Category Archives: Boyd Cathey

DR. BOYD D. CATHEY, Scholar, author, columnist, Southern patriot.

Boyd Cathey: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: In Ukraine

Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Foreign Policy, Hebrew Testament, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Russia, UN, War

Leave a reply

America’s habitual manner of dealing with ‘foreign nations, whether friend or foe—is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable’ ~ H.L. Mencken

BY BOYD CATHEY

Four critical forces stand behind and vigorously motivate American and NATO policies in Ukraine. These forces support without apparent limitation the globalist-controlled and corrupt  Zelensky government in Kiev in its never-ending war against Russia. And like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of the last book of the New Testament, these Armies of the Night propel us, ineluctably and seemingly without concern for what lies ahead, towards nuclear Armageddon.

How has this been possible? How is it that the American citizenry, indeed, the citizenry in most European countries have, for the most part, supinely accepted this state of affairs?

Rationally and geopolitically, the conflict in Ukraine really should be of minor concern to us. It is not our role to be the world’s policeman and to intervene in every conflict, in every distant corner of the world. We have, I would suggest, no actual strategic interest there, except maybe to encourage a peaceful settlement. The Russians were not threatening us or NATO in any discernible or major way. Ukraine is in their backyard, not ours. And yet, we find ourselves mired in an ever-expanding, ever-widening conflict in a country that most Americans cannot even find on a map that may well result in World War III.

Most of the responsibility for what has happened we must bear. President George H. W. Bush and Secretary James Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would never expand to the borders of Russia (in return for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR). Yet, that is exactly what occurred. Then followed the “color revolutions”/coups d’etats in Tbilisi, Kiev, etc., with the instrumentality and complicity of American international finance and agents on the ground (read Victoria Nuland, etc.) which only intensified legitimate Russian mistrust and hostility.

The watershed moment for Russia was the ouster of a legitimately-elected Russia-friendly Ukrainian president by an American-fomented coup d’etat in Kiev in February 2014 and his replacement by a hand-picked American minion, followed by the intensification of widespread Ukrainian government persecution of the Russian majority in the Donbas eastern regions…followed by a dramatic uptick in that anti-Russian persecution in the Donbas in late 2021 and early 2022.

Author Ben Abelow has succinctly outlined what followed in his excellent primer, How the West Brought War to Ukraine. That brief volume is strongly endorsed by such authorities as Profs. John Mearsheimer and Paul Robinson, Ambassador Jack Matlock, and others, and remains a superb text on the conflict.

Certainly, a case can be made that the Russian incursion into Ukraine was a strategic mistake, ironically, because it was exactly what our foreign policy elites desired…an opportunity to take on the Russians directly by military means, using Ukraine as a helpless proxy, and perhaps effecting regime change in Moscow, or at least eliminating Russia as an obstacle to American global suzerainty. Still, President Putin believed, arguably, he had no other option. Nevertheless, it played into the hands of the War Party.

Over the past two decades our nation has shown an almost complete unwillingness to pursue any kind of negotiations with Russia about peace in Ukraine (e.g., the repeated torpedoing by the US of Minsk I and II). War serves OUR foreign policy purposes, and we managed to maneuver the Russians into making the first major offensive action.

Who, then, are these four forces that have pushed us dangerously into a conflict we should have never engaged in? What are the real reasons behind their hysterical and limitless advocacy, such that dozens of media outlets and most of our political leaders appear to have lost any scintilla of rational judgment?

First, perhaps the least visible but most effective force is what President Dwight Eisenhower termed more than sixty years ago “the military/industrial complex,” that is, the immensely powerful and influential military contractors and their complex web of control and influence, both in and out of the halls of power in DC, in our armed services, and in our politics. Each year billions of dollars in profits are generated for Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Goldman Sachs, and other supra-nationals. War in Ukraine has been an incredible financial boon for them—missiles, tanks, armaments and equipment of all kinds. They must be built and purchased (usually at inflated and exorbitant prices). And the pockets of our politicians are always ready for a fat share, not to mention the opened pockets of the corrupt thuggery who currently run Ukraine (and dozens of other American client states).

Then there is the zealous opposition of the fanatical Left to what they perceive is the rise of a Neo-Tsarist Christian populism and neo-fascism (anti-LGBTQ, etc.) in Moscow. Russia under Putin has become for them the locus of opposition to their universalist program of a New World Order, opposition to a global world reset, involving NATO, the USA, the EU, and the World Economic Forum. In a moment of candor Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) summarized (October 25, 2022) the official (if unspoken) American and globalist stance on the conflict and the real issues involved:

“Moscow right now is a hub of corrupt tyranny, censorship, authoritarian repression, police violence, propaganda, government lies and disinformation, and planning for war crimes. It is a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export. In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views, and supporting the urgent principles of democratic pluralism.”

Raskin is a far Leftist and Jewish, and his message is often just as frenzied and fanatical as that of any member of the Squad in Congress.  With one major difference: he’s highly placed and well connected, a part of the Democrat leadership establishment. So when he speaks, he speaks with some authority for the party and its leadership. But not only for the Democratic Party, but for those forces internationally who understand fully that Russia and its president stand athwart their path to a form of post-Marxist global hegemony, far worse than anything Joseph Stalin ever dreamed up.

Next, there are the Neoconservatives and their frenzied hatred for Russia (many of the Neocons have a Trotskyite and Labor Zionist genealogy which recalls the anti-semitism of Imperial Russia in the Pale of Settlement). It is the Neocons who have advocated never-ending war whether in Ukraine, or Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Bosnia, etc., in their zealous quest to impose what they conceive of as “liberal democracy” worldwide (what my mentor Russell Kirk once called disdainfully a “pax Americana”). It is not uncommon to see a Brian Kilmeade on Fox or read a Rich Lowry in the pages of the once-admirable National Review, espouse this viewpoint expressed with unrestrained vigor.

Joined to these forces are what we could call the “ground troops”—the vast majority of those who support American policies in Ukraine: those not-too-well-read, or simply dependent on the establishment media, which is completely one-sided on the conflict, for their information. Their views may well be based on a receptivity to continuing “anti-Russian” sentiment left over from the Cold War (similar to the anti-German sentiment which survived WW II) which many Americans partake of.

These forces have fueled an extremely dangerous cocktail. If someone opposes it, he is immediately shouted down as a “Putin apologist” or a supporter of “the new Hitler”: all of which is rubbish. But, sad to say, it seems to be working. I asked in my columns more than once, “Are there no grown-ups in the room? Or, are we fated to drift onward to a conflagration of terrible proportions?”

In St. John of Patmos’s Book of the Apocalypse he recounts that in a dream the Lamb of God summons and reveals to him four creatures that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. Over the centuries these Four Horsemen have been variously identified in Christian eschatology as harbingers of the Last Judgment and End Times. The first horseman in St. John’s revelation, riding a white horse and carrying a bow, has been seen to symbolize and invoke conquest, pestilence or perhaps even the coming of the Antichrist. The second horseman, riding upon a blood red horse, carries a sword and is seen to be creator of war, conflict, and anarchy. The rider on the third horse is viewed as a merchant and rides a black horse symbolizing famine. Lastly, the final rider upon the pale horse represents Death and the powers of Hell. And as the Evangelist tells us:  “They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth.”

The Military/Industrial complex, with its extensive and foul tentacles, may be seen symbolically to ride the black horse of greed, financial domination, and famine. The Neocons and their epigones can be represented by a rider seated on a red horse, zealously advancing conflict, anarchy, and fratricidal war.

The pale horse, whose rider symbolizes death and enthrallment by the powers of Hell, could well represent the mass of humanity, beguiled and woefully misled by the first three horsemen, and whose headlong movement like lemmings will result in the destruction and the collapse of the world—and of civilization—as we have known it. It is not hard to visualize such figures as Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell prominent in this group.

Finally, the unleashed and fanatical Left rides the white horse of conquest, pestilence, and heralding of the Antichrist, proclaiming the end of Christian civilization and the triumph of what Irish poet William Butler Yeats calls the “Rough Beast” (in his eschatological poem from 1919, “The Second Coming”): the return of a triumphant Satan, once held in check for twenty centuries by a “Rocking Cradle” but now loosed upon the world.

It is not too esoteric to suggest that the USA and the world now find themselves in a situation where, to follow Yeats again,

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….”

Are there voices yet who would sound the clarion call and their warnings be heeded? Indeed, are there any grand figures like the prophets of the Old Testament who could plead successfully for us to turn away from war, criminality, and evil? Or, has our civilization become so infected and decayed that it has run its course?

That question, for the moment, remains unanswered.

==========================================

~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music. Dive into Dr. Cathey’s Barely A Blog archive and latest Hard Truth interview. Boyd blogs at My Corner.

MLK, Russell Kirk, And The Ignominy of Modern Conservatism

Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Colonialism, Communism, Conservatism, Democrats, Education, Egalitarianism, History, Intellectualism, Race, Republicans

5 Replies

Outrage is too mild a term to describe the inane barbarity visited by the Russell Kirk Center on the memory of its namesake, Dr. Kirk, founder of American conservatism. It is built on lies and blatant falsehood

By Boyd Cathey

For the past forty years (officially since 1986) the third Monday in January has been celebrated as a federal holiday, Martin Luther King Day. Federal and state offices and many businesses either close or go on limited schedules. We are awash with public observances, parades, prayer breakfasts, stepped-up school projects for our unwary and intellectually-abused children, and gobs and gobs of over-the-top television “specials” and movies, all geared to tell us—to shout it in our faces, if we don’t pay strict attention—that King was some sort of superhuman, semi-divine civil-rights leader who brought the promise of equality to millions of Americans, a kind of modern St. John the Baptist ushering in the Millennium. And that he stands just below Jesus Christ in the pantheon of revered and adored historical personages…and in some ways, perhaps above Jesus Christ in the minds of many of his present-day devotees and epigones.

It seems to do no good to issue a demurrer to this veritable religious “cult of Dr. King.” There are, indeed, numerous “Christian” churches that now “celebrate” this day just as if it were a major feast in the Christian calendar. In short, Martin Luther King has received de facto canonization religiously and in the public mind as no other person in American history.

And the King cult has taken hold in the “conservative movement” with an especial tsunami-like effect.

The latest outrage of this revolutionary “cleansing” of traditional conservatism has been what has been inflicted on Russell Kirk, the “Sage of Mecosta,” the generally acknowledged founder of the American conservative movement back in the early 1950s. And it comes at the behest and invitation of the very institution bearing his name, The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, which plans to host a joint conference with the Acton Center, on Monday, January 16, with black activist John Woods, Jr., doing the honours. Under the looming visage of Abe Lincoln, Woods’ Web site, Braver Angels, defines his own organization as dedicated “to depolarization…bridging the partisan divide….” (A photo of a gaggle of brainless, lovey-dovey, googly-eyed Clinton and Trump supporters decorate the site.)

Here is part of the blurb from the Kirk Center:

Without King and Kirk, modern American Social Justice liberalism and modern American conservatism as we know them would not exist. And yet, for all of their differences, our modern politics suffer because contemporary liberalism and conservatism often lack the grounding in virtues, communitarian values and faith in an ordered universe to which both Kingian Nonviolence and Kirkian Conservatism held fast. Is it possible that by reacquainting ourselves with these lost traditions we could summon the better angels of left and right and restore a politics of virtue for the modern age?

Outrage is too mild a term to use to describe this inane barbarity. It is built on lies and blatant falsehood.

At one time figures such as Kirk were considered too unwieldly, too untouchable to be incorporated into the swirling vortex of crazed conservative political correctness. Very simply, although the standard encomia were regularly paid to his earlier accomplishments and role, his essential (negative) views on King, his opposition to the civil rights movement (and legislation), his staunch arguments against egalitarianism, his opposition to the frenzied anti-colonialism of the 1950s and 1960s (cf., his adventure novel, A Creature of the Twilight, set in late colonialist Africa), and his virulent disgust directed at George H. W. Bush (which led him to become chairman of Pat Buchanan’s campaign in Michigan in 1992, just as I chaired the North Carolina Buchanan effort) are significant mileposts which Kirk biographer, Bradley Birzer, must acknowledge (see generally, Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative;  University of Kentucky Press, 2015).

From 1967, when I was a college freshman, until shortly before his death in 1994, I corresponded frequently with Russell. As chairman of the Pfeiffer University Visiting Lecture Program—that would never happen today!—I brought him to my school. And, then, after a year as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow at the University of Virginia (where I finished my MA in 1971), Kirk asked me to come to Mecosta to serve as his assistant for 1971-1972. There I was privileged to learn from the Master. Not only did I delve deeply into roots of traditional Anglo-American conservatism (I assisted RK on Eliot and His Age and The Roots of American Order), but one responsibility I had was to edit Kirk’s little educational quarterly, The University Bookman. There he demonstrated his willingness, among other difficult topics, to debate cognitive disparities between the races (publishing reviews of politically-incorrect volumes).

And then, I recall sitting in his library with him as the results of the Michigan Democratic presidential primary filtered in, in the spring of 1972. Although television sets and radios were not permitted in the old house, “Piety Hill,” up the street, I had a radio, and at Russell’s urging I brought it down from my room (the second floor of the library building). Kirk delighted in George Wallace’s upset victory, although I don’t think he wished his wife Annette to find out!

Such examples of his thinking and actions are now all swept under the carpet, carefully ignored, or simply rewritten, and the “Sage of Mecosta” emerges with new raiment, diminished and stuffed in a Procrustean bed, fully “trans-ed” and purified of his earlier inequities and sins of racism and against “human rights.”

Let us recall a little history, and this I essentially repeat from my earlier essays on this subject to which I refer the reader.

Mention the fact that King may have plagiarized as much as 40 % of his Boston University Ph.D. dissertation [cf. Theodore Pappas, Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans, 1998, and Martin Luther King Jr Plagiarism Story, 1994, if they are have not been scrubbed from circulation], or that he worked closely with known Communists throughout his life, or that he advocated American defeat in Vietnam while praising Ho Chi Minh, or that he implicitly countenanced violence and Marxism, especially later in his life [cf., Congressional Record, 129, no. 130 (October 3, 1983): S13452-S13461]—mention any of these accusations confirmed begrudgingly by his establishment biographers David Garrow and Taylor Branch, or mention his even-by-current-standards violent “rough sex” escapades (which apparently involved even under-agers) [cf., Cooper Sterling, January 13, 2018, VDare] and you immediately get labeled a “racist” and condemned by not just the zealous King flame-keepers on the Left, but by such “racially acceptable” conservatives like Rich Lowry and Dinesh D’Souza who supposedly are on the Right.

Indeed, in some ways Establishment “conservatives” such as Lowry (National Review), D’Souza, Glenn Beck, the talking heads on Fox and the furious scribblers at nearly all major “conservative” journals, and many others, not only eagerly buy into this narrative, they now have converted King into a full-fledged, card-carrying member of “conservatism inc.”—a “plaster saint” iconized as literally no one else in our history. Thus, this latest attempt to “scrub” clean Russell Kirk so that he, too, can join the new holy pantheon…finally, it simply had to happen.

Celebrating King becomes a means for the modern “conservative” movement to demonstrate its “civil rights” and “egalitarian” bona fides. When the Neoconservatives made their pilgrimage from the Trotskyite Left into the ranks of conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s, they brought with them a fervent belief in a globalist New World Order egalitarianism that characterized their Trotskyite ideology, and the determination to redefine and re-orient the traditional American Rightwing, and to re-write, as well, American history.

Thus, the purges of the old conservative movement in the 1980s and 1990s—there was no room for Southern conservatives like Mel Bradford, no room for traditionalist Catholics like Frederick Wilhelmsen or Brent Bozell Sr., no room for paleo-libertarians like Murray Rothbard, no room for Old Right anti-egalitarians like Paul Gottfried, and no room for “America Firsters” like Pat Buchanan…. These figures did not believe in King’s (and Lincoln’s) “promise of equality,” and thus were no doubt scarred by latent or real racism.

King Day becomes, then, for the modern Conservative Movement an opportunity for it to beat its chest, brag about its commitment to civil rights and “the American dream, the unrealized idea of equality” (that is, to distort and re-write the history of the American Founding), and to protect its left flank against the ever increasing charges that it could be, just might be, maybe is —“racist.”

The heavily-documented literature detailing the real Martin Luther King is abundant and remains uncontroverted. During the debates over establishing a national “King Day” in the mid-1980s, Senators Jesse Helms and John East (both North Carolinians) led the opposition, supplying the Congress and the nation, and anyone with eyes to read, full accounts of the “King legacy,” from his close association and collaboration with the Communist Party USA to his advocacy of violence and support for the Communists in Vietnam, to implicit support for Marxist revolution domestically. Ironically, it was Robert Woodson, a noted black Republican, who highlighted in a lecture given to honor the “conservative virtues of Dr. Martin Luther King” at the Heritage Foundation on November 5, 1993, the difficulties in getting black advocates of the older generation to respect King’s role as a Civil Rights leader. According to Woodson, as quoted in an excellent essay by Paul Gottfried,

…when Dr. King tried to bring the Civil Rights movement together with the [Marxist] peace movement, it was Carl Rowan who characterized King as a Communist, not Ronald Reagan. I remember being on the dais of the NAACP banquet in Darby, Pennsylvania when Roy Wilkins soundly castigated King for this position. [Paul Gottfried, “The Cult of St. Martin Luther King – A Loyalty Test for Careerist Conservatives?” January 16, 2012].

But not only that, behind the scenes there were voluminous secretly-made FBI recordings and accounts of King’s violent sexual escapades, often times with more than two or three others involved in such “rough sex” trysts; and of his near total hypocrisy when discussing civil rights and other prominent civil rights leaders. It is, to put it mildly, a sorry record, scandalous even by today’s standards…Indeed, King makes Harvey Weinstein look like a meek choirboy in comparison.

But you won’t hear any of that mentioned by the falling-all-over-itself media mavens at “Conservatism Inc.” or on Fox. In fact, such comments will get you exiled to the far reaches of the Gobi Desert and labeled a “racist,” quicker that my cocker spaniel gobbles down his kibble.

Almost all the material is now available and accessible online, including material from the Congressional Record. And I have listed it in previous forays into this topic. Much of what we really have come to know is thanks to the excellent work and dedicated research of the late Dr. Sam Francis, who served on the staff of Senator East. Francis’s work is critical, and originally was written to preface the publication of voluminous testimony and documentation placed in the Congressional Record by Senator Helms.

Francis’s essay and the Helms’ dossier were eventually published in book form (I have a published copy, but I’m unsure if you can still find it on Amazon). A few years back Dr. Francis’s introduction [“The King Holiday and Its Meaning,” February 26, 2015] and the lengthy Congressional Record material, which he prepared for Helms [“Remarks of Senator Jesse Helms. Congressional Quarterly,” February 26, 2005] were put online. For a very complete understanding of King’s association and cooperation with American Communists and his endorsement of Vietnamese Communism, as well as his putative endorsement of Marxism here in the United States while condemning the free enterprise system, these two items are essential reading.

But, say the scribblers at the “establishment conservative media,” wasn’t King really a conservative at heart, an old-fashioned black Baptist who believed in the tenets of traditional Christianity? Shouldn’t we simply overlook these all-too-human failings? And, like John Woods, Jr., shouldn’t we search diligently for those points of “consensus” and “shared communitarian values”?

The answer is a resounding NO.

I can think of no better summation of the real meaning of King Day and its bare-knuckled ideological use to deconstruct, dissolve and obliterate American traditions and heritage than to cite, again, Sam Francis:

“[T]he true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions—not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality—racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social—must be overcome and discarded.

“By placing King—and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction—into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining—perhaps the defining—icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.” 

I will not be celebrating this day; rather, it is for me a mournful reminder of what has happened and is happening to this country…and what has happened to the once-fearless and vibrant “conservative movement” and now to the revered Dr. Russell Kirk.

==========================================

~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music. Dive into Dr. Cathey’s Barely A Blog archive and latest Hard Truth interview.

WATCH: 2-Party Pox: The Republicans Suck AND The Democrats Want To Kill You

Argument, Boyd Cathey, Conservatism, Democrats, Donald Trump, Republicans

Leave a reply

NEW ON THE HARD TRUTH PODCAST: 2-Party Pox: The Republicans Suck AND The Democrats Want To Kill You

In last week’s “HARD TRUTH” podcast (7,646 Views)—David Vance, ilana and guest Jack Kerwick (introduced here ) cancelled the Grand Old Party (GOP). And on good grounds. The Republican Party HAS never stood up for you, WILL never stand up for you and is NOT going to do what it takes. Past is prologue.

As Dr. Boyd Cathey has observed, the “party which never conserves anything” had been exposed as such as far back as 1875. “The great Southern author, Robert Lewis Dabney, writing a decade after the end of the War Between the States … expressed presciently this tendency of dominant, post-war Northern conservatism”:

The history of the Republican Party is “that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism.”

(Another aficionado tells me Dabney was chaplain to the heroic Stonewall Jackson, which completes the picture.)

Some questions, however, lingered. Were we and our guest, Dr. Kerwick, being too theoretically pure? Perhaps conservatives should just put up and shut up about the Only Game in Town? Succinctly put by a viewer and reader:

“Yup! The Republicans suck. But the Democrats want to kill me.”

To that, David provided the perfectly plain answer, as is his wont. WATCH. So did Andrew Breitbart. WATCH AND SUBSCRIBE. David and ilana also get down to some “Monkey Business.” Look, “Monkey Pox” is not a concern, although The Powers are itching to make it a lockdown affair. All you have to do is avoid Biblically prohibited copulation.

(Oh, last week, ilana went with a woke aesthetic, as viewers of the “Hard Truth” podcast told her bluntly. So, no more unwashed hair on this May 26, 2022 “Hard Truth” episode. Ilana cleaned up “good,” as they’d say in the South.)

National Review ‘Conservatism’: As Ugly As The Promulgators

America, Boyd Cathey, Conservatism, Federalism, History, Race, Racism, The South, The West

Leave a reply

Can there be unity with those who wish our extinction and replacement, or with those who urge us to surrender our beliefs?

By Boyd Cathey

Now, after what may have been a racially-motivated mass shooting in Buffalo (May 14) by a deranged young man, new insistent calls go out for the government to fight “white nationalism” and “right wing domestic terrorism.” Attorney General Merrick Garland has already signaled more than once that this is the nation’s major challenge—not the illegal drugs epidemic, not the rampant criminality tearing our cities apart, not the huge spike in gang violence, not the literally millions of illegals coming across our borders; no, not any of these, but homegrown “extremism” coming from disaffected, white segments of the American population.

In addition to new surveillance and potential censorship measures, such as the Disinformation Governance Board, and additional government intrusion into the lives of American citizens, also come the now-accustomed demands from various anguished personalities, political and otherwise, with pained expressions on their faces, pleading for national unity. “Can’t we all get along,” they mumble, echoing words uttered decades ago by Rodney King. (Remember him from the violence in the streets of Los Angeles?).

But such desired “unity” is always one-sided, meaning that we must discard our beliefs, our principles, and accept the latest agenda item, the latest conquest advanced by the post-Marxist Left. Far too many so-called “conservatives” in positions of leadership in America have embraced this elastic strategy, of first opposing something (e.g. same sex marriage), then almost abruptly reversing course, even showcasing their about-face, while defending it as completely consistent with “conservative principles.”

Then, whether from pundits at Fox News or from the Rich Lowry and Kevin Williamson types at National Review, we are instructed to follow suit, to unite around a refashioned definition of conservatism which always seems to tag along just a few steps behind the worst outrages of the radical Left.

The great Southern author, Robert Lewis Dabney, writing a decade after the end of the War Between the States (1875), expressed presciently this tendency of dominant, post-war Northern conservatism:

“This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.”

Thus, a Robert E. Lee and a “Stonewall” Jackson were only a few years ago honored not just by conservatives but nationally, but now lightweight Neoconservative historians like Allen Guelzo dictate for us positions scarcely distinguishable from views current on the extreme Left. And Fox News personalities like Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade do their damnedest in unserious, ghostwritten potboilers to publicize the greatness and sublime conservative vision of figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, and Abe Lincoln.

We are told that we must discard what once we believed were fundamental principles, that we must unite around the evolving definition of conservatism.

But what are those beliefs around which we should unify? If what was once posited as fundamental truth can simply be discarded, tossed on the ash heap, or ignored, where does that leave us in the immense culture war that we have been losing now for more than half a century?

The strategy of the present-day “conservative movement” almost exactly parallels the observation made by Dabney nearly 150 years ago. It has failed abysmally, and, in fact, its most significant achievement is to lead well-meaning citizens away from genuine and effective opposition to the rot which threatens to engulf us.

On the contrary, my mentor the late Dr. Russell Kirk, who in many ways was the father of an older conservatism (back in the 1950s), stated what should and must be our essential credo: We hold a series of immutable beliefs as fundamental, and those principles and that vision are necessary for a just society. Those beliefs and principles come to us as a precious legacy from our ancestors and from our Western Christian traditions.

And as a necessary corollary: there can be no real agreement, no real unity with those who openly and forcefully reject that foundation and those essential principles as poisoned by racism, sexism, homophobia, and “white privilege,” not to mention hints of “fascism” and other not-so-pleasant “isms.”

Let’s consider some history.

The old American republic was formed through a kind of understood compromise between the colonies; the Authors of our constitutional system fully comprehended that there were diverse elements and interests that must be balanced to make the new nation at all workable. But in 1787 there was essential agreement on fundamentals that a seemingly miraculous result was possible. Yet, those far-sighted men also feared what might happen should that which they created be perverted or turned from its original propositions.

The central Federal government was counter-balanced and limited by newly and fiercely independent states which jealously guarded a large portion of their own sovereignty. Voting was universally restricted to those considered most qualified to exercise the franchise. Universal suffrage was considered by the near totality of the Fathers of our Constitution to be a sure means of destroying the young republic: absolute democracy and across-the-board egalitarian views were considered fatal for the future of the country. Such views were sidelined to the periphery, without practical voice in the running of the commonwealth.

Above all the American republic was, in all but name, a “Christian” republic. Certainly, the basic documents of our founding did not formally state as much. There was no formal national “religious establishment,” as existed in almost all European countries. Yet, despite that lack of national confessionality, the new nation, while demanding freedom for religious expression, professed de facto the Christian faith as a kind of understood basis of the new nation. As is often pointed out, almost immediately after adopting the Bill of Rights in 1791 (authored, ironically, by slaveholder James Madison), including the “freedom of religion” First Amendment, Congress provided for paid Christian chaplains in the new Northwest Territories. Even more confirming is the fact that nearly every one of the original thirteen colonies/new states had a “religious establishment” or religious test of some sort on the state level, and those establishments were left completely untouched by the First Amendment, which was understood to mean only the formal establishment of a national supported state church.

Above all, there existed amongst the new Americans the ability to converse and communicate with each other, using the same language, and employing the same symbols and imagery that had brought them together originally as a country. Appeals to traditional English law and the historic “rights of Englishmen,” the belief in a God of the Old and New Testaments whose prescriptions found in Holy Writ informed both the laws of the state and the understanding of justice and virtue, and an implicit, if not explicit, agreement that there were certain limits of thought and action beyond which one could not go without endangering the republican experiment, formed a kind of accepted public orthodoxy.

That modus vivendi—that ability to get along and agree on most essentials—continued, sometimes fitfully, until 1861. The bloody War Between the States that erupted that year might have been avoided if the warnings of the Authors of the Constitution had been heeded, if the Federal executive in 1861 had understood the original intentions of 1787 and the precarious structural balance that the Philadelphia Convention had erected. But that was not the case, and four years of brutal war followed, with over half a million dead and thousands more maimed, and, most tragically, that essential “via media” between an increasingly powerful central government and the rights of the states and of communities, and eventually, of persons, distorted and perverted.

The resulting trajectory towards centralization, the growth of a powerful Federal government, has continued nearly unabated for 150 years. With it and with the gradual destruction of not just the rights of the states, but also of communities and persons, came the institutionalization of a large and mostly unseen permanent bureaucracy, a managerial and political class, that took upon itself the role of actually ruling and running the nation. James Burnham and the late Samuel Francis have written profoundly on this creation of a managerial state within the state.  Indeed, in more recent days we have come to label this establishment the “Deep State.”

Concurrent with this transformation governmentally and politically, our society and our culture have equally been transformed. It is certainly arguable that the defeat of the Confederate states in 1865, that is, the removal of what was essentially a conservative and countervailing element in American polity, enabled the nearly inevitable advance of a more “liberal” vision of the nation. At base, it was above all the acceptance by post-war Americans of nearly all persuasions of the Idea of Progress, the vision that “things”—events, developments in thought and in the sciences and in culture, as well in governing—were inevitably moving towards a bright new future. It was not so much to the past we would now look, but to the “new” which always lay ahead of us.  And that future was based squarely on the idea of an “enlightenment” that always seemed to move to the political and cultural Left.

While loudly professing and pushing for more “openness” and more “freedom,” liberation from the “straight jacket” of traditional religion and religious taboos, and propounding equality in practically every field of public and private endeavor, ironically, the underlying effect and result of this “progress” has brought with it, in reality, a severe curtailment of not just many of our personal liberties, but of the guaranteed rights once considered sacrosanct under our old Constitution.

This long term, concerted movement, and eventual triumph of nineteenth and twentieth century progressivism, politically, culturally, and in our churches, not only placed into doubt those essential and agreed-upon foundations that permitted the country to exist in some form of “unity,” but also enabled the growth of ideologies and belief systems that, at base, rejected those very foundations, the fragile creed, of that origination.

In one of the amazing turnarounds in history, the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991—hollowed out and decaying after years of boasting that it would “bury” the West—witnessed almost concurrently the exponential growth and flourishing of an even more insidious and seductive version of post-Marxism in the old Christian West, in Europe and the United States. A century of the ravages and termite-like devastation by liberalism and progressivist ideology had debilitated the foundations—and the required will—to resist the attractions of a cultural Marxism that eventually pervaded our culture, our education, our entertainment industry, and our religious thought. Older and gravely weakened inherited standards and once-revered benchmarks of right and wrong, of justice, of rights and duties, were replaced by what the Germans call a “gestalt,” or a kind of settled overarching Marxist view of society and culture which had no room for opposing views. Dr. Paul Gottfried has written extensively on this phenomenon.

That dogmatic vision now pervades our colleges and public education; it almost totally dominates Hollywood; it controls the Democratic Party and huge swathes of the Republican Party; it speaks with ecclesiastical authority through the heresiarchs who govern most of our churches; and, most critically, it provides a linguistic template—an approved language—that must be accepted and employed, lest the offender be charged with “hate speech” or “hate thought.” Its goals—the imposition of a phony democracy not just in the United States but across the face of the globe—the legislation of an across-the-board equality which is reminiscent of the kind of “equality” the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm “legislated”—the perpetuation of a largely unseen, unanswerable, unstoppable managerial and political class, secure in its power and omnipotence—the proclamation of the United States (and Europe) as an “open nation with no physical borders”—have been and are being realized.

It is this overlay, this suffocating ideological blanket, with its dogmas of multicultural political correctness, its anathematization of perceived “racism,” “sexism,” homophobia,” “white supremacy,” and other characterized forms of “bigotry” as unforgivable sins, that now has assumed near total dominance in our society. The older forms of liberalism were incapable of offering effective opposition, for cultural Marxism utilized liberalism’s arguments to essentially undo it, and eventually, absorb it.

Yet, there are still millions of Americans—and Europeans—who have been left behind, not yet swept up in that supposedly ineluctable movement to the Left. They are variously labeled the “deplorables,” or perhaps if they do not share completely the reigning presumptions of the Mainstream Media and academia, they are “bigots” or “yahoos,” uninformed “rednecks,” and, increasingly, maybe “white nationalists,” or worse. The prevailing utter condescension and contempt for them by the established Deep State would make the most severe witch-burner of the 17th century envious.

So I ask: we are asked to unify around what? Unite with whom? On what basis and on what set of fundamental principles? Can there be unity with those who wish our extinction and replacement, or with those who urge us to surrender our beliefs?

Frankly, such unity is neither possible nor desirable…unless millions have a “road to Damascus” conversion, or some major conflagration occurs to radically change hearts and minds.

==========================================

~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music. Dive into Dr. Cathey’s Barely A Blog archive and latest Hard Truth interview.