Cultural Capitalism

What’s more deadly to established order than “Cultural Marxism”?

Why, Cultural Capitalism, of course.

More than anything else, it was Western decadence that brought down the Soviet Union.

Those who worry about “Cultural Marxism” (said to have been sponsored by the KGB to weaken America’s will) would do well to consider John Stossel’s recent column.

What liberates oppressed people? I was taught it’s often American power. Just the threat of our military buildup defeated the Soviet Union, and our troops in the Middle East will create islands of freedom.

Unlikely, says historian Thaddeus Russell, author of “A Renegade History of the United States.”

“As a matter of fact,” Russell told me, “in general American military intervention has increased anti-Americanism and hardened repressive regimes. On the other hand, American popular culture — what was often called the worst of our culture in many cases — has actually done more for liberation and our national security than anything that the 82nd Airborne could do.”

I told him that I thought that the Soviet Union collapsed because the Soviets spent so much trying to keep pace with Ronald Reagan’s military buildup.

On the contrary, Russell said, “it collapsed from within. … People simply walked away from the ideology of communism. And that began especially when American popular culture — jazz and rock and roll — began infiltrating those countries after World War II.”

I demanded evidence.

“American soldiers brought jazz during World War II to the eastern front. Soviet soldiers brought it back. Eastern European soldiers brought it and spread it across those countries. … Stalin was hysterical about this.”

The authorities were particularly concerned about young people performing and enjoying sensual music.

“Any regime at all depends on social order to maintain its power. Social order and sensuality, pleasures of the body, are often at odds. Stalin and his commissars understood that.”

American authorities 30 years earlier also feared the sensuality of black music, said Russell, attacking it “as primitive jungle music that was bringing down American youth. Stalin and his commissars across Eastern Europe said exactly the same things with the same words later.”

Then rock and roll came.

“That was even more threatening,” Russell said. “By the 1980s, disco and rock were enormously popular throughout the communist world.”

Little wonder that even today the Russian security services fear Western decadence, and want to ban Skype and Gmail.

If we assume that Gramsci and company were in fact KGB stooges (a highly questionable premise, IMO) the lesson seems to be that the Commies could dish it out, but they couldn’t take it.

I don’t think the Islamist culture warriors like Cultural Capitalism either. I think it’s a perfectly lovely thing to be making money selling decadence to such people.

Long live freedom!

 

 


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7 responses to “Cultural Capitalism”

  1. Donald Sensing Avatar

    In the early 1990s I attended a seminar in DC where one of the speakers was a former member of the Czechoslovakian politburo. He made this point explicitly and firmly.

  2. Mario Mirarchi Avatar
    Mario Mirarchi

    In the 1950s, the second most well-know American in Eastern Europe was Willis Conover, host of a jazz program on the Voice of America:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Conover

    A friend told me an interesting story from a visit of his to the former Soviet Union ca. 1973. He was in a restaurant when a waiter asked him where he was from. He answered “America”. At point the waiter replied “America…Chicago!!”
    My friend replied “No, I’m from Washington”. The waiter said “Chicago!!”
    and began singing Chicago songs. At that point he realized the Cold War was won by the West.

  3. Eric Avatar

    Good points both.

    And Donald, thanks for stopping by!

  4. Leif Avatar
    Leif

    Hogwash. Yet another academic pushing flaccid, uh, I mean “soft” power. The embrace of American popular culture was a symptom, not the cause, of Soviet decline. After all, the Soviet Union was dismantled from above, not below. Her economy was in shambles and Reagan’s defense build-up forced the Soviets into a “use it or lose it” situation. Defense Minister Ustinov pushed for an all-out attack on the West before the US finished re-arming. He lost that fight in the Politburo (and died shortly thereafter), where memories of the demographic disaster of WW II were still too fresh. The rest, as they say, is history.

  5. Trimegistus Avatar
    Trimegistus

    Hard and soft power are not mutually exclusive.

    The fun, free, prosperous West made ordinary Soviet subjects dissatisfied with their regime. The Reagan military buildup made it impossible for that regime to maintain military parity. If the people had been solidly behind the regime, they might have managed, but the people made the rational decision that their rulers were a bunch of paranoid idiots.

  6. margin Avatar
    margin

    Music can also unite the people of a country as the documentary film The Singing Revolution demonstrates happened in Estonia. http://www.singingrevolution.com/cgi-local/content.cgi?pg=1

  7. John Avatar
    John

    And I’m sure that the many European Jews aged late 60 and older will be happy to thank jazz and big band music and possibly Fred Astaire not the “big red one” and millions of other Americans for saving their lives during the 1940s.

    Yeah, American military might. They’re really a bunch of sissies.

    John