The West beat the Communists in the Cold War…or did we?
Think about it – we’re being censored on the internet, spied on by our intelligence agencies, propagandised by our media, indoctrinated by our schools, and demographically replaced by our governments. Both the Biden Administration in the US, and the Ardern government here in New Zealand have begun creating “Ministry of Truth” like entities to go after so-called “disinformation” and “violent extremism” – by which of course they mean their domestic political opponents. Although we still have a market-based economy, the social repression is startlingly reminiscent of what went on behind the iron curtain.
Marxists are very determined people, because Marxism isn’t just a theory to them – it’s effectively their religion. It provides them with a morality (comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable), a teleology (the end of history), and an eschatology (equality/the classless society). Humans are believing creatures, we cannot live on bread alone, and for the Marxist, Marxism fills the psychological need that God and Christianity did previously.
The Marxists didn’t just go away with the fall of the Berlin Wall, they applied their energies elsewhere, such as the environmental movement, where they had the opportunity to attack big businesses for being polluters, and the capitalist system for enabling them; the anti-colonial movement, where they had the opportunity to attack Western countries for being the “colonial oppressors” of the pure and noble indigenous peoples; and more recently as “the Woke”, who attack the entire cultural inheritance of Western Civilisation as a system of “white cis-hetero patriarchal supremacy” – the claim is that the purpose of Western culture, norms and institutions is to keep straight white men in power, rather than provide an environment in which the majority of people can survive, thrive and live fulfilling lives.
The great outcome of the Cold War battle between Capitalism and Communism – the Hegelian synthesis if you will, is “Woke Capitalism” – an acceptance of free markets as the fundamental economic organising principle (albeit with some regulation and redistribution), but importantly, a re-thinking of the way in which equality should be pursued within capitalist societies. Where once the Marxist strategy was to control the economic system through communal ownership of the means of production and use it to ensure equal distributions of wealth and income; now the “woke” control the managerial system, and use it to promote “oppressed minorities” within managerial hierarchies while disfavouring straight white males. They have done this by staging a “long march through the institutions” and establishing themselves as the professional managerial elite. Now that this woke managerial elite is ensconced in power, they’re waging cultural war against Western Civilisation, by using the commanding heights of our own institutions to conspire and militate against our people, norms, and culture. In short, they’ve switched from economic to cultural Marxism.
However, the battle has now been joined – just as Hegel told us, each new synthesis generates its own antithesis – and in this case, the antithesis to “woke capitalism” and the PC managerial elite, is the surging populist-nationalist movements across the Western World – a loose alliance of the patriotic, the socially conservative, the economically downtrodden, and the (until now) politically disengaged.
The woke believe that equality of outcome for “oppressed groups” ought to be the norm in society rather the actual norms that are our traditional inheritance. Wokeness is basically an attack on the normative basis of Western civilisation – an attempt to invert and neutralise our traditional views of right/wrong, good/evil, us/them. Once the normative basis of society is inverted, nothing is left but “do what thou wilt.”
From Christianity, the West inherited the notion that human nature is flawed, but that through self-discipline one can master his flawed desires and at least make progress toward becoming a good person. Wokeness, again, inverts this notion, telling people they’re fine just the way they are, and that it’s the “arbitrary” notions of right and wrong in society that are “oppressing” them. The woke don’t see themselves as demented, power-hungry, sexual perverts, full of resentment toward ordinary people, no, they’re liberated, enlightened, sophisticated – with the “courage” to “be themselves” without guilt or shame and lead those deplorable ordinary people forward to a better tomorrow. What a sick joke.
Wokeness started in the Universities, but has spread through government and media, and now even sets the tone in corporate culture – Conservatism’s one-time allies in the business world have deserted them. Every centre of institutional power in Western Civilisation has fallen under sway of the woke – all that remains, holding the line, is ordinary people and communities.
It’s the people versus the powerful in a battle to determine whether we hold onto our traditional cultures, identities, and ways of life, or dissolve them in favour of a rootless, atomised, materialistic, global consumer culture, that is devoid of any higher meaning.
The new Cold War is not being fought between the West and Russia, or the West and China; the new Cold War is being fought within the West – between what remains of civil society – the conglomeration of associations to which the free people of the West voluntarily belong – and the centres of power manned by the woke.
How do you beat the people with all the power? Well…every day the resistance to wokeness grows. Every day the number of ordinary people fed up with it grows. Already trust in the institutions of power in Western civilisation, controlled by the woke, is at record lows. Every day ordinary people are meeting and talking, forming their own networks outside the purview of government and the woke. Every day those networks congeal into organisations, businesses, and clubs. A parallel society of ordinary people that excludes woke officialdom is slowly forming. As it grows its ability to thwart and work around woke officialdom will grow with it.
They thought they could quietly manage Western Civilisation out of existence, but instead, they’ve destroyed trust in the institutions they’ve taken control of, and spurred the creation of a parallel society that will eventually make them redundant and exclude them.
Evil destroys itself.
