The communists of old, who used guns and tanks to take over a nation, and the cultural Marxists of more recent times, who seek to take a nation over from within, have both made clear their hatred of marriage and family, and have done all they can to destroy both.
Sexual morality in general was targeted by these activists, and everything from abortion, free sex, homosexuality, and so on have been promoted. We saw much of this happening in the former Soviet Union and other communist countries. And it sure was not pretty.
But while political communism seems to be a spent force today, the ideology behind it is alive and well in the West. What we call cultural Marxism has been moving full steam ahead. Taking over the institutions of power and influence is now the preferred strategy of the revolutionaries, and it has been going on for nearly a century now.
For background on this, and to learn more about communists like Antonio Gramsci who spoke about the “long march through the institutions,” see here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2014/06/28/cultural-marxism/
I have written before about the goals of the communists in the West. One such American list includes these points:
-Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
-Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression.
-Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
-Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
-Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
-Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a “religious crutch.”
-Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
-Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
-Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
The targeting of the family and the war on morality, especially sexual morality, has been a hallmark of these folks for many decades now. One of the most important exposes of this is a very important book penned last year by Paul Kengor called Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage (WND Books).
A nice summary of this well-documented volume appears in an article from last year. In it Kengor states:
Efforts to fundamentally transform marriage and family have been long at work, but never (until now) accepted and pushed by the mainstream. In the past, these efforts were spearheaded by the most dangerous radicals. For two centuries, leftist extremists made their arguments, from the 1800s to the 1960s, characterized by the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels wrote of the “abolition of the family!” Even then, in 1848, Marx and Engels could call “abolition of the family” an “infamous proposal of the communists.”
“Blessed is he who has no family,” Marx wrote to Engels, at best only partly in jest. Marx’s partner in crime detested family and marriage so much that he refused both. The ideological duo fulminated against the “bourgeois claptrap” of marriage, which was merely a “system of housewives held in common.” Engels was carrying the banner to smash monogamy a century before the 1960s New Left adopted the credo.
Efforts to revolutionize family and marriage continued, from socialist utopians like Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Albert Brisbane to cultural Marxists in the Frankfurt School such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich to 20th-century leftists and progressives ranging from the Bolsheviks—Lenin, Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai—to Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and ’60s radicals Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd.
When Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer ran a “Red Family” colony in near Berkeley in the 1960s, they were merely following the footsteps of socialist-utopian colonies in the 1800s in places like Oneida, New York and New Harmony, Indiana.
In his book he spends a lot of time detailing this war on marriage and family. The push for all things homosexual today comes out of all this of course. Indeed, he has a whole chapter on “Communists and Homosexuality” for example. He writes:
As communists over time broke down barriers in sexual relations and the covenant of marriage, many moved toward acceptance and advocacy of homosexuality and bisexuality. “Smashing monogamy” was merely one manifestation of blowing up coveted traditions. Some of these cultural Marxists practiced what they preached. Kate Millett’s “sexual politics” had translated into a lesbian lifestyle for her personally, and the New Left politics of guys like Mark Rudd and Bill Ayers at least dictated that they give bisexuality a shot.
He carefully documents how homosexuality and homosexual marriage were not at first championed by the communists, but eventually they fully jumped in bed with these radical causes. Says Kengor, “Any previous reticence about homosexuality … has been tossed out the window. Communists who once purged gays are now aboard the gay-marriage bandwagon. Two examples particularly stand out: Communist Party USA and (amazingly) Fidel Castro’s Cuba.”
Consider this from one of the recent CPUSA documents:
The main obstacle to progress today is right-wing extremism. Right wing spokespeople and groups represent and are funded by the most conservative sections of the rich and powerful. The extreme right, which now dominates the Republican Party, is seeking to roll back all the social and economic rights that working people fought for and won. They want to take the country back to a time before marriage equality, before voting rights, before women’s reproductive rights, before the right to a union. It seems at times that they want to take us back to the days of slavery.
As for Cuba, consider Fidel Castro’s niece Mariela. Says Kengor:
In Havana, in broad daylight, Mariela Castro led an LGBT activist parade, where, as Johnson reported, “Some 400 transvestites sashayed behind Castro, doing a conga line through the streets, to celebrate the Fifth Cuban Day Against Homophobia, observed elsewhere on May 17. Marchers shouted, ‘Down with homophobia! Long live sexual diversity!
This is not just extraordinary; it is utterly unprecedented in Cuba’s tyranny. To repeat: a Fifth Cuban Day Against Homophobia. The day is celebrated just after May Day, the high holy day for the communist state. Mere decades ago, this absolutely would not have been accepted in Cuba. The marchers would have been immediately jailed, without question – and handcuffed and beaten and carted straight to the loony bin.
Raising more eyebrows still, Mariela maintains that her uncle, the grand old gay-basher-in-chief, actually favors same-sex marriage, “but he has not made it public.” More than that, Fidel, according to his niece, is a closet gay-rights advocate. She further reports, “He has done some advocacy work, speaking of the need to make progress in terms of rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Does this radical reversal make sense? Says Kengor:
Yes, it does. The root of the answer, once again, is the much older Marxist/communist assault on marriage. Wittingly or unwittingly, intentionally or unintentionally, led either by the spirit of the times or by more sinister forces that have long led communists, the communist priority is less gay rights than it is a continued assault on the family. The assault means a rejection of older and more established and despised enemies for communists: morality, tradition, religion, God….
For Cuba’s communists, faced with a conflict between their penchant for persecuting the family/marriage and for persecuting gay people, the communist war on traditional morality and faith and the family wins out, thus dictating a sudden embrace of gays. As long as the traditional family is reversed, Marxism is advanced. That is the overriding priority. Communists will do whatever they need to destroy the family; “gay marriage” is an ideal, handy device. Even in Castro’s Cuba, it works nicely for their purposes.
Sixteen years ago American commentator Bill Lind was also highlighting the agenda of the cultural Marxists. In a talk on “The Origins of Political Correctness” he too notes how the war on family and marriage is a major part of these radical’s plans:
Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Where does it come from? What is it?
We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious. If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.
He continues:
The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
If you want to understand why things are the way they are today, you have to know something about the past. That is why the leftists and Marxists have also denigrated history, and/or sought to rewrite it. If we do not learn from history we will keep repeating its mistakes.
The revolutionaries have been singling out marriage, family and morality for a century now, and if you want to understand why things are so bad today, you need to know something of this history. And based on that knowledge, we must act. So, over to you…
http://dailysignal.com/2015/10/15/how-the-left-has-sabotaged-marriage-and-family/
http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/
[2016 words]