The '68 Revolution and the Abortion of Freedom

by Bostian Marco Turk

Bostian Marco Turk analyzes the deep-cutting, long-running effects of the 1968 Revolution that forever changed the West by unleashing a project of dismantling identity and reducing the human being to a disposable object at the whims of wokeism and transhumanism.

The ‘68 revolution was an event after which nothing was the same. Its preservation is mainly maintained by the fact that it is a permanent revolution, which is precisely why its authors do everything to keep it at bay. Man should be freed from the burdens of the past in order to become available for expenditure. But Marxism, the ‘68 cultural revolution and false liberalism have one thing in common: the international character of timelessness. They pursue the internationalist dream by freeing man from fundamental refuges or cultural identity. What is particularly interesting is that all three ideologies abolish the institution of the state. Socialism taught that the state was dying because communism was an international phenomenon that would sooner or later dominate the whole earth.

Postmodern liberalists, who speak of planetary government and seek to impose globalism as radically as possible through a federal Europe, want to do the same. The global consumer, freed from the constraints of the past (religion, family, country, nation—memory), can consume more and more, and in this way generate capital. This includes the tools of social communication: Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, etc., which “multilateral” organizations control, indirectly, by putting pressure on their owners at opportune moments (for example, the removal of the US president’s twitter account after the events of January 6, 2021).

These tools are designed to promote pleasure and enjoyment. Their space is the moment in which they are articulated. This pattern is particularly relevant to social networks, which appeal to the immediate present. They are the exclusive space of current events, in which the passage of time has no place. Certain configurations (Facebook, for example) no longer offer the possibility of a more complex expression of the past. The fact is, this social network is designed in such a way that it is mainly used to show things on a synchronic axis. It is hard to find old messages on this subject. There is no doubt that this is deliberately done to help people forget past events ever more quickly than the present.

Social networks are therefore the most testing “now” that man has ever invented. This presupposes that we express ourselves freely, without the rules imposed by normative behavior, the reflex of which is standard language. Standard language is rarely found on these channels. And yet, communication that conforms to linguistic norms constitutes a relationship with civilization. Nevertheless, like everything else in nature (in the universe conceived as space-time), civilization exists in three time slices, not just one.

It is a bizarre experiment. We can already foresee what it will lead to. The exclusivist emphasis on the present moment will suffer the same fate as social and biological experiments in societal planning. It will end in colossal failure. The experiment undertaken in the name of the false liberalism of post-communism is based on the idea of the absolute freedom of the consumer, free from the burdens of the past. This is understood in the sense that the reign of infinite purchasing, with all the complicity it presupposes, represents a realm outside civilization. The two have nothing in common. This is nothing new, since a similar thing happened under communism. It was unanimously recognized as a break with history. Today, however, the ways out of civilization are different.

The liberated man must also abandon the morality of erotic pleasure. Here, the difference with the tradition of totalitarianism is only superficial… Today, the conception of the family is seen as an option among others, rather than an imperative necessity, even envisaging the possibility of its future obsolescence. This vision lies at the heart of what is perceived as a major demographic threat to the West. In this context, sexual morality is no longer considered an indisputable absolute. The origins of this change in attitude can be traced back to the cultural revolutions of 1968, which advocated sexual liberation in its most diverse forms, including controversial ones such as pedophilia and incest.

This evolution was seen as necessary, at a time when sexuality has become an inescapable component of marketing strategies, moving away from its primary function of reproduction. For example, in extremis, it is no longer possible to imagine a toothpaste ad without an allusion to sexual behavior. However, it could well be argued that this is a shameless intrusion into the innermost recesses of the human being. Discretion in this area is the alpha and omega of his civilizational identity. In fact, this is one of the mainstays of any great society. From this point of view, we can understand why the LGBT+, who have taken over from the ‘68 deviations, are working assiduously to dismantle this preponderant marker of man.

But at the same time, essential things are linked to the question of freedom. What is human freedom? It is openness to the transcendent: for man to be free, he must not be hindered in his metaphysical aspirations. All belief is liberating, because it gives man God, who is the inalienable part of his freedom. It provides a means of exercising that freedom: the covenant. When God enters into a covenant, he does so in order to enable man to realize his freedom. We could call this the vertical freedom of Western man, because it is founded on the awareness of the covenant. European identity is the memory and horizon of the covenant. At this stage of its development, the West has reiterated its original moment. In so doing, it has established itself as such.

It is also the way in which the whole of philosophy, science and art developed. There is no European art without a relationship between the point of origin and the point of creation. There is no horizontal art, just as there is no horizontal man, no man without anchorage in civilization, more precisely in the past. Imagine Michelangelo’s Rebellious Slave, the Rubens paintings in Marie de Medici’s room at the Louvre, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice simultaneously, i.e., one-dimensionally, with nothing to suggest additional chains of context. Try to understand them without any link to the past from which they originate. You cannot.

True freedom is referential, relational. The kind of freedom advocated by the literature of the absurd, Marxism, Communism and Freudianism, however, presents its opposite. None of these recognize human autonomy, let alone the freedom that logically follows from it. Sartre taught that the pinnacle of realization lies in the actualization of the self for the sake of (abstract) freedom. Man is condemned to it; it is given to him and everything is at his disposal. But he must use it correctly, for it is meant to serve self-realization. Yet man cannot actualize himself vertically, because this axis is suspended. The past is crossed out. This leaves only the horizontal, the simultaneous. Clearly, this type of self-realization is a plastic artifact, detached from human essence, linked to superficial, instantaneous identities, denying the person’s metaphysical identity. It is a counterfeit approximation of the real thing. It is the freedom of nothingness.

Secondly, the horizontal way of being presupposes simultaneity: I live here and now, in the collective. Or on Facebook, or on one of the social networks, if we take into account the diversity of circumstances in the comparison. Man is supposed to realize himself with others, in the aspiration to freedom, which is understood as a revolutionary liberation: class, national, colonial liberation, liberation from institutions, from morality for a program of universal brotherhood: “Let’s wipe the slate clean of the past,” sings “The Internationale.” The subversive formula does not presuppose many positive things. But it does imply something very foreign to the logic of life, namely death. A man who is a mere consumable object of ideology can be sacrificed…

The simultaneous present oriented towards self-realization “here and now” presupposes the end of the West. Society is based on spending, on the urgent need to satisfy consumer instincts immediately. Consumerism thus reaches into the deepest recesses of human consciousness, as it is reflected in civilization. The reign of the present destroys what it is not capable of integrating, or rather, of reducing to a one-dimensional form in which all that is not linked to the present moment disappears, first and foremost the genealogical awareness of our origins.

This is no idle exaggeration. The fatal maneuver has already begun, as Michel Onfray points out. The following words indicate just how close we are to an orchestrated decomposition:

“When we stop preserving the memory of our ancestors, when we are no longer able to reconstitute the genealogical branch of our own family, when we lose ourselves in the confusion of what created and established us, we are witnessing the shipwreck of civilization. In fact, we no longer care about history, we no longer care about the past, in fact, we hate it. We falsify classic authors by rewriting them. So many things that are part of history are not taught because they simply don’t seem interesting for today’s vision. We can no longer read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary because it’s too long. We help ourselves with extracts. And then there are the authors we shouldn’t talk about because they’re politically incorrect. My colleagues no longer read classic French literature. In the hatred we harbor for the past, in the unbearable present, and in the configurations of the future we don’t know what they will bring, we can see the collapse of Western civilization.”

From this point of view, we also understand that the relay of the ‘68 uprising, the ideology of wokeism, has as its primary objective the dismantling of history and of what lies in the temporal cleft we call the past. Man must not perpetuate its memory, which is why monuments should be demolished. The personalities depicted on them, especially if they have helped shape the world today, should be erased.

However, the promoters of wokeist iconoclasm are glossing over the fact that debunking is not their invention. This is what the Taliban did in Afghanistan in the late 1990s when they blew up Buddha statues. Later, members of the Islamic State took up the practice. In Palmyra, for example, they destroyed the world-famous Tetrapyle monument.

Nevertheless, the destruction of monuments would not be the final objective. Those who thought that the perversion of civilization would stop at reading choices or tearing down statues were mistaken. For the disintegration of the West is taking place from the perspective of the first “value” of derailed beliefs: the instrumentalization of the individual for the “ultimate goal,” the collateral damage of which would be his physical collapse. Because the implementation of the deconstructive ideologies automatically presupposes “ritual” offerings. Not to mention Freud, who based his teaching on the self-destructive instinct. This is said to be the primary, albeit subconscious, motive of human beings… For death has been made the cornerstone of an ideology that has set itself the goal of the very happiness of man’s life on earth.

Such an oxymoron has remained intact at the heart of the mythology with which Marx’s heirs terrorized the West and with which, in a new metamorphosis, abundantly lined with Freudianism, they intimidate it once again. For the annihilation of death’s power over us—in the name of “freeing” men from their ills—is not the prototype of the first metaphysical revolt. Freudo-Marxists are not to blame alone. In particular, “original sin” has been integrated into the rhythm of modern civilization, which does away with God in order to better manipulate man, right up to the final act, which is the annihilation of his existence. Today, as in the past, the individual is a mere project in the clutches of ideology, his life worthless except insofar as it can support the construction of the whole. He is part of the project; if it does not work, he is out.

The consensus of the behemoth trying to take over the West is profit. From the outset, it excludes mankind, especially its higher faculties. The individual is of interest only insofar as he or she can serve as an element in an ever-expanding mercantilism. The whole becomes the exclusive formula of what — once again — Michel Onfray calls the civilization of transhumanism.

Even George Orwell would shudder at its structural elements. In just a few sentences, the philosopher brings together his ideas on civilization in a way that could serve as the West’s new postmodern anthem, “The Internationale,” updated for the needs of a post-industrial, post-biological society. Thus:

“We are heading towards a civilization called transhumanism, which means the invention of everything that is. Everything that is nature today is being destroyed. We hate nature, even if we keep fantasizing about it and doing this or that about ecology, which is always about urban nature. We’re not interested in nature as such, by the way: we live in hatred of it, because only what we’ve already invented is acceptable to us.”

We have to separate human beings from the community, individualize them, and then distance them from the very foundations of their identity: starting with their sex, age and, in short, everything to do with their biology. According to its etymological roots, biology is defined as the study of living things: bios is as much about living as it is about being alive. When we intervene in the structure, development and functioning of man, at all levels, we literally intervene in his life. No revolutionary ideology in history has had such ambitions. They were all content to intervene in man’s social being, without touching his biology. And what they all had in common was that they failed, while causing a great deal of misery.

The revolution of ‘68, unlike all the others, was a “success,” but its consequences are present in its disruptive action in the field of society and human biology. The most trying after-effect is wokeism, which is galloping along at a hallucinating pace. What yesterday was science fiction is today exclusive reality. Michel Onfray explains:

“No boy, no girl, no man, no woman. There is what you want. There is a project. There are no children, no teenagers, no adults. A young girl like Greta Thunberg can be an adult. At the same time, a child in its mother’s womb can be a dead person, a corpse. If this is no longer our project, our plan, we can kill this child in the ninth month, a few days before birth, because it becomes a question of law, in relation to which we carry out the murder.”

Indeed, in France, on August 31, 2020, on the initiative of the left, a law was passed authorizing abortion up to the end of the ninth month of pregnancy. This is called IMG, interruption médicale de grossesse (Medical termination of pregnancy). It can be carried out right up to childbirth, because the law explicitly states: “up to the end of the pregnancy.” It is a (legal) murder, decided by a panel of four experts. If they give a positive opinion, the child is killed (euthanized) in the same way as the death penalty is carried out in the USA.

This is the “integral humanism” of today’s Europe, the ultimate proof of philanthropy carried out according to the “war in the name of peace” model. Here is the interest of those who govern for the most vulnerable among Europeans: “After nine months, a child can be removed from its mother’s womb for psychosocial reasons and given a lethal injection. The human being has become a thing. Those who plan this think: ‘A child is a trifle, or nothing at all.’ The same applies if you’re old, frail, weak or disabled. You are no longer profitable, so you must leave.”

The law was passed by the (wokeist) left in the name of human freedoms (abortion rights intact). The child is not defined as a person, but as a “project.” If you are in favor of the project, that is fine, but if you change your mind, that too can be settled. Everyone will understand that you are not as interested as you were in the beginning. The nominal justification (the term project) has been provided by false liberalism, which, taking advantage of the ‘68 left, has transformed itself into an omnipresent organization, from Washington to London via Brussels, Berlin and Paris. It has its own name — and its own logic. Here again, Onfray does not spare an explanation: “The deep state functions on the principle that everything can be turned into a thing, and on this basis, we could get rid of those who are no longer productive, more profitable. That is what I call populocide.”

The reduction of man to a marketable object applies to all aspects of life. The laws of transhumanism have the force of a law that governs things a priori. Thus,

“The same applies to the other extreme of life as it does to the unborn. You’re no longer productive, so you’re finished. Covid is the ideal solution for such a maneuver. We treat the elderly by socially anesthetizing them when we place them in places like nursing homes. There, we kill them emotionally in a way that takes away their will to live. The staff tell them, ‘You won’t see your children and grandchildren, or you’ll see them from a distance.’ They’ll be behind the glass, waving at you loudly, but you won’t understand a thing, because they’ll be wearing masks anyway.”

What about the finale of the new “Internationale,” whose chords are written in monetary currency, preferably in that which most closely resembles musical notation, the dollar ($)? It reads: “It’s about destroying human nature in order to create a hybrid man, a fiction, an artifact. It’s a rejection of nature, a rejection of common sense, a rejection of the obvious in favor of the artificial. Everything is a commodity, everything is a fetish.” And the reason behind it?

“The Deep State seeks to put an end to identities, particularities and nations. The aim is to build a great Europe that will devour all peoples. Once it’s built, they’ll turn it into an even bigger colossus. It will be called a planetary government. The technicians will be in power, introducing the final solution for those who can no longer be exploited.”

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The above text is an excerpt from Bostian Marco Turk’s new book, War in the Name of Peace: The ’68 Revolution and the Disintegration of the West, fresh off the press from Arktos. If you liked this selection, be sure to check out the whole book.