By: Zlata Krašovec
Imagine a lab mouse which – after somehow managing to survive the experiments that have been performed on it for practically its entire life – gets its hands on the exact plan of a gruesome experiment. All of a sudden, everything that happened to it and that it saw, heard, and felt to a great extent, but understood almost nothing at all, gets a meaningful framework. All of a sudden, the manipulation of which it was a victim becomes comprehensible. And not only it, but millions and billions like it around the world. I felt exactly like this lab mouse when I was reading the book Forum São Paolo and the Culture War a few days ago.
Born a few years after World War II, I believed for a long time that I lived in the best of all possible social arrangements. A lot of time passed before I discovered how crooked this supposedly just society was, how bloody its foundations were, and how many innocent lives the revolution claimed. The discovery was shocking, the resentment was great. Nevertheless, I believed that outside of our (Yugo) Slovenian hypocrisy and outside the world behind the Iron Curtain, life in general can be different, less complicated. The fruit of the delusion born from this half-knowledge was the illusion that most of what came from the West was fairer, more advanced…
… and so, I have found myself in the middle of a great social experiment called cultural Marxism. At the Faculty of Sociology, Political Science, and Journalism of the University of Ljubljana, where I went after graduation – I do not know why – the father of cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, was on the menu practically every day (besides Marx and Engels, of course). We were no less regularly served the ideas of representatives of the Frankfurt School. I remember that the study plan was drawn up consistently enough and it was difficult to see holes in the network of ideas. On top of that, for a young person, most of the texts we read were attractively written. It was tempting, unaware of the consequences, to think about slogans such as “make love not war” (Marxist pacifism), “free love” (sexual revolution), or “it is forbidden to forbid” (a system when suddenly everything is “allowed”). A young person does not think that the disarmament of the legal and controlled armed forces only means that the weapons are carried only by those who get them on the black market and are not under any control. And that we should not really want such a situation, because the consequences are terrifying. When values are attacked, only those who destroy them are armed. A young person does not think that love, “liberated” by adulthood, marriage, childbearing, turns into the bare satisfaction of fleeting desires and is thus robbed of meaning and depth. Until he strikes himself, the young person does not even think that allowing everything – even what has been considered evil for thousands of years of human history – is actually dangerous. And he thinks even less about the fact that the slogan “everything is allowed” does not really apply to him. Unless, of course, he joins a gang of tradition breakers based on God’s or the natural order of things. Everything is allowed only to a gang that systematically spreads all kinds of anti-values in order to (as the aforementioned book beautifully describes) turn people into a degraded mass that no longer distinguishes what is good and what is bad and is therefore completely subject to manipulation.
Look around you and you will see that this is exactly what is happening. Evildoers, criminals, manipulators, and exploiters have always existed. But they always knew in themselves that they were not doing the right thing. But if everything is allowed, everything can also be declared good, progressive, humane. And the degraded mass of their blinded helpers, who no longer distinguish between good and evil, loyally support them without a bad conscience. It does not ask for much in return for this support. A modest “heel, lie down, sit, good boy” is enough.
The project of cultural Marxism has apparently succeeded to a large extent not only around us, but everywhere. If it seemed that there was still some other world in the area of the Iron Curtain, cultural Marxism has infected practically all the countries of the world. However, it could not subdue all people. Some managed to escape the disastrous brainwashing. Of course, that is why they are declared backward, fools, lowlifes, fascists or Janšists – in short, second-class. The good thing about the whole thing is that this second-class status is freely chosen. Most defenders of the natural or divine order could just as well howl with the wind and earn themselves a cookie from time to time. But many people do not succumb to this temptation, and that is why there remains yeast and salt, which will one day leaven this sticky slurry.
Will they really? Alejandro Peña Esclusa, author of the book Culture War, cites the thought of the Chinese philosopher and strategist Sun Tzu, who says that the most important thing is to defeat the opponent mentally, which means instilling in his ranks a sense of defeat before the battle even begins. Does it not seem that this tradition has already been defeated? Has cultural Marxism on a global level not already crept into every pore of life? Can its well-organised and suspiciously financed march through institutions, its shameless perversion of the meaning of words and the mental occupation of the degraded masses even be stopped? If we could still look towards the West from behind the Iron Curtain, now the disaster is global.
And yet! Did David not defeat Goliath? We just have to recognise the David in us. Then everything is possible. Even with a slingshot.