How Language Perversion Creates the "Woke" Neo-Marxist Political Warfare Battlefield
How Language Perversion Creates the "Woke" Neo-Marxist Political Warfare Battlefield
Neo-Marxist Political Warfare Functions as a Maoist Insurgency Strategy to Create Narratives to Camouflage Its Revolutionary Goal
This Substack article is an excerpt from my book The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation.
The neo-Marxist narratives involve a perversion of language that the ancient Greek historians and philosophers understood. Let’s now expand the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter from Thucydides:
The ordinary acceptation of words in their relation to things was changed as men thought fit. Reckless audacity came to be regarded as courageous loyalty to party, prudent hesitation as specious cowardice, moderation as a cloak for unmanly weakness, and to be clever in everything was to do naught in anything. Frantic impulsiveness was accounted a true man’s part, but caution in deliberation a specious pretext for shirking. The hot-headed man was always trusted, his opponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was clever, and he who had detected one was still shrewder; on the other hand, he who made it his aim to have no need of such things was a disrupter of party and scared of his opponents. In a word, both he that got ahead of another who intended to do something evil and he that prompted to evil one who had never thought of it were alike commended.1
In this passage, Thucydides described a phenomenon that occurred during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), in which the whole Hellenic world convulsed. In both Athens and Sparta, leaders of democratic factions were uniquely able to oppose ruling oligarchs. Because of the ongoing war, democratic factions in Athens desiring a revolution could bring in outside allies favorable to Sparta and vice versa. The same risk prevailed in Sparta. As both Athens and Sparta fell into revolution, the dire necessities of war pushed people to extreme measures. In one of the most widely quoted passages by modern sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, and ancient historians, Thucydides described how language became perverted as emotionally charged. Thucydides commented the severe hardships of war drove the factions to “still more extravagant lengths” with “the invention of new devices, both by the extreme ingenuity of their attacks and the monstrousness of their revenges.”2 Violent hostilities not typically experienced in peacetime led the revolutionaries to bend language to justify what we can imagine was anarchy.
As Thucydides scholar John Wilson pointed out, the Thucydides passage is typically rendered incorrectly as meaning the following: “They changed the usual meanings of words.”3 Translators and commentators typically compare what this passage describes to disinformation campaigns, political propaganda, and works of fiction like George Orwell’s 1984. The passage quoted above from book 3, 82, 4 of the History of the Peloponnesian War involves the internal dynamics of revolutions. Wilson correctly insists that what changes in factional political turmoil is not the meaning of words. Political parties gain a moral advantage by modifying the “use of the available descriptions”4 to justify or otherwise make acceptable their extreme actions. By abandoning the pejorative connotation typically bestowed on immoral or otherwise outrageous acts, political actors substitute new morally positive designations “to make different value-judgments about the phenomenon described.”5 Wilson explained the phenomenon as follows:
As Thucydides knew well, politicians and other wicked men are greatly assisted, not by enforced and arbitrary changes in the meanings of words (something no one would be persuaded by), but by more or less plausible redescriptions of phenomena within the existing vocabulary. We might write of the USSR “Political dissidents were considered mentally ill”; or of some liberal societies “To cause disorder and hurt people in the streets was regarded as a justifiable protest in the name of Liberty.”6
For instance, the radical Left’s goal in America today is not to change the meaning of anarchical violence. Instead, the radical Left aims to recharacterize Antifa’s anarchical violence as morally justified. The goal is to trick an unthinking public into accepting the movement’s extreme violence as justified. The language game tricks us into perceiving that destructive violence as just because their goal is just. Because Antifa wants to establish “social justice,” we are supposed to understand that they must first destroy the evil capitalist, imperialist, colonial, and white-dominated society in which we live. Because they aim to destroy an evil fascist social structure, Antifa urban terrorists operate on a higher moral plane where their obvious anarchical violence is necessary, hence just and not deserving of criminal punishment. The point of this perversion of language is not to deny that Antifa’s tactics call for extreme violence against perceived opponents but to portray their outrageous behavior as worthy of praise. The radical Left’s destructive behavior typically outmaneuvers mainstream and conservative thinkers in an “information space” that traditionalists barely perceive exists. As Coughlin and Higgins pointed out: “The political rhetoric driving American politics runs along well-trodden paths sustaining a political framework from a by-gone era incapable of coming to terms with the political movements threatening our constitutional system today.”7
Contemporary politics demonstrate that we are already far down the path to losing our constitutionally protected rights. In June 2020, during the presidential election cycle, the FBI in Washington, DC, “took a knee” and raised their fists to demonstrate their solidarity with these Black Lives Matter Maoist revolutionaries marching through the streets of the capital.8 The FBI stood by and watched while BLM occupied a street across from the White House, renamed the street “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” and proceeded to vandalize one of the most sacred Christian churches in America, St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square.9 Since James Madison, every sitting U.S. president has attended services since that church opened in 1816.
Then, in Portland, Oregon, the FBI refused to investigate Antifa urban terrorists who looted, burned, and rioted night after night in the city’s downtown streets during the 2020 presidential election cycle. In further disrespect for the rule of law, state and local prosecutors and judges in Portland, many of whom George Soros funded, allowed those few Antifa anarchists who were apprehended and arrested by law enforcement to be released back onto the streets without bail. In August 2020, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced that he would not prosecute most of the approximately 550 rioters arrested in Portland, Oregon, since May 29.10 Why not? Because Schmidt said the Antifa rioters were “deeply frustrated with what they perceive to be structural inequalities in our basic social fabric”11—causes that had political favor in a town dominated politically by the radical Left.
As neo-Marxist insurgents, BLM and Antifa radical Left activists understand how to use “cultural level narratives to power down into the political space where fidelity to the narrative will result in non-enforcement of law that, over time, becomes institutionalized.”12 The image of federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities standing by and allowing Antifa and BLM criminal arsonists and looters to destroy American cities is reminiscent of German police standing by and watching as mobs of Nazi thugs destroyed Jewish property, burned synagogues, ransacked and looted Jewish homes, and beat helpless Jews in cities throughout Nazi Germany on Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) on November 9–10, 1938.
In sharp contrast, the FBI characterized the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2020, as an insurrection. The FBI argued that Donald Trump supporters stormed Congress to prevent then-Vice President Mike Pence from presiding over a bicameral session of Congress to follow the constitutional procedures of counting electoral college votes to certify the presidential election. Characterizing the January 6 protest as a move to overthrow the government, the FBI has hunted down, arrested, and indicted Trump supporters with breaching the Capitol while refusing to investigate seriously whether voter fraud cheated Trump of reelection.13 The MSM (mainstream media) consistently maintained the narrative that President Trump “falsely claimed” that he, and not Joe Biden, won the presidential election held on November 3, 2020.14
Again, Coughlin and Higgins noted that what “is popularly called ‘fake news’ and the ‘deep-state’ are better understood as propaganda and the counter-state.”15 They explained the point as follows:
T
ransitioning to a political warfare analysis, one begins to discern methods, processes, and directionality that terms like “fake news” and “deep-state” do not capture. By their nature, media terms like “fake news” and “deep-state” ensure that analysis always remains on the surface of events. Our national aversion to recognizing threats beyond the strictly military, especially ideological threats in the political warfare arena, has long been recognized by America’s foes as an exploitable strategic level vulnerability.16
Coughlin and Higgins continued as follows:
The Left uses dialectically determined political warfare concepts to drive a core set of narratives that inter-operate at the tactical level, while integrating at the strategic. Narratives are associated with the pseudorealities (or second realities) they seek to establish and enforce. They are called narratives because they are stories—fictions—that seek to supplant the real with the unreal. These narratives are directional, they have velocity, and are always oriented on a target.17
At the beginning of this chapter, the quotation from German philosopher Josef Pieper emphasizes an aspect of language perversion subtly distinct from Thucydides. Pieper, a prominent Catholic theologian who understood the importance of Thomas Aquinas in advancing principles of natural law, appreciated from his personal experience of living through the Nazi rule that the abuse of language was required to advance intolerant totalitarian political purposes. In his short but precisely argued book, Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power, Pieper returned to Plato to explain the following:
Plato’s literary activity extended over fifty years, and time and again he asked himself anew: What is it that makes the sophists so dangerous? Toward the end he wrote one more dialogue, the Sophist, in which he added a new element to his answer: “The sophists,” he [Plato] says, “fabricate a fictitious reality.” That the existential realm of man could be taken over by pseudorealities whose fictitious nature threatens to become indiscernible is truly a depressing thought. And yet this Platonic nightmare, I hold, possesses an alarming contemporary relevance. For the general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language. This, says Plato, is the worst thing that the sophists are capable of wreaking upon mankind by their corruption of the word.18
As understood by Pieper, what we are experiencing today as the radical Left’s neo-Marxist narratives is that revolutionaries create pseudorealities to reframe our perception of reality so they can gain power. To destroy America, neo-Marxist revolutionaries rewrite American history to vilify the prevalent political culture in which we live. Coughlin and Higgins described the neo-Marxist narrative tactics as follows:
At their core, these narratives are not American. Rather, they are dialectically driven neo-Marxist memes that infuse mass line efforts operating at the cultural level intent on powering down into the political space.
This furthers the Left’s political warfare effort to impose conformance resulting in the non-enforcement of laws by those tasked with their oversight and enforcement. As these narratives transition into prevailing cultural memes, non-enforcement becomes institutionalized and enforced by an opposition that increasingly comes under the control of these narratives.19
Political warfare then functions as “a Maoist insurgency concept that recognizes the role narratives play in overwhelming rule of law societies.”20 The neo-Marxist Left constructs narratives “so that it is easier for people to comply than to not.”21 They characterize its politics as liberal or progressive for tactical reasons. As Coughlin and Higgins explained, a principal objective of the Left “is to keep its agenda camouflaged in the old lexicon while escalating radicalized agendas that find cover under ‘politics as usual’ memes.”22 Neo-Marxist “mass line” narratives amplified by the leftist mainstream media augments these neo-Marxist pseudoreality narratives to create a dialectical paradox in which “the highly ideological thrust of the Left’s ambitions are made to sound normal while mainstream defenses of America sound shrill, rigid, and even ideological.”23
1 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 144–145.
2 Ibid.
3 John Wilson, “‘The Customary Meanings of Words Were Changed’—Or Were They? A Note on Thucydides 3.82.4,” Classical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (May 1982): 18–20, Cambridge University Press, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-quarterly/article/abs/customary-meanings-of-words-were-changed-or-were-they-a-note-on-thucydides-3824/D41C67034FFF652D6392E100B672AB4C.
4 Ibid. Italics in original.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Coughlin and Higgins, Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left, 2.
8 Hannah Knowles and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Some Officers March and Kneel with Protesters, Creating Dissonant Images on Fraught Weekend of Uprisings,” Washington Post, June 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/01/some-officers-march-kneel-with-protesters-creating-dissonant-images-fraught-weekend-uprisings/.
9 Egan Millard, “Fire Causes Minor Damage to St. John’s, the ‘Church of the Presidents’ in Washington, during Night of Riots,” Episcopal News Service, June 1, 2020, https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2020/06/01/fire-causes-minor-damage-to-st-johns-the-church-of-presidents-in-washington-during-night-of-riots/. See also: Egan Millard, “St. John’s Church in Washington Vandalized Again,” Episcopal News Service, June 1, 2020, https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2020/06/23/st-johns-church-in-washington-vandalized-again/.
10 Karina Brown, “Portland DA Won’t Pursue Charges against Most Protesters,” Courthouse News Service, August 11, 2020, https://www.courthousenews.com/portland-da-wont-pursue-charges-against-most-protesters/.
11 Emma Colton, “District Attorney to Drop Charges against Hundreds of Portland Protesters,” Washington Examiner, August 12, 2020, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/district-attorney-to-drop-charges-against-hundreds-of-portland-protesters.
12 Coughlin and Higgins, Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left, 4.
13 “Capitol Breach Cases,” United States Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia, Justice.gov, https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases.
14 Brian Naylor, “FACT CHECK: What Pence and Congress Can and Can’t Do about the Election,” National Public Radio, NPR.org, January 5, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/949134479/congress-role-in-election-results-heres-what-happens-jan-6.
15 Coughlin and Higgins, Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left, 5. Bold type in original.
16 Ibid. Bold type in original.
17 Ibid. Bold type in original.
18 Pieper, Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power, 34–35. Italics in original.
19 Coughlin and Higgins, Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left, 2.
20 Ibid. Bold type in original.
21 Ibid., 14. Bold type in original.
22 Ibid., 10. Bold type in original.
23 Ibid., 4. Bold type in original.