April 24, 2024

  

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Purple Haired Harpies and the

Decline of the Historic South 

  

Friends,

I found the following article (below) of interest, so I am passing it on.  It symbolizes for me, in iconic fashion, another major reason that the millennia-old inherited society around us is collapsing, to be replaced by a monstruous, dystopian Gulag, a counter-reality where our tried-and-true verities are unceremoniously dumped onto the ash heap of history.

Just the other day I caught a portion of a public access broadcast of a Raleigh (NC) City Council meeting. Several dozen protesters were present and proceeded to testify...that is, rant and rave and threaten the council members if they did not, that very moment, pass a resolution condemning Israeli occupation of Gaza.

 Now, let it be said, that I tend to be sympathetic to those who urgently seek negotiations and a withdrawal of the IDF, which, no doubt is wrecking Gaza beyond recognition and causing immense human suffering. While I condemn the vicious Hamas attack on Israel, the only way—the only solution, so it seems to me—is for rational members of the parties involved to sit down and negotiate an internationally-guaranteed two-state solution. This would necessarily entail full Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza and on the West Bank (with the requisite departure of zealous Zionist “settlers” who have seized the better land there from Arab inhabitants).

But back to the protesters at the Raleigh City Council: Almost all of them were identifiably women (?), and they were some of the ugliest, foulest looking creatures I've ever seen—anywhere: Purple stringy hair, 300 lb. female monsters, bulging out in all the wrong places, downright nasty, their noses festooned with ringlets, their mouths spilling out threats and imprecations and demands. If anyone—any rational person, that is—were sympathetic to their position, just their presence there would have probably quashed that sentiment and discouraged a sympathetic response.

Yet, the council members—like most mind-in-the-cloud liberals—appeared staid and polite, intently listening, as the loathsome harpies seized the microphone during the comment session.

That set me to thinking: How did those women become such foul harridans? Certainly, they weren’t that way as toddlers or young girls. And my thoughts centered on two causes which I believe have gotten us to where we are today here in central North Carolina: First, our perverted educational system, abetted by the collapse of the nuclear family and the church, and, second, a massive in-migration to the Tar Heel State since Governor Luther Hodges back in the late 1950s had the idea of establishing what became known as the Research Triangle Park centered around the three major universities in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. This, in turn, began a six-decade process of attracting highly-paid technocrats, who brought with them their neoteric beliefs on everything from politics and morality to child rearing…. But very little of the Southern “rootedness” and “social bond” communitarianism (to use the late Richard Weaver’s term) that had characterized my neighbors when I was growing up.

Many of those women at the Raleigh City Council went through our educational system, and most likely had parents who forked over thousands of shekels to make certain their daughters got a "good education."  And, no doubt, that is a major part of the problem. For several decades we have permitted—in many cases, enabled—the total miseducation (I should call it as it is—indoctrination and cerebral infection) of our children by a corrupt public education system (which the GOP feeds almost as badly as the Dems). That miseducation is coming back to haunt us with a vengeance, culturally, politically, and religiously.

Mind you, the Raleigh City Council is now made up of an assortment of leftists and other n'er-do'wells of progressivism. The influx of population in recent decades, mostly techies from California and from “up North” attracted by our growing Carolina electronic industry, low taxes and hospitable business environment, has turned this area from a cordial, mannerly, old fashioned Southern region, into a foul copy of Silicon Valley. I now hate to venture into our state's capital city—it is not the town I remember as a boy.

Automobile traffic is ruthless and becoming impossible. Genuine courtesy, whether on the steadily-expanding and changing road grid, or in dealing with a new and aggressive commercial class, has all but disappeared. Chatting briefly with a cashier while standing in a check-out line gets you nasty looks, if not nasty comments “to hurry up” or “move on” from impatient shoppers.

Surrounding the city and chewing up thousands of acres of once serene farmland, new multi-storied apartments rise in fields that I recall used to cultivate tobacco and soybeans. It’s becoming almost impossible for small landowners and farmers to hold on to their property given real estate sharks circling round, paying inflated prices for their homesteads. How incongruous to be driving out my way, passing beautiful countryside, only to be struck suddenly by ugly high-rise apartments which now are replacing it. As Howard W. Smith (d. 1976), the late conservative Democrat who once represented formerly-conservative northern Virginia in Congress, commented, observing the new faceless, impersonal apartments erected in his district: “And to think, that people actually live in those ant-hills!”

As my late friend and mentor, Dr. Russell Kirk, once said: “It is hard to love the strip mall where the honeysuckle used to grow.”

Thirty-five years ago Raleigh elected a very conservative mayor, a protégé of the late Senator Jesse Helms. That would never happen today. Since then Raleigh and the county of Wake, in which I live, have seen a sea change—in demographics, in voting habits, in the destruction of old neighborhoods, in the once largely unspoiled environment, and in the kind of population—the people—who inhabit the area.

Whereas I grew up in a community which celebrated our traditions and revered the nuclear family, valued the role of the church, where divorce was a rarity, where abortion was practically unknown, and where public education was considered an extension of parental guidance (not some secret lab for “woke” teachers to push six year old boys to have sex mutilation operations, without the knowledge of their parents), that sense of community has largely disappeared.

 Again, my thoughts returned to those foul witches with purple hair....They were an appropriate symbol, a primary illustration, of what the best laid plans of our unweary and grasping political and business leaders had produced…secular and barren modernism run rampant, in search of the almighty dollar, and if traditions or heritage or old fashioned courtesy and belief should stand in the way, then let them be damned.

So, when I stumbled across the following article by an "out" and "proud" lesbian, boasting that now some 30% of Gen Z women identify as LBGTQ....well, given the choices we have made, or have allowed to be made on our behalf over the past half century, is it really surprising?

Our national decline can be traced to a number of factors, including the infiltration and perversion of our educational and entertainment systems, massive immigration (and not just from overseas), the nefarious results of the “civil rights” bills of the 1960s, and, yes, the long-range effects of the 19th Amendment. Humanly speaking it may be impossible at this point to reverse it. Yet, we must continue to try. And may God help us!

***** 

  Them.

Almost 30% of Gen Z Women Identify as LGBTQ+, According to New Survey

Almost 30% of Gen Z Women Identify as LGBTQ+, According to New Survey (msn.com)

Story by Samantha Allen • March 14, 2024

Look to your left, look to your right. If neither of those girlies are queer, you probably are. Almost 30% of Gen Z women now identify as LGBTQ+, according to a new Gallup report that breaks down the data by age and gender in more detail than ever before.

When I saw that statistic I could only think one thing: My fellow millennial women, we need to get to work. Only 12.4% of millennial women currently identify as LGBTQ+ and our younger counterparts are clearly telling us that those are rookie numbers. It is definitely not very girlboss of us to get upstaged like this.

As Gallup senior editor Jeffrey Jones told NBC News, much of the overall increase in LGBTQ+ identification is being driven by bisexual women. “That’s where a lot of the growth seems to be happening,” Jones said. (Indeed, a whopping 20.7% of Gen Z women are bi now, per the Gallup report.)

We can see that trend even more clearly across the entire survey: In total, 8.5% of women of all generations said they were LGBTQ+. Bisexuals account for the clear majority of that figure, with 5.7% of women specifically identifying as bisexual and 2% as lesbian. Across all generations and genders, the rate of LGBTQ+ identification has gone way up, now standing at 7.6% overall, more than double what it was in 2012. That rise is reassuring news for anyone who supports open expression, freedom, and equality — and a devastating blow to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians who think they can legislate us out of existence.

But ever the perfectionist, I can’t help but see room for improvement here. Clearly us pre-1996 babies have some more coming out to do: Let’s listen to some girl in red. Let’s go sit on the IKEA bisexual couch — or is it a green velvet couch now? Whatever we need to do to keep up with Gen Z, let’s pull out all the stops.

Life is only so long, so we might as well be as gay as humanly possible.

“THE GASP I JUST GUSPED,” said one commenter on *Vanity Fair's* TikTok of the couple.

In seriousness, after over a decade of reporting on Gallup data on LGBTQ+ issues, it seems fairly clear to me that people aren’t all of a sudden “becoming gay,” but rather that younger generations are increasingly breaking through the prejudices that keep people in the closet. The frogs definitely aren’t turning people queer, but rising social acceptance coupled with the boldness of youth means that we’re finally getting a more accurate picture of the size of the LGBTQ+ population.

And sadly, bisexual people of all genders still face rampant social stigma. (In fact, bisexual men are often told that their sexual orientation doesn’t even exist and that only women can be bi.) So my completely earnest, non-meme hope is that younger generations can help more millennials feel comfortable being ourselves.

After all, we’ve got a critical threshold to reach. As Gallup noted at the end of its report, “If current trends continue, it is likely that the proportion of LGBTQ+ identifiers will exceed 10% of U.S. adults at some point within the next three decades.” Ten percent! We can get there!

Basically, the writing is on the wall: by 2054, not being bisexual will be “cringe,” or whatever we’re calling it by then. It’s time for us to adult harder than ever before and get gayer before it’s too late.

                                                March 25, 2024

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Russian Elections: Were They Actually Rigged?

Friends,

It is fascinating and instructive to read and digest the various critiques of the recent Russian presidential elections, March 16-18, 2024. Western journalists both on the political Left and the supposed political Right have uniformly attacked the vote as “rigged” and the election as stolen. That is, the election apparatus of “dictator” Vladimir Putin—who, along with Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, is the leader most loathed globally by both the political Left and the Establishment Right—manipulated and massaged the results to the effect that the Russian president received 87% of the votes cast (the turnout was around 74%).

Here is how the English Leftist paper of record, The Guardian, leads off its reporting of March 18 on the Russian vote:

Although Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory with 87% of the vote in the Russian election was no surprise, these elections were important both for the Kremlin and for those in opposition to Putin.

With voter turnout at 74% – the highest in history – anything less than a landslide victory would have suggested that those who did not vote for Putin represented a significant force in Russian politics. This would have been particularly awkward in the case of young upstart Vladislav Davankov, who, with 3.79% of the vote, came a close third place. Davankov has been mistakenly described as an anti-war candidate – he supports peace and negotiations, ‘but on Russia’s conditions and without one step backwards’ – but his platform also called for ‘freedom of speech and opinion, instead of intolerance and denunciations’, and ‘openness and pragmatism instead of searching for new enemies’. [Claims by NPR that all oppositions candidates were in jail are patently false].

Several opposition figures, including the well-known blogger Maxim Katz, and barred candidate Boris Nadezhdin, publicly stated they would vote for him. According to Vote Abroad, Davankov gained the majority of votes at Russian polling stations in other countries. With such a ‘subversive’ candidate on the ballot sheet, nothing other than absolute victory would have allowed Putin to sleep at night.

It was clear for some time that the Kremlin saw this election as a test of the regime’s legitimacy. It was not enough for the Kremlin to win the election – it also had to demonstrate public engagement…. There was a push for early voting, especially in the occupied territories in Ukraine, where electoral officials accompanied by armed men in uniform knocked on people’s doors and politely asked them if they would like to vote early. Those who did not yet have Russian passports were allowed to use their Ukrainian IDs. In Russia there were the usual raffles, discos and canteens at polling stations to entice people out….”

In other words, Russian election officials did some of what American—Democrat—election officials and agents did for the 2020 election, most specifically in the six crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada.

Never mind, say the critics. Russian elections and American ones are two separate species, not comparable. The Russian ones are not credible, they solemnly intone—Putin is a tyrant who was just consolidating his power, they add.

And suddenly up pops, conveniently, a virulent anti-Putin Russian analyst, Sergey Shpilkin, who employs a dubious methodology to estimate that perhaps as many as 31 million out Putin’s garnered total of 76 million (or about 41%) of the Russian president’s vote total is fake! His analysis “hinges on comparing the distribution of votes for different candidates with the turnout at each polling station. A fair election [sic!] would typically show identical distributions differing only in absolute values. However, discrepancies in this pattern suggest vote inflation through ballot stuffing or the rewriting of vote tallies, which appear to have significantly skewed the official results.”

His suggestion is sheer speculation based on what he conceives as a “fair election” and based on the presence or lack of identical vote total percentages for candidates across the board in all voting districts. In other words, he fails to take into account regional variations in voting and voting patterns, differences between urban and rural voting, and other significant factors which would account for vote totals. Indeed, is it not likely that regions of Russia nearest to and most affected by the war in Ukraine might vote differently than, say, regions in the Siberian Far East? Or that the city of Moscow, far more influenced by Western “culture,” might skew such guestimates?

Nevertheless, the results of Shpilkin’s miraculous deduction have been solemnly seized upon by the Establishment Media both in Western Europe and in the United States, as such a conclusion reinforces and confirms their view that “Putin is (another) new Hitler” who has destroyed “democracy” and “freedom” in Russia.

Report after report echoes the same refrain. Yet, despite that near uniformity in the media and among the US and EU political governing class that the Russian elections were rigged, and that if only a “fair” election would be held, Putin would be toast, the facts on the ground demonstrate the exact contrary. Vladimir Putin remains very popular in Russia. And occasionally a rare and realistic appraisal gets past the gatekeepers. Even the anti-Putin UK Telegraph (March 19) was forced to admit that the Russian president “enjoys a frightening level of support that Western media and politicians obscure….” And the Telegraph suggests that it understands why: “to preserve the illusion that there’s just one evil madman to blame for the war in Ukraine, rather than a nation with far too many brainwashed anti-Nato, anti-Western nationalists keen to endorse their leader’s aggression.”

Despite reports from the BBC and The Economist that only “some” Russians in fact support President Putin, even The New York Times was finally forced to admit that independent polling by the well-regarded Levada Center (that has been tracking Putin’s approval rating since 1999) revealed that his support nationally in Russia stood at 86%. “Perhaps even more surprising,” continued the Telegraph, “a ridiculous 75 per cent of Russians told the pollster that their country is heading in the right direction.”

And the writer adds: “In the same way that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners challenged the notion that it was Hitler alone who was responsible for the horrors of WW2 and the Holocaust, we must be honest in assessing Russian aggression beyond Mr. Putin. The media hopefully pretends that Russian aggression is solely a Putin problem. In fact, polling from Levada and others indicates that there are a troubling number of Russians who endorse Putin’s warped view that Ukraine isn’t a legitimate nation [sic].”

Thus, the real enemy is not just Vladimir Putin, but the Russian people, the entire Russian nation. We can only imagine what alarms that sets off in the fetid minds of Western globalists. Will the unelected and fanatical Neoconservative/Leftist globalist foreign policy apparatchiks, hidden away in faceless edifices in Washington and Brussels, now declare that their “war” to rid the world of Putin, perhaps assassinate the Russian president because he won’t accept their tutelage, must be extended to the entirety of the Russian people? In other words, are we now watching the onset of an ethnic and religious war against an entire population? Is that what the US State Department and our foreign satraps in Bonn, London, and Paris now are envisaging in the name of “(y)our democracy”?

Consider: all independent polls prior to the Russian presidential election indicated that Vladimir Putin would win overwhelmingly by a huge margin of perhaps over 80%, which he did. Why, then, pray tell, given the global situation and how he is negatively viewed by American and EU leaders, would he confirm the views of Washington and Brussels that he was a “dictator,” a “new Hitler,” when assuredly he was destined to win by such a large margin?  It makes no sense, and, if anything, Putin is not dumb. Even if the tyrant as he is often portrayed, he did NOT have to rig anything.

Indeed, a strong case could be made that the recently completed Russian elections were actually fairer in some ways than their 2020 American counterparts. At the very least accusers in the US should examine their own disreputable history of voter fraud and manipulation before zealously attacking Moscow.

Are we not witnessing a form of gaslighting and projection by American and EU critics of events in Russia, especially as we consider the various efforts in the United States to rig elections nationally or simply prevent an opponent from being on the ballot (e.g., the actions of Colorado and a few other states to remove Donald Trump from the presidential ballot).

As Mollie Hemingway, Dr. Naomi Wolf, Tucker Carlson, and others have convincingly shown, our own 2020 American presidential election was fraught with very skillful rigging. The 2020 election was undoubtedly the most corrupt in American history. As Hemingway recounts, we witnessed a combination of greatly extended absentee voting and counting newly-discovered votes after the election was supposed to be over, the lack of proper voter identification, vote harvesting, and the intentional use of unverified drop boxes, all of which was backed up by millions of dollars and support from such luminaries as Mark Zuckerberg.  And we must add to this the direct and flagrant collusion of the news media which purposely hid the blockbuster story of Hunter Biden’s corruption and Joe Biden’s involvement in it.

Hemingway sums up what happened:     

[T]o an alarming degree, Democrats achieved control over elections in 2020. What made 2020 different was that for the first time ever the groups that supported Democrats were allowed, on a widespread basis, to cross that bright red line that separates government officials who administer an election from political operatives. Unelected liberal activists were allowed to embed in government offices and actually take over election administration duties in crucial battleground states. They were given vast amounts of voter information and even put in charge of designing, distributing, and collecting ballots…. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were allowed to hire and train their own family members to serve as referees and then got angry the opposing team didn’t publicly accept a narrow loss with several controversial calls.  [….]  (Hemingway, Rigged: How the Media, Bid Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Washington: Regnery, 2021, pp. 206-207)

 

Our national foreign policy elites stress that we favor implanting “democracy” all around the globe, and that we will do everything to see it flourish. Of course, Russia (and then China, Iran, Hungary, etc.) comes in for harsh criticism. Yet, some of our major allies—Saudi Arabia comes to mind—are most definitely not “democratic.” Our zeal for “(y)our democracy” has its velleities.

Or, consider our latest cause celebre, the defense of “(y)our democracy” in Ukraine. Our media and government praise its leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “new George Washington.” Yet Zelensky’s government in Kiev has suppressed opposition parties and put his opponents in jail, while persecuting Ukraine’s large Russian Orthodox religious church. Even former president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has described our ally as “a country corrupt at all levels of society.”

The simple fact is that American criticism of the Russian elections, the constant accusations against its president, and the US commitment to defeat Russia in Ukraine, even if it costs the life of every Ukrainian, is essentially ideological and founded on the correct assumption that Russia refuses to return to the status which it had under Boris Yeltsin, who was, in  caricature called “America’s poodle” for his subservience to American globalist policy.

The developing globalist template can brook no opposition, whether domestically from a Donald Trump who fails to heed the commands of the Deep State, or from a Vladimir Putin who believes that the true interests of his country do not always coincide with Davos, Washington, or Brussels.

                                    February 11, 2024

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Descent into Madness:

Dostoevsky and the End of the West

Friends,

Our society is coming to resemble a dystopian “peoples’ paradise” in its darkly disturbing features. Think back to iconic works of literature like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon and George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Are we not living in a society which is little more than a cross between the nightmare visions of Koestler and Orwell? Do we not live in a society where dissidents are branded as “domestic terrorists,” “insurrectionists,” or “racists,” and face imprisonment for heretofore unimaginable thought crimes, all in the name of “defending our democracy”? –where our children have become wards of the state and are indoctrinated daily by mountains of fetid radical ideology? –where television and the Internet are employed to fashion a particular jaundiced view of life?—where science is now used to tell us the world will end in, what, ten years, if we don’t take immediate action to curb “the climate crisis”?—where we are cajoled to accept a “great reset” and a “new world order” controlled by unseen elites?

Far too many citizens do not fathom what has occurred and is happening in our society. And those who do understand, whether here in the US or in Europe, are swatted down by the long arm of “Big Brother,” turned into “non-persons,” their reputations destroyed, awakened by armed-to-the-teeth FBI agents before dawn and imprisoned for months or years without trial or the benefit of counsel—“enemies of the regime.” Is this not reminiscent of what occurred in Eastern Europe immediately after the conclusion of World War II, when the Soviets progressively installed socialist dictatorships by successfully eliminating and suppressing any real opposition, all happening why the benevolent USA looked on?

But in some ways our situation is worse than that of those Soviet-occupied countries in the aftermath of the world war. For while the post-war Communists essentially maintained certain inherited standards of behavior, for instance, supporting large families and traditional marriage, our elites continue to push the boundaries of what was once thought normative and acceptable in every area of human endeavor, even under Communism. And the disruption or rejection of the laws of nature and those well-established and valid millennia-old norms of behavior and belief leads to gross and grotesque imbalances and vicious infections in society which distort and eventually destroy it—what I have called in an earlier essay, “the zombification of our culture.”

It's as if significant portions of American (and European) culture have been possessed by frenetic Evil incarnate…in academia and education, in our media and communications, in politics, and in our entertainment and sports industries. We are now supposed to be like Pavlov’s dog, trained to bark when prompted, to sit when told, in short, to be obedient and receptive subjects of the latest ukase or dogmatic proclamation of government or revelation of its satraps and lapdogs at some formerly-prestigious university 0r from fashionable glitterati.

As I read through various recent news articles, chronicling some of the more bizarre actions and occurrences in our modern American society, example after example abundantly confirms this impression.

Let me cite just a handful of recent egregious instances from our educational sector—there are far more, too numerous to count:

In Oregon, the Department of Education recently sent out a “mathematics guide …to schools tell[ing] educators that asking students to show their work in math class is a form of white supremacy.” The guide offers a year-long framework for “deconstructing racism in mathematics.” It calls for “visibilizing [sic] the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”  

In Houston, Rice University launched a course (January 2024), titled “Afrochemistry,” which reportedly will “apply chemical tools and analysis to understand black life in the U.S.” According to the University’s website, “Diverse historical and contemporary scientists, intellectuals and chemical discoveries will inform personal reflections and proposals for addressing inequities in chemistry and chemical education.”

In Brookfield, Connecticut, the public school administration placed tampon dispensers in boys’ restrooms, which were promptly vandalized by some boys who disagreed with school policy. The administration related that the “vandals” had been dealt with. But the worst aspect of this is that dispensers were put in place in compliance with a Connecticut law which “requires all schools from grades three to 12 to put menstrual dispensers in female restrooms and at least in one male restroom” in each high school.

One last example, and it would be truly comedic if not so serious in its implications about the state of higher education in America. Several years ago (2018) Professor Peter Boghossian, formerly at Portland State University in Oregon, and two colleagues, prepared a series of scholarly articles in the humanities, and several were accepted by so-called prestigious peer-reviewed journals. The submitted papers sounded all the chords of ideologically “progressive scholarship,” supposedly pushing boundaries in what the authors called “grievance studies,” such areas as “critical theory” and “gender identity.” But with one major characteristic: the articles were all complete spoofs, skillful fakery which managed to deceive those who claim to be “the best and the brightest.”

As Boghossian explained in a later summary of the project:

“While our papers are all outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways, it is important to recognize that they blend in almost perfectly with others in the disciplines under our consideration. To demonstrate this, we needed to get papers accepted, especially by significant and influential journals. Merely blending in couldn’t generate the depth necessary for our study….”

And a number of the articles were eagerly accepted and were praised fulsomely by other academics. Indeed, it is fascinating to read what peer reviewers wrote.

One of the  papers is titled, “The conceptual penis as a social construct,” and it was published to great acclaim by the journal Cogent Social Sciences, in 2017. Here is the abstract:

“Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.”

These few examples can be replicated ad nauseum. Such poisonous nonsense characterizes what passes for learning and scholarship in our colleges and schools; it undergirds and informs our journalism and media; it drenches our entertainment with its infectious dross; it disintegrates and perverts our artistic and musical heritage. It is engaged in total war against the two millennia inheritance of our Christian civilization, which it seeks to destroy.

Have we not descended into sheer madness, collective insanity on a massive cultural and social scale? Indeed, are we not experiencing a foretaste of Hell itself, of the Nether Regions where proud souls possessed by sheer evil and brazen malfeasance are eventually rewarded by their own incredibly excruciatingly painful self-immolation?

Of course, it is not at all fashionable to believe in a literal Hell these days. Yet, the imagery of such a state envisioned by a number of our greatest authors over the centuries describes a reality which is becoming all too palpable in our day, at least for those who care to notice.

The common denominator which characterizes those visions, whether from the pen of Dante Alighieri, John Milton, or other writers, not to mention the strictures from the Bible, is this: without Hope in something greater than ourselves, something beyond the mere material, something indeed spiritual, we are lost. And all the puffed-up scholarly texts about “gender identity” and “critical studies”—all the foul and ugly detritus which passes for modern culture and entertainment—lead only to individuals T. S. Eliot calls “hollow men,” dead souls, with no past to guide them, no future to welcome them, isolated, alone, and empty.

As tiny individual specks in the Universe we are as atoms, at times self-important, but in the scheme of things, miniscule and falling back continually on our own very limited powers and abilities, with the great leveler, Death, our conclusion.

Has this not been the insight and wisdom of our Christian civilization, that without that spiritual understanding, life becomes a mere few short years of banging about until our time is up?

It is Hope, that belief in something beyond ourselves, eminently spiritual, which enables us to lead lives according to both the Natural Law and the Divine Positive Law, which properly and superbly fit, guide and measure our own human natures.

I am put in mind of a piece I wrote for Chronicles magazine a few years back (“The Devils in the Demonstrators,” Chronicles, November 2021. Pp36-37) which focuses on my direct experience with such persons who inhabit a counter-reality, peopled by dead souls whose hatred for our civilization is only matched by their uncontrollable, burning rage.

I offer it now.

The Devils in the Demonstrators

I was chairman of the Annual Confederate Flag Day at the North Carolina State Capitol in March of 2019 when our commemoration was besieged by several hundred screaming, raging demonstrators—Antifa-types and others. It took a mammoth police escort for us to exit the surrounded Capitol building.

I clearly recall the disfigured countenance, the flaming eyes, the foul imprecations of one of the protesters: he was young, white, and obviously not impoverished, probably the son of some well-to-do parents who had shelled out thousands of dollars for his education at one of North Carolina’s premiere universities. His contorted, angry grimace was that of a possessed soul, made mad by years of slow and patient educational indoctrination from our complacent society which tolerates and encourages everyday evil in nearly every endeavor we experience.

I remembered that day—that face—over two years later as I finished watching a made-for-television Russian series titled Demons. Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel of the same name (also known as The Possessed), the plot is fairly complex and difficult to compress into a filmed series. Yet, enough of that complexity and meaning still comes forth while watching its English subtitles.

I read the novel many years ago. Even back then it was a difficult read, especially for someone unfamiliar with Russian history of the mid-19th century and Dostoevsky’s interest in the ideological visions of various revolutionary and nihilist movements then existent in Imperial Russia.

But the television series does an admirable job of encapsulating the novel’s main themes and storyline. And like much of Dostoevsky, the theological questions of good and evil, sin and redemption, and order and disorder are never far from the surface. For the great Russian author saw deeply into the hearts of his fellow men, particularly those vacuous and empty souls of the fanatical idealists who professed a secular vision of a future socialist and globalist utopia on earth, a paradise without the encumbrances and limits of tradition, tsarist authority, and God. But it was precisely such natural and real lineaments which both regulate our innate freedom of will (so that it may not become license), and also provide a safe and ample space for our existence.

In tracing the evolution of revolutionary thinking personified in his diverse characters, Dostoevsky captures and illustrates—as perhaps no other author before or since—the true nature of evil which inevitably ends not only in the destruction of the individual, but eventually also spurs the dissolution and decay of the social fabric of society.

That evil—and it is pure demonic evil as Dostoevsky reveals in Demons—is all consuming, a madness which he both historically and theologically identifies with rebellion against God and, in his particular view, in opposition to the traditional Russian Orthodox Church. But that meaning is applicable for all of traditional Christianity.

In another Dostoevsky novel, The Brothers Karamazov, his worldly and secular character Ivan makes a statement often expressed as: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” By novel’s end he realizes that God does—must—exist, and therefore there must be—and are—rules and law, both divine and human, that must be observed for there to be any kind of human society. Indeed, without them there can be no genuine liberty, no justice, no true happiness.

In Demons the revolutionary cell in Dostoevsky’s imagined provincial town is composed of mostly young members of the upper classes, a couple of disaffected military officers and intellectuals, and the magnetic personality of Nikolai Stavrogin.  Stavrogin is highborn, refined, handsome, self-assured, and intelligent. And yet there is, as the narrator of the story informs us, something repellent, deeply cynical, and inherently foul about him. The other revolutionaries are fascinated by him, specifically Pyotr Verkhovensky, perhaps the most loathsome and manipulative character Dostoevsky ever created, a man capable of murder simply on caprice or whim, without any apparent sense or thought of regret. Truly he is a man possessed.

Verkhovensky, who claims to be taking orders from a central committee in St. Petersburg, is bedazzled by Stavrogin and wishes him to lead the revolutionary efforts; but Stavrogin hesitates. In the depths of Stavrogin’s consciousness, there is that awkward awareness of his own misshapen and fatally damaged soul. Finally, after some hesitation, he visits a spiritual guide, Father Tikhon, where he confesses that he has lost any sense of good and evil, and that all that remains is simply avarice. Stavrogin is a man who refuses God, but in his frustration he innately realizes that nothing else can satisfy that emptiness. Indeed, without God, without the fullness of faith, it is the Devil, Evil Incarnate, who fills the void. Without God, everything is permitted.

Ivan Shatov is perhaps the character with whom Dostoevsky most closely identified. He had once idolized Stavrogrin and looked up to him as a potential leader who would inspire Russia to Christian regeneration. Disillusioned, he has now come to regard him as an irresponsible man of idle luxury. Stavrogin, he declares, is driven by a passion for inflicting torment, not merely for the gratification he receives in hurting others, but to torment his own conscience and wallow in amoral carnality.

Verkhovensky detests and hates Shatov, and conceives a plan to assassinate him, for Shatov, he believes, stands in the way of the triumph of the revolution. And, in fact, one of the conspirators lures Shatov to a remote location where he is cruelly murdered, much to the insane delight of Verkhovensky.

But the conspiracy unravels, and the conspirators are arrested or, in the case of Verkhovensky, flee to St. Petersburg where he can again work his revolutionary mischief. And Stavrogin, understanding finally the futility of his life, and understanding more profoundly than any other of the revolutionaries the nature of the revolutionary contagion—a true “demonic possession”—does what for him is the only logical action: he hangs himself. Unable or unwilling to make repentance, and knowing darkly that he has been possessed by demons, but refusing the mercy of God, like a brightly burning supernova, he collapses upon himself, extinguished and damned.

Of all the great counterrevolutionary works—novels, autobiographies, narrations—Dostoevsky’s stands out for its very human, very real description of the sheer personal evil and demonic lunacy of the then-nascent Marxist revolution incubating in Russia. In more recent times, we have a George Orwell, an Arthur Koestler, and an Aleksander Solzhenitsyn who recount what they experienced or what they saw and observed. But it was Dostoevsky who with deep insight visualized it a century earlier, who plumbed the depths of the human psyche and the inherent and personal nature of what is essentially a “revolution against God and Man.”

For the rejection of God as He desires to be known and obeyed through his Word, His law, and through His church does not result in a secular utopia, a kind of secular parousia or Heaven-on-Earth. The revolutionary madness is, as Dostoevsky declares, a form of possession of men who have misshapen and empty souls which have then been occupied by demons, by evil.

Thus, as I watched Demons I remembered that day several years ago with its seemingly possessed protesters. I also recalled images flashed across the television screen more recently of our latter-day violent Verkhovenskys and Stavrogins, those deracinated students, wooley-brained woke academicians, effete Hollywood celebrities and media personalities, and political epigones who have turned the American republic into a charnel house where the bones of a once-great nation lie in trash heaps.

Over the past many decades, we have permitted our government to impose on us and much of the world what is termed liberal democracy and something we call “human rights.” But those precepts and vision are of a secular, globalist world where the Verkhovenskys dominate a complacent and obedient population, where our culture has been so infected and so poisoned that, as William Butler Yeats prophesied a century ago, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

It does not and will not end well. The “American Century,” without the kind of repentance that was offered to Nikolai Stavrogin, and which he would not accept, is over. And despite our insouciance and material gratification, there will be a price, a severe and heavy price to pay.

Observing the pre-World War I revolutionary fervor which would soon overtake the world, the Anglo-French critic and essayist Hilaire Belloc wrote these lines in This and That and the Other:

“The Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true. We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.”

Dostoevsky, through Father Tikhon, reminds us that there is a way out of the fetid and poisonous bog we are drowning in. In his day it was not taken by the revolutionaries who eventually would have their way in Russia and later in the world, with the charnel house counting eventually 100 million victims.

Like Verkovensky, that frenzied youthful demonstrator against Confederate symbols back in March 2019 was possessed, incapable—unlike Stavrogin—of recognizing his diabolical possession.

Good and evil stand in eternal conflict; one must triumph and one must be extinguished. Dostoevsky fully understood that, and so must we.