Antonio Gramsci

This is a repost, but in light of recent events, I thought it was worth posting again in case you missed it.

Capture the Culture!

Do you ever wonder how we got here? How did the United State of America go from the “Land of the Free” to what it is today? How does one describe America today? “Home of the Entitled?”

In the past I’ve covered how the communists infilatrated our social institutions. See here, here, hereand here, for a just a few examples. But it’s never a bad idea to continue learning history. If we don’t know the enemies of freedom, and the roots of their ideas it will be impossible to defeat them. Knowledge is power.

Via The Astute Bloggers I came across the essay Gramscian Damage which appears to have been written, or at least posted, in February of 2006. It’s very eye opening. Here’s an excerpt, but I suggest you read the whole essay. The author focuses on how the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and the Soviet infiltration of American media, entertainment and education have made the US easy pickings for the Islamacists.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They madedezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again: …

In case you’re wondering what a “meme” is, Dictionary.com defines it as “a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.” So when the author above talks about “memetic warfare” what he means is that the same old talking points are repeated often enough to become accepted as fact by much of the population, without much thought or research by individuals in a society. Think about it – one of the biggest problems our side has with the left is that their core “beliefs” are nothing more than a list of bumper sticker slogans. And we find them everywhere – on the news, in the movies, in our schools and even our places of worship.

So I decided to find out more about this Antonio Gramsci. Wikipedia provided some background on the man, mostly biographical and academic information. He was an Italian socialist philosopher who communicated with the Soviets. I continued searching and came across Gramsci: A Method to the Madness, which was posted in March of 2007.

Behind the many maddening attacks on America’s popular culture is Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci’s strategy for achieving the total state.

In any totalitarian state, the oppressed always outnumber the oppressors. While such regimes are built upon the threat and practice of terror, it is impossible to create institutions of state terror that can control all of the subjects, all of the time. Thus would-be-tyrants who seek to dominate entire populations must devise some means of inducing their victims to enslave themselves. Aldous Huxley, author of the classic anti-totalitarian novel Brave New World, explained that the most efficient totalitarian system would be one in which the rulers would “control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” In Huxley’s model of the total state, the population was controlled through the use of sex, drugs, vapid entertainment, government-generated slogans, and manufactured social fads.

Russian anti-Communist Alexander Zinovyev, a world-renowned author, has described how the West, particularly the United States, is descending into a totalitarian culture of the sort predicted by Huxley. “It is enough to switch on the TV set, to go to the movies, to open a best-seller, …to listen to the ubiquitous music,” complained Zinovyen in the July 24, 1999 issue of France’s Le Figaro, “and you’ll find them propagating the cult of sex, violence and money. Noble slogans about tolerance and respect for others are concealing those three pillars of totalitarian democracy.”

Zinovyev, who was persecuted as a dissident under the Brezhnev regime, has a clear understanding of the way in which those intent on total power work to undermine the cultural institutions of a free society. Often, power cannot be seized through the sudden imposition of a total dictatorship; instead, it must be obtained through the process of patient gradualism — the persistent subversion of vital institutions and the incremental consolidation of power.

These efforts draw upon a blueprint composed by Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci who understood that the creation of the total state requires the seizure of the “mediating institutions” that insulate the individual from the power of the government — the family, organized religion, and so forth — and a systematic redefinition of the culture in order to sustain the new political order. The battle cry of Gramsci’s disciples is: “Capture the culture!”

In his study The Two Revolutions: Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism, Marxist theoretician Carl Boggs emphasizes that “the transition to socialism must occur on two distinct but interwoven terrains — the state and the economy.” Those seeking the triumph of socialist revolution will not prevail by simply overthrowing “the existing state machinery, or [destroying] the old institutions, or even [bringing] into power leaders calling themselves ‘communists.’ Beneath the level of insurrection and statecraft there must be a gradual conquest of social power, initiated by popular subversive forces emerging from within the very heart of capitalist society.” Rudi Dutschke described this process as “the long march through the institutions” — the Marxist conquest of universities, schools, the news media,  entertainment, churches and other religious bodies, tax-exempt foundations, and other key institutions. …

The essay goes on to detail how the Gramscians have indeed gone on to capture the culture. From the Rockefeller Foundation funding Kinsey’s deviant sex research to the campaign to destroy the nuclear family and replace it with the state.

Finally, I came across Why There Is A Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America by John Fonte. I believe it was written in 2000. It’s very long but very informative. Mr. Fonte compared the ideas of Gramsci to those of Alexis de Tocqueville. Not only have the Gramscians infilatrated the media, but also the big corporations in America, the courts and congress. It’s only gotten worse. You should read the whole thing when you get a chance, but here’s the conclusion:

The slow but steady advance of Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist ideas through the major institutions of American democracy, including the Congress, courts, and executive branch, suggests that there are two different levels of political activity in twenty-first century America. On the surface, politicians seem increasingly inclined to converge on the center. Beneath, however, lies a deeper conflict that is ideological in the most profound sense of the term and that will surely continue in decades to come, regardless of who becomes president tomorrow, or four or eight or even 20 years from now.

As we have seen, Tocquevillians and Gramscians clash on almost everything that matters. Tocquevillians believe that there are objective moral truths applicable to all people at all times. Gramscians believe that moral “truths” are subjective and depend upon historical circumstances. Tocquevillans believe that these civic and moral truths must be revitalized in order to remoralize society. Gramscians believe that civic and moral “truths” must be socially constructed by subordinate groups in order to achieve political and cultural liberation. Tocquevillians believe that functionaries like teachers and police officers represent legitimate authority. Gramscians believe that teachers and police officers “objectively” represent power, not legitimacy. Tocquevillians believe in personal responsibility. Gramscians believe that “the personal is political.” In the final analysis, Tocquevillians favor the transmission of the American regime; Gramscians, itstransformation.

While economic Marxism appears to be dead, the Hegelian variety articulated by Gramsci and others has not only survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also gone on to challenge the American republic at the level of its most cherished ideas. For more than two centuries America has been an “exceptional” nation, one whose restless entrepreneurial dynamism has been tempered by patriotism and a strong religious-cultural core. The ultimate triumph of Gramscianism would mean the end of this very “exceptionalism.” America would at last become Europeanized: statist, thoroughly secular, post-patriotic, and concerned with group hierarchies and group rights in which the idea of equality before the law as traditionally understood by Americans would finally be abandoned. Beneath the surface of our seemingly placid times, the ideological, political, and historical stakes are enormous.

Well, Mr. Fonte was right in that the stakes are enormous. But he may have jumped the gun when he said economic Marxism was dead. He can’t be faulted. At the time Barack Obama was some unknown community organizer. But  as we can now see, economic Marxism is alive and well.

I believe we’re now at a tipping point, if it isn’t already too late. Only time will tell, but the only way to combat this is with education. We now have generations of brainwashed Americans who need to be de-programmed. I believe it’s time to recapture the culture.