… bringing lasting negative effects to the entire Western society
State Of Mankind - How Much Do You Know?
Excerpts from "How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World"
(71) Subversion of Western Mass Culture
Communism’s Subversion of Western Mass Culture
Western countries of the free world have been known for their civilized societies, where men are genteel and women virtuous and graceful, and where people treat each other with honesty and friendship. Communism has implemented arrangements in Western countries to subvert and sabotage this civilization. Although it can’t use violence and totalitarianism to directly damage Western civilization and its mass culture as it did in China, it has, as in China, provoked people’s negative and rebellious thoughts and behaviors in order to undermine tradition, destroy public morals, and ruin individual morality.
After Western countries were triumphant in World War II, just as the public was delighted, one group was already hard at work in the fields of ideology and culture. While reflecting on the war and the new waves of ideology to come, they helped to bring about a systematic departure from the traditions that connected man to the divine.
In the United States, the Beat Generation, which appeared after WWII, refers to a group of post-war American writers in the 1950s. They were the progenitors of an art and literary movement whose goal was to undermine society. While they rightly despised some of the hypocrisy of moral corruption in society at the time, their response was to cynically reject and overturn all traditional morality. Members of the Beat Generation were largely nihilist and cynical. They advocated unrestrained freedom; gave full reign to their own personal ideas about the world; rejected traditional virtues; delved into pseudo-mysticism, drugs, and crime; and lived an undisciplined, willful life. Their attempted radical critique of bourgeois, capitalist society coincided with the ideological thrust of communism in the West, and thus they easily became a tool of communism.
Many members of the Beat Generation were indeed deeply influenced by communist and socialist ideology. For example, Jack Kerouac, the founder of the movement, wrote the short story “The Birth of a Socialist” before he became famous. The story was about his rebellion against capitalist society. Another representative of the movement, Allen Ginsberg, later openly became a communist (see Chapter 11 of this book) and supported pedophilia. Their works rejected traditional conventions, were deliberately disorganized, and used vulgar language. This group was the first major departure from the rules and principles of tradition, and they represented in nascent form the counterculture movement that would engulf the West in the 1960s.
The 1960s saw the elaboration and extension of what the Beats had proposed, with subcultures like the hippie, punk, goth, and more. These countercultural trends found an eager audience in the urban areas of the West, tempting one young generation after another toward violence, drug abuse, sexual liberation, nonconformist attire, cultural alienation, and ultimately an inclination toward darkness and death.
In 1968, the movement reached its climax around the time of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. In the spring of 1968, about two thousand hippies gathered in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for several days and nights, expressing their resistance to society with bizarre behaviors, rock-and-roll music, song, poetry, nudity, and drug use.
In the summer of 1969, more than four hundred thousand people gathered in the same way in Woodstock, on the outskirts of New York City. They shouted the slogans “love,” “freedom,” and “peace.” Along with rock-and-roll, hundreds of thousands indulged in debauchery and wild pleasure, all of which contributed to dragging participants and society into vulgarity, decadence, and moral decline. Woodstock was a significant cultural event for the 1960s, and over the following decades, New York’s Central Park, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and Woodstock all became symbols of the American counterculture.
Just as the counterculture in the United States was taking off, turmoil involving millions broke out in France, known now as May ‘68. The events began with angry young students rebelling against traditional morality and culture. At that time, schools had been imposing strict separations between male and female student dormitories, and the two sexes were forbidden from freely coming and going from each others’ bedrooms. The abolition of this provision and the demand for the right to sexual activity in student dorms became one of the major goals of the initial protests. The students’ rebellion then found the support of both the socialist and communist parties in France. Thus, the younger generation, through turmoil and rebellion, went about smashing the moral principles and restraints established for mankind and bestowed since ancient times.
There is a saying that in the late 1960s, there were two centers for revolution: One was Beijing, where the Cultural Revolution was in full swing; the other was Paris, where the events of May ‘68 shook the world. This was called by many the Cultural Revolution of the West. At the time, Chinese students marched with slogans and banners in support of the French student rebels, while in faraway Paris, the “Western Red Guards” wore green military caps and uniforms with red armbands in support of the Maoists in China. They held up huge portraits of Mao Zedong in their parades, and the “three M’s”—Marx, Mao Zedong, and Marcuse—became their ideological mainstay.
Japan also began its own counterculture movement in the 1960s. The Japanese AJSA (Zengakuren, the All-Japan Student Association) formed and organized by the Japanese Communist Party, had extensive influence among students at the time. They were in turn controlled and organized by the Communist Party and mobilized in reaction to the activities of the Red Guards in China. AJSA organized numerous counterculture demonstrations in Japan in conjunction with other left-wing student organizations, such as the Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun) and the All-Campus Joint Struggle Councils, and went so far as to threaten Japanese society with violence.
Similar chaos unfolded in some Latin and Central American countries. For instance, under the influence of the Cuban Communist Party, Mexico’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas student movement engaged in small-scale mobilization, and other left-wing student groups sent telegraphs to students in Paris supporting the May ‘68 antics.
Many may consider the above string of actions largely coincidental. From a higher perspective, however, the entire counterculture movement in both the East and the West was part of communism’s arrangements to undermine the morality of society. The moral traditions and values left to man by the divine had been through thousands of years of history, but under the impact of this global communist movement, they have suffered enormous damage. The movement has been all about stirring up discontent and whipping society into a frenzy in order to undermine traditional morality and ideas. China’s 5,000-year-old traditional culture was devastated as the Four Olds were attacked in the Cultural Revolution.
Western rock, drug abuse, sexual liberation, abortion, unconventional clothing, and avant-garde art were all departures from traditional norms and orthodox faith. Moreover, deviant sexual mores, such as homosexuality and promiscuity, have all become popular, bringing lasting negative effects to the entire Western society. The glory of divine culture has largely been banished in the West, and Western civilization has lost its splendor and luster.
From Chapter Fourteen: Popular Culture–A Decadent Indulgence