Every once in a while, a hostile commenter wanders into the discussion here nattering about the evils of “Cultural Marxism.” One stopped by last night, prompting another commenter to ask what exactly this Cultural Marxism was, anyway.
I responded by saying the term essentially meant, at least to most of those using it, “the Evil Jews But We’ve Learned We Can’t Just Say That Publicly Outside of 4chan and Stormfront Without People Realizing We’re Basically Nazis.”
Oh, sure, once upon a time “cultural Marxism” was indeed a school of Marxist thought dealing with, you guessed it, culture. But in recent years the term has become a popular buzzword amongst neo-Nazis and other proud bigots on the far right, who use it to suggest a vast Jewish conspiracy against Western Civilization and the white race … without having to use the J-word, which tends to give their anti-Semitic game away.
But it’s not as if the opponents of “Cultural Marxism” go to great lengths to hide their racism and anti-Semitism. Indeed, a quick look at some of the “memes” and other graphics used by the Cultural Marxism-haters makes pretty clear where they’re coming from.
So here are some of the most, well, revealing images that popped up when I did a quick image search for “Cultural Marxism.” I’ve done this a couple of times before, but I felt it was time for a refresher, just a little reminder how many of the opponents of “Cultural Marxism” actually see the world.
CONTENT WARNING: All the bigotries you can imagine, and then some.
The last one is especially charming: don’t believe YOUR conspiracy theory, believe MINE.
Oh, and if these people start bringing up The Frankfurt School, well, it’s not because they’re interested in discussing the theories of actual cultural Marxists like Theodor Adorno or Herbert Marcuse. No, it’s just another way for them to say “teh evil Jews,” as this little “infographic” makes abundantly clear.
I should note that not everyone who talks about the alleged evils of alleged “Cultural Marxism” is a neo-Nazi. Some of them are simply people who, perhaps unknowingly, are getting a good deal of their “information” about the world from neo-Nazis who aren’t necessarily very upfront about being neo-Nazis. (There are a lot of these types hanging about in the manosphere and in GamerGate circles.)
If you’re one of the non-neo-Nazis and you’re dropping the phrase “Cultural Marxism” into your conversations online and possibly off, take a good hard look at the images above. The people who made these images are the people you’re aligning yourself with.
These are people who actually believe a secret cabal of hook-nosed Jews runs the world. These are people who think interracial classrooms = white genocide, and that supporters of multiculturalism not-so-secretly yearn for a world without white children. These are people who think Adolph Hitler had a lot of really good ideas, and not just about landscape painting. These are people, in other words, that you should have nothing to do with.
On important thing to note is the first people to whine about cultural marxism were the original nazis, who called it Kulturbolschewismus.
“Diversity is a sick and perverted idea.”
[arewethebaddies.flv]
I don’t understand how some of those even work – like, how fucked up do you have to be to look a photo of a bunch of smiling kids at school and think ‘this must be stopped’. I mean, obviously it works for them because they’re racist scum, but still, you’d think they’d at least try to find some scowling or grumpy looking kids or something.
What is “gender mainstreaming” and why is it bad?
It fucking annoys me how Nazis appropriate Beethoven for their bullshit. Beethoven’s appearance is so idealized paintings hardly capture how he really looked like. The man was 5’3” and so dark-skinned he was called The Spaniard. Thayer, Beethoven’s best 19th century biographer, said Beethoven resembled the Moor more than Haydn, who was mistaken for being black when his employer first met him. If those Nazi imbeciles actually met Beethoven they would heap on him all of their racism and bile.
BTW Beethoven was a massive Social Justice Warrior. He was pretty big on all those “decadent” Enlightenment and French Revolution ideals of freedom and equality. Writing an opera about a woman who saves her imprisoned husband and pulls a gun on the villain helps with the whole feminism/progressive department too.
Reblogged this on Zarathustra the Serpent and commented:
It fucking annoys me how Nazis appropriate Beethoven for their bullshit. Beethoven’s appearance is so idealized paintings hardly capture how he really looked like. The man was 5’3” and so dark-skinned he was called The Spaniard. Thayer, Beethoven’s best 19th century biographer, said Beethoven resembled the Moor more than Haydn, who was mistaken for being black when his employer first met him. If those Nazi imbeciles actually met Beethoven they would heap on him all of their racism and bile.
BTW Beethoven was a massive Social Justice Warrior. He was pretty big on all those “decadent” Enlightenment and French Revolution ideals of freedom and equality. Writing an opera about a woman who saves her imprisoned husband and pulls a gun on the villain helps with the whole feminism/progressive department too.
Every time one of these nuff-nuffs squawks about the “Frankfurt School”, I picture a campus in Europe where people learn to make hotdogs.
And that’s why I know to automatically disregard anything that contains the phrase “cultural marxism” unless I already know that the person I am talking to actually knows what they’re talking about.
It probably better to say anti-semantic about cultural Marxism. This is so tiresome, listening to this twaddle that these numbnuts make up about Judaism. We’re only just now getting to a pre-shoah population size. Globally, there are only 16million of us out of a global population of 7+billion. I wish these fuckers would have some perspective.
But then I must admit I do enjoy spending a bit of time with antisemites, I always manage to confuse them. I guess it must be the big fuck off “death or glory” skull with crossed bones half sleeve tattoo, blue-eyed skinhead look I rock.
As my granny used to say, there’s no use educating pork.
Nap, that’s about as accurate as their summary of what the Frankfurt School did. Those dudes said nothing about “multiculturalism” or “gender mainstreaming.”
Now I want to start a hotdog stand called The Frankfurt School.
Lol, I love that telling children that there are other children that don’t necessarily look like them but are still children is apparently genocide.
It’s really instructive how they think two races mixing will only obliterate the white one. Yeah, no bizzare notions of purity going on here. Nope. None.
Always happy to be part-catalyst for a new post full of Nazi memes. But seriously, thank you for the explanation and for expanding on it.
The reason I posed the question in the first place is I find it very suspect that I’ve only ever seen the term used negatively, and by people who are always vague about what it actually means. Sometimes I just want people to un-dog whistle their dog whistles, so that they have to be faced with what they are actually saying.
Another example is MRAs who attack “radical feminists” without any concept of what makes radical feminism distinct from other schools and movements. I wish they would just come out and say “it means women I don’t like.”
@Viscaria:
Long years of being on the internet have thaught me that most people who use words like fascists, communists, marxists and the like have only a very dim view of what they actually mean.
@Policy of Madness
I’ve seen ‘gender mainstreaming’ pop up in reports produced by the UN and international aid agencies. As I understand it, it’s an organisational shift that places gender issues – read: women’s issues – in a more prominent position, and requires that all policies and programs are assessed in terms of gender impact (along with myriad other indicators, of course).
In other words, this evil must be stopped. /s
::waves at group:: long-time lurker and big fan of the community here
There are some areas of the world (especially some areas of South America) that have a “one drop” rule that applies to whiteness. If you have even one white ancestor, you are white.
I’m not saying that’s desirable, only that it proves how stupid and inconsistent the whole thing is.
Wasn’t Jurgen Habermas, the communications philosopher, part of the Frankfurt School at one point? And he isn’t Jewish. (Wikipedia tells me he’s still alive. I didn’t know that. Anyway.)
This is so stupid, in any case. How does a bunch of political/philosophical theorists (mostly white men, anyway) = a conspiracy against white people? I mean, they’re making even less sense than the people on YouTube who think pop music is controlled by the satanic atheist Catholic Illuminati or whatever.
“I should note that not everyone who talks about the alleged evils of alleged “Cultural Marxism” is a neo-Nazi. Some of them are simply people who, perhaps unknowingly, are getting a good deal of their “information” about the world from neo-Nazis who aren’t necessarily very upfront about being neo-Nazis.”
Yeeeeah… but if you need a label to identify a fucked up idea, you’re probably not very bright and/or kind of racist anyway.
I can’t respond to most of those memes except by repeatedly bashing my head against a wall and despairing of humanity, but the school one? England is 85% white. I looked it up. Eighty five percent. Oh noes, we are so genocided that there are only ten times more of us than the next largest ethnic group (Asians at 7.8%, and yes, I looked it up on wikipedia). Run away from the scary brown people! FFS.
Good Article.
However, a correction. A far as we are aware, no member of the Frankfurt School ever described themselves as a ‘Cultural Marxist’. As far as we know no-one with any influence has ever done this. They produced abstract academic analysis, they never advanced policy prescriptions called ‘Cultural Marxism’.
Saying that there was once a school of Marxist thought called ‘Cultural Marxism’ isn’t true and gives the enemy too much credit. The term originated with rightwing Conspiracy Theorists and has no basis in reality.
Don’t forget that the way most of these people started hearing about “cultural marxism” was from Anders Breivik. You know, that monster who killed a bunch of kids at a summer camp in Norway because he didn’t like the political party they were supporting. Never mind the terrorist bombing he set up and used as a distraction for his attack on said summer camp.
Really the guy you want to associate yourself with. But I guess for the idiot right-winger who doesn’t mind casual anti-semitism would probably think that’s the kind of star to hitch their hopes to.
“We have our own diversity”…that dresses in identical short trenchcoats and Louboutins.
So diversity. Much wow.
Seriously, the “is this Kenya?” one doesn’t say what they think it says- to me it says that England is still fucking segregated as all hell.
Well my skin is as white as it gets and those people can go fuck themselves.
If I got an euro every time some american rightwing idiot misuses words like “marxism”, “socialism”, “communism” etc. I would never be able to spend all that cash.