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“The United States has undergone a cultural, moral and religious revolution… A militant secularism has arisen in the U.S…. We are two countries now – morally, culturally, socially, and theologically. Cultural wars do not lend themselves to peaceful co-existence [because either] one side, or the other, prevails. The truth is that while conservatives won the Cold War with political and economic Communism, we’ve lost the cultural war with cultural Marxism… It is now the dominant culture whereas those of us who are traditionalists are, if you will, the counterculture.” Words: 2339
So states Patrick J. Buchanan in the opening scenes of James Jaeger’s new film, “Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America”. As always, Buchanan is outspoken and splendidly patriotic in his testimony on the present degeneration of our country. Many of us born before the 1960s with its shocking nihilism [i.e. complete denial of all established authority and institutions] agree vehemently with him. We were raised in a land far removed philosophically from the America we are cursed with today, and this disturbing fact weighs heavily upon our hearts and minds.
Lorimer Wilson, editor of www.FinancialArticleSummariesToday.com, provides below further edited [..] excerpts from Nelson Hultberg ’s recent guest editorial* at www.thedailybell.com for the sake of brevity to ensure a fast and easy read. Wilson has also taken the liberty of supplying definitions for most of the “big” words in the article to ensure that nothing will be lost in the understanding of what the author has to say in this superb article. (Please note that this paragraph must be included in any article reposting to avoid copyright infringement.) Hultberg goes on to explain why “our nation is committing insidious suicide under the guise of erecting the false ideal of social egalitarianism” as follows:
America’s Social Collapse
We, who were raised in pre-nihilist America, find most of today’s movies, TV programs and literary works hideous and depressing. We cringe at the obsessive sexuality of Hollywood’s cinematic pretensions, at its love affair with anti-heroes, and the reprehensible way it so cavalierly saturates its stories with over-the-top violence. We find ourselves aghast at how much boorish mediocrity and phantasmagorical [i.e. fantastic and incomprehensible] ugliness pulsate through the commercial byways of modern America calling itself “cutting-edge art from the avant-garde” and we wonder:
– What is it that has wrought such decadence — where once righteous ideals and a heroic sense of life prevailed?
– Why [does] miasma [i.e. an unwholesome atmosphere] and moroseness now dominate the social stream instead of the spirit of magnanimity and unbridled optimism of our ancestors?
– Why [have] sweet drug poisons such as “crack ” and “Methamphetamine” invaded the lives of callow [i.e. lacking experience of life] youths in ghetto and country club alike?
– Why [do] middle class Americans (who once worshiped self-reliance) now shamefully demand more and more entitlement handouts from government?
– Why [have] our elected leaders in Washington become despicable quislings [i.e traitors] slithering around in Machiavellian [i.e. conduct where the end justifies the means] muck?
– Why [is] family life and marriage, the very founts of civilization, treated so shabbily by psycho-babble [i.e. spewing of meaningless, yet supposedly insightful, information] experts?
– Why is androgyny [i.e. showing characteristics of both sexes] so zealously promoted by liberals on every other television show and homosexuality pawned off as a “Marlboro Cowboy life style?”
– Why are tradition and honor scorned by professorial elites pontificating [i.e. talking in a dogmatic and pompous manner] endlessly about how America’s original moral principles were repressive?
Cultural Marxism Has Corrupted America
There is indeed a reason why this tragic disintegration of American life’s value has swept over the country this past century. It is called “Cultural Marxism.” It is not the only reason why our culture is collapsing into decadence, but it is perhaps the most important reason.
Cultures are vast mosaics [i.e. assemblies of many different components into a composite whole] of human aspirations, loves, needs and fears played out within the context of their time, their geography, their natural wealth, and the vision of their most brilliant thinkers. There are always numerous factors that move a culture toward truth and high-minded freedom or toward fallacy and the dust bin of history. Usually, [however,] there are one or two reasons that are paramount while the others are secondary. In this case, the paramount reason is the deliberate ideology of “Cultural Marxism” that invaded our nation back in the 1930s.
What exactly is this horrific ideology that has brought our way of life to such a sorry denouement [i.e. outcome of a complex sequence of events], and how did it originate? That is what Jaeger’s film is all about; and he paints a riveting portrayal of a great country brought to ruin over an 80 year stretch by patiently sinister minds warped by a Mad Hatter’s view of reality.
In 2007, William S. Lind, a brilliant conservative thinker affiliated with the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, wrote an article titled, “Who Stole Our Culture?” In it he outlined what Cultural Marxism was all about, hammering home for the first time to Americans, in general, what Cultural Marxism had done to America. The article was a political/sociological tour de force because of the exceptional clarity with which Lind explained the ominous goals of the Cultural Marxist theoreticians beginning in the aftermath of World War I in Europe, followed by exportation of their agenda to America in the 1930s.
James Jaeger’s film duplicates the brilliance and lucidity of Lind, only with the visual imagery of film. It gives Americans a perceptive explanation as to why our nation is committing insidious [i.e. spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way] suicide under the guise of erecting the false ideal of social egalitarianism.
Americans are being dumbed down to a vulgarian’s existence with Orwell’s famous reversal of definitions (“Ignorance is Strength, Slavery is Freedom”) infecting everything in which we partake. Jaeger’s film exposes in spades this heartbreaking destruction of the Republic. The film’s power lies in its haunting imagery and conceptual resonance. Thus it offers a wonderful educational tool to spread the word to the populace about how and why we, as a people, are so apathetically condoning enslavement and decadence.
Our most treasured values have been turned upside down in a diabolical [i.e. showing the cunning or ingenuity or wickedness typical of a devil], “behind-the-curtain,” Marxist orchestration that has taken over our schools, churches, movies, publishers and media in the way gangrene spreads its pustules up the length of a man’s legs to invade his body’s core where the lungs and heart reside.
Cultural Marxism Has Spread Throughout America
Philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in his 1955 book, “Eros and Civilization”, promised a new paradise for man when all the trappings of capitalism and traditionalism had been rooted out of society… and then in 1964 came his next book, “One-Dimensional Man”, which led to the New Left Hippie revolution of the 1960s. The famous Chicago Seven protesters in 1968 (Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, et al), along with radical feminist Angela Davis, were greatly influenced by the vitriol [i.e. abusive or venomous language used to express blame or censure or bitter deep-seated ill will] toward American capitalism found in Marcuse’s “One-DimensionalMan”. Yale professor Charles Reich’s “The Greening of America” in 1970 extended the New Left revolt. Earlier lethal contributions, such as Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality” (1950) and Eric Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom” (1941) continued to further seduce Americans into believing that everything they had formerly held to be true about life, morality and justice was terribly wrong.
Herbert Marcuse heaped malevolent diatribes [i.e. verbal attacks] relentlessly upon the youth of the 1960s complaining bitterly that:
“The West is guilty of genocidal crimes against every civilization and culture it has encountered. American and western civilization are the world’s greatest repositories of:
– racism [i.e. the discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race and the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races],
– sexism [i.e. discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of the opposite sex],
– nativism [i.e. the philosophical doctrine that some ideas are innate],
– xenophobia [i.e. the irrational fear of foreigners or strangers],
– anti-Semitism [i.e. the intense dislike for and prejudice against Jewish people],
– fascism [i.e. the political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government], and
– narcissism [i.e. the exceptional interest in and admiration for oneself] and, as such, American society is oppressive, evil, and undeserving of loyalty.”
George Lukacs announced to gullible minds everywhere: “I see the revolution and destruction of society as the only solution. A world-wide overturning of values cannot take place without annihilation of the old values and a creation of new ones.”
Did all this “critical devastation” come about conspiratorially? In a sense, yes, because it was behind-the-curtain so to speak. It was orchestrated from a small but fervent coterie of revolutionaries that lived in the thinker / writer world, the world of the Ivory Tower. It was not precisely (or truly) conspiratorial, however, because the term “conspiracy” means something secret and illegal; and the revolutionary goals of the Cultural Marxists were not exactly secret. They openly published books that furthered their goals. Yet their goals of destruction were secret in the sense that they were not divulged in full to the reading audience that flocked to their books. Were their goals illegal? Not in the sense of official law in the courts of mankind, but such goals were certainly illicit in the sense of natural law fashioned by Nature’s God and decipherable by reason. So I think it is fair to say that the advocates of Cultural Marxism were engaging conspiratorially, just not the kind of conspiracy that prosecutors challenge in a courtroom.
Marxism Became User Friendly – and Triumphed
The end result of all this is that from 1920 to 1960, the revolution of Karl Marx was thoroughly redesigned and re-launched. As Jaeger’s film puts it, the Frankfurt School revolutionaries have given us “user friendly Marxism” instead of the draconian Gulag version of the USSR. This new user friendly version took over the intellectual youth of the 1960s and turned them upside down value-wise. These intellectuals now control and administer our schools, media, courts, and legislatures. The cultural Marxists adopted Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values,” in which the Mad Hatter’s world is instituted. Everything that previously was an evil now becomes a virtue while all the old virtues become evils. Individualism, self-reliance, property, profit, family, traditional marriage, fidelity to spouse, strength of will, personal honor, rising through merit — all these integral pillars of our civilization become distinctive evils that oppress us as humans. They must be rooted out of our existence.
This was the purpose of the ideology of Cultural Marxism — to root out the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian civilization and the splendid Camelot of Freedom it had created in America from 1776 to 1913. What is horrifying is that it has been triumphant. Marx has not buried us in an economic sense as Khrushchev boasted he would; but Marx has buried us in a cultural sense. James Jaeger’s film demonstrates this in lucid fashion that is at once fascinating and abhorrent.
Can the Founding Fathers’ Vision Of America be Resurrected?
Can the traditional, American vision that the Founding Fathers forged from the works of Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, and Jefferson be saved? If it is to be saved, a very valuable tool for such salvation will be this elucidative [i.e. clearly set forth] film. It is a marvelous instrument to put into the hands of a teenager just entering college, or to show to apathetic neighbors who just can’t seem to understand why modernity is in such shambles. It is the kind of film that shakes one up. It sends lightning bolts of insight into the viewer’s mind.
The struggle patriots now face is titanic. It will require a Herculean effort to win, and the struggle is not relegated solely to Americans. All those throughout the West who love freedom and the resplendent values upon which it stands are inescapably drawn into this conflict whether they realize it or not.
Conclusion
We are, all of us, confronted with a dreadful future because of the immense evil and falsity of past thinkers such as Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and Lukacs. The only alternative to engaging their progeny in battle is to let these destroyers of our culture win by default — which is utterly unacceptable. “Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America” is a powerful arrow in the quiver of liberty. It needs to be viewed by patriots everywhere and then shared with friends and neighbors throughout one’s circle of influence.
*http://thedailybell.com/1240/Nelson-Hultberg-Cultural-Marxism-The-Corruption-of-America.html