2,129 words
Introduction
Wokeism
In right-wing circles, the term “wokeism” has acquired a pejorative meaning. It roughly stands for everything we see as undermining the social fabric of our white nations, from aggressive feminism to genitals chopping gender ideology, from imposing eternal white guilt to opening the floodgates of mass immigration. However, anyone who ventures into the left-wing swamp of Tumblr will soon encounter a striking combination of this wokeism with all kinds of ‘occult’ movements. One combination that stands out in particular is the merging of child-mutilating gender ideology with Satanism. The preached ‘satanic freedom’ also often includes a veritable celebration of aborting unborn children. Now, this article does not seek to incite a new “satanic panic” but we do question the possible connection between wokeism and certain occult movements.
Cultural Marxism
We can roughly characterise wokeism as a new guise for the concept of ‘cultural Marxism,’ a term that has fallen out of favour in recent years, but which remains a key concept for commentators such as those of the Dutch political party Forum for Democracy in their analysis of the current crisis. The term “cultural Marxism” is more or less a misnomer, however. Although this movement, like Karl Marx, sees ‘human equality’ as its ultimate goal, its starting point is exactly the opposite. Marx believed that social structures and changes are determined by economic, material factors, but cultural Marxism emphasises the independent influence of cultural, spiritual factors. So, despite Marx’s best efforts to kill it, the spirit of his teacher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is still very much alive. Another important difference, at least in theory, is that orthodox Marxists assume autonomous economic development towards the hoped-for ideal state,[1] while cultural Marxism calls for actively changing culture through so-called ‘critical theory.’[2] Cultural Marxism and its critical theory are inextricably linked to an institute known as the ‘Frankfurt School.’
The Frankfurt School
As its name suggests, the Frankfurt School (FS) was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 by a group of Jewish scholars as an institute for social research. After the Second World War, their socio-cultural explanations of the reasons for the persecution of the Jews would have a huge nefarious, undermining influence on European culture. Among the most important members were Max Horkheimer,[3] Theodor W. Adorno,[4] Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse[5] and Walter Benjamin. In many right-wing circles, the prevailing opinion is that the FS was ‘just a bunch of Jews who wanted to take revenge on white people for the persecution of the Jews by destroying the culture of their nations.’ However, such a judgement does not do justice to the complex historical developments that led to the formation of the FS theory. If we want to combat cultural Marxism and critical theory, it is important to first understand the FS in the context of the overall development of European ideas, which forms the basis of its enormous success and appeal.
Overview
We will begin our historical overview at the beginning of the 19th century, with the rise of Romanticism in Germany. We will then trace the development of Romantic ideas in three thinkers who, despite their fame at the time, have now been consigned to oblivion. They are Johann Jakob Bachofen, Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages. We will conclude with Walter Benjamin, who, as a member of the FS, was the main conduit for their ideas. In the work of Schuler, Klages and Benjamin, the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche is constantly present in the background, usually as a guide, sometimes as a counterpoint.
Romanticism in Germany
Enlightenment and its Discontents
The thinking of the ‘Enlightenment’ was largely inspired by the horrors of the religious wars that had gripped Europe since the 16th century. Reason and pragmatic thinking were placed on a pedestal as a means of combating the intolerant, dogmatic thinking of the churches, which was supposed to be the main source of the wars. Being at the centre of European civilisation, the Enlightenment was mainly a French affair.[6] However, the French Revolution that had been spawned by the Enlightenment, and the wars that France waged to spread its revolutionary ideals, caused even worse massacres than the religious wars. The cultural movement we call Romanticism was to a significant extent a reaction against these excesses of Enlightenment rationalism. An important contribution also came from the nationalism that had began to flourish in response to the French drive for conquest with its claims to (of course French) universality. Romanticism emphasised the world of feelings, of the non-rational, and celebrated the unique, the particular, the unrepeatable. In Romanticism, it was mainly Germany that set the tone as das Land der Dichter und Denker (the Land of Poets and Thinkers).
Romantic sentiment found little sympathy among the German ruling class, however. After Napoleon had been finally defeated, and especially after the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, the rulers wanted to restore the ancient, more or less feudal order throughout Europe, and particularly in Germany. An order in which the people were bound first and foremost to the local monarch, not to that Romantic, dangerously inflammatory, schwärmerische (enraptured) German nationalist ideal. The tiny German states feared for their independence, and multi-ethnic Austria feared the disintegration of the empire under nationalist pressures. So the Romantic ideals, which had initially helped to mobilise against French conquest and domination, were now banned in state institutions.[7] It is the irony of history that in their struggle against Romanticism, the ruling class came to rely on the same rationalism that had spawned the French Revolution!
Academia and “Philhellenism”
As a result, rationalistic liberalism prevailed in German government and academic institutions almost until the Great War. This was reflected, on the one hand, in the prestige accorded to the natural sciences and technology and, on the other hand, in a rationalistic view of man in the humanities. At least since Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768),[8] German scholars had revered ancient Greece with an almost religious fervour (Philhellenismus).[9] Greece was seen as a unique and superior civilisation, completely different from the ‘barbarians’ in the rest of the world. And why? Because it was supposedly rational and ‘enlightened.’ The Greeks, it was thought, ‘were too highly developed to truly believe in their gods or act on their impulses.’[10] Of course, this image of Greece mainly reflected the flattering image that the rationalistic liberals had of themselves.
However, it was precisely during the period of high liberalism (1860-1900) (Suzanne Marchand)[11] and the Entzauberung der Welt (Max Weber)[12] that cracks began to appear in the prevailing liberalism and rationalism. New discoveries in natural science put pressure on the rationalistic Newtonian worldview, so that for some scientists even spiritism became an attractive subject of research as a way out of this scientific cul-de-sac.[13] In the humanities, the sun-lit white marble temple of Philhellenism crumbled with the discovery of countless sources of ancient civilisations outside the traditional Biblical and Greek fields of research.[14] The Greeks’ close ties with the hitherto despised ‘irrational’ Orient could no longer be ignored, and before the dismayed scholarly eyes their revered rational Greeks transformed into religious, irrational, sexualised, semi-Oriental beings.[15] The attention of academics shifted from classical Athens to both pre-Socratic and Hellenistic Greece, and research into the Greek mystery cults and the cult of the mother goddess took on a prominent place.[16]
Art and Philosophy
All this was in line with developments that had been underway outside academic institutions for a long time. The great thinkers of Romanticism had operated mainly outside state institutions and sought out their audience independently, for example Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who no longer placed reason at the centre of his worldview, but rather the non-rational, all-encompassing will. The literary world also had begun to focus increasingly on the barbaric, vitalistic, chthonic and undomesticated side of antiquity.[17] Poets and writers sought a new unity in life by revitalising a non-rational, “pagan” ideal primordial state. In doing so, they devoted themselves to ecstatic experiences they thought anticipated this ultimate redemption.[18] “Ecstasy” was also the keyword in the descriptions of the music of Richard Wagner. His operas, especially “Tristan und Isolde,” aroused frenzied admiration and enraptured enthusiasm among the Romantics. Listeners would literally be bewitched by this “satanic” music.[19] Mark Twain noted after attending a performance of “Tristan”:
I know of some, and I have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in a community of the mad.[20]
Manly Women, Womanly Men
According to literary scholar Mario Praz, we can view Romanticism as, among other things, an expression of the hidden influence of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814). Better known as Marquis de Sade, this ‘libertine’ French aristocrat had brought the intertwining of eroticism and violence to light in a series of abominable and banned but secretly highly influential books. According to Praz, Romanticism was characteristic of the entire 19th century, but there were two phases in which the view of man differed radically. In its first heyday around 1830, the man who captured the Romantic imagination was mainly active and even sadistic, with Lord Byron as a prime example.[21] In its second heyday (also known as “Decadence”) around 1880 however, the image of men tended towards passivity and masochism.[22] This development also influenced the image of woman: she changed from a vulnerable, pure victim into a femme fatale who trampled the defenseless man under her feet, like the biblical Salome or Carmen in the opera of the same name.[23] Another important form of the domineering woman is, of course, the almighty mother. We will now take a closer look at this “Great Mother” and her rather reluctant prophet, Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887): antiquarian, philologist, anthropologist, professor of Roman law at the University of Basel, and a friend and colleague of Friedrich Nietzsche.[24]
Notes
[1] Paradoxically, orthodox Marxism only achieved success where it actively sought to change culture and society, with its end-times vision in hand.
[2] The ‘New Left’ is the political elaboration of this endeavor.
[3] Author, with Adorno, of the book Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment)
[4] Known for his pseudoscientific book The Authoritarian Personality.
[5] His work is a monstrous alliance of Marxism and Freudianism.
[6] Examples: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Descartes. In Germany, we had the great Immanuel Kant, of course, but can we really call someone who was secretly influenced by the occult seer Emmanuel Swedenborg, and who emphasised the gap between empirical knowledge and the ‘Thing in Itself,’ a true Enlightenment thinker?
[7] Suzanne Marchand, ‘From Liberalism to Neoromanticism: Albrecht Dieterich, Richard Reitzenstein, and the Religious Turn in Fin-de-Siècle German Classical Studies’ in: Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement No. 79), Oxford University Press: Oxford etc. 2003, 138.
[8] Winckelmann waxed lyrical about Greek art as edle Einfalt und stille Grösse (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur). His own life, however, was anything but simple and idyllic.
[9] In a contrast that was often deliberately sought with France, which was more oriented towards ancient Rome. Strictly speaking, the term ‘Romanticism’ should only be used for movements in the Romance countries.
[10] Marchand, “Neoromanticism,” 131.
[11] Marchand, “Neoromanticism,” 139.
[12] “Disenchantment of the world” means that the belief prevails that there are no mysterious forces in the world, and that ultimately science will be able to explain everything in the cosmos. Cf. Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Geistige Arbeit als Beruf. Vier Vorträge vor dem Freistudentischen Bund), Duncker & Humblot: München & Leipzig 1919, 15.
[13] Moritz Bassler, ‘»Lehnstühle werden verrückt« Spiritismus und emphatische Modeme: Zu einer Fussnote bei Wassily Kandinsky’, in: Hofmannsthal-Jahrbuch 1/1993: Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne / im Auftrag der Hugo von Hofmannsthal-Gesellschaft von Gerhard Neumann, Ursula Renner, Günter Schnitzler, Gotthart Wunberg, Rombach Verlag: Freiburg 1993, 287.
[14] Marchand, “Neoromanticism,” 130.
[15] Marchand, “Neoromanticism,” 146.
[16] Marchand, “Neoromanticism,” 156.
[17] Georg Dörr, Muttermythos und Herrschaftsmythos. Zur Dialektik der Aufklärung um die Jahrhundertwende bei den Kosmikern, Stefan George und in der Frankfurter Schule, Königshausen & Neumann: Würzburg 2007, 41, footnote 112.
[18] Michael Pauen, Dithyrambiker des Untergangs. Gnostizismus in Ästhetik und Philosophie der Moderne, Akademie Verlag: Berlin 2014, 156. See also the famous dictum by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud that ‘The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.’
[19] Cf. D’Annunzio on Wagner in Mario Praz, Angus Davidson (trans.), The Romantic Agony, Oxford University Press: London etc. 1954, 397.
[20] Praz, The Romantic Agony, 411, endnote 184.
[21] The text Lady Byron discovered in horror in her husband’s secret hiding place was probably the Sade book La nouvelle Justine. Cf. Joshua D. Gonsalves, ‘Byron. In-Between Sade, Lautréamont, and Foucault: Situating the Canon of “Evil” in the Nineteenth Century,’ DOI https://doi.org/10.7202/013591ar
[22] Praz, The Romantic Agony, 206.
[23] We might even discern a parallel development in homoeroticism: from an active attitude, as in Lord Byron, to a passive one, as in Huysmans’ Des Esseintes.
[24] Robert A. Yelle, ‘The Rebirth of Myth? Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and Its Romantic Antecedents,’ in: Numen, 47:2 (2000), 188.
23 comments
Cultural Marxism is Gramscism and the belief that the White race is the cancer of Human History as Sontag said. As for occult influence Crowley’s fame was at its height in the 1960s when CM was having its salad days, a big influence on The Beatles in particular.
Good article! What does “wokeism” stand for in left- wing circles? 🙃
the loony-left agree with following definition:
“woke” = (LGBTQ + anti-White)
Sleepwalking brain dead. Anti-White, all-White dependent xenophilia, (really negrophilia, keeping a social distance of at least 6 miles from diversity) weirdosexual, jew-tool, less-than-useful conformist idiots who are so goddamn stupid, they’re dangerous.
“Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke.”
To the left woke means being enlightened or awake, but what it really means is hatred of the White Man and all his achievements. Similar to Political Correctness or the Dead White Males movement in the 1980s, and of course CRT
The loony-left have a very high self-regard, which is entirely unfounded. That’s what makes them so comical and disgusting. They regard themselves as “progressive”, “enlightened”, and on the winning side of History. But they’re not any of these things.
They are really just decadent, delusional and suicidal.
All the stupidest of people have a laughably high opinion of themselves, none worse than blacks, who identify as kings, amerika-builders, astronauts, and samurai to overcompensate for being retarded.
Fantastic! Looking forward to the next part.
Nationalistic sentiments predate the Enlightenment, Romanticism, or the emergence of nation-states. The term itself may have been invented then, but the unity and defence of soil it proposes is one of primal concept. You can observe it in the animal kingdom too, with territorial creatures. Very good article!
I don’t deny at all that nationalist sentiment is much older than the 19th century, but the confrontation with the conquering troops of Napoleon made it flourish like never before.
The facade of that building looks like a gaping maw. 🙃
In my debut work nine years ago, I had a picture of that building captioned as “In the land of Mordor where shadows lie.”
Didn’t Skeletor have a castle that looked like a gaping skull—that is what it reminds me of? 🙃
Castle Grayskull. Thanks for bringing back the memories of the 1987 He-Man movie with Billy Barty, Dolph Lundgren, and a younger Courtney Cox.
The building certainly seems like a subject for Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month. Kunstler annoys me by neglecting his Eyesore of the Month and never updating it on the first day of the month. Often he doesn’t do it until a third of the way into the month, apparently not realizing it’s the only reason many people, including me, go to his site. He explicitly confirmed that he’s a jew despite being a half jew (I believe he wrote “I’m a jew”) when he supported the US and Israel war against Iran just recently.
The concept of “woke-ness” is a lot more convoluted than I thought. However, this article downplays the Jewish angle. I think that’s a mistake.
The Jews use “woke-ness” to kill off the White race. They created it. That’s all we need to know. Jews invented communism, psychoanalysis, transsexualism and open borders for the same purpose. There is no need to take their “ideas” too seriously.
kolokol: August 6, 2025 The Jews use “woke-ness” to kill off the White race. They created it. That’s all we need to know…
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Wrong. Jews did not create the word “woke.”
Jews created the anti-White Frankfurt School, yes. It’s history is not lost.
You can’t have Satanism without Jewish Christianity, and there’s little about the word “woke” that came from anything “cultish.” It was simply originated by American Negroes, butchering the English language, in the 1930s and ’40s. I pointed that out here with “Woke?” at whitebiocentrism.com five years ago and some unthinking so-called “white nationalists” still insist on using the word like it is theirs.
Woke?
Post by Will Williams » Fri Aug 28, 2020
I don’t pretend to be an English grammar scholar, but I know bad English when I hear it and “woke” is bad English, like Negroidal Ebonics, or something. I refuse to use “woke” or even to acknowledge its use, thanks.
Seems I’m right. Found this: “Despite the recent spike in its usage, ‘woke’ is not a new word. It was first used in the 1940s and was created as a political term by black Americans. It means to be awake to issues of social justice and racial justice.”
I axe you, what self-respecting White person would talk like a street nigger?
The Frankfurt School was entirely Jewish, all right. Read the definitive article about its history here: “Jewish Merchants of Sin and Porn, part 5: Psychoanalysis, Sexology, the Frankfurt School, and the ‘New Left’” at nationalvanguard.org
…In 1923, a group of Freudo-Marxist Jews founded the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. A decade later, when Hitler came to power, the Institute shut down and they were forced out of Germany. They came to America and resumed their work at Columbia University in New York, and became known as the “Frankfurt School.”
The Frankfurt School developed what is known as “Critical Theory.” Critical Theory is basically an overt Jewish intellectual assault on the Western world, done under the guise of high-minded idealism and weaponized pseudo-morality. It works to tear down, criticize, and “deconstruct” all of Western civilization and culture, by purporting to show how it is inherently and historically racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, homophobic, etc.
In essence, it is the Jewish reverse engineering of civilization, with the sexual morality that civilization has been built on a primary target for deconstruction, as the Freudian notion of “sexual repression” is frequently claimed to be at the root of many of the world’s problems.
The 1947 book Dialectic of Enlightenment by the Jews Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer — described as being “undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory” — portrays anti-Semitism as a mental illness in gentiles (Jewish behavior never figures into the equation, of course), and claims that civilization itself is repressive and evil….
Read a lot more at the link above.
I don’t see the term as entirely improper. So contemporary leftists came up with a short and memorable name for cultural Marxism. This backfired in recent years, when “woke” started to take on a bad odor from them fanatically embracing everything wrong, dysfunctional, and destructive. I don’t mind that outcome!
Beau,
I believe that you are correct in saying that this silly term has back-fired on them.
In fact, it has turned into a derogatory term; similar to what ‘gay’ turned into when used in the way that it was not sanctioned when used to describe something rather irksome.
Will,
Thanks for the information regarding the term ‘woke’. As someone that doesn’t come from the USA, I’d only heard the term ‘woke’ used by semi-outraged conservative media-types when describing screaming social activist-types. I actually thought it was a recently minted derogatory term for social justice warrior-types.
I also think that you are correct in recommending that people don’t use these silly made-up terms.
NS Crusty: August 7, 2025 Will, Thanks for the information regarding the term ‘woke’. I actually thought it was a recently minted derogatory term for social justice warrior-types. I also think that you are correct in recommending that people don’t use these silly made-up terms.
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Thanks, Crusty. SJW-types like to use the word, yes, but, unfortunately, so do some whites (lower case) who claim to be pro-White. Whites should use proper English, so it’s all right to say, for example, “I woke up this morning to my wife bringing me a cup of coffee.” Other than that, forget “woke.”
I’ll repeat some more of what I wrote five years ago on our little National Alliance forum about the Negro misuse of that word :
Woke?
by Will Williams » Fri Aug 28, 2020
I don’t pretend to be an English grammar scholar, but I know bad English when I hear it and “woke” is bad English, like Negroidal Ebonics, or something. I refuse to use “woke” or even to acknowledge its use, thanks.
Seems I’m right. Found this: Despite the recent spike in its usage, ‘woke’ is not a new word. It was first used in the 1940s and was created as a political term by black Americans. It means to be awake to issues of social justice and racial justice.
I axe you, what self-respecting White person would talk like a street nigger?
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FULL CONJUGATION OF “TO AWAKEN”
Indicative present
I awaken
you awaken
he/she/it awakens
we awaken
you awaken
they awaken
Present continuous
I am awakening
you are awakening
he/she/it is awakening
we are awakening
you are awakening
they are awakening
Simple past
I awakened
you awakened
he/she/it awakened
we awakened
you awakened
they awakened
Past continuous
I was awakening
you were awakening
he/she/it was awakening
we were awakening
you were awakening
they were awakening
Present perfect
I have awakened
you have awakened
he/she/it has awakened
we have awakened
you have awakened
they have awakened
Present perfect continuous
I have been awakening
you have been awakening
he/she/it has been awakening
we have been awakening
you have been awakening
they have been awakening
Past perfect
I had awakened
you had awakened
he/she/it had awakened
we had awakened
you had awakened
they had awakened
Past perfect continuous
I had been awakening
you had been awakening
he/she/it had been awakening
we had been awakening
you had been awakening
they had been awakening
Future
I will awaken
you will awaken
he/she/it will awaken
we will awaken
you will awaken
they will awaken
Future continuous
I will be awakening
you will be awakening
he/she/it will be awakening
we will be awakening
you will be awakening
they will be awakening
Future perfect
I will have awakened
you will have awakened
he/she/it will have awakened
we will have awakened
you will have awakened
they will have awakened
Future perfect continuous
I will have been awakening
you will have been awakening
he/she/it will have been awakening
we will have been awakening
you will have been awakening
they will have been awakening
Conditional present
I would awaken
you would awaken
he/she/it would awaken
we would awaken
you would awaken
they would awaken
Conditional present progressive
I would be awakening
you would be awakening
he/she/it would be awakening
we would be awakening
you would be awakening
they would be awakening
Conditional perfect
I would have awakened
you would have awakened
he/she/it would have awakened
we would have awakened
you would have awakened
they would have awakened
Conditional perfect progressive
I would have been awakening
you would have been awakening
he/she/it would have been awakening
we would have been awakening
you would have been awakening
they would have been awakening
Subjunctive
Present subjunctive
I awaken
you awaken
he/she/it awaken
we awaken
you awaken
they awaken
Past subjunctive
I awakened
you awakened
he/she/it awakened
we awakened
you awakened
they awakened
Past perfect subjunctive
I had awakened
you had awakened
he/she/it had awakened
we had awakened
you had awakened
they had awakened
Imperative
you awaken
we awaken
Participle
Present participle
awakening
Past participle
awakened
Occasional commentator on here Kerry Bolton’s books are very good on these topics. The laundry list of jewish and goodgoy traitor involvement as founders, funders, and directors of these radical post-war campus movements that ate away at amerikan society like an aggressive cancer is astounding.
A blend of observation and intuition has convinced me that something spiritual occurred in the West after World War II that had widespread, disastrous results. I’m sure that it has existence or roots going back centuries or millennia, and is something which sometimes manifests more openly than at other times, as in the French Revolution, the World Wars, the Frankfurt School, Kinsey, the Sexual Revolution, Wokeness, etc. I think that Christianity is right that every person is flawed, which explains some mistakes, weaknesses, and evils in history. But there seems to be an additional force or attribute which uses this human fallibility, and which needs to be fought. Something within human nature, or something spiritual. That’s why it’s wrong to ever say “Woke is dead.” And maybe Mick Jagger and Don McLean were onto something with their “Sympathy for the Devil” and “American Pie.” 🙂
This and other essays on intellectual history are very helpful and interesting. I’m looking forward to Part 2.
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