"Lenin would have smiled"

Melanie Phillips writes We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left. They're back - and attacking us from within

For many communist fellow travellers, the scales fell from their eyes when the Hungarian uprising was crushed in 1956. Others, over the years, lost faith not just in communism but in its less radical sister, socialism, as their core tenet of 'equality' proved itself in a myriad different ways to be the enemy of freedom and justice, with market forces appearing to carry the torch of liberty instead.

But as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down.

This was what might be called 'cultural Marxism'. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.

This key insight was developed in particular by an Italian Marxist philosopher called Antonio Gramsci. His thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals  -  who are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.
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with the development of the EU superstate we can see that the victory over one anti-democratic regime within Europe  -  the Soviet Union  -  has been followed by surrender to another.

For the republic of Euroland puts loyalty to itself higher than that to individual nations and their values. It refused to commit itself in its constitution to uphold Christianity, the foundation of western morality.

Instead, it is committed to moral and cultural relativism, which sets group against group and guarantees supreme and antidemocratic power to the bureaucrats setting the rules of 'diversity' and outlawing all dissent from permitted attitudes.

When the Berlin Wall fell, we told ourselves that this was the end of ideology. We could not have been more wrong.

The Iron Curtain came down only to be replaced by a rainbow-hued knuckle-duster, as our cultural commissars pulverise all forbidden attitudes in order to reshape western society into a post-democratic, post-Christian, post-moral universe. Lenin would have smiled.