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I don't think Jordan Peterson is saying that the Frankfurt school of thought is single-handedly responsible for modern western culture. I think he's saying that the Frankfurt school influenced radical ideas in academia which are gaining tract today, and might be responsible for shaping the culture of the future, if the ideas go unchecked.
I would say that it is an over-simplification of his arguments to say that he believes the neo-Marxists to be responsible for everything under the sun.
It seems that I did not illustrate my point clearly enough. I'm saying that Lind's whole platform about "cultural subversion" and how it functions, and the terminology used in his attempts to describe the phenomenon, seems to derive from the descriptions of men like Besmenov, Kalugin and other KGB agents. His thoughts in that regard are hardly original. The conspiracy that Marxists were subverting the United States culturally and through the media, had existed for a long time.
That he links the origins of "subversion" to the Frankfurt school, rather than the Soviets, may have been an idea that originated from him. Although I suspect that this idea was thrown about in many conservative circles for lot longer, considering that prominent critical theorists made no attempt to hide what they believed in that regard:
Herbert Marcuse corresponded with Dutschke in 1971 to agree with this strategy, "Let me tell you this: that I regard your notion of the 'long march through the institutions' as the only effective way..."[4] In his 1972 book, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse wrote
To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by 'boring from within', rather by 'doing the job', learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_institutions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterrevolution_and_Revolt
I don't think he's necessarily drawing a line from gender studies to Pol Pot. He sees gender studies as having little academic worth, while he draws a line from the people who parade around Soviet-era Communist symbols, hammer and sickles, to the killing fields of Pol Pot and Stalin. No differently than a man would draw a line from a person waving the Nazi flag, to the gas chambers of Holocaust.
Yes, I said that Lind condensed the John Birch society's vague ramblings into a coherent theory when he popularised the term in a post-communist context. That's why Yuri was first presented by G Edward Griffin. His vague doom mongering, strident anti-communism and conservative ideology was the perfect match for their conspiratorial mindset. Never mind that his timeline and claims about Soviet subversion utterly failed to materialise.
Lind also openly catered to the anti-semitic element.
Peterson doesn't say much about the term at all, but I'm sure he's aware of the baggage it brings, and how it was popularised in the '90s as part of the conservative persecution complex in the US Culture Wars. He caters to his audience.
Peterson has point blank claimed that mass killings are the end game of the Marxist doctrine present in Women's Studies and the like.
"People say that real Marxism has never been tried – not in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, in Korea, that wasn’t real Marxism. I find that argument specious, appalling, ignorant, and maybe also malevolent all at the same time. Specious because Solzhenitsyn demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the horrors [of the Soviet system] were a logical consequence of the doctrines embedded within Marxist thinking. I think Dostoyevsky saw what was coming and Nietzsche wrote about it extensively in the 1880s, laying out the propositions that are encapsulated in Marxist doctrine, and warning that millions of people would die in the 20th century because of it.
You’ve painted a pretty bleak picture for the future.
There are bleak things going on. To start with, Bill C-16 writes social constructionism into the fabric of the law. Social constructionism is the doctrine that all human roles are socially constructed. They’re detached from the underlying biology and from the underlying objective world. So Bill C-16 contains an assault on biology and an implicit assault on the idea of objective reality. It’s also blatant in the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies and the Ontario Human Rights Act. It says identity is nothing but subjective. So a person can be male one day and female the next, or male one hour and female the next."
Sure seems like he's trying to draw that line to me.
Reminds me of the Glen Beck special on Socialism, Nazism and healthcare.
You're free to inform him about the excess baggage associated with those terms. I don't think he is intentionally trying to rile up anti-Semitic sentiment.
It's just that cultural Marxism happens to be a fairly accurate description of self-described Marxists that subscribe to the critical theory and believe in the establishment of a cultural hegemony, as the way to further the cause of socialism.
Spencer's politics are basically a "pale" imitation of the identity politics on the left. It's not a stretch to say that his version of the alt-right shares similarities with the radically progressive movement of the left.
I was wrong about Gottfried's teacher being Hockheimer, it was Marcuse. Hockheimer had returned to Germany at that point. I'll give Peterson the benefit of the doubt in terms of using such loaded terminology unless I see something blatantly antisemitic from him.
Spencer's politics are identity politics (as are Gottfrieds), but no-one that's actually read any Frankfurt School material would say they are a product of the "Frankfurt School" or "Marxism".