Although we are in a War on Islamofacist Terrorism, in “a Clash of Civilizations”, we are also in a clash within Western civilization, a clash between those who believe in America and those who are anti-American, who believe in the atheist ideologies of communism and socialism in all their versions, including their attempted co-opting of environmentalism and other causes. This is not something that can be covered in an op-ed for the editorial page. The issues are complex and their implications grow out into a full-fledged Cultural War.
In 1789, after the American Revolutionary War had ended and the United States of America was entering its second decade of existence, Benjamin Rush, a man who had signed the Declaration of Independence, knew that the fight to establish the ideals of America had barely begun. He wrote:
There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of the American Revolution with those of the late American war. The American war is over but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed.
During the 1860s -- approximately 90 years after the Revolutionary War—America brought about the Civil War. It was in essence a war about the survival of America, and Abraham Lincoln stressed this in his most famous speech, in the Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.
This Civil War did indeed test whether the United States could endure based on the conceptions of America. It was a war of great violence and great courage, and when it ended, slavery ceased to exist in the United States, bringing the country closer to the ideals of America.
Approximately 90 years later, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, ideas were being taught in colleges and universities to the generation of youth that would lead to the next major revolution to sweep the United States. Unlike the first two major revolutions, this one was not to be a shooting war. Instead, we entered a fifty-year revolution of ideas, an American Cultural War.
Just as the Revolutionary War and the Civil War were moments of destiny in the life of America, this Cultural War that we are now engaged in is a moment that will determine the destiny of everything we hold most dear. The particular cultural war in which we Americans find ourselves will determine the future you and your children and your children’s children will live in and find their lives regulated by. It will determine what is legal and illegal, what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is praised and what is condemned—and it will determine whether you and your children will have a life of opportunity or a life of oppression. It is the most important series of events in your life, whether you acknowledge it or not.
We have major problems in this country. More and more people are beginning to realize that we have a terrible problem in values. These problems demand solutions. But proposed solutions do not come out of a void. People, influenced by what they read and are taught, decide on methods to solve the problems they face. These methods, these solutions, carry philosophies within them.
One of the major bodies of information that exists and has been taught in our schools is an entire world of belief that is decidedly anti-American. These ideas have been taught in our universities and colleges for over seventy years now, influencing generations of students, who later become teachers, professors, politicians, social workers, lawyers, judges, and so forth. The list of problems in America—a list any of us could easily make—are all problems that have been brought about largely due to wrong solutions that have come from anti-American beliefs, from a philosophy in disguise.
All solutions are philosophies in disguise. Cultural values #1 propose as solutions to our problems ideas embedded in the philosophy of America. Cultural values #2 propose as solutions to our problems ideas contained in philosophies that actually go against the basic ideology of America.
Now, there is no suggestion of a vast conspiracy theory here. There doesn’t need to be. People with strong views act on them, and their actions tend to echo the actions of others who agree with them. Like-minded people band may act together in a small group with a common agenda. But the vast majority of enemies are free-lancers. Just as freeways do not become crowded by conspiracy, but rather by the independent actions of tens of thousands of individuals to go north or south or east or west at a given time, so may tens of thousands of people go in a direction in the Cultural War and act in accordance with their perceived beliefs. It doesn’t take a conspiracy to fight a cause—merely a common general viewpoint, and an interest in what others of like viewpoint are doing, have done, and may do in the future. Most of what I discuss or use as examples are just the actions of free-lancers doing their best for something they believe in, or following something that they have learned. This would be admirable, except of course for the fact that what they believe in, or the methods they are following will cause the transmogrification of America into a socialist United States, or some other left-wing nightmare of Utopia, or, at best, simply doing mischief.
The destruction of much of what we value as Americans only requires many individual people, each of them with a philosophy that disagrees with American basic ideas of individuality and liberty and responsibility and such. And then they make an effort to get into the positions necessary to make laws and court rulings, rules and regulations for government agencies, curricula for schools, style sheets for newspapers, rules for universities, and the philosophy behind our law schools and journalism majors. And then, over time, the changes come. . . And suddenly our legal system has changed, and our schools have changed, and journalists are slanting stories, and political correctness is coercive, and people are worried if they say the wrong word, or tell the wrong joke, or look the wrong way. It’s all very quiet and very efficient, and we shouldn’t be surprised now to see the results.
All of these are problems in America. All of these involve values. All can be grouped under categories such as religion, truth, property, marriage, morality, justice, culture, and so forth. I believe that all of these are areas that have not become dysfunctional by accident. I believe that the breakdown in these areas have been deliberately planned and carried out by many people, some working in groups and some working independently, but under the same basic types of ideology. These people are followed by millions of other people who, with the best of intentions, unknowingly carry through with some policies and actions that are actually detrimental to America. All it takes is some people who act deliberately, followed by many people working individually who have been taught the same beliefs as the first group, or who are acting on a previously designed system in ignorance of what the design actually has been co-opted to do.
Now, consider these categories I listed above, the categories in which our problems exist -- religion, truth, property, marriage, morality, justice, culture, and so forth. I listed them deliberately this way, in this order. I think you will agree that these are areas of our problems. Now look at what a Leftist named Bakunin said:
The old world must be destroyed and replaced by a new one. When you have freed your mind from the fear of God, and that childish respect for the fiction of right, then all the remaining chains that bind you -- property, marriage, morality, and justice -- will snap asunder like threads.
The past century has experienced horror after horror carried out by those who follow the writings of certain philosophers. In the 20tyh century alone, over two hundred million people throughout the world have been murdered through deliberate war or other deliberate actions carried out by those who followed versions of a few non-JudeoChristian philosophies. Words written on sheets of paper have driven so-called revolutionaries to destroy the live of millions upon millions of people throughout the world. A man who saw much of this destruction first-hand, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote in The Captive Mind:
It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention.
“Influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books . . .” Lives influenced. Unpleasantly. We’ve seen it around the world. Why should we feel that we Americans are immune to this sort of influence?
Bakunin—who, incidentally, was the author of one of those “intricate and abstruse books” that have destroyed life for tens of millions of people in the 20th century alone—really summarized everything in his quote. He fully recognized that the destruction of religion and values leads to the undermining of concepts of “property, marriage, morality, and justice”—the essential elements of our culture, of America.
We see the JudeoChristian religious complex and these American values under attack everywhere we look.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Perri Nelson's Website, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, A Blog For All, The Random Yak, Big Dog's Weblog, Maggie's Notebook, basil's blog, Shadowscope, Stuck On Stupid, The Bullwinkle Blog, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Conservative Thoughts, Rightlinx, sissunchi, Faultline USA, third world county, stikNstein... has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Overtaken by Events, Renaissance Blogger, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
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