The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (51 page)

In Russia, the earthy and simple faith of the peasants and the common people was brutally repressed, to make room for Marxism. It was a man-made monstrosity, its goal a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a dreamland wherein the distinction between ruler and ruled would vanish, and all would be united in a paradise: not the comprehensive will of God, who makes individual saints stand out sharply like sabers, but the shapeless and uniform will of the people. It turns out that, in the meantime, the “will of the people” was simply the will of their overlords, just as the will of Rome in the days of the empire was the will of the emperor.

 

In China, Mao-Tse Tung, impatient with the sluggish industrialization of his country, slaughtered millions in a movement aptly and ghoulishly called the Cultural Revolution. The most venerable Chinese tradition of natural law—Confucianism—was condemned as retrograde. Village, clan, family, temple, all had to yield to the new power coming from the Western intelligentsia.

 

Lenin and Stalin murdered their own citizens. Said Lenin with a diabolical carelessness, “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.”
⁸
Well, twenty million eggs got broken in Stalin’s forced collectivization of the Ukraine and the famine that followed. But then, why did the intelligentsia in the West ignore it, or, in the filthy case of Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty, cover it up?
⁹
What had they got against Ukrainian peasants? The same thing they had against all peasants, all “backward” communities, all village churches, all self-governing schools. They understood that under the old regime, a professor of sociology might aspire to be a lovable oddball in his neighborhood. Under the new regime, that man would be running the show. In the old world of sin and strife and repentance and grace, the Professor of Sociology had to crack his arthritic knees in prayer like his neighbor the plumber. In the new world, whose only sins are political, admitting of no repentance except reeducation, the Professor dons the alb of the priest, with the nightstick of the policeman. Class envy may explain very little enough in this life of ours. But the appeal of Marxism to the intellectual elites, that it certainly
does
explain.

 

Hitler and Mussolini denounced Christianity as effeminate (and Judaism, in the case of Hitler, as envy-poisoned), and tried to replace the traditional religion of their countries with worship of the State, the bloody-minded Hitler using the Jews as his sacrificial lambs. The Italians were to recapture the glory of the old Empire, apparently by seizing Ethiopia, and Germans sang, with no sense of hyperbole,
Deutschland über Alles!
In Germany, as in the Soviet Union, the economy, the schools, and local government were all to be controlled by a single party, the national party.

 

These titanically wicked men so tower over their comrades in devilry that we forget how many others there were, and the hatreds that united them. The Ottoman Turks, their imperial dreams fading, slaughtered a million Armenian shepherds and farmers.
¹⁰
The Viet Cong backhoed over a French-Indochinese Catholic culture that dated back to the Renaissance. A litter of toadies to the Soviets savaged Eastern Europe.

 

Franklin Roosevelt—not a wicked man—broke with American traditions, not simply by discarding the wisdom (and humility) of Washington, who refused to seek a third term in the presidency. Had Roosevelt succeeded in all he attempted, the Supreme Court would be an appendage to the legislature, and the American federal government would be the undisputed master of every arena of national life. In this regard he tried to carry out the daydreams of Woodrow Wilson, who disliked the road blocks built in to the American government and preferred the parliamentary system of Europe.
¹¹
He preferred, in other words, the unitary state.

 

Human sexuality was to be managed by self-appointed experts. Margaret Sanger, bigot extraordinaire, hater of “lesser” breeds, despiser of simple family women, preached birth prevention, calling it “birth control.”
¹²
She sold it to the rich—in those days, Republican women’s groups were fond of planning the non-parenthood of poor Democrats—as a means of controlling the poor, which in America meant immigrant Catholics, blacks, Indians, and other undesirables. Sanger had plenty of eugenic “science” to back up her racism. She sold it to the poor as an opportunity for “choice,” meaning the freedom from being burdened with yet another child. Alfred Kinsey and his associates committed thousands of acts of pederasty while conducting “scientific” experiments on babies and children, jiggered his statistics, belittled the idea of a sexual norm, brought his prurience into every living room in the nation via the magazines, and yet sold himself as an old-fashioned Indiana husband and father.
¹³

 

 

 

Ignorance Has Consequences

 

The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetites. Those who remember alone have a sense of relatedness, but whoever has a sense of relatedness is in at least the first grade of philosophy.

 

From
Richard Weaver
,
Ideas Have Consequences

 

 

The modern man forgets the past, and finds himself at the mercy of technocrats, propagandists, and snake-oil salesmen. The postmodern man is no longer aware that he has any past to forget. To remember and honor the hard-won achievements of our civilization is to have a fair chance of freedom; to forget them or despise them is to have no chance at all.

 

 

Freud, far more intelligent and learned than his descendants and his detractors, has been even more influential dead and discredited than alive. No one now chatters about the
id
and the
ego
, yet psychology and sociology have accepted, as plain fact, that religion is a product of a certain kind of psyche, and probably not a healthy one. No one sends a troubled teenager to a priest, or to a wise man who leads a life of profound and regular prayer. The teenager is sent to a psychologist, who increasingly is not much more than a pharmacologist. Sin has dropped out of that “scientific” discourse.