‘It was Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed over seventy people in a car bombing and mass shooting of children in 2011, who first brought the term “Cultural Marxism” to the world’s attention in his thousand-some paged statement of belief, which focused almost entirely on the concept.’ (Joan Braune, ‘Who’s Afraid of the Frankfurt School – “Cultural Marxism” as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory’, Journal of Social Justice, Vol. 9, 2019: 2)

The ideology of Hindu supremacism is going global. Last Vijaya Dashami the RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat had waxed eloquent on a new enemy, imported directly from White supremacist terrorist discourse, namely ‘Cultural Marxism’. The term is a New Right invention that has nothing to do with any specific tendency, Marxist or otherwise. It is the name of a right-wing conspiracy theory that blames all the different claims being made today as threatening to ‘traditional family values’ (read patriarchy) and to ‘traditional ways of living’ of the Whites, now threatened by growing demands of equality and multiculturalism from various quarters. As the quote above states, this term was first brought to the world’s attention by a mass murderer who killed 77 people in Norway some thirteen years ago. According to Paul Rosenberg, Brevik had used the term ‘cultural Marxists’ or ‘cultural Marxism’ 600 times in his 1500-plus page manifesto.

News reports say that more recently, in the third week of February, a meeting of conservative academics from the United States and Germany, hosted by the RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) at the Taj Ambassador hotel in New Delhi, discussed ‘woke people’ and ‘wokeism’, presumably along with cultural Marxism. When Bhagwat first spoke of the threats posed by ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘wokeism’, I was a bit intrigued as I was reminded of a conversation with an RSS-aligned younger family member (over a year before the Bhagwat speech), who had used these terms (‘woke’ and ‘woke-ness’) almost as if they were part of his organizational lexicon. It had then seemed to me as though the younger social media-savvy generation was, perhaps unthinkingly, taking terms over from the discourse of the New Right in the USA. After all, as Subhash Gatade points out, the terms ‘woke’ and ‘wokeism’ have their roots in black politics in the US in particular and were always terms with positive connotations as they underlined the need to stay awake and remain alert. There was something strange in that use of the terms but one which gelled very well with the Right-wing appropriation of it as an invective. It must be remembered that the earlier derogatory term for this was ‘political correctness’ for which many well meaning people too seem to have fallen – at least in India.

It is interesting, for this reason, to look closely at the image above that is repeatedly used by Organiser, the RSS mouthpiece. The article with which it appears here is revealing in and of itself: ‘Cultural Marxism: The Root of All Ideological Conflicts’. The image caricatures the protesters against White Oppression and the queer among others. A nude woman’s figure here is partially covered by the article title but it is more clearly visible in the other versions. She has ‘I am God’ written on her body. In the background, we can see among the caricatures the banner ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘Equality’, ‘No More Racism’ and of course, the Marxist in red T-shirt with a hammer and sickle printed on it. The fat figure with a Satanic laughter at the back is the rich Jew – in this case, most likely George Soros, whom the Hindu supremacists love to hate. (If interested, the readers can see a moronic 11 minute video on YouTube by two HR enthusiasts.) The idea is simply that the worlds of White or Hindu supremacism are, in their respective domains, epitomes of harmony and virtue and all the ‘ideological conflicts’ are simply produced out of thin air by these God-forsaken ‘Cultural Marxists’. The minor detail here should, of course, not be missed: In the discourse of the Christian Right inequality is part of the God given order just as varnashramadharma is the divinely ordained ideal state of inequality.

It is therefore, not surprising that, as David Neiwert points out,

“The pattern is becoming frighteningly familiar: A white man, radicalized online at alt-right media websites and through social media into hateful white nationalist beliefs built around the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism,” walks into a mass gathering of his selected targets (which can be any of the perceived participants in the conspiracy, including liberals, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, any nonwhite person, LGBTQ folk, even moviegoers) and opens fire.”

Let us note here that the ‘anti-Semitic’ reference here is to actual neo-Nazi and Christian Right white supremacist anti-Semitism and not the one propagated these days by Zionist circles – though some minor overlaps here and there cannot be ruled out. Indeed, as researcher Bruce Wilson’s study (discussed in the next paragraph) shows, most of the White supremacists are virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant in the present Euro-American context.

Bruce Wilson, who has studied many cases of direct white terrorist attacks and its links to the conspiracy theory that is ‘Cultural Marxism’, sums it up thus:

‘William S. Lind’s “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory posits a grand plot, allegedly launched almost a century ago by Jewish Marxists, to destroy America and Western Christian nations by targeting culture.
According to William S. Lind, who has been by far the most dedicated and successful promoter of the conspiracy theory, “Cultural Marxism” is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.
“Cultural Marxism” now provides an extremely useful linguistic tool for racists, as a dog-whistle term that invokes a wide range of enemies said to be at war with white America and Christian civilization
The “cultural Marxists” — and also those unaware what “cultural Marxism” is but who are nonetheless under its evil sway — might be Democrats, liberals, or progressives, LGBTQ citizens, feminists, secular humanists or environmentalists.
They could be multiculturalists, or citizens of non European-American ethnicity, black nationalists or members of Hispanic organizations. They could be recent legal immigrants or illegal ones.’

So who is William Lind? He is one of the originators of the conspiracy theory that goes by the name ‘Cultural Marxism’, though he draws on the ‘work’ of equally virulent characters like Michael Minnicino, who perhaps was among the earliest to demonize the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in general, and Adorno and Walter Benjamin in particular, as the Jewish-Marxist originators of a new ‘Dark Age’ in Europe. They are responsible for the emergence of currents like feminism and African-American scholarship and politics that define this Dark Age. We may parenthetically note a strange resonance here with the Sanatani idea of ‘Kali Yuga’, understood as the age of threat to Brahmanical power by the Sudras and women. According to Wilson, ‘Lind is no fringe figure — for decades he worked closely with top architect of the religious right and new right, the late Paul Weyrich.’ ‘Lind’s “cultural Marxism” ideas have also become pervasive on the U.S. far-right and are even making surprising inroads among mainstream conservatives’, according to him. Further:

‘In the Spring of 2016 Donald Trump met William S. Lind, and he accepted Lind’s and Weyrich’s 2009 book The Next Conservatism, which includes Lind’s “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory and also discussion of Lind’s ideas concerning 4GW (4th Generation Warfare, on which more on some other occasion).
The book also contains policy prescriptions that closely resemble the platform Donald Trump has run on in the 2016 presidential election primaries.’ (Bruce Wilson’s article linked above)

As Joan Braune (in the article cited in the epigraph) points out, there is actually no such thing as ‘cultural Marxism’ – no Marxist individual or group that call themselves ‘cultural Marxists’. It is entirely a creation of the New Right and is most fundamentally a conspiracy theory of the kind that we can see in the preceding discussion. Braune also refers to a memo written by a former Trump aide, Richard Higgins, that ‘framed Trump’s presidential campaign [in 2016] as a war on “Cultural Marxism”.’ She says:

‘Higgins wrote of a “cabal” (an antisemitic trope) promoting Cultural Marxism that included “globalists, bankers, Islamists, and conservative Republicans,” and had captured control of the media, academia, politics, and the financial system, as well as controlling attempts to tamp down on hate speech and hate groups through CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) government programs. The Frankfurt School, Higgins asserted, sought to deconstruct everything in order to destroy it, giving rise to society-wide nihilism.‘ (Braune 2019: 5)

It is interesting to see how much of this discourse has now become, with minor modifications, the staple of Hindu supremacist discourse of the RSS. One obvious modification, given its love for Israel due to a shared Islamophobia, is to replace the figure of the conspiring wicked Jew with that of the Muslim-in-league-with-Marxists. In a sense, as is evident from the earlier discussion, even this modification is not really quite original as the contemporary Euro-American New Right had already brought in Islamists and Muslims into the center of their discourse. It is important, nevertheless, to grasp the ways in which the RSS and Hindu supremacists in India have discovered kinship with White Terrorist ideology that has developed into a cult of the bomb and the gun over the past few decades, at least since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Given the fact that the term ‘Cultural Marxism’ plays a crucial role in this spate of white terrorist violence at least since 2011, it is reasonable to assume that Mr Bhagwat is not ignorant about – or innocent of – the links it establishes for him and his organization.