22AR27-03
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AR 27:3 - Why "violence will remain central to Marxist success"
In this issue:
CRITICAL THEORY - its strategy for using "the reversal of meaning"
TRINITARIANISM - a decline of orthodoxy
Apologia Report 27:3 (1,556)
January 20, 2022
CRITICAL THEORY
"Zombie Marxism" by Mike Gonzalez (Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation) provides concise historical background -- "This December we celebrate the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the communist superpower Ronald Reagan rightly named the 'Evil Empire.' Yet everywhere today, Marxism still stalks humanity. ...
"But ... the big fight is over the United States. ...
"Surveys show Americans, writ large, reject these ideas, and are starting to discern the stakes.
"We need discernment because Marxism's breakthroughs today are the result of different strategies and tactics. ...
"The leaders of Black Lives Matter [founded in 2013] groups, the creators of the 1619 Project, and the architects of Critical Race Theory may be internationalists who believe in the Manifesto's call for world revolution. But they are a very American phenomenon." And they are making Americans "domestic agents of cultural replacement. That's the mutation we confront. ...
"The architects of the 1619 Project <www.bit.ly/3fFvLM2> and the academics who created CRT are equally part of the effort to replace America's narrative. (The term 'white supremacy,' which is meant to replace such ideas as 'Land of the Free,' appears no fewer than 38 times in the foundational text of CRT). ...
"[W]e discover that the founders of the Black Lives Matter organizations are at the center of the destructive unrest that led to the hacking of our cultural software. They are not just 'trained Marxists,' as BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors labeled herself and another co-founder, Alicia Garza (in a video that has now disappeared from public view). But they were recruited and trained by Marxists steeped in this new view of how to build revolutionary consciousness through recruitment, organizing, and indoctrination."
Today's successful Marxists "boned up on the lessons of the 1920s Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, or the theoretical works of his German contemporaries at the so-called Frankfurt School, which produced Critical Theory (of which Critical Race Theory is an American offshoot). ...
"[I]n 1918, Gramsci said the proletariat was consenting to his own enslavement. ... [C]ommunists needed to undertake a 'war of position.' This involved a long-term effort to organize the masses and indoctrinate them into Marxist ideas. ...
"Gramsci and the Critical Theorists did not repudiate Marx and Lenin so much as expanded on their beliefs. ...
"According to Harmony Goldberg, a Gramscian cultural anthropologist, [wrote] in her 2015 'brief introduction' to Gramsci's ideas [that an all-out] ideological war is needed. A crisis can be used to overthrow a society, but the long-term subversion of a culture must come first."
Gonzalez explains that "Goldberg is not just any Gramscian anthropologist. In 1996 she founded the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL). This is the same place where, seven years later, Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, then 22, began her Marxist training."
In Goldberg's words, the Left needs "to move history forward" by indoctrinating society into the new 'national-popular collective will'.... The job of the cohering force was to organize other classes and instruct them on the need to replace the existing order with a socialist one.
"Garza learned these lessons a full decade before a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin in July 2013 - the event that supposedly launched Black Lives Matter. ...
"As SFWeekly wrote in a long profile, 'Garza's summer with SOUL wasn't just about getting a political education ... but a crash course in grassroots community organizing.' ...
"Garza thus learned from master theoreticians how to apply the Gramscian rules." She told Maine liberals in 2019, "I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society, which creates inequities for everyone, even white people." ... The ultimate object, of course, is getting rid of capitalism, since Garza says that 'it's not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it's under capitalism.' '''
"Patrisse Cullors is at least as important as Garza in building the main organization, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. ... In her case, the ideological mentor was Eric Mann. He is a former member of the Weather Underground....
"Mann devotes detailed attention to the hard work of creating a multi-class alliance. ...
"In a 1996 essay that was later revised, he wrote: '[A]ny effective Left movement must confront the major fault lines of ... a racist, imperialist society....
"His version of the historic bloc is black and Latin American. But he calls for 'an agreed-upon Black priority' with African Americans as the 'cohering force' in the struggle against capitalism."
A "much bigger revolutionary payoff for all training by Mann would come when Cullors founded first BLM, and then BLM GNF, and began in earnest the work of dismantling the American cultural narrative (or hegemony in their language) by getting many Americans, especially the young, to believe that they should destroy their country and culture because it is white supremacist at its core. Not for nothing does Cullors tell us herself that she is a 'trained Marxist' and that the only reason she does not use the term communist is that it's gotten a bad rap."
Because of Mann's training of BLM leaders, "Black Lives Matter succeeded in pressuring the Los Angeles School Board to cut the LA Schools Police Department's $70 million budget by 35 percent on June 30, 2020, after a full month of riots and destruction following Floyd's death. Afterwards, Mann took a victory lap. Writing on August 21, 2020, Mann cast the victory in Gramscian terms: 'We know of no other Defund the Police campaign in a major U.S. City that has made such a major political and material breakthrough....'
"'A successful revolutionary movement,' Goldberg explained, 'would first have to engage in a long-term effort to undermine that consent' Americans have given to their system. ... This is what BLM and the 1619 Project do today through the curricula they send to the nation's 14,000 school districts. It's also what CRT 'anti-racism' trainers do in all aspects of our lives. ...
"Prior to 2013, the terms 'white,' 'racial privilege(s),' 'of color,' and 'racial equity,' were hardly ever used, wrote Goldberg. ...
"'From 1970 until 2014, the combined usage frequency of the three 'macro-level' racism terms - systemic racism, structural racism, institutional racism - never exceeded' a minuscule presence in the mainstream press according to Goldberg. "'By 2014, however, this ceiling was shattered [by their being used] roughly 10 times more frequently than they were in 2013.' ... The media, in other words, had taken an active hand in inculcating the counter-hegemony, whose acceptance is needed before communists can topple a country. ...
"It's nothing less than the replacement of the key American idea that 'All Men Are Created Equal' with the lie of white supremacy. Such a strategy ... would need to understand that violence will remain central to Marxist success." Law & Liberty, Dec 16 '21, <www.bit.ly/3t7NEem>
Gonzalez expands on this in his September 2021 book, BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution <www.bit.ly/3n1Ypek>
In an excellent summary of the conditions that produce collective delusions and willing participation in totalitarian systems, Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University (Belgium), emphasizes the importance of non-violent response to socialists' desire to bring disruption to society. <www.bit.ly/3n5WJAz>
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TRINITARIANISM
Craig A. Carter, research professor of theology at Tyndale University in Toronto, is concerned about the decline of orthodox trinitarianism. "I have some sympathy for those who make these errors in trinitarian theology, because twenty years ago I was partially taken in by similar ideas. ... In 2004–05 I secured a contract to write a book on the doctrine of God as a basis for social ethics.
"Through reading prominent late-twentieth-century theologians ... I had become convinced that social trinitarianism was essential to a distinctively Christian approach to social ethics."
Craig, notes that "In his widely discussed 2017 book <www.bit.ly/3F7JyFw> All That Is in God, James E. Dolezal surveys the many unorthodox claims, inconsistencies, and historically illiterate statements in today's expositions of the doctrine of God." Carter notes Dolezal's summary that "Traditional understandings of God ... have been caricatured for the sake of replacing them with notions of a changing, temporal deity whose oneness is merely social."
For Carter, "The major shock in Dolezal's book is that he establishes that it was not only liberal theologians, such as those associated with process theology, who veered away from orthodox trinitarianism in the twentieth century."
Carter finds that "There are three common errors in contemporary trinitarian theology. First, there is the error of denying one or more of God's metaphysical attributes.... Second, there is the error of denying the Nicene doctrine of homoousios.... Third, there is the error of characterizing the God-world relation as bidirectional...."
Carter gives two examples of trinitarian confusion that he's noticed: "In June 2021, Dr. Ed Litton was narrowly elected the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention" which, he points out, is "America's largest denomination." Within "a matter of weeks," Litton's church "accommodated three different articles on God within its confession of faith." Carter gives some background and concludes: "Baptists are doctrinally untethered."
Carter also calls attention to Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology <www.bit.ly/3t9K9E8> concluding: "I cannot see any way to understand Grudem's doctrine except as positing the Father and Son as having two separate wills and thus being two separate centers of consciousness. Otherwise, how could the Son submit to the Father eternally? Grudem's approach suggests something other than monotheism."
In Carter's initial book project, "All went swimmingly until I dug into the primary sources. ...
"It took me some time to absorb the extent to which the fourth-century Fathers considered it necessary to uphold the unity, oneness, and uniqueness of God in order to express correctly the biblical teaching of the Trinity." He ultimately found that "Modern assumptions make it almost impossible to read the Bible the way the Church Fathers did. ...
"A feature common to both liberal and evangelical systematic theology in recent years has been a pragmatic focus: Theology is valued not for what we learn from it about the being of God, but for how it helps us have better marriages, better ecclesiology, better political systems, and so on. Theological doctrines and systems must prove their usefulness to be accepted." For Carter, "theology has no pragmatic purpose in the way moderns think of it."
Carter's reasoning is that "Nicene doctrine cannot be separated from a patristic approach to biblical interpretation. ...
"I realized that if classical theism was to be retrieved, it was necessary to defend the superiority of patristic exegesis...."
His goal became "to recover the exegetical, theological, and metaphysical resources that are necessary for practicing sound theology in and beyond modernity" and he describes what he's already published. First Things, Jan '22, <www.bit.ly/3nu9bKT>
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