'The Marxists are brainwashing us': the conspiracy theory that permeates a certain right

When in 2011 the far-right terrorist Anders Breivik murdered 77 people, most of them young people from the Norwegian Labor Party, in the massacre on the Norwegian island of Utoya, he justified his action as a fight against the attack on the West by Muslims and Marxists.

His thought (to call it that) was ascribed to the theory of cultural Marxism, according to which feminism, the LGTBI movement, environmentalism, atheism, multiculturalism, etc. collaborate in the destruction of the free world, which have managed to inoculate the disastrous virus of "political correctness" that eats away at society and leads us to a totalitarian future.

Marxism remains ghostly and continues to travel the world, but hidden in new incarnations.

Breivik claimed to fight him.

Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory, common in the field of the extreme right and the alternative right, which ensures that the left, unable to succeed in the political and economic fields, has thrown in the rest to succeed in the cultural field ( understanding here culture in a broad sense, not only cultural products).

The entire society would be permeated by progressive ideas, the victim of massive brainwashing.

“We are not going to back down from this cultural and Jewish Marxist brainwashing that we have been indoctrinated with to be useful idiots to international finance, capitalism and war (…) we simply want to defend white working class people, our rights and our nation,” said the

American Mike Enoch at a demonstration.

As in any story of this type, there are different variants, but this one can be quite descriptive: it all started when, after the Russian Revolution, the Soviet model failed to be exported to other countries.

The philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued that it was necessary to achieve cultural hegemony, that is, dominate the landscape of thought, art, education, the media, common sense, beliefs, morals.

If Marx had established that the important thing was to transform the economic base and that the "superstructure" rested on it where the cultural facets of society were found, the Italian theorist turned the Marxist tortilla around.

That tortilla now included culture as an ingredient, it was another battlefield, and no less important.

This trail was followed by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, synthesizers of Freud and Marx) or the countercultural and New Left movements of the sixties.

From those mud these mud, say the convinced, where minorities and identities conspire against capitalism, Christianity, the traditional family, the free market, and manage to silence dissent through the supposed gag of "political correctness" .

All this would be a triumphant translation of Marx's thesis to the field of culture: the aforementioned minorities would be the substitute for the working class as agents of the revolution, colonization would take place largely through the universities, infiltrated by these ideas .

Big companies, governments and parties of almost every tendency would have accepted cultural Marxism,

“This theory is part of the ideological rearmament of the extreme right, which, since the end of the 1990s, first in the United States and then in Europe, decided to bet almost everything on culture wars.

In their absurd simplicity, conspiracy theories offer an interpretation of the world where everything seems to fit.

This is why they are successful,” says Italian historian Steven Forti, author of Far Right 2.0 (21st Century).

It is an effective way, a suggestive story, to viralize certain far-right ideas against a ghostly and fearsome enemy.

The leaders of Vox have directly alluded to these ideas.

For example, Santiago Abascal, leader of the party, has sometimes pointed out "the urgency of curbing cultural Marxism."

In a similar way, although not as explicitly, the policy of the PP Isabel Díaz Ayuso has been pronounced,

theory

with that supposed return of communism.

They tend to see crypto-communists out there ready to destroy freedom.

Taking real elements to create a hallucinated story is what other theories do, such as the great replacement

There are those who see traces of similar logic in previous currents.

“Like Judeo-Bolshevism, cultural Marxism homogenizes vast groups of shadowy enemies and assigns them a secret plan to disrupt society,” writes Samuel Moyn, a historian at Yale University, in

.

The fear of crypto-communists in Hollywood, promoted by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and the subsequent

followed a similar pattern.

These days, and in certain sectors (most notably on social media), even climate change is seen as a hoax to impose a "green dictatorship."

Of course, the conspiracy theor's favorite tycoon, George Soros, is often in the thick of it.

“When Santiago Abascal speaks of a 'progressive dictatorship' or Donald Trump of a 'politically correct dictatorship,' they are broadly speaking of the same thing,” says Forti.

Curiously, among the left, rather than the sensation of having surreptitiously dominated the world, the opposite predominates: that of constant defeat and an uncertain future, with a capitalism that is stronger and more unregulated than ever.

wickers of truth

In reality, there is a grain of truth in the theory of cultural Marxism, which is why it is credible to many.

Indeed, from Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, through the counterculture and the New Left, the left has increasingly taken cultural and identity issues into account.

However, “it is a conspiracy theory because it takes some trends from reality —the fact that the left lost weight in the working class, which in turn was transformed— to put together a story about a kind of orchestrated infiltration in the institutions.

It is the idea that there is a kind of army of moles undermining Western culture”, says the Argentine historian Pablo Stefanoni, author of ¿La rebeldía became right-wing?

(Intellectual Key/21st Century).

As the expert points out,

Taking real wicker to create a hallucinated story is something that other conspiracy theories of the extreme right also do, such as that of the "great replacement", promoted by the Frenchman Renaud Camus, who uses the migratory challenge to invent a world plot of the "elites globalists”, who intend to replace Western civilization with the Islamic… in just one generation.

In general, this type of thinking tries to attribute dark intentions to certain political and social tendencies in order to delegitimize them.

Critics of so-called cultural Marxism try to revive the anticommunist fervor of the Cold War, when communism was virtually non-existent.

“It is a kind of zombie anti-communism to feed a feeling of existential threat and amalgamate ideological proposals under the same demonizing label,

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