Twenty years ago today, supporters of freedom and human rights cheered and wept for joy as the Berlin Wall was torn down by jubilant young Germans.
To so many, that heady day seemed to herald the emergence of a better world. The spectre of communism had finally been laid to rest. Liberty had triumphed over tyranny.
The end of the Cold War even led some to proclaim that this was 'the end of history' - which was to say that liberal democracy was now the dominant and unchallengeable force in the world.
The collapse of communism was actually a slow-burning process. Its moral and political bankruptcy became obvious decades before that glorious Berlin day in November 1989
However, the 9/11 attacks on America tragically proved this to be absurdly over-optimistic. The eruption of radical Islamism revealed that, while the West may have been rid of one enemy in the Soviet Union, another deadly foe had risen to take its place. So much is, sadly, all too evident.
But what is perhaps less obvious is that communism did not just vanish in a puff of historical smoke. The Soviet Union was defeated and fell apart, for sure. But the communist ideology that fuelled it did not so much disintegrate as reconstitute itself into another, even more deadly form as the active enemy of western freedom.
Subversive
Soviet Communism was a belief system whose goal was to overturn the structures of society through the control of economic and political life. This mutated into a post-communist ideology of the Left, whose no-less ambitious aim was to overturn western society through a subversive transformation of its culture. It is lead by the children of the leftist of the 60’s.
To grasp the extent to which this has in fact taken place, we have to go back in time to well before the moment the Berlin Wall fell. The collapse of communism was actually a slow-burning process. Its moral and political bankruptcy became obvious decades before that glorious Berlin day in November 1989.
For many communist fellow travelers, the scales fell from their eyes when the Hungarian uprising was crushed in 1956. Others, over the years, lost faith not just in communism but in its less radical sister, socialism, as their core tenet of 'equality' proved itself in a myriad different ways to be the enemy of freedom and justice, with market forces appearing to carry the torch of liberty instead.
But as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilization (and capitalism) found another way to realize their goal of bringing it down.
This was what might be called 'cultural Marxism'. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.
This key insight was developed in particular by an Italian Marxist philosopher called Antonio Gramsci. His thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals - who are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.
Gramsci understood that the working class would never rise up to seize the levers of 'production, distribution and exchange' as communism had prophesied. Economics was not the path to revolution.
He believed instead that society could be overthrown if the values underpinning it could be turned into their antithesis: if its core principles were replaced by those of groups who were considered to be outsiders or who actively transgressed the moral codes of that society.
So he advocated a 'long march through the institutions' to capture the citadels of the culture and turn them into a collective fifth column, undermining from within and turning all the core values of society upside-down and inside-out.
This strategy has been carried out to the letter.
The nuclear family has been widely shattered. Illegitimacy was transformed from a stigma into a 'right'. The tragic disadvantage of fatherlessness was redefined as a neutrally-viewed 'lifestyle choice'.
Education was wrecked, with its core tenet of transmitting a culture to successive generations replaced by the idea that what children already knew was of superior value to anything the adult world might foist upon them.
The outcome of this 'child-centered' approach has been widespread illiteracy and ignorance and an eroded capacity for independent thought. It was the process of Purposely Dumbing Down America and especially the youth or children.
Misdeeds
Law and order were similarly undermined, with criminals deemed to be beyond punishment since they were 'victims' of society and with illegal drug-taking tacitly encouraged by a campaign to denigrate anti-drugs laws.
The 'rights' agenda - commonly known as 'political correctness' - turned morality inside out by excusing any misdeeds by self-designated 'victim' groups on the grounds that such 'victims' could never be held responsible for what they did.
Feminism, anti-racism and gay rights thus turned men, white people and Christians into the enemies of decency who were forced to jump through hoops to prove their virtue.
This Through The Looking Glass mindset rests on the belief that the world is divided into the powerful (who are responsible for all bad things) and the oppressed (who are responsible for none of them).
This is a Marxist doctrine. But the extent to which such Marxist thinking has been taken up unwittingly even by the Establishment was illustrated by the astounding observation made in 2005 by the then senior law lord, Lord Bingham, that human rights law was all about protecting 'oppressed' minorities from the majority.
None of this is to say there has been a giant, organized conspiracy to undermine Britain in this way. Admittedly, some Left-wingers did so conspire, but many others bought into these ideas for different reasons.
Of particular importance was the demoralization of the British ruling class by the loss of Empire and the indebtedness of Britain to America at the end of World War II - a profound loss of cultural nerve that made the Establishment vulnerable to any ideas, however outlandish, that promised to bring about the New Jerusalem.
These ideas gained general traction within the intelligentsia, the universities and the media - which is why the BBC is so institutionally skewed towards political correctness.
Totalitarian
However, the terrifying fact is that they form a totalitarian mindset that replicates the way communist societies clamped down on any other than permitted views. Thus the intolerance - or even arrest - of Christians opposed to gay adoption and civil union, or the vilification as 'racists' of those opposed to mass immigration (as they have tried of vilify Lou Dobbs from CNN for his arguments to secure US borders. And laws like the Hate Crimes bill that was just snuck by the American people and signed by Obama are designed with this end in mind… to be used against Christians, Jews, patriots, etc.)
This mindset also led to the belief that a sense of nationhood was the cause of all the ills in the world, precisely because western nations embodied western values. So transnational institutions or doctrines such as the EU, UN, international law or human rights law came to trump national laws and values (which is where we find ourselves now if we allow Cap and Trade to pass and Obama to sign the Copenhagen treaty or if Senator Boxer and Secy Hillary Clinton have their way and push us into the UN’s - Rights of the Child treaty taking away parental rights and giving it to the UN.)
But the truth is that to be hostile to the western nation is to be hostile to democracy. And indeed, with the development of the EU super-state we can see that the victory over one anti-democratic regime within Europe - the Soviet Union - has been followed by surrender to another.
For the republic of Euroland puts loyalty to itself higher than that to individual nations and their values. It refused to commit itself in its constitution to uphold Christianity, the foundation of western morality.
Instead, it is committed to moral and cultural relativism, which sets group against group and guarantees supreme and antidemocratic power to the bureaucrats setting the rules of 'diversity' and outlawing all dissent from permitted attitudes.
When the Berlin Wall fell, we told ourselves that this was the end of ideology. We could not have been more wrong.
The Iron Curtain came down only to be replaced by a rainbow-hued knuckle-duster, as our cultural commissars pulverize all forbidden attitudes in order to reshape western society into a post-democratic, post-Christian, post-moral universe. Lenin would have smiled.
by Melanie Phillips – MailOnline
Related:
Political Correctness – Revenge of Marxism - “Political Correctness is Marxism with a nose job. Multiculturalism is not about tolerance or diversity, it is an anti-Western hate ideology designed to dismantle Western civilization. If we can demonstrate this, an important part of the battle has already been won. The battle is being won through various subtle types of brainwashing and invading through population growth and re-settlement.
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Obama Snubs Berlin Wall Ceremonies
President Barack Obama's decision to spurn German President Angela Merkel's invitation to attend ceremonies commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago is "the most telling nonevent of his presidency."
That's the view of National Review Editor Rich Lowry, who notes that Obama has visited more foreign countries than any other president during his first year in office, yet has begged off going to Berlin to celebrate the Nov. 9 anniversary because of a crowded schedule.
"It's hard to imagine any other American president eschewing the occasion," Lowry writes.
"Wouldn't Obama at least want to take the occasion to celebrate freedom and human rights — those most cherished liberal values? Not necessarily. He has mostly jettisoned them as foreign-policy goals in favor of a misbegotten realism that soft-pedals the crimes of nasty regimes around the world.
"During the Cold War, we undermined our enemies by shining a bright light on their repression," Lowry writes. "In Berlin, JFK called out the Communists on their 'offense against humanity.' Obama would utter such a phrase only with the greatest trepidation, lest it undermine a future opportunity for dialogue."
The Berlin Wall came down because the free world, led by America, stood resolute against communist tyranny. But for Obama, "we are less an exceptional power than one among many, seeking deals with our peers in Beijing and Moscow," Lowry observes.
"Why would Obama want to celebrate the refuseniks of the Eastern Bloc when he won't even meet with the Dalai Lama in advance of his trip to China?"
Many would say, “Of course our Marxist leaning president would not want to go to a celebration of the event that marks the fall of Communism in Europe and then the USSR. Perhaps he’d rather be putting it back? He is surrounded by Marxists and Socialists… and calls them his friends. It was he himself who said if we want to know him, judge him by his friends. Well…”
Source: NewsMax
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