Recently, one of Canada’s best-known rabbis (an American by birth and a graduate of prestigious colleges in the USA) asked me bluntly and simply to explain the essence of Critical Race Theory. This is what I told him.
Critical Race Theory is the latest version of Marxism, except it has gone racial. This means that unlike traditional Marxist theory, which used to focus on the injustices experienced by working men and women in industrial and industrializing societies around the world and preached violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist democracy that persecutes them, the new victims are any kind of minority, usually people of color, but not exclusively. The “white” working class no longer counts.
In the USA, Cultural Marxists have elected African Americans to fulfill the role of those persecuted by capitalism, which is done by white people or people with white skin (despite the fact that more than 50% of self-defined African Americans belong to the silent, non-protesting, law-abiding middle classes or “bourgeoise”).
Almost any grievance group, whose goal is to bring down liberal democracy and capitalism, can join African Americans in their persecuted status. So even wealthy Muslim immigrants can do so. Or sexual adventurers can be granted that status. Privileged women of color like “Ilhan Omar” and others like her can also qualify, as can millionaires like Meghan Markle or Oprah Winfrey.
The key thing is to hate whites, hate capitalism, hate democracy, hate American, Canadian, and British political culture, and believe that “whites” have caused all the trouble in the world. For example, an activist from this thought group once reframed WWII as “white on white” violence.
In an odd but not surprising anti-Semitic twist, Israelis (most of whom look like Sicilians and come from the Arab world) are thought of as colonial whites from Europe oppressing indigenous Arabs — so many of whom claim to have come to the land of Israel from Arabia some time ago. (Historical scholarship and truth are in short supply among the Cultural Marxists).
The last fifty years have seen an unhealthy and growing domination by Cultural Marxists of federal, state (provincial), and municipal bureaucracies, who then provide funds for a growing number of like-minded NGOs.
Together they argue that these new grievance groups deserve special treatment, “reparations,” and “affirmative action” from the whites, as a kind of compensation for bad behavior in both the past and present. And so, meritocracy goes to the wind and non-whites become privileged (that is, they get access to the public purse — that is to say, our tax dollars.)
Classical Marxists like Bernie Sanders and historian Howard Zinn have always believed that Marxism explains “superstructure.” Marxists have argued that the “base” or “mode of production” of any society is the direct cause of its culture and institutions.
So, law, government, music, the arts, and the intellectual life of ideas are solely an expression of the base. There is no real freedom of thought. Those who think they are free are under an illusion. The Marxists call this “false consciousness.” It must be violently destroyed. There is no defense in “following the law” as it is by its own nature, corrupt.
As “bourgeois culture” embodies the false consciousness of the “superstructure” it is by definition immoral, evil, and must be destroyed. It is the evil guardian of “structural inequality.” Any social mobility is explained away by accusing those who rise, of joining the oppressors.
And so, Larry Elder, African American radio personality and contender for the position of Governor of California, is labeled a white supremacist by his Cultural Marxist-inspired critics in the media.
Old style, traditional Marxists and Leninists like Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro believed that the working class around the world would eventually rebel and set up a classless society. That did not happen. Workers in states have shown more loyalty to their nation than their class.
So just after WW II, Cultural Marxists (the Frankfurt School) began a campaign launched from New York City to undermine and subvert the bourgeois values practiced by lawyers, implemented by administrators, and until recently supported by police, the military, the media, and the educational elites. Their goal was to destroy capitalism and bring on a Marxist state, with a command economy and a revolutionary vanguard (they and their self-anointed political colleagues) who would run the country.
They have succeeded. They are now dominant in the Liberal Party of Canada and the Democratic Party of the USA.
Here is the clincher. The values of Cultural Marxists, when you read through their contradictory, dense, and boring books and articles are essentially a crude inversion of the pillars of the Judeo Christian tradition; that is to say, the Ten Commandments.
Let me, therefore, outline the ten basic commandments of Cultural Marxism which, not surprisingly, are violations of almost every one of the ten commandments of the Bible, values that permeate the Constitution of the United States and have informed much of British common law. Here they are:
- God is dead — therefore the means justify the ends. If the Cultural Marxists believe that bourgeois culture and society should be destroyed then, there is no moral restraint-look at Antifa riots to support this point
- One now worships Karl Marx. He is the substitute for God. And his prophets are violent and numerous.
- Language is flexible. You can take any name in vain. Words mean what you want them to mean if it furthers your agenda like “largely peaceful protests”
- The Sabbath means nothing. There is no rest for the righteous. They must be attacked during the 24/7 news round and on occasion arrested at gunpoint by the FBI or CIA. And so, defund the police and turn every city into a war zone.
- Mothers and fathers are not honored. Your children can be taken from you and their gender forcefully reassigned as God did not make man and woman according to sacred archetypes.
- Murder is okay if you are a political enemy. Remember Ashli Babbitt?
- Adultery is meaningless because marriage and the nuclear family are oppressive.
- Lying is what you do to defeat your enemies
- The property of your enemies (Jews, Christians, Vietnamese minorities, Korean grocers, “whites” of any kind) is up for grabs. Take it!
- Envy is everywhere and greed rules
This short enumeration of the ten commandments of the Cultural Marxists should provide a good grid from which to understand their values and goals. It permeates their writings and their practice. The rest is gobbledygook.
If you are religious you would call this “the devil’s work.” If you are not religious you would call this …“the devil’s work.”
Geoffrey Clarfield
