In recent days we have seen a sequence of events – establishment endorsement of Islamic groups post-Charlie Hebdo, harassment of Christian schools by Ofperv inspectors, legalisation of eugenic experimentation via the creation of three-parent children, etc – that have highlighted the exponential advance of Cultural Marxism.

Society’s most fundamental building blocks – the family, relations between men and women, inherited culture – are being systematically demolished. Uniquely in history, those who call themselves conservatives are in the forefront of this cultural revolution.

Before any effective resistance can be mounted against this onslaught, it is a prerequisite that we should understand our enemy: intelligence is the most powerful weapon in any war. What is the Frankfurt School? What is Cultural Marxism? The facts, though unadvertised for obvious reasons, are accessible. To trace this iniquity it is necessary to go back to 1919 and the murderous communist dictatorship of Bela Kun in Hungary.

The deputy “People’s Commissar for Culture and Education” in that short-lived regime was Georg Lukacs. Under his programme of “cultural terrorism”, Lukacs imposed a system of pornographic sex education on Hungarian school pupils, promoted promiscuity, denounced the family and encouraged children to mock their parents and religion (does any of this ring a bell?). The question he posed was: “Who will save us from Western Civilisation?”

The Kun regime quickly fell, but Lukacs’ claim that cultural subversion was the best means of promoting revolution impressed Lenin. Late in 1922, on Lenin’s instructions, a meeting was called at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Present were: Georg Lukacs; Karl Radek, representing Lenin; Felix Dzherzhinsky, founder and head of the Cheka (later KGB); and Willi Munzenberg, a leader of the Comintern, later murdered by Stalin.

The strategy decided on at that meeting was to subvert intellectuals “and use them to make Western civilisation stink”, in Munzenberg’s words, and to graft Freud’s ideas onto Marxism, exploiting sexual anarchy to destroy that same civilisation. The following year, 1923, an Institute of Marxism was established at Frankfurt which, to camouflage its purpose, soon changed its name to the Institute for Social Research and became commonly known as the Frankfurt School.

The Institute built up a cadre of cultural Marxists, including Max Horkheimer, Erick Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 the Frankfurt School migrated to the United States. There its members set about poisoning American culture, based in Columbia University. Theodor Adorno promoted degenerate atonal music to induce mental illness, including necrophilia, on a large scale. He and Horkheimer also penetrated Hollywood, recognising the film industry’s power to influence mass culture. The American schools system was a prime target for successful subversion.

By the post-War era the Cultural Marxist programme had a wide-reaching agenda of destruction. It aimed to destroy the family, denying the specific roles of the father and mother, and advocated the teaching of sex and homosexuality to children; mobilisation of women as revolutionaries against men, through aggressive feminism; large-scale immigration to abolish national identity; dependency on the state and state benefits; control and infantilisation of the media.

The great canon of Western literature was demolished by pygmies in the name of “deconstruction”, exploiting the intellectual snobbery of insecure academics. Universities today are the worst enemies of independent thinking and free speech: in the words of Robert Lind, all American campuses have become “small, ivy-covered North Koreas”.

The Frankfurt idea of “pansexualism” which underpinned the so-called sexual revolution in the 1960s was championed by Herbert Marcuse, an admirer of the Marquis de Sade’s “polymorphous perversity”. Concepts such as childhood, innocence, virtue were anathema to the Frankfurt School, as was traditional order in society. The Frankfurt School enjoyed two key advantages: since it presented itself as a “critical theory”, advancing a purely negative critique of society and offering no alternatives, it could not be compelled to defend its own theses; and by uncoupling Marxism from the command economy its ideas were able not only to survive the collapse of the Soviet system but to flourish thereafter.

The term “political correctness” – clearly incompatible with a pluralist society – was confected by Anton Semyonovich Makarenko, Lenin’s education guru and favourite wordsmith, who also coined the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Today its monopolist tyranny is maintained by such devices as the “availability cascade”, meaning the pervasive availability in the media of PC views to the exclusion of contrary opinions (cf. the BBC), the “reputational cascade” pouring disapproval on dissidents (cf. Twitter) and the “chilling effect” freezing out dissent. To mould opinion an ugly Newspeak vocabulary (“homophobia”, “Islamophobia”, etc) has been invented, supported by coercive legislation.

That is how we came to our present predicament. If we are to reverse it, we need to understand its origins. The Frankfurt School itself now belongs to history, but it has spawned a Common Purpose generation of useful idiots perpetuating its evil and destructive power. The challenge now is to destroy the destroyers.