Talk title: Cultural Marxism - a threat to life and the family

Dr Anca Maria Cernea is a representative from the Association of Catholic Doctors of Bucharest (Romania).

Full text of Dr Anca-Maria's talk below:

It is a great privilege to talk today to the SPUC National Conference.

Last year, my husband Vincent and I had the providential opportunity to meet the SPUC - Voice of the Family team that was present in Rome at the Synod of Bishops, where I participated as a lay auditor.

I don’t know how to thank God for those meetings and for all the prayer support, the intellectual ammunition they have provided to me, their friendly encouragement. That was last year, in 2015, when we met in person.

But over the years, we as well as many of our friends in Romania have been following with great admiration and gratitude the SPUC website. I came across it on internet more than ten years ago while preparing a paper about bioethics in the postmodern era.

It was at a time when cultural Marxism was making its way into the public debate in Romania, in a manner that was already noticeable. Before that, of course, in our country we had been confronted much more with the devastating consequences of classical Marxism. Later on, we studied in more detail the Marxist pedigree of things like "gay rights" and gender theory, that sounded quite new for our region. The biggest difficulty for us in fighting this kind of ideological assault was the fact that it apparently came from the West. And for us, Eastern Europeans, who had recently made our way back into the Free World, the West was the inspiring model for reforming our societies after communism. If not paradise on earth, at least the measure of normality. Then we had to acknowledge that not everything was worth copying, and we had to undertake the task of carefully differentiating the things that genuinely belonged to Western Civilization and made it so great, from the time bombs planted inside it by its enemies, in order to destroy it.

We had all studied Marxism in school. Of course, nobody used to believe that stuff, but this training has proven helpful. I was coming from an anti-communist family, my parents were former political prisoners, but I took this study of Marxism quite seriously, precisely because I wanted to understand our enemy.

I will try to share with you certain things about communism that may allow us all to better see the nature and the origin of the current-day attacks against innocent human life and against the family. We need to know what we are fighting against.

I recently saw a text by a pro-life pro-family activist who was saying: "We are fighting the same battle from before the French Revolution, the fight between sexual license and sexual morality."

Well, is that it?

No, it’s not. We are fighting much more than that.

We also hear quite often in church sermons, that the attacks against the family in today’s world are motivated by "consumerism, hedonism, individualism".

Are they?

No, not exactly. These are just predisposing factors, weakening the moral strength of people and societies. But they are not the cause.

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." (Eph. 6:12).

If we only defend sexual morality and fight sexual license, if we only preach against consumerism, it means that we only fight flesh and blood, not the spirits of darkness.

In practical terms, the defence of life, family and morality is very important, but we also need to keep in mind that there is more. What we need to defend is Judeo-Christian Civilization. We need to take our world back from the revolutionists. For if we only focus on our pro-life pro-family goals, and we let the other side take everything else: culture, education, politics, media, entertainment, justice, administration, economy, then we won’t be able to defend life and family for very long.

The cause of all of these attacks lies in a satanic revolt against God, against His law and the moral order of His creation, a revolutionary attempt to redesign human society and human nature.

It is not "progressive", it is not new, it is almost as old as humankind.

"Old Errors and New Labels" is the title of a prophetic volume, published in 1931 by the Venerable Servant of God, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

These errors have been present in the world since the evil snake has persuaded Adam and Eve not to rely on God’s word, but to attempt to "be like God" (Gen.3,5), to take control, to take God’s place - by eating the forbidden fruit, the fruit of knowledge, and by transgressing God’s command.

Ever since that day, we find these types of errors again and again in human history, under different labels, in idolatry, in magic, and also in the gnostic heresies that have been attacking the Church since the dawn of Christianity.

Generally, gnostic heresies are based on a radical opposition between matter and spirit, between body and soul. Matter is considered evil, spirit is considered good. Matter, they say, was created by an evil demiurge; there is also a spiritual God, but he is completely unknown, transcendent, inaccessible. Gnostic errors promise salvation from the "prison" of the created Universe, a salvation obtained by men through some kind of secret knowledge, without any help from God.

This gnostic opposition between matter and spirit, body and soul, results in teachings on sexual morality that are situated on both extremes: either absolute prohibition of procreation, or total libertinage, sexual promiscuity, ritual orgies. 

This is all contrary to what the Bible teaches, namely that God has created all things and has found them good. That He has created us, men and women, in His own image and likeness. That evil has entered the world through human sin. But also that God, in His infinite goodness and love for mankind, has provided it with the chance of salvation, through the Incarnation, death and resurrection of the Verb, thus reconciling God with His creatures. For us Christians, the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. This is the basis of Christian teaching on the holiness of marriage, on the God-given blessing of having children, and on everything that has to do with Christian teachings on sexual morality.

Modern-day ideologies are nothing but new labels for the old gnostic errors.

Eric Voegelin wrote, since the 1920ies, that Nazism and Bolshevism were a kind of substitute religions, with their own symbols, prophets, scriptures, hierarchies, liturgies, celebrations, etc., representing the contemporary form of the ancient Gnostic heresy. This time it is not about a transcendent "knowledge" of spiritual secrets, but the pretext is all material, it’s all about "science" and "progress". An immanentized Eschaton.

Marxist ideology is in fact an error of religious nature, claiming to have a full explanation of reality and to offer "salvation" here in this world, through human means, without God.

And since it is a challenge of religious nature, it is the Church shepherds who must fight it, they must preach against it, the way St Irenaeus has defeated the Gnostic heresy of his time, by exposing it.

The current-day culture war is being wedged by gnostic-revolutionary ideologies (most of which are related to/derived from Marxism and communism) against Judeo-Christian Civilization.

Olavo de Carvalho highlights some important things about communism that are usually overlooked:

Communism has been, throughout human history, the only globally organized political movement, with branches and agents in the most remote places of the Earth, all disciplined and able to act in a coordinate and efficient manner. Communism could count on unlimited financial resources, far superior to the West’s biggest known fortunes and to the combined budgets of many governments.

Although it has at its disposal a huge number of organizations and mass parties, Communism is substantially a clandestine movement, even in times when communist organizations may function publicly without being persecuted.

Only a tiny part of the communist activity consists of recognizable propaganda. The most significant part consists of infiltrating and blending into all sorts of organizations - political parties (liberal and conservative alike), media, unions, government and private enterprises, cultural, educational and charitable institutions, the armed forces, Freemasonry and so on.

The communist movement has never had nor needed any doctrinal unity, and has proved its capacity to tactically adapt to the most different ideological formulas.  The unity of the communist movement is strategical and organizational, not ideological. Communism is not a set of theses: it is a power scheme, the most flexible, vast, integrated and efficient that ever existed. Even Islamic radicalism, which is so quickly expanding nowadays, would be powerless without the support of the world network of communist organizations.

There is no international anti-communist movement.

The formal opposition between the abstract concepts of capitalism and communism does not translate, in reality, into a mortal conflict between capitalists and communists. There has been an enduring collaboration between the communist movement and some of the West’s greatest fortunes, billionaire foundations like Rothschild’s and Rockefeller’s.

To which we may add Soros nowadays.

As pastor Richard Wurmbrand has shown in his famous book Marx and Satan, Karl Marx has written verses expressing a deep hatred against God and all mankind. Marx did not deny the existence of God, but hated Him and wanted to take His place. Wurmbrand quotes and letters of Marx’s son, addressed to him with the words: "My dear devil", and testimonies about strange ceremonies which Marx used to practice in his house.

Marx was a Satanist. This is the key to Marxist ideology.

Grzegorz Górny, a leading Catholic intellectual from Poland, has explained recently in a conference in Fatima, that communism is the exact opposite of the Ten Commandments.

The prophecy made by Our Lady in Fatima, Portugal, to the three children, in October 2017, warned against "Russia’s errors" that would spread all over the world. This is what has actually happened over the last hundred years.

First, Marxism was imposed through violence in Russia, and then the in rest of the "Eastern Block", by means of terror and genocide. In the West, Marxism has rather taken the form of insidious cultural subversion, cultural Marxism, aiming at the moral destruction of the Free World.

Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB major who has defected to the West, tried to warn the Americans against the Soviet strategies, aiming at encouraging and pushing the Free World to destroy itself. In lecture he gave in 1983, he explained that only 15% of KGB resources went to classical espionage activities; 85% went to the ideological subversion of the West.

The historical origin of the current-day sexual revolution is Russia, not the Western World.

Abortion was legalized first by Lenin in the Soviet Union, in 1920 - in the USA, only in 1973, and could only be done by a judicial stratagem (the famous Roe vs. Wade case) because abortion was not accepted by the American public at that time, and would not have been legalized by democratic, parliamentary means.

No-fault divorce-was adopted in 1918 in the USSR - in the US in 1969 (the state of California).

Homosexuality was decriminalized in the USSR in 1922- in the US in 1961 (the state of Illinois).

If the cause of the worldwide sexual revolution is Western individualism and consumerism, why was it Lenin’s Soviet Union to first introduce all these novelties, at least half a century before they were forced into the United States? Weren’t we told that the Americans were individualistic and consumerist and the Soviets were all the opposite?…

In 1950, a certain Harry Hay founded the first organization in the US for "gay rights" in history, called Mattachine Society; almost all its members, starting with Hay himself, belonged to the Communist Party USA, an organization directly managed by the Soviets.

Radical sex education for school children was first introduced in 1919 in Hungary, by Béla Kuhn’s Bolshevik revolution. In America it took until the 60ies, when the perverse sex education under the influence of Alfred Kinsey’s teaching, generously supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, made its way into the schools. Kinsey was an entomologist who pretended to have proven that human homosexuality was far more extended in society than officially admitted (the famous "10%"), thus should be considered as normal. Kinsey’s "research" was actually fraudulent and criminal, as proven by Dr Judith Reisman, Associate Professor at the University of Haifa, Israel, and Research Full Professor with The American University. But it is important to note that Alfred Kinsey was a communist, and a friend of Harry Hay.

The activists of the sexual revolution of the West in the 60ies read cultural Marxists, like Herbert Marcuse. Their idols were Ho Shi Min, Mao and Che Guevara. They all hated capitalism and consumerism.

As we have seen, the first sexual revolution in human history was made by Lenin.

Lenin, with Georg Lukács and Willi Münzenberg, the head of Komintern, initiated the Frankfurt School - known also as the "The Critical School" or the "Critical Theory". It descends from Lukács through Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and many others, to today’s gender ideology formulated by Judith Butler. Typical of this school is the use of terms and concepts taken from psychology, combining Marx with Freud, in order to undermine the moral foundation and the institutions of Western society, starting with the family.

The authors of the Frankfurt School direct their effort towards the destruction of Western culture - by criticizing, "unmasking", discrediting, deconstructing every piece of it, but without proposing any explicit utopia in replacement; they just respond to the call of their founder, Georg Lukács:

"Who will save us from Western Civilization?"

Parallel to the Frankfurt School, cultural Marxism also followed Antonio Gramsci. Unlike the Frankfurt School, Gramsci is clear about his purpose; his plan is none other than to bring about a Soviet-type communist society. But in contrast with classical Marxist teachings, he recommends that "cultural hegemony" be conquered first - through gradual, imperceptible mutations in language and social patterns, introduced with the help of fellow travellers, like actors or other celebrities, as well as through the creation of false majorities, infiltration and take-over of institutions, media, film industry, education, and most importantly, of the Catholic Church - so that, one day, people would wake up in a communist society, without realizing how they got there.

After the spectacular failure of classical Marxism, which pretended to revolutionize society through a violent takeover of property, now cultural Marxism seems to prevail, pretending to revolutionize family, sexual identity and human nature.

Actually, what these revolutionists pretend is to correct God’s creation and His Law. To emancipate humanity from the supposed "oppression" of the laws of nature, not to mention the moral law. Thus feminism promises to liberate women from their husbands, and children from their fathers, abortion to liberate mothers from their children, gay marriage to liberate humankind from the family institution, gender ideology to liberate people from being born male or female, environmentalism to save the planet from the humans, euthanasia to liberate us from all physical or psychological suffering.

As a matter of fact, revolution never brings the promised result. But it does have consequences. 

The same way as classical Marxism pretended to liberate the working class, but what it actually did was to decimate it through mass murder and humiliate it through terror and material misery - now cultural Marxism is not doing any good to society either, it destroys it, by undermining the normal bonds of love and human solidarity between people, by isolating them in selfishness and mutual hatred, and ends up creating much more suffering and distress then those that initially had served them as pretext.

Communism is the most homicidal phenomenon in human history. It has killed more human beings than any natural disaster or disease outbreak. Both forms of Marxism are deadly, cultural Marxism appears softer, but in fact it also kills millions through abortion. 

And both forms of Marxism have the same basic communist mental patterns: of finding reasons for revolt, of pretending to "liberate" some victimized category by throwing it against another, the promise of salvation here on earth, the ruthlessness of the revolutionary elite, struggling for power by any possible means, including fraud, intimidation, violence and crime. This is why in Eastern Europe, common people can often recognize these "progressive" things, like the "gay rights" propaganda, gender ideology, legislation imposing politically correct speech codes, as new forms of communism.

Moreover, in Eastern Europe we can cite examples of interesting career trajectories, from servants of classical communist regimes to activists of the Cultural Revolution.

Zygmunt Bauman, the father of the New Left, now lives in the UK since 1968,  but he has started his career in the 50ies in the communist political police in Poland. He was very much appreciated by his superiors as an officer with outstanding merits in fighting the anticommunist underground, of course with the typical methods of that time. He explains that episode of his youth through his lifelong attachment for leftist ideas - and who are we to argue against this explanation of his.

Another colorful example is Anna Grodzka, formerly Krzystof Begowski  (as she was still a man). Grodzka/ Begowski’s past has a lot more in common with the communist regime in Poland and with the USSR than with the decadent West. Begowski has been a member of the communist party. He had studied psychology, underwent a long military training and travelled a lot to the USSR during the Martial Law in Poland, with a special passport. After 1989, he tried his luck in politics, in SLD, the new name for the former communist party, but was not specially successful. Later on, Begowski re-invented himself, he became a woman, Anna Grodzka, and joined a small but noisy anticlerical party. As a member of the Polish Parliament, Grodzka specialized in promoting transgender rights in Poland. And she does at least another important thing: she insists that Poland should not help Ukraine defend itself against Russia.

We can also cite examples from Latin America, where cultural Marxism is being imposed by former classical Marxists and communist terrorists who became "democratic politicians" in the meantime - like Mujica from Uruguay, Lula da Silva and Dilma Roussef in Brazil, or leftist leaders very close to such terrorists: the Kirchners clan in Argentina notoriously associated with former Montoneros. Even in Cuba, one of the places of this planet where classical Marxism is still officially ruling, great advances have been achieved since the 1990s in terms of rights, public visibility and recognition of the diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities, largely thanks to the work of the National Center for Sex Education headed by Mariela Castro, psychologist, sexologist, and also Raúl Castro’s daughter.

These people have one more important thing in common - besides their past, their old habits - like calling each other "comrade" when they talk together:

All of them still have the same old enthusiasm for Russia - although their great friend, Vladimir Putin, likes to pose as the defender of Christianity. It’s still not clear why the "profoundly devout" Russian President, somehow failed to convince those comrades to stop promoting the antichristian agenda of cultural Marxism.

The fact is that communism has not actually been defeated in 1989, and great part of its networks of power and influence have survived and prospered by switching the accent from Stalin’s model to Lenin’s.

"New Lies for Old Ones" is the title of a book published in 1984, in which the famous KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was warning the Free World against a new strategy the Soviet Union was about to implement in order to advance the Leninist project of a worldwide communist domination. According to Golitsyn, the Soviets would initiate a "liberalization", a "democratization" of the Eastern Block; they would even give up the leading role of the communist party, in order to make the West relax its defense. A later book by Golitsyn, published in 1995, is called "The Perestroika deception", and its subtitle reads "The World’s Slide Towards the 'Second October Revolution' ('Weltoktober')". He explains that perestroika was nothing but the continuation of the pursuit of a worldwide Leninist revolution.

The installation of a communist world government has been set as the goal of the 3rd International since the 1920ies. An important step on the way to achieving this was the creation of the United Nations Organization, after WW2. The foundations of the UN were laid by the Soviets, negotiating with the Americans - America was represented by Alger His, who was a Soviet agent. 

I remember a high ranking communist party political analyst who came to talk to us, future intellectuals, students of one of the best Bucharest colleges, back in 1984. He told us about detent and convergence, through which East and West would finally build enduring peace in the world, as the Eastern Block was undergoing a the process of liberalization, while in the West the role of the State and State-owned companies was increasing, leading to a situation of compatibility between the two systems. He didn’t forget to mention Comrade Nicolae Ceau?escu’s merits in achieving peace on the planet, by insisting for the disarmament of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and for a New International Order.

In the early nineties, in Prague, I had the privilege to hear a conference by a German author, Hans Graf Huyn. He explained perestroika from the perspective of Marxist dialectics, as a strategy that had been carefully planned by Soviet leaders in order to deceive and penetrate the West.

Seen from the Marxist dialectic angle, the history of the Soviet Union is a sequence of hard-style totalitarianism with phases where the regime pretends to soften-up, but what happens in fact is that for a while deception prevails over violence. So you have the first phase of Lenin’s Revolution, a gigantic blood bath, with terror and mass murder. Later, because of the collapse of the economy, Lenin initiates the "New Economic Policy", the NEP, where some private property and private initiative is allowed to exist. Then Stalin comes to power, and the accent moves again towards government violence, genocide, military invasions, concentration camps. Stalin also sets some limits to the general sexual promiscuity - which doesn’t mean a restoration of morality however; it is enough to look at the number of rapes committed by the Red Army in WW2, estimated between 3 to 4 million cases. After the death of Stalin, comrade Khrushchev comes to power and denounces the abuses of his predecessor (abuses in which he himself had played a leading role) and he announces a thaw. Then he is replaced by comrade Brezhnev and it’s again a Stalinist inspired totalitarian state. Then there is Andropov; and finally Gorbachev, who initiates perestroika and apparently lets go, gives up Marxist dogmas and allows Eastern Europe to break free and Russia to liberalize.

After Gorbachev is replaced by Yeltsin, he becomes able to dedicate more time and energy to other projects. Basically his agenda consists of transforming the UN into a World Government, by constantly weakening the sovereignty of the nation states and expanding a worldwide network of "progressive" NGOs, advancing typical cultural Marxist Malthusian-environmentalist agendas, like population control and "reproductive rights", undermining at the same time the Christian religion and replacing it with a New Age kind of neo-pagan spirituality. This is still a Leninist revolution, and this time it takes place not only in Russia, but in the whole world.

And now Russia is back in USSR, back into its violent habits. Its government frames terror attacks in order to justify wars, kills and imprisons dissidents, attacks neighboring countries like Georgia and Ukraine, directly threatens others, like the Baltic States, the Republic of Moldova, Poland and Romania, and threatens the whole world with a nuclear war.

Nevertheless, Putin is regarded by many conservatives in the West as the new Christian emperor, a new hope for Christianity. Moreover, Putin’s regime has managed to infiltrate the worldwide pro-life movement, in order to use it as an instrument of propaganda. At the same time, Putin openly declares his regret for the collapse of the Soviet Union, he compares Lenin’s remains in the mausoleum with Christian relics, and furiously protests against the demolition of Lenin’s statues in Ukraine. He organizes big parades under the sign of the sickle and hammer. Is this what that process of Christian conversion of a satanic genocidal regime should be looking like?

In Christian terms, conversion means that the sinner confesses his sins, repents, does penance, tries to compensate his victims where it is possible; public sins must be confessed publicly. We haven’t seen anything of the sort in Russia. On the contrary. There has been no justice, no repentance, no examination of conscience in Russia for communism and its crimes. Russian society is de-Christianized, they have record levels of drugs and alcohol consumption, divorce, abortion, abandoned children, HIV infection, pornography consumption, human trafficking and all types of corruption.

No, communism has not yet been defeated, it has only been forced by the circumstances to undergo a "dialectical" transformation, actually un upgrade, in order to survive its economic failure and its incapacity to keep up with the West in the arms race of the Cold War. Perestroika was basically a deception, as Golitsyn had said, but of course, the KGB could not determine history in all details, thanks God, and many things have gone way out of their control, especially in Eastern Europe.

But cultural Marxism is now so widespread in the world that it doesn’t need that central coordination any more, like in the times of the Cold War. Nevertheless, there is no proof that the old communist networks have ever been dismantled.

On the contrary, there is a lot of evidence suggesting that Russia is still supporting leftist subversive movements in the West - for example Occupy Wall Street was advertised intensively by Russia Today TV channel, at the same time as it was financed by Soros, and notoriously allied with LGBT NGOs.

If we want to defend Christian Civilization, we should start by clearly defining its enemies. The best definition is the one offered by Olavo de Carvalho. The enemies of Judeo-Christian Civilization are the three globalist projects: Russian-Chinese, Islamic, plus Western revolutionary avant-garde.  Actually, the Russian and Chinese governing elites, specially the secret services, the Islamic religious leadership and some governments of Islamic countries, plus the western financial elite and revolutionists, ideologues and social engineers. These three globalist projects do compete on certain issues, but they generally function in alliance against the Judeo-Christian Civilization.

And we have to defend it against them. For this Civilization is the safest place that can be found here on earth in terms of the respect for innocent human life and for the family.

We need to fight political wars. And in order to win political wars, we need to be able to wisely fight the culture war.

But we should first seek the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; all the other things shall be added unto us (Mt. 6:33). We should not forget that the spiritual war is the most important.

It has to be fought by adequate means, as Saint Paul wrote to the Ephesians: "Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil." (Eph. 6: 10-11)

And the good news is that the victory has already been won by Our Lord on the Cross. He has overcome the world. So we have nothing to fear.