Monday 14 January 2008

The "long march through the culture," and the need to attack Trevor

Several blogs including The Hive, Quest for Security and Poneke have been all a-giggle about old Trevor Loudon and his predilection, they say, for seeing "communist fronts" everywhere, even in places as unlikely as the NZ-China Friendship Society.

Taking on established bloggers is par for the course for newer blogs like these bidding for attention, but the Hive and Poneke have enough integrity not to get their facts wrong  when they start a blog war, and they're good enough not to have to resort to blog wars to attract readers.  It's sad that they think they have to.

Gigglers like the 'Quest' bloggers are just useful idiots who know no better, but Hive and Poneke are intelligent enough, I would have thought, to know that the use of front organisations has been a pre-eminent strategy by communists for at least the last ninety years in injecting the foul bacillus of communism into the culture, and to know that if that wasn't the case it wouldn't be necessary to have people like Trevor eager to lift up the rocks of these front organisations to see what's crawling around behind the shiny public faces.

The "long march through the culture" that communism has enjoyed over the last ninety years, despite its bloody history over all of those years, was largely the result of 1)the 'moral disarmament' caused by the suffusion of religious morality and its extolling of sacrifice as a moral virtue -- a political blank cheque the communists have been ready, willing and better placed than the religionists to pick up -- and 2)the strategic thinking of (first) Leon Trotsky, and thence of one Antonio Gramsci, the co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, a talented theoretician who, as Lindsay Perigo explains,

put a distinctively modern, relativist stamp on traditional, dogmatist Marxism. He is Marx laced with Machiavelli (a Gramsci pin-up). Marx had implied the existence of truths independent of human perception; Gramsci cleansed Marx of any taint of objectivity and proclaimed that truth was entirely "pragmatic," "praxis"-driven, determined by the interests of the revolution. Marx had preached the historical inevitability of the triumph of socialism, independent of man's will; Gramsci taught that only the wilful, conscious but clandestine subversion of capitalist culture at every level—a "long march through the culture" as he put it—could effect revolution. He was frustrated that the proletariat had not only failed to rise up against capitalism but had seemingly grown enamoured of it! This infernal reactionary ourage he attributed to the bourgeoisie's "cultural hegemony," their domination of churches, schools, the media, the unions, the arts, etc. The bourgeoisie therefore had to be beaten at their own game, their institutions infiltrated by intellectual moles ... and, by a long, silent, subtle process, brought down.

The moles' agenda was not to be "revolution" explicitly, but something unexceptionable on its face, couched in weasel words with which we're all too familiar: "consensus," "mandate," "justice," "pluralism," "community," "democracy," "global [insert marshmallow noun here]," and so on. (Note the names of two of the groups associated with New Zealand's recent "terrorist camp" raids: “Global Peace and Justice Auckland,” spearheaded by communist John Minto, and “Peace Action Wellington”!)

Ever wondered why the church is riddled with atheist priests?
Think Gramsci!
Where "Liberation Theology" (Marxism set to Catholicism) came from?
Think Gramsci!
Why our schools and universities place social consensus above genuine learning and deal in the currency of Marxism disguised as mush?
Think Gramsci!
Why our newspapers and TV networks, now full of graduates from the schools and universities, do the same?
Think Gramsci!
Why "corporates" are universally despised as evil, even by the corporates themselves?
Think Gramsci!
Why the United States, the last semi-repository of bourgeois values, is "The Great Satan" to Muslim and non-Muslim alike all over the globe?
Think Gramsci!
Where the editor of Salient gets this sort of stuff from, "rebutting" my column on Global Warming:
"Go about your business now, keep consuming. The mindless corporations are protecting your interests— believe it—only lefty politicians subvert real science. Rest assured, greed is a good thing."

[For all of these manifestations of nonsense], Think Gramsci! Via Chomsky in this last instance—but remember where Chomsky got it from!

Other contemporary luminaries influenced by Gramsci include the pomowanker Foucault; and unsurprisingly, and, chillingly, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who just couldn't wait to bring his troops home from Iraq. Brown the weasel-worder, who has forbidden public servants to use the words "Muslim" and "terrorist" next to each other!

There's no question that the Left has taken its "long march through the culture" with devastating success. We are assailed by their bromides at every turn, and the Right has been mortally corrupted by them (as well as its own contradictions). Their "long march," with Gramsci at the helm, has dragged the world to the abyss of totalitarian Hell.

Thank goodness then for the likes of Trevor Loudon, who are happy to keep track of the "long march," however surreptitious the marchers, and for the likes of Lindsay Perigo, who unlike so many others knows that it's going to be a long haul back from the pomowankers and the nihilists, and via a very different path.

"We lovers of reason and freedom have to do a Gramsci of our own," says Perigo, but in favour of reason and freedom and capitalism.  This is a long march on which our culture is in desperate need. 

Who's with us?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can see that you approve of Loudon's mission, the assembly of myriad files detailing nebulous connections between various suspected 'commies,' often in the distant past.

I firmly agree with Poneke in finding it hilarious and bizarrely fascinating that Loudon believes Hitler and Mussolini are leftists. What is even greater comedy is Loudon's po-faced reply on Poneke's comments thread, where he holds that 'EVERY political moderate, social democrat, conservative or libertarian is to the right of Hitler and Mussolini because they were in reality leftists' and as such, Poneke cruelly misrepresents his argument in his (excellent) thread title:

"ACT Party vice-president declares himself to be a near-anarchist on the political right of “left-wing” Hitler and Mussolini"

I actually find Loudon's attitude creepy. I'm sure if he delved into my past, he'd be easily able to dredge up some associations that could be patched together to make me look like a dyed-in-the-wool Maoist commie. I'll save him the trouble:

- Active in student politics at Vic Uni while there, attending several marches and fraternising with their organisers
- Both parents involved in 1981 anti-tour marches
- Posted for a long period on activist website FightDemBack
- Worked under known dirty commie red Alick Shaw in the kitchen of the Grain of Salt in my student days
- Has several Chinese friends who have as yet to smuggle him back to mainland China for the final indoctrination procedures - can only be a matter of time

This should be enough thoughtcrime to pin me to the wall in Loudon's book. The guy comes across as totally Orwellian in his desire to lather on the tar... NZ China Friendship Society = 'communist front'? What a joke...

PC, you might hold Loudon up as ahero and a martyr for what he's doing, I'll hold him up for ridicule. Still, while he's on his hands and knees looking for Reds under the bed, at least he's not up to any more serious mischief...

DenMT

KG said...

"NZ China Friendship Society = 'communist front'? What a joke..."
yeah--reds under the bed are always a joke to lefties--derision and ridicule being just two more of the weapons the dishonest bastards use to shut down debate and investigations into their unsavoury connections.
As for a lefty having the nerve to describe Loudon as "Orwellian"..words fail.
I for one refuse to let the left set the terms of any debate by their use of all the usual tactics and labels:
the left are thuggish, dishonest totalitarian assholes who would happily see us descend into slavery. Every time a famous lefty dies I raise a glass in celebration.
You bet I'm with Loudon and Perigo. The item I have up on Crusader Rabbit right now about the Canadian publisher facing a Star Chamber type interrogation demonstrates perfectly where the left would lead us.
Bastards and scum, every last one of them.

poneke said...

I'm not engaged in a blog war, nor making fun of Trevor. I have a fair amount of respect for his energy, and the journalist in me has found some of his articles on the links between different people and organisations quite interesting. As I wrote, some of his stuff is also batty IMO, but then, many people say that about some of what I write.

What prompted me to write the article was Trevor's very serious claims that Hitler and Mussolini were actually far-left-wingers, not of the extreme Right. Given Trevor's background and the content of his blog, it was, IMO, a somewhat newsworthy thing for the vice-president of a party represented in our Parliament to be arguing. Were I still working in the parliamentary press gallery, I would have written the same story.

I endeavour on my blog to maintain high journalistic standards of accuracy, and with my article about Trevor, as with much else I write, I have linked through to the source material, which in Trevor's case, largely came from his own blog.

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling said...

If you are a stickler for accuracy then you would be right to attack Trevor, generally speaking the "left / socialist" was about ownership and the "right / fascist" was about regulation. I think Hitler said the same thing, something along the lines of "I don't need to go to all the trouble of owning all the industry, I just tell it what to do", but in German.

Like Ronald Reagan, I find "left right" pointless

"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism." [1]

[1] Cresswell, P (Ed.) "The Free Radical" July August 2007, p1.

Eric Olthwaie, a crawler.

Libertyscott said...

It may be fair to argue that the NZ-China Friendship Society is no longer a communist front, but it is certaintly pro the Beijing regime.

It never has on its agenda addressing human rights, freedom of speech or any such issues in China, as it was originally set up to represent the PRC in NZ before NZ recognised it (back in the days when the legitimate government of China was seen to be the ROC on Taiwan).

For those who find what Loudon does creepy, would they think the same if he was digging up those who were once local supporters of Pinochet, the apartheid era S.African government, Stroessner, Franco or other non-Marxist dictators? Of course not, so why should sympathy with regimes of murderers be treated with kid gloves?

The intellectual argument that Stalin and Hitler were both at the same end of the political spectrum has long been made and is quite accurate. Marxism-Leninism and Nazism are totalitarian visions committed to annihilation of those who do not fit their mould of perfected people, and both have spilt blood in abundance - yet past sympathy with the former is somehow forgivable.