Exploring (mostly Cultural) Marxism in today's Left

Yup, it's really easy to stay locked in to your right-wing bubble of hate and fear.None of the claims you said were lies were indeed lies. You think that calling something a lie makes it a lie. It doesn't.You are the perfect Republican. Unhesitatingly swallow whatever crap the feed you, never notice that they are earnestly working against your best interest.I hope that nobody you care about is on Medicaid. Half of the people in nursing homes are. Over half the babies born in the US are.And Medicare is next on the chopping block. Paul Ryan has gleefully said so.But you will continue to vote for them and spread their lies and ignore reality.

This is a situation from (southern) Italy. The time is the late 19th and early 20th century. Around the time after Marx was known.

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When America Barred Italians

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By HELENE STAPINSKIJUNE 2, 2017

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Women like my great-great grandmother Vita Gallitelli came to America for more than simply a better job. Subject to the whims of their padroni the men who owned the feudal land upon which they toiled Italian women were commonly the victims of institutionalized, systematic rape. There was a practice known as prima notte that allowed the landowner to sleep with the virgin bride of his worker, which extended into the 20th century.

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The husbands couldn’t protest, since they would be barred from working the farm and their families left to starve. As it was, they were barely staying alive. In the 1800s, half the children born in Basilicata the instep of Italy’s boot died before age 5. It’s the reason Italian-American families hold big bashes for their 1-year-olds even today.

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The itinerant workers were considered subhuman and made 40 cents a day if they were chosen by the overseer, doing backbreaking work on land that was not theirs, walking several hours back and forth to the farm each day. They were expected to offer the padrone a tribute to thank him for the work crops, or if they had it, meat they butchered themselves. This was the basis for the shape-up on the American docks on which many of my relatives toiled when they came to this country and the kickbacks they were expected to give to the union bosses and even the mayor.

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In Italy, our ancestors were given meat twice a year on Christmas and Easter by that same stingy landlord but most days they subsisted on bread stretched with chestnuts or saw dust to feed the whole family.

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Opinion | When America Barred Italians - The New York Times

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Your solution to this problem would have been?Here was the idea then.

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ibid.

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So our desperate great- and great-great grandparents came in droves from Italy, spurred on by industrial barons in need of cheap labor who welcomed them with open arms to America. They would scrape together the 300 lire the cost of three houses at the time to book passage here, to the land of dreams, where menial, often dangerous jobs no one else wanted awaited them. Some, like my relatives, came here illegally, under false names. Or as stowaways. On one ship alone, 200 stowaways were found.

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From 1906 to 1915, the year Vita died, Basilicata lost nearly 40 percent of its population to emigration. The Italian landowners the same ones who raped and starved my relatives and maybe yours were devastated by American emigration, left with too few hands to work their land.

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Is this non Marxist solution to human oppression problems satisfactory to you?There were critics.

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ibid.

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The Italian government, initially happy to see its poorest and most troublesome people leave the country, realized that the best and strongest were now leaving as well, looking for a better life and higher wages. Before a United States congressional commission, a politician from Calabria testified that emigration from the South had gone too far, adding that he was sorry Columbus had ever discovered America.

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The United States government used the theories of Cesare Lombroso, a 19th-century Northern Italian doctor, to stop more of his suffering, starving countrymen and women from immigrating.

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Lombroso, a traitor to his own people, was convinced that there was such a thing as a natural born criminal. He measured the heads and body parts of thousands of fellow Italians particularly Southerners and came up with a description that matched the description of most of the immigrants coming over at the time: short, dark, hairy, big noses and ears.

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He compared them to lower primates and said they were more likely to commit violent crimes when they arrived in the United States than immigrants from Germany, Norway, Austria, Sweden, England and every other European country.

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Lombroso and a growing sea of American nativists branded the Southern Italians savages and rapists, blaming them for the crime that was on the rise in the United States.

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The United States Immigration Commission concluded in the infamous 1911 Dillingham report: Certain kinds of criminality are inherent in the Italian race. In the popular mind, crimes of personal violence, robbery, blackmail and extortion are peculiar to the people of Italy.

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The Immigration Act of 1924 barred most Italians from coming into the country causing immigration from Italy to fall 90 percent. Even though the vast majority of those coming to America were good, honest working people and not criminals.

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That Immigration Act of 1924 was what caused Jews to die in the millions, when most could not immigrate.(Ironically, Southern Italians have similar Palestinian/Israelite/Phoenician ancestry as Jews do. Many were nicknamed "Il Moro" through the past thousand years plus which means "The Arab" by the northern Italians)What would your solution be to this problem?How should the Italians of the early 20th century have handled this situation?

You make a great point LNA. The truth is that illegal immigration of folks trying to better themselves by escaping hopeless situations may be made illegal, but such immigration cannot be made evil; at least not in the minds of some decent people that I agree with. Many (but not all) folks who don't grasp or accept this idea have other agenda such as "worrying about the browning of America". Of course, if you call those folks on that stuff, then you are a no-account, PC commie bastard trying to deny free speech by using your own free speech. That is the entire premise of this ridiculous thread.This thread isn't really about immigration, but immigration is certainly a good example of what this particular line of argument is about. Namely calling folks commie in response to being called out when expressing positions of debatable, if not questionable, ethical and moral underpinning.What would Jesus do if he encountered a family of asylum seekers looking for refuge? Is the answer really "turn them over to the Romans?". Is there really no word in the Bible addressing the behavior of nations of folks? Can you come up with questions any more rhetorical than these? Do bears not defecate in the woods?Edited by NoNukes, : tone down a tiny bit.

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah said "woe to them that build house onto house " ,which means that it is evil to own so much land that there will be artificial scarcity. Peasants weren't allowed in the Old Testament.But any effort to give land to peasants ( like 1954 Guatemala ) will earn your country a nasty date with CIA bombs.C-O-M-M-I-E!Communist movements were a side effect of massive racism & discrimination on the one hand and the unjust land ownership issues on the other.The same right wingers who claim that they themselves support "freedom" will quickly use the government to box people into a narrow corner. People who are trapped inside an oppressive situation will get attacked for both trying to get out and away THEN attacked for the progressive movements that they might join from the inside.

Don't give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.They're the wrong sort of people.

From the June 29 Wall Street Journal.

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Iraq's Kurds have de facto independence and are on the verge of declaring it de jere. They fight ISIS to facilitate the creation of a greater Kurdistan. Nonetheless, the Kurds, especially in Syria and Turkey, are hardly monolithic. Not all see the U. S. favorably. In Syria, Kurdish forces fighting ISIS are linked to the Marxist PKK in Turkey.

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The only mention of Marxism and Marxist influence in his entire half page article on post ISIS strategy in the northern half of the Middle East.So much for this Marxism is behind radical Islam.These Kurdish Marxist fighters are nationalist too.The communist party in Israel is where anti nationalist Jews and Arab Christians generally cast their votes.How can you fit this into a giant Marxist frame?How do you shoehorn the Arab Nationalism uprising against the Ottoman Empire in World War I?You can make sweeping claims but I can't find any evidence of any unique Marxist contribution to much of anything going on. I just can't.Sorry.

"Marxism is behind radical Islam?" Are you imputing that to me? I never said any such thing. You don't seem to understand much of what you read, at least of what I write. What I've been saying is that Marxism is the reason for the support of Islam as an "oppressed" group, the reason the media seem to avoid identifying Islam as the cause of a particular terrorist event, the reason it's hard to get anyone to accept that Islam is a dangerous ideology and the reason there is so much support for bringing in refuges as if there were no danger and so on. And call us "racists" and "Islamophobes" who keep sounding the alarm. All that originated with Cultural Marxism.;

Christianity has all the principles needed for humane reform, we certainly don't need Marxism which is an evil murderous ideology.

FYI, this thread isn't about immigration at all. Perhaps you meant to post on that thread.This cavalier attitude toward American law is very depressing. I vote that you be disbarred.

And there still has been no evidence presented that would indicate (mostly Cultural) Marxism in today's Left; as usual, as expected. What has been presented is the usual stream of irrelevant quotes as ifr that was evidence of anything other than the fact that many of today's Conservative Commentators say things that are almost a stupid as il Donald's comments.

Ever going to start using those tools?

They've been used throughout history. Slavery and the slave trade would never have been abolished if it weren't for Christianity. There would never have been orphanages or hospitals without Christianity. There would never have been a Magna Carta without Christianity.

I haven't been following this thread closely, but a comment in another forum led me to research "Cultural Marxism" a little.Turns out it was invented by German Nazis, perhaps Hitler himself. It's strongly anti-semitic and is currently pushed by neo-Nazis and white supremacists such as Stormfront and Daily Stormer. Anders Breivik, who killed eight people by detonating a van bomb amid Regjeringskvartalet in Oslo, then shot dead 69 participants of a Workers' Youth League (AUF) summer camp on the island of Utya, is obsessed with Cultural Marxism and other white supremacist looniness.Sweet bunch o' fellas you choose to hang with, Faith. Guess we have to add Jews to the many groups you hate.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Not a primary source, but perhaps this discussion from Rational Wiki might clear things up a bit. There are some references in the article to some primary sources, so I don't think they are too far wrong.Cultural Marxism - RationalWiki

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Cultural Marxism generally refers to one of two things:

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First extremely rarely "Cultural Marxism" refers to the general application of the Frankfurt School's Marxist ideology to the social sciences.

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Second about 99.9% of the time "Cultural Marxism" is a snarl word used to paint anyone with progressive tendencies as a secret Communist. The term alludes to a conspiracy theory in which sinister left-wingers have infiltrated media, academia, and science and are engaged in a decades-long plot to undermine Western culture. Some variants of the conspiracy alleges [sic] that basically all of modern social liberalism is, in fact, a Communist front.

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I think it is pretty clear that the intent of this thread fits the second definition. To wit:

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In current wingnut usage, the term is a favourite of Pat Buchanan and, to the most dangerous extent, Anders Behring Breivik. It is a Cold Warrior's way of decrying "political correctness" or "multiculturalism."

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Sound familiar to the usage here?Further from RW

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If anyone rants about "Cultural Marxists taking over culture!", feel free to remind them that they're literally spouting Nazi propaganda updated for the modern era.

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Here I think Rational Wiki goes just about as far overboard as does this the premise of this thread, and that's quite a difficult feat.

Leftist propaganda is of course all you are spouting here, you and NN. I've given good sources of information on this thread.The idea that it was "invented by Nazis" is screaming insane. It didn't even exist as such until the sixties in America, not Germany. The Frankfurt School started out in Germany before Hitler and was certainly Jewish and anti-Nazi, but the Nazis had nothing to do with them except to inspire them to leave the country.Cultural Marxism is the correct term for the Frankfurt School's Marxist dogma that has taken over America since the sixties. The Frankfurt School was so anti-Nazi that it saw Nazis everywhere, even in America and designed their attack on the culture as if it was a Nazi culture, with the intent of destroying it. What they were attacking in fact was all the good things of western culture, not Nazism. There was no Nazism in America. Multiculturalism is one of their methods, Islam being a favorite way of destroying us these days. You define an Oppressor and an Oppressed, just as did classical Marxism, and you champion the Oppressed to destroy the Oppressor. It's all invented to cause class division, conflict and war and destroy the west. Obviously the local leftists think that's just wonderful.Political Correctness is a Marxist term invented by Mao to refer to such "correct" positions as those promoted by the Frankfurt School. I don't follow any of the extreme right wing you are all imputing to this concept. They have no say in any of this. If they jumped on the topic it was a lot later than I did and I have nothing to do with them. Instead of smearing me with people I have nothing to do with, take the time to read my posts.How crafty and evil is the Left, to make up such stuff. Staggering. Maybe the weirdest thing is how they succeed at convincing idiot liberals of their destructive aims. I would never have believed that evil murderous lies could take over the world until the last couple of decades, and until seeing it in operation at EvC. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.