Every once in a while, a hostile commenter wanders into the discussion here nattering about the evils of “Cultural Marxism.” One stopped by last night, prompting another commenter to ask what exactly this Cultural Marxism was, anyway.
I responded by saying the term essentially meant, at least to most of those using it, “the Evil Jews But We’ve Learned We Can’t Just Say That Publicly Outside of 4chan and Stormfront Without People Realizing We’re Basically Nazis.”
Oh, sure, once upon a time “cultural Marxism” was indeed a school of Marxist thought dealing with, you guessed it, culture. But in recent years the term has become a popular buzzword amongst neo-Nazis and other proud bigots on the far right, who use it to suggest a vast Jewish conspiracy against Western Civilization and the white race … without having to use the J-word, which tends to give their anti-Semitic game away.
But it’s not as if the opponents of “Cultural Marxism” go to great lengths to hide their racism and anti-Semitism. Indeed, a quick look at some of the “memes” and other graphics used by the Cultural Marxism-haters makes pretty clear where they’re coming from.
So here are some of the most, well, revealing images that popped up when I did a quick image search for “Cultural Marxism.” I’ve done this a couple of times before, but I felt it was time for a refresher, just a little reminder how many of the opponents of “Cultural Marxism” actually see the world.
CONTENT WARNING: All the bigotries you can imagine, and then some.
The last one is especially charming: don’t believe YOUR conspiracy theory, believe MINE.
Oh, and if these people start bringing up The Frankfurt School, well, it’s not because they’re interested in discussing the theories of actual cultural Marxists like Theodor Adorno or Herbert Marcuse. No, it’s just another way for them to say “teh evil Jews,” as this little “infographic” makes abundantly clear.
I should note that not everyone who talks about the alleged evils of alleged “Cultural Marxism” is a neo-Nazi. Some of them are simply people who, perhaps unknowingly, are getting a good deal of their “information” about the world from neo-Nazis who aren’t necessarily very upfront about being neo-Nazis. (There are a lot of these types hanging about in the manosphere and in GamerGate circles.)
If you’re one of the non-neo-Nazis and you’re dropping the phrase “Cultural Marxism” into your conversations online and possibly off, take a good hard look at the images above. The people who made these images are the people you’re aligning yourself with.
These are people who actually believe a secret cabal of hook-nosed Jews runs the world. These are people who think interracial classrooms = white genocide, and that supporters of multiculturalism not-so-secretly yearn for a world without white children. These are people who think Adolph Hitler had a lot of really good ideas, and not just about landscape painting. These are people, in other words, that you should have nothing to do with.
I definitely got that icky sexualized / male gaze feeling from that photo. I think it’s a combination of the passive, vacant sort of expression and the hazy focus of the photo that’s generally seen on objectified images of women looking “sultry”.
The message would still be terrible if it was using the image of a smiling active kid, but using that picture just adds another layer of stomach-churning skeevy awfulness.
Marxists aren’t all atheists. You can be a Catholic Marxist, a Jewish Marxist, a Muslim Marxist, etc. It’s not exclusively atheistic, notwithstanding Karl Marx’s disdain for organized religion.
PIRA had an interesting time trying to reconcile their Marxist leanings with their Catholic support base.
For right-wingers the connecting thread in marxism, socialism, communism, and atheism is Things That I Hate and Fear. OK, hate is based on fear and fear is based on ignorance. For a lot of white people there is a real fear that if whites don’t remain a majority, then the PoC will take over and do to us what we did to them. I think much of the extreme hatred of Obama is that he’s the face of the American Future — neither black nor white but human — and they are consumed by fear of what happens when whites are no longer in ultimate control. I think he’s well aware of this phenomenon, which is why he’s been very careful not to favor PoC. (You can trace this all the way back to his time on the Harvard Law Review, when many of the black students were unhappy that he didn’t choose more blacks for [positions of influence.) Basically he’s trying to smooth the way for the next non-white president.
http://cs412126.vk.me/v412126346/a08e/Eg9rekQYQ3g.jpg
Sledgehammering away at a non-thing is a chick magnet? Actually, it’s more like a one-way ticket to incel status. Nobody wants a moron’s seed, sweetie.
This cannot be said strongly enough. The same goes for softcore Holocaust Denial(Just asking questions!) and “Elites/Banker/The FED”( = Jews) conspiracies. If these dooshes didn’t speak in codes they’d never get a following. The fact is the hardcore whitepower/Nazis -in raw numbers- are a dying minority. Unfortunately, they are a loud and dangerous minority.
And for those who think there is no excuse for non Nazis/non racists to be taken in by this chicanery ‘Because of the Internet’, the research skills to sift through digital wheat and chaff are not developed overnight. Some people have a talent for it, others don’t. At one point everyone reading these words was naive about something or someone online. These scams are sold through predatory practices, social engineering and deception, not “reason”. Regardless of how naive one has been, the party responsible for the scam is always the scammer.
More information on people “concerned about” ‘Cultural Marxism’:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/reframing-the-enemy
http://blog.adl.org/anti-semitism/anti-semite-john-friend-interviews-center-for-immigration-fellow-on-his-radio-show
http://www.adl.org/combating-hate/domestic-extremism-terrorism/c/racists-in-europe-and-the.html
As WWII becomes a more distant memory, I’m also seeing young people who seem to adopt Nazism as a sort of jokey aesthetic in the vein of Leninade and that sort of thing. The difference being that neo-Nazis are real modern-day people who cause actual harm, whereas the number of people who are working to make the US into Soviet Russia are approximately zero.
I think it’s because, as the war gets further away, people think of Nazis less and less as real people who did lots of terrible things and more as movie villain-type characters, and of course it’s allowable to like and even admire or emulate movie villains (by cosplaying, etc).
Is anyone else seeing this, or am I maybe misperceiving it?
IMO these can be factors, especially as a “gateway”. I know in 2006 I had literally no idea the white power/Nazi apologists were as organized and sophisticated as they are. It sounds like a joke until you see the evidence. Many people more savvy were also unaware of how bad it was until Operation Blitzkrieg:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/summer/-operation-blitzkrieg
So I can easily see a certain younger crowd already treating “taboo” issues as cruel jokes just not taking neo-Nazism seriously. It’s an extension of being insulated from taking any oppression seriously because of privilege and, as you say, it’s so far in the past for them.
The good news is these are the ones who usually grow out of it.
Agreed on the “Nazis as cartoon villains” thing, at least in my experience. If they’re not real people, we don’t need to worry that we may fall into that line of thinking, however close we may be, which is why someone can justify having borderline neo-Nazi views while still using “Nazi” as an insult. Then again, many are surprised to learn that there are still self-admitted Nazi symphatizers in existence.
Of course, there is the huge issue that many people, not just young people, seem to perceive the Nazi regime from their privileged point of view – in other words, they don’t see the process of “rounding up the undesirables and eliminating them” as a central problem. They sense that there was oppression, but not in the social sense, and seem to simply take the “orderly and strict” German stereotype and bring it up to eleven, like teenagers worrying about being told to go clean their room or to be home by nine.
I actually made a Facebook post about it a while back, after a 20-something coworker with Nazi sympathies finally quit and I felt like ranting. The gist of it was that if you think that the biggest crime of the Nazi regime was that they made trains run on time, your priorities are pretty messed up.
Particularly since that was a) Mussolini and b) not actually true.
@ Katz
That whole “Nazis were efficient” thing is a complete myth. The Nazi state was incredibly inefficient partly by accident, partly by design (Hitler for instance deliberately made the government as useless as possible to prevent anyone building up a power base that threatened him).
The Nazi regime wasn’t even totalitarian in the strict sense. Unlike the Allies who introduced what was in effect a partial command economy (“OK, your factory makes tanks now”) the Nazis left everything to the free market; hence Otto Schindler having to win contracts to make armaments. There was the Todt Organisation of course but even that was second priority to the extermination aspect. The irony was that even after 1942 when the writing was on the wall and starvation was round the corner there was a huge sector of the German economy producing luxury goods.
It’s almost axiomatic in military studies that we beat Germany as much through production as fighting.
Considering those particular myths are encountered constantly in popular culture*, I don’t find it strange that young people, particularly young people of some privilege, have confused ideas on what Nazism actually entails. They know it’s bad, but bad in a Darth Vader kind of way. Meaning, not actually real, and if it was, it would be an extension of being told what to do in the current society. It’s another form of disillusionment with the system, at least as far as I’ve observed.
Of course, the point was that in the imaginary Nazi dystopia conceived by the privileged, everyone is equally oppressed by the control-obsessed common enemy, the government. Antisemitism, racism and other factors are secondary to the suffering of the middle class. That way, hierarchical systems and one’s own privileged position in an oppressive system will not be under scrutiny.
*where the train analogy is also sometimes attributed to Hitler instead of Mussolini, because all fascism is the same. Except communist fascism, which is way worse, but still ranks below hippie commie nazism.
Jeez, and here I thought just wearing the uniform for reenacting purposes was maybe in questionable taste.
This Nazi vermin thinks of itself as the pinnacle of the white “race”.
If that would be true (and it’s the opposite, obviously, and races don’t even exist biologically) then a white genocide would be the best thing that could ever happen to the world.
That reminds me of this Asian fashion trend that I heard about earlier this year: Nazi Chic.
Though I heard of it as “Swastikawaii”, which is even worse.
The white genocide people are horrifying. There was an episode on the TWiBPrime (this week in blackness) podcast where a white genocide guy called in. He honestly seemed to believe that the absence of housing discrimination and segregation was forcing white people to intermarry with POC and that was equivalent to genocide of white people.
But “anti-racist” IS our codeword for anti-white, because racism is an implicit consequence of the concept of a “white” racial identity as made up by the establishment.
We don’t want any more people who identify as “white” teaching their little mayo-stain children how to be racist and take advantage of everyone else. and the only way to stop perpetuating institutional racism is by erasing the institutional “whiteness” of purebred WASPs, so we must indeed force diversity and tolerance.
racists and misogynists usually get along but with this conspiracy stuff they can put aside their differences and became one and reach unimaginable glory aka delusion.
also it’s fair that since every left leaning act is considered “cultural marxism” then every right leaning one should be considered “cultural Nazism ” 😀
Minor nitpick: It’s “Adolf”, not “Adolph”
No relation to any Dolphs, neither the one from the Simpsons, nor the one from Rocky IV
Oh, racism… It seems that this site is of a Right Marxist variety – Nazis/Fascists. Race and nationality, by their own, hardly play any role in human life – our choices and morality do. Marxism, of all kinds, has to be stopped – I care not whether it’s the Left or the Right of Marxism. I wish death to this entire ideology and all that it has spawned or corrupted all the same. Either it’s the hypocritical Communists who would declare us “bourgeois” and then starve us in the millions because they think that they can do better then God and free market or the stupid Nazis who declared us “inferior”, despite my nation almost inventing and upkeeping for centuries the principles nowadays considered uniquely American… I am not some “professor”. Far it be from me to distinguish those who wish for my enslavement and/or death. By obsessing over something as immaterial as skin color, you reveal yourselves as the “right” arm of the Cultural Marxism’s ever-growing army of useful idiots – the “left” arm is, of course, the various SJW’s and whatnot. A signature of a Marxist, no matter if it’s of the “right” or the “left” sub-division of it is their obsession not with primary (morality, willpower) characteristics of a human being – but with tertiary ones. Or, as they call them… Classes. White. Black. Woman. Man. Straight. Pervert (adulterers, homosexuals, lesbians and “transgenders”). Wealthy. Poor. Determining the worth of a human being to be nothing more then a part of a group. So that these groups/classes would be made to war with one another (as it is now) – all in order to advance the ultimate Marxist agenda. Allow me to elaborate what that is. People all too often assume that money is power. Nothing is farther from the truth. Money can be powerful, but it will never buy absolute power, not even in this Marxist-infested society. Lavrentiy Beria serves as the goal and the inspiration for every petty bureaucrat, for every left-friendly billionaire, for every would be Moslem caliph, for every “progressive”. You see, Marxists are immoral. The principles of the “ends justify the means” and “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs (or humans)” are all they have on morality – each having an ego of a god, they want absolute power over each and every human and the world itself. Take, for example, Lavrentiy Beria – he was able to rape girls all but in the open and nobody dared to do anything about it. This is it. This is what the Marxists of every nation ultimately want – the power to do absolutely anything with impunity. The power no mere money can buy. The power approaching that of a god. Of the “god of the world”, certainly – I am sure that, if nothing else, Old Nick the Cosmocrator, surely had some part in inspiring such monstrous men as Luther, Muntzer, Marx and Hitler against the faithful. Much is laid at the feet of the Jews – of course, those who do so fail to realize that the term “Jew” simply denotes a practitioner of Judaism. A Jew that gets more and more into Judaism becomes more and more of a moral and decent person. I hardly think that Jews are a threat – to Marxism, sure, since Jews are the ultimate keepers and projenitors of the Christian, “bourgeois” morality that has uplifted humanity from savages to, well, decent people. If you are concerned about the state of culture and morality (you should be since, without those, societies, nations and the very notion of self-government, much less a representative government, go out of the window), you should recognize that the ultimate foes of Marxism (of all of it’s kinds) are free will and morality. Things such as skin color hardly matter – contrary to what the Nazis say, there’s no such thing as “race”. The difference in skin color is just that – difference is skin color. A corn, no matter how you breed it, is still corn – humans, no matter how they breed, still remain humans. They all bleed and feel and die the same, in the end. Much is made of the notion of “superior race” – when you should be seeing that a given “better race” is most likely associated with a better culture. Namely, that of the Western civilization/Christianity/Judaism. And if you are fighting against those – whether due to atheism/denial of “bourgeois morality”, perversion/”the alphabet” of homosexuals and their ilk, “guilt” (over lifting inferior cultures out of barbarism and slavery, I suppose – teenaged atheist trolls seem to blame Western civilization for every evil known to man) or whatever… You indirectly serve the aims of Marxism and, as such, you can be considered a useful idiot in that way.