Communism still the the threat? 'Agenda: Grinding America Down' (2010)

I recently managed to see Curt Bowers' documentary, 'Agenda: Grinding America Down' (2010), which I recommend to anyone on the Far Right. While the documentary is deeply flawed, on an intellectual level, and doesn't offer what I see as being the correct solution to America's ills (Christian fundamentalism, conservatism and the values of the Founding Fathers), it will change one's views of communism. One can glean the content of Bowers' research on Cultural Marxism from other sources (e.g., William S. Lind), but it's in this documentary that one can find it all in the one place. What's more, much of the documentary was new to me - I hadn't heard of the 'Cloward-Piven strategy' before seeing it - and I'm sure that a good many others will something new in it too.

So what is it about? Bowers claims to have attended, as a young undergraduate in the University of California in Berkeley in 1992, a Marxist conference held by some respectably-dressed academic greybeards. It was at that conference that these Marxists outlined their strategy for the future and vowed to press on with communism and not be dissuaded by the recent dissolution of the USSR and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe - events which were more devastating to communism than any theoretical refutations of Karl Marx's texts. The strategy was to infiltrate and make use of the burgeoning homosexual and environmentalist movements and mount an assault on capitalism, the traditional heterosexual family, Christian morality, in the name of "social justice", "equality" and the rest. To achieve this end they would make use of the traditional communist method of setting up front groups (with names like 'Centre for Political Progress and Change') which would agitate for environmentalism or illegal immigrant rights, for example, while concealing the communist intentions of their founders.

Communists in America have traditionally practised entryism in trade unions, Christian religious groups, academia, education, organisations such as American Civil Liberties Union and the Democratic Party); also movements such as the Afro-American civil rights movement, the 1960s student movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the anti-nuclear weapon movement, feminist movement... It goes without saying that Bowers' thesis isn't that communism brought these movements about: communism didn't invent homosexuality, environmentalism, the anti-war movement, Afro-American civil rights... It's a matter of harnessing the energy of the mass movements and exploiting them for communist purposes.

In 2008, as a legislator in Idaho, Bowers wrote a controversial op-ed article in a newspaper which declared that American communists and their associated 'front groups' and 'fellow travellers' had succeeded in implementing many of the goals outlined at that conference in Berkeley in 1992. The article aroused shock and indignation, but also met with public support. It was after that episode that Bowers turned his attentions to researching the American left-wing radical and Marxist groups which had played such a large role in America's decline. 'Agenda-' is the result.

One of the good things about 'Agenda' is the use of diagram charts. Here's one, showing the drift of the Democrat Party (especially under Obama, Reid and Pelosi) to the Far Left, and the drift of the Republican Party to where the Democrat Party once stood:

 

Here is Bowers' other chart diagram, which traces the progressive lineage from Marx to Obama.

Bowers relies upon many of the classics of American anti-communism, such as Cleon Skousen's 'The Naked Communist' (1963) - and also interviews with leading conservatives, including a few former Republican Party politicians and also the New Zealand Americaphile conservative author, Trevor Loudon. It's for this reason - the reliance on secondary sources - that Bowers' documentary (and the chart above) contains a few errors - errors which wouldn't have been made, perhaps, if Bowers had bothered to read books written by actual communists.

One error is the ascribing of too much importance to Fabianism. The Fabians weren't Marxists and have had little influence except outside the Labour Party of Britain, the Australian Labor Party and perhaps the Indian nationalist Nehru. It's true that the Fabians did provide a few 'useful idiots' - people who were sympathetic to Lenin, and then Stalin: Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Sidney Webb. But one shouldn't confuse a useful idiot with an actual communist.

The other error regards the Frankfurt School. I haven't read much of them - only a little Marcuse - but I know enough of them to question whether the Frankfurt School really did found Cultural Marxism and political correctness - which is what Bowers, William S. Lind and other conservatives assert. The Frankfurt School really were men of the thirties and forties, while political correctness emerged (in the West) in the 1990s. Paul Gottfried wrote a book, 'The Strange Death of Liberal Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium' (2005) which is about the rise of political correctness and goes into the doctrines of the Frankfurt School in detail (he knows enough about the School to be considered an expert), and he doesn't link them together.

Another error is Bowers' assertion that North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, China and the rest are communist states. But what we have in Vietnam, Laos and China is a curious anomaly: authoritarian states which are one-party states with a political system which is ostensibly communist but with market economies. China and Indochina stopped believing in communism a long time ago, although there is no sign that the communist parties in those countries will relinquish power.

This is all mere quibble, however. It's after seeing this documentary that I understood the true character of Obama. I'd previously seen him as a standard centre-left Democrat who wanted - like any other US president - strong economic growth, social harmony, prosperity... Obama and his fiscal and monetary stimulus have been a massive failure, of course, and he and all his supporters know it; but what if he didn't want economic prosperity? It's only after you look at his radical left-wing neo-Marxist background that you begin to understand that maybe Obama wants economic stagnation. He wants the capitalist system to fail - and for government and the welfare state to step in. Everything Obama puts forward is designed to push the communist agenda. He wants illegal immigration and gay marriage because he subscribes to neo-Marxist fantasies of gays and Latinos as being "oppressed" (oppressed by the wicked heterosexual WASP, that is); he wants Obamacare because he wants an America that is dependent on the government for its healthcare (and housing, and employment, and education); he wants to combat global warming because he wants state control over the industries (and the Americans) who produce carbon emissions; he attacks the rich because he wants class war between worker and capitalist; he uses the slogan 'Change' because he believes in dialectical change, that is, the transition from a capitalist society to a socialist one.

Is Obama a Marxist? J. Edgar Hoover made the distinction between five types: the open, 'card-carrying' communist; the undercover communist who conceals his beliefs from view; the potential communist convert; the fellow traveller; and finally, the dupe, or useful idiot. By all accounts, Obama was an avowed Marxist in his youth, either an open or undercover one, or maybe a potential convert. This by itself doesn't mean and could be considered a youthful dalliance; after, all we in Australia recently had a prime minister who, in her undergraduate days, was a Maoist. But the fact is that Obama has always associated with communists and left-radicals, and his appointees seem to be left-over commies and the radicals from the 1980s - the type who supported the Sandinistas and Palestinian nationalism and who made plane trips to Moscow and Cuba. What's more, communists campaigned for his election in 2008 and his re-election in 2012, and various radicals and malcontents (such as Jeremiah Wright and the bisexual former New Left terrorist Bill Ayers) form his milieu. There is his family background - his mother, Stanley Dunham, and his mentor, the hardline Afro-American Stalinist Frank Marshall Davis. One can overestimate the influence of one's family on one's politics - after all, I'm sure quite a few people on the Far Right had Far Left parents, and vice versa. But the point is, when one puts this all together, it seems too much of a coincidence. My estimate is that Obama is at the least a fellow traveller or a dupe.

The documentary raises some interesting questions. One is the extent to which communists wield power in our society and to what extent they have become the masters of contemporary social movements such as environmentalism and homosexualism. (One can easily verify for oneself Bowers' claims regarding the communist and Far Left involvement in both of these). But more than that is the general culture: how did the media, for instance, become so unquestioningly pro-multi culti and pro-immigrant? How did we get a justice system where rapists, murderers and illegal immigrants wander around free and unpunished while the likes of Emma West are locked up for something they said on a train?

Future historians will chart the degeneration of Western society from the 1960s, when left-wing radical baby boomers, with the help of "humanist" conservatives, pushed through an agenda of 'change' and 'progress' which has nearly destroyed Western civilisation, mainly through mass non-white immigration. During the 1960s, Australian communist groups were at the forefront of 'change' - campaigning the loudest for the abolition of White Australia and for indigenous rights, simply because they believed that these would be useful to the Soviet and Chinese communist cause. One has to ask: supposing that the communists in Australia had been locked up in concentration camps (like Hitler did to the German communists) or butchered (like Suharto did to hundreds of thousands of Indonesian communists) - would the abolition of White Australia gone ahead? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps the changes of the 1960s couldn't have been stopped that way. But move forward a few decades - it's certainly true that, had prophylactic measures been taken against British and American communists, Obama wouldn't have won election in 2008 and 2012, Emma West wouldn't have gone to jail and the British Labour Party most likely wouldn't have been able to bring in 3.8 million immigrants from 1997 to 2010.

The White Nationalists blame the West's modern ills on 'Jewish-owned MTV'; the EDL and the other anti-Islamics blame it on Islam; Bowers, on communism and lack of prayer in schools. I think Bowers - more than the White Nationalists and the anti-Islamics - is onto something. This is where we Far Rightists, neofascists, Neo-Nazis come in. We don't know much about prayer in schools but we certainly know about fighting communists.

Bowers has shown us the enemy; now it's a question of which tactics we use to defeat them.