All countries are basically social arrangements … . No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary … . Within the next hundred years … nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century—“citizen of the world”—will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st.16
In Talbott’s vision, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank are the “protoministries of trade, finance and development for a united world.”17
“Are we all clear that we want to build something that can aspire to be a world power, not just a trading bloc but a political entity?” thundered Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, to the European Parliament in February 2001. “Do we realize that our nation states, taken individually, would find it far more difficult to assert their existence and their identity on the world stage?”18
Europe is already face-to-face with the “National Question.” Do its great nations—Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia—and its ancient states, with their magnificent histories and heritage—Portugal, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Holland, Poland, Greece, all the rest—wish to live on as separate and unique peoples? Do they have the will to endure as who they are? Or are they weary of independence? Would they prefer national euthanasia inside a socialist superstate and a life as permanent dependencies of a Brussels bureaucracy?
The great European civil war lasted from 1914 to 1989. Fascism and Bolshevism were crushed. But that is not the end of history. With the war against International Communism over, a new struggle, against international socialism, has begun. This is the decisive conflict of the twenty-first century. It will determine whether the unique cultures of the West survive or become the subcultures of a multicultural continent. It will determine whether the nations of Europe will survive independent and free, or be converted into provinces of a European superstate where the exercise of their inherent right to preserve their unique identity will be forever outlawed.
Today, the peoples of Europe are being told that decency, justice, and rightful restitution for their past sins require that they throw open their doors and share their national homes with the descendants of those their fathers misruled and persecuted, however many wish to come. Can the nations of Europe resist the nonnegotiable demands of the cultural Marxists? For what is being demanded of them is nothing less than the demographic, national, and cultural suicide of their countries—for the good of mankind.
“Commitment to all humankind is the highest commitment of which we are capable; it transcends the narrow allegiances of church, state, party, class, or race in moving toward a wider vision.” So declared the Humanist Manifesto. But some of us yet believe our loyalty to our own families, countries, church, and culture comes first. So the lines are drawn in the battle of the century. Patriotism or globalism. Nation-state or New World Order. “Independence Forever!” or world government.
Independence is more precious than power, and countries are worth fighting for. And because men will not give love or loyalty to an EU, a UN, a WTO, or any “international community,” the fight for independence forever can be won, if patriots of all nations pull together and do not lose heart. For what James Burnham said of liberalism is true of globalism. “[It] does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice and death … . [It] proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions—pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling, and in suffering.”19
Because it is a project of elites, and because its architects are unknown and unloved, globalism will crash on the Great Barrier Reef of patriotism. That is our belief, and in that is our hope.
Nations may break up, some may surrender their sovereignty to vanish inside a European superstate, but people will rebel, as they did against the Soviet empire, and re-create the countries whence they came.
Mr. Gore may have slipped his Kyoto Protocol by customs, Mr. Clinton may have signed us on to the UN International Criminal Court, but Mr. Bush has repudiated Kyoto and the ICC. As for the WTO, it is paralyzed by transatlantic quarrels over U.S. steel tariffs, dumping, and export subsidies, and, outside Davos, its admirers are few. And as the Battle of Seattle showed, the passion and fire, be it laborite, Naderite, or Far Right, were outside the hall in the street.
Europe’s peoples are growing wary of the brave new world being prepared for them by the Strobe Talbotts and Romano Prodis. At the EU summit in Nice, the smaller nations balked at new surrenders of national sovereignty. Danes rejected the euro. In March 2001, 77 percent of the Swiss and every single canton voted no in the “Yes to Europe” referendum that would have produced immediate negotiations to enter the EU.20 In some German-speaking cantons, the “no” vote reached 85 percent.21
When Ireland ignored an EU directive and cut taxes, Dublin was disciplined. “Sorry,” said President Prodi, “but sometimes the teacher has to punish the best pupil.”22 The Irish foreign minister, whose economy was growing at 8 percent, fired back, “Perhaps when other countries in Europe have [Ireland’s] sort of success, I will take more cognizance.”23 Irish voters then torpedoed the Nice agreement and EU expansion as a dilution of Dublin’s voice in Europe and a threat to Irish sovereignty.
Italians have a new center-right government that means to put Italy first. The German Christian Democrats are increasingly blunt about their desire to maintain their national identity and culture. British Tories went down to defeat, but the causes they espoused—preserving the nation and saving the pound—have majority support. Rising resistance in Europe needs to hear an echo from this side of the Atlantic.
WHEN THE EU expands eastward, the crunch will come. An EU of twenty-five nations cannot be ruled from Brussels, unless Brussels acquires the power the U.S. government wields over the fifty states. As the Cold War against world communism was won, the struggle against global socialism is not lost.
Americans should resist any surrender of sovereignty, no matter which president or party favors it, and align themselves with the patriots of Europe like Margaret Thatcher and the Euroskeptics who are making retention of the British pound the red line of patriotism. For all countries, the choice is coming: between national defiance and national extinction. And we cannot go gentle into that good night.
How can Americans enlist in this battle?
• Oppose new funding to the IMF and World Bank. These agencies have squandered hundreds of billions of tax dollars on loans that would put most bankers in prison. But the IMF now has a golden hook in scores of countries to force them to conform to the dictates of the global elite. That hook needs to be removed.
• Press the president to send the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court that Mr. Clinton signed, and the Kyoto Protocol that Mr. Bush has rejected, to the Senate, with a recommendation that both be voted upon and voted down. Any UN attempt to seize governmental powers should be resisted, especially any taxes for exclusive UN use or any plans for a UN Army.
• America’s ultimate goal should be the abolition of the WTO and a return to bilateral trade treaties enforced by the United States and its trade partners, and an end to this international tribunal in which America has one vote and the European Union has fifteen.
• Oppose any expansion of NATO. Once a defensive alliance of free nations to block any invasion of Western Europe by Stalin’s empire, NATO has been converted into a neoimperialist bloc, which now asserts a sovereign right to attack and invade small nations like Serbia in the name of democracy and human rights. The Founding Fathers would have been ashamed of what Clinton and Albright did to the Serbs. This small nation did not attack us, did not threaten us, did not seek war with us. Yet, we smashed Serbia as horribly as Hitler had, for defying our demand for an unrestricted right of passage through their land, to tear off the cradle of their country, Kosovo.
• Support a complete withdrawal of U.S. ground forces fr
om Europe and Asia and a review of all treaty guarantees that date back to a Cold War that ended a decade ago. Old allies such as South Korea should begin to provide the troops and pay the costs for their own defense. Every great empire of the last century perished for the same reason. Overextended, each involved itself in wars far beyond the scope of its own vital and national interests. Let us learn from history.
While vigilance against terrorism and a defense against missile attack by rogue nations are national priorities, the best way to avoid any attack on our nation or its armed forces is to get them out of harm’s way, by disengaging the United States from ideological, religious, ethnic, historic, or territorial quarrels that are none of America’s business.
What happened on September 11, 2001, was a direct consequence of an interventionist U.S. policy in an Islamic world where no threat to our vital interests justifies our massive involvement. We are a republic, not an empire. And until we restore the foreign policy urged upon us by our Founding Fathers—of staying out of other nations’ quarrels—we shall know no end of war and no security or peace in our own homeland.
THE CULTURE WAR
Challenging Prof. Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis of a coming “clash of civilizations,” James Kurth wrote in The National Interest that Huntington’s batteries, like the guns of Singapore, are pointed in the wrong direction:
The real clash of civilizations will not be between the West and one or more of the Rest. It will be between the West and the Post-West within the West itself. This clash has already taken place within the brain of Western civilization, the American intellectual class. It is now spreading from that brain to the body politic.24
Exactly. Like colon cancer, the long-term threat to the West lies deep within, and whether the West survives is a question Western peoples will answer. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The revolution has thus far triumphed, but its tenure, like that of Danton and Robespierre, may be brief. For the civilization it is creating cannot endure. Like heroin, it gives a good high, but imbibed too deeply, it kills. Six hundred Americans had died of AIDS in 1983 when the author urged the White House to address the medical crisis in a column that closed, “The poor homosexuals; they have declared war on nature and nature is exacting an awful retribution.”25 So it did. Hundreds of thousands have since died. Hundreds of thousands who carry the HIV virus are kept alive only by daily “cocktails” of miracle drugs.
The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children. The statistics on abortion, divorce, collapsing birthrates, single-parent homes, teen suicides, school shootings, drug use, child abuse, spouse abuse, violent crime, incarceration rates, promiscuity, and falling test scores show how this society, in which the cultural revolution is ascendant, is decomposing and dying. Empty nurseries and full waiting rooms outside the psychiatrist’s office testify that all is not well. But before this diseased culture runs its course, it may take the West down with it.
WHY CANNOT THE new culture and civilization endure?
First, the elite it has produced is unloved and commands no loyalty. Indeed, it is detested for its intolerance and amorality, and for what it has done to traditional heroes and the old faith. The public jubilation over Mr. Clinton’s disgrace in the pardons scandal reflects the public’s contempt for the counterculture he came to embody.
Second, the ideology of the revolution clashes with the laws of human nature and nature’s God. Thus, this new society is built on sand. Women are not the same as men, and saying so does not make it so. Women are profoundly different, with separate and distinct social roles that are not interchangeable, judicial orders notwithstanding. They cannot live as men do without calamitous consequences for the family, society, and country.
Homosexuality is not redemptive; it is addictive. By the very way in which they define themselves, the homosexuals are killing themselves, physically, morally, and spiritually. So say Augustine, Aquinas, and the Atlanta Center for Disease Control, as well as the Torah, the New Testament, and the Koran. Who says otherwise?
Even a glance at the obituary pages testifies that homosexuality is incompatible with a long life. Like other societies, ours is discovering that before He wrote his commandments in stone, God took the precaution of writing a copy on the human heart. Deny that His laws are binding, rage against them, you still cannot escape the consequences of living outside the laws of nature and of nature’s God.
We may indoctrinate children into believing that gender differences exist only in the mind, that all civilizations, cultures, religions, and nations are equal. The world will teach them they were lied to. While our “current relativism asserts the equality of all cultures,” writes Kenneth Minogue in New Criterion,
nobody, of course, seriously believes this. Quite apart from technology, the moral inequality of cultures is conspicuous in the position of women in different cultures. It was only the West that abolished slavery. But it is a mark of current decorum—perhaps avoidance of the dreaded “triumphalism”—that we should not proclaim any superiority in European civilization, even though it is the one place the millions want to get into.26
In their hearts, who truly believes in the equality of all civilizations, cultures, faiths? Do followers of the Prophet believe Christianity is a religion equal to their own? Did the North American martyrs who died to bring the Catholic faith to the Iroquois believe Indian religions were entitled to equal respect? Did Cortes and Pizarro believe all civilizations were equal when they set out to conquer and convert the Aztecs and Incas? Have all cultures produced equally great works of poetry, prose, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture? Does anyone believe that, or is that just polite prattle at the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art?
Are all nations equal? Why then are the refugees from all over the world fleeing to the West? Are all peoples equal? In America we have equal rights under the law. But the idea of the innate dignity of every human being and of equal justice under law is not a product of China, Japan, Africa, or Arabia. It came out of the West. Is chattel slavery evil? Yes, but which faith first began to teach that, and what nation began the eradication of slavery? Was it not Christianity and the British nation?
Under our First Amendment, all ideas and faiths have an equal right to be heard, but it is illogical and absurd to thereby conclude that all ideas and faiths are equal. All civilizations are not equal. The West has given the world the best that has been thought and taught. Western civilization and culture are superior. One-person, one-vote democracy is not an inviolate principle; it is a utilitarian idea. On a global basis it will not do. With 4 percent of the world’s people and 30 percent of its economic wealth and military power, Americans should be the last people on earth to be babbling nonsense about the equality of nations, and the last people to yield an ounce of sovereignty to the Tower of Babel on Turtle Bay.
A world government in which all nations and peoples have an equal voice in determining the destiny of man is absurd. The pilot flies the plane, not the passengers, and parents do not give toddlers a voice and vote in family decisions. This is not a call to arrogance, but to a new moral certitude and self-confidence on the part of those to whom the truth has been given.
In his 1931 essay “A Plea for Intolerance,” Bhp. Fulton Sheen deplored that “want of intellectual backbone” that causes the modern preacher “to straddle the ox of truth and the ass of ignorance.”27 Toward some things, Sheen admonished us, moral people must be “intolerant.”28
Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth … or principles. About these things we must be intolerant … . Right is right if nobody is right; and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. And in this day and age we need, as Mr. Chesterton tells us, “not a Church that is right when the world is right, but a Church that is right when the world is wrong.”29
The revolution will be short-lived, because the spirit of cynicism it has bred in the young will turn against it. Its icons will be smashed by the barbarians i
t has spawned. Critical Theory is a game all can play. The politics of personal destruction used on John Tower and Robert Bork are now a weapon in the arsenals of both sides in the culture war. With the revolution in power, the cynical attitude of the sixties slogan—“Don’t Trust Anybody over Thirty!”—is easily turned against it. With Western culture, the immune system of our civilization, discredited and damaged, the new America is as defenseless as the old.
When German Panzers were at Moscow’s gates, Stalin discovered that few would die for Bolshevism, but her people would fight to stop the rape of Mother Russia. Patriotism saved the motherland, but American patriotism has been subverted by the sappers of the culture war. When Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Sandy Berger went to Ohio State to drum up support for renewed bombing of Iraq, they found that the Gen-Xers were no more enthusiastic about Clinton’s wars than Bill Clinton and his Woodstock comrades had been to fight “Nixon’s war.”
“CAN’T WE ALL just get along?” Rodney King plaintively asked as the riots raged in LA, after the cops who had thrashed him were acquitted in Simi Valley. If only we could. But the painful truth is: We cannot “all just get along,” because we are going through a civil war of the soul, a clash over who we are, what we believe, what we stand for as a people. It is an irrepressible conflict, for it is about first things. Those who deny that the culture war is at root a religious war have not dug down to its roots. It is self-delusion to believe that there can be a brokered peace. This revolution will quickly violate any armistice we agree upon, for it is about absolute power, and the annihilation of the old America.
The Death of the West Page 25