The West’s trajectory into the realm of a reimagined Marxism has been nothing short of catastrophic – historically, but never more so than in the present. Marked by the rise of postmodern neo-Marxism, wokism and nihilism, this resurgence has infiltrated society in academia, corporations, the entertainment industry and our legislative bodies.
It is a trajectory that demands our attention and invites reflection on how we reached this point and what it might mean for our future.
Akin to the Hell of Milton’s Paradise Lost, our universities have seen a multiplication in their subjects bent on destruction under the mantle of Marx, perhaps the most dangerous intellectual ever to have lived. As a consequence of his doctrine’s implementation across all contexts it was imposed in, Marx became responsible for the deaths of up to 100 million people the world over, according to Stéphane Courtois and other scholars in the authoritative Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.
In my previous columns, “Wokism and the End of Academic Standards” and “Canada’s Cultural Revolution,” I recalled the path I embarked on to become a writer, envisioning myself securing a tenured position at a Canadian university that would sustain my creative pursuits. The idea of teaching and writing – like W.H. Auden did, like T.S. Eliot did – held immense appeal, though I was also aware of the significance of the journey outward: travelling, accumulating a treasury of experiences that would challenge my worldview, honing the language that compelled my spirit to creation.
It became a transformative experience, breaking off from the university between my B.A. and M.A. – travelling and living in South Korea, China and Vietnam. I became a diligent student of language, culture and history – including political history and the deadly, calamitous spectre of Communism. While my expectations for graduate study in Canada were high, the reality that awaited me was unsettling, to say the least.
The time abroad prompted a deep inquiry into the origins of the tightening ideological grip upon Western institutions, fostered through my readings of history, my conversations with local people, and reflections on my formative years, particularly my high school education. Reality laid bare to me the deliberate withholding by Western intellectuals and media of the Russian Revolution’s seismic upheaval and the torturous reign of Mao, with his ruinous Cultural Revolution, to say nothing of Vietnam.
Over time, I came to the conclusion that these were carefully curated omissions which would become central to the current crisis of woke identity politics. The predominant intellectual narrative of the late 60s and early 70s – meticulous in its construction – cast American involvement in the Vietnam conflict as a sinister form of modern colonialism, with Americans solely bearing the yoke of aggressor and oppressor.
Not a single student I spoke to about the Vietnam War era in my M.A. and PhD cohort was aware that Vietnam was, in fact, a civil conflict between the Communist North and the – though highly imperfect and admittedly corrupt – nascently democratic South. Meticulous in its construction, the fabrication remains unassailable, although a few have tried, including Lewis Sorley in A Better War, and the Vietnamese author Bao Ninh in The Sorrow of War, works which were essential to shaping my understanding of my adopted country.
In my opinion, the rise of postmodern neo-Marxism was contingent on the Vietnam conflict. The myth of American colonial oppression confounded the credibility of that nation’s cause. Revolutionary destructiveness at home gained traction as images of the conflict broadcast across living rooms in the West, igniting impassioned student protests around the world in spite of our widespread knowledge, by that point, of the utter failure of the Soviet experiment.
When the French intelligentsia – significantly, the former colonial masters over former French Indochina – finally caught wind of uncountable millions of deaths and atrocities under the Soviet Communist regime, identity politics ensued: the original Marxist dichotomy between the bourgeoisie and proletariat was switched to “oppressor” and “oppressed” across a range of identity factors including, most prominently, race and gender. (An outrageous and tragic aspect was that this framing of the Vietnam conflict negated the legitimacy of South Vietnam and the very existence of tens of millions of anti-Communist Vietnamese.)
With the arrival of leading postmodernist Jacques Derrida in America in 1968, culminating in his tenure at Yale University in 1975, the reimagining was complete, unleashed in full, propagandistic force under the guise of scholarly endeavour. Since then, the convergence of these factors has been instrumental in radicalizing not just one, but two generations of Western students, wielding Vietnam, from the outset, as the neo-Marxists’ most potent weapon in their ideological arsenal.
An unsettling amnesia now grips us in turn. Like those Communist regimes in the U.S.S.R., China and Vietnam, the postmodernists implemented tactics to erase or rewrite history, preaching the ostensibly “constructed” nature of history and the co-existence of an infinite number of possible interpretations.
This is documented in the destruction of historical artifacts and manuscripts (currently practised in Canada through, for example, the near-emptying or “weeding” of Ontario school libraries), to say nothing of the practice of “struggle sessions” in Mao’s China, a particularly public form of verbal and physical degradation echoed in the “cancel culture” of our own time.
Like those regimes of the past century, moreover, postmodern neo-Marxism seeks fundamentally to distort all reality that works against its aims, reshaping past and present discourse by robbing the individual of all inherent dignity and distinguishing characteristics, making the fight that we face not only a political battle but a struggle for our very humanity.
This column is based on Part 3 of Brock Eldon’s nonfiction novella, Ground Zero in the Culture War, which was recently published in three instalments (accessible here, here and here) in C2C Journal.
Brock Eldon teaches Foundations in Literature at RMIT University in Hanoi, where he lives with his wife and daughter. A graduate of King’s University College at Western in London, Ontario, and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, he writes fiction and non-fiction and can be followed here on Substack.
