This was first published in Quadrant in 1983 and then online in 2014.
It’s a classic illustration as to how the entire Antonio Gramsci, March Through the Institutions campaign of the last 50 or 60 years and that I have been talking about for many years, works and unfolds.
Many people wonder what has happened and how it has all gone wrong with just about all of our institutions and how they’ve been hijacked with a massive lurch to social and cultural Marxism
Institutions as diverse as all levels of education, national broadcasters, (ABC and SBS) the state and federal bureaucracies, NGO’s, Quangos, the churches, the judiciary, police and even defense and many others. Some we don’t even think of as institutions so knit with our daily lives.
This is particularly about the ABC but it’s a template, a case study with the same modus operandi through all the institutions of Western democracies. The ABC’s Marxists
“….Incredibly, the main department in the ABC which concerns itself primarily with the role of ideas in our society, particularly the role of political ideas, has been, since its inception, a vehicle for Marxist and neo-Marxist propaganda clearly hostile to the values and institutions of liberal democracy. Over the years, the Marxist presence has spread throughout the ABC and is now a major force in many of the key areas of the ABC, including its union and management structures.
It is the contention of this article that this development has been assisted, no doubt unwittingly, by the abysmal failure of the ABC’s management and its Commission, over an extended period, to take the necessary action to halt a process which is obviously so destructive to the democratic well-being of our society. At the very least, it demonstrates a remarkably myopic evaluation of the importance of ideas to a healthy democracy on the part of management and the Commission.
It is important at this stage to get clear what is at issue. The primary problem with such radio programs as Lateline, Broadband and their successor programs Doubletake and Background Briefing, and to a lesser extent such television programs as Nationwide and Four Corners, is not their allegedly forthright and brave explorations of the world and the “frontiers of knowledge” but rather their persistent bias in favour of ideas, values and contributors whose primary function is to legitimise political values of the left to far left, while devaluing and discrediting ideas and values of a more moderate and conservative character..”