Culture: June 2017 Archives

About 10 years ago, an intelligently entertaining (and often spiritually edifying) pop culture blog went on permanent hiatus. It's worth revisiting, in this year of the 500th anniversary of its pseudepigraphous author's great historical moment.

The premise of Luther at the Movies: The Great Reformer, famed for his blunt speech, reviewing the latest cultural effluent from Hollywood.

The blog's tagline:

Join me, Martin Luther (Doktor), as I do to contemporary cinema what I did to the Whore of Babylon. Unless I am convinced that a motion picture does not emit a stench to choke a sow, my conscience is captive to my impeccable taste. Here I sit, in a comfy Loews stadium-seating theatre, replete with Nacho bar and adjustable arm rests! I can do no other!

From the Blogspot "About me" section:

Although alive in Christ, as far as this vale of tears is concerned, I am currently as dead as Chevy Chase's movie career, though I have not let that interfere with a robust drinking and blogging career. My favorite color is blood red and I like walking in the rain.

From the inaugural post:

...Well, beware you purveyors of pompous pus foisted on shepherdless sheep--I'm back! The wretched of the earth who seek to escape their miserable lives for two hours only to be tricked into seeing V for Vendetta now have a champion!

Hollywood, New York, London, Rome, Bombay--listen well! The only cheek I will turn is the one on my backside--for you to kiss as I eviscerate your contemptible contributions to the common culture. And yes, I mean derivative crap like Lucky Number Slevin!...

Luther did not limit himself to music:

As we look ahead to launching another child into higher education, I am thinking that the Ivy League schools have ceased to offer an education worthy of the price tag, much less their long and honorable heritage.

Case in point: This center-left Yale student's complaint that his Shakespeare course had been politicized:

Full disclosure: politically I am center-left, voted for Hillary Clinton, and I dislike our current president. Politics in the classroom does not unsettle me because I disagree with the liberal viewpoints. What unsettles me, rather, is the thought that my education is being politicized at the expense of timeless truths.

I chose to study English because I wanted to improve my writing and reading abilities, because I value the literature of the language I speak, and because some aspects of the human condition are only accessible through books, plays, and poems. Reading Shakespeare should, of course, inform the way we think about systems of government, political leaders, and historical change. But it shouldn't require an "I'm With Her" sticker and a subscription to The Washington Post. One will have a difficult time deciphering the hidden nuances of Julius Caesar if one is determined to view his character through the prism of current events.

Literature is ideally a way of broadening our social imaginations. If authors are only worth reading insofar as they inform modern phenomena, then the entire English canon is of mere antiquarian interest and can be summarily dismissed.

Classrooms need not be purged of politics altogether. That's neither possible nor desirable. But professors must recognize the line between timeless political insights and rank partisanship. Politics in the classroom can also be a distraction from the syllabi and the space built into the curriculum for contextualizing historic sources with contemporary situations.

This prompted an interesting series of comments by the pseudonymous "Chi Huavara", posted on June 26, 2017 at 4:36 pm:

Finnegan,

You're starting to wake up. You've identified a problem, but though you've described the symptoms, you don't know what the problem is exactly quite yet. You can't really put your finger on it. Since you've already started, let me help you here.

It's important to understand the history of modern education in America, and in particular, Critical Theory and its origins. Some will attempt to mischaracterize what follows as a conspiracy theory, but this is really just the basic history of education in America, freely available to anyone willing to do the research.

After the Russian Revolution, Marxists were perplexed as to why Marxist thought didn't overtake Europe as they expected it would. So they set about devising ideologies and strategies specifically designed to conquer Western Civilization and the globe with Marxism.

In 1918, Hungarian Deputy Commissar for Culture and Marxist György Lukács was independently developing such strategies. Lukács developed what he called "cultural terrorism." One component of cultural terrorism, was to develop sexual education courses in schools that would work to distort traditional sexual morals. He came to the conclusion that if sexual morals in Christians could be compromised and undermined when they were children, then Christianity itself could be destroyed, and along with it Western Civilization and therefore opposition to Marxist indoctrination. He surmised that Christianity was the foundation of Western Civilization, and therefore had to be directly attacked. He accomplished this by highly criticizing Christian sexual moral values in the classroom, while simultaneously promoting sexual promiscuity. He also derided parental authority, which children are always open to. This had the effect of transforming children into bullies, petty thieves, sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths. The Hungarian working class became enraged at Lukacs' work, and drove him out of Hungary. He would...

In 1923, In 1923, Lukacs founded the Institute for Marxism at Frankfurt University in Weimar Germany along with fellow Marxists Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. Cultural Marxists came to realize however, that their true intentions would be better concealed if they changed the name to the Institute of Social Research, which is popularly referred to as the Frankfurt School. The primary goal of the Frankfort School was to translate Marxism from economic terms to cultural terms, or to teach Cultural Marxism. It would use multidisciplinary methods to indoctrinate and manufacture new groups of oppressed proletariat. Marcuse used polymorphous perversion to expand the ranks of the proletariat to homosexuals and transexuals. Gramsci's "Long March Through The Culture" strategy was utilized alongside Freudianism to create a kind of psychological spearhead in their War on Christianity and Western Civilization.

In 1930, Marxist Max Horkheimer became director of the Frankfurt School, and begun work to transform György Lukács' work into the ideology of Cultural Marxism, which wouldn't be fully realized until some time in the 1950s.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, many professors from the Frankfort School fled since they were identified with Bolsheviks, the school having been modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and also since many of their members were Jewish. Professors from the Frankfort School would relocate to the United States and become very influential in American universities and re-establish the Frankfort School in New York City with help from Columbia University. The Frankfurt School professors would shift their goal from destroying Western culture in Germany, to destroying Western culture in America.

At Columbia University, Cultural Marxism would come to be known as Critical Theory, which all modern circular is based on today.

Then like clockwork, 20 years after György Lukács Critical Theory (Cultural Marxism) is taught in America, we see the rise of the beatniks, and later the hippies; the first American victims of György Lukács' academic indoctrination strategy. The beatniks and hippies, exhibited the same kinds of behavioral aberrations as the earlier Hungarian students as bullies, petty thieves, sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths.

These boomer-era hippies then became professors, and through the haze of LSD and other mind-altering substances, continued to indoctrinate generations of future students with Critical Theory nonsense.

This is why you see what you see from your professors. It's their designed purpose to indoctrinate you with far left Marxist ideology, rather than provide a genuine education. And to ridicule and punish those who question their recitations.

What can be done?

I propose the ratification of a Constitutional Amendment that would establish a permanent separation of education and state. After all, when you have state funded and supported "education," then what you're going to get is generations of highly indoctrinated statists every graduation.

#SeparationOfEducationAndState

Totalitarian communism as a political force is mostly dead, but the cultural movement it spawned to undermine the West has succeeded and continues its erosive work in schools across Western Europe and the Anglosphere.