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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   3196 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!

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.

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.

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