November 15, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Clinton Scandal; NAACP Attacks the National Anthem

Friends,

Two topics today compose this installment of MY CORNER.

First, in our rapid news cycles, remember last week we once again witnessed a flurry of reports about those now infamous Clinton emails. And what was to be expected: the Mainstream Media’s zeal and care to defend the Hillary campaign against accusations that show up in Donna Brazile’s new tell-all book, Hacks: The Inside Story…. One of the better and more persistent writers on this topic, as well as on the entire “Russians Did It!” canard, has been the intrepid Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept. [https://theintercept.com/2017/11/05/four-viral-claims-spread-by-journalists-on-twitter-in-the-last-week-alone-that-are-false/ ] He has authored a well-researched piece concerning four falsehoods spread by Clinton supporters, Democrats and the Mainstream Media, in an attempt to prevent the real story from coming out. I will pass on his latest investigatory piece today.

What is patently clear through all the seemingly never-ending controversy is the absolute and frenetic determination of Hillary and the Dems, the media and the Deep State minions to deter any genuine investigation, to, as it were, keep the genie locked up inside the lamp. What we have before us is potentially one of the greatest constitutional scandals in American history. It is precisely the object of the Establishment, including many Republicans, to push a “false flag” narrative that we are told we must accept. That narrative has become both a diversion leading away from the real scandal as well as the basis for an attempted “silent coup” against our elected president. 

Millions of “deplorables” should, I suppose, be out in the streets or camping on the Washington DC mall, demanding that Congress pursue the Clintons (on the “lost” emails, on the Uranium One deal, on the Clinton Foundation “cash-to-play,” and other potential criminalities, not excluding political assassination).

Yet, our folks are “normal.” By that I mean that we work regular jobs (a lot of times longer than eight hours a day), we raise families, we deal with school, we attend church, we pay bills, we do  housework—in other words, we lead lives punctuated by regularity and a certain rhythm of life. Getting out in the street and protesting is not something most of us are inclined naturally to do. We lead different lives from the subventioned semi-professional agitators who seem to be bused from one “spontaneous demonstration” to another, and whose existence seems to be totally wrapped up in and convulsed by a manic and continuous “struggle” for such nebulous—and unobtainable—ideas as “equality” and “social justice.” 

We are not like that: our lives are not controlled by such all-consuming madness. In a sense, then, the difference between the “normals” and those culturally Marxist “social justice warriors” is not just one of political perspective, but, rather, is deeply spiritual and one of balance and the manner in which various facets of our humanity are integrated into the whole person.

Yet, even the most integrated and “normal” person—the person who normally eschews never-ending controversy and who lacks the inclination to continually “protest” this or that perceived injustice—the person who seeks only to live a “regular” life under both Natural and God’s laws, even that person may eventually reach a certain point, a watershed moment, when he believes he must act. On a very personal level, that may come when a law-abiding man has his home or family endangered by an intruder or potential criminal: physical resistance may be required. Or, it may happen locally when our inherent rights and communal well-being appear threatened—as happened to my neighborhood several years ago when developers wanted to put a new road through, displacing us all: although very few of my neighbors would ever attend a political rally or go demonstrate, they all came out to denounce the road-building project (which was defeated).

But getting out in the streets by the thousands—even for such truly noble causes like defending the unborn—is always a difficult proposition. Nevertheless, the present crisis—and that is what it truly is—demands our close attention and our action. Not necessarily staged and paid-for-by-George Soros-style raucous semi-riots like those we have seen mushroom since the election of President Trump, but yes, much more push back and organized resistance to the multifaceted efforts of the forces of the Deep State to thwart the will of American voters expressed last November and torpedo the efforts to enact a truly “make America great again” agenda.

That means increased vigilance and being better informed about events as they occur. That means more attention to what our schools are teaching our children, to what our pastors are preaching in church, to what we watch on television and what we read. It also means choosing our friends wisely, exchanging ideas and vital information with them. And it means a commitment to vote our convictions, which means continuing the draining of the “swamp” by voting out those politicians who are a part of it and who participate in it.

Articles like Greenwald’s assist us to understand and fathom the mountain of information—and the disinformation—that comes our way and clutters our television viewing.

My second topic fits in an odd way into this general theme. About a week ago the California branch of the NAACP (soon supported by other social justice warriors throughout the nation) officially came out in favor of changing our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” charging it to be “racist.” Here is what they said:  The anthem is "one of the most racist, pro-slavery, anti-black songs in the American lexicon." [https://www.newsmax.com/us/naacp-national-anthem-third-stanza-racist/2017/11/08/id/825008/?ns_mail_uid=61377180&ns_mail_job=1763053_11092017&s=al&dkt_nbr=010504l4m0yo] And in particular, they singled out the third verse, which reads: "No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave." Obviously, then, to those incredibly brilliant historians at the NAACP any pejorative use of the word “slave” by 19^th century Americans, and especially by someone like the Maryland aristocrat Francis Scott Key, is anathema, and its use in our National Anthem must be purged.

Key’s singling out of the “slave,” they insist, must refer to those slaves who had been induced to fight for the British during the War of 1812; and, thus, Key, from an old and aristocratic Maryland family must therefore be attacking them and supporting the “peculiar institution.” Besides, they add, as a prominent U.S. attorney he opposed abolitionism, citing the famous case of notorious agitator and abolitionist libeler Benjamin Lundy (1833), which Key forcefully prosecuted. Yet, they fail to mention that Francis Scott Key manumitted his own slaves, and that he represented several slaves (pro bono) seeking their freedom and publicly attacked slavery’s cruelties and abuses. Of course, that history doesn’t fit their narrative.

And more, any reading of patriotic literature from the period reveals that the use of such words as “slavery” or “slave” in such contexts very often is a metaphor for “treason” or “submission” to foreign rule or perceived tyranny (i.e., from Britain). “Hireling” and “slave” refer to those Americans—both white and black—who had, in Key’s view, sold out to the country’s former overlords. The meanings are descriptive, not racist or approving of the slave system, but rather of persons who prostituted their services to a foreign power.

Nevertheless, the NAACP narrative has gained traction, and by the same social justice warriors who rage against the monuments to Lee and the Confederate dead, and more recently, against symbols of Christopher Columbus and George Washington. It is part and parcel of a stream of revolutionary consciousness that infects much of our society, that poisons our culture, that distorts our history and our understanding of our past, that chokes off any reasonable discussion among our political leaders,  that infects Hollywood, and abuses and perverts our very language. It seeks nothing less than the total purging and complete transformation of our culture…the abolition of the West.

And, yes, it also underlies even the “Russians Did It!” narrative that so throttles and perverts current debate in our nation’s capital.

The Progressivist Revolution, partially stymied by the November 2016, election is like the Stars War film, “The Empire Strikes Back,” with a renewed, frenzied zeal to recover lost ground and put things aright—and in every facet, every dimension of our lives.

We may not have the inclination—at least not yet—to get out and imitate the ravings of “Antifa” or Black Lives Matter or the Communist Workers’ World Party in Durham, North Carolina, but, nevertheless, we must prepare and enter the combat, each in our own way. The stakes are too high….

November 13, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Establishment Doubles Down on Russia Card and Reminds Us that Truth is What They Tell us It Is

Friends,

On each occasion when my hope is to pass on information about, say, the proposed tax legislation before Congress, or some other significant domestic issue confronting our citizenry, the same old narrative, those same accusations of “Russian meddling in our elections,” of the “Russians Did It!,” surface once again. It’s as if the Deep State Mainstream Media and their slavish minions in the Democratic and Republican parties cannot let loose of it. It’s like a highly flammable and unquenchable blazing fire: it dies out at one location only to spring up, revived, in another location. It makes no difference if all the evidence in the world is adduced to disprove it. Like the arsonist who continues to pour gasoline on the smoldering embers, it continues its never-ending and convulsive fury.

It is, of course, motivated at its base by something much larger, and that is an uncontrollable and unhinged hatred—pure venomous and condescending disdain—for upstart Donald J. Trump and his voters. All along the Russia Card, the “Russians Did It!” canard, has been the most significant arrow in the Deep State quiver of dirty tricks and—let us call it what it really is—attempted treason against the United States Constitution and a not-so-clandestine attempted coup d’etat against a sitting American president who wasn’t supposed to win the 2016 election.

While I do not suggest that there are a few, highly-placed men in dark glasses, gathered in some smoke filled room—well, I forget, smoking is no longer politically-correct, so how about cocktail-furnished room?—who dictate the daily Deep State strategy, which “stories” are to be run and which ones killed, which narratives are to be spun and who is to write the first page story in The Washington Post or breathlessly relate the juicy tidbits to rapt brainwashed Left-leaning viewers on CNN, while I do not suggest that, there is, I submit, an “understanding” based on a shared mentality, an ideological agreement formed in years of training and submersion in the establishment political culture that dominates along the shores of the Potomac.

You don’t need to get your “daily walking and talking orders,” if you belong to or participate in the Deep State establishment. Your whole thinking process, your mental framework already reflects a certain receptivity and capacity for taking important cues and  cue words—the outlines of the current narrative—and correctly spinning the “accepted” version of events.

Thus, yesterday, as I caught a bit of Chris Wallace’s “Fox News Sunday” program, I wondered, “Is this really any different from what shows up on the highly-touted Sunday news programs on ABC or CBS or NBC, or even CNN?” There were Julie Pace (of AP) and Gillian Turner (former National Security Council member during the George Bush administration and now a Vice-President of Fox News) sounding like correspondents for…CNN!  Pace was specific: “The president,” she said, “had gotten out of line during the second part of his trip to Asia.”  He wasn’t “listening to his advisors, but rather was depending on his faulty instincts.” [my italics] In other words, he had refused to go along with advice from some of those Deep State plants that cautioned him not to stray into his America First agenda. And Turner chimed in, and with the nodding agreement of all the panelists trotted out the standard line on Russia: “The Intelligence committee has made its judgment about Russian involvement in our elections. It is fact and cannot be denied. For Donald Trump to hesitate on this point is either because he is ignorant or can’t get over his fascination with Russia and Putin!” 

Or as they used to say in Catholic theology (in the old days when doctrine used to really mean something): “Roma locuta est, causa finita est!” “Rome has spoken, the cause is decided.” That is, the Deep State and the intelligence-foreign policy-political establishment (including the major bosses and many of the pundits at Fox) have spoken dogmatically, have set the narrative and the ground rules: you can be against Hillary, you can even say that it was Hillary that the Russians actually wanted to support, but, for Heaven’s sake, don’t get close to saying—don’t even raise the specter—that the “Russians Did It!” narrative is false or defective!

And then, as if on cue, on another network, Deep State apparatchiks, James Clapper (former Director of National Intelligence under Obama) and former CIA director (also under Obama) John Brennan, added their own supposed nails in the Trump coffin: how dare Trump continue to hint at contradicting the “consensus” of the “intelligence community”! This narrative is set in stone, you see, and cannot be questioned, cannot be transgressed, or else you will be condemned more vociferously and more imperiously than any condemnation ever issued by the old Vatican Holy Office! Trump must be deranged!

Puffed up like bloated frogs, with contempt and condescension dripping from each and every syllable, these Deep State creatures from the black lagoon are accustomed, once they speak in commanding tones, to having the restive natives—including many of the pundits in the establishment “conservative movement”—bow down in obsequious obeisance and deference, and, if not in total agreement on every point, at least maintain a respectful silence….

That President Trump on occasion refuses to go along and that some—a few independent journalists and reporters—continue intrepidly to ferret out uncomfortable details that don’t fit the Deep State, joint Democrat/establishment Republican/Neoconservative template and blow wide holes in that narrative, is, for the elites of the Washington-New York “swamp,” extremely disquieting and disturbing. That even highly-placed former Democratic National Committee Chairman Donna Brazile would admit in her new revelatory book—after the still-unsolved mysterious death of DNC staffer (and the real email hacker) Seth Rich—that she actually feared for her life, should cause even the doubting-Thomases on our side to take serious note. [Refer back to comments on November 7 and May 16 and 27 on the Rich case.] The forces of the Deep State establishment will stop at nothing, use any tactic, employ any maneuver, in their quest to regain full power and re-establish the trajectory of Progressivist Revolution.

Dr. Paul Craig Robert, former William Simon Chair Professor of Political Economy at Georgetown University, and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Ronald Reagan, is a fearless voice in the political maelstrom. I link a superb recent item he wrote which serves as an excellent introduction—indeed, a kind of summary—of the “Russians Did It!” canard.  [https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/11/02/washington-corruption-unparalleled-history/ ]Of course, Dr. Roberts has been denounced by the Mainstream Media as a “conspiracy theorist,” but the real conspiracy theorists in America today are those who theorize and work in tandem to overthrow the president, derail his agenda, and, in effect, undermine the Constitution.

Although I continue to believe that much of electronic technology “comes from the Devil,” thank God at least some of the Web and the media is still able to present an alternative view of the “facts” that are normally spoon-fed to us. No longer do we stand in awe  of and waiting on every voluble word of wisdom emitted from the mouth of “Uncle” Walter Cronkite.

November 12, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

THE 100^TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION: A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Friends,

The week of November 5-11 witnessed two significant anniversaries. The first, November 11, 2017, was the 99^th anniversary of the Armistice ending World War I.  But another, more infamous and earth-shaking anniversary occurred on Tuesday, November 7, 2017: the 100^th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, when the Soviet Communists took possession of the Russian state.

Already perhaps too much has been written about that critical event in the history of the bloody 20^th century. The most comprehensive study of Communism and its criminally tragic effects is arguably the incredible volume, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1997, edited by Stephane Courtois, with a group of international scholars). Therein approximately 100 million deaths are documented and attributed to the worldwide Communist bacillus. And there are other solid and impressive studies, including works by Stefan Possony (Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary), Robert Conquest (The Great Terror), Simon Montefiore (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar), not to mention the more personal accounts of experiences with and under Communism, including Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon, the collection The God that Failed (by several prominent ex-Communists), George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and, certainly more riveting and damning, the various works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

And in the United States certainly the most stunning and critical personal account remains Whittaker Chamber’s eloquent Witness, a volume that continues to thoroughly irritate the American Left which remains totally wrapped in the sullen stubborn embrace of an historical philo-communism. One only need recall the bald-faced Soviet propaganda of New York Times writer, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for journalism, for his glorification of the Stalinist state, a template that continued even after the brutal occupation of Eastern Europe, the 1948-1949 Berlin blockade, and the suppression of popular movements in East Germany and Hungary (1956). Voices in the West and America that raised the question of Communist infiltration here not only into our politics, but into our culture, our entertainment and our educational establishment, were shouted down as “right wing extremists” who did not respect “free speech” and who “looked for Commies under every bed,” or, more recently, as “racists” and “fascists.”

The late Senator Joseph McCarthy was pilloried and basically had his character assassinated as a “drunken and thuggish right wing extremist” who “made up facts” and used his Senate position to badger and batter innocent victims of his “rabid anti-Communism.” Yet, as we know now from the release of the revelatory Venona Transcripts (documenting Communist espionage in the United States) and the opening of the old Soviet archives, not to mention such blockbuster studies as Professor Arthur Herman’s Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, and M. Stanton Evans’ Blacklisted by History, McCarthy was essentially correct in  his understanding of the continuous, long-range infiltration and subversion of American institutions. It was even worse than he imagined….

What he did not and could not foresee were the ideological vicissitudes of post-Communist Marxism and its ironic triumph in the West, at almost the same time it was dying an ignominious death in Russia and the former Soviet satellite states in the East. Just as the Stalinist brand and its Moscow-based septuagenarian commissars, once proudly reviewing Red military might from their perches in the Kremlin, disappeared into the dustbin of history after the final desperate KGB-attempted coup in August 1991, the once-exiled and persecuted descendants of Leon Trotsky staged a seemingly miraculous rebirth—but it was a rebirth in the West, a rebirth that had been slowly and surely cultivated and solidified in the minds of thousands of educators and artists over decades.

In so many ways, superficially, it did not resemble the stodgy imagery of the creaky and bureaucratic, top-heavy Soviet state. It rejected the innate “conservatism” of Soviet Communism and the remarkably old-fashioned “morality” coming from Moscow (e.g., persecution of homosexuals, insistence on traditional marriage, etc.).  It was zealously internationalist; it understood the insights of earlier Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs,  that the West could not be defeated by military confrontation, but rather must be so through a cultural “long-march” through its institutions, through its schools and universities, through its entertainment industry and media, and, most critically, through the transmogrification of its very language and accepted manner of communication. To accomplish these objectives was, in effect, to win the seventy year old struggle, a victory that Soviet Communism was unable to achieve.

And, in a fascinating twist of history, the two major supposedly intellectual antipodes in American society—the openly cultural Marxist Left, with their media and political minions, and the Neoconservatives, with their media and political minions, despite their continuous shadow boxing and bickering over Obamacare, taxes, trade, and civil rights--both owe their profound origins more to that man bludgeoned to death on Stalin’s orders in Mexico City in 1940, Leon Trotsky, than to either Joe Stalin or Thomas Jefferson.

Both have joined in what at first appeared an incongruous “alliance” in manifesting a virulent hatred of post-Soviet, post-Communist Russia, and in particular, towards its president Vladimir Putin.

But is it really that incongruous?

Much of the current hatred for Russia and its president, twenty-six years after the collapse of Communism, may be attributed to what post-1991 Russia has become. Certainly, it is no model or copy of the United States or any of the Western European EU states—and that is a major part of the problem: Russia’s conspicuous unwillingness to submit to the political and economic tutelage—and control—of Bruxelles and Wall Street and the managers along the Potomac.

A much larger issue—and an issue fully realized by both the American Left and the pseudo-Right Neoconservatives—is the direction culturally in which Putin’s Russia seems headed. It is not just the news, as reported for instance by the Reverend Franklin Graham and other traditional Christians, that post-Communist Russia has experienced a revival of traditional Christianity and opened 28,000 new  churches since 1991 (plus restoring hundreds closed by the Reds); it is not just the fact that Russia has criminalized homosexual proselytization among Russian youth and has enacted laws favoring the nuclear family (making same sex marriage illegal); it is not just the fact that the Russian Duma has passed the strongest anti-abortion laws of any European state; it is not just the fact that the Russian Ministry of Culture has sponsored dozens of blockbuster anti-Communist and pro-traditional Christian films; it is not just the fact that Russia has kicked George Soros’s subversive organizations out of the country.

No, it is not just any one of these actions or numerous others that have raised the ire of John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Max Boot, in virtual alliance with Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and CNN; it is all of them.

And the drowning chorus in the American media is that “Russia is violating ‘human rights’,” that “Putin is a thug and dictator” (despite national elections that independent observers found fair), that “Russia wants to re-establish the Soviet empire” (a complete misquoting of something Putin said several years ago when he commented that the sudden break-up of the old Soviet state was a tragedy economically, ethnically and socially—with millions of ethnic Russians arbitrarily consigned to new countries, and with a total disregard for economic realities—he was not lamenting the fall of the Communist state).

As we look at the anniversary of the establishment of one of the bloodiest regimes in human history and what has happened since its demise, and the curious juxtaposition of American political forces in a “united front” against its successor, Pat Buchanan’s remarkable words seem apt: “In the new ideological Cold War, whose side is God on now?” [April 4, 2014, http://buchanan.org/blog/whose-side-god-now-6337]

During the past couple of months Russian President Vladimir Putin has participated in several formal commemorations of the victims of Communism, dedicating “Walls of Grief” to the memory of millions of lives that perished under that infamy and denouncing Marxism and its crimes (i.e., Butovo, Sretenskii). He was accompanied on each occasion by leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church which in so many ways became the underground and “martyr” church under seven decades of Communist barbarity.

One such recent visit by Putin was to the newly-constructed Sretenskii Monastery in Moscow, built on the site of what once was the headquarters of the Soviet KGB and NKVD secret police, Lubyanka, now demolished. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sretensky_Monastery_(Moscow)] The monastery is devoted to the New Martyrs—those thousands of Christians murdered by Bolsheviks following the 1917 revolution. The new church’s decoration reflects this. Around the dome are illustrations of key saints of the Russian Orthodox Church, among whom are Emperor Nicholas II and his family, symbols of suffering at the hands of Bolshevism.

As Professor Paul Robinson describes it:

Behind and above the altar, one can see a depiction of Christ’s crucifixion. But around the cross are not merely the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, but also some more of the New Martyrs. On the far right are a man and his two sons who initially supported the revolution and joined the Red Guards, but who then refused to renounce their Christian faith and were shot. On the left is, among others, Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who became a nun after the assassination of her husband Grand Duke Sergei, and who was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918. And on the far left is a woman who during the Great Terror brought food and clothes to those detained by the NKVD, until she in turn was arrested and shot… In May of this year, he attended the service at which the church was consecrated. Our guide spoke of Putin as the former head of the FSB, the successor organization to the Soviet secret services who executed the New Martyrs. Our guide stated that by coming to the service and bowing and praying before its altar, Putin in effect repented on behalf of those secret services and asked for forgiveness. There is little doubt in my mind that Putin understood perfectly what his presence symbolized and what message he was sending all across Russia. [https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/the-new-martyrs/]

No greater contrast and symbolism marks the tremendous changes in Russia since 199—but it is precisely those changes that so threaten the Western secularist and globalist elites and the Marxist internationalists like George Soros.

To paraphrase Pat Buchanan: Who is now the real enemy of the historic traditions and beliefs of the Christian West

November 11, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Meditations on Veterans’ Day, 2017

Friends,

Ninety-nine years ago, this day, the Great War—the “War to End All Wars”—World War I—came to a conclusion. An Armistice was signed, but an armistice that in many ways eventually made many of the deaths and sacrifices of millions of young men and their families seem in vain. Most of those valiant “dough boys” did not know it at the time; they fought for country, for patriotism, defending their nation against perceived evils and threats—this was their duty and what they believed.

Many of their political leaders had ulterior, secretive plans to remake Europe and reshape the world—and without doubt, the leaders France, Italy and Britain and the draconian peace they exacted and imposed on the defeated Central Powers helped propel the world headlong towards an even more horrible and momentous conflict two decades later. Yet, in those heady days of November 1918 in Allied capitals there was celebration. In the United States people filled the streets. Contemporary photographs and silent film record the joy and relief: the American nation had been in its first major foreign war—excluding the Spanish American War—since 1848, and it had not only been victorious, but had, arguably, been the deciding factor in that victory.

Ever since that day, November 11, Veterans’ Day—known first as “Armistice Day”—has been a day to honor our veterans and to recall their service. And, in many ways, it is a very personal day for many of us, a day to remember and honor members of our families who went to war, who left wives and children behind, who answered the call—and some who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

No matter whether the war could be “justified” by politicians or if it were for the right reasons, in the end the individual soldier did his duty. He knew that his nation had called, and that as a citizen he must answer that call. When the country demanded his service, he went and he did his very best. He may not have understood all the particular geopolitical ramifications or all the long-range effects of his actions, but he did understand that he was there—wherever “there” was—with his band of brothers, engaged in extreme combat, and that some of his fellow servicemen, perhaps even himself, would not “make it back.” He was serving his country, just as his ancestors for generations had done…and just as those poor Germans, those Russians, those Brits were doing.

Like many of you, I have ancestors who fought in all America’s wars, from the Revolution (with a five greats grandfather, a captain in the Continental Line, who died on a prisoner ship in Charleston harbor in 1780), several who served during the War for Southern Independence (including a great-granddad who survived Gettysburg), a great uncle who was in the US Navy during World War I, and my father who served in the 101^st Cavalry and was seriously wounded in the Saar region of Germany in early 1945.

More recently, I honor today a beloved cousin, James Lowell Brake, who served honorably in both Korea and Vietnam. “Jim” married my cousin, and in so many ways, despite their eventual retirement in Newport News, Virginia, three hours distant, they became very dear and close to me. Cousin Jim passed away in 2008, but his wife of fifty-four years, continues to live in Virginia and continues to be very special. I only wish she lived closer.

Cousin Jim was one of those soft-spoken veterans who did not boast or talk that much about his service, yet his life and his career were remarkable in so many ways. Originally from the Rocky Mount, North Carolina, area, he remains for me an unsung hero. Here is a portion of his obituary from The Rocky Mount Telegram (February 18, 2008):

“Jim attended Rocky Mount High School and matriculated at North Carolina State University. Upon graduation, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force in June of 1953. One week later, he married the former Barbara Perry of Raleigh, N.C. In September of that same year, Jim was called to active duty. He went on to graduate from Air Command and Staff College in 1965 and Armed Forces Staff College in 1968. He served in Korea and flew during the Vietnam War, where he was a forward air controller and logged 529 combat missions marking targets for the fighters. Jim worked at the Pentagon on the Air Staff for 4 years from 1968-1972. In 1975 he went to Japan as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Planning and Programming for the Air Forces in North East Asia. He also served on the Japanese Joint Committee. His last assignment was Commander of Pope Air Force Base at Fort Bragg, N.C., where he retired a Colonel. During his long career he received 13 different medals, including the Legion of Merit with one bronze leaf oak cluster and the Air Medal with four silver leaf clusters.”

But this account only begins to tell of a full life well lived. Cousin Jim, after his retirement from the Air Force, served as a substitute math and science teacher and worked at the Virginia State Department of Environmental Health. And for many years he and his loving wife were very active in the local St. John’s Episcopal Church.

When I think of Jim, when I think of my late father and the long list of soldiers on both sides of my family, I wonder what they would think, what they would say, if they were able to return for a fleeting moment and view the American nation of 2017. We honor them today, but we should also ask ourselves how we have received and treated the precious heritage and the legacy they passed on to us.

As boy I remember my grandfather on my mother’s side recounting to me, as if it were yesterday, about Jefferson Davis’s funeral procession down Fayetteville Street in 1893 in Raleigh (on his way to final burial in Richmond); and I recall my grandmother on my father’s side, who was born in 1865 (and died in 1962), telling me that as a small girl she remembered a centenarian neighbor who, when he was a boy, had seen George Washington in Charlotte on his great Southern Tour in 1791!

Relative to the history of most European countries or to ancient Rome and Greece, the American republic’s history, our past, is short. It has been 246 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed, and 228 years since the US Constitution became the governing document for thirteen former British colonies. The country established by the Framers incorporated the insights of English law and custom, and was founded on a belief in a just and munificent God who offered both hope and direction to the new commonwealth.

The Framers were both adamant and deeply concerned: for future generations they established what they understood to be a fragile constitutional republic, and, accordingly, they created safeguards and implanted established balances against the growth of an unchecked executive power (or abuse by other branches). Under the 9^th and 10^th Amendments the respective states and citizens were recognized as depositories of original God-given rights—rights not conceded by the Federal executive, but held directly through tradition and from the Creator.

Our fathers and ancestors fought for that country, for that reality of families and the land they had cleared and planted—for “blood and soil,” and for the local and regional liberties that they had inherited from their ancestors, and for the faith they had received, and, in sum, for the Western and Christian civilization they brought with them to the New World.

When my ancestor Phillip Perry landed in Virginia in 1646 and when my ancestor James Cathey came to Philadelphia in 1718, they brought their families with them, they brought their traditions and customs, their faith. They came for new and fresh lands, to raise their families, not for some nebulous “idea” of “making the world safe for democracy” or for “human rights in South Sudan.”  Yes, their offspring would help create a new nation here on this continent, but in many ways what they created was an extension of that European and Christian culture—a culture they did not leave behind when they crossed the Atlantic.

The “American experience” gave that cultural inheritance a tint, certain characteristics, particular American aspects that distinguished us from the countries of old Europe. But from the beginning—from the debates at Philadelphia, from the writings of the Founders and Framers—we were also aware of that historic European legacy and those traditions that so shaped us, even if we progressively transformed them in our own peculiar ways.

Our fathers and forefathers served and fought for those beliefs and those traditions, for that legacy handed down to them, and which they handed down to us. The fetid cultural and political decay we behold around us in 2017 is not what they sacrificed for. They may have given their all and their lives for our right to act stupidly, but that doesn’t mean that they wanted us to act stupidly. They did not fight for “global democracy,” much less for the universal right of same sex marriage. They went to war for home and state, for family and loved ones, for duty to the country.

That inheritance and our traditions are under attack domestically as never before (save perhaps back in 1861-1865). As we honor our veterans—as I honor my father, my Cousin Jim and my ancestors who are buried in the Carolina soil they cleared, planted, and held so dear, and where they raised their families—we should re-dedicate ourselves and our families not only to their memory, but to their beliefs and to the Old Republic they so loved.

November  9, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Strange “United Front” of the Marxist Left and the Neocon Right  on  Russia

Friends,

A few days ago [November 6] I passed on several items about the evolving “Russians Did It!” canard, and I promised more details and additional information. As readers of these commentaries know, this particular question has been a topic of great interest for me, and not just recently but stretching back now for a number of years. For the question does not just involve purported Russian “involvement” in our 2016 elections but encompasses the widespread Russophobic narrative shared by both the American far Left and the Neoconservative “Right.”

How was it possible, I asked, that two supposedly ideological opposites in American political thinking could come together in a kind of (un)comfortable “united front” to denounce post-Communist Russia and its president? What brought these politicians, these pundits and their journals and foundations and think tanks, together against a perceived and common enemy?

To discover reasons for this concordance our first examination must be historical and has much to do with the common origin of the modern American Left and the dominant leadership cadres of the modern “conservative movement.” In one of those strange ironies and bizarre turns of history, both these intellectual forces inherited and share a legacy that has more to do with the vision and praxis of Leon Trotsky and his brand of internationalist Marxism, than with our traditional Cold War understanding of Right and Left.

For dominant Neconservatism, various historians have carefully documented this process. We need only to cite such authors as Paul Gottfried (The Strange Death of Marxism, After Liberalism, and Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt), Claes Ryn (The New Jacobinism and America the Virtuous), Gary Dorrien (The Neoconservative Mind), and the father of Neoconservatism, itself, Irving Kristol (Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea and Reflections of a Neoconservative). It still surprises some “movement” conservatives to discover the history of what I call “the great brain robbery” of the conservative movement, that is, the vicious struggle between an older, traditional conservatism and those intellectual refugees from the older Trotskyite Left who made their pilgrimage to the right in the 1970s and 1980s, and ended up in virtual control of the “movement.”

The Neocons brought their essential—and philo-Marxist—philosophical foundations with them. Thus, in opposition to earlier traditional conservative thought (as exemplified by the late Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Mel Bradford, and Robert Nisbet), they incorporated as fundamental to “conservatism” a vision of liberal democracy, “universal human rights” and across-the-board equality as a basic human right, and those positions had profound consequences politically, socially and practically in their support for the burgeoning expansion of so-called “civil rights” and how they envisage the very concept of “rights.” Their ideology had significant impact,  from their zealous belief in America’s unique destiny to impose democracy and equality, by force if necessary, across the face of the globe (cf. Allan Bloom), to their support for “moderate” feminism and acceptance of transgenderism and same sex marriage (which Neocon pundit Jonah Goldberg terms as a “conservative value”), to their tendency to support open borders, as well as their re-writing and radical revising of history to exclude older conservatives and the older conservative tradition that did not share their egalitarianism (and most recently the intellectually warped attempts by Goldberg and Dinesh D’Souza to paint the American Left as “fascist” and prove that it is the Neocons who are the real champions of equality and human rights).

I can think of no clearer example of this Marxist genealogy and its modern Neocon manifestation than an example cited by Dr. Paul Gottfried in an extremely revealing analysis authored ten years ago. His essay appeared via Takimag (“The New Face of National Review,” April 17, 2007). Gottfried cites Neocon writer, Stephen Schwartz, in a commentary for National Review Online, who offers a flattering depiction of onetime Soviet Marxist leader Leon Trotsky (1879-1940). Gottfried continues:

“The loser in a power struggle with Stalin after the death of Lenin in 1924, Trotsky in exile, first in Norway and later in Mexico, had warned against the rise and spread of ‘fascism.’ According to Schwartz…the democracies should have heeded the admonitions of the ‘antifascist’ Communist revolutionary Trotsky…. Hateful rightists are supposedly still blaming Trotsky for a Soviet dictatorship, to which, according to Schwartz, he had contributed only minimally. Were Trotsky still alive, we are told, he would be lending his considerable talents to fighting …. rightwing extremists. Schwartz ends his commentary by declaiming:

‘To my last breath, I will defend Trotsky who alone and pursued from country to country and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling to Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, and who had the capacity to admit that he had been wrong about the imposition of a single-party state as well as about the fate of the Jewish people. To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists and Stalinists in their second childhood make of it what they will’.”

Schwartz’s views are by no means isolated or singular amongst the Neoconservative punditry; there are other examples that, so to speak, equally let the cat out of the bag.…And what is fascinating is how such views increasingly appear essentially indistinct from views and opinions that can be commonly found in the pages of The New Republic, The Nation, and The New York Times, or via MSNBC and CNN—whose perspectives are representative of a more honest admission of their genealogical and philosophical origins on the Trotskyite Marxist Left.

In a very real sense, then, the opposition of both the American Left and the Neocon “Right” to Vladimir Putin has much to do with his perceived opposition to liberal democracy, “human rights,” globally-imposed equality, and, perhaps most importantly, his unwillingness to fall into line economically and politically with the advancing globalist panzers of the New World Order, whether directed from Bruxelles or from the board rooms on Wall Street or from smoke filled conference rooms in Washington. The fearful rise of nationalism and conservative populism, and the refusal to accept globalist tutelage and ultimate control, whether coming from Moscow or from Donald Trump, is what unites unlikely partners such as internationalist and Marxist George Soros with Neocons such as Bill Kristol and politicians like John McCain (who has received Soros pass-through funding).

The “Russians Did It!” canard is just the latest episode in this ongoing Kabuki dance between the Neocon-dominated “conservative movement” and its auxiliaries, who now suggest that the Russians wanted Hillary to win in 2016, and the openly Marxist Left and its auxiliaries, who continue their discredited narrative that the Russians colluded with Donald Trump and therefore “stole” the election away from the Deep State’s rightful heir apparent. Both have Russia in their cross hairs: for the Neocons it is as if nothing has changed since the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991 and we are still fighting a dictator just like Josef Stalin; for the cultural Marxists it is because they see a post-Communist, nationalist and religiously traditionalist Russia as a danger to their particular brand of socialist hegemony. The differences in their opposition are impressionistic, like a many-headed, serpentine Hydra which incarnates various aspects of globalism, egalitarianism and what they term “liberal democracy”: they take differing paths to reach their goals…but those objectives are fundamentally alike.

November  8, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

First Year of the Trump Presidency: The Cultural War Continues  Unabated

Friends,

Today marks one year since the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States. Despite an unrelenting phalanx of fierce, no-holds-barred opposition from this nation’s media, entertainment/sports conglomerate and the Deep State—despite internal obstructionism from the Republican Party establishment and Neoconservative elites and the hysterical jeremiads from those self-important, self-erected political Moguls, the Bushes, John McCain, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake—And despite the sabotage inflicted on the president’s agenda  from even within his administration—Despite all this, remarkably, the Trump Counter-revolution is still alive and still, if at times haltingly, advancing.

That is not to say that the past year—or, more precisely, the past ten months—have been a complete success, nor that every action, every presidential initiative, has moved the announced and enunciated “Trump Agenda” forward. Indeed, as was to be expected, after the president’s election many lukewarm, hesitant supporters, mostly Neocons—who would have preferred another, more pliable GOP, candidate, but reluctantly went for Trump—attempted to surround him, to coopt him and shape his agenda. Already having service in the Deep State managerial swamp, they were well placed and connected to assume positions in the new administration—they were experienced and prepared to swoop in and occupy posts of power.

In this they were partially successful: the most notable example being the naming of Nikki Haley to the post of UN Ambassador. Haley was a protégé of globalist Lindsey Graham and had been a trenchant NeverTrumper prior to Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination. More horrifically, bringing in the intellectually-challenged Haley to fill the post once occupied by an Adlai Stevenson was akin to asking Inspector Clouseau (of “Pink Panther” fame) to solve a major crime. And her apparent eagerness to involve this country in another shooting conflict marked a sharp contrast with major emphases of the Trump agenda.

Yet, those efforts to coopt and to dominate the administration and shift it towards standard Republican globalism also had some significant misfires, the most spectacular being the failure of Council on Foreign Relations NeverTrumper Neocon Elliott Abrams to secure the number two position at the State Department. Only the active and vigorous response to his potential candidacy—announced as a “given” by the Neocon establishment National Review—by traditionalist, “paleo-conservative” Trump supporters was able to derail what seemed like a sure thing. Thankfully, around Trump there were men like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and a few others who understood what the “Trump Revolution” was actually about and meant to millions of voters. And, then, there was the intuition of the president, himself. Although admittedly no intellectual and not versed in the history of “the conservative wars” between traditionalist America First conservatives and the internationalist, open borders, free trade Neocons, the president’s instincts seemed to correct or at least deflect some of the more egregious attempts by the GOP/Neocon elites to undo or subvert his agenda.

Yet, as most Trump voters knew well before the election, the president is also a clever and accomplished deal maker who is well-versed in implementing a strategy he enunciated in his now-famous volume, The Art of the Deal, and in years of successful business experience and wheeling-and-dealing. While efforts to secure the promised border wall and reduce illegal immigration, to institute extreme vetting of Muslim refugees from violence-torn countries, and to balance our trade deficit and bring back and protect American jobs have only been moderately successful, in retrospect, who would have imagined last October, when all major polls and all the bookmakers in Las Vegas predicted a smashing Hillary Clinton victory, that we would be in the position where we now find ourselves? Instead of hopelessly debating the final nails in the prepared coffin of our old, ailing republic, the electoral victory of the “deplorables” and of Middle America have, at the very least, opened a crack in the door, given us one more opportunity for serious counter-revolution against the overwhelming forces of the Deep State.

The naming of Neil Gorsuch to the US Supreme Court, the reformist directives of Betsy DeVos at the US Department of Education, the actions of Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice, and the continuing campaign of Steve Bannon, now outside the White House, to continue the grass roots “make America great again” efforts and--just maybe—reconfigure the Republican Party, are signs that that battle continues to rage. The welcome victory of Judge Moore in Alabama, the departure from the Senate of Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, even the apparently coordinated attacks on the president by the Bushes, pere et fils, and John McCain, are indications that “Trumpism” is no paper mache’ momentary challenge to the elites.

Even the failure of establishment Republican Ed Gillespie in yesterday’s Virginia gubernatorial election offers confirmation of this. The Mainstream Media [MSM] heralds and trumpets Gillespie’s defeat by eight percentage points (plus the Democrat’s election in New Jersey) as “major setbacks” to and a “rejection” of the president and his agenda. Yet, once again, the MSM engages in wishful thinking, letting its unbridled hatred of President Trump dictate its coverage and analysis.

The simple fact is that northern Virginia, where a substantial proportion of Virginia’s population now lives, is basically one giant suburb and extension of the Deep State capital of this country, Washington DC (which, recall, only gave 4% of its votes to the president in the 2016 election). Most of the rest of Virginia—with the exceptions of urban Richmond,  Norfolk/Chesapeake, and Charlottesville, is still a Southern and mostly conservative state; but the influx of Deep State-dependent voters whose very existence is bound up in and with the along-the-Potomac managerial and governmental elites, has made Virginia increasingly a “blue state.” The result of the election yesterday only confirms that fact—and also confirms the fact, very much apparent, that the American nation is no longer “one country,” but sharply and most likely, irreconcilably and hopelessly divided.

Despite this, even The Washington Post, in its November 6 edition, was forced to admit using its own, most likely slanted polling, that were the 2016 presidential election to be held today, Donald Trump would still defeat Hillary Clinton. The electoral map is a stark indication of our division.

That may not be much consolation for Ed Gillespie—he attempted to be “all things to all (potential) Republicans.” Yes, he was persuaded to embrace a defense of Confederate monuments and, more hesitatingly, attacked Latino gangs (MS 13), but for a self-identified GOP establishmentarian with a record of support for open borders and the acceptance of standard Deep State positions on most social and cultural issues, it is very likely that hard core “deplorables” did not overnight become zealous Gillespie supporters. That, plus the increase in Left-leaning DC suburbanites, were too much to overcome in Blue-tending Virginia. The election was not a repudiation of the president. Indeed, a more sharply-focused Trump standard bearer might well have done much better…the better indication may be in the upcoming 2018 US senate race, where the president’s former Virginia campaign manager, Corey Stewart, is running hard and smart.

Finally, the clearest indication that the Trump counter-revolution continues is the feverishly unhinged and over-the-top—the openly vicious—opposition to the president and his agenda by the culturally Marxist Left, the media, the Democrats, academia and Hollywood. Never in at least the past 150 or so years have we seen such a reaction and such stark division in this nation. Watergate was a mild tempest-in-a-teapot in comparison.

While certainly distressing and filled with extreme portents for the very future of the American nation, in an ironic way, it is perhaps a good thing to have the unbridgeable divisions that were always there, always percolating just below the surface and infecting and polluting our culture, now revealed in all their unmistakable horror and with all their immense challenges for all to see.

Recently, in the Raleigh-Durham area, the principle news caster for the area’s major television station WRAL, David Crabtree, has been featured in one of those “soft” “touchy-feely” public service ads, proclaiming “We are One…we share the same things, love our children, practice our faith…united as one.” The implication is that the old concept of “E pluribus Unum” still holds. But no, no longer. We do not live in a “united” nation.

And it has not been those of us caricatured as “irremediables” and “deplorables” who have caused this rupture, who created this disunion. We have only maintained what our fathers and our ancestors believed and left to us as a legacy. It was not us, but rather the forces of revolutionary Leftist subversion and miseducation, of a cultural rot which the Left identified as “progress” and advancement, of a degeneration of thinking and language, that have succeeded in tearing this nation asunder.

2016 was, then, a potential watershed year. In retrospect, the unexpected victory last November may have been the easier part of what may be the final phase of an immense “culture war.” Despite our various weaknesses and the apparent superiority of our enemies, we yet have the inherited traditions—not yet extinguished, the remembrance of who we were and who we still can be as a people, to nourish us. But every man, every family, must in its own best way, be involved. For this is a war to the death, not so much physical, but spiritual.

We must be fully engaged—our enemies must be completely and totally vanquished. That—and our constant prayers—is, I believe, the only way to restore the country and make America great again.