page of any of the theorists they claim invented it. (Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse.) I’m not saying you have to read someone’s entire bibliography in order to criticize them, but if you’re going to call yourself an expert on a supposedly existing conspiracy of “cultural Marxism,” it might be a good idea to get a handle on what its proponents actually wrote. At least make sure they said what you accuse them of saying. But no, it’s easier to reduce them to supervilains in an anti-Semitic fairy tale.
“Or I know some kids are actually taught to sing “Baa-Baa Rainbow Sheep” in nursery, despite literally nobody having a problem with the descriptive use of the colour black to describe non-human things.”
You “know” something that has been wrenched entirely out of context by right-wing newspapers in a long-running campaign to discredit left-wing councils. It never had anything to do with race. Here’s Private Eye explaining the full context:
“For the record, the charity Parents and Children Together, which runs the two play groups at the centre of last week’s outbreak, told the Press Association that “children at the two family centres sing a variety of descriptive words in the nursery rhyme to turn the song into an action rhyme. They sing happy, sad, bouncing, hopping, pink, blue, black and white sheep etc. This encourages the children to extend their vocabulary.” Curiously, this explanation went unreported by any of the national papers.”
This story has been rolling around the right-wing press in the UK since about 1986, when The Sun was pretty much making stuff up about the “loony left” on a regular basis (those involved are fairly open about how much bollocks they simply made up). It flares up from time to time, and is always, always nonsense.
“Cultural Marxism” is clearly doing a pretty bad job, since a lot of perfectly sensible left-leaning folk I’ve talked to for some reason believe the “Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep” myth.
Well, technically, most white people, like myself, are of mixed race in my experience anyway. I mean, if you ask a lot of white people, they’ll be able to break it down by percentages or fractions. (I don’t know my bio father’s side of the family though, so I’m just a mutt, and I’m quite content with that.)
Which makes me laugh that some of these same white people are silly enough to whine about a white person dating, marrying and/or having kids with someone of a different race. It’s like “Didn’t you just say you were 1/4 Native American and 1/2 German and 1/4 *insert race here*? Why are you so freaked out by this?”
I agree with your assessment up until a point: The OP said that they were consistently misgendered, and that’s really fucked up. We shouldn’t immediately assume that someone is a cis male because they agree with GG and are cosplaying as their little manic-pixie dream mascot in a rape meme hoodie. There are people who are of other genders who are very supportive of GG, as is their right to do so, even if I and many others think that it’s not a good idea or in their best interest.
(Wasn’t there a trans woman who recently left GG after they started doxxing other trans women? I remember commenting on it here somewhere.)
However, I’m really thinking this is going to be used as another example of “SEE?! You SJWs are all terrible people! HOW DARE YOU MISGENDER SOMEONE!”
So, yeah, misgendering this person was shitty of the people at MAGfest, even if they had no way of knowing that this person was nonbinary.
Other than that, the rest of the post is self-martyrdom. I mean, that’s like walking into an all-African-American church in a KKK hood, and then crying about how you were thrown out.
OP’s dressed as the mascot for a “movement” that has harassed, sent death and rape threats to female individuals in the gaming community. Nonbinary, transgender, genderfluid or even female or male, that’s antagonizing people, and they shouldn’t be surprised that people were upset about it, nor that they didn’t want to be anywhere near OP.
Of course, that would take some self-awareness.
The oddest things lead one to delurk.
Shortly after I married, we moved to Indiana, and a coworker informed me that she was in a mixed marriage “too,” and she wondered how I managed. I hadn’t actually thought of my lapsed Catholic/non-observant Jew marriage as mixed, but I asked just how her own relationship qualified. “He’s Lutheran.” She was Methodist.
I took this bizarre statement home, and my husband commented, “Maybe we should move to California, where a mixed marriage is a man and a woman.” (Instead, we wound up in Iowa, which had SSM before it was finalized in California. Go figure.)
Moving to the Midwest taught me just how small a percentage of the US population is Jewish. I grew up in New Jersey, and as a child I thought the world was pretty evenly divided among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. It’s all about what’s familiar and what’s not.
That’s my grandma right there.
“If your sister marries a [racist slur for an Asian person] or an [racist slur for an Aboriginal person], she’s out of the will!” “… Our great-something-grandfather was Chinese and your great-something-uncle was Aboriginal.” “SO?”
*facepalm*
Ewwwwwww! Gross.
Tilt your head sideways and squint a bit at the bottom right corner of the last assemblage of “memes” and you can read “Not all sex involving children is unwanted”. (I don’t want to check up what the pie/pic heading on that sign stands for.)
————————————
Marx.
I doubt these people have read any Marx at all. I edited my husband’s thesis on Marx and his philosophical milieu and their precursors. Not only do I know more about all of Marx’s writings than all of these dimwits who’d be lucky to know an occasional extract from the “Manifesto”, I also knew more than any reasonable person would ever want to know about Engels, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Rousseau and fifty other, mostly dreary, all men, writers and thinkers. (Thank goodness most of it has receded into lost memories. That was a lot of unwanted intellectual baggage to carry around. The little bit of German I learned in order to check the excerpts and quotations has also trickled away for lack of use.)
I put Marx in much the same box as Freud. Obviously clever and well-intentioned, but totally prisoners of their own time and place and status. Marx’s ideas about the inevitability of the historical progress and eventual overthrow of capitalism was just one version of the common notion of the time that history was a fairly steady march of “improvement”. From a distant golden age peopled by “noble savages” through to a utopian future of brotherly love with nasty warlords and feudalism and vile capitalism as necessary evils along the way. And make no mistake. Capitalism and industry of his time was vile. He was right about all of that.
The idea of a functioning democracy with universal adult suffrage — meaning no restrictions on the basis of class, sex, property, race — would have been just as foreign to them as multiculturalism the way we understand it would be. (Well, at least here in Australia.)
That was some good lulz. Welcome aboard! Did you get your scented fucking candle yet? Click on the purple seal on the right-hand sidebar and all will be revealed…
Well, if that’s the case, then I’m the product of a mixed marriage too…my dad was raised Catholic, my mom Lutheran Protestant. In fact, there were mixed marriages all over both sides of my family tree, same basic thing. FFS, we’re all German!
Thanks, Bina! I’ve lurked for a while, so I HOPE I know the rules, and I live in terror of the Blockquote Monster.
My husband and I have, together and separately, lived in several states and foreign countries, and Indiana still wins as the weirdest spot. A friend moved there after we left, and she confirmed this independently. “All kinds of crazy stuff happens, but they just say, ‘Those kinds of things don’t happen here,’ as if it negates their existence. They said it about the hostage situation last week, and when I pointed out there was one last month at the strip mall, it was as if they didn’t hear me.” In her southern hometown, as in my old neighborhood, they would have hashed over memories of hostage situations past and present for hours. Indiana is a collective delusion that it’s normal. It’s not. Nowhere is. Except the Normal in Illinois, and even that’s just a name.
“Crazy” in the previous comment was a direct quote, and did not refer to a person…
Hey, no worries about the c-word…you can use it in a quotation, last I checked. The only time it’s not kosher is as a descriptor for MRAs and the like, because stupid isn’t a mental illness.
Ha…funny, that’s what all my friends from around those parts tell me, too. Makes me wonder how the state managed to produce Kurt Vonnegut. I’m Canadian, so I count myself lucky that the worst thing we have up here are just plain old dorky rednecks who eat too many doughnuts at Tim Horton’s.
In 1933, the Soviet Union made being gay a criminal offense. Anyone convicted would be sentenced to five years of hard labor. The notion that promoting gay rights is promoting communism shows a profound ignorance of history. Then again, the MRAs have never been known to let facts get in the way of their arguments.
Waiter, I’ll have a large slice of paranoia pie with bigotry sauce and a generous sprinkling of wingnuts.
There seems to be a general tendency for people to be general-purpose bigots — anti-semitism and homophobia and racism and misogyny seem to flock together, so one might well conclude that there is no specific aspect of the objects of bigotry that is a rational basis for their beliefs. The Cultural Marxism thing follows a familiar pattern: it results from slapping together a number of only superficially related things rather than coherent thought based on thorough understanding of the history of ideas.
Marx wrote a very shrewd analysis of the early industrial age but many of his predictions for the future did not come to pass (how shocking). In particular he thought that capitalists would resist to the death every effort to improve the lot of the workers, and he failed to consider the effect that the broadening of the franchise might have. Marxism can be a useful tool for analyzing the role of class and economic power in society, but as my father used to say (correctly, I think) Communism became a sort of atheistic religion with Das Kapital as its bible, very dogmatic and doctrinaire. Marx is useful as long as you don’t treat his writings as Holy Writ. I don’t think Marx would be a Marxist if he were living now.
So many who use to the term are neo Nazis, ‘race realists’ or misogynists. What does that prove?
There’s link to a Marxist conference to be held in Melbourne, found in the comments section of one of the articles linked.
http://marxismconference.org/front.php
There’s really nothing in the agenda that speaks to a proletariat struggle in the classic Marxist sense; instead class refers soley to gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation. Maybe this is because the low socioeconomic, working class demographic includes straight, white, blue-collar males?
@Cyberwulf:
I’m always terribly English about it, my instant reaction is to say sorry. For them standing on my foot. Because clearly it must have been in the way.