The Origins and Ideological Function of Cultural Marxism

Salon, 2019

Leaderless resistance strategy, Scaminaci said, "posits that the federal government or an occupational government is the threat,” while “autonomous, anonymous cells form and magically — at the right time — carry out uncoordinated attacks.” But magic is not a strategic plan, so Lind and his mentor, John Boyd, had a fix in mind. “The strategic situation today is completely the opposite," Scaminaci observed. "The federal government is controlled by a president ideologically closest to the Patriot militias and the white nationalists. Trump has been dismantling the intelligence elements that would monitor the white nationalists. He has demonstrated his complete willingness to delegitimize the FBI, CIA and to a lesser extent DHS." In Scaminaci's view, we are not seeing "leaderless resistance" but something considerably more dangerous: "scripted violence," dictated from above with just enough plausible deniability. “The mass killers now are taking cues from Trump, from Fox News and from their own message boards," Scaminaci said. "If they are relying upon previous manifestos and memes, how deeply do we think they have thought this through?” “Cultural Marxism,” in other words, is an important piece of the puzzle behind right-wing terrorism, but not the whole thing. Understanding what this term means and where it came from illustrates what form anti-Semitism has taken in our time, and how it no longer threatens only Jews, but all of democracy.

Salon, 2018

Simply put, Lind developed and promoted the “cultural Marxism” myth as a framework for rationalizing the white nationalists’ enemies list, while separating it at least a little from the legacy of Nazism and related ideologies. Immigrants top that list today, just as Muslims did after 9/11. But Jews remain forever at the center — even when Lind incoherently frames his imagined conspiracy as an attack on “our Judeo-Christian culture.” As noted above, Lind's vision of 4GW eliminates a host of previous distinctions, including those between civilians and combatants, and between immigrants who are fleeing violence and invaders who are spreading it. However, 4GW plays in different ways to different audiences, Scaminaci explains: BQ In scholarly works examining Lind's 1989 article, scholars almost deliberately ignore his 1994 Gazette article in which Lind claimed that President Clinton and the Democrats (though not by name) were waging war against our "Judeo-Christian" values and culture because "cultural radicals" had pushed "cultural Marxism" in favor of "cultural fragmentation." As useful as his 1989 article has been in the fields of terrorism and national security strategy, his 1994 article was political in intent. The intent was to delegitimize, without naming anyone, President Clinton, the Democratic Party, liberalism, and secularism. 4GW is as much a guiding strategy of the Christian right as it is also a useful tool for understanding the Christian right's assault on secular, multicultural America. EQ

2018

In the colossal manifesto Anders Behring Breivik ! wrote before killing sixty-plus members of a Norwegian social-democratic youth organization in 2011, "Cultural Marxists" are a prominent category of "traitors". It is due to the Quisling-esque sellout to the enemy by this overrepresented elite that Europe is now threatened by a genocidal Islamic Jihad, to be perpetrated by the millions of Muslims who immigrated into European countries-so it reads. Consequently, they deserve the death penalty, and Breivik executed more than sixty of them. Cultural Marxism: the monster Admittedly, Breivik was an eccentric and a freak even by the standards of ultra-radical European nationalists. But the logic of his ideological constructions is more widely shared and features as a template for fractions of the New Right in Europe and beyond. And the phrase "Cultural Marxism", still rather marginal in 2011, has in the meantime become a stock term ! in political debate and in neoconservative writings, and it has precisely the meaning it had in Breivik's manifesto. In the words of an American organization called "Western Mastery", "Cultural Marxism has become the cultural branch of globalism. The enormous impact of this ideology on Western culture cannot be understated. It has effectively demolished societal structures and propagated cultural perversion. It has created a society that is racially mixed but extremely politically divided, sexually promiscuous, abrasive, hedonistic, and flat-out bizarre. " So: what is this monster? And why has it become such an enemy of the Right? Silly old Marcuse When Cultural Marxism is described in such writings (and Breivik's manifesto can serve as an example once more), fingers are pointed in two directions: to Antonio Gramsci !and to the Frankfurt School. While Gramsci's role is somewhat ambivalent-he is implicitly hailed as the inventor of metapolitics, and his strategies have been widely adopted in conservative and New Right politics-the Frankfurt School is usually presented as guilty of a long list C O L U M N J a n B l o m m a e r t 0 1 / 1 1 / 2 0 1 8

This chapter looks at the hoax forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as a quintessential example of a common form of conspiracy theory, and illustrates the underlying paradigm of conspiracist analysis. It shows how the named scapegoats and feared outcomes are interchangeable, while diverse conspiracy theories retain the same basic set of dualistic apocalyptic frames linked to narratives of demonized scapegoating. In this way, the Protocols serve as an archetype and generator of analogs in which sometimes Jews are scapegoated as the puppet masters of the vast conspiracy and in other historic moments different targets are identified. Contemporary mentions of the Protocols that appear in four genres are reviewed. There is also an overview of four contemporary social movements or subcultures in which the basic allegations found in the Protocols are used to denounce alleged conspiracies. There is an explanation of how a series of trigger events beginning in the 1980s created a sense of apocalyptic urgency, which facilitated a surge of conspiracy thinking in the United Sense and helped spread specific targets and allegations across political boundaries. The conclusion is that there is a need to teach how conspiracy theories undermine democratic civil society; and that the Protocols need to be a central part of any such curriculum.

CONSPIRATORIAL MIND AND SOCIAL IMAGINATION, 2017

RESEARCH FOR THE 21ST CENTURY This article starts from the observation that research on conspiracy theories is currently thriving, but that it is also fragmented. In particular there is an increasing divide between disciplines with culturalist and qualitative approaches, such as history, cultural studies and ethnology, and disciplines with quantitative and empirical approaches, such as psychology and political science. The article argues that this 'great divide' has to be bridged for research to arrive at a genuine understanding of conspiracy theories. As a fi rst step in such a bridgebuilding process, the article engages, from the vantage point of (American) cultural studies, with research done on the other side of the divide, namely in psychology and political science. It summarizes the work done in these fi elds and evaluates it critically, concentrating on methodology; the assumptions about the dysfunctionality of conspiracy beliefs; the circularity of some arguments; the focus on individual rather than social and collective aspects; the lack of engagement with the defi nition of the phenomenon; and the neglect of cultural and historical difference. The article ends with recommendations for future collaborative research projects.

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2020

As a conspiracy promoted by the far-right, Cultural Marxism has gained ground over the past quarter century. In its dominant iteration, the US-originating conspiracy holds that a small group of Marxist critical theorists have conspired to destroy Western civilisation by taking over key cultural institutions. Yet what does such a conspiracy look like in a transnational context – and how are such conspiracy theories adapted for local use? In this article, we trace Cultural Marxism’s use and function in Australia’s recent culture wars, asking when, where and in what contexts the conspiracy is invoked in the Australian political and media landscape. Our analysis examines the ways in which Cultural Marxism has moved from the ‘fringe’ to the ‘mainstream’, revealing the porous nature of divisions on the contemporary Australian right as well as differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ right. We pay particular attention to the localised use of the conspiracy in the ‘Safe Schools’ controversy of 2016–2017, whereby Cultural Marxist tropes were imbued with local concerns about sexuality and gender issues. The article provides an important illustration and analysis of the ways in which transnational conspiracy theories and tropes of the far-right can be translated, adapted and used in different national contexts.

EuroVisie. A Publication of the Study Association for European Studies, 2017

It is striking that many of today’s conspiracy theories under the umbrella of “cultural Marxism” attribute imagined conspiracy theories retroactively to conservative or even reactionary organisations, groups and individuals of the past. People that actually strived for reform in order to preserve: preserve the market economy, preserve European colonial domination, preserve Christianity, preserve family values, preserve the rural areas, etc. At first sight, many of these “conservative reformers” could be regarded as kindred spirits to the sympathisers of the Alt-Right movement.

Confronting Antisemitism in Modern Media, the Legal and Political Worlds

Current conspiracy narrativesinitiallyappeartoexhibit no connection with antisemitism. "1%,""Vaccination-lie,""Chemtrails," or the "Flat Earth Conspiracy" do not overtlyinvoke the "Jewish World Conspiracy." This studyfocusses on the relation between antisemitism and conspiracy ideologies under the premise of "detour-communication." The first part demonstrates that antisemitism and conspiracy ideologies share common structures and functions, which impedeaclear distinction. This distinctioni sf urther complicated by "detour-communication": An implicit wayt oe xpress antisemitic statements via codes and ciphers after the Holocaust since overt and explicit expressions of antisemitism weretabooed in Western states.T he second part focuses on the historicald ynamics of the "JewishW orld Conspiracy" myth from Christian medieval allegations to those of TheP rotocols of the Elderso fZ ion. In aq ualitative analysis of 200p osts from German conspiracy-ideological Facebook pages, this studyd emonstrates the ways in which antisemitic codes are used to direct non-antisemitice xpressions to the myth of the "Jewish World Conspiracy." Therefore, this studyi llustratest hate lements of the Protocols are stillb eing used in conspiracy-ideological communications on the internet.

Traces how conspiracy theories are constantly reorganized by right-wing movements to meet current enemies