Proud to be a cultural Marxist

OVER the years I have been saddled with a variety of labels. In South Africa I got called a ‘kaffir boetie’ (the equivalent of n****r-lover). Also a ‘soutpiel’, an Afrikaans term for a British expat whose dangly bits hang in the ocean somewhere between England and some foreign land.

I was also branded a ‘commie’ which, at that time, was absolutely accurate. I did indeed support the banned South African Communist Party because of its unyielding opposition to apartheid.

I ditched communism when I realised that, although it was admirably godless, in practice its ruthless dogmatism was every bit as abhorrent as any religion.

So I became an anarchist. When a colleague accused me of wanting to unleash chaos on the world, I retorted ‘chaos is what we have right now. What we need is anarchy.’

My anarchism eventually gave way to a brand of ‘no gods, no masters’ liberal socialism – and it’s in this camp I shall remain until I go the way of Monty Python’s parrot.

But lately, I’ve been accused of being a cultural Marxist, a term used by far-right white supremacists and dimwits on media outlets such as America’s Faux News to describe activists who champion progressive rather than repugnant reactionary causes.

It was invented by the far-right to describe Jews taking over the world in order to eradicate Christian conservative values. It has now spread to include all people with left-of-centre views. Cultural Marxism, of course, has nothing to do with actual Marxism and is a great example of neo-fascists and Trumpanzees not knowing what Marxism really is.

So I wear the label with pride. Being a cultural Marxist means, among other things, that I have zero tolerance of the media reporting on puerile matters that have no relevance whatsoever to the real world.

One recent Saturday, for example, LBC News devoted the best part of the day to yet another unseemly squabble involving some members of the utterly dysfunctional British royal family. Several so-called ‘royal correspondents’ were invited to prattle on at length about the spat.

My hackles rise every time I hear the term ‘royal correspondent’ because what these mediocre, over-paid hacks say and write is the antithesis of proper journalism.

They exist only to feed asinine gobbets of tittle-tattle to credulous British serfs who think bad soap operas are for real and that the monarchy is A Very Good Thing when, in reality, it’s an anachronistic irrelevance that should be allowed to quietly fizzle out and die.

So, feel free to add ‘proud republican’ to my growing list of labels.

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Barry Duke

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