Posted on 06/13/2003 4:31:16 PM PDT by PeterBaker
Pablo Picasso is reported to have described art as an "offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy".
Who then was the enemy that Robert Mapplethorpe was fighting when he took an image of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and contorted it into a tie-rack; an image that featured a photo of Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip protruding from his anus?
The enemy was organized religion; the same enemy that Andreas Serrano attacked when he placed a crucifix into his own urine and toured the world with the photo, named Piss Christ. It was also the same enemy that the Brooklyn Museum had in mind when, in 1999, it featured a painting of Mary splattered with excrement and a halo of female genitals around her head. The enemy was clear when the creators of Queer City cast Jesus as a depraved homosexual who sexually assaults a six year old boy. Similarly, it was clear in The Last Temptation of Christ which portrayed Jesus as a weak-minded, effeminate wimp. Tongues of Flame depicts Jesus as a junkie, and Terrance McNally’s Corpus Christi portrayed Jesus as a lecherous, promiscuous homosexual.
In February 2001, the Brooklyn Museum hosted Renee Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper, a 15-foot photo of Cox naked as Jesus, with eleven of her Black friends as his apostles. A white man was, of course, shown as Judas. In other exhibits, Mary was portrayed as a Barbie doll and a tattooed lesbian.
In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Satan is glorified as a loving, caring individual who is the homosexual lover of Saddam Hussein. As in the television program of the same name, Jesus is regularly ridiculed and equated with sexual anatomy.
$51,000 of funds, sourced from Australian tax payers, was awarded to Rollan McClearly, a Phd student at the University of Queensland, to ‘prove’ that Jesus was a homosexual. Relying on primarily on astrology, McClearly, himself a homosexual, noted: “The starting point is the matter of John, who always referred to himself as Jesus’s beloved disciple”
As the dominant religion of the West and the empirical source for the entire canon of Western morality, Christianity has been the principle target in this cultural war that has been waged for decades.
Marylyn Manson, the popular American rock singer knew the score when he said: "Each age has to have at least one brave individual that tried to bring an end to Christianity. No one has managed to succeed yet, but maybe through music we can do it." And try he has, ripping bibles to pieces on stage, joining the Church of Satan, and selling photos of his penis lodged between the pages of the Christian Bible for US$6.95 on his fan-club website.
Why Christianity? In many parts of the world, particularly the United States, Christianity remains one of the few remaining bulwarks to the cultural overthrow of the Western mind by the secular humanists. The education system, arts, media, film and most every other aspect of our lives have already been conquered, but religion remains an obstinate obstacle to the imposition of this ‘new morality’ on Western societies.
Despite the viciousness and aggression of this cultural war, few have posed any resistance. It was never a war to be fought according to the rules of engagement that most of us would be familiar with or be comfortable with; rather it was, and continues to be, waged using the weapon of Marxist Critical Theory.
Critical Theory is based on the observation that Westerners, intoxicated with capitalism and inculcated with a love of freedom, would never throw their lives away for a Leninist-style socialist revolution in the West. As such, Critical Theory states that the path to revolution to the West begins with an attack and undermining of the dominant culture of the society. As one exponent has eloquently described it, this theory is "essentially destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention, and conservatism." The artists who attack religious symbols and beliefs, like the US Supreme Court judges who outlaw prayer in American schools, are the footsoldiers in this war against organized religion.
The idea that the Left could triumph in the West only by hijacking its culture was first articulated in detail by Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party, fled to America to become a profound influence on American society, and by extension much of the English-speaking world.
Like all Marxists, Gramsci divided the world into two distinct groups: the oppressed and the oppressors. The oppressed were kept in that state by the privileged class who used force, domination, coercion and the projection of an ideological hegemony as tools to manipulate the masses. The masses, duped and hoodwinked by the oppressors, were inculcated with values and ideas that ensured they would always remain the oppressed.
The key, in Gramsci’s view, to freeing the oppressed was to attack and render illegitimate the belief systems of the ruling class. In other words, to create an ‘anti-hegemony’ that would spread through civil society -- the ubiquitous battleground in Gramsci’s class war. In the view articulated by Gramsci and his Marxist associates, the private is always political; the workplace, church, art gallery, and bookstore are all battlegrounds in the war for cultural hegemony.
Gramsci’s ideas were given force after Hitler’s rise to power by the formation in Chicago of the Institute of Marxism, later to be known as the Frankfurt School; in reference to its four German expatriate ideologues: Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Professor Herbert Marcuse. Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality” laid down the ideological framework for the attack on conservative values, labeling anyone still possessed of ostensibly middle class ideals as a ‘fascist’. The smearing of their ideological opponents as facists and racists is a standard feature of Leftist discourse. Indeed, the Moscow Central Committee laid down the rules in 1943 when they stated:
"Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic. The association will, after enough repetition, become 'fact' in the public mind."
Who then was the enemy that Robert Mapplethorpe was fighting when he took an image of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and contorted it into a tie-rack; an image that featured a photo of Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip protruding from his anus?
The enemy was organized religion; the same enemy that Andreas Serrano attacked when he placed a crucifix into his own urine and toured the world with the photo, named Piss Christ. It was also the same enemy that the Brooklyn Museum had in mind when, in 1999, it featured a painting of Mary splattered with excrement and a halo of female genitals around her head. The enemy was clear when the creators of Queer City cast Jesus as a depraved homosexual who sexually assaults a six year old boy. Similarly, it was clear in The Last Temptation of Christ which portrayed Jesus as a weak-minded, effeminate wimp. Tongues of Flame depicts Jesus as a junkie, and Terrance McNally’s Corpus Christi portrayed Jesus as a lecherous, promiscuous homosexual.
In February 2001, the Brooklyn Museum hosted Renee Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper, a 15-foot photo of Cox naked as Jesus, with eleven of her Black friends as his apostles. A white man was, of course, shown as Judas. In other exhibits, Mary was portrayed as a Barbie doll and a tattooed lesbian.
In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Satan is glorified as a loving, caring individual who is the homosexual lover of Saddam Hussein. As in the television program of the same name, Jesus is regularly ridiculed and equated with sexual anatomy.
$51,000 of funds, sourced from Australian tax payers, was awarded to Rollan McClearly, a Phd student at the University of Queensland, to ‘prove’ that Jesus was a homosexual. Relying on primarily on astrology, McClearly, himself a homosexual, noted: “The starting point is the matter of John, who always referred to himself as Jesus’s beloved disciple”
As the dominant religion of the West and the empirical source for the entire canon of Western morality, Christianity has been the principle target in this cultural war that has been waged for decades.
Marylyn Manson, the popular American rock singer knew the score when he said: "Each age has to have at least one brave individual that tried to bring an end to Christianity. No one has managed to succeed yet, but maybe through music we can do it." And try he has, ripping bibles to pieces on stage, joining the Church of Satan, and selling photos of his penis lodged between the pages of the Christian Bible for US$6.95 on his fan-club website.
Why Christianity? In many parts of the world, particularly the United States, Christianity remains one of the few remaining bulwarks to the cultural overthrow of the Western mind by the secular humanists. The education system, arts, media, film and most every other aspect of our lives have already been conquered, but religion remains an obstinate obstacle to the imposition of this ‘new morality’ on Western societies.
Despite the viciousness and aggression of this cultural war, few have posed any resistance. It was never a war to be fought according to the rules of engagement that most of us would be familiar with or be comfortable with; rather it was, and continues to be, waged using the weapon of Marxist Critical Theory.
Critical Theory is based on the observation that Westerners, intoxicated with capitalism and inculcated with a love of freedom, would never throw their lives away for a Leninist-style socialist revolution in the West. As such, Critical Theory states that the path to revolution to the West begins with an attack and undermining of the dominant culture of the society. As one exponent has eloquently described it, this theory is "essentially destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention, and conservatism." The artists who attack religious symbols and beliefs, like the US Supreme Court judges who outlaw prayer in American schools, are the footsoldiers in this war against organized religion.
The idea that the Left could triumph in the West only by hijacking its culture was first articulated in detail by Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party, fled to America to become a profound influence on American society, and by extension much of the English-speaking world.
Like all Marxists, Gramsci divided the world into two distinct groups: the oppressed and the oppressors. The oppressed were kept in that state by the privileged class who used force, domination, coercion and the projection of an ideological hegemony as tools to manipulate the masses. The masses, duped and hoodwinked by the oppressors, were inculcated with values and ideas that ensured they would always remain the oppressed.
The key, in Gramsci’s view, to freeing the oppressed was to attack and render illegitimate the belief systems of the ruling class. In other words, to create an ‘anti-hegemony’ that would spread through civil society -- the ubiquitous battleground in Gramsci’s class war. In the view articulated by Gramsci and his Marxist associates, the private is always political; the workplace, church, art gallery, and bookstore are all battlegrounds in the war for cultural hegemony.
Gramsci’s ideas were given force after Hitler’s rise to power by the formation in Chicago of the Institute of Marxism, later to be known as the Frankfurt School; in reference to its four German expatriate ideologues: Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Professor Herbert Marcuse. Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality” laid down the ideological framework for the attack on conservative values, labeling anyone still possessed of ostensibly middle class ideals as a ‘fascist’. The smearing of their ideological opponents as facists and racists is a standard feature of Leftist discourse. Indeed, the Moscow Central Committee laid down the rules in 1943 when they stated:
"Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic. The association will, after enough repetition, become 'fact' in the public mind."Meanwhile, Marcuse targeted the disenfranchised and asocial, encouraging the complete rejection of all moral and cultural order. It was Marcuse who coined the phrase, “make love not war” that became one of the mantras of the sixties’ free love movement and continues to be chanted at anti-war rallies to this day.
The Frankfurt School first articulated the vision of what American commentator, Pat Buchanan would call the “therapeutic state”; the state where sin has been replaced with sickness and crime with ‘anti-social behaviour’. The seven deadly sins are now the seven sicknesses: ‘lust’ is a sexual addiction, ‘gluttony’ is a genetic predisposition towards eating too much; ‘slothfulness’ is chronic fatigue syndrome; and ‘anger’ is a sickness that can be cured through ‘anger management classes’. Assert the old morality, such as that homosexuality is abhorrent and a transgression against the Bible, Torah and Koran and they have a sickness for you too: homophobia – the irrational and illogical fear of gay people.
In their efforts to smash their own civilization, the exponents and practitioners of Marxist Critical Theory have been largely successful. The traditionally Christian culture of the West has been replaced by a New Age gospel of secular humanism. The moral absolutism of religion has been usurped by moral relativism: the idea that there is no absolute wrong or absolute right, but just different, equally valid, perspectives. In the mind of the humanist, it is as Nietzsche proclaimed, God is Dead; His role has supreme legislator has been replaced by the whims and desires of man. Man is, in the view of most people, his own God. If, as CS Lewis once wrote, the greatest trick that the Devil ever played on man was convincing him he didn’t exist, then the greatest trick of the 20th century was convincing man that God didn’t exist.
Yet God does exist, and it is only religion that provides the codification of morality that societies need to survive. As George Washington noted: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man seek the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness."
The more the West has abandoned religion and the more it has embraced humanism as an alternative creed, the more birth rates have declined; to the point that in many Western societies, birthrates are in negative and populations aging rapidly. The fact is that, without faith, people have little to live for except the satiation of their desires: a selfish disposition that sees children as being a hindrance and an obstacle to ‘life’.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.