Just because you’re paranoid…

… doesn’t mean they aren’t after you

Regular readers will have noticed something of a political slant to the last three posts. What immediately triggered it was the realisation of a sudden shift in the position of the UK Baptist Union – representing probably the largest of the mainly Evangelical denominations in Britain. Only three years ago it issued a statement reaffirming the biblical view of marriage, and urging those dissenting ministers who were inclined to perform SSM to desist “for the peace of the body.” Now one of the two candidates for President is a gender-queer pansexual activist, pushing a theological position that gender itself is unchristian.

A second trigger was that a law is going through Parliament, if Parliament doesn’t implode first, to make homosexual and transgender sex education compulsory for primary school children. Even the NSPCC’s evidence of the confusion and harm this can cause children is crushed under the juggernaut of gender-identity affirmation ideology, so that the harm will be not just psychological, but physical – hormone treatment and surgery are rapidly becoming the western progressives’ Female Genital Mutilation, and for even more ideologically suspect reasons than that barbaric tradition.

As it happens, I’m writing a history of my Baptist church, which records how, in the first decade of the twentieth century, children at the village school were withdrawn by their parents from lessons taught by the local Anglican curate, one A. A. Slipper. This was because he insisted on teaching that Baptists go to hell. The Baptists, according to the account of one woman who experienced it, were so evangelistically successful locally, that there were more children withdrawn than there were in class.

But the chilling point is this – the Church of England School, in “authoritarian” Edwardian England, complied with parental wishes by providing alternative activities to the Baptist kids, whose freedom of religion was threatened. In our “liberal democracy,” parents are not only forbidden on threat of prosecution to withdraw their children, despite sound religious, moral, scientific and political objections, but are branded by the state as morally corrupt. This is, of course, according to the Newspeak moral categories I examined in a former post. It’s only a matter of time before such objections are grounds for children to be taken into state care.

What is sadder is that (even before legislation) the only parents courageous enough to withdraw their infants from such classes have been Muslims and Jews. In Birmingham, Muslims who went to the Bishop of Birmingham for support were turned away on the grounds that he stood, instead, for the gay community. Well, of course, in the identity-politics calculus, a generic “gay” and “trans” community out-victims actual Muslim non-whites, because of the trump-cards “straight” and “fascist.”

So I awoke from something of a long sleep, and realised that it’s probably too late to save Christianity or sanity in Britain or America, but at least I might do something to open the eyes of my local church. And maybe a few of you. So here’s a recap of my own relevant experience.

I went to Cambridge the year of the “Garden House riots,” which was the nearest Cambridge got to the Paris student riots. The New Left was clearly in charge of the Students Union in my time, because then (as now) they kept instituting Marxist policies and de-platforming in the name of “the student body,” which meant those who were enlisted automatically into the union, payment being deducted from university fees.

In my third year I took a break from medical science to study social psychology, with a curriculum controlled by leftists in the Social and Political Sciences faculty. This I knew through one supervisor (in a Piaget Group) who had been one of the organisers of the Garden House riots, but had since converted to a lively Pentecostal Christianity. Formerly his political aim had been to subvert the whole edifice of British culture.

Incidentally, after that radical period, a number of reformed and unreformed leftists have admitted that this was the whole aim and modus operandi of the New Marxism post-Paris.

In my psychology studies, there was a kind of foundation, almost like a Decalogue, in the form of the concept of the “authoritarian personality” formulated by Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School. In essence, though it was presented as science, this was the application of left ideology against Christian and traditional values. Looking at the list of “fascist” traits, I realised immediately that they mostly described me – and of course, that they were fully intended to do so, Christ being the ultimate ideological enemy. Quite clearly (as has been much discussed since), if belief in God, family, a structured society and so on can be successfully sold as symptoms of illness (and more than that, of a culpable illness, “fascism”), then Adorno’s utopian Marxism wins by default.

On that foundation was built a programme for the destruction of sexual and moral values by the likes of Reich and Marcuse (whose name was chanted by students on the Paris barricades in 1968). I had actually come across one of the Paris riot leaders, Danny Cohn-Bendit, before university, when he imported gangs of anarchist thugs and successfully disrupted and bankrupted the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. He, like many other New Leftists (including Foucault, Sartre, Derrida, and de Beauvoir) actively promoted paedophilia (and later denied he had meant it), and he is now a mainstream MEP and Green Party leader, and the recipient of all kinds of EU awards. Check out how his anti-authoritarianism plays out in practice here.

At the time I hated (and in my essays contested) the doctrines, but failed to realise that they were the background of a concerted programme to undermine the whole of society with these ideas, firstly through the universities, but through them into politics, journalism, primary and secondary education, social institutions, the arts and, of course, the churches where leaders could be seduced or made useful idiots by soft-talking propaganda and biased seminary training.

I shouldn’t have been blind, because subsequently at medical school (a far more conservative environment) I actually went to a few meetings of a newly-formed “student action” group, on the basis that a voice for sanity inside would be better than simply being falsely represented as I, and everyone else, had been at Cambridge. I rapidly found it was a waste of time: apart from me, the group already had its Marxist ideology sorted, and merely looked for how to implement it within the medical profession. Incidentally, some of those people are esteemed professors and leaders of the profession now: do they look back fondly on their mis-spent youth, I wonder, or is their ideology now just the Establishment norm?

Since then, within the history of this blog, I’ve done reading on the nature, and history, of propaganda in our society in Jacques Ellul and others. I’ve read Foucault (I don’t say I’ve understood him, because the post-modernist agenda works on obscure writing – only the ideology is clear). I’ve looked in more depth at the programme of the Frankfurt School and the Paris Left through in-depth writers like Roger Scruton. I’ve spoken to faithful Evangelicals struggling with the political machinations of the Anglican General Synod, and observed in videos how the deception actually works. And so on.

One useful shorthand for the whole programme to destroy western society and refashion it from the ground up on left-utopian grounds mainly, it seems, centred on sex of any and every kind – paedophilia is still bubbling below the surface in academic sociology – is “Cultural Marxism.”

Fast forward to today’s Independent newspaper (its “independence” actually shows the fulfilment of the Frankfurt School’s program, because success is when you have educated ordinary people to enforce your new norms, without even needing to manipulate them).

A Conservative MP, speaking in a Bruges Group meeting, spoke about the things I have been describing as the explanation for the increasingly repressive nature of much in our society. Which it clearly is, because the only other explanation is “coincidence.” Or perhaps malevolent demons.

The article describes how a bevy of left-leaning spokemen, from Anti-Racist groups, the Labour Party and even an anonymous spokesperson from the Board of Jewish Deputies, are cited in the article to say that the whole idea of “Cultural Marxism” is a far-right conspiracy theory, which is apparently proven by the fact that Anders Breivik, the lone-wolf Norwegian mass-murderer, used the term in his rambling manifesto.

Not only that, but it’s anti-semitic, the Frankfurt School having been largely formed of Jews (but then Marx was undoubtedly Jewish, and yet Soviet Marxism was undoubtedly anti-semitic, so what exactly is the point being made?).

So the impression intended by the piece is that the Frankfurt School was a semi-mythical outfit like the Illuminati, and “Cultural Marxism” an equally mythical, and deadly dangerous, fiction, like the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These protocols,  about a plot for Jewish world domination, were debunked in 1921, but were still taught to school children by the Nazis (a bit like the way “Columbus proved the church wrong” is still taught in our schools).

The Protocols are still taught as factual throughout the Islamic world (there are 9 Arabic translations!), which may be one reason that a leading mullah in New Zealand, speaking at an anti-racist rally after the Christchurch shootings, was able to elicit cheers from his audience for blaming the atrocity on a conspiracy of Mossad and local Jewish businesses … oh, you didn’t see that video? Despite the blanket news coverage?

The “news” in the Independent, then, is that this MP is not only gullible enough to believe in a moon-landing hoax, but is willingly or unwittingly promoting right-wing terror attacks on Jews (but, because Islam is a peaceful religion, is apparently not equally encouraging Islamist attacks on Jews). This being such an evil, the thrust of the article, reflected in its headline, is her condemnation and the call for her to retract or be sacked.

The most grimly amusing part was the shock-horror reaction of the leader of an anti-racist group, Joe Mulhall: “In fact, it’s worrying that a mainstream politician would even have heard of such a phrase [“Cultural Marxism”? “The Frankfurt School”?], which is usually championed by those on the extreme right.” Yeah, whatever: or maybe she’s just living in the real world.

Now, notice how the news is managed here: it would be good journalism to report that a politician blames a particular movement for particular problems, and to investigate whether that claim is true, including both those who think it is, and those who do not. But actually, the ideological presupposition of the piece is that she is a crypto-fascist peddling a myth, and the only voices heard in the piece are ideologically committed people calling for her to be silenced at all costs. And that, of course silences the reader, too, who might already have discovered the problem, as I did, in a lifetime of personal experience, of academic reading, and serious reflection on our times, but not wish to be a right-wing conspiracy theorist, both mad and bad.

There’s a postscript: a glance at Wikipedia on the Frankfurt School shows that the Indie is quite right, and that “Cultural Marxism” is indeed nothing but a far-right conspiracy theory. Except that a little research, not least on the “changes” page of Wikipedia’s article, shows there has been a flurry of activity from one or two people in the last day or so, changing the text, and then locking it. It seems that Wikipedia once had its own main article on “Cultural Marxism,” but it was taken down in the midst of an editing war.

Well that was a good thing, I guess – otherwise a Conservative MP might have read it and thought it explains why the world has suddenly woken up and found itself gender-queer.