new left, not so new-raison d’etre

“But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence,
where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said,
certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed,
certain behaviour cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument
for the continuation of servitude.”
Herbert Marcuse

As we revisit our friend Melvin Tinker and his book
“That Hideous Strength: How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in the Church, the World and The Gospel of Change”,
we pick up where we last left off…reviewing some of the writings of the likes of individuals
such as Herbert Marcuse.

Who was Herbert Marcuse you ask?

He was a German-born American philosopher, sociologist, and Political Theorist.

Marcuse was a key figure in the Frankfurt Shcool of Critical thinking.

According to Tinker–
“In 1923 a week-long symposium was organized by Felix Weil in Frankfurt,
Germany in which they laid out a vision for a Marxist think-tank and
research centre.
The original name for the centre was the Institue for Marxism (Institut fur Marxismus),
but a more innocent sounding title was subsequently given,
The Institute for Social Research (Institut fur Sozialforschung).
Since that time the ISR has usually been known simply as the Frankfurt School.”

Besides his time spent in the Frankfurt School, Marcuse also spent time working for the
US government in the Office of Strategic Services which was a precursor to the CIA.

But what is actually more relevant and crucial to us today regarding Marcuse,
as we witness a sinister surge in this new cultural Marxism grabbing hold of
our Western Civilization, is that Marcuse is known as the ‘father of the New Left’.

The New Left…??

Perhaps The New Left is an oxymoron—not new at all.

Have we not been inundated with all things of the New Left ever since the midterms?
Does the new darling of that New Left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ring a bell?
So perhaps we’re actually discerning that this “new” left isn’t so new after all…

Tinker responds to Marcuse’s opening quote —
“Notice all those ‘cannots’?
Who do you think they are applied to?
Mainly people like Christians.
This is a new totalitarian-tolerance while all the time masquerading as a new freedom.
As such the new tolerance must extinguish the old tolerance and those people and
institutions which traditionally expouse it such as the church.
Furthermore, for neo-Marxism to have a raison d’etre
there must be repressed groups which need liberating,
People are required to see themselves as victims of the liberal society of which they are a part.

PC or not PC? That is the question
It is cultural Marxism which lies behind the all-pervading political correctness of our age.
Those of both the political right and left acknowledge this.
Pat Buchanan of the right wrote, ‘Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent
and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition, punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance.’

Similarly from the more liberal publication Newsweek:
PC is, strictly speaking, a totalitarian philosophy …
Politically, PC is Marxist in origin…There are…
some who recognize the tyranny of PC but see it only as a transitional phase,
which will no longer be necessary once the virtues of tolerance are internalized.
Does that sound familiar? Its the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In 1930 Max Horkheimer became the director of the ISR which is when neo-Marxism was
launched in earnest.
Horkheimer was convinced that the major obstacle to the spread of Marxism was traditional
Western culture with its Judeo-Christian heritage.
Here there developed a revisionist neo-Marxist interpretation of Western culture under the rubric,
Critical Theory, the goal of which according to William S. Lind ‘was not truth but praxis,
or revolutionary action: bringing the current society and culture down through unremitting,
destructive criticism.’
Truth, according to this view, was locked into its own particular point in history and so was
historically relative (of course that would apply to Critical Theory itself
a fact which was conveniently overlooked).

“unremitting destructive criticism…” along with ‘facts that are conveniently overlooked‘.
With the New Left’s biggest obstacle being Western Culture and its Judeo-Christian heritage…??

If you think that none of this is relevant or affects you, your life, your routines, your beliefs…
you best think again.

No, this New Left is really not so new at all—
yet it continues on relentlessly, with a growing fevered pitch,
to desperately turn your world upside down.
To de-establish the established.
To neuter the bedrock of Western Civilization…that being
her Judeo-Christian foundation.

And there is no one who is more giddy about this revved-up assault
then that of our old ancient foe.

Split
Divide
Eliminate
Conquer

You and I will soon have two choices, that is if those two choices aren’t already standing before us…
Stand firm in our faith…
or…
appease and apologize…
and in turn, lose our souls.

First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and
following their own evil desires.
They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?
Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.”
But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was
formed out of water and by water.
By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.
By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire,
being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years,
and a thousand years are like a day.
The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.
He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief.
The heavens will disappear with a roar;
the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.
Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?
You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.
That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.
But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth,
the home of righteousness.
So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this,
make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.
Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation,
just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him.
He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters.
His letters contain some things that are hard to understand,
which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Therefore, dear friends, since you already know this,
be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of lawless men and fall from
your secure position.
But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
To him be glory both now and forever!
Amen.
2 Peter 3:3-18:1

death of your own culture, right under your own eyes…

“What we have in the Tower of Babel episode is in effect a rival cosmology to that of God’s;
it is an unmaking and a remaking of the world, a blasphemous human “let us’
over and against the Holy ‘let us’ of the Triune God.”
Melvin Tinker

(Le Mont-Saint-Michel / Julie Cook/ 2018)

I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday–
so as I sat in the waiting room along with all those others who were also waiting,
I was actually hard at work.

I learned a long time ago to make the most of any and all “empty” moments.
Call it multitasking or simply the survival skill of having been a working mother…
I was sitting in a corner, book open in my lap while my yellow highlighter was going to town.
I was almost disappointed when the nurse came out and called me back.

I was in the midst of the slow continuation of working my way through the marvelous,
albeit short, book by Melvin Tinker
That Hideous Strength: How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in the Chruch, the World and The Gospel of Change

Below I want to offer you the two page’s worth of enlightenment that I managed to read
and highlight before the nurse came to get me—

It is so much on the money that I had to contain myself from shouting out
a big ‘AMEN” as I read.
Had I done so, the folks waiting around me might have thought I was out of my
meds….meds for things like sudden and unexpected outbursts—
appropriate and not…
but little did they know I was reading words of an alarming truth that is sinisterly
consuming our very lives.

“We saw how for Lewis, the ideology of his day, which he sought to expose and debunk,
was naturalistic materialism.
One of the main ideologies of our day is a variant of this, namely, neo-Marxism,
sometimes called cultural Marxism or libertarian Marxism.

A philosophy of human liberation.
It seeks to overcome human alienation, to emancipate man from repressive social institutions,
especially economic institutions that frustrate his true nature, and to bring him into harmony
with himself, his fellow men, and the world around him so that he can overcome his estrangements
and express his true essence through creative freedom.

But the liberty which the cultural Marxists have in mind is not the liberty
of classical liberalism– equality under the law or even equality of opportunity.
Unlike the classical Marxist whose main focus was economic inequality,
theirs is an equality cutting across the whole of human experience.
It was Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School who argued that traditional societies promote what
he called a ‘repressive tolerance” because they do not deal with the latent inequalities of humans;
the fact that some are cleverer, wiser or harder working than others,
who are then to be considered to be oppressed because of their perceived deficiency.

As Andrew Sandlin writes:
Libertarian Marxism is all about liberating humanity from the social institutions and conditions
(like the family and church and business and traditional views and habits and authorities)
that prevent the individual from realizing his true self,
his true desires and aspirations, from being anything he wants to be–full autonomy…
Libertarian Marxism is the Marxism of our culture and time.

Peter Berger calls the ‘plausibility structures’ of a society,
that is those background assumptions, beliefs and ways of thinking and acting which are taken as given.
It is the presumption which declares “Of course, everyone now days knows that…’
The aim is to get people to think and feel for themselves that certain values and practices,
such as same-sex marriage, are common sense, fair or even natural.

Over the last 60 years or so in the West there has effectively occurred the death of on culture,
rooted in the Judeo-Christian world view, and the rise of another more secular one.
Philip Rieff observes that,
“The death of a culture begins with its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways
that remain inwardly compelling.’ Once the ideology of neo-Marxism, you talk instead about ‘equality,’
‘liberation’ and ‘tolerance’–the things of which the Chruch of England speaks endlessly)
the revolution is more or less complete.
The upshot of this is that if these beliefs and practices are considered plausible,
Christian beliefs and practices become implausible more less by default,
in which case it will not do simply to argue for the cogency of the Chrisitan faith for
most people will think that there is nothing to argue about.
Many of us don’t spend that much time thinking how we might argue against flat-earthists—
we simply assume they are mistaken, out of touch and an irrelevance;
so it is with many people’s view of Christianity.

Changing the view of Christianity, one Marxist at a time…
we’ve been warned….

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether
I come and see you or am absent,
I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit,
with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel,
Philippians 1:27