Category Archives: Boyd Cathey

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

UPDATED (5/6/022): WATCH HARD TRUTH: Bleeding Russia Dry With Boyd Cathey

Boyd Cathey, Foreign Policy, Russia, THE ELITES, The Establishment, The West

ON HARD TRUTH this week, David Vance and myself are joined by a fearless and learned dissident scholar, DR. BOYD D. CATHEY, for a wide-ranging discussion on the US plan to bleed Russia dry. While the Americans, from their Ukrainian-manned vantage points, seem willing to fight to the last Ukrainian; Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has vowed that Russia “would never accept the global village under the command of the American sheriff.”

Some breaking developments come to me about little Jasper, who cameos at the end of our broadcast with Boyd: Jasper has begun to lord it over Boyd something fierce due to his new, if modest, video fame! Last night he demanded filet mignon and Boyd had to relent and give him a sizable portion of his supper! Oh, well, that’s what we pet lovers must do…. Here is Oscar-Wood, Mercer parrot, surveying the new building materials–aluminum & glass–for the kitchen cabinets, on which he has been “working.” https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer/status/1517976224831721472.

SUBSCRIBE HERE.

BOYD D. CATHEY earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and a doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. He did additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland. 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, religion and culture.

BOYD’S WEBSITE: https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/

BOYD On The Unz Review: https://www.unz.com/article/the-illusion-of-liberal-democracy-americas-long-record-of-destruction-continues/

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Knew What Ukraine, NATO & US Neoconservatives Were Up To

BAB's A List, Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Foreign Policy, Globalism, History, Iraq, Nationalism, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Russia, The West

 Solzhenitsyn: The USA and NATO are in the process of encircling Russia and depriving Russia of its independence as a nation state.

By Boyd Cathey

In all the hysteria over the latest strain of the Coronavirus virus, the frenzied ideological (and essentially authoritarian and anti-constitutional) activities of the House January 6 “Investigatory” Committee, and the frenetic lead up to this recent Christmas, one significant anniversary was missed, or rather ignored, by our media, including the so-called “conservative” media: the birth on December 11, 1918 of arguably the 20th century’s greatest novelist and social/cultural critic, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn, let it be said, will long be remembered when the names of moronic fanatics like Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and others of that ilk, have become filthy curse words symbolizing the political and cultural nadir of our once great republic.

Yet, with all the ejaculatory exclamations and dire warnings, and subsequent demands for “American” and “NATO” action to thwart the supposed “threat” by the Russians, under that evil genius Vladimir Putin, to use bloodthirsty Cossack troops to invade and conquer poor, little democratic Ukraine, Solzhenitsyn’s comments shortly before he died on August 3, 2008, demand consideration.

No one can accuse the great Russian writer of being an advocate of violence, aggression or war. His experiences, so brutally and so vividly recounted in his various semi-autobiographical novels dissuade any dispassionate reader from that conclusion. He had seen the open jaws of bitter Hell, and that Hell attempted not only to swallow him but destroy him and his soul totally. That the Soviet Hell—the Gulag—did not succeed, and that he emerged stronger for it, a man of resilient and unquestioned Faith, is a remarkable example of how true religious conviction and Hope can indeed overcome even the worst trials, both physical and spiritual.

When Solzhenitsyn came to the United States and gave his famous address at Harvard, June 8, 1978, it was met first by shock, then by a studied if respectful silence by many in the media. For in that speech he had taken target at some of America’s showiest and most prized attributes:

He attacked moral cowardice and the selfishness and complacency he sees in the West. Materialism, sharp legal maneuvering, a press that invades privacy, “TV stupor” and “intolerable music,” all contribute to making the western way of life less and less a model for the world, he said. “A decline in courage,” Solzhenitsyn said, is the most striking feature of what he called “spiritual exhaustion” of the West. “The forces of evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?” “To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being….”

And that was in 1978.

Furthermore, modern managerial democracy and its vaunted demand for universal (and chimerical) equality, imposed on the rest of the world and modeled on the US experience, actually led to the eventual triumph of totalitarianism.

After the fall of Communism and the end of the Soviet Union, it was gradually insinuated that the great writer was now, given the elapse of time, perhaps a bit passe’ or too much the slavophile or Russian nationalist. Indeed, increasingly leftist (and neoconservative) pundits and writers, while grudgingly acknowledging his literary ability, called him a “reactionary,” unable to understand the new globalist age.

But Solzhenitsyn’s comments about Ukraine made after the dissolution of the old Soviet Union ring true today and are even more prescient now than when they were made shortly before his death.

I transcribe below a letter he wrote to a Ukrainian friend, Sviatoslav Karavanski in 1990, later published in the journal Zvezda, December 1993. And I follow that with portions of an interview that Solzhenitsyn gave to The Moscow News, April 28/May 4, 2006.

Author Peter Rieth (in The Imaginative Conservative, August 24, 2014) commented on the Russian author’s warnings:

“Americans should take heed. Solzhenitsyn’s words would make President Reagan roll over in his grave. America in 2014 is supporting the goals of Lenin, helping pummel the city of Donietsk, a historic British city which was a bastion of anti-Leninist resistance and advancing a geopolitical vision dreamt up by German imperialists, pursued by Hitler in the west and Bolsheviks in the east. It is only historical ignorance which makes this possible….”

Here are the two items:

“Esteemed Mr. Sviatoslav Karavanski,

“I deeply respect you for all that you have suffered and for your calm under duress when you were made to suffer. I am happy that I can hear your calm voice, even though your countrymen—from the tribune of the High Committee of the USSR to the far off emigrant newspapers—have concluded on the basis of my writings that I am simply a believer in Greater Russia, a chauvinist, a colonialist, a servant of imperial tyranny, and a ‘retarded imperialist’ at that (as published in Gomin of Ukraine 10.10.1990). Such premeditated blindness and incompetence make one wonder, but also make one alert. Just what are they trying to hide by barking so loud?

“I can appeal to you sir, in the hope for mutual understanding, since they have not sought such mutual understanding with me.

“With regard to your historical arguments, beginning with your reflections on Tatar invasion (at least with respect to Red Rus and not Rus itself), one could elaborate on this matter for quite some time. Yet all such elaborations would pale when compared to the strongest argument which you now fail to make, perhaps because it is so clear: If the hearts of the people of Ukraine desire to separate from the Soviet Union, then we have nothing to quarrel about. All that is required is a movement of the heart! This was the thrust of my article. I also wrote about this in my Gulag Archipelago (part V, chapter 2). This is why my current view is certainly not without precedent. Yet even you, good sir, have failed to note that I have no quarrel with Ukrainian separatism, only with the factual state of Ukraine.

“Currently, as statues of Lenin are being torn down in Ukraine (as rightly they should be!), why is it that western Ukrainians of all people in that land desire that the state of Ukraine should have the borders made for it by Lenin himself? The borders which Uncle Lenin himself drew up for Ukraine? For the present borders of Ukraine are the result of Lenin seeking for a way to compensate the Ukrainian people for consuming their liberty under Soviet domination. Thus it was Lenin who arbitrarily attached Novorossiya, the Donbas (by which Lenin separated the Donbas from the anti-Communist counter revolutionaries of Donietsk) as well as attaching parts of the left bank to Ukraine. Later, Khrushchev arbitrarily added (1954) Crimea to Ukraine. And now Ukrainian nationalists stand firm in defense of their “holy” territorial integrity—of borders created by Lenin?

“I wrote in my article (though I suspect no one read what I had to say): ‘of course, if the Ukrainian nation does indeed wish to go, then no one can dare use force to prevent their departure’. But realize please how heterogeneous is this great territory and allow the local people to decide the fate of their districts. And for writing this, I am considered to be a ‘retarded imperialist?’ What of those who forbid the nation from expressing its will, and, along with those democrats and liberty lovers, even fear this expression of national will for some strange reason?

“Under such turbulent circumstances, it is impossible to discuss this complex problem through which our two nations have combined together through family ties in hundreds of cities. There is also an additional argument which, to my surprise, you make: you claim that the language which children will speak should not be left to the ‘whims’ of parents, but should be determined by the State? You write that ‘non-Ukrainians are free to make their choice’. But will you limit the amount of their schools? As for Ukrainians, I understand you to be saying they are not free to choose? Thus you support coercion yet again? No sir, this dictatorship is unnecessary. Let all cultures develop in a natural way.” (Published in Zvezda, December 1993)

*****

By 2006, Solzhenistyn had become far more pessimistic, as we can see from this interview:

“WT [interviewer]: Personally, I think that the three basic components of Christian civilization, Euro-Atlantic civilization—the United States, the European Union and Russia—should all create a strategic alliance with one another sooner or later. If they do not, then our whole civilization will cease to exist. How can we save our European and Atlantic civilization; does it need to be saved?

Solzhenitsyn: Unfortunately, global processes seem to be moving along a direction contrary to your desires. The United States of America are moving their occupation armies into ever newer countries. Such was the case of Bosnia 9 years ago. Such was the case of Kosovo (where they helped establish an Islamist state in the heart of Europe). We have witnessed it over the last 5 years in Afghanistan and over the last 3 years in Iraq. Although in Iraq, the occupation will not survive long. The activities of NATO and, separately of the United States, do not differ except in minor details. NATO clearly realizes that Russia is not capable of threatening the Alliance and thus NATO methodically and stubbornly develops its military apparatus from Eastern Europe to the south of continental Russia. One sees it in their open support for a variety of color revolutions as well as the paradox of North Atlantic interests taking precedent there over central Asian interests. All of this leaves little doubt: NATO is in the process of encircling Russia and depriving Russia of its independence as a nation state. So, to answer your question: no, allying Russia to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization that uses violent force in various corners of our planet to plant the seeds of an ideology of modern western democracy will not expand Christian civilization, only terminate it.

WT: What is your view about what is happening in Ukraine. And what is your view on the issue of fragmenting the Russian nation (the most fragmented nation in Europe)? Should Russia raise the prospect of uniting all of the Russian and Rus lands if the Ukrainian elites turn their country in the direction of NATO and the EU?

Solzhenitsyn: Events in Ukraine, ever since the time of the referendum in 1991, with its poorly formulated options, have been a constant source of pain and anger to me. I have written and spoken about this often. The fanatic oppression and suppression of the Russian language there (a language which polls show is consistently the preferred language of 60% of the people there) is a beastly methodology aimed primarily against the cultural prospects of Ukraine itself. The vast territories which were never part of historic Ukraine, such as Crimea, Novorossiya and the entire southeast were forcibly and arbitrarily consumed into the territory of modern Ukraine and made hostage to Ukraine’s desires to join NATO. Under the Yeltsin presidency, not one meeting was ever held with the Ukrainian President that did not end in Russia capitulating and accepting everything Ukraine requested. Yeltsin uprooted the Black Sea fleet from Sevastopol; something not even Khrushchev did under the USSR. It is all a simple minded, indeed simpleton and cruel joke perpetuated against the entire history of XIX and XX century Russia. Given these circumstances, Russia will never, in any way, betray the many millions of Russian speaking peoples in Ukraine. Russia will never abandon the ideal of unity with them.” (Moscow News, interview with W. T. Trietiakov published 28 April/4May 2006)

*****

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was mutually agreed by Yeltsin and President George W. Bush that the Soviet state would be dissolved and the former constituent states of the Union become independent, on condition in return that the United States and NATO would not incorporate those states into their military alliance, an obvious threat to Russia (and for which there would be now no real reason). But that is exactly what occurred, beginning with President Clinton and continuing under George W. Bush, and under Obama and Biden.

George Kennan, one of the most distinguished of American diplomats, told The New York Times he believed the expansion of NATO was “the beginning of a new cold war…I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

And today Russia finds itself virtually encircled by an armed NATO, a Ukrainian government which mistreats and persecutes its large ethnic Russian minority (around 30%) and that has violated the peace terms of the Minsk Agreement (negotiated after the 2014 crisis), and American and European Union NGO agents provocateurs and subversion internally and in nearby pro-Russian associated states (such as, most recently, Kazakhstan).

In 2014 American government officials, including Obama’s Assistant Secretary of for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland (wife of the late John McCain’s foreign policy advisor, Robert Kagan), were responsible in large part for instigating the “Maidan coup” which overthrew the popularly elected and pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. In a secretly recorded phone message Nuland declared that the Obama State Department had selected Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the new prime minster: “Yats is the guy,” she said. Voting by Ukrainians be damned if not acceptable to the Foggy Bottom globalists.

Is the American State Department, infested as it is with Neoconservative globalists, willing—like England did to Poland before the outbreak of World War II—to give Ukraine the promise of (unlimited) military support which could unleash world conflagration?

Is the so-called “conservative movement” so corrupted by a secular and increasingly anti-Christian globalism that it now spouts ad libitum Leftist foreign policy talking points? To listen to a Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) or Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one would have to conclude so.

Already our misguided and belligerent policies have forced Russia into the arms of China—the two largest nations of the earth whose national and internal interests have sharply diverged, but who now find themselves drawn closer due to American insistence on imposing our form of democracy uber alles, our internal subversion (via the “color revolutions”) in former Eastern Bloc states, and our zeal to see Russia accept the worst gutter filth that we export around the world.

One year (2007) before he died, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave another interview, this one to the German magazine, Der Spiegel, in which he said:

“[Vladimir] Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people…. And he started to do what was possible, a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard-pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favorably by other governments. Putin gives us hope and seeks to restore Russia’s Christian tradition. That I applaud.” [The Washington Post, August 5, 2008]

Once again, the American media and political establishment largely ignored his utterance, just as our nation has ignored the warnings of Lee Congdon, former Ambassador Jack Matlock, Paul Craig Roberts, the late Stephen Cohen, and others. And now it is we who have created the conditions for unnecessary conflict, misery, and global conflagration.

********

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~ 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.

UPDATE II (11/30/021): ‘American Foreign Policy Advances the Globalist Revolution’

America, Boyd Cathey, Cultural Marxism, Foreign Policy, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, South-Africa

Boyd D. Cathey at LewRockwell.com about my column at CNSNews.com, “Americans Should Recall How Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa“: 

“… One writer who is also a dear friend is Ilana Mercer. Ilana writes a regular column that is printed in various venues. A former citizen of South Africa, she has seen quite personally how the ravages of Marxist and Communist revolution can destroy a civilized country and its social structures. And she has recounted that experience—and warning to the West—in detail in her necessary volume, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa. It’s a book that more Americans should know and pay heed to, for there are certain parallels with the insane post- or neo-Marxist ‘woke’ anti-racist and anti-white revolution now occurring almost unopposed here in the United States. Indeed, what is now happening here makes the revolution in and transformation of South Africa seem mild in comparison. 

In a recent column, Mercer offers a broad survey which examines the tragically obtuse and wrongheaded policies of the United States around the globe: for decades, whether under Democratic or Republican presidents—it seems to make little difference—American policy has been to impose on other countries by whatever method was convenient or available an egalitarian leftist-liberal ‘democratism,’ a uniform global model as part of a universal zeal to remake the world. Older traditions, inherited religious belief, valued customs, and forms of government and statecraft which do not hew the ‘democratic’ line and do not celebrate “equality” (as our government apparatchiks define it successively to suit their globalism) become pariah states. And soon, with the influence of US government-supported and financed NGOs (non-government organizations), ‘opposition’ groups pop up in those non-juring countries. With American funding and the enthusiastic participation of almost the entirety of the US media, including most so-called ‘conservative media’ (e.g. Fox News, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, etc.), new paper ‘heroes of democracy’ are created and showcased. …”

MORE: “American Foreign Policy Advances the Globalist Revolution.

UPDATE I (4/6/021): Nothing escapes my loyal, and oh-so smart readers. Musil Protege writes quite frankly:

“That’s pretty good. Dr Cathey promoting you on the website that should’ve been carrying you all along.”

UPDATE II (11/30/021):
I said once or twice or thrice to paleos who have consistently submerged my work, pretended it does not exist; and wished me weakly away: Good or bad, your duty is to reflect reality among our ranks . To the extent you cover your faces and wish scary lady ilana mercer away—that she and her wonder-words would vanish—to the extent you’re reality testing has failed. Miserably. A recent eruption from an enforcer of the pack-animal camp reminded me of Musil Protege’s feisty words.

Vulgarity And Vanity Come To The Ancient St. George Chapel, At Windsor Castle

BAB's A List, Boyd Cathey, Britain, Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood

By Dr. Boyd Cathey

… IN DECEMBER 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated as King of England, basically over his love for an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, something deeply frowned on and disapproved of back then—yet scarcely forty-five years later the heir apparent to the English throne, Prince Charles, married Lady Diana Spencer, a disastrous matrimony that would assist immeasurably in discrediting the House of Windsor, which had already begun a decline many years earlier.

But like most current ruling monarchies today, the catch phrase is “relevance,” getting “with it,” so to speak, with all current fads, breaking with tradition, basically turning a backside to the past and its critical importance in the survival of the nation. And if that means inviting a whole slew of remarkably disreputable Hollywood types, not to mention pseudo-celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, into the great halls and chapels that once beheld the noble figures of a King Charles the Martyr or Victoria Regina, then so be it.

And then there was the ungracious spectacle of the “Presiding Bishop,” Michael Curry, of what is called the Episcopal Church in the United States. Curry, a few years back, was the Episcopal bishop in North Carolina, and distinguished himself for his left-wing social and religious views—he would much rather preach the gospel of “Saint” Martin Luther King than St. Paul: too many inconveniences and prohibitions in the Pauline message!

And he did not disappoint in St. George’s Chapel: jumping around like a jack-rabbit, pretending he was sermonizing to a group of illiterate Yazoo bayou dwellers in Mississippi, he brought, as admiring Fox commentator/airhead Ainsley Earhardt fawned, “a wonderful and inspiring American element” to the wedding. [Where, pray tell, does Fox get all these brainless blondes from?]

For thirteen minutes he basically said just one sentence: “How great is love!” But he managed to mix in bits of MLK (yeah, cheater King was an expert on conjugal love!), civil rights, and a social gospel totally extraneous to the supposed occasion.

The Windors, for the most part, set stony-faced, enveloped by the tide of nonsense and relevance that has overwhelmed them. Oh, certainly, it was said that the ceremony
“combined the best of British tradition with a new and fresh ‘American’ approach.” But what it actually did was point out sharply the truth … about monarchy and monarchs in the modern world:

“They are increasingly a ‘sign of contradiction’; this must be their role in our world. If they fail in this—if they embrace all the tawdry excesses and excrescences of our times—they will forfeit that historic role, and rightly so.”

Our world is perishing for the lack of heroes, for the lack of those Don Juans of Austria, for those new and courageous Stonewall Jacksons and King John Sobieskis who would stand manfully against the onrushing tide of Modernity and decay in our civilization. The awe and reverence, the understanding that the past is never really “past,” that it is always potentially within us, and that it can inform our steps and continue to inspire us and anneal us in its grace, is a precious legacy, an invaluable gift from our ancestors and Christendom. We forfeit it, and the blackness of despair and death awaits us.

When the traditional champions of our culture and civilization quit the field, as the Windsors have done, only Evil—the “rough beast”—smiles.

… READ THE REST. The complete commentary is “That Royal Wedding, Reverend Michael Curry, and the End of England.”

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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. 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.

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