The War Against the Family

You may have heard that the ongoing war against the traditional family is a “communist plot.” Don’t laugh. The family has been a primary target of socialist revolutionaries for well over 160 years.

In fact, the ongoing breakdown of the family coincides with the continued advance of socialism. The left has worked steadily to normalize divorce, abortion, and sexual perversion. To understand the left’s role in the breakdown of the family, however, it is first necessary to understand what the left is.

Setting aside the variable meanings of words like “socialism,” “communism,” and “Marxism,” a common set of ideas are found in all three. These ideas may be summarized in five parts, as follows: (1) that man’s “salvation” may be achieved through political activism or a revolution, (2) which establishes “peace” by making all countries into one country (internationalism), (3) which is hostile to private ownership of the means of production (anti-capitalism), (4) which “emancipates” women from motherhood (feminism), (5) and which brings universal “prosperity” through universal cooperation and harmony.

What we have, in the ideas of “socialism, “communism,” and “Marxism,” is the appearance of a new faith. It is a faith in which the Marxist-Leninists (i.e., communists) see themselves as the leading edge or “vanguard.” Such was the conceit of the Soviet state, and it remains the conceit of the Chinese Communist Party today. It is impossible to properly understand this new faith without understanding the clandestine work of the communist countries and their special services. According to intensive investigations carried out by congressional committees in the 1950s, the Soviet Union was the coordinating center for a global “communist conspiracy” that involved the infiltration and subversion of many nations, including the United States.

This subversion was not halted in the 1950s; according to many sources—such as Pete Earley’s “Comrade J”—it continues today, despite the fall of the Soviet Union.

In discussing the war against the family, we must first show that communism, as the vanguard of the leftist faith, is much more than a “conspiracy” or a “web of subversion.” If we look carefully, we can see that civilization has been gradually passing from a belief in spiritual salvation to a belief in political salvation (through political activism). This passage from spiritual faith to political faith began during the Industrial Revolution. As might be expected, scientific and technological achievements led many people to materialism (the belief that nothing exists except matter). In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a materialist theory of man’s origin “by means of natural selection.” With the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, humanity suffered a setback: If man is an evolutionary accident, then what possible meaning could life hold? How does man retain his dignity?

This is where Marxism comes into the picture. How does an aspiring acolyte of the new faith lay the foundations for heaven on earth? After all, man must now look to himself for salvation. From the “Prison Notebooks” of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, we learn that the potential for “socialist consciousness” will ultimately depend on the denial of common sense and human nature. Gramsci is not alone in this proposition. In “The Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said that “communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it, therefore, acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”

According to Marxism, sexual morality is a weapon of the exploiting classes. Thus, sexual immorality is a weapon of class struggle. To break the back of capitalism, Marxism approves the doctrine of free love. It is no wonder, then, that the communist bloc (with the help of leftist allies in the West) promoted the breakdown of sexual norms in the 1960s. By dismissing sexual morality as the tool of an oppressive, male-dominated, racist society, the communists were striking a blow against traditional culture, social order, and religion.

Communist agents of influence have undermined the idea that men should be breadwinners and women should be homemakers. The validity of distinctive male and female roles has been denounced as “harmful to women.” According to the founder of modern feminism, Betty Friedan, the housewife lives in “a comfortable concentration camp.” Friedan explained, “The women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.”

Where did Friedan get this outlandish idea? She was secretly a communist who had done extensive propaganda work for the Party, as David Horowitz explained in his 1999 Salon article “Betty Friedan’s Secret Communist Past.”

In the early days of Marxism, Engels wrote a book titled “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” In this book, he advocated the abolition of the family and promoted collective child-rearing. Books of this kind, in the 19th century, made no impression on the public. It was only in the 20th century, after disparaging the role of the housewife, that the communists decisively undermined the family. This opened the door to no-fault divorce—a law that was first tried in the Soviet Union. It turned marriage into an unenforceable contract. Motherhood was decisively undermined. Then came the legalization of abortion. A regime of infanticide was established, compromising millions of women.

There followed, in the wake of this, a series of astonishing developments: (1) a pornography epidemic, (2) the legalization of gay marriage, and (3) sex education for younger and younger children. What could be more demoralizing? Who would dare to resist, given the rising hedonistic imperative?

According to Marx in Vol. 3 of “Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe,” destroying the family would lead to the destruction of Christianity. “The secret of the Holy Family is the earthly family,” noted Marx. “To make the former disappear, the latter must be destroyed, in theory and in practice.”

The German sociologist Gabriele Kuby observed that “all sexual revolutionaries in the twentieth century have their spiritual roots in Marxism,” according to her “The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.”

The revolutionary notion, as Kuby explains, holds that “vice as a form of social control is virtually invincible.” In other words, when the individual gives up sexual self-restraint, he engenders a rising totalitarian power. To understand how this power works, Kuby lists those who stand to benefit from the family’s decline: (1) anyone wishing to make humanity into rootless fodder for the sake of global ambition, (2) anyone who wants the West to sink into a “demographic winter,” and (3) anyone who wants to eliminate Christianity.

The more we examine the war against the family, the more we discover the hidden hand of the communist vanguard. If a power is able to discredit motherhood and delegitimize masculine authority, how can that power be opposed?

The denial of sex differences, the legalization of same-sex marriage, gender reassignment for children, the disparagement of motherhood, the demonization of masculinity—are ideas favored by the new religion of the left. All the philosophers, statesmen, and saints of past centuries—pagan and Christian—would have condemned these ideas as lunacy. But here we are, in the 21st century, watching the lunacy unfold.

The final battle in the culture war is not far off. We do not know what the outcome will be. It is safe to say that life will eventually return to normal. It is a question of how much death and suffering will take place in the meantime.

Original here.