“A time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace” (Eccl. 3:8).

“From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matthew 11:12, ESV).

If you subscribe to what has been written in this series before, it is clear from a Christian worldview, that the pinnacle and animator of evil comes from Satan and his hosts. To reduce our perspective to those entities being the total circumference of opposition to Christ’s kingdom is as perilous as it is fallacious. Human beings are confederated with the forces of anti-christ.

There is a statement that is universally true, applies to the current conflict, yet exemplifies the complexity of language and context. It is this, “There is a genocidal enemy who has declared war and used weapons to annihilate both combatants and innocents alike.”

I chose those words advisedly. They are not hyperbole. It is a statement of fact – without bias, opinion, or social construct. It could be truthfully stated at any point of recorded human history, by any tribe, tongue, nation, or people-group. So long as a person does not suffer from impaired faculties, regardless of political or philosophical persuasions, they will acknowledge the veracity of this statement. However, it does demonstrate how language can be weaponized and altered when placed within the broader context of worldview. Still, it warrants pause and deep reflection to till the fallowed mind of the jaded or beguiled.

A genocidal enemy declared war and used weapons to annihilate both combatants and innocents alike.

The truth-value of what seems to be a universally accepted statement of raw fact is predicated upon the events to which it refers, what the observer brings to the reading of it, and the frame of reference applied to it. For example, historic Marxists agree with that statement, but attribute the offense to the bourgeoisie (ruling class). Cultural-Marxists view the statement as true by virtue that white American males used weapons against indigenous peoples and annihilated both combatants and innocents alike. On the other hand, traditionalists would not apply truth-value to the cultural-Marxists’ interpretation regarding those events. They would claim that white American males were neither “genocidal” nor annihilated “innocents.” Instead, they would affirm the statement as true as referring to other points in history. Marxists declared war on their enemies and used weapons to annihilate combatants and innocents alike.

Dying American generations have witnessed millions of tortured, enslaved, and murdered human beings under the specter of Marxism. Throughout the twentieth century, flickering TV images dimly glimmered in darkened homes and ink-stained fingers strummed through daily newspapers. Indelibly imprinted on those generations’ psyches were the putrid stench of decaying flesh, body counts, and human misery. No avatars. No special effects. Real, reality. The kind that shoots a searing pain up your arm when touching fire. The kind that happens whether you imagine it or not.

Unfettered expressions of Marxism have never resulted in a kinder, gentler version. Like receding waves that leave debris in their wake, each new movement predicted success by virtue of their own moral and intellectual superiority – Bolsheviks, Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Frankfurts, and so forth. But ironically, each iteration resulted in more oppression than what they promised to eradicate. Both those who actively resisted along with disinterested bystanders were forced to bow the knee or become exterminated. They were either imprisoned or killed. This is not metaphorical, but quite literal – lifeless rotting bodies on the ground. Several generations saw this first-hand. Real, reality.

It is reasonable to infer the grieving mother whose hoarsened voice wailed at the mass grave where her husband was dumped could not have imagined this outcome when it all started. After all, it was one of her Marxist family members, friends, or neighbors who likely put a bullet through his head and dumped him like a piece of garbage. It was one who said they wanted equality, brotherhood, and freedom from oppression.

Moreover, it does not require much imagination to conclude it could have been anyone’s grandparent, parent, uncle or aunt. Left to Marxists’ devices, it is not too much of a stretch to infer it could be anyone reading this essay, their spouse, children, or grandchildren.

Cultural-Marxism is the new aberration bubbling out of the Snow Witch’s cauldron that also promises equality, fraternity, and freedom from oppression. Yet, no data in the annals of human history leads a person to believe it will result any differently than its predecessors.

Do not be deceived, nothing satiates their ravenous appetite for power. Nothing less than an auto da fe to all the icons of Western civilization will do, especially those of the Christian church and other religious communities. Their bugles are already playing the Degüello. No quarters. No exceptions. Real, reality.

If you think this is fanciful, take them at their own words and actions. In 1997, Nicholas Humphrey gave the Amnesty Lecture at Oxford and claimed that society has an obligation and “should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible… than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon” (Hitchens, 2007).

Consider the invectives regularly spewed toward Christians by leftists. Most Christians who dare to refute the leftist mantra have been desensitized by the constant harangue of racist, sexist, homophobe, xenophobe, and misogynist. On November 5, 2017, a gunman walked into First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle, killing 26 people and wounding 20. In the aftermath, the political left responded with jeers and insults when Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House, tweeted a call to prayer.

Examples of Bible-believing Christians being labeled as deplorables, hicks, rubes, are too many to chronicle. One example on June 23, 2020, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King called for statues of Jesus Christ be torn down. On July 16, 2020 a statue of Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd in the courtyard of Kendale Lakes Catholic Church was toppled and beheaded by an alleged BLM protester. This was on the heels of an incident in an Orlando Catholic church where the perpetrator drove a minivan through the front door set it ablaze.

Knowing the heinous activities of Russian Marxists who burned 100,000 churches, arrested 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests and executed 95,000 of them, the atheist-leftist Bill Maher makes no reference to those in his own philosophical camp, but vilifies Christians as dangerous “irrationalists” who “steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken” (Maher & Charles, 2008).

Yet, despite serious attempts by Marxists worldwide to showcase a single model of success to this theory, they have yet to show a single one. Twice-failed presidential candidate, Bernie Saunders, often hailed European socialism as the sole exception. However, close examination refutes his claim. Instead, it shows capitalist economies with large and costly social programs, not full-throated socialism.

Despite the progressive-lefts’ attempts to divorce socialism from Marxism, there is no clear line of demarcation between the two. The starting point for both ideologies is some form of dialectical materialism. Both claim the ultimate evil is oppression; and, the source of all human maladies is an oppressor class. Both prescribe the overthrow of those in power as redemption. Both reject individualism and embrace collectivism. Both assume the highest good is to achieve egalitarianism. Both assume an achievable utopian state. In the final analysis, they are distinctions without a difference. The term, socialism is at least dependent, correlational, or subsumed by Marxism or visa versa, depending on the context. One may distinguish one’s fingers from the hand, but in the end they are all the same body.

These new cultural-Marxists are not neoliberals or Keynesian economists for which the western-world has become so comfortable. This social theory goes by many names. They are using terms like post-postmodernism, post-millennialism, trans-idealism, performatism, metamodernism, alt-postmodernists, Critical Race Theorists (CRT), metaphysical idealists, and a host of others. The less ideologically inclined may better recognize them as progressives, statists, globalists, leftists, the resistance, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Antifa, or one of many other splinter groups.

They are the rotten fruit of an aging postmodernism. Like their progenitors, they rebel against the trite and shallow features of Western technocracy and all streams whose headwaters can be traced back to the Enlightenment. They rage against postmodern idealism as a petulant child to its parent. They indict both capitalistic and collectivist solutions to global problems as mere enervations of the previous generations’ modern and postmodern cultures. At the same time, their Marxist collectivism is shrouded by clever buzzwords – woke, intersectionality, transformation, hegemony, white privilege, systemic racism, social justice, micro-aggressions, and the like.

Cultural-Marxism has cobbled together a daunting cadre of professions and interest groups that could even terrify the stout of heart, much less the timid. The casual observer will easily identify its fingerprint on almost every aspect of American life – government, academia, media, arts, technology, commerce, et al. The nation’s glitterati are no longer covertly stowing this contagion in cavernous enclaves, like faculty lounges or think tanks, but have unleashed it into the streets like the bulls of Pamplona. Those who do not run for their lives are being run over.

Fortunately, this intimidation factor is somewhat mitigated by studies that conclude such people-movements are not monolithic like the Marxists would have everyone believe. Their own cherished playbook, Rules for Radicals, asserts that “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have” (Alinsky, 1989, p. 139). Looking more behind the mask, examiners will note early participants in these movements are swept up in the enthusiasm and aspire for acceptance, but only have an enigmatic understanding of the ideology. Then, like shoaling fish, they swim in the protective current of the masses while subscribing only to certain beliefs and experiencing various levels of acculturation (Kioupkiolis & Katsambekis, 2016).

In this school of fish, at least five wobbly postmodern pillars prop up cultural-Marxism. 1) Reality is a collection of perceptions derived from simulacra, or images that simulate what is real but only approximate what actually exists (Baudrillard, 1994). 2) Consciousness of the “self” as the subject (actor) is an illusion (Heidegger, 1962; Nietzsche, 2004). 3) Knowledge (epistemology) is a social construct . 4) Language is semantically self-referential and culturally derived (Derrida, 1997). 5) All meta-narratives (worldviews) are linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable heterogenous language games derived from culture (Lyotard, 1993; Wittgenstein, 1968). Overarching all of these pillars are two large revulsions to all things drawn from Western civilization, Enlightenment and Christianity.

The cultural-Marxists co-opt these pillars in a way that reinforce whatever oppression-oppressed paradigm they wish to advance. For example, consider how Critical Race Theorists (CRT) accentuate the oppression framework by undermining the founding documents of America:

1) The Founders were white male slave-owners who were acculturated in an Enlightenment meta-narrative, which they enshrined in documents to create a hegemony that would perpetually subjugate women and people of color. Their view was not reality, but a culturally derived amalgam of linguistic symbols. It carries no more truth-value than a shopping list at Walmart. Freedom from oppression will only be accomplished when this hegemony is rejected, destroyed, and replaced by one that ensures an egalitarian state for humankind.

2) The illusion of the individual was a by-product of Western acculturation and perpetuates oppression. It is reflective of a view of reality that is dualist rather than a semantic network of images and signs that can only approximate what exists. To free oppressed people of color, the myth of the individual and all accompanying dualisms must be rejected and replaced by a collective consciousness. It is not freedom of the individual, but freedom of the racial group that will overcome and sustain freedom from oppression. It is not racial prejudices of individuals, but systems that perpetuate the oppressive hegemony that are the problem.

3) Since all knowledge is culturally derived, the claim by the Founders to have knowledge of truth that transcends their culture only perpetuates the hegemony that oppresses people of color. For modern day conservatives to elevate the Constitution is to perpetuate the oppression by reinforcing their hegemony, and are thus racists.

4) Because language is self-referential and socially acquired, CRT deconstructs any historical document to accentuate the inherent lack of unified meaning and discontinuity of ideas, cull out any trace of meta-narrative, then reconstruct by way of “the new” (Vattimo, 1988). In other words, they legitimize what has been historically referred to as eisegesis – reading into the text.

So to free the oppressed groups that the hegemony in those documents were intended to suppress, the documents must be deconstructed by removing mythological meta-narrative and re-interpreted by the groups they were intended to oppress.

So building on these foundationless assumptions, the CRT assert the Founding documents cannot be applied to people outside slave-owning American white males of the 18th century. It is rife with multiple interpretations. It is legitimate to sit in judgment using current culturally derived progressive values to impose on the text.

That is the reason progressives continue to nominate and confirm constructivist judges/justices. In their view, the Constitution is a malleable ever-changing document. So CRT imposes the racial oppression-oppressed narrative by reframing the historical 3/5 argument for Americans of African descent to support their worldview.

5) All meta-narratives are linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable heterogenous language games derived from culture. It follows then, that there are no self-evident truths that transcend the white, male 18th century mindset contained in the Constitution. So, the CRT’s worldview is seen through the prism of racial oppression. Every aspect of thought is filtered through this prism.

As one turns a diamond and sees varied colors, so various interest groups shine different oppression-oppressor frameworks, but it is the same ideology – Marxism. Whether one is talking about feminism, LGBQT+, racism, xenophobia, marginalized religions, or whatever else, they hold to the same postmodern underpinnings and make the same arguments with the same justifications.

These demonstrate that a text without a context is a pretext. The context, based upon a person’s worldview, serves as an interpretive grid to what appears as raw facts. Even the belief that worldviews serve as interpretive grids comes from assumptions found in a particular global perspective on reality, or what postmoderns refer to as a “meta-narrative.”

Generally, philosophers now concede that the starting point for all truth-claims is necessarily tautological, meaning circular. As such, the conclusion for this foundational belief is not derived from any premises. One such example is the foundational postmodern belief, “all meta-narratives originate from culture.” There can be no premise to warrant that as a conclusion. It is basic, the starting point for a host of other beliefs that are based upon that assumption.

It is in the insidious nature of rejecting reason, ontological being, unified and sentient self, and associated episteme that makes traditional apologetics designed for 20th century modernism by-and-large ineffectual. For instance, the appeals for a national conversation about race by the CRT isn’t about race at all. It is about power. Every fact, statistic, study, and documentation will go through the prism of the cultural-Marxist worldview, get redefined or reinterpreted, then made to fit within the cultural-Marxism framework. Since they view reason as mere cultural baggage from an exhausted residue of a bygone worldview, it will not provide any common ground upon which to pursue what Francis Schaeffer called, “true, truth” (Schaeffer, 1968).

 

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