August  21, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 World Revolution, George Soros, and the Assault on the West

Friends,

Back between grad schools, I served as assistant to conservative writer and philosopher Russell Kirk, way up in Mecosta, Michigan. Other than my secretarial duties for Dr. Kirk I had I plenty of time to read (the Kirks had no television). And with Russell’s library of over 30,000 books I had a bibliophile’s cornucopia at my fingertips! Not only that, he was one of the most widely read of “teachers” a young grad student could ever have.

So, in addition to his vast collection of histories and biographies, I was able to read great literature, the classics—Sir Walter Scott, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Robert Lewis Stevenson, T. S. Eliot, and more ancient, Plutarch’s Lives, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Norse Sagas, Corneille, and, my favorites, the Spaniards Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca. I mention these not to boast, but only to say that my year with Dr. Kirk was very fruitful in multiple ways that I only now appreciate.

As I reflect and write essays, scenes and quotations from many of those classics come back to me, and many times seem to fit and support my narratives.

This morning, as I was assembling some items to send out, items that seemed to support a central theme, one of those quotes came to me. It is from Benjamin Disraeli, the great Conservative 19^th century British prime minister, prominently featured in Kirk’s signature work, The Conservative Mind (1953). It comes from one of Disraeli’s novels, Coningsby. Here it is: "So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."

Disraeli wrote those words over 170 years ago. But today, as we survey the decaying remnants of a culture that once was proudly the “Christian West,” that is, our inherited European civilization that has been with us and has shaped and annealed us for nearly two millennia—as we behold the very open, no-holds-barred attacks on this legacy, it is apparent that this decay and decrepitude has arrived not by accident, or even by frontal assault. Rather, the great success of Marxism has been to subvert and influence, to transform, the culture of the West from within, almost as if clandestinely. 

Shortly after the First World War the Italian Communist theoretician, Antonio Gramsci, formulated a theory regarding what he termed "cultural hegemony." The brilliant Gramsci, viewing the failure of "war communism" to overthrow the traditional order (e.g., the defeat of the Marxist revolutions in Germany and of the Soviets at the momentous Battle of Warsaw in 1920), understood that Marxist revolution could never be successful in its campaign against the historic Christian West through open military conflict.

Despite the ravages and debilitating effects of 19^th century liberalism, an overarching, traditionalist cultural and religious template—a “cultural hegemony”—yet guided much of Western thought, set standards, and governed conduct. This cultural hegemony, Gramsci postulated, must be overturned and replaced. The West would only be conquered if its traditional cultural and religious bases, grounded in an orthodox Christian faith, were transformed.

The past century has witnessed the implementation of this strategy, and, ironically, more so by Marxists in our midst, and less so by the more conservative and more nationalist Soviet Communists, especially under the guidance of Josef Stalin. This “cultural” Marxist long-march through our institutions began in earnest in the academy, in our schools and colleges. Various observers point to the tremendously wide-ranging success of the “Frankfort School” Marxist intellectuals, who, being Jewish, were driven out of National Socialist Germany in the 1930s, and thereupon set up shop in the United States at Columbia University. From that secure perch they exercised incredible influence in nearly every aspect of American (and European) intellectual life.

Indeed, as a grad student I remember that various works by Herbert Marcuse (in philosophy), Theodor Adorno (in sociology and music theory), Max Horkheimer (in social psychology), Erich Fromm (in psychoanalysis), and Jurgen Habermas (in history) were all the rage—several of my grad professors enthusiastically imposed them on me and my fellow grad students. What I began to realize even then was, taken as a whole, and with additional ideological support from such influential writers as Frantz Fanon (on colonialism, imperialism and “white oppression”) and Michel Foucault (on the transformation of social and political structures, and “critical theory”), what was occurring was an immense and universal effort to alter not just thinking patterns and social and political objectives, but our very language, itself.

And there was very little real opposition: the dominant intellectual force in the West through much of the 20^th century was a pliant and intellectually bankrupt liberalism, which could not withstand the withering critiques launched against it by cultural Marxism. Indeed, it can be argued that liberalism prepared the terrain for Marxist success.

Those older “liberal” writers and professors had done their damnedest to critique and bring down an even older, traditional order, politically, socially, and religiously, but they had nothing better or more permanent to replace it with. Their theories about “liberal democracy,” “equality,” “civil rights,” and “liberalization,” advocated and implemented to take the place of fealty to inherited tradition, belief in religious orthodoxy, and the existence of social orders and the inherent recognition that inequality is a natural condition of life—those nostrums, having weakened both the political and social fabric of historic Western society, left Europe and America open to the dazzlingly seductive attractions of a Marxism which was  not, like the Soviet brand, stodgy and kleptocratic.

The future of the world lay not with those septuagenarian and fossilized commissars standing immobile in Red Square annually on May Day to review Soviet armed might; it was with those cultural Marxists whose genealogy may be traced to the internationalist vision of Leon Trotsky and his minions, who had, over the decades, revolutionized the thinking, goals, and very language of the West—and whose mindset, whose template, had not only re-invigorated a once-thought-dead Marxism, but had established its preeminence and “cultural hegemony” across the broad spectrum of all Western thought and culture.

This, then, is what those of us yet faithful to that much older tradition, that orthodox Christian and Western inheritance, face. Across the political and cultural landscape even those supposed opponents of this advancing Progressivism—and their final assault on what is left of our inherited but severely endangered legacy—those supposed opponents employ its language and tacitly accept its ultimate objectives. Thus, those so-called Neoconservatives and their Republican camp followers serve, in their own circuitous manner, to both enable and sanctify the conquests of the Progressivist and Marxist advances.

Still, the universal conflict, which apparently seemed lost for us, is not over. November 2016 proved that, and the fitful awakening here in the United States and the growth of a nationalist conservative and populist and traditionalist reaction in Europe, illustrate that.

And that is precisely why we see the increased, feverish, and hysterically unbridled reactions by the multifaceted forces of the Progressivist “Deep State.” That reaction takes many forms, most particularly in the United States by the open warfare waged on President Trump (and even more on his agenda) by the Mainstream Media and its acolytes in both political parties, in academia, and in popular culture.

Among the influential, worldwide “gray eminences”—political and spiritual “godfathers”—of the Progressivist offensive is the international billionaire George Soros, whose tentacles reach into nearly every corner of the world. Through his Open Society Foundations he funnels billions of dollars into Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) whose work on the ground in dozens of countries is to influence and subvert any nation that may resist incorporation into a New World Order, the actual and ultimate objective of the Deep State, and, thus, the final stage and triumph of a new “cultural hegemony” envisaged by Antonio Gramsci. 

According to the foundations' website   [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Society_Foundations], 1993–2014, its    expenditures included:

·         $2.9 billion to defend human rights, especially the rights of women; ethnic, racial, and religious minorities; drug users; sex workers; and LGBTQ communities;

·         $2.1 billion for education;

·         $1.6 billion on developing democracy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union;

·         $1.5 billion in the United States to promote reform in criminal justice, drug policy, palliative care, education, immigration, equal rights, and democratic governance;

·         $737 million for public health issues such as HIV and AIDS, TB, palliative care, harm reduction, and patients' rights;

·         $214 million to advance the rights of Roma communities in Europe.

Soros’s vision conveniently coincides with the overall domestic goals of the Deep State/establishment in everything from support for "immigration reform" to funding for gun control, expanding "voting rights," the destruction of gender identity,  and the efforts of such groups as "Black Lives Matter." 

In foreign policy, his tentacles have reached into far off Georgia in the Caucasus, to Ukraine,  to Syria, or to countless other locales. With his pyramid of pass-through funding foundations, his NGOs, and his close linkage and connections to leaders in the European Union, Washington, and on Wall Street, he pushes his globalist agenda, including "open borders" and economic and social "dirigisme." And increasingly Soros lends support for overturning legitimately chosen governments that reject his  vision (e.g., the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, and more recently his efforts to undermine the government of Viktor Orban in Hungary).

But you will hear nary a word about his nefarious tentacles of influence from the Mainstream Media. If you mention him and his international, behind-the-scenes influence, you are immediately labeled a “conspiracy theorist nut” or worse.

Yet, Soros fits Disraeli’s description of 170 years ago; if there ever was confirmation, he exemplifies it.  He epitomizes that occult face of the “blood dimmed tide” of Revolution against God and man that poet William Butler Yeats warned of in 1919—at the very same moment in time when Antonio Gramsci was authoring his theories that would prove so fatal to the West.

He who would know the truth, must then act upon it. Over the past year or so the actual character, the real face of the Revolution, has been revealed as perhaps never before. Although lacking many of the resources and weaponry of our Enemies, those of us resolved not only to defend what is left of our culture and our Western Christian civilization, and, if possible, to restore it, must be as bold and as cunning as Nathan Bedford Forrest, as wise and as prudential as Marse Robert Lee, and as patient and as calculating as our Enemies who understood that to conquer the seemingly unconquerable, it will take time, and above all, persistence, intelligence and constancy. And, for us, at the foundation of it all, Faith.