By: Borut Korun
In the first half of the 20th century, Marxist sociologists began to plan the destruction of European civilisation. The goal was, of course, utopian: to change Europeans.
Theorists of social change have attributed the failures so far to the wrong methods of operation.
To transform European man
The Italian Marxist ideologue Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned in 1926, realised that the 1918 revolutions in Western Europe were not successful because people were ingrained in their civilisational environment and are unwilling to change it radically. Sooner or later, they return to the old, established way of living. To introduce a communist model of society, one should start with the foundations of civilisation. In the book Records from Prison, he put forward the thesis that people should first be deprived of their attachment to their nation, their country, their language, their family, and even change their sexual habits. When people become alienated from traditional European civilisation, they could be re-educated into something else, realise the communist ideal of a different society.
Thus began the last attempt to change European man and his civilisation and to realise utopian notions of a classless society. This new ideology has taken on European civilisation or European culture, which is why we also call it cultural Marxism. This has been successfully destroying Europe’s foundations for decades now.
The implementation of this plan was theoretically undertaken by a group of sociologists, representatives of the so-called Frankfurt School of Sociology, which established the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) in Frankfurt during the German Weimar Republic before the Second World War. It featured Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who headed the institute, Friedrich Pollock (1894–1970), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Leo Löwenthal (1900–1993), and Erich Fromm (1900–1980), and after the war they were joined by Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–1982), Jürgen Habermas (1929) and others. All members of the institute were members of the German Communist Party.
They began to tear down the foundations of Western society
The teachings of Frankfurt’s left-wing sociologists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts were cantered on a theory they called “Critical Theory”. Critical theory, of course, was no science at all. The purpose of any scientific critique is a critical shock, a critical assessment of a thesis or a scientific activity. The aim of criticism is to find possible errors or deviations in theory, to approach (scientific) truth. And from the very beginning, Frankfurt’s Critical Theory was aimed at tearing down the foundations of Western society. Its goal was not to get closer to the truth, but to change the subject of its research, to change society in the sense of cultural Marxism. So, it was a social teaching.
The work, co-written by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, is The Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung), the most important work of Critical Theory in which they attacked the Enlightenment.
Let me mention a study carried out by Frankfurt sociologists, which probably had a decisive influence on their further work. Following the American example, they conducted a survey with questionnaires. The questionnaires were intended to investigate the psychological structure of the working class and the substitutes, a group that Marx believed should bring about social change. Of course, they also asked about political orientations, educational practices, and the like:
The results of the poll unequivocally showed that workers, voters of the left parties, mostly did not have the expected character traits and “advanced” views. For the people of Frankfurt, this meant that the workers in Germany would not insist on their (left) political orientations when there were political aggravations, that for them (for Jews therefore) the situation was serious in the face of the German National Socialists and their anti-Semitism, and that there is need to prepare for departure to the US. (We would expect them to emigrate to the Soviet Union as communists.) They realised that they would not change society if, following Marx, they relied primarily on the working class, and that belonging to European civilisation and its norms, especially a sense of belonging to Christianity, was a major obstacle to the Marxist project of creating a new, different man. The realisation that European civilisation, with its Christian core, is their main adversary, led to a completely different Marxist strategy, so from then on, we no longer talk about Marxism, but about neo-Marxism, cultural Marxism, or neo-leftism. The people of Frankfurt found out what Gramsci had already written that it was necessary to “re-educate” another layer of society and no longer working class. The target group of re-education is no longer the proletariat, but young intellectuals. The content of learning is also different. From the political philosophy of the Frankfurt School derive its primarily educational and social demands. They are supposed to “liberate” the European man from the “yoke” of authoritarian structures, such as marriage, family, homeland, nation, or from the “yoke” of natural hierarchies, such as parental authority. As Hokheimer wrote, the bourgeois family was supposedly “the basis of fascism”. This is because upbringing in such a family is supposed to be based on authority. Instead of the universalist ethic of the Enlightenment, the ethics of the “liberated” individual supposedly came.
Changing society in the spirit of neo-Marxism
The neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School returned to Germany after the end of World War II along with the American victors. Their task was to implement a program of denazification and transformation of German youth, to prepare Germans for democracy. In fact, in the spirit of neo-Marxism, they changed the foundations of Western society. Their great success was based on the fact that they acted on a demoralised, post-World War II-exhausted and disappointed European population. Their students “marched through institutions”, got jobs in newspaper editorial offices, radio and television stations, taught at universities, entered the judiciary, in short, conquered the entire humanistic superstructure of society in both European countries and the United States. In all these institutions, they have had and still have a dominant influence on public opinion.
Neo-Marxism, this seemingly scientifically based ideology, but in fact a utopian pseudo-religion, has spread throughout Europe, the United States, Canada. The individual components of the destruction of European civilisation are: anti-authoritarianism, feminism, multiculturalism, the assertion of sexually deviant individuals, multi-gender theory, opposition to rationality, condemnation of “white man” civilisation, destruction of the family, permissive upbringing, opposition to the existence of nations and advocacy Europe, changing historical memory, tarnishing Europe’s past, idealising Islamic civilisation… An essential feature of this political religion is that it is extremely destructive, and its weapon is so-called political correctness.
The outbreak of this ideology, which supposedly lead to a revolution, was the “student uprising” in 1968. Fortunately, the working class, fed up with revolutionary promises, remained on the side-lines at the time. There has been no revolution, but after that year, Europe is rapidly changing for the worse.
It is almost superfluous to remark that cultural Marxism has permeated every pore of Slovene life. This destructive ideology is still nurtured and consolidated in many institutions: in the school system, in the written media, at the FDV, FF on the national RTV and elsewhere. Its consequences are also the mental confusion of civilisation and the physical disappearance of the Slovenian nation.