The news is full of the word “woke.” Woke people, woke agenda, woke action. Television and internet show woke people burning things down. What is this?
“Woke” is one piece of Marxism. Marx says we are exploited and oppressed. Oppression is woven through the system. The system itself is oppressive. Oppression is so second-nature in everything around us that we are unconscious of it. We need transformative Marxist knowledge to raise our consciousness, to wake us up.
When Marx says, “Religion is the opium of the masses,” he is talking about the need to be woke. Religion is a tool of oppression because it keeps people asleep. Like opium, it deadens pain and clouds the truth. Religion sooths suffering and gives false hope. So Marxist revolutions remove images of Christ, defile statues of the Virgin Mary, break stained glass windows out of churches, and enforce speech codes against pastors and priests preaching the Gospel.
We are familiar with Marxism in economics. But Cultural Marxism applies to all of culture. The exploited, exploiter, and oppressive system are not only laborers, capitalists, and capitalism. The exploited are the colonized, Blacks, women, the poor, animals, Earth, gays, and transgenders, to name a few. Exploiters are males, Aryans, governments, Whites, landlords, journalists, police, etc. The oppressive systems are imperialism, colonialism, Jewish world conspiracy, patriarchy, racism, sexism, globalization, speciesism, misogyny, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, militarism, cisgenderism, nativism, and matrimony.
What seems at the surface to be a thousand different things really boil down to one thing: sleeping victims in systemic oppression.
For wokism, we do not live in a basically good system that has faults which could be reformed. The system in total is oppressive. Wokism must get rid of everything.
That is what wokism has done in each of its revolutions around the world. Cultural Marxism multiplies victims until it has a large enough street army to burn down the system.
To be merely a reformer of the faults of the system is to be still asleep. You who are not part of the revolution, not marching, not spray painting, not burning are guilty because that makes you part of the system. Hear the woke slogan, “Your silence is violence.” That is why you deserve violence.
Americans have the idea it can’t happen here. What would stop it?
It won’t be us who stop it when we are too busy being practical. The student of American religion, William James, described “American pragmatism.” Pragmatism measures the truth of an idea by its practical outcome. We believe in Christ only if things go better with him. America worships Practical Jesus. The concern a few people have about Cultural Marxism tearing down America is not practical, people think. Being concerned about it does not pay the bills, do the laundry, mow the lawn, get the kids’ homework done, or fill leisure time. We are so practical, we might “practical” ourselves right out of our country.
What should “woke” mean?
