A while ago I finished reading Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan. I was not familiar with the author prior to reading the book, and would in all likelihood not have come across his book had a close friend not urged me to read it. I'm glad I did read it, and for a number of reasons which I will endeavor to share with you. It discusses a number of crucial issues which may be summarized as the following: a dying population, mass immigration, an anti-Christian culture, and 'the breakup of nations and the defections of the ruling elites to a world government whose rise entails the end of nations'. I intend to post about all of those issues but if I'm to give each area the proper attention I'm going to have to do it one by one. So I'll start with the cultural revolution. This post is actually less of a review, and more of a summary. I quote Buchanan at length, and keep my commentary to a minimum, so as to keep the post as short as possible (even so its pretty long). First things first though; although I think the book is immensely useful when it comes to explaining certain things, it does have some drawbacks, so I'll start with them.
Drawbacks
There are 4 main faults. First is the use of the term Judao-Christian throughout the book. Although the author is not a Christian Zionist he persists in using the phrase and I can only assume that he is covering his back after having been accused of being an anti-Semite many times. Therefore since he is already bringing up very controversial issues such as the cultural revolution (and naming Jewish names), and promoting Christian values, he feels a need to temper the possible fallout and not rock the boat even more. Usually the nonchalant use of the term bothers me, but in the context of the information and values he conveys in his book, I'm willing to overlook it in this instance.
Secondly, being an American, a large portion of the book is understandably devoted to examining American problems and possible solutions. While I found his information and thoughts interesting, I confess that I have no emotional attachment to America. Even though it has patently been hijacked for malevolent means, I don't have much affinity for the founding fathers or the Old America. If Buchanan thinks America can climb out of the present hole it has dug for itself then good luck to him. But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm more concerned with Europe, and most of all with Orthodox nations.
Thirdly, being an ex-Presidential candidate, and Republican, Buchanan does show some flicker of hope in the democratic process and even his former party. To his credit he does ravage Republican policy, Republican politicians, the political and judicial system, but out of some sort of nostalgia or wishful thinking, hopes that the situation can be reversed using the democratic process. That after he spent the whole book outlining that the media, political, educational institutions are all firmly tied up in the hands of those he opposes.
Fourthly he talks in broad terms about the West without really giving a definition.
Cultural Revolution
Buchanan starts off by stating that America has 'undergone a cultural revolution, with a new elite now occupying the commanding heights.' He observes: 'What was immoral and shameful- promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide- has become progressive and praiseworthy'.
He traces the start of this revolution to 1914, which in my opinion doesn't go back far enough, but in his analysis of the situation from that moment on, he brings up some very interesting points. He describes how during WW1, that apart from in Russia, the workers had failed to rally to the revolutions launched in their name. Nothing the marxists had predicted had come to pass. Two of Marx's disciples advanced an explanation: 'they had not risen in revolution because their souls had been saturated in two thousand years of Christianity, which blinded them to their true class interests.' Until Christianity were uprooted the revolution would be betrayed by the workers in whose name it was to be fought.
The first 'dissenting disciple' was Hungarian Georg Lukacs who had the following solution to the problem: 'I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution. A worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries'. As deputy commissar for culture in the Hungarian communist regime, Lukacs put his self-described 'demonic' ideas into action in what came to be known as 'cultural terrorism'. Buchanan summarises:
As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures.
The second disciple was Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who had seen that Bolshevism did not work, and that the regime could only compel obedience through terror.
Gramsci concluded it was their Christian souls that prevented the Russian people from embracing their Communist revolution. 'The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2000 years', Gramsci wrote; and a regime grounded in Judeo-Christian beliefs and values could not be overthrown until those roots were cut... Marxists must first de-Christianize the West.
Rather than seize power first and impose a cultural revolution from above, Gramsci argued, Marxists in the West must first change the culture; then power would fall into their laps like ripened fruit. But to change the culture would require a 'long march through the institutions'- the arts, cinema, theater, schools, colleges, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, and the new electronic medium, radio. One by one, each had to be captured and converted and politicized into an agency of revolution. Then the people could be slowly educated to understand even welcome the revolution. Gramsci urged his fellow Marxists to form popular fronts with Western intellectuals who shared their contempt for Christianity and bourgeois culture and who shaped the minds of the young.
On the cover of his 1970 runaway bestseller The Greening of America, the manifesto of the counterculture, author Charles Reich parroted Gramsci perfectly: There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted with violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence... This is the revolution of the new generation.
In 1923, Lukacs and members of the German Communist party set up, at Frankfurt University, an Institute for Marxism modelled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow which would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. The Jewish Max Horkheimer became its director.
At Horkheimer's direction, the Frankfurt School began to retranslate Marxism into cultural terms...To old Marxists the enemy was capitalism; to new Marxists, the enemy was Western culture... Victory would come only after Christian beliefs had died in the soul of Western man. And that would happen only after the institutions of culture and education had been captured and conscripted by allies and agents of the revolution.
The following extract from the book could easily be passed over by many, but it is telling:
...in 1933, history rudely intruded. Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Berlin, and as the leading lights of the Frankfurt School were Jewish and Marxist, they were not a good fit for the Third Reich. The Frankfurt School packed its ideology and fled to America.
Two of the more famous Jews were Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno (who changed his surname from Wiesengrund). Among the new weapons of cultural conflict that the Frankfurt School was to develop was Critical Theory. One student described it as the 'essentially destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism'.
Under Critical Theory, one repeats that Western societies are history's greatest repositories of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-semitism, fascism, and Nazism. Under critical theory, the crimes of the West flow from the character of the West, as shaped by Christianity...Critical Theory eventually induces 'cultural pessimism', a sense of alienation, of hopelessness, of despair where, even though prosperous and free, a people comes to see its society and country as oppressive, evil and unworthy of loyalty or love. The new Marxists considered cultural pessimism a necessary precondition of revolutionary change.
They flatly asserted that individuals raised in families dominated by the father, who are flag-waving patriots and follow the old-time religion, are incipient fascists and potential Nazis. As a conservative Christian culture breeds fascism, those deeply immersed in such a culture must be closely watched for fascist tendencies.... As early as the mid-1960s, conservatives and authority figures who denounced or opposed the campus revolution were routinely branded 'fascists'. Baby boomers were unknowingly following a script that ran parallel to the party line laid down by the Moscow Central Committee in 1943:
Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them a fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic...The association will, after enough repetition, become 'fact' in the public mind.
Since the 1960s, branding opponents as haters or mentally sick has been the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the left.
During the 1950s, the Frankfurt School lacked a personality to popularize the ideas buried in the glutinous prose of Horkheimer and Adorno. Enter Herbert Marcuse. (Editors note: another Jew)
Marcuse provided the answer to Horkheimer's question: Who will play the role of the proletariat in the coming cultural revolution? Marcuse's candidates: radical youth, feminists, black militants, homosexuals, the alienated, the asocial, Third World revolutionaries, all the angry voices of the persecuted 'victims' of the West.
Past societies had been subverted by words and books, but Marcuse believed that sex and drugs were superior weapons. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse urged a universal embrace of the Pleasure Principle. Reject the cultural order entirely, said Marcuse, and we can create a world of 'polymorphous perversity'.
For cultural Marxists, no cause ranked higher than the abolition of the family, which they despised as a dictatorship and the incubator of sexism and social injustice... Wilhelm Reich believed the way to destroy the family was through revolutionary sexual politics and early sex education. The appearance of sex education in elementary schools in America owes a debt to Lukacs, Reich and the Frankfurt School.
In the death of the West, the Frankfurt School must be held as a prime suspect and principal accomplice. The propaganda assault on the family it advocated has contributed to the collapse of the family.
The pill and condom have become the hammer and sickle of the cultural revolution.
In a third of a century, what was denounced as the counterculture has become the dominant culture, and what was the dominant culture has become, in Gertrude Himmelfarb's (Editors note: yet another Jew) phrase, a 'dissident culture'. We see it in the mandatory requirement for 'sensitivity training' in the military, in business, and in government. Turn on the TV and observe. The values of the revolution dominate the medium. Political correctness rules. Defiance of our new orthodoxy qualifies as 'hate speech', disrespect for its dogmas as a sign of mental sickness.
Political correctness is cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy.
People who today accept these ideas 'cannot know that they were hatched in a Marxist nursery in Weimar Germany' or that their purpose was to 'subvert our culture and overturn our civilization'.
Why they succeeded
Buchanan proposes a number of elements that came together:
First was 'the message in a bottle', as the men of the Frankfurt School called their ideas.
Second, there arrived on campus, beginning in 1964, a huge cohort of youth who had known niether hardship nor war. The cultural revolution now had a huge, captive, and receptive audience. Spoiled and affluent, carefree, confident, liberated, and bored, these young people were ready for rebellion.
Third, 1960s television could convey the tactics and triumphs of campus radicals and urban revolutionaries instantly to their peers.
Through its control of the culture, the Left dictates not only the answers, but the questions asked. In short, it controls the cosmological apparatus by which most Americans comprehend the meaning of events. This cosmology is based on two great axioms: the first is that there are no absolute values in the universe, no standards of ugliness, good and evil. The second axiom is- in a Godless universe- the Left holds moral superiority as the final arbiter of man's activities.
I'll end today's commentary with a rousing quote:
Political adversaries who use terms like Nazi, fascist, anti-Semite, nativist, homophone, bigot, xenophobe, and extremist have started a fight and should be accommodated.
I'll add that its time, not to be silenced, but to take their 'Critical Theory' and shove it right back in their faces with the same gusto that they try to shove it into ours. Two can play the game of constant repetition and demonisation, and since the truth is not on the side of those degenerates, we can beat that at their own game!
