Babel Inc

by Kerry Bolton

  Puritanism is not conducive to the arts. Doctrinally it rejects leisure—the necessary milieu for the pursuit of High Culture—as ungodly.[6] For example, at the founding American Puritan colonies, the influence of music was minimal, and was excluded as a profession.[7] Puritan functionalism also worked against the development of a significant Puritan visual art.[8] Work was a godly duty and should not be wasted on frivolous and distracting pursuits. This repudiation of the arts as an ungodly waste of work time metamorphosed into art as a profit-making commodity. Additionally, without a tradition of high art at America’s founding, a culture of discernment such as found in the nobility of Europe, was not developed, and indeed, instead of a nobility based on ancient bloodlines, what emerged in the United States was an oligarchy. Hence, in secular America the arts became justified through profit, and remain so, not only in the United States but also now throughout much of the world through globalisation. The United States has also retained, again in secular form, the messianic sense of mission of both the Puritans and the Jews to remake the world on the type of universal principles enunciated poetically by Zangwill and Lazarus.

  The genuine folk culture that emerged did so among Scots-Irish hillbillies and Southerners—both disparaged in popular entertainment—and in the ethnic enclaves of Irish, Italians, and other Europeans, while the corporations saw money to be made in peddling African rhythms to White youth in what has become an immense, worldwide market. Today, this is the America that is held up as a reachable dream for the youth of the entire world.

  ‘Culturally Lethal’

  Since the time of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ for a new world order in the aftermath of World War I, U.S. policymakers and certain sections of global Big Business have been motivated by a messianic sense of America’s duty to impose its model of liberal-economic-democracy over the entire world. America has a doctrine that is for export and a desire to implement that on an international scale.

  Major Ralph Peters, a prominent military strategist who served with the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, and whose area of expertise is the former Soviet bloc and Eurasia, appears to have coined the term ‘constant conflict,’ an American strategy for keeping the world in a state of flux, off-balance, by means of what the Left called ‘cultural imperialism.’ Peters has written of this in an article by that name in a military strategy journal:

  We have entered an age of constant conflict. . . .

  We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.

  Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure . . . The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.[9]

  Peters is stating that this ‘global information empire’ led by the United States is ‘historically inevitable.’ This ‘historical inevitability’ is classic Marx, just as ‘constant conflict’ is classic Trotsky (‘permanent revolution’). It is an example of how Marxism and global capitalism have come to intersect; something alluded to by Peters himself. This is a ‘cultural revolution,’ which is buttressed by American firepower.

  Globalist hegemony is being imposed on the ruins of traditional cultures by a culture of ‘comfort and convenience,’ the Brave New World of Huxley’s dystopia[10] of serfdom through pleasure, Peters writing in Huxleyan terms:

  It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry ‘American culture,’ with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites—figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians—human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience—ease—and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare.[11]

  Here can be seen the Huxleyan ‘addiction’ (sic), to use Peters’ own term, which now embraces much of the world, other than what the globalists consider to be the backward ‘traditional elites’ and cultures, the so-called ‘Islamofascists,’ and the resurgent orthodox religiosity and traditions of the nations of the former Soviet bloc on which George Soros has expended so much to thwart. Peters continues:

  Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather ‘Baywatch.’ America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no ‘peer competitor’ in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted—men and women everywhere—clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.[12]

  The ‘constant conflict’ is one of world cultural revolution, with the armed forces used as backup against any ‘rejectionist states,’ such as Serbia and Iraq. The world is therefore to be kept in a perpetual state of flux, with a lack of permanence, which Peters’ calls America’s ‘strength,’ as settled traditional modes of life do not accord with the aim of industrial, technical and economic ‘progress’ without end. Peters continues:

  There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the U.S. armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.[13]

  Note that Peters refers to the U.S. armed forces and the U.S. ‘cultural assault’ as working in tandem to maintain the United States’ global economic domination, which more accurately means the domination of global corporations. Peters has made ‘American interests’ synonymous with global corporate interests, although such corporations are not rooted to any specific nation-state, any more than the City of London branch of the Rothschild dynasty was rooted to the British Empire when it ceased serving its interests, or Rupert Murdoch was rooted to his Australian birthright when becoming an American citizen served his global business interests. Peters refers to certain cultures trying to reassert their traditions, and again emphasises that the globalist ‘culture’ that is being imposed primarily via U.S. influence is one of ‘infectious pleasure.’ Historical inevitability is re-emphasised, as the ‘rejectionist’ (sic) regimes will be consigned to what Trotsky called the ‘dustbin of history’:

  Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities—usually with marginal, if any, success—and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don’t have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of th
e future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples’ failure, while further increasing our relative strength.[14]

  Michael Ledeen[15] as one of the primary advocates of America’s world revolutionary mission, in similar terms to that of Peters, calls on the United States to fulfil its ‘historic mission’ of ‘exporting the democratic revolution’ throughout the world. Like Peters, Ledeen predicates this world revolution as a necessary part of the ‘war on terrorism,’ but emphasises also that ‘world revolution’ is the ‘historic mission’ of the United States and always has been. We have noted the origins of this in a confluence between two different currents in American history: its Puritan and Enlightenment foundations.[16] Writing in National Review, Ledeen states:

  . . . [W]e are the one truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically, and that is precisely why the tyrants hate us, and are driven to attack us.

  Freedom is our most lethal weapon, and the oppressed peoples of the fanatic regimes are our greatest assets. They need to hear and see that we are with them, and that the Western mission is to set them free, under leaders who will respect them and preserve their freedom.

  . . . [I]t is time once again to export the democratic revolution. To those who say it cannot be done, we need only point to the 1980s, when we led a global democratic revolution that toppled tyrants from Moscow to Johannesburg. Then, too, the smart folks said it could not be done, and they laughed at Ronald Reagan’s chutzpah when he said that the Soviet tyrants were done for, and called on the West to think hard about the post-Communist era. We destroyed the Soviet Empire, and then walked away from our great triumph in the Third World War of the Twentieth Century. As I sadly wrote at that time, when America abandons its historic mission, our enemies take heart, grow stronger, and eventually begin to kill us again. And so they have, forcing us to take up our revolutionary burden, and bring down the despotic regimes that have made possible the hateful events of the 11th of September.[17]

  Ledeen gives credit to the United States for bringing down not only the Soviet bloc, but also the Afrikaner, as part of the ‘historic world revolutionary mission’ that the United States has had since its founding. However, he states that the task of world revolution was left uncompleted, since the Third World has yet to be brought into the globalist orbit. There is also still a long way to go in regard to Eurasia and the former Soviet bloc, and in particular Russia, where there have been reversals in the process of the ‘colour revolutions,’ and where there is increasing resistance to what is being perceived as American ambitions towards global hegemony.

  The United States has utilised globalist ‘culture’ since the ‘Cold War,’ when an entire operation under the auspices of the CIA, and funded by the Rockefellers,[18] was established to manipulate the arts and artists to subvert the Soviet bloc while enticing the world towards ‘The American Dream.’ The Congress of Cultural Freedom, as the front was called, was a collaboration between U.S. globalists, big business, the CIA, and the anti-Russian Left,[19] especially Trotskyite communists, who regarded the USSR since the purging of Trotsky by Stalin, as anathema.[20] Indeed, such was the hatred of these anti-Russian communists that many became the most avid of Cold Warriors on behalf of the United States, as exemplified by Trotsky’s widow Natalya Sedova, who became a proponent of the war against North Korea.[21] These anti-Soviet Leftists morphed into what is now misnamed the ‘neo-conservative movement’ (more aptly termed ‘neo-cons’) who continue to herald the United States’ ‘world revolutionary mission.’ The above-cited Ledeen and Peters are examples of the neo-cons. The globalist culture promoted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom for several decades through the Cold War was primarily the formlessness of ‘abstract expressionism’ (the daubings of Jackson Pollock being particularly promoted), which was heralded by these cultural Bolsheviks in the service of globalisation as the United States’ ‘official art,’ and which was aptly condemned by the Stalinists as ‘rootless cosmopolitanism.’[22] It was a great paradox of history that the United States was promoting revolutionary decadence, while the USSR maintained a conservative position and saw the arts as reflecting the soul of the folk.[23]

  [1] Bolton, ‘The Global Democratic Revolution,’ Revolution from Above, 213–44.

  [2] T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948).

  [3] T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), I:3.

  [4] See the section below, ‘Culturally Lethal.’

  [5] Ibid.

  [6] F. J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976).

  [7] R. Crawford, ed., America’s Musical Life: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

  [8] Bremer, op. cit.

  [9] Ralph Peters, ‘Constant Conflict,’ Parameters (Summer 1997), 4–14, http://www.usamhi.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm.

  [10] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969 [1932]). For a discussion of Huxley’s concepts, see K. R. Bolton, ‘Huxley’s Brave New World,’ Revolution from Above, 48–54.

  [11] Peters, ‘Constant Conflict.’

  [12] Ibid.

  [13] Ibid.

  [14] Ibid.

  [15] Ledeen, consultant to the U.S. National Security Council, State Department and Defense Department, is currently a ‘Freedom Scholar’ with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which aims for ‘regime change’ throughout the world. See ‘Michael Ledeen,’ SourceWatch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Michael_Ledeen.

  [16] For an examination of these two originally rival factions at America’s founding, see Nicholas Hagger, The Secret Founding of America: The Real Story of Freemasons, Puritans and the Battle for the New World (London: Watkins Publishing, 2007).

  [17] Michael Ledeen, ‘Creative Destruction: How to Wage a Revolutionary War,’ National Review, 20 September 2001.

  [18] Particularly through the Rockefeller founded and funded Museum of Modern Art. See Bolton, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom,’ in Revolution from Above, 141–43.

  [19] Ibid., 138–43.

  [20] K. R. Bolton, ‘Stalinism and the Art of Rootless Cosmopolitanism,’ in Stalin: The Enduring Legacy (London: Black House Publishing, 2012), 28–54.

  [21] Ibid., 114–18.

  [22] F. Chernov, ‘Bourgeoisie Cosmopolitanism and Its Reactionary Role,’ Bolshevik: Theoretical and Political Magazine of the All-Union Communist Party, no. 5, 15 March 1949, 30–41.

  [23] These subjects are detailed in Bolton, Stalin: The Enduring Legacy, ‘Stalinism and the Art of Rootless Cosmopolitanism,’ 28–54.

  Wars in the Name of ‘Multiculturalism’

  As indicated by Peters and Ledeen, a one-size-fits-all world is being imposed by the United States. One must have ‘democracy’ whether one wants it or not. That is to say, one must have the ‘freedom’ to buy the consumer junk vomited over most of the world by the global corporations. If one resists (the so-called ‘rejectionist regimes’) there is the ultimate option of US, NATO, and UN bombs to explode the ‘rejectionists’ into oblivion, in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights,’ ‘re-educate’ the ‘liberated’ people, and try the surviving leaders as ‘war criminals.’

  Hence, the two world wars were fought to inaugurate a new era of free-trade economics over the entire world,[1] and to put any regime that is reticent on notice that they too can expect ‘total war.’ One of the recent wars that epitomises the im
position of globalism by sheer force is that waged against Serbia. The proponents of Serb annihilation clearly stated that the Serbs were an anachronism that had to be defeated because they insisted on their own ethno-state. The Afrikaner Republic had to go for the same reason.

  The Kosovar Albanians served as the present-day equivalent of the 19th-century Uitlanders in the Afrikaner Transvaal Republic. The Uitlanders justified British military invasion for the control of South Africa’s mineral wealth by cosmopolitan mining interests. Kosovar Albanians justified NATO/UN invasion of Serbia to grab the mineral wealth of the region, again for cosmopolitan economic interests.

  The war against Serbia is of interest for several major reasons. The war was undertaken against a people-culture-nation that sought to maintain their identity. While the war against the Serbs was launched with rhetoric about opposing the ‘ethnic cleansings’ of Kosovar Albanians faced with ‘genocide,’ Serb actions had been defensive rather than aggressive, and involved maintaining an integral part of Serbia. Even during the war there were occasional reports of Kosovar Albanian terrorism against Serbs, until increasingly the Serbs were depicted as the sole villains. However, the Albanian Muslim ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Serbs from Kosovo during the US/NATO war was the continuation of a process that had started long before to integrate the region into a ‘Greater Albania.’ During the war a British report stated of this anti-Serb ‘ethnic cleansing’ that ‘The violence against Kosovo’s dwindling Serb population increased on Monday night when nine mortar rounds were fired at a village in the U.S. sector, killing two young Serbs and injuring five.’[2]