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Marxism is a Cult Religion
by James Lindsay
March 15, 2024
Guest contributors: ConceptualJames
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All Marxism is cult religious.

All Marxist “theory” begins by believing it uniquely knows what human beings really are (socio-spiritual beings), into what they have been thrown (a mundane world of property ownership, imposed identity, and suffering through scarcity), and to what we must return (a truly social society that transcends individualism). Because Marxists fundamentally believe they know the true and secret socio-spiritual nature of humans whereas (demonic, Demiurgic) social forces have conditioned everyone else not to know them, they feel uniquely entitled to power for the purpose of remaking man into who he is. This explains most of their behavior.

The ultimate goal of Marxism isn’t economic, political, or social control, as most would believe. Those are merely means to its end. Its ultimate goal isn’t even power, though it worships power as the constitutive force of reality. Its ultimate goal is to direct the socio-spiritual evolution of Man. Socio-spiritual in the sense that Man’s true spiritual nature manifests in his social relations. This is the idea of the “New Man” Marxists always speak of. He is Man spiritually evolved to remember who he truly is, a truly social and creative being that is one with all others in his species and, indeed, all of Nature. 

This means that Marxism is just a particularly nasty, vindictive, and deceptive form of Gnostic theosophy, a cult religion. Laid bare of all its details in whatever form, economic, racial, sexual, whatever, it is a drive to seize power to direct the spiritual evolution of Man. Everything else it argues is either rationalization or excuse, none of it is real or legitimate because none of it does anything but serve its actual purpose in whichever moment of resistance it finds itself in. 

What is meant by “direct the socio-spiritual evolution of Man”? In a word, eugenics. Marxism intrinsically practices eugenics, though not necessarily on the “crude” physical level (mundane) but on the more refined spiritual level they believe they uniquely understand. In practice, a lot of the crude part comes out by necessity. The goal is to prune out of mankind those unfit to evolve spiritually to the higher collectivist levels and to transform the rest into socio-spiritual Marxists.

In theosophical cults, Man is believed to have forgotten who he really is by virtue of some Fall. He is truly Spirit and One with God and thinks himself otherwise because of the distortions of his conditions: materialist, social, economic, or otherwise. He has forgotten this because he lacks “God’s wisdom” (theo-sophy) to know who—and what—he truly is, which is a spiritual being at one with the One. Since this is true for everyone all at once, no one is truly separate from anyone else. All is One; All are One. To be an individual in this circumstance is to reject Oneness in favor of individualism, which is Man’s Fall.

The goal of theosophical religious cults is to seize enough power over their adherents to remind them of who they “really are,” which brings them to “at-One-ment” (atonement for their false separation from God) by obliterating their allegedly false consciousness of themselves and Man. They misunderstand themselves and thus misunderstand the society and world around them. Theosophists aim to remind them of who they “truly are” and bring them back to Oneness of spirit and being. They can be kindly enough, but in the end, they are tyrannical because humanity can only evolve as a whole if their presumptions about the nature of reality and Man are true.

These cults are ultimately Gnostic. As the second-century Valentinian Gnostic Theodotus put it: “It is not, however, the bath [baptism] alone that makes free, but knowledge [gnosis] too: who we were, what we have become, where we were, where we have come to be placed, where we are tending, what birth is, and what rebirth.” Theosophists believe we were Spirit but have become mortal; we were in Paradise in perfect union with God but have been thrown into this mundane world; we are tending toward spiritual awakening or destruction; and birth is a Fall and rebirth is accepting their Gnostic cult beliefs and practices. It isn’t all just ancient heresy or New Age hippie nonsense. Marxism is cut from precisely this cloth.

The old Gnostic heresies place the Fall of Man in the Sin of Adam, obviously, blaming the wrath of God for flinging us out of Paradise and our inheritance into this world of work, pain, toil, and death—as individuals, separated from God and Eden. Their belief was that the Serpent in Genesis 3 told the truth, and the God in Genesis is not God but a demonic Demiurge, builder of the world, imprisoner of his spiritual brethren in Man. 

Marxism, qua Marx, places the Fall in the separation of private property (thus individualism) from communal property (thus collectivism). The bourgeoisie is Demiurgic, constructing a political economy in which the masses must labor, suffer, and die. The masses can awaken as a class-conscious proletariat that understands Man’s true nature is socialist, which means being transcendent of private property and the individualism that follows from it. This program goes on through the other forms of Western Marxism.

Critical Race Theory, which is Race Marxism, puts the Fall in the creation and imposition of power-laden racial categories (“whiteness” and “white supremacy”), which is a proxy for Western values including capitalist economics and their cultural hegemony. “White people” become Demiurgic, imprisoning “people of color” in a world not made for them but willing to use them. They can become race conscious, though, and understand Man’s true nature is transcendent of race while retaining consciousness of it.
Queer Theory, which is Queer Marxism and overtly an esoteric religion based on sex, puts the Fall in the assertion of any valid claim to normalcy and legitimacy. “Normativity” is a Demiurgic force that imprisons perverts, weirdos, deviants, and degenerates, in addition to sexual and “gender” minorities, in a world that demands they be normal. They can become consciously queer, however, and understand Man’s true nature is transcendent of any norms or expectations.

The framework is the same in every case, and the details only vary a little as needed. A demonic superpower—the Demiurge, the bourgeoisie, whites, "cis" straight people, or whatever—orders and rules the world for itself. It did this by illegitimately taking a step toward godhood, separating itself from the All, and locked out those who are truly innocent and knowing. It is the projection of Satan onto the godly and godliness onto Satan. On the first page of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels say the whole of their program is put in a word: “oppressor versus oppressed.” The privileged establish themselves as separate and deserving while the innocent are excluded from “godlike” knowing and punished severely when they take a bit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The Gnostic theosophical myth is that the innocent are excluded by powers who broke away from the unified totality of being to assert their individuality. Maybe they have done this through claiming deity themselves as Creator of the (mundane and Fallen) world, or in a socio-spiritual sense through private property, racial status, social status otherwise, etc. Because these deign to be God but are not, they are jealous and wrathful of anyone who might approach the “hidden truth” of gnosis, which would break their spell and end their illegitimate power. They hide and suppress the “truth” and punish anyone who seeks or stumbles upon it.

The theosophical gnostics know otherwise, though. They know the "gods" are false and that God as a unified totality is real and, in fact, not distinct from themselves. They are therefore spiritually or socio-spiritually advanced but oppressed and must shepherd Man to Liberation. This amounts to a revolution, either of Heaven and Earth or of society, depending on the locus of their beliefs, but it’s all the same. Marxism, Race Marxism, Queer Marxism, and the rest are identical in this form. They are all theosophical religious cults pretending not to be.

One way to put this is that theosophy, whether Marxist or otherwise, is Satan presenting himself as an Angel of Light until he creates a madness in those who follow him that way that possesses them with a spirit of enmity and false superiority presenting itself as righteousness and truth. You can know them by their fruits, it is said. What are their fruits? Entitlement. Narcissism. Self-aggrandizement. Accusation. Deception. Enmity. Sowing confusion, even in their own minds and hearts. Attempting to lead the little ones astray. Destruction, everywhere they go. It is Evil selling itself as uniquely Good.

Marxism cannot escape this cloth because Marxism is cut from this cloth. All Western Marxist “theories” are the same in this. They are destructive theosophical cults. All Marxism is cult religious.

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Emergency and the Philosophy of Leftism
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The philosophy of the Left has been overwhelmingly defined by Marxism since the 1840s, and most of us think of it as a fully ultra-progressive ideology. This philosophy gives rise to a certain condition among those who adopt it, a condition of emergency that Progress itself hasn’t already happened. Stelios Panagiotou, the staunch classical liberal at the mostly post-liberal British philosophy club called “Lotus Eaters,” has expressed the intrinsic crisis of Leftism this way:

The philosophy of the left, for the most part, seems to stem from a deep resentment of the past, which makes one view the present as a condition of emergency that requires the grandest possible oppression as a means for achieving a future utopia.

Panagiotou gets it right, but there’s a lot more to the story. The problem is that while Marxism is ultra-progressive in the sense discussed—that all progress no matter how fast is always too slow—it is also strangely and obviously regressive. In fact, it isn’t possible to understand Marxism, or the philosophy of the Left, without understanding that it is firstly deeply regressive, though in a dialectical way. Marxism is regressive by progressive means.

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In a prosaic sense, think of their obsessions about cultural preservation with "indigenous" peoples, for example. What they are angry about in the Modern and Postmodern Eras is the development of Western Civilization, which they believe has stripped mankind of access to his State of Nature (thus, “alienation”). To the Marxist, Western Civilization and individuality, through the false doctrine of private property. have stripped mankind of what makes it human.

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That angry focus and ressentiment against this alienation on principle is why they want to preserve other cultures in living time capsules and simultaneously tear down Western Civilization to and beyond its foundations. The time-capsules are actually preservation sites against the ravages of Western Civilization and potential leverage points for the tokenizing Soviet korenizatsiya program against the “great power” of Western Civilization—never let a crisis go to waste. Further, indigenous cultures (as they view them) and outsider cultures are ones that have been less contaminated by the evils of Western Civilization, which makes them noble because in certain ways they're closer to the State of Nature they idealize. For the Marxist, man’s State of Nature is genuinely and truly communistic, as in communal owning and sharing of all in relative plenty.

Marx particularly defined “history” itself as mankind leaving his State of Nature, which was primitive communism, and marching through various stages of civilization. Whether blurry or sharply defined, each of these stages is defined by its exploitative economic circumstances, all predicated on private property as the alienating force of Man from his communal true nature.

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Imagine a sociopolitical movement that divides the population roughly into two essential classes: the oppressive “great power” class and the marginalized minority classes, who are said to be oppressed by the powerful. Now imagine that movement tells the population—and especially those minority classes—the following story.

You are oppressed by the great power and its chauvinistic beneficiaries. Our movement sees this and thinks it’s a great injustice. We believe your people should be free from this oppression and should be able to self-determine. Your communities, your political meetings, and your schools, we believe, should be in your own languages. Your history and cultures should be preserved against the great power that threatens to destroy them through forced assimilation and cultural chauvinism. We’re on your side, and they are against you.

 

What’s more, what sets you apart from the great power is that you’re more like us than you are like them. We recognize that. You’re more intrinsically communal and social than they are. They don’t value community like you do, or like we do. They claim to value individual rights and self-determination so long as you agree with them, and they don’t recognize your agency and autonomy, but we do.

 

Because we understand this injustice and have the power to help you, we want to ally ourselves with you. We will help raise up leaders among you who can help you resist the great-power chauvinism from the majority power, and we can bring your representatives into our Congress to fight against them and for your right to self-determination, autonomy, and community!

You might be thinking this story sounds a little bit like a weirdly generic version of the rationale behind our current Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) regime, or a bit like Critical Race Theory (CRT). You’d be right to think so. That’s exactly how DEI and CRT work.

In our DEI-based system, the story is the same with unique specifics. There’s a great-power of “white supremacy culture,” “patriarchy,” “settler-colonialism,” and “heteronormativity” that must be resisted “intersectionally” with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives based on Identity Marxist theories like CRT and radical feminism. It will select leaders of all sorts from among those “marginalized groups” (and their ideological allies) and give them a leg-up in the professional world in every regard—so long as they agree with the underlying Critical Theory–based DEI ideology. This will be done for “equity” and “representation,” and anyone who doesn’t agree is a bigot. Also a bigot is anyone who disagrees with what any diversity hire says. (It will also be bigotry to accuse any diversity hire of being a diversity hire, especially when it’s true.)

What you just read, however, is more or less the story the Communists Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin told the variety of ethnic minorities bordering on and contained within the former Russian Federation in the 1920s, people like Georgians, Ukrainians, Caucasians, Latvians, and Estonians. In their version of the story, the “Great Russian” was imposing a “Great Russian chauvinism” upon them to make them act more Russian, and the Communists were there to help the minority non-Russian identities resist. These minority identities had different values that the Communists said were intrinsically more socialist than the feudal Russians or distant capitalists, so they were natural allies to the Bolsheviks, who by then held power under the banner of the Communist Party.

The Communists promised these non-Russian ethnic minorities—and delivered to them—not just the limited right to self-determination in their ethnic minority enclaves but also raised up leaders among them, both locally and in a second chamber of the Party Congress in Moscow. There was just one catch.

The general rule of both of these policies was to be strictly socialist, of course. Self-determination in their regions was allowed to the degree it didn’t contradict Communist Party goals, policies, programs, or leaders, and ethnic minority leaders were raised up both locally and centrally according to their alignment with the Party line. Only Socialist Georgians like Stalin, Socialist Ukrainians, Socialist Caucasians, Socialist Latvians, and Socialist Estonians, among Socialist others (like the Muslim Tatars) were elevated to leadership anywhere by the Soviets.

The Communists didn’t do this minority-outreach program out of the goodness of their black little Commie hearts, of course. There was a real perk for the Party to having these ethnic minorities in positions of power. Not only were they able to bring in loyalists; they were able to bring in loyalists who, whenever they might propose something more radical than the general Party Congress or other leaders might accept, could be shielded behind accusations of bigotry if anyone disagreed with the good token ethnic minority. Should you disagree with your Ukrainian comrade, for example, you could easily be accused very credibly of harboring and acting from Great Russian chauvinism rather than any principled disagreement.

The purpose of this program, as stated, was generally to promote a high Soviet Communist ideal: fakticheskoye ravenstvo (Фактическое равенство), “actual equality,” or what we call “equity” today. Actual equality was meant to begin with simple economic equality and extend beyond it to total (actual, or “factual”) equality across all domains of human experience and life: social, political, cultural.

This DEI-like program, instituted initially in 1921 and more fully in 1923 by Lenin and Stalin jointly, reigned over Soviet policy for most of that decade. It was called korenizatsiya (коренизация), which means “the process of putting down roots.” It was the Soviet Union’s “Inclusion” program that history has recognized as being the world’s first “Affirmative Action Empire.” In practice, it gave a great advantage to the Communists, particularly the most diabolical and Machiavellian among them, and among the people created immense and incurable ethnic strife throughout the young Soviet Union.

In the end, korenizatsiya was precisely the kind of predictable disaster one might expect—likely deliberately so—and it set the stage for a great unification (“Russification”) program in the 1930s where everyone would be a Russian Communist and, to prove it, several million Ukrainians (estimates give 3–9 millions) would be brutally and intentionally starved to death in the Holodomor for their mere capacity to potentially resist. Of course, “self-determination” was always to be secondary to the needs of the Party, and the party didn’t need Ukrainian kulaks nearly as much as it needed their land and their total submission.

The great unification program of korenizatsiya was always embedded within it under the brand name raznoobraziya (разнообразие), a program that Lenin favored and promoted strongly. Raznoobraziya, uncomfortably enough for us today, translates directly from Russian as “diversity,” and we would recognize it by that deceptive term. “Unity in content through diversity in form” was how Lenin understood the concept. That is, people will look different but all think the same: as Communists. By 1930, this “unity in form”—as Russian Stalinist Communists—is exactly what Stalin enacted using the failure of korenizatsiya as justification. The point was always the “unity in content.” “Diversity in form” was just an excuse and a lever. Just like DEI.

How did korenizatsiya get from there, then, to here, now?

In 1965, the (neo)-Marxist Herbert Marcuse wrote in his infamous totalitarian essay “Repressive Tolerance” about “emancipation” to socialism requiring activists find the sociocultural Archimedean point that could leverage the whole society into this reunification of socialist consciousness. The phrase “Archimedean point” refers to a hypothesized spot where a fulcrum could be placed that could prop up a lever that could move the whole Earth. Stalin understood from when he outlined it in Marxism and the National Question in Vienna in 1913 that korenizatsiya would provide that Archimedean point for the Bolshevik vision of the USSR with its Russian core and growing variety of satellites. Marcuse understood the same thing about the tumultuous “melting pot” of the United States in the riotous 1960s.

The conditions Marcuse described in “Repressive Tolerance” and his other writing of the 1960s, particularly An Essay on Liberation (1969), make clear that he was trying to work out how to leverage the various “ghetto populations,” minority though they might be, to create a breakthrough against the capitalist West. His problem was that what he called “advanced capitalism” had tamed the working class and turned them conservative by giving them a better life and pleasant livelihood. Marcuse recognized that the various “ghetto populations” had the needed “vital energy” for revolution, but they didn’t have the theory or social location necessary for it.

To solve this problem, one would be tempted to say Marcuse reinvented korenizatsiya if it weren’t certain that he was already familiar with it, not just once but at least twice, if not three or even four times over. It’s not quite a reinvention if you just import it and apply it. It barely needs to be said today, of course, that Marcuse’s vision is how we ended up with the “liberating tolerance” regime of DEI, CRT, and all the rest, which is to say that Herbert Marcuse knew what he was doing.

See, the thing is that korenizatsiya didn’t die with Stalin’s reversal of the program in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. It wasn’t thrown on the ash-heap of history where it belongs as a catastrophic failed doctrine. Communists don’t throw away destructive things that achieve their ultimate purpose of consolidating their own power. Instead of being abandoned, korenizatsiya was recognized as a powerful tool—a evil means to a totalitarian end—and exported

First, it was adopted line for line by Mao Zedong and his CCP in China to deal with the huge Han Chinese majority and the 55 ethnic minorities in that loose federation. “Criticize Han Chauvinism!” was the brand name for the program, and it worked to undermine the nationalist KMT (Guomindang) regime under Chiang Kai-shek and to consolidate power for Mao’s favored factions in the CCP throughout his reign. Mao brought it in because it works for its intended purpose of breaking down an existing regime and installing and consolidating Communist power over a diverse population.

It was also exported to the United States in the 1920s by both Soviet infiltrators and the Communist Party USA, seeking to turn the South into a socialist capital-B “Black” nation that would agitate against the United States on racial lines. Perhaps what saved the US from this powerful Communist racial attack was the Great Depression, which led millions of Southern blacks to migrate north in desperate search of work in the factory cities. Since Stalin’s definition of a nation was a continuous people in a continuous place with a continuous history, this need-driven diaspora of Southern blacks foiled the Soviets’ first attempt at korenizatsiya subversion of the United States. It took until 1989 for Critical Race Theory to get off the ground as its next serious attempt, some sixty years later, not to just gloss over Black Power, the Black Nationalism movement, and the Black Panthers in Marcuse’s day.

Korenizatsiya was also exported to the entire colonized world, Third World and First. It became the basis for the radically violent decolonization movements throughout the Third World, sometimes referred to as “Third Worldism” and sometimes as “postcolonialism.” It also set the stage for the radical indigenous movements that have torn apart nations like South Africa, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, not to mention U.S. states like Alaska, New Mexico, and Hawaii. It has even been secondarily imported into Europe along with the anti-indigenous populations of “migrants” who are currently “decolonizing” Europe through blatant and highly subsidized colonization. Korenizatsiya lives on throughout the entirety of the non-Communist world.

Marcuse was well aware of the program and its uses in the USSR. He was also familiar with and praised its uses in Mao’s revolutions in China. He was deeply aware of the “Third Worldist” liberation movements upon which he based his own ambitions. He was also astutely aware of the racial tensions and manipulative Communist history in the United States before and during the 1960s. It’s therefore extremely likely Marcuse knew he was refactoring korenizatsiya for America’s rawest wounds and softest spots.

In all places where it’s used, korenizatsiya is the same. An aggrieved minority population is told it can self-determine and must do so specifically in resistance against the great-power chauvinism it finds itself embedded in. Grifters and sympathizers within those populations, but no one else, are elevated within the community and in power centers within the majority population. The point is always “diversity in form but unity in content,” which is to say that “diversity” is as superficial to the program as it is to people and is just a cynical pretext to consolidate power in “unity of content” in anti-Western and ultimately Communist visions of control and conquest. Anyone who disagrees is tarred as a bigot. No one in the general population, majority and minority combined, has the slightest idea what to do about it.

In all places where it’s used, korenizatsiya also has the same results. Ethnic strife. A two-tiered system that favors radicals in the name of minority status. Degradation of the tokenized minority communities through socialism, grift, and bad leadership. Eventual backlash by the majority population and escalating ethnic conflict. Trust in systems breaking down and systems themselves breaking down to earn that newfound distrust. Civilizational breakdown and eventual catastrophe—all eyes on South Africa, the leading modern korenizatsiya experiment, for a look a few more years down that road.

What we’ve taken in over the last few decades and established in our countries institutional structures and national psyches is not an enlightened movement of empathy and tolerance that advances civil rights and equal opportunity. It’s a Soviet program of destruction and power consolidation called korenizatsiya that is a parasite on the noble ethics of civil rights and equal opportunity. That is, it’s a diabolical counterfeit that offers us only our own destruction while handing our society over to grifters and their Communist handlers.

The choices we face here in the West are therefore stark. We can continue on this morally gilded road to our own destruction; we can fall prey to the identity-driven backlash korenizatsiya is designed to produce in the “great power” majorities and throw away our peace and freedoms; or we can reject korenizatsiya in both the positive application and negative backlash and assert that free nations honor, respect, and secure individual liberties and recognize “social justice” to be nothing more than a pretext for tyranny.

That choice is ours. There’s only one right answer if we wish to remain free and prosperous.

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Is “Woke” the right word for them? Are they really “Right”? Should we call them something else? Is this really even happening? Does it even matter? Is this even important?

Each of these is a worthy enough question and matter for its own debate, but regarding the question of whether “Woke” is the right term for them, I haven’t been fully convinced despite my heavy use of the term. As you’ll see momentarily, I’m now far more convinced.

So far, I have attempted in various X (née Twitter) arenas to explain why I think the term “Woke Right” fits and to identify some examples, and I’ve done a couple of podcasts explaining the phenomenon and making the case more fully. I’ve also done a number of interviews. Still, it remains an open question, are they really Woke, so I decided to do a little experiment. A throwback to an earlier James, if you will. And, as it happens…

We are so back.

To put the conclusion out front before I explain myself, I figured a good way to test the “Woke Right” for Wokeness would be to submit a little hoax essay to what I presume is their flagship publication, American Reformer. To produce this “Woke Right” hoax, I took a couple thousand words straight out of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (better known as the Communist Manifesto), and lightly modified it into a “Woke Right” critique of liberalism, which the so-called “Woke Right” hate. They published it: The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right (It’s archived here in case they take it down).

I figured there’s nothing more definitively Woke than the Communist Manifesto, so I think we can drop with the inverted commas here and get on with calling them the Woke Right after this. They published Karl Marx’s definitive Communist work, dressed up to resemble their own pompous, self-pitying drivel, when it was submitted from a completely unknown author with no internet footprint whatsoever bearing the name “Marcus Carlson” (get it? Haha).

That question answered raises the deeper second question above—which I will not address here—about if they are really on the “Right,” as they consistently claim they are. For them on this, I’ll only say, I have been using the term “Right Hand of the Left.”

So what did I do, and why did I do it? Before explaining myself, I’ll explain the mechanics of this little prank.

I started by taking the preamble and then just short of six continuous pages of text from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto. This chapter is titled “Bourgeoisie and Proletarians” and is the part of the manifesto where Marx and Engels make the case that the bourgeoisie (middle class, owners, management, and wealthy) as a class is abusive of the proletariat (workers) as a class in just about every way you could imagine. I then rather crudely swapped out references to the bourgeoisie with something to do with either liberalism, liberals, classical liberalism, or their real and mighty bugbear that they call “the post-war liberal consensus,” which they believe oppresses them. Concurrently, I swapped out references to the proletariat with references to an object they call the “New Christian Right” as a way of referring to themselves. I then massaged some of the specifics for fit, flourish, and flow, cut a bunch and consolidated to fit the word count requirement, attached the document to an email from a made-to-order burner account, and hit “send.” A few days later, they published it on American Reformer with minimal edits.

So far as these terms of art go, meaning “post-war liberal consensus” and “New Christian Right,” I didn’t invent them. I took them from a couple articles published on American Reformer aiming to describe their own movement, what it’s about, and what it believes oppresses them. While these are technically terms to explain in another time and place, what I noticed (when re-reading The Communist Manifesto to prepare a pair of podcasts about it) is that Marx’s complaints about the bourgeoisie and vision of the proletariat match what I had read on American Reformer itself about the Woke Right with regard to the “liberal consensus” and liberalism along with their vision for a New Christian Right. It required shockingly minimal editing to make Karl Marx’s arguments transform into Woke Right arguments about American liberalism. (In fact, I have the original first step document in its raw form, if anyone wants to see it, revealing just how fast the connection is.)

So, that’s what I did. Why did I do it? And why target American Reformer?

I don’t have any particular animus against American Reformer to speak of, but so far as I know, it’s the flagship publication for what I’ve been calling the Woke Right, or at least the Protestant “Christian Nationalist” (or, “Ecumenical Integralist”) wing of the Woke Right. It makes a good target, though, because American Reformer represents not the cringe-inducing (antisemitic) fringe of the Woke Right but its more respectable, mainstream wing. Beyond that, I know rather little about it because, as I’ve said many times, I mostly find the Woke Right to be an enormously irritating distraction that I don’t actually give much time to and try to avoid thinking about entirely. Wandering into Woke Right thinking is far too easy a mistake for us to keep making, I keep telling myself, but we, as a loose coalition, keep making it. Maybe that’s because it has a ton of money behind it and because they use divisive Woke dialectical tactics to divide movements and collect supporters….

What I learned doing the Grievance Studies Affair, however, is that if you can’t tell people about an ideological problem out there in the world, you can show them instead by participating directly, if disingenuously. That is, you can hoax them and get them to publish a blatant caricature of their own beliefs in an embarrassing yet informative way. Rather famously, I, et al., got a feminist social work academic journal to accept a rewrite of a chapter of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a pathway forward for intersectional feminism as a movement.

Moreover, I learned that if you’re going to target publications for a “hoax-ish” exposé, you should aim at the most significant one you can. That turns out to be American Reformer, which I also featured in one of my podcasts about the Woke Right. (Incidentally, I learned almost all I really needed to know about the Woke Right, their arguments, their mentality, etc., from that one article I read for the podcast, which isn’t surprising because Woke Right “philosophy” is effectively just another Grievance or Woke architecture, and these are all extremely easily produced once you know the names for various pieces and the specific accusations attached to them.)

Why did I do it? That’s a lot simpler. I suspected that the so-called Woke Right really is Woke; many people disagreed; and I wanted to test that hypothesis instead of arguing about it to very little effect. Up to now, when I have pointed it out, argued it, explained it, and discussed it, I’ve been vigorously assured I’m completely wrong and this “New Christian Right” is not Woke at all. In fact, I learned I’m the bad guy here: “attacking Christians,” “punching Right,” “punching down” (amusingly), “gatekeeping,” and “being subversive, divisive, or [insert any of many slurs].”

Well, I’ve been here before, and back then a simple test sufficed. I ran this test once in the Grievance Studies Affair to expose the Left in academia. It was easily replicated against the so-called Woke Right. The result, though limited in scope, is a positive one. The Woke Right is Woke enough to argue against liberalism in exactly the same pompous and conspiratorial way (literally) Karl Marx argued against his own class enemy. So, if by “Woke” we mean running the Woke operating system and sociopolitical architecture, the Woke Right is clearly Woke.

So, circumstances relevant to the Woke Right also compel me to ask, is this me attacking Christians or “dividing the right”? Well, no. You are free for yourself to decide if the “New Christian Right” represents Christians or Christianity, but this was little more than a simple test to see if they’re a Woke duck. They walk like a Woke duck. They talk like a Woke duck. They’re a Woke duck.

They considered a lightly modified excerpt from the Communist Manifesto to be a “powerful article” for who they are and what they think (that we can expect they will not stand behind now that they know what it is, of course). If that aligns with Christianity is something for others to decide. If spotting this worrying Woke trend as it permeates the movement to stop Woke is “dividing the right,” maybe using terms like “right” here isn’t what we need to be doing. Maybe we should just be stopping Woke, however it presents itself.

Does this mean I’m saying the Woke Right are Communists? No, not at all. Historically, Fascism was a reaction to Communism that adopted the Communist operating system but not Communism or its specific agendas. In fact, they adopted the operating system of Communism specifically to be “anti-Marxist” (according to Mussolini)—just like the Woke Right. I do not think the Woke Right are Communists—aside from some infiltrators who must certainly be taking advantage of the Woke Right movements. I think they have taken up the Woke operating system, nothing more, nothing less. I do hope we won’t now repeat obvious historical mistakes, but I’m not accusing them of being Communists. They did not accept a Communist, qua Communism, text but a modified version that flatters their sensibilities.

In fact, it’s rather the opposite, in a way. The Woke Right, or at least the nerd-macho “New Christian Right” at American Reformer, etc., positions itself as the only viable solution to Communism in the West. In fact, their niche is something like being the only outfit, broadly construed, that is capable of equipping the American Church of resisting Communism—and certainly they have positioned themselves vigorously against my work as being productive to that particular cause. Well, as is evident, they haven’t done their homework at all. Clearly, my hoax essay only passed editorial muster because, it is now abundantly clear, these particular fellows are unlikely even to have read the Communist Manifesto. If winning a war requires knowing your enemy, as Sun Tzu said, they don’t even recognize him when he shows up on their own front door.

As a final question, you might be wondering how tight this hoax is. I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here (pdf), you’ll find a document showing the whole story in four appendices: a comparative back-and-forth text, the final submitted text (American Reformer published a very lightly edited version of this), the relevant sections of the Communist Manifesto, and my initial word and concept–swap so you can see my process before the final editing. A small sample of the back-and-forth text, from beginning and end, are offered here as a taste.

Communist Manifesto:

[p. 27, preamble] A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

American Reformer:

A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right. Moreover, all the existing powers of the American Regime since the end of the Second World War have aligned themselves against it and its re-emergence from the shadows of American civic life, politics, and religion—the Marxist Left and its neo-Marxist “Woke” descendant, the liberal establishment, the neoconservatives, and their police and intelligence apparatuses.

There are two consequences of this unholy alliance. First, the Christian Right itself is recognized by all these forces to be a power and thus a threat. Second, it is time for this arranged order to end and for a New Christian Right to emerge and stake its rightful claim on twenty-first century American politics.

The Communist Manifesto:

[pp. 36–37, ch. 1] This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself.

American Reformer:

This organization of the New Christian Right into a movement will continually be upset again by the competition between its various factions, but it is rising. We take no enemies to the Right and always redouble our efforts to our Left. In that way, we ever rise up again, stronger, firmer, mightier for all these contests. For this reason, in the end, we will win back our culture and take back our communities, and the liberals can go ahead and thank themselves.

I’ll close here and open the space for discussion. This is my explanation for this little experiment. My conclusion is that I validated my hypothesis in a significant way that will advance the debate. The Woke Right is Woke. They saw themselves in what can only be called a “Communist Manifesto for Christian Nationalists.”

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