Frank Miele, editor of the Daily Inter
Lake, devotes three columns to the unraveling of our civilization in an
effort to explain why it happened. His columns are well
worth your time.
I date the beginning of the unwinding of Western civilization to
1905, when Italian communist Antonio Gramsci advised his fellows that they
needed to effect a "long march through the institutions" of the West
in order to convert the whole world to communism via education. A
couple of decades later came the Red Scare of the early twenties, when the West
(rightly) feared being undermined by disciples of the nascent Bolshevik
Revolution going out into the world.
Early signposts that these movements were succeeding included the
1950 trial of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers's subsequent publication
of Witness, which told us in plain words about the conspiracy in
plain sight going on before us. Harry White and Hiss were close
confidants of FDR, and both were communists working for
Stalin. McCarthy had it right, and history has never forgiven him for
it.
The so-called New Left in the sixties continued the subversion by
putting it into the streets to delegitimize the extant order. The
Establishment encountered a major problem in defending itself intellectually:
that generation had never seriously questioned its values. America
had, after all, just won the worst war in history and that was clearly
good. Yet college professors, whom we thought the smart ones, were
telling us we were evil and our kids were right. Helped along in
self-doubt by the questionable wisdom of the Vietnam War and the obvious issue
of black civil rights, many doubted the moral rectitude of Western
civilization. That doubt had still not been cleared up when the
Nixon matter threw the country into still another bout of self-doubt.
The subversives stayed at it in the universities, sneakily
removing the once required subject of Western civilization and replacing it
with leftist ideology camouflaged as civics. The Western literary
canon came under attack by feminists, another flavor of
socialist. Hollywood got into the act with the likes of Oliver Stone
presenting America as the land of the greedy and the home of the
evil. Bit by bit, the planks that had built Western civilization,
the predicate of its intellectual defense, were pulled up and replaced with
Marxist junk. Rather than the close, tight reasoning of Locke,
Montesquieu, Madison, et al., our kids were learning to whine the trite tripe
tropes of the left.
Came the nineties and the Clintons. Far from
ideologues, they were just crooks. That made the work of the
subversives even easier, since many who felt uncomfortable with Marxism readily
understood the value of under-the-table bucks and secure congressional
sinecures. All of this is hidden by the rubric of socialism and
backed by the power of the ever growing state.
America had long since kicked God out of the
schools. It wasn't obvious to most at the time, but that was the
prelude for all that followed since even the mention of God came to be verboten. This
is too bad, because the more complicated society became, the more we needed
God. The fact is that understanding God and what He wants of us is
far more demanding than understanding Marxism. The complexity of
human psychology exceeds anything most of us can even imagine.
By contrast, the allure of socialism or communism has always been
its simplicity and superficial reasoning. Those very characteristics
make it a perfect cover for criminality on the large scale. Those
who fall for its siren song are largely young and
inexperienced. Having always been protected, they don't see
humanity's flawed (sinful) nature and are vulnerable to Marxist
"perfectibility of man" thinking.
The Marxist allure usually comes at a young person at just the
point in his psychological development where he is breaking away from
home. It's a confusing time of life when one is trying to make sense
of it all. He's naïve without being aware of it. He's
ready to follow someone without being aware of it. That requires a
loosening of ties to what went before, in order to grow into the new skin of
his new self. And here beckons Marxism with easy, ready
answers. Only years later, if he's a thinking person, will he begin
to see what he so glibly zipped past early on.
All this is the natural result of a society growing
wealthy. The young don't have to work as hard to make
it. Things seem easy because they are easy. And
it's so easy to attribute one's success to one's own brilliance. Who
needs God in this easy world?
In this process, we see why civilizations fall. Cocky
and lazy, elites sink into immorality and drop their moral
guard. Watching it happen is why so many great writers return,
toward the end of their lives, to the religion of their youth. They
finally grasp the astonishing complexity of the human condition and the
unknowable, amazing mind of God, so far beyond our grasp that calling it
"genius" smacks of the childish.
Frank Miele is right. We need not only a return to
belief in God, but also a rededication to thinking about Him, studying Him,
talking about Him, giving Him proper respect. One imagines God
looking at the hash man has made of the many gifts He gave us and wondering why
He ever bothered.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/03/how_the_west_was_unwon.html
