“As a wife of the 1940s, I have my own sphere where I am in charge: this home, my family, and my community, where I do a great deal of volunteer work, as women did in the past. It is a more important sphere than the business world where Mr. Kraft works, because it is the sphere where babies grow into children and then into men and women. I, as the woman of the house, hold the future in my hands.”
“I agree with that,” Mr. Kraft said. “Unless women create good homes and raise the children right, those things go undone. They are not natural to men. We see all around us what kind of children come from homes where the wife is not a mother and homemaker. As Arnold Toynbee warned, our barbarians have come from within.”
“As far as all the nonsense about women being oppressed by being given charge of the home,” Mrs. Kraft added, “I find quite the opposite is true. Creating a good home is a greater challenge than most matters in the business world, and it allows more room for creativity. The home you are enjoying now is my achievement. How many women in business achieve so much? Or are so loved and honored for their achievement as I am by Mr. Kraft and our children?”
“That you are indeed, Mrs. Kraft,” Mr. Kraft replied.
They had a remarkable home life, as I could plainly see. It was the sort of home most people of my generation knew about only from books or plays or family memories. But it was exactly the kind of home we all wished we could live in—not just for the beautiful things, but for the warmth and contentment and absolute solidness I could feel radiating from every corner.
After an ample and excellent meal, Mr. Kraft and I adjourned to his den while Mrs. Kraft did the dishes. As he busied himself filling and lighting his pipe, I started to think. Maybe this was the answer to the puzzle I was facing of how the Christian Marines could explain what we were fighting for. In a broad sense, we knew the answer: a nation where the Ten Commandments ruled. But I knew our program, our goal, had to be developed beyond that to be understood by other people.
The danger facing us was falling into an ideology. Retroculture avoided that danger, because unlike an ideology it was not based on some abstract scheme of ideas. It was simply recovering what we used to have and used to be, which was the ultimate in concreteness. And we could know it would work, because we knew America had worked in the past. Logically, what worked once should work again.
“Just how many of you Retroculture people are there?” I asked Mr. Kraft.
“Tens of thousands,” he replied, “and growing fast. You don't hear about us much in the general media, because we represent a rejection of everything it stands for. But we have our own magazines, books, clubs, and societies. We come in all varieties–there is even a group of non-Amish who live like the Amish, what they call, “plain.” There is growing talk of founding new towns where everyone would live in a certain time period and there would be nothing out of place for that time.”
“It kind of makes you wonder what a whole Retroculture country might be like,” I mused.
”It would be splendid, as America itself once was splendid, before the squalid sixties,” Kraft replied. “Remember, we had a country that worked.”
“That is hard to remember now,” I responded.
“But people do remember,” Kraft said. “Take a look at this–and it is from more than twenty years ago.”
He handed me a copy of a poll taken in 1992 by Lawrence Research for something called the Free Congress Foundation. It was a survey of people's attitudes toward the past, and the findings were remarkable. 49 percent said life in the past was better than it is today; only 17 percent said it was worse. 59 percent said the nation's leaders should be trying to take the country back toward the way it used to be. 61 percent thought life in the 1950s was better than in the 1990s. 47 percent said their grandparents' lives were happier than their own – and the margin was 15 percent higher among blacks, whose grandparents had lived under segregation.
When given a menu of times and places in which they could choose to live, a typical suburb in 1950 came in first with 58 percent; in last place was Los Angeles in 1991. When asked for a second choice, the winner, with 32 percent, was a small town in 1900; modern LA again came in last.
56 percent of those polled had a favorable impression of the Victorian period. 45 percent said they saw signs of people and things turning back toward the past–and that it was a good thing.
“For America, that poll represents nothing less than a cultural revolution,” Mr. Kraft said. “From the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony onward, Americans have been future focused. We have always believed that the future would be better than the present, and that the present was better than the past. We don't believe that any more. We believe—in fact, we know, because unlike the future, the past is knowable—what we once had was better than what we have now. Caught as America is in an endless downward spiral of decline, decay, and degradation, we have no reason to hope for our future–unless that future can be a recovery of our past.”
“Thanks to a certain professor from Dartmouth College, I've read a bit about our past,” I said. “Not just America's past, but the history of our Western culture. My impression is that through most of history, we were past-focused. We saw the past as a model we should try to recapture and emulate. Is what we're seeing here a return to normality?”
“Yes,” Mr. Kraft responded. “Most of our culture's great leaps forward have come from attempts to return to the past. The Renaissance is a good example. The Renaissance was an attempt to recover the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome. Of course, such efforts don't exactly recreate the past; 15th century Florence was not the Roman Republic. But the attempt to recapture the classical past created a new synthesis that was brilliant—and that could never have been created by looking only to the future, which is, after all, a void.”
“Do you think an attempt to recapture our own past—Retroculture—could give us a renaissance?”, I asked.
“Again, the answer is yes,” Kraft replied. “Retroculture is something solid, something real people can put their hands on and understand. Most people know how their grandparents or great grandparents lived. They know they were good people who lived decent, satisfying lives. They can grasp the fact that we can live that way again. Once they realize it is possible, once they realize that the saying, ‘You can't go back,’ is a lie, it is something they want to do. And if they do it, as we have done it in this home, in our lives, they find it works.”
“One final question, if I may,” I said. “If some people were willing to fight for a country where Retroculture could flourish—not one where it was enforced by law, but where people could live Retro if they wanted to, without any hindrances from the government—would you be willing to help?”
“Of course,” Mr. Kraft replied. “At present, Retroculture can't go much beyond home life, because all kinds of government regulations and regulators and lawyers come down on you if you try. As I said, some of us would like to create whole new towns and communities where everyone would live in a certain time. But we know the government would prevent that, because one or another of these victims groups would protest.”
“Retroculture isn't political,” he continued. “Retroculture is about escaping politics and government and all that nonsense. It's about simply living a normal life, the kind of life Americans used to live. It seems to me that if we're going to talk about a new country, that's the kind of country we should want.”
I thought that summed it up pretty well. After drinking a glass of good Port and smoking a cigar to accompany Mr. Kraft's pipe, I bid him good night and headed home through the April slush. Another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.
Chapter Eleven
The summer of 2017 marked the beginning of work. As Trooper Kelly had warned, building an organization proved to be anything but exciting. It was slow, it was dull, it was frustrating. I often felt like I was trying to drive a thousand blind geese through one tiny wicket. But slowly, the Christian Marine Corps grew.
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br /> The first thing I did was identify a small group of people I could turn to for advice. I knew better than to think I had all the answers, or all the questions, either. The questions were more important, at least at the start. As Sir Francis Bacon said some centuries back, if you start out with questions, you may end up with answers. But if you start out with answers, you will end up with questions.
The first and most important question was, what did we want to do? We knew the answer to that one: we wanted to take our country back. We wanted to take it back for our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture–in short; for the Ten Commandments.
We realized this was a tall order. We were living in a country where a teacher who posted the Ten Commandments on the wall of his classroom would be fired. (By 2016, in Massachusetts, he would also be fired if he did not put up a state-supplied poster titled “The Ten Commandments of Safe Sex.”)
But we also knew the cultural Marxists, seemingly so powerful, had reached what in war is called the culminating point. They were running out of gas. As they stuck their big noses into the business of more and more average people, they were building up a tremendous backlash. Our goal was to shape, strengthen, and guide that backlash.
That was itself a challenge, but one we thought we could manage, God willing. To further limit the task, we decided we would focus on New England.
The second question we faced was, how do we do it? Here too, we had an answer: by offering the other good people who had the same goal our expertise in war. We sought only to be advisors, never controllers – a true general staff.
The secret of success in the culture war would be “leaderless resistance,” where people worked independently but with efforts harmonized by shared objectives. The worst thing we could do was create some kind of formal, hierarchical organization. That would be easy for the other side to attack, it would demoralize our own troops by reducing them to pawns on someone else's chessboard, and it would leave us dependent on one or a handful of brains when we could have many brains thinking and acting for us. Also, it would generate office politics as people within the organization struggled for power. I'd seen enough office politics in the Corps to last me the rest of my days.
Ultimately, the Christian Marines did not want to be about power. This, we recognized, was our biggest difference from all the other factions. We did not want power. We did not want a new country built around power, or struggles for power.
Power was itself an evil, maybe the greatest evil. Tolkien was right; the Ring of Power, which is power itself, cannot be used for good. That was another lesson we learned the hard way in the U.S.A. At one time, America had shunned power, refused power, at home and abroad. Those had been our happy days. Then the “Progressives” came along, who thought the power of government could be used for good. Eventually, they decided the power of government was good, in itself–because they controlled it.
That's how it always works: power looks good to whoever has it. But it isn't. Our war was in a way the strangest war of all, a war to bury power, not to seize it.
Advisors we would be. In the heat of battle, when someone had to decide and act, fast, we would do that. And our advice itself would be action, because it would counsel action. But in the end, our goal was to return to our plows, Cincinnati, not Caesars.
Only with these questions answered did we turn to the third (too many people started with this one): what kind of organization would we be?
First, we would start small. The old German motto was correct: “Better no officer than a bad officer.”
That meant we could not simply recruit former Marines. There were people from other services, and people who had never been in the military at all, whom we would want. And, truth be told, the number of Marines who really understood war was small. The Corps had put strong emphasis on studying war, beginning in the 1980s, but most Marine officers blew it off. Their focus was looking good in the uniform and maxing the Physical Fitness Test, they read nothing beyond the sports page and their only talk was about trout fishing and getting promoted. To us, or to anyone, they were useless.
One of our great fears was that if actual fighting started, civilians who shared our values would turn to retired senior officers for leaders. Most of these guys, the colonels and generals, had never been soldiers. They were milicrats – military bureaucrats. In the old American military, once you made major, further promotion was based on how well you used your knee pads and lip balm, not military ability. If our side ended up led by milicrats, we would be defeated before the battles even began. We would be like the Whites in the Russian Civil War, who got all the old Tsarist generals as their leaders. The Reds got guys like Trotsky, who were serious students of war. We all knew who had won that one.
Because we would stay small, a few hundred men at most, we could avoid formal processes for recruiting. In fact, we avoided formal processes for everything, because the focus of any process becomes the process, not the product. We would accept new Christian Marines only by consensus, and we would consider candidates only on the basis of what they had done, not what they told us. We wanted to see actions, not words: articles or books published, speeches given in places where they counted, people mobilized, victories in free play military maneuvers, and later, as it turned out, in real combat, victories over the New Class–results.
And results, as the old German used to say, was what mattered.
A final rule we adopted was one I insisted on, as only someone who has just learned something important himself can insist. Any Christian Marine had to know the canon of our culture. He had to undergo my baptism by immersion in the great books and ideas of Western civilization. We couldn't hope to fight for that culture, and fight well for it, unless we knew what it was. A few of our recruits came to us with that knowledge–more accurately, that understanding. The rest had to start where I had started. That was true regardless of how well they understood war. An officer should never be a mere technician.
For the next couple years, as we slowly grew in numbers, we kept a low profile. We weren't exactly a secret organization, but we didn't put out any press releases, either. If we succeeded, people would know us by our works, which were all that counted. If we failed, better our failures remained obscure. In any case, general staff officers have no names.
Carefully, we built our cadre. New Christian Marines were recruited, and accepted, one by one. I spent a lot of time doing detective work. When our side won a battle in the culture war, like keeping pro-homosexual propaganda out of the schools, who had provided the leadership? That might be someone we wanted. A Marine from New England was potentially one of us. Where did he stand on the cultural issues? Were there other men who believed as we did in key positions in the state legislature, or the National Guard, or the state police? If so, they could be important to us.
Did we infiltrate the power structure in the New England state governments? Of course, wherever we could. In Massachusetts and lower New England, we didn't get very far; the cultural Marxists were fully in charge there. But we gradually made some key friends in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Some of those friends became Christian Marines. Others just knew who we were and what we had to offer.
We also infiltrated the active-duty forces. Our goal was not to overthrow the United States government. We were never enemies of the old U.S. Constitution. But we knew that government and its New Class were going to fall, of their own weight, corruption, ineptness, and disinterest in actually governing. We were looking, always, to the time after it fell. We wanted as many active duty Marines – and soldiers, sailors, and airmen – as we could get who would come to New England when it happened, and help us save something worthwhile from the wreckage.
By the first decade of the 21st century, the message that the U.S.A. was finished, that it was only a question of when it came apart, not whether, found many a receptive ear. Books like Martin van Creveld's The Transformation of War had opened quite a few minds. Only the people in the capital, in Was
hington, could not see it coming. They were like the citizens of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, watching the rain come down in buckets but not thinking about the dam.
For us, in Maine, the dam started to crumble in the Fall of 2020.
Chapter Twelve
Anyone who wondered where we Mainiacs were coming from could find out by sitting down to a typical Maine dinner. Everything was boiled, and if the cook was feeling exuberant that night, it might be seasoned with salt and pepper. Then again, it might not.
Any people with food that bad had to be conservative. And we were, in the old sense of the word: we lived pretty much as Americans had lived all along, and we liked it that way.
The funny thing was, Maine kept electing liberals. The liberals’ crazy ideas didn't seem to matter in Maine. They could talk on, as they were wont to do, about this or that group of “victims,” and Mainers could nod, because there weren't any of those people Down East. They weren't about to move in next door.
Then, in the Fall of 2020, they did.
The “they,” in this case, were the gays. They were our one home-grown minority.
As our culture began to fall apart, in the 1960s, the gays started “coming out.” This broke the old rule of “Don't frighten the horses,” which had allowed mutual toleration. The rule meant that they were not open about their orientation, and we pretended not to notice it.
By the 2000s, they had become one of the cultural Marxists' sacred victims groups, which meant they were encouraged to flaunt their vice and we were supposed to approve of it. This was justified in the name of “toleration,” but toleration and approval are different. You may tolerate things you don't approve. I was willing to tolerate gays, but I would sooner have given my approval to an act involving three high yellow whores, a wading pool full of green Jello, and Flipper.
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