Free The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh Page B

ragtag band of mujahideen armed with Stinger missiles. The army that had bulldozed Hitler from Stalingrad to Berlin had nothing to support it after the Soviets had hollowed out Russian society and morals with their imported philosophy. After that, of course, Bin Laden turned his sights upon the United States, seeing America as another “weak horse.”
    A wonderful illustration to Faust by Eugène Delacroix depicts Mephistopheles in winged flight over Wittenberg, one of several “ Lutherstädte ” (Luther towns) in Germany associated with the events of the Protestant Reformation. As a depiction of the sacred (the church spires) and the profane (the fallen angel, his wings still intact, flying impudently naked above the symbols of the Principal Enemy), it vividly expresses the ongoing battle between good and evil. It also unites many of the images—innate images, as I have argued, the embedded ur-Narrative we all share—about which we have been speaking, including the divine, the daemonic, and the satanic, the Battle in Heaven, the Fall of Man, and the Faustian bargain.
    For Satan, as for Marx, religion was an impediment to the grand design of transforming humanity from a collection of free-willed, autonomous individuals into a mass of self-corralling slaves who mistake security for liberty and try to keep the cognitive dissonance to a minimum in order to function.
    The Marxist view of religion has gone through an evolution, to the point where some of the Frankfurt School’s defenders argue that cultural Marxism did, in fact, make a place for “religion” (or at least transcendence) in its weltanschauung. It “evolved,” they say, past the official atheism of Marxism-Leninism as practiced by a backward society like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
    It is worth a moment to reflect on the use of this word. “Evolution” is most closely associated with Darwin, thus affording it a patina of “science” as far as the Marxists are concerned, but whenever the word is used by the Left, it takes on an added, quasi-teleological meaning: We are evolving toward something, a “higher state.” Thus, Supreme Court justices are said to have “grown in office” or “evolved” as they make their way from right to left during the course of their lifetime tenures. And politicians are said to have “evolved” whenever they switch positions from something more conservative to something rather more liberal (as with gay marriage). As Rob Clements noted on the blog The Other Journal (which has the tagline “an intersection of theology and culture”):
    In its most prolific phase, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the [Frankfurt School] consisted mainly of dissident Marxists who believed that orthodox Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century, particularly with regard to the rise of fascism as a working-class movement. This led many of these dissident Marxists to take up the task of re-appropriating Marxism in light of conditions that Karl Marx himself had never considered. The school has a clear genealogy, appropriating elements of Marxist materialism, Hegelian philosophy, German idealism, Gestalt psychology, and atheistic Jewish Messianism. This synthesized analysis gave expression to a transdisciplinary, anticapitalist intellectual tradition with both immanent (material) and transcendent (metaphysical or spiritual) themes.
    In a nutshell, here we see the problem with nontraditional theory and dogma: It must constantly change the terms of the debate to accommodate, however reluctantly, reality, as much as the Marxists would like to ignore it. T.H. Huxley (the quotation has been attributed to others) spoke of the “murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts.” Cultural Marxist theory is always getting used to such brutal facts and twisting its theory to