(c) Copyright 1998: Graham L. Strachan
Imagine a country waging war against a neighbouring country without having the decency to tell it. Under international law that would be a crime. But what if one class within a society waged war on the rest without telling them? Would that not be a crime also? Well that’s the situation which exists now in Australia, and throughout much of Western society. For the most part those under attack are only vaguely aware that something is amiss. They find themselves the target of hate, yet they are accused of doing the hating; they find themselves discriminated against, yet they are told they deserve it because of discrimination in the past by people now dead; they are accused of being ‘racist’, yet if they try to defend themselves their viewpoint is suppressed; in Australia they are denied electoral representation by political trickery; they see the law hijacked by pressure groups; they watch in disbelief as their society is progressively destroyed, and they are mystified. It makes no sense. It appears to be deliberate, but who would deliberately set out to destroy a society which functioned well? That is the question being asked by the victims of an undeclared class war; a war understood fully only by those waging it; a war motivated by ideologically-inspired class hatred.
The social class waging the war is the bourgeois-Left, middle-class socialists who see themselves as the world’s salvation, the only hope for the future of mankind. Recently they were joined by the bourgeois-Right, middle-class Monopoly (Big Business/Finance) Capitalists, who don’t see themselves as anything in particular, other than rich. These two groups now comprise the ‘Third Way’ elite, and together they are conducting an undeclared class war against unsuspecting victims they call the ‘ordinary’ people of the world. Their aim is to destroy the existing social order based on independent nations, and to replace it with a global order which will better suit their own purposes. The Monopoly Capitalists want ownership of the world’s resources and control of the world’s economy. The Monopoly Socialists want social control, including control of people’s attitudes, thought processes, and behaviour.
Since they are at war with the rest of society, these elites live by war ethics, harbour a war mentality, and adopt all the tactics applicable to a genuinely declared war. Society is divided into ‘them’ and ‘others’, and ‘If you’re not for them, you’re against them’. Professor Morris Ginsberg, in his book ‘On the Diversity of Morals’(1956), called it ‘the ethics of enmity’, the ethics of hatred for the enemy. It is real enough. Testifying before Kenneth Starr’s grand jury in the United States on July 28, 1998, Linda Tripp stated, “There was always a sense in this White House from the beginning that you were either with them or you were against them. The notion that you could just be a civil servant supporting the institution just was not an option.”
Having embraced these ‘ethics of enmity’, the bourgeois-Left employ the tactics of war against their fellow man. Thus one sees in Australia all the sorts of things one would expect to find in a State actually at war: state-of-emergency style rule by the executive, by-passing the parliament; government decision-making increasingly conducted in secret; the withholding or falsification of information about the activities of government; lies and propaganda in the media; entertainment loaded with propagandist messages, pushing particular policies, attitudes and viewpoints; the encoding of the meaning of ordinary words [‘democracy’ means dictatorship (theirs); ‘government is now ‘governance’]; the indoctrination of people, including little children, poisoning their minds against the ‘enemy’, including their parents; the persecution of people who question government policy as traitors and enemies of the State; constant talk of the ‘need for social stability’ and to fight ‘devisiveness’ (maintaining morale); an obsession with appearances rather then substance; and the idea that all means are justified in securing final victory. The only differences between class war and regular war are that the enemy is your own countryman, nobody tells him he is under siege, and if he wakes up and actually returns ‘fire’ (as in the case of Australia’ s nationalist One Nation Party) the force of the State is used to persecute, prosecute, intern, and ultimately execute him.
To justify this hostility towards the rest of the community, the bourgeois-Left project an image of being the champions of minority groups who need protecting. To do this they have first to invent ‘enemies’ who are allegedly ‘victimising’ the minority groups. Thus they create a whole pantheon of villains: rednecks, homophobes, xenophobes, globaphobes, femophobes, neandathals, troglodytes, good ol’ boys, sexists, male-chauvinists, neo-Nazis, people with ‘links’ to the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Semites, right-wing extremists, patriots, urban terrorists, and so on.
The greatest scapegoat of all is the ‘racist’. To create ‘racism’, challenges to government policy concerning racially identifiable groups are induced by legislating those groups special privileges. When the enemy (ordinary people) inevitably question the privileges, the act of questioning is deliberately misconstrued by the media as a ‘racist’ attack on members of the racial minority. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. The questioning of a policy is not a personal attack on the people the subject of that policy. But the purpose of the media in a State at war is not to tell the truth. It is to stir up hate for the enemy, and bolster the morale of the favoured side. The label ‘racist’ demonises the class ‘enemy’ and provides a moral justification for the class antagonism of the bourgeois-Left, who can then suppress challenges to their war agenda under the guise of ‘fighting racism’.
So how did all this come about? It began with Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848), Part 1 of which begins, “The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles.” Marx announced the class war, and sought to legitimise it by inventing the idea that world history was being driven by certain ‘ineluctable (inescapable) laws’, discoverable by examining trends in preceding epochs. In the final stages of history, the laws allegedly said, the industrial working class would rise up and overthrow their bourgeois (middle class) economic oppressors, thereupon establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat (working class).
The Manifesto went on to urge the workers of the world to establish a one-world socialist government, to abolish private property, and to destroy individuality, personal independence and freedom, existing culture, eternal truths, existing law, the traditional family, marriage, countries and nationality, all religion, existing morality, and existing education, replacing it with ‘social education’. Once those things were done, the promise was that the State would eventually wither away and there would be communism forever. It would be the ‘end of history’, heaven on earth. That is still the programme, except it is now called ‘Globalism’.
Superficially it appeared to be a matter strictly between the working class and destiny, but a much-overlooked passage in the Manifesto gives the game away. It says, “....when the class struggle nears the decisive hour....a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class....a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat....” There, waiting in the wings, was the bourgeois-Left, hoping to use the might of the working class to ‘wrest by degrees’ the factories from the entrepreneurial capitalists, and to deliver them, along with a captive labour force and the reins of government into their own hands. Marx and his collaborator Engels were bourgeois-Left, not working class. Marx was a lawyer. The Engels family owned cotton mills.
The idea that Communism was a working class movement was nonsense. The misery theory of communism, that communism was the product of inequalities under capitalism, was pure ideology. In his book “None Dare Call it Treason” (1964) John A. Stormer showed that communism was strongest in the intellectual centres of the world. Leading communists come out of places like Harvard Law School, not factories. Writing more recently, Professor Ronald H. Nash, in ‘The Closing of the American Heart’ (1990) said [p. 142], “According to reliable sources some ten thousand American college professors freely identify themselves as Marxists. To this number can be added thousands of others who strongly sympathise with left-wing political and social values.”
Despite the intent of the Manifesto to incite the working class to criminal action, it failed. As the nineteenth century wore on, improved economic conditions caused the proletariat to become more ‘bourgeoisified’. A revolution of sorts was effected in Russia, but proletarian it was not. That ‘portion of the bourgeoisie’ ‘went over’ to the proletariat at the ‘decisive hour’ just as prophesied. Comrade Trotsky, who had been waiting in New York, ‘went over’ by chartered ship with a bag full of money and 265 trained revolutionaries from New York’s lower East Side, most of whom subsequently took senior posts in the post-revolutionary Soviet government. Comrade Lenin, who had been waiting in Switzerland, ‘went over’ in a sealed train with 29 other revolutionaries, escorted across Germany by the German government (at war with Russia) to Stockholm where more money was collected, and from there on to Russia to conduct the revolution. In his book, ‘Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution’ (1981), Professor Antony Sutton shows where the money came from. The title says it all.
In ‘What Is To Be Done?’ (1917), Lenin laid down the strategies for this bizarre one-sided social assault. He urged Social-Democrats to “go among all classes of the people as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators and as organisers.” Every action of the enemy was to be interpreted in class war terms, every petty event exploited to further the struggle for victory. Every revolutionary movement had to be supported, anything which tended to disrupt or fragment existing society. The task was to “utilise every manifestation of discontent, and to collect and utilise every grain of even rudimentary protest.” He referred to the revolutionary classes as “the social class which has declared war in order to commence the war”. The present system had to be disintegrated by “spreading enmity and distrust”. [See V. I. Lenin, ‘What Is To Be Done’ (1917), in A. Fremantle, Ed., ‘Communism: Basic Writings’ (1970), p. 93]. On top of that, the enemy was to be blamed for causing the social disruption.
Despite more than a century of this sort of agitation the bourgeois-Left had still, by 1960, failed to incite the working class to do their bidding and overthrow the ‘capitalist’ system. The time had come to abandon the proletariat and find another ‘vanguard of the revolution’, a New Left to replace the Old. This was found among the intellectuals and student radicals of the 1960s who were demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But there was a problem: these groups had not figured in the original Marxist analysis which had unearthed the ineluctable laws of history. A new ‘sociology of the intellectuals’ had to be constructed which brought students and teachers within the Marxist model. In Australia this was achieved by a thing called the ‘Arena Thesis’, so named because of its association with the Melbourne-based New Left journal ‘Arena’.
According to the Arena Thesis, the Marxist model had failed to grasp the ‘role of culture as a form of social power’. The revolution in the ownership of means of production in factories (physical labour) was now superseded by a revolution in the ownership of the means of production in education (mental labour). The new negation of capitalism in its ‘neo-capitalist’ phase was ‘intellectual culture’, which was declared to be ‘inherently socialist’, and the new relations of production were not material but intellectual. The ineluctable laws of history were no longer driving the working class, but school teachers, university academics and students, and the bureaucrats and civil servants ultimately drawn from their ranks. It was now ‘intellectual culture’ that was destined by the forces of historical development, “to move from its passive and latent entrenchment, and to challenge the whole of industrial society”. [See Richard Gordon, Ed., ‘The Australian New Left’ (1970), pp. 192-8].
The New Left, it was said, “was already strategically placed in the vanguard of the changing forces of production within the capitalist system”. It certainly was. It had control of the education system and curriculum, including teacher training, and it soon permeated the other bureaucracies from which it could dictate and control the whole social ‘reform’ agenda, an agenda designed to bring down the existing social order from within. The ‘intellectually trained’ strata were now waging a one-sided class war against the rest of the community, the fact of it, the methods employed, and reason for it, being kept largely to themselves.
Inexorable laws of history aside, the moral justification for bringing down the social order of the West was, in the beginning, that it exploited and oppressed labour. That no longer holds true. The bourgeois-Left have now joined forces with the very people who exploit labour: Monopoly Capitalists. The true enemy, the real object of bourgeois-Left hate has, by default, come into clearer focus. It happens to be society’s ordinary, basically decent people, whose value system includes independence, individualism, freedom from tyranny, human dignity, moral behavior, personal responsibility, common sense, matters of principle, a say in their own government, duty, honesty, kindness, family, law and order, country, perhaps God. They are the people, and those are the values that have to be “swept out of the way, and made impossible”. And why? Because when all the pretence about ‘redressing past wrongs’ and ‘eliminating discrimination’ is stripped away, the truth is that the bourgeois-Left simply despise those values. That ’s why they have to undermine them, stand them on their head, and shove their very opposites in the faces of the people who cherish them. It’s a sickness called envy: hatred of the good for being the good.