Who's Afraid of 'Cultural Marxism'?
Miriam Cates was slammed for using the phrase "cultural marxism" but it accurately describes the project of left wing intellectuals in the 1960s and 70s... as well as their intellectual descendants.
Is the attempt to capture schools and other institutions by the LGBTQ+ lobby part of a wider Marxist conspiracy against Western culture?
The claim was made by Miriam Cates MP at the National Conservatism conference in London two weeks ago when she lambasted ‘cultural marxism’.
Cates was immediately denounced for using the phrase that critics claim has long been associated with anti-semitism. We’ll come to the alleged anti-semitism in a moment but first the C word. I’m allergic to the word conspiracy and generally try to avoid it. Most perceived ‘conspiracies’ tend to be cock-ups. I’ve friends, for example, who argue the lack of an arrest of Nicola Sturgeon is a sure sign of a massive conspiracy by SNP-friendly cops. Others, equally passionately, tell me the fact her garden was dug up is a sure sign…of a conspiracy by Union-friendly cops. Take your pick.
Whenever you feel a conspiracy theory nibbling at you like a fish pedicure it’s worth remembering that apophenia…the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things…was a term originally coined to describe the early stages of paranoid schizophrenia.
Yet, at the risk of sounding just a little …err…apophenic, what if ….there really IS a Marxist conspiracy and it is cultural in nature, rather than the boring old economic one we used to associate with Marxism? Why can’t we then call that ‘conspiracy’ -if it actually exists- ‘cultural Marxism’?
A good reason for, at least, treading warily was advanced in a powerful essay in the NY Times in 2018 by Yale Professor of History and Law, Samuel Moyn, who explored the use of the phrase by anti-semites in the 30s as well as more recently by the likes of Bolsanaro’s intellectual guru, Olavo de Carvalho, a man who frankly put the fruit into the fruit and nut. It also goes without saying that it should make us pause if a term has been championed by an actual terrorist, as ‘cultural Marxism’ was by Anders Brevik.
And yet.
Sometimes terms are used by our opponents that describe a phenomenon so perfectly we have little option but to use them. Take the loaded phrase, “US Imperialism”. Critics of the US from Al Qaeda to Putin never stop complaining about ‘US Imperialism’ which they say lies behind most major conflicts in the world, because America benefits ….allegedly….from “creating endless wars”. Yet …here’s that fulsome critic of the term ‘cultural Marxism’, none other than Samuel Moyn, from Yale using the same rhetoric as America’s dopiest critics.
It turns out sometimes terms are useful …even if our opponents use them as well.
So what of the origins of that term ‘cultural marxism’? The phrase appears to have been first used in 1992, in a long, rambling and frankly deeply…apophenic….essay entitled ‘A New Dark Age’ by Michael Minnicino in the journal of the Schiller Institute. Feel free to try and read it. I recommend loud music and some sort of mind-altering substance.
Minnicino was a devotee of a bonkers ex-Trotskyist who became an even more bonkers Far Right and spectacularly unsuccesful Presidential candidate and all-round conspiracy theorist, Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche claimed that Queen Elizabeth II was a global drug trafficker who was trying to assassinate him. He also claimed Jews had founded the Ku Klux Klan. Are you smelling what I smell?
Whatever the phrase’s dodgy antecedents, the claim that Miriam Cates was using it to dog-whistle anti-semitism is plainly unfair, as Yoram Hazony, one of the organisers of the Nat Con conference, and a Jew himself, later told Jewish News.
“I deplore this attempt to smear a friend of the Jews such as Miriam Cates with the utterly preposterous accusation of antisemitism. The term ‘cultural Marxism is an apt phrase to describe the cultural agenda promoted by many on the left today.”
It’s also a little ironic that the politician who led the charge against Miriam Cates, citing the anti-semitic roots of the term… was none other than Lord John Mann. “Who he?”, I hear you ask.
Mann, who’s not Jewish by the way, but advises the government on anti-semitism, just happens to be the blowhard who cheerfully signed up, when he was an MP, for the media witch hunt alleging a massive paedophile conspiracy at Westminster.
Don’t get me wrong.
Child abuse by top politicians has been covered up in the past. Cyril Smith being a case in point. And you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder about cover-ups in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. But this was different. Mann chose to wade in at the height of the storm created by the bizarre allegations of Carl Beech, whom we now know was a fantasist.
It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to realise at the time that Beech was fruitloopy. I said so online. Beech alleged he had seen Ted Heath, a former PM, murder a boy in some sort of Satanic ritual. He alleged ex-MP Harvey Proctor had tied a boy to a table, with the politician stabbing the child in the arm and cutting his chest and legs. “I tried to untie him, but I couldn’t. There was a lot of blood. He just kept saying sorry,” Beech told police.
Despite this, the officer in charge of the investigation, Det Supt Kenny McDonald, described Beech’s account as “credible and true” on news bulletins in December 2014. It would later be revealed he had failed to ask a series of obvious questions. As his story unravelled officers discovered Beech was a paedophile himself. He had hoarded 350 indecent images of children and secretly recorded a teenage schoolboy using the toilet. Software that could disguise “forensic footprints” had also been used on his devices.