Review: Agitprop in America

N.S.: I prefer the phrase racial socialism to “cultural Marxism,” but no one phrase (decadence?) completely grasps the movement that is destroying America and the West.


By A Colleague
Sat, Apr 25, 2020 12:43 p.m.

Most Americans are well aware of the insidious pervasiveness of political correctness into American politics and culture. The new book Agitprop in America offers a cogent explanation of the phenomenon, how it developed historically, and how it threatens cohesive, traditional American culture.

The review is well worth reading in its entirety. Based on the review, I have added the Agitprop in America to my reading list.

Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.: review of Agitprop in America (Occidental Observer, April 24, 2020). A few excerpts are included below:


Review: Agitprop in America
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/04/24/review-agitprop-in-america/

-------------------

“You can live with the loss of certainty, but not of belief.” So begins John Harmon McElroy’s recently-published Agitprop in America...

In Agitprop in America, McElroy takes aim at a succession of modern academia’s sacred cows, with chapters covering Marxist history and propaganda techniques, “social justice” activism, mandatory diversity, political correctness, free speech, snowflake culture, government spending, and the dominance of Cultural Marxism in the American education system. One of the book’s more unique features is a 107-page lexicon of 234 terms (from Ableism to Xenophobia) explaining the invention and employment of language as a method of cultural transformation via agitprop....

The book opens with the contention that “since the 1960s Marxists and their sympathizers in America have been using agitprop (an integration of intense agitation and propaganda invented by Lenin) to destroy America's culture and build Cultural Marxism. To do this, agitprop has changed American speech and manipulated cultural values and beliefs.” American history has been rewritten “to make it into a Marxian tale of unmitigated oppression.” American contemporary society has been reinterpreted as the story of “one biologically defined ruling class (straight White males) “victimizing” all other biologically defined classes.”...

Part I of the book consists of a brief sketch of the historical context of agitprop in America. McElroy does a very capable job of following political correctness from its Soviet and Maoist origins, through the campus agitations of the 1960s, to the “woke” culture warriors of today...

In our current age of declining optimism and rising nihilism, I found McElroy’s persistent belief in American exceptionalism to be somewhat heartening....

Drawing on Saul Alinsky's infamous Rules for Radicals, McElroy explains how Cultural Marxists provoke their opponents into reacting ... Another tactic is to create problems, or interpret problems, in such a manner that permits the proposal of Marxist “solutions.”...

I agree with McElroy that we shouldn't call anti-American agitators “liberals,” and that “Leftists” also leaves a lot unsaid. McElroy, however, proposes “PC Marxists,”...

The second part of the book consists of the above-mentioned 107-page lexicon of 234 terms explaining the invention and employment of language as a method of cultural transformation via agitprop...

The third section of the book is probably my favorite, and McElroy demonstrates the best of his reading and understanding here. The section consists of commentaries/chapters covering “seven related revolutionary concepts that PC agitprop has imposed on America.” These are “Biological Class Consciousness,” “Social Justice,” “Mandatory Diversity,” a politics of double standards, mass indoctrination on “sensitivity,” censorship and the policing of speech, and the promotion of a sterile and self-obsessed atheism....