October 1, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

New Study Finds White Rice to be Racist

Friends,

The latest major study issued by a blue-ribbon commission on racism infecting American culture comes on the heels of other startling examples which “woke” academia, government and the media have pinpointed during this past year. Indeed, in recent months we have witnessed the Oregon Department of Education explain how traditional mathematics—you know the  2 + 2 = 4 version—is racist and unfairly penalizes  BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People Of Color] students, and that students should be able to decide for themselves what 2 + 2 actually is, with no correction or interference from a white teacher. A BIPOC child may think the equation equals 5 or maybe 6. For a teacher or professor to admonish the student is blatantly wrong and an indication of toxic white supremacy.

And then there was the credentialed academic and author who claimed that a majority of white people with dogs who let their canine pets stay indoors was a clear indication of “white canine racism” [since BIPOC people tend to be poorer than whites without the wherewithal to offer good indoor housing to their pets].

I have written about these and other cases in MY CORNER back on February 17 of this year.

The number of such reports emitted recently from academia boggles the mind. Almost every day we can read of another instance, another example. And academia embraces such findings with zealous alacrity.

So, when I ran across the following news article, I decided to relay it to readers exactly as it ran: 

HISTORIC WHITE RICE RACISM IS ENDEMIC TO WHITE EUROPEAN CULTURE, RESEARCHERS SAY (UPI – Wednesday September 29, 2021)

(Boston – September 29, 2021) A report issued Tuesday, Sept. 28, labels white rice as an historic and continuing example of “white European colonialism and toxic food racism.”  The report, issued by the Blue-Ribbon Task Force on Food Racism and Inequity, in 108 pages reveals in detail both the history and the effects of white rice in Anglo-European culture, how its consumption became a status symbol utilized by white plantation owners and wealthy classes to emphasize their supremacy and control of society, and the resulting submission of BIPOC peoples.  The report also includes a long chapter on rice-cultivation and the historical use of slave labor and oppressed people in the process.

Dr. Stanwyck Vile, who heads of the International Institute for Food Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness [IIFDEI], chaired the commission, composed of world-renowned experts in the fields of African-American studies, feminism, transgenderism and transphobic deterrence, ableism, and anti-fat theory. Dr. Gladys Hookah-Schmuck, tenured chair of the Black Liberation and Feminist Lesbian and Polyamory Studies program at Baxter University, served as vice-chair.

Interviewed about the findings of the year-long, multi-million dollar study, supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Dr. Vile highlighted several of the major points in the report.

“White rice is, you see, white,” he offered. “That was our first very substantial clue that white rice is, well, racist. We spent six months researching that point. You see, there is no equity here. Yes, there is brown rice, but as we all know, it is consigned largely to Chinese restaurants. And that fact is, as they say, a double-whammy: it’s largely limited to Asian establishments and normally not consumed by most people. Brown rice is, then, obviously oppressed and restricted, which is a most definite indication of the white supremacy of white rice.”

At that point Dr. Hookah-Schmuck interjected another important finding and complaint made by the commission report. “We were shocked by the fact that historically there is very little evidence of black rice…and we spent hours and hours scouring manuscripts and recipe books going back to the 13^th century, reviewing television cooking programs—we even watched the complete Julia Child series. But, then, we happened upon reruns of Justin Wilson, the Louisiana chef.”

“And everything seemed to fall into place,” she continued. “Wilson,” she revealed with an air of triumphant satisfaction, “was a white male Southerner, from Louisiana, who talked with the kind of accent that you would normally hear employed by Southern racists and Klan members. And he only used white rice. It was all right there.”

It seemed to make sense to the commission members, the connections, the relationships, according to Hookah-Schmuck.

At this point in the interview, Vile interjected: “One of our major findings and recommendations had to do with ‘black rice’ equity. We looked at the history, or I should say the lack of history, of black rice, and we suggested some potential and much-needed remedies to this toxic state of affairs.”

“The only substantial examples of black rice we can find historically,” added Hookah-Schmuck, “are when white race is overcooked and burned, but, you see, that is never intentional, so in no way is that process motivated by social justice concerns and the desire for genuine equity and diversity.”  

Dr. Hookah-Schmuck added that a significant section of the commission’s report is dedicated to proposed methods and federal programs to address this burning question.

“So what we are recommending is that the United States Congress enact a Rice Equity and Diversity Act,” added Vile. “We have communicated with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and explained to her the extreme need for legislation which would set up a national rice civil rights standards board and which would require that in every household where rice is prepared that a substantial portion be blackened by burning. Of course, this would also require a large staff—a rice patrol, as it were—to enforce that regulation, to have the authority to enter any household at dinner time and make certain ‘rice equity’ is carried out.”

Speaker Pelosi, according to Vile and Hookah-Schmuck, was very receptive to the commission’s proposal, and promised to consult with other prominent comgresspeople in the House Democratic Caucus about future legislation. She also hinted that several Republicans, including Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, and perhaps a few others (who did not wish to be labeled “racists”), would co-sponsor such legislation.

Asked about the bad reputation in which burned or black rice is held, its claimed unsavory and non-appetizing flavor and smell, Hookah-Schmuck suggested that such claims come mostly from far right wing extremists. She added that among the commission’s recommendations is a demand for a budgeted re-education of the American public about the delights and tastiness of burned black rice, using the school system and the media.

Although the commission did not make explicit the dollar amount envisaged by commission members to accomplish these ambitious goals, a member did, off the record, volunteer a figure of five to eight trillion dollars, over a ten year period, to be gathered via a value-added tax on all purchases that certifiably white citizens make when they go to the grocery store.

*****

[Now, if you have read this far, you may suspect—rightly—that this purported “news article” is not genuine, a fake. And, at least for the moment, it is. But does anyone doubt after seeing and reading what has happened on college campuses this past year and what is spewed forth daily by our media and political class, that such a finding, such a report might well be in our future? In other words, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if something like this does happen? After all, this is the giant lunatic asylum—the United States of America, circa 2021—in which we live. BDC]

                                           September 26, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

National Archives Officially Labels the US Constitution “Racist” and “Offensive”

 

Friends,

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all it was completely logical, the inevitable result of the insane “woke” political correctness that has been building and raging, largely unabated, in the United States now for years. Indeed, in my regular columns and essays I have been writing that this insanity, spread and imposed like a highly contagious and fatal infection—far worse than COVID—would not and could not be stemmed by the pitiful half measures of spineless Republicans and of despicably cowardly “conservatives.”

Yet, the news that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C.,  had begun to re-label the nation’s founding documents, characterizing them as reflecting “racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes” and being   “discriminatory towards or exclud[ing] diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more, ” still caught me off guard.

We are not talking about secondary copies of the US Constitution, Declaration of Independence, or Bill of Rights, those reproductions that you hang on the wall in a school classroom. No, NARA is the official repository of the original documents themselves, of the original copies signed by the Founders and the Framers. It is those priceless and irreplaceable items held by it in trust that the National Archives has decided to label as “outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent [in] views and opinions.”

Accordingly, that agency of the federal government has begun to “re-contextualize” its more than 100 million documents based on a report issued by its Task Force on Racism and issued April 20, 2021. That report declared that NARA and its unique collections are shot through with “structural racism,” including “a Rotunda in our flagship building that lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [black, indigenous, people of color], women, and other communities.”  Additional examples of structural racism at the National Archives include “legacy descriptions that use racial slurs and harmful language to describe BIPOC communities.” The National Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero accepted the commission’s report and recommendations, and immediately began the work “to transform its exhibits, archival information and descriptions, and policies.”

NARA’s catalogue and labeling are being rewritten—“re-imagined” is the currently popular term to describe the historical legerdemain.  Everything now, including our founding national documents and symbols, must reflect the new consensus, the new revisionist interpretation of American history and all that which will follow: “equity,” reparations, and the eventual and practical disenfranchisement and replacement of “white America.”

 

You may have thought the “1619 Project” just an outrageous outlier, a radical and intellectually dishonest attempt to redo and refashion American history to fit an extreme progressivist “woke” reinterpretation of our past. But that project, lauded and praised by the loudest voices in academia and heralded by the media (including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and most broadcast outlets) already possesses and dominates by and large our educational system, our entertainment industry, and, yes, our political discourse. And it was inevitable that it would reach the National Archives and its precious holdings.

 

The re-imagining of the nation’s foundational documents, then, is entirely logical. It is consistent with “1619,” and reflects the powerful influence such thinking has and exerts over our governing and corporate classes.

 

But what is truly scandalous, and appalling, about what is occurring is that opposition to this outrage has been largely muted, with very little news of it in the media.

 

You would think, would you not, after all the hullabaloo about the “1619 Project” and the disgustingly weak and embarrassingly contradictory actions of the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees (majority Republican) regarding the hiring of (and tenure for) the Project’s main author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, that this latest assault on the nation’s historical past and identity would have been met by fierce opposition and an outcry from conservatives?

 

Yet only forty-four Republican members (no Democrats) in the US House of Representatives sent a protest to National Archivist Ferreiro, as reported by The Federalist. Those lawmakers called on NARA to remove the warnings on this nation’s original documents and cease politicizing them.

 

Their communication continued:

 

“We are deeply concerned by the National Archives Record Administration’s ‘harmful content’ warning displayed on the Archives’ cataloged website, including on seminal documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the U.S. Constitution…”

 

But where are the other 168 GOP House members? Where is the voice of the Senate Republican Caucus? Of Mitch McConnell? And others?

 

Certainly, if polled I’m sure they would declare their formal opposition—they may have already done so. But where is their concerted action, other than a few easily forgotten words or fatuous protests?

 

Over the last few years I have written that the efforts to take down Confederate monuments, most egregiously perhaps the recent disgraceful removal of the Lee Monument in Richmond, were just a first step in a major process of fanatical hatred for and redefinition of American history. It is not only the physical monuments themselves, but what they symbolize, that has to be destroyed and extinguished. And the hysterical campaign to erase those monuments honoring the Confederate dead is just the first part of this effort.

 

There is a recent documentary, “How the Monuments Came Down,” produced by the Virginia Film Office and widely distributed by PBS which makes this goal crystal clear. Removal of the monuments is only the easiest, hanging fruit, as it were. There is much more to come until, as one of the commentators declares, “we have rooted out entirely white supremacy and systemic racism.”

 

In their national campaign to erase anything that offends them, the “woke” lunatics have counted upon the benevolence of the establishment Republican Party and very prominent members of what is laughably termed “the conservative movement.” Either by studied inaction or active encouragement, the Rich Lowry types (editor of National Review) and the near-unanimity of the apparatchik pundits on Fox News have cheered on the destruction of Confederate monuments, while simultaneously praising Martin Luther King Jr. as a “true conservative,” despite his embrace of Marxism and a genuinely Communist praxis on various occasions (for example, his address honoring Communist W. E. B. DuBois, February 23, 1968). Their response to the madness griping the nation is to apologize to the Left and whine with a form of virtue signaling: “Look at me! I condemn those Confederate symbols, just like you! Please don’t call me a racist…oh, will you still invite me to one of your swank cocktail parties on New York’s Upper East Side? Please!”

 

Back on June 16, 2020, I compared the pusillanimous response of our established conservative movement, what my friend Dr. Paul Gottfried calls “Con Inc.,” to a scene in the classic film, “Waterloo” (1970):

 

“The response of those supposed ‘conservative’ defenders of American traditions to the fanatical tsunami of violent revolutionary lunacy reminds me of the scene in the film “Waterloo” (1970), when an illiterate private in the Duke of Wellington’s army who has engaged in plunder and stolen a young pig, cautions the pig not to squeal, not to alert those around him of his plunder (a capital offense under military rules). ‘Be quiet,’ he tells the pig, ‘and I’ll only eat half of you!’ ” 

 

Whether the craven response by Congress and national conservative leaders, or, more locally, the action of a Republican Gerald Kivett in Sampson County, North Carolina, member of the county commissioners, who made the successful motion to remove the Confederate monument in that largely rural county, it amounts to the same thing: cowardice, the fear of being labeled a racist and perhaps being “cancelled,” hoping to stave off something worse, but at base a lack of conviction and faith.

 

All the apologies and virtue-signaling of the GOP and Con Inc. will not save them or those other symbols of traditional American history. The three-piece suit enablers only encourage the madness, embolden it, and in the end their response, or failure to respond, will not spare them. After Lee, it must be Washington, Jefferson, perhaps changing the name of the US capital?  The list of culpables is endless.

 

The Revolution is not mollified by weakness and groveling. Offering up half a pig will kill the pig, as it will kill what is left of this country.

                                              September 19, 2021

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

These Bushes Are Poisonous:

George W. and Granddad Prescott's Legacy

Friends,

Some conservative media types and political leaders were shocked by former President George W. Bush’s remarks during a speech  at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11. There he compared the January 6 Capitol protesters to the Islamic terrorists who viciously attacked the United States, killing nearly three thousand citizens and wounding more than double that number.   

Warning of future terrorist threats to the United States, Bush solemnly intoned: “We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only [from] across borders but from violence that gathers within.”  Alluding to American citizens who entered Capitol Hill to protest the 2020 election, he continued: 

“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

The leftist media rejoiced at what they called “a thinly-veiled slam at the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and other U.S. political extremists.” 

Bush’s image of “the same foul spirit” cast disparagingly not only at the demonstrators of January 6, but at seventy-five million Americans who refused to go along with the revenge of the Deep State last November is one more reminder of not only who George Jr. is and was, but of the deep-seated nature of the Bush dynasty going back seventy years. The real George Bush had emerged…but, he had been there all the time, and far too many had failed or not wanted to understand and see. They should have.

A history of the Bush family, beginning with Yankee patriarch and Wall Street banker, Prescott Bush, is one of calculated pretense to being and sounding like whatever best advances the political and financial fortunes of the family.  But down deep the Bushes have never been conservatives. In recent years, the Bushes have, it is true, sometimes sounded “conservative,” but in their honest moments, they reject basic principles that give essential life to traditional conservatism….which goes a long way to explain George Jr.’s loathing not just of Donald Trump, but more especially of his MAGA supporters…and why his most recent statements could have come from a “woke” Democrat operative.

That really shouldn’t shock us, but far too many conservatives remain confused.

Let’s go back and take a look at some of the family history and notice the characteristics. First, the patriarch of the family: Prescott Bush. He was the archetypal patrician New England “progressive” Republican.  Just read a few lines from the Wikipedia about him:

 “Prescott Bush was politically active on social issues. He was involved with the American Birth Control League as early as 1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of Planned Parenthood in 1947 [....] 

“From 1947 to 1950, he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950. A columnist in Boston said that Bush “is coming on to be known as President Truman’s Harry Hopkins. Nobody knows Mr. Bush and he hasn’t a Chinaman’s chance.” (Harry Hopkins [a Communist fellow traveler] had been one of FDR‘s closest advisors.) Bush’s ties with Planned Parenthood also hurt him in heavily Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute campaign in churches by Bush’s opponents; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost to [William] Benton by only 1,000 votes.”

 

Prescott became US Senator from Connecticut through appointment in late 1952, and he served until 1963. Continuing on from the Wiki:

“On December 2, 1954, Prescott Bush was part of the large (67–22) majority to censure Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy after McCarthy had taken on the U.S. Army and the Eisenhower administration. During the debate leading to the censure, Bush said that McCarthy had ‘caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers: that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy blindly,  not  daring  to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions, or, in his eyes, you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line’    ^[....]                  

“In terms of issues, Bush often agreed with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. According to Theodore H. White’s book about the 1964 election, Bush and Rockefeller were longtime friends. Bush favored a Nixon-Rockefeller ticket for 1960.”

 

McCarthy was right about Communist subversion in American government and culture, as we know now. And Prescott was wrong.

This is the kind of silk-stocking, Rockefeller Wall Street Republicanism that Prescott’s heir, George H. W. and succeeding members of the family, inherited. And since 1992 the persistence of this same heritage and praxis among the Bushes has been on full display.

Back in 2013, George Sr.’s son Jeb, even then eyeing the White House, made a point of down-playing any real differences with Hillary Clinton, the odds-on favorite to be the Democratic Party nominee in 2016. According to The Washington Times (September 13, 2013):

“On Tuesday September 10, Jeb Bush, chairman of the board for the National Constitution Center and former governor of Florida, presented former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the group’s annual Liberty Medal. [!!!] It is widely speculated that both Bush and Clinton will run for their party’s nomination for the presidency in 2016.”

 

What this report buried on the back pages actually hinted at was something profound about the Bush family, which had not and would not change from generation through generation. They were to a man (and woman) members of Eastern establishment Republicanism. Although the Times article highlighted a minor incident, digging deeper one finds a constant pattern of Bush family adherence to the managerial state and its policies. Despite the occasional perfunctory nod to more traditional conservative principles (as George H. W.’s professed acceptance of the “Reagan Agenda”), the “Leopard could not change its spots.”

In 1992 I was the North Carolina state chairman for Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge to George Bush Sr. I argued strenuously with some of my Republican friends that voting for Pat Buchanan in the presidential primary was the right thing to do. While admitting the deficiencies of then-President Bush, their main argument was that voting for Buchanan would only weaken the GOP and assist Bill Clinton, and that a Bill Clinton presidency would give the man who couldn’t keep his pants up the opportunity to name Supreme Court justices. When I pointed out that David Souter, Harry Blackmun, Earl Warren, William Brennan, Sandra Day O’Connor, and other Left-leaning justices had been appointed by Republican presidents, responses were muted.   But every poll, including immediate polls right after Buchanan’s famous “culture war” speech at the GOP national convention, gave the lie to such spurious charges. George H. W. lost because of what he did and what he said, and because the American electorate listened to the insidiously seductive and polished oratory and promises of “Slick Willie.”

In 2000 most conservatives, faced with an electoral choice in the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, once again marked the Republican ballot. Although traditionalist Patrick Buchanan was running that year as a clear-cut choice, an independent conservative on the Reform Party ticket, the GOP once more successfully employed the tactic of triangulation which they had used and continue to use to corral traditionally conservative voters, fearful that a split on the right would insure a progressivist win.

Buchanan’s vision was much more in tune with a beleaguered “middle America,” indeed with the Americans who would eventually elect Donald Trump. In a certain palpable sense, Buchanan and the issues he attempted to highlight in three campaigns finally and fully emerged in 2016. And despite the election skullduggery of 2020 and the hysterical efforts of the dominant cultural and political class, media, and academia to put the genie back in the lamp, what Trump did—whether he actually comprehended it or not—was to partially tear off the mask revealing the ugly and sullen face of a Deep State Establishment, both Democrat and Republican, which essentially cared only for its privileged position and power, and would do most anything to conserve them.

“If you vote for Pat,” they screamed, “you insure a Democrat in White House.”  Yet each time weary conservative voters supported the GOP—Bush Sr., Bob Dole, George W., John McCain, Mitt Romney—what were they really doing but endorsing and enabling “revolution lite,” a slightly less toxic version of the lunacy the hard Left was pushing and enacting? As my granddad once told me: “The Republicans are as useless as teats on a boar hog,” but worse, since with them never did those progressivist goal posts recede, only, as he added, “they are killing us more slowly.”

In 2011 an article appeared in The Washington Monthly highlighting some of the issues that separated George Jr. from conservatives: “Bush was wrong about everything from education to health care, immigration to international aid, national service (e.g., AmeriCorps, USA Freedom Corp) to foreign policy.” After 9/11 President Bush’s announced grand strategy, lifted whole-cloth from the Neoconservative vision of secular globalism, was to try to impose on perhaps the most primitive country in the world, Afghanistan, the most advanced (and corrupting) nostrums of liberal democracy: full feminism, full-blown equality, unrestrained consumerism, what the late economic historian R. H. Tawney called “the acquisitive society.” As we know now, or should know, is that that vision ran up foursquare against 1,300 years of ingrained Islamic tradition which had defeated British colonials in three desultory and bloody wars (1839–42; 1878–80; 1919), not to mention the disastrous defeat of Russian occupation (1979-1992), which helped bring on the collapse of the Soviet Communist state in 1991.

Those lessons were lost on George Jr., so hopelessly cocooned as he was in the language and agenda of globalism. The ghost of grand-father Prescott was not far from the scene.

In a real sense, George Jr.’s vision of America and the world was based on what liberal columnist Richard Cohen also noticed and termed Bush’s “neo-liberalism,” especially in education and the role of the Federal government:

“Bush has extended the [Education] department’s reach in a manner that Democrats could not have envisaged. I am referring, of course, to the 2001 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, better known as No Child Left Behind. I will spare you the act’s details, but it pretty much tells the states to shape up or face a loss of federal funds. It is precisely the sort of law that conservatives predicted Washington would someday seek — and it did.”

 

In 2013 Professor Jack Kerwick, in a fascinating article in the journal, Modern Age ["The Neoconservative Conundrum," Modern Age, Winter/Spring 2013, vo. 55, nos. 1 & 2,  pp. 5-12], wrote of a philosophical outlook that he identified as partaking of the revolutionary “rationalist mind,”  using the measures and research of the late English conservative political theorist Michael Oakeshott. Kerwick identified this as essentially an ideologically a priori approach to statecraft, which rejects long-standing custom and the organicism of tradition, in favor of an imposed, “progressivist” universal standard based on supposedly self-evident “principles” born out of human reason. It was such a rationalist mindset that guided Bush Jr. through much of his presidency, and it was one of the several reasons that made staunch conservatives uncomfortable with and suspicious of him.

Years ago the wife of a dear friend of mine who had an important position in the Reagan White House related to me that the one role Vice-President George H. W. Bush requested—and got—from President Reagan was control of most appointments on the Gipper’s staff. You can imagine what types of folks were approved for service. Years later a number of those same staffers began appearing on MSNBC and CNN as pundits and militating in Never Trumper efforts.

The specter of Prescott still casts a spell over the Bush family.  All along, despite some pleasant words, the Bushes have been enablers. As congressional Republicans continue to sell out America on everything from immigration to infrastructure, conservatives need to be told, once again, that the Republican “establishment” is not on their side. Prescott Bush’s ghost lives and prospers at the RNC and in the halls of the US Congress. Until it is fully exorcized this nation will have no real opposition to the ongoing, steep decline into multicultural totalitarianism.

                                 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Feodor Dostoevsky and the Fate of Christian Civilization

Recently, I finished viewing a made-for-television Russian series titled “Demons,” based on the novel by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Sometimes known by the title, “The Possessed” (1872), the plot is fairly complex and difficult to compress into a filmed series. Yet, enough of that complexity and meaning comes forth in the Russian series (it is subtitled).

I had read the novel many years ago. Even back then I recall that it was a difficult read, especially for someone unfamiliar with Russian history of the mid-19^th 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 question 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, in particular into the vacuous and empty souls of the fanatical idealists who professed a secular vision of a future socialist and globalist paradise on earth, a paradise without the encumbrances and limits of tradition, tsarist authority, and God…those natural and real lineaments which both regulate our innate freedom of will (so that it will not become license), but also provide a safe and ample space for our existence.

In tracing the evolution of revolutionary thinking, personified in his diverse characters, he 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 also eventually the dissolution and decay of the social fabric of society.

That evil, and it is pure demonic evil as he reveals in “Demons,” is all consuming, a madness which both historically and theologically he 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,” he has his worldly and secular character Ivan near the beginning declare: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted,” only to realize at the novel’s end 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, that 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 high-born, 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, including 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 who radiates through his presence complete subservience to evil.

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 I neither know nor feel good and evil and that I have not only lost any sense of it, but that there is neither good nor evil... and that it is just a prejudice." 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 identifies: he had once idolized Stavrogin 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 idle, footloose son of a landowner."  Stavrogin, he declares, is driven by a passion for inflicting torment, not merely for the pleasure of harming others, but to torment his own conscience and wallow in the sensation of "moral 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 counter-revolutionary 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 and what they saw and observed. But it was Dostoevsky, almost clairvoyantly, who visualized it a century earlier and 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 paradise, a kind of secular “Parousia.” 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.

As I watched “Demons” I was put in mind of a day several years ago: Back in March of 2019 I was chairman of the Confederate Flag Day at the North Carolina State Capitol. Our commemoration was besieged by several hundred screaming, raving demonstrators—Antifa-types and others. It took a mammoth police escort to enable us to exit the surrounded Capitol building. But I clearly recall the horridly disfigured expression of one of the protesters, his flaming eyes, his foul imprecations: he was young, white, and obviously not impoverished, probably the son of some well-to-do parents who had shelled out thousands for his education at one of North Carolina’s premiere universities.

His face, his angry grimace, was that of a possessed soul, made mad by years of slow and patient educational indoctrination, by our complacent society which tolerates and encourages everyday evil in nearly every endeavor we experience.

I vividly recalled the image of that fanatic as I finished watching the series, and I recalled images flashed across the television screen more recently of our latter-day violent Verkhovenskys, and of the Stavrogins, those wooly-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.

We have over the past many decades permitted our government to impose on us and much of the world what we term liberal democracy and something we call “human rights.” But those precepts and that 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 could not accept, is over. 

And despite our insouciance and material gratification, there will be a price, a severe and unimaginable price to pay.

Observing the pre-World War I revolutionary fervor which would soon overtake the world, English critic and essayist Hilaire Belloc wrote these lines:

“[T]he 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.” (This and That and the Other, 1912)

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.

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

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

[A slightly different version of this essay was published by Chronicles Magazine in November 2021.]