July 15, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Understanding the War against the West
(Latest Published Essay in THE REMNANT)
Thursday,
June 28, 2018
Understanding
the War against the West
Written
by Dr. Boyd D.
Cathey
As we celebrate the 242nd anniversary
of this nation’s declaration of independence from Great Britain, perhaps it is
useful and productive to reflect on some issues that continue to deeply affect
us as a country in 2018.
Between the late 1940s—the beginning of what we
call the “Cold War”—and the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991, America and its
allies were engaged in a worldwide military, economic, and ideological defense
of what our political leaders variously called, somewhat nebulously, “freedom,”
“the democratic way of life,” or, better said, “our Western Christian
civilization.” Although we were not totally agreed on just what we
were defending, we did know, or at least most of us knew, what we were
defending against: international Communism, a tyrannical system of
government and of life antithetical to everything we considered noble, worthy,
and sacred.
Communism had some definite advantages, at least on
paper: it possessed a unity of purpose, a standard ideological narrative,
generally centralized control of its political apparatus emanating from Moscow
(with eventual exceptions of China, Yugoslavia, and perhaps a few other
states), a revolutionary fervor and a certain attractiveness in the developing
or “Third World.” It also faced a West that oftentimes appeared disunited in
its strategy and approach to the Communist menace, from those who advocated
victory over it, to others who strenuously desired to find a modus
vivendi with it.
But its inherent weaknesses would bring the old
Soviet Union to an ignominious end. By the 1980s the Soviet state and most of
its European satellites suffered from disastrous economic policies, the
ossification of its leadership cadres, and an inability to meet the increasing
challenges of recrudescent internalized nationalism or to stanch the revival
of traditional religious belief. This spelled the inglorious demise of the
system that many disillusioned writers in the 1930s had once proclaimed as the
“bright future of mankind.” In the end, those factors combined with American economic
might, the political determination of the Reagan administration, and the rise
of such powerful forces as Solidarnosz [Solidarity] and the stepped up
opposition of the Catholic Church (e.g., in Poland), witnessed the truth of T.
S. Eliot’s poetic expression: “How does the world end, Not with a bang, but a
whimper.”
Yet, as scholar Professor Paul Gottfried has
demonstrated in his studies, most especially in The Strange Death of
Marxism, a virulent strain of Marxism continued and thrived, ironically, at
the same time as an ossified Communism seemed to perish. As he explains, this
variant of Marxism was less myopically dedicated to the eradication of
capitalism, as long as it could control and manipulate capitalism
internationally. What was singularly important for it was the revolutionary
subversion and transformation of cultural, educational and religious
institutions. And in its efforts to achieve that objective in Europe and in the
United States, it has been singularly successful.
I can remember clearly the epidemic of student
demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s (when I was in grad school at the
University of Virginia). Many of my fellow grad students, some deeply involved
in Leftist and Marxist organizations, now teach at prestigious universities. The
ideas and narratives they absorbed and developed back then form the corpus of
what they instill into the minds of undergraduates and graduate students today.
And those ideas have by no means been moderated since then; rather they have
become even more pronounced.
And who can forget the radical revolution in the
arts, and, in particular, in music at approximately the same time. In the 1950s
on network television (only three national networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS) there
were such prime time programs as “Voice of Firestone,” “Bell Telephone Hour,”
and classical artists (e.g., Joan Sutherland, Beverly Sills) frequently
appeared on Ed Sullivan and many other programs. The Metropolitan Opera was
broadcast on hundreds of commercial radio stations throughout
the nation—in the Raleigh, NC, area there were only three stations, and the
largest, WPTF (an NBC affiliate) offered the Met each Saturday during the
season. The other two presented selections of genuine country and what I would
call “big band” music. Even Elvis Prestley, while a gyrating pioneer in
“rock-and-roll,” also was famous for his Gospel songs. There was, to summarize
it, a connection between average American citizens and their
inherited musical traditions.
Yet, it was on the Ed Sullivan program that the Beatles
made their real American premiere, followed by the Rolling Stones and countless
others. That was the audial sign that “things are’a changing,” and that
eventually many of those “links” to our past would be severed, and the
inherited traditions and culture that once were familiar to our fathers and
grandfathers would be exiled or pigeon-holed, and that legacy desiccated. In
1940 forty-five million American listeners, from every walk of life, would tune
into the Metropolitan Opera one Saturday afternoon and hear soprano Lily Pons,
onstage and live, sing “La Marseillaise,” and emotionally connect, as one, with
her on the fall of France. By the 1970s that unity seemed to be hanging by a
thread, and it has only gotten worse since then.
In a few short years, the legacy of and link to
“high Western culture” had been severed and expelled from popular view, and the
“Voice of Firestone,” “Bell Telephone Hour,” and the Met, were either off the
air or exiled to the remote niche of “public radio.”
The 1960s into the 1970s became the time of “drugs,
sex, and rock-and-roll.” Radical changes took place in how this nation
understood marriage, the family and sex, and how we viewed the experimentation
and use of drugs. Moral actions and beliefs once considered beyond the pale,
were now, at first cautiously, propagated as normal, or, at least acceptable.
And this transformation had its turbulent echo in
religion, in particular, in mainline Christianity. From 1962 until 1965 the
Catholic Church convoked the Second Vatican Council. As Professor Roberto de
Mattei has carefully documented in his magisterial study, The Second
Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story (2012), the council was hijacked
almost from the beginning by a liberal-Modernist bloc, centered in Germany,
France and the Low Countries. Indeed, as Father Ralph M. Wiltgen wrote just two
years after the council, “the Rhine had most definitely flowed into the Tiber.”
And the practical results, although pitched as a necessary pastoral,
non-doctrinal updating, were, in fact, disastrous to both the Church’s teaching
mission and its doctrinal stability.
In Protestantism the reverberations were, if
anything, even worse. The worldwide Anglican Church, save in some African
countries, seemed basically to renounce any pretense of orthodoxy. Mainline
Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, and others followed
suit. Even the Southern Baptists, a bastion of Christian conservatism, seem in
recent days to be following uncomfortably the primrose path towards embracing a
politically-correct “social gospel” porridge.
Of course, our entertainment industry, Hollywood
and television programming most especially, paralleled this revolutionary
pathway in productions and offerings. It only takes a few minutes of reviewing
what’s playing at the local cinema, or which films or television programs are
the most hyped and most viewed on cable, to understand this. Spend some time
watching, say, TCM or the Encore Westerns channel which specialize in classic
films from the 1930s until the 1960s, then turn the remote to primetime shows
or current “hit” movies on cable or satellite. The stark differences can’t be
missed.
By 1975, CBS had made an executive decision to
abruptly terminate what it called its “concentration on ‘rural’ programming”:
gone were such popular standbys as “Gunsmoke” and “The Andy Griffith Program,”
to be replaced by such “socially-conscious” offerings as “Maude” (remember the
abortion controversy?) which burst the former limits of how sex and morals
could be presented…or accepted.
From 1934 until 1965 film and movies were governed
by a set production code and a national review board (the “Breen board,” so
called after its chief motivator Joseph Breen, who had worked with Cardinal
Dougherty of Philadelphia in the 1930s to set some parameters and standards on
film entertainment). Productions had to pass the code to be released. Of
course, complaints about “censorship” percolated throughout the period—the
board was stifling artistic expression and free speech, the argument ran. But
can anyone who has carefully viewed and considered in any depth the artistic
cinematic output of those earlier years, and then compared it to what prevails
today in so many cases, claim that the newer is better?
It would be too facile to blame these revolutionary
changes in the West simply on Cultural Marxism. Yet, there are clear contours
of descent that link the radical transformations we behold around us with this
Progressivist variant of Marxist theory. Certainly, in education from the 1960s
and onwards, there has been a truly startling transition: many institutions of
higher learning, once the supposed oases for open debate and inquiry, are now
turned into hothouses of extreme leftist indoctrination and dogmatic
multicultural political correctness. And from this new dogmatism, there can be
no dissent.
In the late 1950s and 1960s the rise of an
“anti-colonialism” and “anti-white racism” in the Third World was coupled with
a revolutionary response on college campuses to “white” European “oppression.”
I recall having to read (in 1971) Franco-African Marxist Frantz Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth in a political theory class. Along with the
influential cultural Marxist philosopher Michel Foucault, Fanon fathered a
template of cultural revolution which, in turn, spawned a “liberation” ideology
that would within a couple of decades dominate Western academic thinking. In
the 1980s came further manifestations: “critical theory” in race and gender
studies. The transformation of the economic structures and the foundations of
the West would follow—would come as a result of those machinations, with the
collaboration of a converted (better said, subverted) mainline Christianity,
and the establishment of a newly dogmatized, Progressivist linguistic template.
This new Marxism owed far more to the globalist theorizing
of Leon Trotsky than the stodgy commissars in Moscow. Trotsky’s evangelical
message blended well with the New Left’s emphasis on societal and cultural
transformation. Unlike the older Soviet variant, the new Marxism would achieve
victory through the infiltration and conversion of Western institutions—the
colleges and schools, the church, entertainment, and, finally, political
discourse, and the enforcement of a strict code of speech and, eventually,
thought.
And what is ironic about this process is that here
in “the West,” while we have been drenched in this multifaceted cultural
revolution, nations like Hungary, Russia, Poland, and some of the countries
once under the Communist yoke in Eastern Europe emerged from decades of tyranny
as if time, it seemed, were turned back fifty years, to a kind of status
quo ante bellum. The old beliefs, the old traditions and ideas, the
feelings of national pride, and the religious faith of the peoples of Hungary,
Poland, Slovakia, and Russia, that had once seemed suppressed and
dead-and-buried, have blossomed anew as if very little had happened since
Soviet troops occupied them in 1945. And strangely, it was the very existence
of an “iron curtain” over much of Europe, a kind of protective prophylaxis that
sheltered these countries for five decades from the worst effects of
American-style imported crass commercialism, decaying moral standards, and the
destruction of religious and cultural beliefs. Thus, it is no accident that
nations like Hungary, Poland, and, most especially, Russia, having escaped the
worst of those influences and having returned to older traditions, are now the
strongest opponents of the decadent contagion that suffocates Western Europe
and increasingly, the United States.
As Pat Buchanan has written:
It is as if the world is
turned upside down, with Russia stoutly opposing secularism and cultural
destruction, while America and Western Europe embrace them.”
So it is that the United States and Western Europe
stand at a cross roads. True, there has been something of a counter-revolution
occurring. The successful “Brexit” movement in Great Britain, the rise of
nationalist and populist movements in Italy, Russia, Hungary, and other
European countries, and the election of Donald Trump are clear indications of
that. This was a major flaw in the Progressivist strategy: Millions of citizens
were left behind as the institutional victories of the cultural Marxist
revolution continued, and they have now rebelled, if perhaps belatedly. But
even the modest success of these counter-revolutionary efforts has brought a
zealous and at times hysterical reaction from those who have used cultural
Marxism and its multiple manifestations to advance the Progressivist
Revolution.
Nearly a century ago Marxists theorists such as the
Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci understood that to defeat the “hegemon” of
the Christian West it was not sufficient to challenge it head-on militarily, or
at the ballot box. A broad strategy of infiltration and continuous subversion
was required. That revolutionary process would take decades to achieve it aims.
The fossilized and doddering Communist commissars reviewing their troops every
May Day in Red Square would not succeed, but the destruction of the traditional
supportive and basic institutions that gave life to the West, would.
And, thus, in November 2016 millions of desperate
American citizens—most especially those left behind “deplorables”—finally had
had enough and voted for a self-made iconoclastic billionaire, a
bull-in-the-china shop, who promised to “drain the swamps.”
Marxism began a “long march” through our
institutions a century ago. Now, 242 years after the Founders declared
independence, our people must, absolutely, continue their counter-revolution
and their efforts to preserve what remains of our heritage, and, with God’s
help, begin the arduous, seemingly impossible, task of recovery.
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