{"article":{"id":97521,"heading":"Western Culture, Opera, and Cultural Marxism","author":"Steven LaTulippe","created":"2003-12-16 20:07:35","modified":"2013-11-11 00:28:02","last_modified":"Mon, 11 Nov 2013 07:28:02","article":"

Times are tough for those of us who are both passionate about high culture and philosophically averse to political correctness. The pickings are pretty slim and we are generally what's on the menu. The Italian Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci exhorted his fellow communists to infiltrate Western culture and work to bring forth a socialist utopia from within. And infiltrate they have.

It is virtually impossible to patronize any art form in America today without being bombarded by cultural Marxism. Painting and sculpture have wandered into the wilds of the abstract. To the extent that one can discern a meaning at all, it is inevitably some sort of snide swipe at Western Civilization or some paean to victimology. Dittos with photography (see Robert Maplethorpe - http:\/\/www.artcyclopedia.com\/artists\/robert-maplethorpe.html<\/a>).

The theater is a particularly hideous wasteland. It seems that every play produced in the past three decades is either about nothing too important...or revolves around some predictable theme of political correctness.

Television and movies are now thickly laced with overt and covert political ideology. The vilification of men, the trashing of Western Civilization, and the monotonous victimization of various non-Western groups is a given. Add a dash of mindless consumerism and decadent over-sexualization, and these forms of artistic expression are insulting to Western sensibilities at best (my own prize for the most viciously anti-Western movie is a tie between American Beauty and Dances with Wolves).

A quick stroll through the bookstore reveals that most contemporary novels are not much better. It seems as though men have largely dropped out of the fiction book target audience (thank God I prefer non-fiction), since the overwhelming majority of novels on display at the front of any major bookstore are either directed at women, children, or yet again, some politically correct victim group.

In my opinion, the purpose of art is twofold. First, is the minor goal of entertainment. While this may seem light-weight, one should not overlook the importance of giving the brain a little R&R. We live in a stressful world. It is a nice break to occasionally sit back and enjoy an artistic creation strictly for the momentary joy and beauty of it.

The more profound purpose of art is to inspire. Art should work on the soul of the individual to prompt him to strive for greater heights...to rise above his mundane existence and carry forward the work of his civilization. It should endeavor, by both positive and negative example, to stir the passions of the viewer and prompt a thirst for greatness.

By this measure, our culture has been functioning in reverse (i.e., its general purpose is to degrade and destroy).

So...what is one to do?

My preferred solution has been the opera.

The reason why I love opera is that the soul of opera, unlike almost any other current art form, resides in the 18th and 19th Century cultural zeitgeist. Modern performances tend to maintain fidelity to the original creation. The cultural milieu of that period was far better, from the perspective of the typical non-self-hating Westerner, than the fare produced today. The stories revolve around love, heroism, and comedy. The composers were, by and large, men who consciously or subconsciously loved their native culture and wished to celebrate it in music and stage.

Examples abound. William Tell fights to free his homeland from German domination. The Ring Cycle tells of the struggles of man and the Gods in Nordic mythology.

Opera allows me to relax, sit back, and soak in my culture.

At least until last summer, that is.

My first rude awakening that there was a weasel in the henhouse came when I decided to take in a late-season show at the Pittsburgh Opera. La Boheme was on the schedule, and I naïvely strolled in for my breath of cultural fresh air.

What followed was 2 1\/2 hours of old fashioned Marxist critiques of capitalism and a variety of snide attacks on Western civilization. Now, assuming here for a moment that Puccini was not attempting to lampoon the Bohemian lifestyle (something which I still believe is possible), then this opera represents one of the earliest examples of anti-Western diatribes with which many of us have come to dread in modern art.

The characters are typical coffee house intellectuals who spend most of their time glorifying their superior, anti-materialistic credos and denouncing the greed and avarice of the bourgeoisie. I was having flash-backs of my Brown freshman orientation. The \"heroes\" bounce between biting verbal attacks on \"the rich\" and sarcastic jabs at \"the system\".

While the context was more \"old Left\" (i.e., 19th century labor union-style communism) instead of \"new Left\" (i.e. modern political correctness), the fundamental philosophical worldview was there for all to see.

But...I survived. I grinded my teeth for a few hours and whispered gripes to my wife (who gets quite annoyed with me when I go into \"political mode\").

I wrote La Boheme off as an aberration, figuring that it was a fluke.

Then I went to see HMS Pinafore.

This past July, I made my first pilgrimage to the Chautauqua Institute. For the uninitiated, the Institute is located on the wonderful Lake Chautauqua in upstate NY. It is a true gem of culture, spirituality, and learning which hosts a 9-week-long affair including orchestral performances, opera, theater, and various intellectual pursuits.

Upon arriving, I quickly scanned the schedule and saw that there was a performance of HMS Pinafore coinciding with my visit. I purchased tickets and eagerly went off to the opera hall.

Almost immediately after the show began, I began to get that queasy feeling. This opera was also drenched in Marxist philosophy. Once again, I sank into my chair while the characters went on harangues about class oppression and \"the system.\" The whole opera revolved around the idea that class distinctions are unfair, immoral, and arbitrary. In essence, any person of higher rank, knowledge, or position must have attained it through caprice or nepotism. People in positions of authority are ignoramuses, hypocrites, or both. People in positions of low social esteem are likewise victims of circumstance. Their situation in no way reflects any shortcomings of their character or ethics.

Taken together, these two operas have forced me to re-evaluate my analysis of the decline of Western Culture. I was of the general opinion that the undeniable cesspool that has become our contemporary culture had its roots in the chaos of the 1960’s and counterculture\/anti-Vietnam war movements of that era. At most, I considered the socialism of FDR’s New Deal to be the beginning of the end.

But La Boheme was first staged in 1896. HMS Pinafore’s inaugural performance was even before that (1878). The fact that the latter opera was created during the High Victorian Era in Britain is disheartening in the extreme.

Clearly, the rot had been eating at the roots of our culture for quite some time before the appearance of Abbie Hoffman and the Weathermen.

If this Nation is ever turn itself around, those of us on the libertarian\/paleoconservative right are going to have to come to grips with these unpalatable realities. Things are pretty far gone...and they have been going that way for quite some time. We didn’t arrive here overnight, and we will not likely extricate ourselves anytime soon.

December 15, 2003

Steven LaTulippe is a physician currently practicing in Ohio. He was an officer in the United States Air Force for 13 years.\n","contact":"paleoliberty@aol.com","link":"\r\nhttp:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/orig4\/latulippe2.html","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/plain","summary":"Opera allowed me to relax, sit back, and soak in my culture -- until last summer. That's when I realized operas were stocked with old fashioned Marxist critiques of capitalism and snide attacks on Western civilization -- and rotten to the core.","numcomment":3,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2003\/12\/97521.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":97523,"heading":"All Art Is Political","article":"The following link presents the documentation on how the CIA supported and manipulated the Abstract Expressionist movement as a weapon of the Cold War of the 1950's.\r\n\r\nhttp:\/\/www.art-for-a-change.com\/Newsletters\/dec2003.htm","author":"opera lover","parent_id":97521,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-12-16 20:18:56","modified":"2003-12-16 20:18:56","fileurl":""},{"id":97542,"heading":"An actual communist position on art","article":"In the summer of 1938, Andre Breton (the founder of the Surrealist movement), published the "Manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art" in collaboration with Russian Communist Leon Trotsky (then in exile) and the Mexican painter, Diego Rivera. This manifesto is one actual communist position regarding art (there are many such positions). However, the manifesto easily exposes the "cultural marxism" post for the reactionary clap trap it is. As the manifesto so clearly stated: "The independence of art - for the revolution! The revolution - for the complete liberation of art!"\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nMANIFESTO: TOWARDS A FREE REVOLUTIONARY ART\r\nThis manifesto was written by Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky in Mexico in the\r\nlate 1930s. Diego Rivera was a co-signatory.\r\n\r\nWe can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so\r\nseriously as today. The Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous, and\r\nso comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one\r\ncorner of Europe. But today we see world civilization, united in its\r\nhistoric destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces armed with\r\nthe entire arsenal of modern technology. We are by no means thinking only of\r\nthe world war that draws near. Even in times of "peace" the position of art\r\nand science has become absolutely intolerable.\r\n\r\nInsofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play\r\nsubjective talents to create something which brings about an objective\r\nenriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific or\r\nartistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance, that is to\r\nsay, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity. Such\r\ncreations cannot be slighted, whether from the standpoint of general\r\nknowledge (which interprets the existing world), or of revolutionary\r\nknowledge (which, the better to change the world, requires an exact analysis\r\nof the laws which govern its movement). Specifically, we cannot remain\r\nindifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity\r\ntakes place, nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws\r\nwhich govern intellectual creation.\r\n\r\nIn the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread\r\ndestruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is\r\npossible. From this follows of necessity an increasingly manifest\r\ndegradation not only of the work of art but also of the specifically\r\n"artistic" personality. The regime of Hitler, now that it has rid Germany of\r\nall those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty,\r\nhowever superficial, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen or\r\nbrush to the status of domestic servants of the regime, whose task it is to\r\nglorify it on order, according to the worst possible aesthetic conventions.\r\nIf reports may be believed, it is the same in the Soviet Union, where\r\nThermidorian reaction is now reaching its climax.\r\n\r\nIt goes without saying that we do not identify ourselves with the currently\r\nfashionable catchword: "Neither fascism nor communism!", a shibboleth which\r\nsuits the temperament of the philistine, conservative and frightened,\r\nclinging to the tattered remnants of the "democratic" past. True art, which\r\nis not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on\r\nexpressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time - true art is\r\nunable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical\r\nreconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver\r\nintellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all\r\nmankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have\r\nachieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep\r\nclean the path for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with\r\nthe bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union, it is precisely because,\r\nin our eyes, it represents, not communism, but its most treacherous and\r\ndangerous enemy.\r\n\r\nThe totalitarian regime of the USSR, working through the so-called cultural\r\norganizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire\r\nworld a deep twilight hostile to every sort of spiritual value. A twilight\r\nof filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those\r\nmen steep themselves who have made of servility a career, of lying for pay a\r\ncustom, and of the palliation of crime a source of pleasure. The official\r\nart of Stalinism mirrors with a blatancy unexampled in history their efforts\r\nto put a good face on their mercenary profession.\r\n\r\nThe repugnance which this shameful negation of principles of art inspires in\r\nthe artistic world - a negation which even slave states have never dared to\r\ncarry so far - should give rise to an active, uncompromising condemnation.\r\nThe opposition of writers and artists is one of the forces which can\r\nusefully contribute to the discrediting and overthrow of regimes which are\r\ndestroying, along with the right of the proletarian to aspire to a better\r\nworld, every sentiment of nobility and even of human dignity.\r\n\r\nThe communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of\r\nthe artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict\r\nbetween the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him.\r\nThis fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the\r\nnatural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes\r\ninto play and which psychoanalysis has analyzed, tries to restore the broken\r\nequilibrium between the integral "ego" and the outside elements it rejects.\r\nThis restoration works to the advantage of the "ideal of self", which\r\nmarshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the\r\ninterior world, of the "self", which are common to all men and which are\r\nconstantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the\r\nindividual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle\r\nits stream with this primeval necessity - the need for the emancipation of\r\nman.\r\n\r\nThe conception of the writer's function which the young Marx worked out is\r\nworth recalling. "The writer", he declared, "naturally must make money in\r\norder to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and\r\nwrite in order to make money...The writer by no means looks on his work as a\r\nmeans. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself\r\nand of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence\r\nof his work...The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is\r\nnot a business activity." It is more than ever fitting to use this statement\r\nagainst those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of\r\nends foreign to itself, and prescribe, in the guise of so-called reasons of\r\nstate, the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of\r\nall restrictions on the range of his exploitations - these are possessions\r\nwhich the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of\r\nartistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must\r\nunder no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who urge\r\nus, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to\r\na discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we\r\ngive a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by\r\nthe formula complete freedom for art.\r\n\r\nWe recognize, of course, that the revolutionary state has the right to\r\ndefend itself against the counterattack of the bourgeoisie, even when this\r\ndrapes itself in the flag of science or art. But there is an abyss between\r\nthese enforced and temporary measures of revolutionary self-defense and the\r\npretension to lay commands on intellectual creation. If, for the better\r\ndevelopment of the forces of material production, the revolution must build\r\na socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual\r\ncreation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be\r\nestablished. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from\r\nabove! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from\r\noutside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their\r\ntasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.\r\n\r\nIt should be clear by now that in defending freedom of thought we have no\r\nintention of justifying political indifference, and that it is far from our\r\nwish to revive a so-called pure art which generally serves the extremely\r\nimpure ends of reaction. No, our conception of the role of art is too high\r\nto refuse it an influence on the fate of society. We believe that the\r\nsupreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in\r\nthe preparation of the revolution. But the artist cannot serve the struggle\r\nfor freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he\r\nfeels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his\r\nown inner world incarnation in his art.\r\n\r\nIn the present period of the death agony of capitalism, democratic as well\r\nas fascist, the artist sees himself threatened with the loss of his right to\r\nlive and continue working. He sees all avenues of communication choked with\r\nthe debris of capitalist collapse. Only naturally, he turns to the Stalinist\r\norganizations which hold out the possibility of escaping from his isolation.\r\nBut if he is to avoid complete demoralization, he cannot remain there,\r\nbecause of the impossibility of delivering his own message and the degrading\r\nservility which these organizations exact from him in exchange for certain\r\nmaterial advantages. He must understand that his place is elsewhere, not\r\namong those who betray the cause of the revolution and mankind, but among\r\nthose who with unshaken fidelity bear witness to the revolution, among those\r\nwho, for this reason, are alone able to bring it to fruition, and along with\r\nit the ultimate free expression of all forms of human genius.\r\n\r\nThe aim of this appeal is to find a common ground on which may be reunited\r\nall revolutionary writers and artists, the better to serve the revolution by\r\ntheir art and to defend the liberty of that art itself against the usurpers\r\nof the revolution. We believe that aesthetic, philosophical and political\r\ntendencies of the most varied sort can find here a common ground. Marxists\r\ncan march here hand in hand with anarchists, provided both parties\r\nuncompromisingly reject the reactionary police patrol spirit represented by\r\nJoseph Stalin and by his henchman Garcia Oliver.\r\n\r\nWe know very well that thousands on thousands of isolated thinkers and\r\nartists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned out\r\nby the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small local\r\nmagazines are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking new paths\r\nand not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is destroyed by fascism\r\nas "degenerate". Every free creation is called "fascist" by the Stalinists.\r\nIndependent revolutionary art must now gather its forces for the struggle\r\nagainst reactionary persecution. It must proclaim aloud the right to exist.\r\nSuch a union of forces is the aim of the International Federation of\r\nIndependent Revolutionary Art which we believe it is now necessary to form.\r\n\r\nWe by no means insist on every idea put forth in this manifesto, which we\r\nourselves consider only a first step in the new direction. We urge every\r\nfriend and defender of art, who cannot but realize the necessity for this\r\nappeal, to make himself heard at once. We address the same appeal to all\r\nthose publications of the left wing which are ready to participate in the\r\ncreation of the International Federation and to consider its task and its\r\nmethods of action.\r\n\r\nWhen a preliminary international contact has been established through the\r\npress and by correspondence, we will proceed to the organization of local\r\nand national congresses on a modest scale. The final step will be the\r\nassembly of a world congress which will officially mark the foundation of\r\nthe International Federation.\r\n\r\nOur aims:\r\n\r\nThe independence of art - for the revolution.\r\n\r\nThe revolution - for the complete liberation of art!\r\n\r\n","author":"the world turns","parent_id":97521,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-12-16 22:19:23","modified":"2003-12-16 22:19:23","fileurl":""},{"id":97940,"heading":"paleoconservative","article":"Is that shorthand for "raving fascist lunatic"?","author":"more rational","parent_id":97521,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-12-19 11:34:23","modified":"2003-12-19 11:34:23","fileurl":""}]}