Progressives, I mean. They may well be, but that doesn’t completely account for their behaviour. The use of sex as a crowbar to prise open traditional culture is more than just an unwholesome preoccupation with exchanging bodily fluids.
On the surface progressives, the Christians as much as the secular, seem preoccupied with sex. Who is doing what, with whom and how is so often the focal point of their agitation. Never mind strengthening the economy or rationalising our taxation system, what gets them truly excited and marching is extending sexual boundaries.
We wait to hear what hitherto fringe activity is going to be declared a vibrant aspect of the human tapestry and promoted as something firstly to be understood, then accepted, then normalised and finally valued. The wise money is hedging between polygamy and paedophilia, with sado-masochism an outside bet.
There is no dark plot to undermine society masterminded by shadowy billionaires. Rather progressives just act as they have been programmed through decades of indoctrination by our universities and media. They do what will corrupt society instinctively rather than deliberately setting out to destroy Western culture.
But this is nothing new. The use of sexual mores as a means of changing society has a pedigree running throughout the twentieth century.
In 1919, 34-year old Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March 21 – August 1, 1919). Lukács was politician enough to realise the major obstacle to his dream of transforming society and creating a communist paradise was the Christianised culture of the West.
Lukács posed the fundamental question, ‘Who will free us from the yoke of Western civilisation?’ He realised that if society was to be transformed, the new battleground was not the economy or workplace, it was the culture. To create the new society, Christianity, which he thought corrupted and weakened the working class, had to be destroyed.
Lukács stated: ‘Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.’ He didn’t want a violent nor even a political revolution, but a cultural revolution. The nation had to be radically altered and the traditional social and cultural order overturned. Lukács set plans in motion to de-Christianise Hungary by instituting a policy he termed ‘cultural terrorism’.
The front-line troops he chose to enlist in his cultural revolution were children. If Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be destroyed. To achieve this he developed the idea of using our sexual instincts as an instrument of destruction.
Lectures were organised in Hungarian schools and literature was distributed to instruct children about the benefits of promiscuity or ‘free love’, the nature of sexual intercourse, the antiquated and oppressive nature of conventional family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the utter irrelevance of religion which Lukács taught deprives man of all pleasure.
Children were urged to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the Church, and to ignore precepts of bourgeois morality. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror directed against parents, priests, and dissenters. Fortunately, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, although it did great damage, lasted only a few months. But the tactical principles of Lukács lived on.
Lukács was instrumental in the foundation of the Frankfurt School of social theory. Willi Munzenberg, another of the founders, summed up the Frankfurt School’s long-term operation thus: ‘We will make the West so corrupt it stinks . . . organise the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilisation stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.’
With the rise of the Nazis, leading members of the group went to the USA and through their positions in universities exercised considerable cultural and political influence throughout the West. Their work provided the intellectual groundwork of the entire 60s counter-culture movement and its subsequent impact on society.
The Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief – or even the hope of belief – that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation necessary to provoke socialist revolution. They saw their task as undermining the Western Christian legacy. To give them credit, they are succeeding.
Their most influential spokesman Herbert Marcuse, like Lukács, taught that tradition, with its guiding structures and underlying acceptance of objective truth, is repressive and must be crushed. The key to our liberation and happiness as individuals and as a society is the exploration of our erotic curiosity. His work promised a utopia of sex on demand with every single desire of every single individual fulfilled.
The impact of this has permeated society. The Guardian can headline an article Marriage is a form of prostitution whilst consistently referring to prostitutes as ‘sex workers’ employed in the ‘sex trade’, a seemingly legitimate form of employment. The implication being that paid-for sex outwith marriage is more morally honest than sex within marriage which is exploitative.
TV soap operas are deliberately used as a means of altering public attitudes to homosexuality and transgenderism. And mainstream denominations scramble to keep up. The Church of Scotland welcomes practising homosexual ministers whilst in the Church of England voices are raised for the re-baptism of transgender Christians.
Whether this is done knowingly or by useful idiots, the result is the same: the eventual dismantling of the culture which made Western civilisation.
A Grain of Sand 