This essay was posted anonymously on the comments section of
this post.
It is too good not to post in its own right. It is a very good precis of the subversion that has changed western culture so dramatically in the last 60 years.
Slightly abridged.
The extreme left has for decades agitated among various minority groups in order to bring about the breakdown of our existing society and its replacement with a model of their own choosing.
The three main roadblocks to its goal of a secular and socialist world order are private property (which provides material independence from state power), the family (which affords loyalties prior to the state), and religion (which claims authority above that of the state).
Homosexual activism was long ago identified by Marxist-Leninists as a social force to be harnessed and directed to undermine the traditional family and the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western culture, thus expanding the role of the state into personal relationships once thought to lie beyond its purview.
The collectivist, totalitarian notions underlying this power-grab stem directly from revolutionary Marxism.
Marx held that individuals are the products of social and class environments, making them pawns of forces they are incapable of transcending without the intervention of an activist government. His followers (whether of the revolutionary or ballot-box variety), regard mankind as essentially stupid and wicked. Luckily, there is a cadre of self-anointed intellectuals who are better, wiser and kinder than their fellow man. They alone possess the knowledge and methods needed to construct a planned social order. It is their right, and indeed their duty, to ascend to political power and re-order society according to this blueprint.
Socialists regard equality of condition as the only natural and morally desirable state of affairs. Inequalities, once identified, are to be minimised or eradicated through state action redistributing wealth and power. The therapeutic state is the natural instrument for the betterment of the human condition, and only the coercive power of Big Government can purge people of their greed, selfishness, prejudice and bigotry.
In meeting these objectives, rights are something to be forcibly taken from one group and doled out to other preferred groups as determined by social activists. As Lenin once said, “
Freedom is so precious it must be rationed.” Collective or group rights therefore flow not from any ethical principle, but from the political agendas of those who wanting to impose their normative world view on everyone else by force.
The Origin of Group RightsSince the 1960s, the West has increasingly abandoned its grounding in individual rights and shifted to a variety of “
collective entitlements.” Identity politics means that anyone identifying as “
oppressed” is entitled to special political representation and subsidisation at the expense of the rest of society, purely on the basis of group membership.
The notion that particular groups of people meet together secretly or in private to plan various courses of action, and that some of these plans actually exert a significant influence on particular historical developments is typically rejected out of hand and dismissed as the figment of a paranoid imagination.
In this case, the evidence is clear, and overwhelming. “
Group rights” were dreamed up and promoted by Marxist-Leninists looking to overthrow our existing society in the furtherance of their control freak nightmares.
Marx claimed that society is evolving inexorably toward socialism through a process called dialectical materialism. An existing condition (thesis) comes into conflict with a new condition (antithesis) that is attempting to emerge. Out of the dialectical conflict between these two opposing forces a new, higher condition (synthesis) emerges. This is then put through the process again as the new thesis, until socialism is achieved.
Lenin expanded Marx’s dialectical analysis from its early focus on economic relationships to take in social and political relationships, thus widening the role of the revolutionary as a change agent. The task of the revolutionary was now to identify and exploit pressure points for dialectical conflict, thus undermining the legitimacy of the existing social and political order, and hastening the eventual triumph of socialism.
In the 1930s, Stalin devised a strategy for weakening and subverting democratic societies that changed the nature of revolutionary politics forever, while profoundly increasing the threat that revolutionaries posed. Until then, Communist parties in non-Communist countries had openly declared their anti-capitalist, anti-Western and anti-democratic agendas. They called for the “
dictatorship of the proletariat” and advocated “
civil war” in the western democracies to bring this about. Because most people in free societies remained unconvinced of the need for a violent socialist revolution, Communists remained a fringe minority with little political clout.
In 1935, the Communist parties adopted a new tactic, which they dubbed the Popular Front. The agendas of the Popular Front were framed in terms of the fundamental values of the societies the Communists meant to destroy. In place of the “
dictatorship of the proletariat” and “
international civil war,” the Communists organised coalitions for “
democracy, justice and peace.”
Nothing changed in the philosophy and goals of the Communists, but by seemingly advocating “
democracy, justice and peace” they were able to forge broad alliances with individuals and groups who had no inkling of their true agendas, or believed them to be less sinister and dangerous than they were.
Communists initially selected as prime targets various racial, religious and national minorities, and intellectual groups that exerted a direct effect on public opinion. Working through the Popular Fronts they formed with “
liberal” factions, the Communists were able to hide their conspiratorial activities, form “
peace,” and “
human rights” movements, and greatly increase their numbers by mobilising non-Communists to do their work for them. These are the people that Lenin referred to as “
useful idiots.”
Groups who can be helped by Communists to see that they are “marginalised” from capitalist society due to their race, gender, class and sexual preference have long proved particularly fertile ground for those looking to promote dialectical conflict.
Gramsci and Gay Activism
The notion that homosexuals are an oppressed group or class first gained broader currency through the efforts of university professors influenced by Antonio Gramsci, one of the many disreputable Communists enshrined as intellectual icons by the academic left.
As an innovative Stalinist in the 1930s, Gramsci pondered the historic inability of Communist parties to mobilise workers to seize the means of production and overthrow the capitalist ruling classes. He saw that Western society, steeped in traditions of freedom and liberty, would never succumb to a frontal assault and its workers were too busy accumulating capital to be cannon fodder for a socialist revolution.
Gramsci responded by expanding Marx’s ranks of the oppressed from workers alone to include other “
marginalised groups” such as women, racial minorities and homosexuals. Due to the ideological supremacy of the existing powerful groups in society, said Gramsci, these groups lacked consciousness of their own oppression. By internalising the value systems and world views of the privileged groups, they had consented to their own marginalisation.
For a revolutionary social transformation to occur, the revolution must therefore first take place at the level of consciousness. Gramsci saw intellectuals as having a key role in delegitimising and unmasking the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups to empower “
marginalised groups.” He urged radicals to acquire “
cultural hegemony” by which he meant capturing the institutions that produce society’s governing ideas. Helping “
marginalised groups” to an awareness of their own class oppression would be the key to controlling and transforming the society itself. Universities were to be first-line political weapons in this “
war of position.”
The Dictatorship of the ProfessoriateMarxist intellectuals first slithered into the academy in the 1930s. They covertly increased their numbers over succeeding decades, and by the 1960s were a significant presence at universities throughout the Western world. After achieving critical mass in the liberal arts faculties, particularly those dealing with the study of society itself, they systematically excluded anyone holding viewpoints outside the leftist spectrum.
Many academics now see themselves not primarily as educators, but as agents of an “
adversary culture” at war with the world outside the university. Their agenda is to produce students who will go forth from the academy as “
agents of social change,” committed to achieving “
social justice” for the “
marginalised groups” Gramsci had identified.
For three decades students have been taught that rather than living in free societies, they are trapped in a wicked caste system of race, gender class and sexual orientation crying out for revolutionary change. There are few, if any dissenting voices. Under the saturating drumbeat of this “
cultural pessimism,” many intellectuals from “
dominant groups” were induced to “
switch sides” as Gramsci had envisaged.
Useful IdiotsAfter their consciousness-raising by Marxist academics, intellectuals from “
subordinate groups” and those from “
dominant groups” induced to throw in their lot with the “
oppressed” moved from the academy directly into government, the media, entertainment, the trade unions, the churches, the education system and other opinion-shaping activities or careers. Once there, they worked tirelessly to promote the Marxist-Leninist agenda. As a result, the values of a free society have been subjected to three decades of unrelenting attack from within.
Two kinds of intellectuals are pushing the notion of homosexuals as a “
marginalised” or “
oppressed” group. The first is a numerically small hard-core left wing activist class that derives a sense of intellectual superiority from knowing it is manipulating the situation. The second consists of large numbers of passive enablers who have unwittingly embraced socialist doctrines, largely because their leftist professors ensured that they were never exposed to intellectual alternatives.
Friedrich Hayek describes this second group as “
the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own, but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into them sufficiently loudly and often enough.” Having internalised the system of values on which their membership of “
club virtue” depends, they have a strong emotional resistance to having it questioned. With people like these, you either agree with them, or you are racist, sexist, homophobic, uneducated, uninformed, or just plain stupid.
US political columnist Joe Sobran uses the metaphor of a hive of bees, united by a kind of “
group mind,” to describe the informal body of leftist opinion making up this “
useful idiot” class. There’s no central direction as such, but the bees can sense an enemy, and know when to attack.
Sobran says, “
To become a bee in this hive is to surrender, voluntarily and eagerly, your own personality: to submerge the self in a collectivity; to prefer the buzzing cliché of the group to individual thought and expression; to take satisfaction in belonging and conforming to a powerful mass while punishing others for failure to conform … The similarity to an insect colony - where the individual exists only functionally, being both indistinguishable from and interchangeable with its fellows - is not superficial, it is of the essence. To be an insect is to be relieved of the burden of having a soul of your own.”Political scientist
Eric Hoffer is another who provides a penetrating insight into the collectivist mentality. Hoffer saw that mass-movements are an outlet for people whose individual significance is miniscule in the eyes of the world and - more important - in their own eyes. He pointed out that the leaders of the Nazi movement were men whose artistic and intellectual aspirations were wholly frustrated, as were the Bolshevik leaders.
Those drawn to collectivist ideologies are invariably people with a pressing need for self-inflation and ego-boosting (generally in the absence of any real claims in that direction). As Hoffer makes clear: “
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause.”
People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are unlikely to be attracted to mass movements: “
A man is likely to mind his own business when it worth minding,”
Hoffer said. “When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”
The “Godfather” of the Gay Rights Movement
The person most responsible for bringing "
gay rights" issues to the forefront of Western social discourse is an obscure American “
civil rights” campaigner named Harry Hay. In the 1930s, Hay renounced his family's privileged social status to become a Marxist-Leninist agitator. He married a political colleague; the couple adopted two children and for years worked together to advance the Communist cause in various parts of America. Throughout his youth and marriage, Harry Hay fought a homosexual orientation. By 1950, he had abandoned his wife and children to fully embrace a homosexual lifestyle.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (of which Hay and several gay friends were members) frowned on homosexuality in Marxist-Leninist ranks. But Hay and his friends remained unconvinced that their sexual preference necessarily represented a liability to the advancement of socialism.
Hay had read Gramsci. He had also read Alfred Kinsey's groundbreaking Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and been struck by Kinsey's finding that about 10% of men Kinsey surveyed had been "
exclusively homosexual" for at least some significant part of their lives. If Kinsey's 10% figure was even close to accurate, Hay reasoned, homosexuals must represent a large and significant group that could be mobilised to advance the socialist cause. Hay soon concluded that the general public's sympathy could be aroused for gay people if homosexuals were painted as yet another "
oppressed minority" in need of liberation and government advocacy.
In 1950, Hay and a number of fellow Marxist-Leninist intellectuals founded the Mattachine Society, America's first "
homosexual activist" organization. Its ostensible goals were to educate the public about homosexuality and work for the repeal of the (at that time) 48 States' so-called "
sodomy laws" (which viewed homosexual behaviour as a criminal offence).
Capitalising on still-unsevered social connections, Hay and his fellow Mattachines traversed America addressing various audiences and spread their views still further through an ever-widening circle of influential publications. Inspired by the Mattachines, several lesbian intellectuals founded a "
sister" organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in 1955.
In line with Marxist-Leninist “
Popular Front” doctrine, Harry Hay’s claim that homosexuals were both a sexual and a political "
minority" welded together sexuality and politics. With constant repetition, Hay's propaganda claim -- "
homosexuals are an oppressed minority" -- has come to resonate strongly with many “
useful idiots” concerned with minority “
civil rights.”
But “
civil rights” is just a fish hook to attract the support of respectable people, who are then persuaded that the social suffering of homosexuals can be alleviated only by the radical social change gay activists are demanding.
Gay activists regard legal recognition of same-sex partners as the first step in securing gay marriage and adoption rights, thus relegating heterosexual marriage to just another lifestyle option among many. Publications meant for a homosexual readership today openly state that the gay activist agenda is to subvert and destroy heterosexual marriage.
Behind this push is the Marxist-Leninist propaganda claim that the formative family normalises heterosexual relations, thus marginalising alternative sexualities. Gay activists (whether they know it or not) are being used as a cat’s-paw to advance the Marxist-Leninist agenda of eradicating the formative family as the basic building block of civil society.
Gay activism is therefore highly dangerous to the established social order. If gay activist demands are met, the Marxist anti-family agenda moves a step closer to completion.
