I have long forgotten those abstruse tomes by Marcuse, Lukacs and others; what I do remember are those witty analysis of popular culture artifacts such as the Donald Duck comics, demonstrating their repressive, capitalist, alienating message. Donald lives with three "nephews" who, obviously, are his sons but for some reason he never recognizes them as such. He has no wife but a girlfriend who lives apart and they never marry. Comic book heroes live individualistic lives, they never spend a minute in honest work and none is ever engaged in any socially constructive enterprise. In their view, the comics are a cultural tool to facilitate capitalist exploitation. I cant explain it now, but then it made sense to me.
Cultural Marxism is a vitriolic attack on standard morals and ideas, considered repressive and the cause of all psychic evils. But it is not Marxist at all because for Marx, culture is the superstructure that follows the underlying arrangement for material production. All Marxist regimes were and are highly repressive and authoritarian, just look at North Korea. There is no hedonism nor free sex in North Korea, there is hard work, discipline and sacrifice. Orthodox Judaism, Hassidism and all other currents are strongly disciplined and with harshly enforced rules. Cultural Marxism is more an outgrowth of Freud and Jung, who considered repression as the root of all mental and spiritual disease. To accuse Marxism of promoting hedonism is absurd.
Western hedonism has other roots (probably Greek paganism), and it carries the seeds of its own destruction. The Islam strongly opposes Western morals but in my opinion its solidity is cracking. Judaism, in its core, is also reacting and erecting barriers. The post-Marxist Chinese are indifferent to hedonism, they care for money alone. I think hedonism must be combatted and the only remedy is religion, including Christianity. The tragic paradox, typical of the Jewish fate, is that fanatic repressive Muslims as well Western reactionaries accuse us of fomenting hedonism, while at the same time, Orthodox Judaism is the very symbol of paternalism and reactionary repression.
Of course it is all nonsense. I learned to understand antisemitism from Kevin MacDonald: he says that the content of the accusations along the ages change and never make sense, but they make sense if seen as expression by disorganized, moronic, confused masses of the fear of Jewish evolutionary competition. Since I have no solution to this conundrum, I an only hope that the Mosshiach will arrive soon.
16 comments:
Religion is your blind spot, the stench no longer noticed.
Funny, I never noticed it, but now that you mention it, I gave a sniff and whaddya know - I'm a dirty, smell Jew after all. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
K
I took down the pic. That was not the idea.
I think the idea is that the Cultural Marxists did not advocate vacuous hedonism for its own sake , but rather as a means to the end of destroying the cultural basis of the western state, ie the white nuclear family, ethnic white identity, religion, and anything else that stands in the way of a communist takeover.
That having been said, I think that today's representatives of the Hard Left like Hilary Clinton, Obama, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi no longer wish for classical economic communism, but rather prefer a system of World Government in which economics occurs as in China, but the Elite are in charge, and ruthlessly control everything outside the narrow sphere of wealth creation, such as world population, armaments, re-distribution, health care, and of course, education, national boundaries, etc.
It is as bad if not worse than old-fashioned Marxism.
Anon.
In the West, traditional religion has been in decline since the mid-18th century (the Enlightenment and all that). The Church's peak of secular power ended centuries before that. My point is that WAll of this occurred well before the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) even got off the ground in the late 18th century. The Haskalah had almost no impact among the Polish and Russian Ashkenazim until the 19th century, and among many of them, no influence at all until they emigrated to America. Perhaps it's a bit much to blame the decline of religion in the West in its entirety on the Jews. Let's face it, the truth claims of the Abrahamic religions aren't true. That would have come out sooner or later.
This was the great irony - the Fascist (until today) blame the Jews for being Bolsheviks but the average Jew was just as opposed to Bolshevism as they were. Only a small minority of Jewish intellectuals were Bolsheviks or Cultural Marxists or cosmopolitans or international bankers or members of the Elders of Zion or what have you, but my poor illiterate fisherman grandparents and millions like them were gassed to pay for their supposed "sins".
K
It seems to me that they never stopped hating us. How could a learned critique of cultural artifacts of the nineteen twenties (much before Donald Duck was even invented by Disney) cause the social rot of 2012?
Hedonism is not necessarily the problem, it is self-hatred, that seems very advanced in the West, but infects some elements of the Jewish pop as well.
The idea that Jews are responsible for Western self-hatred - a bizarre idea that never caught on except in the West - is so culturally illiterate as to be astonishing.
In the modern period, it received its most influential expression by Rousseau - who was HUGELY influential and very anti-Western civizliation- and then increased dramatically with the German Romantics, who celebrated things like death and suicide and whom Goethe was already complaining about as anti-life and utterly sick people, and then steadily gathered pace till in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when nearly every major non-Jewish writer had self-hating ideas of some degree or other, often extreme.
The idea that Jews are responsible for this long non-Jewish intellectual history is one of the most pathetic attempts at blame shifting on the part of ethnic white chauvinists imaginable. It is contemptible, ignorant, and illiterate and psychologically considered, no different than Africans claiming they cant get their act together because of European colonialism.
The blogger at Unamusement Park (half-Jewish), posted an interesting commentary on an article that highlights the disconnect between the leadership of American Jewish organizations and ordinary Jews on the issues of illegal immigration and immigration reform. The gist is that the leadership is much more liberal on this issue than the community and that they have basically chosen to rationalize away and ignore the opinions of rank-and-file Jews.
Just a warning, some of his commenters on other posts are Jew-haters, but the blogger is not. Most of the comments on this post seemed uninflammatory so far.
http://unamusementpark.com/2012/03/jewish-leaders-insist-no-really-all-jews-are-bad/
In modern history, outside of Israel(and sometimes inside of it also), for such a brilliant people, the Jews seem to have had uniquely bad leadership, especially if you define leadership as serving the interests of your community rather than serving your own ideological and financial interests. Actually, it's hard to name one Jewish leader worthy of that name in the entire history of the Diaspora. Most of what we have are less extreme versions of the leaders of the Judenrats in the Ghettos.
K
"Since I have no solution to this conundrum, I an only hope that the Mosshiach will arrive soon."
I absolutely agree with you. Only one tiny detail bothering me. He'll come after hmmmm the apocalypse. And that might be a little painfull if I may say.
Got to find something else it seems.
The apocalypse is not part of Jewish doctrine. The Moschiach may appear at any moment, if only we increase our mitzvahs (good deeds) so as to merit his arrival.
K
Good luck to the mitzvah-makers. There will be no moshiach if they go at it for a thousand years. Judaism would have to be true to even hope for his arrival, and we all know that Judaism cannot prove its claims, starting with the existence of God.
Maybe it's not true, but if we all behaved as if it were, the world would be a better place. I'd say it's a better plan than say waging eternal jihad.
K
Maybe it's not true, but if we all behaved as if it were, the world would be a better place. I'd say it's a better plan than say waging eternal jihad.
K
The hope of the coming of the Mossiach is, well, a hope.
I am not buying a burial place in the Mount of Olives's cemetery to be among the first ones to see the coming of the Mossiach. You know, some Jews believe that resurrection will start there and pay millions for a well-placed site.
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