January 23, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Memphis Monuments Issue and the Crisis of Our Western European Culture

Friends,

Back on January 13 of this year I wrote in the MY CORNER installment about the flagrant and outrageous violation of several state laws that has occurred in Memphis, Tennessee. There the city fathers, in the darkness of night, illegally removed monuments to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and a bust honoring Captain Harvey Mathes of the 37^th Regiment Tennessee Troops, also disturbing the gravesite of Forrest.  Ignoring state law, civil law and statutes protecting cemeteries, Memphis officials, of their own volition, decided that the wishes of the citizens of Tennessee expressed in the laws enacted by their legislators, didn’t matter one damn bit, if those wishes stand in the way of fanatical political correctness and the unchained and unhinged ideological desire to destroy symbols of our tradition, symbols that honor our ancestors and their immense, sometimes mortal, sacrifices.

I also wrote that this openly culturally Marxist initiative in Memphis was not simply an assault on Confederate symbols and imagery. Rather, it represents just one aspect of a generalized attack on all of our European Western and Christian traditions and inheritance. For the symbols, statues and monuments honoring the Confederate soldier and his epic struggle cannot be disconnected from the symbols, plaques and memorials honoring and commemorating all the other soldiers and events of our history.

For almost the entirety of the 153 years since Appomattox, most all Americans, North and South, have understood that. General Lee, for example, was acknowledged universally as not only one of the world’s greatest military leaders, but a man of supreme nobility of character and admirable honor who epitomized what it was to be “le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche” [“the knight without fear and beyond reproach”], as the famous 15^th century French knight, the Chevalier de Bayard, was termed. In all military academies, his strategies were studied; presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight D. Eisenhower considered him a model in every regard, including his humanity so deeply infused with Christian virtue.

Over above the more military considerations was the understanding that by and large the Confederate commanders leading what eventually became a “lost cause,” as well as their troops, were noble exemplars of the finest and best traditions of our Western heritage. They were and are not separate or isolated from that heritage. Yet, because the modern Progressivist mind has decreed from its parapets of power the horror of racism to be America’s central historical theme and since the South, and in particular the Confederacy, represents that ineradicable “sin,” it has been the Confederate soldier and other symbols of the Confederacy and of the South that have become the first target.

But it is just that: the first target, and by no means the only target. For the goal and object of those fanatical Progressivist revolutionaries is to completely erase or pervert most all of American history and the iconography that accompanies and symbolizes it. This is strikingly clear in other, concurrent efforts at “cultural purification,” including the removal of a plaque at Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia, honoring George Washington (he was a slaveholder, you know), efforts to remove monuments honoring Christopher Columbus (he was a “white oppressor” of the native population), and Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan priest who brought the Gospel to Indians in California (he was illustrative of colonialism and the “white man’s burden”).

What additional targets are in the Progressivist and cultural Marxist playbooks? Let’s see, Fort Bragg should become Fort Al Sharpton; Jefferson City, Missouri, should become John Brown City; and perhaps Washington State will be renamed Leon Trotsky State. Sound too extreme, too incredible?  Just ask our grandparents of fifty and sixty years ago if they could have imagined what we are witnessing today….

The Progressivist revolutionaries understand instinctively that if you remove the visible and real symbols of a culture you deprive it of its requisite and healthy expression and inhibit its memorialization.  Destroy the memory of who we have been, of our legacy and those traditions and beliefs that gave us life and meaning, and you critically, probably fatally, castrate our civilization, sever our connections to our past…and we become fodder, flotsam-and-jetsam for the widespread type of indoctrination we see today in our schools and colleges, and being imposed on us by our entertainment and media, and swallowed like sweet but infectious swill by our politicians. And in the end, you replace twenty centuries of culture, of belief and faith by a new and vile culture brewed in the stinking and poisonous cauldrons of Hell, itself.

This, then, is what we are up against.

So, you may not believe that what has happened and what is happening in Memphis affects you? After all we simply must get ready for the Superbowl (and that awesome Superbowl party)! Or, get the kids prepared for that next soccer game, right? And Leith Motors has that new 2018 Toyota I’ve been wanting….

But inaction in these matters, even if benign or innocent, inevitably conducts us to the extirpation of our culture and to the end of everything we hold dear and of value.

In many ways we are like the frog cast into a pot of at-first lukewarm water. In the beginning, the frog swims around, carefree, not realizing that the burners are being turned up gradually. And soon the water is boiling, but it is too late for the frog, who is cooked and his life extinguished.

So, go about our family duties, certainly. But if we do not become engaged in whatever way that we can, we shall assuredly be like that frog…and all the soccer practice and Superbowl watching we once enjoyed, well, they will only be fleeting and burning memories as we and our families are swept aside to the squalid ash heap of history.

It is that simple and that clear.

The MY CORNER column from January 13 has been picked up—I rewrote and revised it, and it is now published on The Abbeville Institute site (a site I strongly recommend). And I pass along this version today:

Memphis and the Assault on Our Western Christian Inheritance

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/memphis-and-the-assault-on-our-western-christian-inheritance/

By Boyd Cathey on Jan 22, 2018

The city fathers of Memphis have been engaged in police state tactics and patently illegal actions, taking down the historic statues honoring General Nathan Bedford Forrest and President Jefferson Davis and the bust memorializing Captain Harvey Mathes of the 37^thRegiment Tennessee troops. Despite the Tennessee Heritage Law and the decision of the Tennessee Historical Commission which should have prevented such offenses, the cultural Marxists who dominate the government (and who have re-enslaved and placed the city’s black citizens back on the—this time Marxist—plantation), the city fathers have outrageously ignored and violated the law.

While many establishment Republican leaders in Tennessee, just like their pusillanimous GOP co-cowards in most other states, prefer to look the other way and thus have failed to take the legally dictated measures (for fear of being called “racists”), the national Sons of Confederate Veterans has and is launching several major lawsuits to ensure that the laws of the State of Tennessee, not to mention the wishes of a majority of citizens of that state, be obeyed.

How, you may ask, is this legal action in Tennessee important in the overall context of what we should call “the battle for Western civilization?” Very simply the response is this: what is occurring in Memphis—and in other cities and states across not just the South, but the nation as a whole—represents in microcosm the multilevel and multifaceted assault on the entirety of our Western and Christian traditions, our heritage and our legacy.

From the very initiation of the current attempt to “cleanse” our environment of symbols of our past—that is, those symbols that the culturally Marxist Left finds offensive or inconvenient to their Progressivist narrative, those symbols that illustrate another narrative, a broader vision of our historic Western Christian heritage—from the beginnings of this assault, the cultural Marxists have clearly selected those targets that they believed would be easier to destroy and demolish…as their first step.

If last year after Charlottesville, or, if after the Dylan Roof attack in 2015, the fanatical Left had made an immediate and generalized concerted effort to take down and remove all monuments and plaques honoring, say, President George Washington or President Thomas Jefferson—both of whom were slaveholders—their campaign would have failed, would have collapsed. Public opinion was not yet ready for such radicalism and, despite decades of Progressivist disinformation and ideological miseducation in our schools and media, would not have countenanced it.

But Confederate monuments and symbols: Ah, there was a target that could be tarred and feathered with more essential public support! Already there were dozens of establishment “historians” in major universities infected with the ideological virus of cultural Marxism, for whom “racism” was seen as the driving force, the central characteristic of American history. And the Confederacy? There was a ready-made target, a putative nation that was, so they wrote, “founded on racism.”

While a frontal attack on Washington and his historical and cultural symbolism at this time would have probably failed, an attack on the Confederacy, its heroes, its monuments and its memory, was seen as more productive and potentially successful.

But—and this is the essential point that absolutely must be understood—the attack on all things Confederate (and implicitly, Southern) was and is just a FIRST STEP, a first step in the complete “purification” of America, a complete and total purging of ALL of our historic symbols and of our historical memory. And eventually, the total transformation of the historic nation, itself.

What those who split hairs and endorse taking down Confederate monuments while at the same time defending the Washington symbols fail to understand is that the defense of the monuments honoring Generals Lee and Jackson is part of a seamless defense of the entirety of our Western and Christian heritage and traditions. Defending symbols of the Confederacy and its soldiers, and a defense of our other national symbols, cannot be separated.

This has been the fatal error of the “Neoconservatives,” those pundits and scribblers mostly in Washington or in New York who now dominate the so-called “conservative movement,” its think tanks and journals, Fox News, and who provide the meagre intellectual gruel for most establishment GOP thinking. Accepting implicitly the essential cultural Marxist narrative about race and racism, they are impelled by succeeding logic, to come to similar conclusions as their supposed enemies over on the “farther Left.”  Accepting the egalitarian myth that “America was founded on the ideological principle—the unrealized idea—of equality” (a principle which is demonstrably and historically false), they remain prisoners of their circuitous logic.

So, they attempt to split hairs like all temporizers in history.  They countenance a “little bit of revolution,” while attempting (always unsuccessfully) to resist the full effects and results of their initial if tepid agreement with the Revolution’s premises.

The late Senator Jesse Helms used to say that the only thing you find in the “middle of the road is a dead chicken.”  In the end, whether it be the temporizing Kerensky in Russia in 1917 or the Girondistes during the French Revolution, our history is littered with the unlamented carcasses of dead chickens, of those who tried to have it both ways.

A defense of monuments to General Lee is, in fact, a defense of Western Christian tradition. Not to understand that is to seriously fail to comprehend what our Western Christian tradition is all about…and only enables our fierce and frenzied enemies who seek, in their darkest designs, to destroy it and us.

So, against Memphis the national SCV has filed legal actions, actions against enemies of our history and our inheritance.

SCV Commander-in-Chief Tom Strain, in an official statement from the International Headquarters in Franklin, Tennessee, announced that:

“…several court actions against the City of Memphis [had been filed] to combat and rectify the despicable crimes against and theft of Confederate statues on the night of December 20, 2017. On that night, the City ordered police and cranes into Forrest Park and Confederate Park and forcibly removed the Forrest Memorial Equestrian Statue, the Jefferson Davis Statue, and the bronze bust of Capt. Harvey Mathes, 37th Tenn. Infantry. The Forrest gravesite was also damaged. The statues were taken to an undisclosed location….

“The SCV Court filings against the City and ‘any and all co-conspirators’ include requests for a Temporary Restraining Order and a Preliminary Injunction. These actions, filed in (Nashville) Chancery Court, call for the defendants to exercise all duty and care for the 3 statues and prohibit the defendants from further damaging, moving, selling, or in any way harming or otherwise disturbing the statues and the Forrest gravesite pending further legal action.  It is likely that additional lawsuits will be filed, to combat violations of the Tennessee Heritage Act and to pursue damages incurred under the laws…. It is our opinion that the City and its cohorts committed numerous violations of state law, civil law, cemetery law, and a host of other illegal acts in what appears to be a sham scheme to remove the Confederate monuments and to circumvent Tennessee law.  

“Though the state attorney general has offered no help in prosecuting these crimes, the SCV has called on the Tennessee Legislature to appoint a special prosecutor to pursue charges against the Memphis mayor, city council, and all those involved in the thefts and/or damage to the Parks and monuments.”[January 12, 2018]

And Commander Strain asks that those who believe in our traditions and heritage access the SCV web site and make contributions to the Heritage Defense Fund. But not only for Lee, Forrest and the other long-dead Confederates, but for our Western and Christian heritage, itself.  For that, in truth, is the real target.

About Boyd Cathey

Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations.

January 21, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Celebrating Robert E. Lee Day While Thousands of Women Go Marching Off to Hell

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Friends,

I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, yesterday to join well over 300 North Carolinians gathered in the House of Representative chamber of the historic 1840 State Capitol to celebrate North Carolina’s 29^th annual celebration of Robert E. Lee Day. It was an inspiring ceremony that reminded the attendees of the precious historical legacy and cultural inheritance that we have received and that is so gravely endangered these days. I came away encouraged: there were men, women, and children, various members of the military and surviving veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm, with their families, all joined in memory of those who went before us, those who selflessly defended their homes, their land, and their faith, so that we might enjoy and experience those gifts…and pass them on to our children.

When I walked the short distance from a crowded parking lot to the State Capitol, I noticed that my car was surrounded by dozens of other cars emblazoned with bumper stickers with such messages as:  “Dump Trump,” “Keep Your Hands Off My Vagina,” “Abortion Free and Legal,” “Open Immigration NOW!,” “Lesbians Unite to Smash the Right,” “Resist!”—those are just the ones I noticed. And I wondered if, when I returned, my little Kia (with a Confederate license plate) would be scarred or damaged by those latter-day liberated amazons. As walked up the sidewalk to the Capitol I noticed hundreds of women—most of whom I would have certainly avoided had I met them at a social gathering—headed for a rally, an event concurrent with our event, just a few blocks away on what is called the Bicentennial Plaza, a much larger event for certain, but in no way comparable in quality or merit.

It was the Raleigh extension of the “Women’s Resist” movement, a grab bag manifestation of a whole motley crew of what is best described as an expression of “feminist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, Marxist and anti-Trump sentiment,” which  was held on the one year anniversary of the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

 Despite a mammoth Pro-Life Rally in Washington the day prior—perhaps as many as 200,000 participants and the president addressing them (the first president to do that)—it was the women’s  march that was practically the only thing the media could or wished to concentrate on, those hundreds of thousands of #Resist movement women (with some of their poor, bedraggled husbands and brainwashing-in-process young daughters and sons in tow), now supplemented by the supposedly sexually-abused #MeToo” militants, out in the streets demonstrating for a variety of feminist and civil rights causes.

If there was and is anything that should convince us of the absolutely deleterious and poisonous effects of modern public schooling and university education, and the effects of our entertainment Behemoth, it was to behold those women (and their menfolk) heading to their rally. Most carried signs, bearing expressions which, when not just foul-mouthed or profane, partook of what I would call “illiterate-speak.” That is, sloganeering based on fiercely weaponized and half-baked nuggets, those bits of ideas spread throughout our dominant culture, which for them are in fact unquestioned in any close detail and which under normal circumstances would not bear up under any close analysis or inspection.

Those women live their lives based on Progressivist slogans, incorporating a deconstructed—or, rather, reconstructed—language of short catch-all phrases and terminologies, buttressed by pseudo-scientific gobbledegook: “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “voting rights,” “gender equality,” “transgender rights,” the list is interminable. Their explanations and definitions are usually circuitous, and generally all come back to a foundation in what they call “equality” and “liberation” from traditional—and thus “oppressive”—rules and moral (and natural) law, which they almost always misunderstand or simply ignore. In other words, those foundations that have created our civilization and given it life over the past more than twenty centuries are discarded, become mere impediments that must be overthrown in the way of Progress, or, at the least, radically altered and transformed or re-interpreted.

One thing you can be sure of is that tomorrow we shall see another “right” invented for whatever new barbarity will be intuited to have been miraculously found in the “penumbra of the Constitution,” and that there will some Federal judge or judges out there who will, then, confirm that that is exactly what the Founders and Framers truly intended, whether it be for some dehumanized “metrosexual” male who all of a sudden “declares” that he “feels” like a woman and demands that he be allowed to use a lady’s restroom, or for some husky female who decides that she should be a tackle on the Minnesota Vikings football team so she can run up against Javon Roosevelt who weighs in a 320 pounds (and has three convictions for wife abuse).

Now it is transgender rights and gender fluidity, but tomorrow it will be incest and polygamy, no doubt.  And there will be a series of “experts” and assembled PhDs in psychiatry and counseling brought in to testify that such practices are indeed just fine and—shall we even use the word?—normal.

Yes, that is most assuredly what James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and other fathers of this republic envisioned!  Right?

I have argued previously that what we see presently in our society, and not just with the so-called “women’s movement,” is a form of collective madness, the existence of an artificial counter-reality, a condition in which certain broad strata of our population, ingesting decades and, yes, centuries of both intellectual and spiritual disinformation, have constructed around themselves a pseudo-reality to match their ideological indoctrination: reality for them must match what they have been told and instructed to believe. So, instead of accepting the God-given reality and the natural order as created, instead of accepting their own creaturehood and an understanding of the flawed nature and limitations of humanity, itself, they construct a revolutionary counter-existence to explain things and events, what German philosophers might call “gestalt,” as a way of justifying their beliefs and resulting actions.

And thus there is the need to diagnose and explain why the rest of us—those who reject their worldview—do not accept the new template and the new reality they propound. Whether it be the attempts of historic liberalism of the 19^th century to define traditionalist and royalist thinking as “reactionary,” “anti-democratic,” and “opposed to the inevitability of Progress,” or more recent efforts in the old Soviet Union, when not exiling dissenters to the Gulag, to send those who opposed the new orthodoxy to mental and psychiatric hospitals for treatment and “re-education,” those who advance the counter-reality, which in essence is a rebellion against God and His creation, seek to disauthorize and delegitimize their opponents.

Just this past week a veritable gaggle of “expert” psychiatrists and non-medical pundits spent an inordinate amount of time on air, “diagnosing” Donald Trump as “mentally unfit” for office. Obviously his physical examination tests were skewed, obviously his doctor (who was also Obama’s) was lying…this is what we were told. Even as I caught a bit of NPR riding in my car to Raleigh (the program “What! What! Don’t Tell Me”) and later that night (Jimmy Fallon), the unhumorous attempts at humor characterizing Trump as “mentally abnormal” were shot through with bitter scorn and hatred, a drippingly vile condescension exhibited not just toward the president, but at anyone who would not follow the new dogmatism and accept the new reality.  (Remember FBI agent Peter Strzok’s description of being able “to smell Trump supporters at WalMart”?)

The  Progressivist syllogism goes as follows:

-What we in the media, academia and the dominant culture dictate and proclaim is true, cannot be legitimately contested by any sensible person;

-But Donald Trump and millions of those “deplorables” in the despised “fly-over country” (to quote the pornographic novelist Philip Roth) deny and dispute what we demand they accept;

-Therefore, Donald Trump (and all those unwashed deplorables) are “mentally sick” and “unadjusted,” requiring counseling and correction, and if that doesn’t work, condemnation and exiling from the public square.

(And, let me point out, that one doesn’t have to agree with the president on every issue—I certainly have my disagreements on some issues—to fall victim of this new dogmatism.)

And thus we see the broadly erupting epidemic, which becomes fiercer as the days pass, of suppression of  “dissident” speech on college campuses in the name of “protecting” students from racism, sexism and homophobia; of firing or penalizing employees who question the Progressivist narratives on race and sex; the censoring of those on Facebook or Google who question the new and very dogmatic templates; and the abject fear of any politician (Democrat or Republican) or any public personality of transgressing the steadily-moving-to-the-Left goal posts on race or sexual “liberation.” To do so will result in overwhelming demands for a complete and groveling apology—and perhaps a handsome donation to the NAACP or Planned Parenthood, to help make up for the “sin” committed against the new dogmas.

I have termed the counter-reality that produces this palpable intellectual and spiritual totalitarianism as a form of lunacy, a kind of madness that inverts and attempts to pervert creation and nature, itself, so as to match a synthetic and imposed, essentially anti-human, ideology. To protect itself from dissent and probing questions, it must continually be on the offensive, continually convulsed and convulsive like all fanaticisms, and always on guard that some “reactionary,” in some place, will speak up and notice its intellectual vacuity and artificiality…and its horrid and genocidal effects.

Those women yesterday professed that they were marching for “equality,” for the expansion of something they called liberty. But they have no idea of what genuine liberty is or entails.         

In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?” He responds, in part:

“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.

“The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return…. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much... But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [Italics added]

True liberty, and its exercise, requires that it have an object and a terminus. In our European and Christian civilization, with its fundamental inheritances from the three great historic centers of learning and wisdom—Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem—that means we are entrusted with essential rights and liberties that are both inherited and defined by who we are as a people and by our relationship to our Creator and to those institutions that give us existence and life. This is our inheritance; we have no other. To attempt to overthrow or pervert it is to open the doors to self-destruction. 

Those women I saw yesterday, and the millions of other Americans like them, are modern revolutionaries, and, to use Chesterton’s parable, are lunatics, “already outside the world of reason,” whose unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to actually create anything of real and lasting value.

And thus that smaller crowd at Lee Day at the State Capitol, while overshadowed in numbers (and by media coverage), represented hope and recovery, and the blessed assurance that our battle goes on…and that numbers and fame, while significant and certainly important, are as nothing if we are on God’s side.

January 19, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Coup Against Trump as Beast of the Apocalypse: Some Parallels in History from Post-World War II Europe

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Friends,

Beginning back in 2016 the American government, that is, the Obama administration, working hand-in-hand with the Hillary Clinton campaign, employed the FBI and possibly other government intelligence agencies in a multilevel and blatantly illegal and unconstitutional effort to malign, undermine and destroy the candidacy,  and then the presidency, of Donald J. Trump. And, after his totally unexpected election, through investigations based on falsehoods and Communist-style disinformation using a Federal commission (headed by Robert Mueller), again employing the FBI, to bring him down, perhaps resulting in his impeachment.

In short: an attempted coup d’etat, a complete reversal of the 2016 election, and the complete the destruction of what was left of our battered United States Constitution...unparalleled in American history since at least the unconstitutional measures of Abraham Lincoln, more than 150 years ago.

Let me describe this process in a somewhat novel way.

I recall this morning a bit of history with three short recapitulations of events that took place in the nations of Eastern Europe right after the defeat of Germany in 1945 and the occupation of those countries by Soviet Communist armies, some seventy years ago. And there is a reason for this, for there are lessons for us today here in the United States, and there are also historical parallels, as well.

The seizure of power by Soviet-supported domestic Communists in those countries was largely a peaceful seizure of political power by puppets of and collaborators with Moscow, intent on controlling the post-war destinies of eight Eastern European nations (not to mention the Baltic States). That is, to establish a New World Order.

Let me emphasize the word “peaceful” here. During the period from 1944 until 1948, after clearing those states of German forces, the Soviet army brought with it the return of previously exiled Communists, who filtered back in to Berlin, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Warsaw, Prague, Belgrade and Tirana.

By the terms of the Allied agreements for the post-war—agreements that the Western Allies made with the wily Joe Stalin (and that the Western Allies should have known would not be honored—indeed, some “advisors” to Roosevelt were openly pro-Communist), “coalition” governments were to be established bringing together non-Communist political groups and Communist and pro-Communist groups to govern those countries. The diverse cabinet ministries were split between the differing political groups, with the Communists invariably getting control of the Ministry of the Interior (the equivalent of our security services and FBI agencies), the Ministry of Information (in charge of regulating the national media) and the Ministry of Education (for schools and universities). With these powerful agencies of government at work to further revolution, eventual seizure of total power by Communists was greatly facilitated—and with stationed Soviet troops usually close by, the transition from constitutional republics to Communist ones was made a near certainty.

Of great assistance were the honeycombed nests of philo-Communists and card-carrying Communists within Western governments of the time. One has only to examine the Venona Transcripts, such accounts as the Whitaker Chambers revelations, detailed volumes such as Perjury, and hundreds of other documents to understand how the American and British governments were largely willing to look the other way, if not actively encourage, the absorption of Eastern Europe (and later China) into the Soviet Bloc.

Now let me offer those promised passages concerning three non-Communist leaders who ran afoul of Communist revolution—and, again, let me emphasize that we are talking about “peaceful revolution,” or to put it into current usage, “silent coups.”  If you read these short passages (mostly from the Wikipedia, or longer accounts) you may detect certain analogies, certain similarities with what is occurring today in the United States. The analogies, of course, are not always exact, but there is enough here to illustrate some similarities in praxis and process between then and now. None of these personalities was, strictly speaking a “right winger,” and each of them had faults and foibles and made mistakes. But they do illustrate what happens when “coalitions” with Marxists of any stripe are proposed, or if “collaboration” is followed, or we are counseled to “go along, to get along,” which has been the standard position of the Establishment Republican Party in the United States when faced with Leftist revolution.

JAN MASARYK

In February 1948 the majority of the non-communist cabinet members [of the Czechoslovak government] resigned, hoping to force new elections, but instead a communist government under Gottwald was formed in what became known as the Czech coup (Victorious February in the Eastern Bloc).  Non-Communist Masaryk remained Foreign Minister, and was the only prominent minister in the new government who was neither a Communist nor a fellow traveller. However, he was apparently uncertain about his decision and possibly regretted his decision not to oppose the communist coup by broadcasting to the Czech people on national radio, where he was a much loved celebrity.

On March 10, 1948 Masaryk was found dead, dressed only in his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry (the Černín Palace in Prague) below his bathroom window. The initial investigation by the Ministry of the Interior stated that he had committed suicide by jumping out of the window, although for a long time it has been believed by some that he was murdered by the nascent Communist government. (Others in the country put it thus: "Jan Masaryk was a very tidy man. He was such a tidy man that when he jumped he shut the window after himself.")

ZOLTAN TILDY

Tildy became Prime Minister of Hungary, serving from November 15, 1945 until February 1, 1946, when Tildy was elected President of Hungary. He was an ex officio member of the High National Council from December 7, 1945 until February 2, 1946.

Tildy served as the first President of the Republic of Hungary until July 31, 1948, when he was forced to resign after allegations emerged about his son-in-law being arrested for corruption and adultery. Tildy was held under house arrest in Budapest until 1 May 1956. He was appointed to the position of a state minister in the coalition government during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He was eventually arrested by Soviet forces after the revolution was crushed by Warsaw Pact intervention. On June 15, 1958, Tildy was sentenced by the Supreme Court to six years' imprisonment, in the trial of Imre Nagy and associates….

KING MICHAEL OF ROMANIA

In March 1945, political pressures [from the United States and Britain!] forced King Michael to appoint a pro-Soviet government headed by Petru Groza. For the next two-plus years Michael functioned as little more than a figurehead. Between August 1945 and January 1946, during what was later known as the "royal strike," King Michael tried unsuccessfully to oppose the Groza government by refusing to sign its decrees. In response to Soviet, British, and American pressures, [!!] King Michael eventually gave up his opposition to the communist government and stopped demanding its resignation.

[…] Early on the morning of 30 December 1947, Michael was preparing for a New Year's party at Peleș Castle in Sinaia, when Groza summoned him back to Bucharest. Michael returned to Elisabeta Palace in Bucharest, to find it surrounded by troops from the Tudor Vladimirescu Division, an army unit completely loyal to the Communists. Groza and Communist Party leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej were waiting for him, and demanded that he sign a pre-typed instrument of abdication. Unable to call in loyal troops, due to his telephone lines being cut, and with either Groza or Gheorghiu-Dej (depending on the source) holding a gun on him, Michael signed the document. Later the same day, the Communist-dominated government announced the 'permanent' abolition of the monarchy, and its replacement by a People's Republic, broadcasting the King's pre-recorded radio proclamation of his own abdication. On 3 January 1948, Michael was forced to leave the country… He was the last monarch behind the Iron Curtain to lose his throne.

According to Michael's own account, Groza had threatened him at gun point and warned that the government would shoot 1,000 arrested students, if the king did not abdicate. In an interview with The New York Times from 2007, Michael recalls the events: "It was blackmail. They said, 'If you don't sign this immediately we are obliged' — why obliged I don't know — 'to kill more than 1,000 students' that they had in prison."  According to Time, Groza threatened to arrest thousands of people and order a bloodbath unless Michael abdicate.

There are some lessons here—historical lessons—as we learn more about the blatant attempt of the Obama administration, in cahoots with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, using and employing an agency of the Federal government—the FBI—to spy on and produce a fake and false “dossier,” and then unleash a completely political attempt, the Mueller Commission, based on the dossier,  to basically overturn the 2016 election and to “get” the newly elected president on manufactured charges of, first, Russian “collusion,” then obstruction of justice, and now possibly financial irregularities that may have happened ten or twelve years ago. That strategy, of course, was the “alternative” strategy, the “security” angle that senior FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress discussed with the highest FBI officials (some of whom are still IN PLACE), just in case Hillary did not win the 2016 election.

Although we see some of that intrigue and calculated skullduggery being unraveled presently, do any of us doubt that the whole sordid and putrid and repulsive mess goes far deeper?

Are we not dealing with a Deep State along-the-Potomac “swamp” that makes those old-fashioned Soviet puppets seem at times mild in comparison?  Have we not heard Glenn Simpson (of FusionGPS, the firm hired by the Democrats whose fake dossier was used as the basis by the FBI and Obama to surveil Trump and his staff) declare that “some people were killed” in this process? Do we recall what happened to that disaffected Democratic National Committee staffer, Seth Rich, who mostly likely was the mole who released all those incriminating DNC memos to Wikileaks—murdered outside his DC apartment, and no culprit ever found or charged, oh-so-conveniently?

Indeed, the set of Marxists we are dealing with today, with their historical origin in a fanatical Trotskyite globalism, those Marxists who dominant the Deep State governmental and managerial establishment “swamp,” are the lineal descendants of Petru Groza in Romania and Gottwald in Czechoslovakia, but worse.

They have extended their control and infection into nearly all realms of American life, they totally control one major political party and have succeeded in largely silencing the other (when not inducing it to go along as “enablers” or “collaborators”), they have taken control of the “conservative movement,” basically neutering it and empowering numerous “conservatives” to counsel “moderation”—that is, to act like Jan Masaryk, when they should be acting like Lech Walesa…but, then, those “conservatives” owe their origins equally to Trotsky and his philosophical minions, do they not? [Hello Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, David French, National Review, Weekly Standard, etc.]

This, then, is what we observe around us…and this is very simply what we must overthrow and defeat: no easy task. But it must be attempted if we are to survive as a people.

Perhaps the best way to summarize this inexpressibly horrid situation, this condition that defies easy description in some understandable way, is through a poem that the great Irish writer William Butler Yeats authored almost exactly 100 years ago (1919), in the disastrous and civilizationally-destructive aftermath of the First World War.

It is his famous “The Second Coming,” and in it he sees the collapse of civilization and our Western culture in the vision of a Biblical Apocalypse, a vision of the End Times, when sheer and pure evil—the evil Beast itself now unleashed by man’s corruption and sinfulness (for Yeats, the establishment of Soviet Communism)—ravages the old Christian world. What, indeed, would Yeats say, what would he write today, were he to see what we see, and what that current incarnation of the age-old Beast, the globalist New World Order, now unleashes upon the world?

Where, then, are those who denounce from the rooftops the contagion, the foul presence of the Revolution, the roaming and roaring Beast who, according to Scripture, not only devours and destroys our inheritance as Sons of God [cf. I Peter, vs. 8-10], but perverts our very souls?

       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

January 18, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Two Major Events Focusing on Southern and American Heritage—and the Attacks Launched Against Them; plus, A Few Preliminary Words about Senator Jeff Flake

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Friends,

I want to publicize two major events today—events that I encourage you, if you can, to attend. So, later in this installment of MY CORNER, I will provide ample details. Both of these events will examine aspects of Confederate and American heritage, and both will be tremendously rewarding as we understand the massive assault on our historic culture.

But, first, I must say a few words about the latest outburst, the latest paroxysm of nauseating and hypocritical outrage from one of those once-completely dominant #NeverTrumpers in the Republican Party, who still cannot figure out why and how Donald J. Trump managed to polish off fifteen opponents in the 2016 GOP primaries, much less how he won the general election in November of 2016. The latest whining bombast comes from perhaps the most egotistical and supercilious Republican senator in the United States Senate, even more so than John McCain: Jeff Flake of Arizona [what is it about Arizona electing two of the worst “losers” in American politics?].

Flake gave a major speech on the floor of the United States Senate this past Wednesday in which he harshly attacked President Trump for the president’s criticism of the Mainstream Media, comparing Trump to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, while at the same time he strongly defended the viciously biased and culturally Marxist establishment press…to the point that even most of the major pundits on Fox News (and even one or two on other networks) felt compelled to reject and question his critique and his motives.  Flake’s counterpart from Arizona, John McCain, however, quickly joined him and supported his accusations. No surprise there.

Flake announced this past October that he was on his way out of the Senate,  that he would not seek another term—extremely low polling numbers, growing opposition among conservative Arizona Republicans and his unhinged hatred for President Trump were undoubtedly the causes. Thus, he joined Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, another #NeverTrumper, who is departing Washington…and John McCain, with his terminal brain cancer, who will not be far behind.

Now, if only Susan Collins from Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Ben Sasse of Nebraska—and a few others in the Senate—could be induced to step down, retire, or maybe take a new job as postmasters in remote villages in, say, Guam or the Virgin Islands, things would improve incredibly in our nation’s highest deliberative body (among Republicans)…and for the nation.

More extensive commentary on this soon.

But I mentioned two events at the beginning, and I want to publicize them and encourage you to attend, if at all possible.

The first is ROBERT E. LEE DAY, which will be celebrated in the old House of Representatives chamber in the historic 1840 North Carolina State Capitol, in Raleigh, NC, this coming Saturday, January 20. The event begins at 1 p.m. Certainly, those from distant locations will find it difficult to make the trip…but if you are within a decent driving distance, then this is an event you will want to attend.

Here are the full details:

29th Annual Lee Birthday Celebration

At the Historic 1840 NORTH CAROLINA STATE CAPITOL

Saturday, January 20, 2018, 1:00 P.M.

Sponsored by the MOS&B. UDC, and SCV

Join us as we support the Captain James Iredell Waddell Chapter 32 of Raleigh for the 29th Annual Robert E. Lee Birthday Celebration in the historic House of Representatives chambers on the second floor of the North Carolina State Capitol on Saturday, January 20, 2018 at 1:00 p.m. Our brethren of the Military Order of Stars & Bars co-host this event with the UDC Captain Samuel A’Court Ashe Chapter of Raleigh and the Sons of Confederate Veterans 47th Regiment NC Troops Camp of Wake Forest each year.

The sponsoring organizations of the MOS&B, SCV and UDC will be presenting Military Service Awards to several Veterans this year.

Sergeant Major James Haymes, retired from the United States Army, will be the Keynote Speaker. He is the former chief tour guide of the White House of the Confederacy at that Museum. He has a story to tell about his hero General Lee from his years growing up visiting the old White House of the Confederacy listening to stories from Lee’s granddaughter and his return after his military service.

There is ample free parking around the Capitol, on the streets, and in parking lots across from the State Museum of History on Saturday.

The second event is a major conference hosted by The Abbeville Institute in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Saturday, February 24. This will be an event of national, even international significance, featuring prominent speakers from various parts of the nation, as well as from Italy. And it will examine how the current attacks on historic monuments—the symbols—of our culture are in fact an assault on the entirety of our Western and American traditions. It is not just a monument to Lee or Jackson on some courthouse lawn that is the object of dedicated culturally Marxist revolutionaries, it is the whole of our inherited Western and Christian culture. That is what is at stake.  That is what is in the cross hairs—whether we recognize it or not.

Here below are full details and contact information. Once again, I urge you to make an effort to attend, if you can.

THE ABBEVILLE INSTITUTE  presents:

Attacking Confederate Monuments and Its Meaning for America

Charleston, SC:

February 24 @ 8:00 am - 10:00 pm

Before “political correctness,” Americans respected Confederate memorials. They knew the War was a conflict that went back to the founding fathers and that the secessionist descendants of Jefferson were as much good Americans as the Union descendants of Lincoln. Today, however, our elites are kindling fires to consume not only Confederate symbols but much else besides.

A modest plaque with only the words: “In Memory of George Washington” was removed from Christ Church in Alexandria along with an identically styled plaque for Robert E. Lee. Washington was on the Vestry of Christ Church. He freed his slaves in is will and left funds to care for those unable to work. Lee freed the slaves inherited from his father-in-law before the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Vestry that removed the plaques were not children throwing a tantrum. They were well educated civic and religious leaders. How are we to understand such impiety and lack of humanity? What kind of America are we and our children sloughing towards? What is the source of this attack on the Confederacy and traditional American society? And what can be done? Join us for a thoughtful discussion of these topics.

REGISTER NOW Join us today for this thoughtful discussion.

Speakers

Marco Bassani, University of Milan, A Spokesman for Independence of Lombardy, Italy
“Civil Society and the State: The Europeanization of the American Political Landscape”

Michael Kogan, Philosophy, Montclair University
“ Re-Shaping A Nation’s Memory: The War On Southern and American Icons.”

Donald Livingston, Philosophy, Emory University,
“The Disintegration of Lincolnian America”

Carey Roberts, Associate Dean, Liberty University
“Confederate Monuments and Revenge of the Nerds”

Kirkpatrick Sale, Cultural Critic and author of 12 books
“Memory Holes for Slavery and the Confederacy.”

Aaron Wolf, Senior Editor, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
“Awake For the Living: Lee and the ‘Feeling of Loyalty’”

BANQUET SPEAKER

Congressman Ben Jones (alias “Cooter” from “Dukes of Hazzard” fame)
“Southern to the Bone, or How to be Happily Unreconstructed in a World Gone Crazy”

Meet the Speakers:

For those arriving Friday night and would like informal discussions with the speakers, add $25 to the conference fee.

What’s included:

The lectures begin on Saturday, February 24, 2018  at 9am and continue up to a banquet followed by a speech from Congressman Ben Jones.  Conference fee is $150 which includes tuition, breakfast, the banquet, and refreshments throughout the meeting. Payments can be made online or by check to Abbeville Institute, P.O Box 10, McClellanville, SC 29458.

Place: Crowne Plaza Hotel, North Charleston, SC.

Accommodations: Crowne Plaza Hotel, 4831 Tanger Outlet Blvd, North Charleston, SC 2914. Room rate $129, cut off date January 23, 2018. For reservations call (843)744 4422. Mention the Abbeville Institute.

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REGISTER NOW Join us today for this thoughtful discussion.

Details

Date:

February 24

Time:

8:00 am - 10:00 pm

Cost:

$150.00

Organizer

Dr. Don Livingston

Phone:

843-323-0690

Email:

donlivingston45@gmail.com

Website:

www.abbevilleinstitute.org

Venue

Crowne Plaza Hotel

4831 Tanger Outlet Blvd 
North Charleston, SC 29418 United States+ Google Map

Phone:

843-744-4422

Website:

http://www.ihg.com/crowneplaza/hotels/us/en/north-charleston/chssc/hoteldetail