May 8, 2021
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Aggressive Abroad and Despotic at Home:
VE Day and the End of the “American Century”
Friends,
Seventy-six
years ago, on May 8, 1945, at 2301 hours, Central European Time, World War II in
Europe officially ended. Although the war would continue in the Pacific Theatre
for several more months, May 8 marked the dramatic end of what was certainly the
most horrific and disastrous land war in history. European culture was changed
irrevocably. A civilization which had survived the devastation and depopulation
of the Thirty Years War, the horrors of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and
then the calamity of the Great War of 1914-1918, now witnessed a kind of final collapse,
a coup de grace by which its
politics, its history, its traditions, its very mode of viewing the world were
undone.
Those
millennial traditions and inherited beliefs, that time-honored culture, that
understanding of how societies function and properly exist so identified with
Europe—what remained of that, after the catastrophe of the First World War—was now
overwhelmed, subsumed into a new reality dominated by competing blocs: the
United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its Communist satraps.
Both spoke often and loudly of democracy and equality; both projected global
visions for the world. Their definitions were, of course, different. But both
had the cumulative effect of exiling older terminologies and language, and, in
practice how Europe and the rest of the world should be organized and governed,
and what principles and beliefs should be held dear.
In
their conquered zones the Soviets, of course, did their best for the next
forty-plus years to extinguish long-standing religious belief and a Western and
Christian culture that dated back at least to Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome
on Christmas Day, 800 A.D. But in an ironic way, Communist oppression only covered over that legacy and those
inherited traditions and faith. The persecution did not extinguish that
heritage; it survived intact, often just below the surface, to emerge fully
vibrant in such countries as Hungary, Poland, and Russia after the fall of
Communism in 1989-1991. And in some fascinating ways what the break-up and
disappearance of the Soviet system revealed was that its totalitarian rule had served
as kind of prophylaxis which not only kept its “captive nations” superficially
docile, but also protected them against the more radical and life-altering vision
of a Pax Americana from the West.
This
last statement deserves explanation. The Marshall Plan and American insistence
on disauthorizing older more conservative and traditional elements in Western
Europe—during the same period as the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe—had
profound cultural and educational effects. Whereas Soviet domination was unable
to uproot an older religious faith and culture in its areas of hegemony—and, in
reality, those forces were to play a significant role in its eventual
overthrow—in countries like Germany, France, and Italy the transformation
imposed by the United States was more profound and pervasive, and the
resistance to change far less resilient.
Essentially,
American global policy placed nebulous values of
equality and liberal democracy ahead of allegiance to country, or, rather, insisted
that allegiance to country was coterminous with acceptance of American style
democracy and equality as absolutes. Of course, the rationale for this was an
initially legitimate and real opposition to world Communism—our American
“ideology” against theirs, our ideals against the Red menace. But in its
post-war role America became the “exceptional nation,” and soon assumed the
duty to go round the world and impose those ideas and that vision of democracy
and equality on other, unenlightened or recalcitrant countries. To use the words
of Neoconservative author Allan Bloom (in his The Closing of the American Mind): “And when we Americans speak
seriously about politics we mean that our principles of freedom and equality
and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” Americans
thus engaged in “an educational experiment undertaken to force those who do not
accept these principles to do so.” (Quoted in Paul Gottfried, War and Democracy, 2012, p. 110)
In so doing our
policy-makers, given free run for decades, not only attempted to impose a kind
of global “world faith” which would subvert regional identities and national
traditions abroad, but also strengthened
and cemented the growth of what James Burnham and Sam Francis would call “the
managerial state” at home.
It was the
fulfillment of the prophetic words of General Robert E. Lee after the War for
Southern Independence and the resultant radical bowdlerization of the United
States Constitution: the America cobbled together in 1787 would henceforth be
set upon a path “aggressive abroad and despotic at home.”
If World War II
signaled the final eclipse of the British Empire—a decline actually begun
through the exhaustion and destruction of the Great War—it also signaled the
advent of the American colossus. And despite a spirited challenge from world
Communism, it was the American side which would finally emerge triumphant.
But the seeds of
our decline were already present and germinating; indeed, they had been there
since those fateful days in 1865.
There is little said
by Abraham Lincoln with which I can agree. But I do concur with the words he
spoke in Springfield, June 16, 1858: “A nation divided against itself, cannot
stand.” And so, just as the unsuspected election of Donald Trump in 2016
indicated rising and serious doubts about American universalism in the world, if
ever so slightly, it also uncovered giant fissures and raw divisions between
populations not only incapable of speaking to or understanding each other, but
in fact, incapable of finding agreement over basic definitions of what is good
and true. Expressions such as “systemic racism,” “sexism,” “white supremacy,”
and “police brutality” have been deployed as verbal cluster bombs used to
disable, cancel, and ultimately vanquish all opposition to the rapidly
advancing liquidation of those remnants of Western civilization and culture
which somehow escaped the post-war dissolution.
May 8, 1945, and
the Potsdam Agreement later that August, while representing the end of
mankind’s worst land war and the (brief) triumph of a Pax Americana, foretold the eventual triumph of progressivist
neo-Marxism and the demise of the “American Century.” The Framers of the
American Constitution in 1787 were not granted a divine guarantee that the
confederation they cobbled together would last forever. It was, in the words of
Benjamin Franklin, “a republic if you can keep it.”
That republic has
not been maintained. The time for dissolution and separation is at hand.
I so appreciate your well-written and well-thought out commentary, Mr. Cathey. You are truly a gem in an otherwise rather bleak landscape.
ReplyDeleteThere is no movement, party, or leader visible now that or who has any hope of effecting a reversal of our implosion. Marjorie Taylor Greene comes the closest combining courage, insight and eloquence. Tulsi Gabbard is a close second.
ReplyDeleteThe Fed and the Congress are in complete panic mode with no idea whatsoever about how to set a course to economic health. The courts and the media are corrupt and uphold no laws and seek no truth. The only inevitable event will be Solzhenitsyn's pitiless crowbar of events. Perhaps there will be an epiphany before then and we will stop trying to square the circle of maintaining a society with a huge mass of hate-filled minorities and not a few such invading foreigners. This attempt will die a lingering death as it is the ultimate moronic sacrament.
So collapse will come first after which the encrustation of paralyzing and distorting laws can be swept away and a new birth of freedom ushered in.