October 25, 2020

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Newly Published Essays at LewRockwell.com, Abbeville Institute, and The Intellectual Takeout

 

Friends,

Since the end of September this year a number of my essays have been published by online journals, including LewRockwell.com, The Abbeville Institute, and Chronicles Magazine’s The Intellectual Takeout. In large part these pieces were taken from the MY CORNER site, but have been edited and sometimes re-written. And, in essence, they form two consistent but slightly different thematic threads.

Four of these essays address the general crisis critically threatening our Western Christian civilization these days, examining the agenda and praxis of those who would undermine its foundations and eventually destroy it—and thus destroy the only real civilization and culture that we have, received from our fathers and our ancestors. That civilization is, to quote the eminent philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), the “living inheritance of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.” It has informed and annealed our culture, our thinking, our artistic heritage and literature, our understanding of who we are and how we should act and behave, our appreciation of right and wrong, indeed, our very language, for two millennia. It has nourished us, inspired us, provided the very basis for our laws and moral understanding of the universe. This legacy, Western Christian civilization, is in essence God-given and derived also from our perception of the workings of nature and its laws.

That civilization is under ferocious attack, with its fierce opponents seeking feverishly to replace it with a truly satanic barbarism where the laws of Nature and of God are mocked and disdained.

To face these enemies—and they are Legion—requires knowledge and understanding, a comprehension, first, of just who are these Enemies and how they operate and how they disguise themselves with an appealing but diabolically false face.

To turn on the television these days or to listen to most of our political leaders, our entertainment icons, and our clergy, we hear all manner of propositions which we are now instructed to accept without question.

We are solemnly informed that religion must be banned from the public square, after all, as our leaders never cease to tell us, we live in a secular society. If history and faith tell us otherwise, then we must discard or alter them and embrace the new faith of secular humanism.

We are told that Western civilization is inherently “racist” and “sexist,” that we are burdened with the ineradicable “sin” of “systemic racism.” Joe Biden proclaims this as unassailable truth. Being a white person of European descent is the new Mark of Cain. And try as we will, we cannot erase that sin because it is coterminous with our very culture and heritage and who we are as a people. Continual and abject apologies, immense reparations of every sort, and the public (and de facto) renunciation of our culture are thus required.

In fact, the new rules on race and gender are more severe and unrelenting than anything ever taught by the Church. If you transgress those rules, you’ll be “cancelled,” shamed, have your online accounts banned, perhaps fired from your job, or worse.

We are harshly condemned, as well, if we maintain that traditional Christian morality forbids same sex marriage or gender equality—morality, in the new dispensation has become a strictly individual affair, that is, as long as you do not transgress the new Progressivist standards.

We are instructed that we must bow down to the Golden Calf of across-the-board egalitarianism and the advent of a globalism in which our beliefs in family and country are radically altered, if not dissolved.

If we dissent or fail “to get with it” and forget to mouth the new platitudes and slogans, we are made to look like obscurantists, “old fogeys,” “deplorables,” reactionaries whose time is past…and who must be silenced or even eliminated by the forces of inevitable Progress.

Four of the eight essays address these broader questions, and I offer them today. They were published by LewRockwell.com and The Intellectual Takeout.

The remaining four address particular situations, and I’ll offer them later.

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LewRockwell.com anti-state•anti-war•pro-market

The Philosophy of Progress is Killing Us

 

By Boyd D. Cathey    My Corner     October 7, 2020

Over the past few years I have written about what I term a “triumph of lunacy” in our society—most significantly on our college campuses and in our schools, in our entertainment, in the media, but also in our culture generally. The post-Marxist progressivist Left, after the apparent political set-back of the 2016 elections, has redoubled its efforts with a frenzied fanaticism unknown in our history, at least since a few years before the War Between the States.

What distinguishes our revolutionary period from previous upheavals is that today’s revolutionaries have, in effect, created a “counter-reality” in which they base their thought and actions. That reality they have manufactured out of a critical misapprehension of the nature of creation and the nature of mankind. That counter-reality is totally subjective, anchored in fractured internal thinking processes which have been infected and warped from their inception. That counter-reality is the inverse of the two-millennia of Western civilization; it possesses its own language, its own precepts, its own rules of conduct, its own goals and objectives, undeterred by the inexorable laws of nature or the historic teachings of the Christian faith. Indeed, it is the contrary of historic Christianity….

READ ON at:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/10/no_author/the-philosophy-of-progress-is-killing-us/

 

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LewRockwell.com   anti-state•anti-war•pro-market

Who Are the Real “Crazies”?

 

By Boyd D. Cathey    My Corner   October 14, 2020

 

A few days ago I sent out to some friends a short piece, unsigned, on “gaslighting.” If you follow media pundits and online scribblers, you’ve probably heard or seen the term used in a political or social context and wondered exactly what it meant.

Gaslighting, in that currently employed sense, can be defined as a form of psychological abuse aimed at controlling a person by altering perceived reality to the point where the person will doubt his own sanity. Essentially it involves mental manipulation  “in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes, including low self-esteem. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and information, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim’s beliefs.”

 

This usage apparently originates with the play, Gas Light (1938) and two succeeding classic movies from 1940 and 1944 (this latter film famously stars Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten). The main character in the play (and in the films) literally attempts to drive his wife crazy by gradually dimming the gas-powered lights in their home. As she complains that the lights seem to be getting dimmer, her husband not only denies the fact, but convinces her that it is just her imagination…to the point where she begins to question her own sanity…..

 

READ ON at:

 

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/10/no_author/who-are-the-real-crazies/

 

 

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INTELLECTUAL TAKEOUT    Chronicles Magazine

The Real Revolutionaries That Seek Control and Power

By Boyd Cathey   September 28, 2020

I was appalled, but not really surprised by the coverage the local media (not to mention the national press) has given the results of the grand jury report concerning the death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Here in central North Carolina the largest television station, WRAL, continuing its slide into outright propagandizing and turning every police action into an act of “police brutality” or “white racism,” flagrantly misconstrued both the events of Taylor’s death as well as the statements of Kentucky’s black Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron announcing the decision regarding the Louisville officers involved in the shooting. Only one of the officers was indicted, and that for reckless endangerment, not for murder. It was the correct decision under Kentucky law.

Despite the widely reported news that the officers had forcibly entered the apartment where Taylor resided under the state’s no-knock entry law, we have learned since that the three officers did knock and announced themselves, just before shots came from within the apartment. As former Federal attorney Andrew McCarthy describes it: “…no charges were brought against Sergeant Jon Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, whose shots in the dark chaos struck Ms. Taylor only after the officers were fired upon by her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker…. The cops were doing their job in executing a lawful search warrant at a location that was quite justifiably tied to a notorious criminal — Ms. Taylor’s former boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover.”

This finding was completely insufficient to satisfy the street mobs and the pliant Democratic political leaders, who seem to believe their future success is dependent on the success of mob violence and the abject fear that it and the charges of racism engender among our political class. Even among supposedly “conservative” Republicans there has been a steady retreat to the “tall grass,” a giving in to the hysterical frenzy of the Black Lives Matter terrorists and their media protectors. The very night that Tucker Carlson on his program on Fox News announced that the no-knock provision was not employed in the Taylor case and that the officers did knock and announce their presence, just an hour earlier, again on Fox, Martha MacCallum strongly implied that it was used, just like the continuing template on CNN, MSNBC, and the other major networks.

Like all so-called compromisers in violent revolutions, the temporizers usually end up devoured by the very radicals and radicalism they attempt to defend or justify. Only recall what happened to the “moderate” Girondistes during the height of the French Revolution (who opposed the ultimate terror of a Citizen Robespierre) or Alexander Kerensky and his Socialist Revolutionary government in Russia (done in by the Bolsheviks during the October 1917 Revolution). Both advocated and pushed for understanding and for compromise of one sort or another; both were swallowed up by the very same forces with which they attempted to deal and whose demands they tried so assiduously to satisfy….

READ ON at:

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/the-real-revolutionaries-that-seek-control-and-power/

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LewRockwell.com  anti-state•anti-war•pro-market

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

The Academy’s War on Western Civilization

 

 

By Boyd D. Cathey  My Corner   October 10, 2020

Of all the venues where the unleashed hysteria of revolutionary Progressivism manifests itself, it is most rampant in our educational establishment, on our college campuses and in our schools. It is there in those hallowed halls and in the hothouse public school classrooms that the Progressivist infection really begins in earnest. It is there where it becomes contagious and the pathological indoctrination of our children in a rancid ideology diametrically hostile to nearly all of Western tradition and beliefs.  What occurs in those centers where our children are educated is happening in our society at large….critically dangerous, perhaps even fatal, to our culture.

Our educational system has become the seedbed—the Typhoid Mary, if you will—for the frenzied “cancel culture” we see around us and for the concerted and increasingly fanatical attempt to destroy and erase the two millennia of Western Christian civilization….

READ ON at:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/10/no_author/the-academys-war-on-western-civilization/

 

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The remaining essays will be offered later this week.