I WAS appalled at the level of naivete displayed by Pat Kane throughout his article on cultural Marxism (‘Cultural Marxists’ have become the demonic other of the alt-right ... and the indy movement can’t escape this war, March 30).
To choose just the most dubious part of it (difficult), his description of the aims and effects of the Frankfurt School of Communist intellectuals was so deceptively bland and smiling it could have been made up by Orwell.
After being rescued from the Nazis by America, these “philosophers” (philosophy is a discipline where you can twist reality any way you like) set out to destroy their rescuer and replace it with a wonderful North Korean-type “paradise”.
Their root motivation being religious, they believed they had not just the power but the right to give all of history the shape of a monolithic “righteousness”, sweeping away everything non-”righteous” (read: non-Communist), whether systems, societies or people, in its path.
Their successors’ activation of Gramsci’s “Long March [to Communism] through culture and the institutions” has given them millions of agents in the media, education, politics, social philosophy, and increasingly the law and even business, where they only had a few agitators before.
Kane’s language describing their new methodology took the phrase “useful dupe” to a new dimension. Societal norms are such because they’ve made people happy and secure. They’re not intellectual concepts to be challenged and changed in favour of supposedly better ones.
Pol Pot’s holocaust, the Gulag, and other contributors to up to 100 million murders of Marxist righteousness testify irrefutably to what happens when the personal is made political and human beings are reduced to political quantities that can be “adjusted”, in the speak of one Marxist I know.
Only one “critique” is allowed, that of family values, country “white supremacy” (an especially fake moral issue, one among many: you may as well talk of “black supremacy” in Zimbabwe or “yellow supremacy in Communist China), ie norms that preserve non-Communist people and culture.
Both are to be disposed of, together if necessary, using a shifting of the point where we apply moral discrimination so as to make only one “choice”, to take but one example, alienating us all from our real common humanity, a process now so close to being an improved norm that Oprah Winfrey can declare “white people must die” without being prosecuted for inciting Nazi-type genocide. (It’s a pity Mr Kane didn’t recognise parallels with Nazism here, along with others such as “the male is our misfortune”, “whiteness is criminality”, etc).
Any counter-critique, however valid in the real world, is shouted down in universities in a way reminiscent of book-burning by Nazi students who had their own “political correctness”, or discredited by blind journalistic apologists.
Their opponents and their targets must only be criminals. Any “extreme” reaction from an alt-right deprived of all mainstream means of articulating the AntiCom case was provoked by the left so that they could look sanctimonious about opposing those they’d manipulated into such “extreme” displays in the first place.
It’s sad to see the nationalist cause prostituted to a system only the insane would regard as morally superior. Are you sure you’ll be righteous enough to escape the Gulag when we get the revolution, Mr Kane?
Ian McQueen
Dumfries
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