Many of our readers are undoubtedly familiar with the terms multiculturalism and Critical Race Theory, but it is likely that far fewer know the names or history behind those revolutionary ideologies which in recent decades have upended Western society – names such as Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School. Their story is that of the 1917 Communist Revolution (plotted and financed in the West) brought home to roost in the United States.
Karl Marx described Communism as the inevitable end-point of historical development. The Proletariat working class, he said, must sooner or later become so infuriated at being used and abused by the privileged Bourgeoisie that they will rise up in spontaneous revolutions to overthrow capitalism. Thus, in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, it was widely believed that similar proletarian revolutions would sweep through Europe and North America. But they did not, and the only two attempts at starting such revolutions in the West – in Munich (the Bavarian Soviet Republic, 1918-1919) and Budapest (the Hungarian Soviet Republic, 1919) – were each extinguished within months.
George Lukacs – Lessons Learned in Hungary
Why this was so, was of intense interest to the Communist International. A Hungarian Communist named Georg Lukacs believed that he had the answer. As one of the Commissars of Culture in the short-lived Hungarian revolution, he had gone head to head with – and in the end, been utterly routed by – the indomitable faith of Hungarian Catholics. In fact, modern historians attribute the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic to Lukacs’ imposition of the basest immorality (including radical sex education in the schools, liberal divorce laws, and easy access to contraceptives) in public policy, eliciting such general disgust from that truly Catholic population that the revolutionaries lost all hold on governmental powers. Lukacs had put his faith in a heavy-handed use of the firing squad, and found it entirely inadequate to overcome a population animated with true Christian faith.
Communism took hold in Russia, Lukacs realized, because that nation was dominated by a peculiar corruption of Christianity typified by the pathological characters in the works of his favorite author, Dostoyevsky – people alienated from God in a world which they believed to have been abandoned by Him; a population which was mindful of the community’s destiny rather than that of their own soul. For such people, as Dostoyevsky powerfully depicted, the notion of crime had lost all meaning. Having once accepted the fact of his alienation from God, a man will view any act in the service of the “destiny of the community” as justified. In other words, whatever serves the interests of an “oppressed” group is deemed moral. Such a mindset was necessary, Lukacs believed, to unleash “the diabolic forces lurking in all violence” on which a successful (as he termed it, “demonic”) revolution would depend.
But much to the contrary, as Lukacs realized, the influence of Christianity upon the Western world had been to emphasize every individual’s uniqueness and sacredness. The prevailing belief among Western nations was that each of us can have a direct relationship with God, and that through the exercise of reason we can know His Will and discern good from evil. Using our reason, then, we can work toward the Good by exercising our divinely appointed dominion over nature to overcome the problems we face, both as individuals and as a society.
Lukacs believed that until this underlying Christian worldview was destroyed among Western populations, they would never fall into the state of hopelessness and alienation needed to make them ripe for revolution. Western Christianity itself, then, was the obstacle to Communist expansion, and destroying it must be the Communist International’s first order of business.
Antonio Gramsci – Lessons Learned in Italy
Meanwhile, another sordid figure, Antonio Gramsci, had separately come to very similar conclusions. Gramsci had been a founding member and leader of the Italian Communist Party, but was imprisoned for life in 1926. During those latter years of his life, like a diabolic inversion of St. Paul, he became the leading light of the Marxist world, writing thousands of pages of historical analysis in his Prison Notebooks pointing the way to a Communist new world order – not, however, through a purely Marxist overthrow but rather through a neo-Marxist strategy of subversion and co-option of existing institutions.
The difference was significant. The Bolsheviks did not simply take over the existing structures of Russian society in 1917. Nor was that the way of the Communists who seized control of Eastern Europe after World War II. The strictly Marxist modus operandi was to destroy existing institutions and replace them with new ones of the Communists’ own making. Gramsci’s method of co-opting existing institutions (including government offices and the armed forces) would leave much of a targeted population unaware that they were falling to Communism.
Another difference was that Marx had spoken of oppression only in economic terms. To the economically oppressed serfs whom Marx relied upon to revolt against their privileged oppressors, Gramsci added other marginalized groups – namely women, racial minorities, and criminals. Their oppression, he argued, was hegemonic – hidden beneath the West’s dominant value system. These groups had rarely demonstrated rebelliousness toward their oppressors because they accepted the system of values held by their oppressors. The predominance of Christian beliefs in the West convinced them to consent to their marginalization.
The first step toward moving these people to revolt, Gramsci wrote, must be to delegitimize in their minds the belief-systems of the Christian West. And since these belief-related values permeate every aspect of society – government, courts, political parties, schools and universities, churches, corporations, work places, entertainment and informational media, art, literature, science, history: in a word, every institution including, above all, the traditional family – these must all be made into battlegrounds in a war for a new system of values favoring the oppressed groups.
This battle, as mentioned above, would not be an uprising such as Marx envisioned. Instead, it would be like the 6000-mile “Long March” of the Chinese Communist army which brought Mao Zedong to undisputed leadership of the Communist Party in China in 1935. By making a long march through the cultural institutions of the West in a systematic trek of infiltration and subversion, Communist ideology could lead the oppressed groups within Western populations to reject the intellectual and moral tenets of the old order, unmasking the West’s Christian worldviews as instruments of domination, and thereby converting the “structure of repression into one of rebellion and social reconstruction.”
Together, Gramsci’s vision and Lukacs’ tactics for societal subversion would prove to be a very potent combination.
Origin and Intent of the Frankfurt School
After the counter-revolution which unseated the Soviet regime in Budapest, Lukacs fled his native Hungary. Going first to the Soviet Union, he was soon (in 1922) secreted into Germany to head a psychological warfare operation against the West based out of Frankfurt. By 1923 he had gathered a small band of Marxist-leaning intellectuals and with them established an adjunct facility of Goethe University called the Institute for Social Research (I.S.R.) – an overtly Communist think-tank popularly known as the Frankfurt School.
Hitler banned the Institute in 1933, so in the following year (after a brief respite elsewhere) it was relocated to New York City as part of Columbia University. There, for almost twenty years, it was allowed to inject neo-Marxist ideology directly into U.S. academia and cultural life until it returned to Germany in 1951.
The objective of the Frankfurt School was to pave the way for a socialist revolution in the West by de-Christianizing it – that is, by destroying its traditional culture, perverting its present cultural forms to such an extent that they will engender a “new barbarism.” The intellectuals who gathered for this purpose in and around the Institute had a variety of backgrounds and ideas about how to go about this task. Some were outright Communists. Others were mere socialists, not Party members. Others were simply radicals – Zionists, Freudian psychologists, even satanists.
The Institute’s philosophy was thus a nightmarish collection of errors and deviancy rendered into popularized forms such as Critical Theory which would be attractive to college students. (Critical Theory is of course not a scientific theory at all, but merely rhetoric aimed at discrediting whatever social institution it turns its gaze on.) Lukacs himself contributed much to the Institute’s program, particularly in his expertise of tactics for “cultural terrorism” and the undermining of sexual morality. Gramsci’s idea of a Long March through the institutions was adopted, and Herbert Marcuse, a thoroughly perverse German–American philosopher, expanded Gramsci’s new proletariat of women, criminals, and racial minorities to include also homosexuals and “transsexuals.” Other members contributed various aspects of Freudian theories and techniques for psychological conditioning. The end product of this diabolic amalgamation aimed at destroying the Christian West has become the enduring hallmark of neo-Marxism: “Cultural Marxism,” or as it is now commonly called in the West, multiculturalism.
Inroads into Education, Arts, and Media
Chief among all the institutions of Western society to be co-opted, because it offered the most direct path to capturing all the others, was the public education system. Nowhere was Cultural Marxism’s strategy of subverting institutions into agents of revolutionary change more dramatically successful than in the schools. The steady indoctrination of college students in Marxist ideology quickly produced a whole generation of educators in America’s elementary and secondary classrooms intent on passing that ideology on to their own students.
In 1950, the “authoritarian personality” was added to the Frankfurt School’s list of institutions to be overthrown. Racism and fascism, it was said, are endemic to traditional American culture – particularly its Christianity, capitalism, and the traditional family. Such a poisoned culture, then, can naturally only produce minds prone to racism and fascism. Therefore, anyone who upholds traditional moral values or institutions is seen by that fact to be both racist and fascist, and children raised by traditional-minded parents are virtually certain to become racist and fascist as well. Everyone raised in the traditions of religion, patriotism, family values, free markets, and gun ownership must be recognized as an oppressor in need of psychological cleansing from his unconscious biases. Soon, too, as a logical sequitur of “white privilege” and “white guilt,” Christianity itself was deemed by the Institute to be the ultimate source of all antisemitism.
We see the deep-rooted effects of these doctrines all around us today. Adherence to the notion of universal truth is seen as patent evidence of authoritarianism. Even the most basic self-evident truths are decried as white narratives to keep other races in subjection. The male instinct to protect women is “patriarchy” and “paternalism.” The desire to form a traditional family is “heteronormativity.” To show appreciation for the West’s cultural achievements is the foulest expression of “white supremacy.”
By the early 1960’s, sociology had become the most popular course of studies in American universities, and waves of student protests were becoming the norm. In our own day, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, our campuses make up the largest body of Communist propaganda sources in the world, overflowing with political correctness and narcissistic grievance studies. Not surprisingly, graduates who leave the universities with one of these worthless and useless degrees – in Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Queer Studies, etc. – find themselves ill-fitted for the job market. Being also saddled with unmanageable amounts of debt, they are then naturally more than ever inclined toward leftist movements aimed toward destroying American society.
The arts were an even easier target for the Institute’s tactic of subversion and transformation through infiltration. Revulsive, nonsensical modern paintings and sculptures come easily to mind as examples of the Institute’s success, but every field – music, literature and drama, architecture, etc. – was affected. The classics began to be abandoned in favor of the alienated writings of modern Black and feminist authors. Atonality and dissonance became the norms in modern music. Artists began to depict objects as a drug user would fixate upon them, as isolated and disintegrated wonders, producing isolated feelings in the viewer. Playwrights sought to create an “estrangement effect” in drama, causing the audience to come away feeling demoralized and aimlessly angry. All these steps toward exalting ugliness served the Institute’s goal of making the arts alienating rather than, as their true purpose would have them be, uplifting. Modern art’s purpose as a neo-Marxist tool is precisely to destroy that uplifting potential of true art by concentrating on brutality, driving men down to the level of beasts and causing them to feel bereft of their connection to God.
Throughout the 1960’s, the Frankfurt School’s phenomenal success in producing the desired cultural transformation was increasingly apparent throughout the United States – most dramatically, perhaps, in the multiform manifestations of the civil rights movement,[i] the sexual revolution, and the drug-fueled hippie movement of that era, but also in many subtle conquests which the majority of Americans did not even recognize as Marxist inroads. The most significant of these may have been capturing radio and television as instruments for social control.
Subverting Media and Technology
At the time of the First World War, there were only about 100,000 radio receiver sets in the entire United States. Within twenty years, however, radio had progressed from being just a toy for hobbyists to being the most popular form of entertainment. In 1937, 28 million families (out of a total 32 million in the country’s population) had a set – a greater percentage than those having indoor plumbing. In that same year, the Rockefeller Foundation launched the first-ever research project to study the social effects of this new form of mass media, headquartered at Princeton University but enlisting a whole network of other universities. Popularly known as “the Radio Project,” it functioned basically as an arm of the Frankfurt School. Its director was a long-time collaborator of the Institute, as were other of its chief members, and its activities were centered on testing the Institute’s theories about the effect which mass media could have in brainwashing a population, especially toward increasing their sense of alienation.
In his pivotal essay on Cultural Marxism, “The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness,’” Michael Minnicino (†2023) wrote of the Institute’s reach in mass media and many other aspects of America’s drift into the arms of Communism, including at the governmental level, and what is at stake for all of us:
“The entire development of television and advertising in the 1950’s and 1960’s was pioneered by men and women who were trained in the Frankfurt School’s techniques of mass alienation. …
“The technique of mass media and advertising developed by the Frankfurt School now effectively controls American political campaigning. Campaigns are no longer based on political programs, but actually on alienation. Petty gripes and irrational fears are identified by psychoanalytic survey, to be transmogrified into ‘issues’ to be catered to… Issues that will determine the future of our civilization are scrupulously reduced to photo opportunities and audio bites … where the dramatic effect is maximized, and the idea content is zero. …
“Part of the influence of the authoritarian personality hoax in our own day also derives from the fact that, incredibly, the Frankfurt School and its theories were officially accepted by the U.S. government during World War II, and these Cominternists [i.e., members of the Communist International] were responsible for determining who were America’s wartime, and postwar, enemies. … America had, to an incredible extent, handed the determination of who were the nation’s enemies, over to the nation’s own worst enemies. …
“The principles through which Western Judeo-Christian civilization was built, are now no longer dominant in our society; they exist only as a kind of underground resistance movement. If that resistance is ultimately submerged, then the civilization will not survive – and, in our era of incurable pandemic disease and nuclear weapons, the collapse of Western civilization will very likely take the rest of the world with it to Hell.”
Our Present, the Endgame of Gramsci’s Long March
Frederich Engels described that hell on earth in prescient language, as if to expand on Our Lady’s own warning of the annihilation of nations and a general martyrdom of the faithful. He wrote,
“All the…large and small nationalities are destined to perish…in the revolutionary world storm…. [A general war will] wipe out all…nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only reactionary classes…but… reactionary peoples.” (“The Magyar Struggle,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Jan. 13, 1849)
We see that very “hell” taking shape all around us today. A regime of consciously fostered ugliness pervades our daily lives, from our architecture to our clothing. The present generation is unable to cognitively transmit to the next generation the values upon which Western civilization was achieved. We suffer under a tyranny of political correctness which jails anyone who refuses to affirm the current madness of “abortion rights” or “gender fluidity”. A shameless double standard favoring all manner of error and vice pervades our society. (This is a tactic which Marcuse called “repressive toleration” – “tolerance for movements from the left, but intolerance for movements from the right.”)
Who has not felt the climate of fear and atomizing disorientation produced by constant apocalyptic threats (of war, pandemic, economic collapse, “global warming,” etc.)? “Group rights” (e.g., “gay rights,” “migrant rights”) now trample actual individual rights. Such an insane inversion of the rule of law (traditionally understood as equality of individual opportunity) creates group-based “equality of results” instead of honest, fair, and productive merit-based results. And we all see this “hell” being formed by rampant drug dependence openly or covertly facilitated by the U.S. government and health practitioners, even in school-age children.
(Remember that hallucinogenic drugs instantly bring about the alienated state of mind sought by the Frankfurt School’s tactics. In vast numbers of our population, the use of drugs alone is effectively bringing about that desired psychological conditioning.)
Parents are dragged out of school board meetings under arrest for objecting to sex education materials which in the meantime are turning our nation’s youth into sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths. Our children are trained by their values-neutral education to rebel against all authority and to reject Christian morality. No voice of reason is tolerated in either public or private spheres in the face of any aspect of Cultural Marxism’s agenda, which is armed with judicially-powered enforcers, from local police forces to the ACLU.
The well-known defecting KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov, described the process of ideological subversion which Communism has employed against the West since the Soviet-era. Its goal, he said, was “to change the perception of reality of every American so that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.” The first step in this large-scale brainwashing operation which he described was Demoralization, in which people are persuaded to lose faith in their culture and its institutions, and to see their society as so flawed that it is not worth fighting for.
The present state of American society not only confirms that this process of demoralization is well-nigh complete, but even gives new meaning to Bezmenov’s expression, “to change the perception of reality.” Rational thought and moral reasoning have been in complete freefall since the 1960’s. By reports, it appears that most people today reject the very idea of absolute truth and consider reality itself to be fluid. Including their own gender.
According to Bezmenov, there are just two remaining steps on the way toward Normalization of an American Communist state: first, the Destabilization of society to the extent that the population loses its sense of reliance that things will be the same from one day to the next; and then a brief period of manufactured large-scale Crisis, about which “something must be done.”
What is done then will be the death of everything that all previous generations of Christians have strived for toward building the Kingdom of God on earth.
ENDNOTE:
[i] For more on this topic, see Chapter 9 “New American Founding: The Untold Story of Civil Rights and Cultural Marxism” in the book Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, Skyhorse Publishing, New York, NY, 2024.
Read more about how the ‘errors of Russia’ have spread across the world in the 133rd Issue of The Fatima Crusader (Fall 2024), Communism: An Error of Russia.