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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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We obsess far too much about physical weapons, hypersonic missiles, tanks and drones. They are important in conflicts where both sides are politically strong and united: traditional interstate wars. But political weapons are more important, they control that unity and self-conception. What good is it winning wars if you lose the peace?

I'm tapping the sign again. This is, literally, unequivocally, without exaggeration, the work of Marxists and Marxist fellow travelers. It is the cumulative result of memetic weapons deployed by the Soviet Union and its precursor philosophers (Marx, Engels, Adler, Lenin et. al.) in an explicit attempt to undermine and destroy capitalist (read: Western) society and bring about the Glorious Revolution. I realize that typing that out makes me sound like a schizophrenic, and it sometimes makes me want to tear my hair out that as it turns out the people who were most right about Communism and Communists were McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But McCarthy was, broadly speaking if not always in specific individual cases, completely and utterly correct.

Modern progressives are the heirs of Antonio Gramsci. Read this list of Soviet talking points and tell me that I'm crazy:

  • There is no truth, only competing agendas.
  • All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
  • There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
  • The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
  • Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
  • The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
  • For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
  • When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

These ideas were drummed up in a Soviet think-tank or by communist fellow-travelers in a philosophy department in Vienna circa 1880 and eventually deliberately transmitted to Western intellectuals as tools of societal subversion designed to hollow out capitalism and replace it with a globalist regime which cannot defend itself because the very act of defense is seen as morally wrong. Once this was accomplished, there would be no need for T-62s to roll across the Fulda Gap and risk all-out nuclear war.

If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be, he has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet."

This is from a speech by Reagan, in 1964. Nineteen sixty-four. The most xenophobic right-wing frothing-at-the-mouth commentators from the 60s 70s and 80s were if anything underselling Soviet subversion because it sounds ridiculous. Ideas as weapons? Come on we're Americans, we engage in free debate as a pastime! Any idea the Soviets could create can't hurt us because their propaganda is clumsy and inelegant, it is designed for their fear-bound uneducated populace, not the Leaders of the Free World!

I realize that typing that out makes me sound like a schizophrenic, and it sometimes makes me want to tear my hair out that as it turns out the people who were most right about Communism and Communists were McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Don't leave out the John Birch Society. Going back and reading books from One Dozen Candles can be unnerving in their prescience.

McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

Two different groups with different agendas. The HUAC was devoted to rooting out actual communists (most famously Alger Hiss), fellow-travellers (like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles), and people protecting them (like Arthur Miller). McCarthy was putting on a show for the benefit of the "water fluoridation is communism" crowd and pioneered the art of making bad-faith allegations of communist sympathies against political opponents.

Lumping them together discredited the work of the HUAC, it didn't rehabilitate McCarthy. After the Army-McCarthy hearings McCarthy's reputation is rightfully unsalvageable.

Two different groups with different agendas.

I'm aware.

McCarthy was putting on a show for the benefit of the "water fluoridation is communism" crowd and pioneered the art of making bad-faith allegations of communist sympathies against political opponents.

McCarthy was, broadly speaking, utterly correct up until the Army hearings. Though frankly, the item at the Army hearings that imploded McCarthy's reputation was asking about an attorney in the office representing the Army's participation in the National Lawyer's Guild (NLG). That was what prompted the famous line "have you no decency?" The NLG was, according to a 1950 HUAC report, "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party." While there are reasonable questions as to the control, or lack thereof, the Communist Party exerted on the NLG, the rebuttal to this report was delivered by NLG President of the Guild Professor Thomas Emerson, a self-described socialist. According to the NLG's own website the Communist Party "aided" in its formation, though the NLG maintains they preserved their independence. The NLG helped found the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), which was a communist front. The NLG represented the Rosenbergs, who were Soviet spies, and the Hollywood 10, who were communists. A few decades later, the NLG was the primary source of funding for the Weather Underground, a Marxist terrorist group.

McCarthy was wrong about individual cases, granted. But his overarching point, that there was communist infiltration in the State Department? Completely accurate.

It's funny how history goes. Nixon goes down for Watergate, but Obama wiretapped Trump's campaign and then used the intelligence agencies to launder Hillary's oppo research to blame Trump for being in league with the Russians that Clinton was paying to try to honeytrap the Trump campaign.

McCarthy goes down as the dumbest prosecutor in history for being right only 99.5% of the time.

Modern progressives are the heirs of Antonio Gramsci. Read this list of Soviet talking points and tell me that I'm crazy:

Heirs of Gramsci and also Orwell.

There is no truth, only competing agendas... but also there is truth, truth-telling ceremonies, true histories that have been distorted and covered up by the West. 'History is a whitewash', to quote Capaldi's Doctor Who in a reimagined, more diverse Victorian setting.

There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another... but favoured cultures to be glorified as feminist, rape-free (at least before whites arrived), diverse, inclusive and their darker aspects are left tastefully obscured or just blamed on white people for corrupting them...

The poor and criminals are victims of society but hate criminals are just evil and hateful.

There are these subversions and inversions as needed, different paths in the same direction.

You asked me why I label your thinking as anti-western and then you post this?

From my perspective every statement you just made only reinforces @MonkeyWithAMachinegun's thesis.

every statement you just made only reinforces @MonkeyWithAMachinegun's thesis.

Um... yes? That's the point? If this seems like a reasonable response to you, you're deeply confused about what that post is doing.

Are you endorsing @RandomRanger's claim that "There is no truth, only competing agendas" and that "There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another"?

If so, are you trying to argue that the position of absolute moral relativism seemingly being advocated here is "pro" rather than "anti" western? and If you do believe that, do you believe that CS Lewis, Adam Smith, St Augustine, and Marcus Aurelius would all share your belief?

To be more clear, I'm saying that the claim that 'there's no truth, only competing agendas' is just a tactic, it's only rolled out in certain circumstances when the aim is to muddy the air. It's like how there's no such thing as race, just the human race and there's also no definition of race because of all this genetic variation... but also Black gets its capital letter and not white and any idiot can immediately see racial differences at first glance, which is how the whole system works. Try telling a Brazilian admission board that there is no race, just the human race and see how far you get with that. The definition of the words change to meet the needs at the time.

And that's why I said they were heirs of Orwell.

Are you posting under the influence, sir?

Are you endorsing @RandomRanger's claim that "There is no truth, only competing agendas" and that "There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another"?

No, I am telling you you're misreading that post very, very badly. That is not his claim, but his account (further elaborating on MWAM's) of what the postmodern-influenced keyboard activists in question believe in practise. (And also, between the lines but I may as well make it explicit now, that you need to calm down and take a few deep breaths...)

These ideas were drummed up in a Soviet think-tank or by communist fellow-travelers in a philosophy department in Vienna circa 1880

Were they? I mean, maybe, but I don't know if I can take ESR's word for it.

So I'm not a philosopher by training, and I'll welcome correction on this by someone from the motte who knows more, but my understanding is that yes. At the very least, two of those points:

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

And

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Are straight up Soviet propaganda cliches.

The soviets were certainly partial to the first, but even Tolstoy was suggesting that lynching negros negates America's prosperity:

In a 1905 interview with The Century magazine, Leo Tolstoy criticised American culture, where despite "virtually no hindrances to individual development", yet "you lynch negroes, form trusts, and adopt imperialism."[20]

So I'm not convinced that this one was thought up by a Soviet think tank.

Similarly, the second critique goes back at least to Hobson:

When productive capacity grew faster than consumer demand, there was very soon an excess of this capacity (relative to consumer demand), and, hence, there were few profitable domestic investment outlets. Foreign investment was the only answer. But, insofar as the same problem existed in every industrialized capitalist country, such foreign investment was possible only if non-capitalist countries could be "civilized", "Christianized", and "uplifted"—that is, if their traditional institutions could be forcefully destroyed, and the people coercively brought under the domain of the "invisible hand" of market capitalism. So, imperialism was the only answer.[2]

While I agree these two sentiments were not necessarily thought up in a Soviet lab somewhere, that's why I mentioned that the other option was they were composed:

by communist fellow-travelers in a philosophy department in Vienna circa 1880

I should have been explicit in that I don't literally mean Vienna in the year 1880 and only Vienna in the year 1880, but rather that these ideas were the result of Marxist thought or proto-socialist thought which influenced Marx.

Tolstoy was suggesting that lynching negros negates America's prosperity... So I'm not convinced that this one was thought up by a Soviet think tank.

No, but he was an anarchist, which I believe fits the definition of "fellow-traveler", or as the Bolsheviks would have said a "poputchik." That is, a sympathizer who is not an actual communist or member of the communist party. I don't think it's particularly radical to say anarchists are fellow-travelers with communists, though if you disagree I'd be happy to explain my reasoning.

Similarly, the second critique goes back at least to Hobson

Who was also a communist fellow-traveler, if not simply a communist. His writings strongly influenced Lenin and Trotsky, and he was a member of the Independent Labour Party of England, which was an explicitly Marxist party.

Perhaps communist fellow-traveler is the wrong phrase, proto-socialist might fit better for those writers who predated Kapital, but at that point I think we're splitting hairs.

Sure, the communists liked people who agreed with them, and people who didn't like the western system around the turn of the 20th century generally liked to tear it down. This much we agree on.

There's more to the question though. Would the poputchiks consider themselves poputchiks? Tolstoy certainly didn't consider himself a Marxist or a socialist, though you're right that Hobson basically did.

Did the rest of these really come about from late 19th century counterculture? I don't know about that. Crime not being due to individual choice probably goes back at least to André-Michel Guerry in 1833 talking about crime and suicide rates being subject to rigid laws rather than individual choice. Cultural relativism was described by Herodotus. Etc.

As for this:

Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

I don't even know that Marxists believe this. Marx hated the lumpenproles. At best you can say that the Marxists believed that the poors are driven to theft by capitalism, but I don't know about entitlement or the virtue of submitting. Certainly none of them viewed theft as permissible in a socialist society like the USSR.

It just seems like you've collected a bunch of boo lights and credited Marxists and people kind of like Marxists with maybe originating or maybe just believing them. Doesn't seem to have a lot of explanatory power.

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