Mark Latham: The new ideological war is already on the home front

A NEW ideological battle for our hearts and minds is being waged inside some of Australia’s institutions, writes Mark Latham.

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AS we honour those who fought for our country on this glorious national day, it has become doubly important to remember what they fought for.

It wasn’t just freedom and democracy. It was also the gains of 17th-century Enlightenment.

Four centuries ago, Western society came out of the darkness of the Middle Ages and embraced the ideals of advanced learning, science and culture. It became known as the Age of Reason, as mankind abandoned its prejudices and superstitions, creating a new world of rational, evidence-based thinking.

Today, when we talk about Western civilisation, this is what we mean.

It’s what the Anzacs fought for: rejecting the barbarism of the Ottoman Empire and later, in World War II, the many sins of Nazism and Tojo.

Japanese Imperial soldiers in the early days of WWII.

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

I’m from an age group (born 1961) that hasn’t had to fight wars in defence of our country.

I thought we were the lucky generation, consolidating the achievements of the Anzacs in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

But in recent years, that’s all changed. Our civilisation is under attack from forces within.

Aussies celebrate Victory in the Pacific Day in 1945, complete with an effigy of Japanese prime minister Tojo.

A new fight for Australia has begun, a battle for our values inside the nation’s institutions.

At one extreme, radical Islam wants to destroy parliamentary democracy, replacing it with sharia law. At the other extreme, “progressives” in the political system have fanatically pursued identity politics: judging people, not by their character and individuality, but by how they look — their race, gender and sexuality. My opposition to identity politics firmed up last year when I researched the Respectful Relationships school curriculum.

The program was supposed to address concerns about domestic violence, but its teaching materials had nothing to do with that. They were based on gender fluidity, telling students that nothing is fixed in biological science. On a daily basis, girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

A new war: Iraqi Federal Police do battle with Islamic State fighters in Mosul. Picture: AP

The NSW government has abolished Safe Schools but its sister program, Respectful Relationships, also needs to go. As I dug deeper, the program’s author, Debbie Ollis from Deakin University, brazenly declared Respectful Relationships to be a form of “post-structural understanding of gender construction”.

This is where the danger lies.

Labor and Liberal education ministers have introduced this course into classrooms without understanding its ideological basis.

It’s a radical “hegemony theory”, centred on personal identity. In the 1930s Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci tried to answer the puzzle as to why, following the 1917 Russian Revolution, there had not been any more communist uprisings.

He argued that the working class had been seduced by hegemony: the communications and values systems of capitalism had tricked people into supporting the politics of free enterprise. In the 1970s and ’80s, European Marxists updated this theory to address questions of identity. They argued that modern capitalism has fried our brains — that no one can truly know themselves and their race, gender and sexuality due to the impact of systemic propaganda.

While most people regard the Enlightenment as a wonderful period of progress, the identity-Left see it as a “capitalist construct” designed to mislead us. Post-structuralist Marxism also seeks to undermine the credibility of recorded history, telling students that what we know about the past has been manipulated by capitalism. This is winding back the gains of the Enlightenment, junking evidence as the basis of knowledge.

Similar nonsense is being pushed in our universities, with campus “safe spaces” segregating so-called minorities from scary “privileged white men”. Fears of a mental health “anxiety epidemic” have also contributed to the fragility of young Australians, with many now believing that identity confusion is a natural state of mind.

Perhaps the biggest worry is in employment policy. Across the public and private sectors, people are no longer being hired on merit but by their appearance. Racial, gender and sexuality quotas mean if the best person for the job is a straight white man, he has no guarantee of getting it.

In the Australian Public Service and corporate-left outfits like Westpac and Telstra, he will most likely miss out. Through identity politics, anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual discrimination has been institutionalised. The Left has tried to justify this practice by inventing the concept of “unconscious bias” — that subliminally we all hate women, blacks and gays. For wackiness, the theory is up there with left-feminist notions of “repressed misogyny” and “repressed racism”: the argument that any woman or black American who voted for Donald Trump did so because they had internalised capitalism’s hatred of themselves.

It’s complete garbage. I’m a white man and I love black gay women. I wish I knew more of them. One of the great gains of the Enlightenment was the concept of meritocracy.

You no longer needed to look like a feudal lord to get ahead in society.

After 400 years of supporting merit-based recruitment, the Left has junked its core belief in fairness.

It has gone back to the medieval practice of judging people by their appearance, seduced by the superstition of “unconscious bias”.

Post-structuralist Marxism is a bigger threat to Western civilisation than the state Marxism of the 20th century. The old Soviet Union was a clearly defined and highly visible rival. Now the enemy is within.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Left got a lot smarter, advancing its ideology through public institutions. It’s been clever in targeting social issues as a ruse, a Trojan Horse for identity politics.

On the surface, campaigning against school bullying, domestic violence, mental anxiety and gender inequality is as sweet as syrup.

In practice, however, it’s a clever way of masking the poison of post-structuralist Marxism.

Have no doubt: the Anzacs trapped in the trenches of Gallipoli would have been horrified by the rise of identity politics in Australia. In their name, and for the sake of fairness and meritocracy, it must be defeated.