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Monday, March 28, 2005
The Embryo Of The Death Cults
Your Curmudgeon is aware that he's been writing a lot on this subject. Of course, that's largely because recent news items have made it uppermost in his thoughts, but there are other reasons as well. In particular, the filaments that bind the history of death worship in America to the appalling present-day events that dominate our headlines have become unprecedentedly clear.
A Culture of Death doesn't spring into being like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It has to be germinated and incubated rather carefully, as it's contrary to every healthful attitude toward existence. It would be quickly wiped out if required to stand on its own from its first moments. That's an excellent a priori reason to look backward for the appearance of its embryo, and what means were required to sustain it.
As a foundation, consider the words of Isabel Paterson from The God Of The Machine:
The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others. And the good people cannot be exonerated for supporting them. Neither can it be believed that the good people are wholly unaware of what actually happens. But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the their measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.
The "lingering death of three millions" refers to the politically engineered campaign of starvation, by the Soviet government of Josef Stalin, against the South Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian kulaks -- independent peasant farmers -- who refused to fall in line with the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Within the young Soviet Union, there was little discussion of what was taking place; to voice an opinion was all too likely to attract the attention of Lavrenti Beria and his henchmen. Beside that, the details of the campaign were not widely known; Stalin had no reason to disseminate them. But the news leaked out here in the United States, and Communist flacksters and sympathizers found themselves having to defend what amounted to a program of extermination mounted for political purposes.
The defense they mounted was the one cited by Miss Paterson above: it was for "the greater good" -- a term whose precise meaning was carefully left unspecified.
He who didn't live through those days -- the Thirties and Forties -- can have only a pale conception of the milieu. Americans had had their faith in freedom and capitalism shaken by the Great Depression -- ironically, an entirely government-contrived phenomenon. The literary-intellectual elite based in New York had absorbed the fashionable decadent cynicism about life and freedom prevalent in the salons of London, Paris, and Berlin. Some of the most dynamic writers of the day were outright supporters of the Communist idea, and took pains to infect as many of their fellows as they could. Sovietists had begun their climb into the highest levels of the federal government, exploiting the indulgent attitude of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations toward centralist ideas and their willingness to advance the consolidation of political power in Washington.
The anti-Communist reaction in the entertainment media, the HUAC hearings in the House of Representatives, and Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations of Communist penetration of the federal government were the last serious attempts to abort the embryo before it could reach an unstoppable size. These have been hysterically and luridly defamed as "witch hunts" against a bunch of innocent liberal humanists -- a fine shield behind which to hide a philosophy that explicitly licenses the State to slaughter the innocent in the name of some "greater good."
Your Curmudgeon considers it noteworthy that the drive for the legalization of abortion did not even begin until the fundamental premise of Communism -- the disposability of the individual on utilitarian grounds -- had been conceded the status of a defensible moral position. Similarly, not until the moral acceptability of abortion was well established did the drive for "assisted suicide" and other maneuvers toward euthanasia begin on these shores. Each stage in the gestation of the embryo was preparation for the next.
The Fifties were the era of The Bomb. As necessary as it was and remains, it was nonetheless an inducement to think about horrible things -- the deaths of tens of millions -- in a dispassionate and utilitarian way. The huge American military establishment, which had garrisoned Europe and portions of Asia, lent urgency to the subject with its warnings about the emerging Soviet and Red Chinese threats. And of course we had the Korean War, and Douglas MacArthur's suggestion that we should nuke China as a convenient adjunct.
The Sixties and Seventies were the era of The Pill. As they came of age, Baby Boomers sought to reject as much of the Forties and Fifties milieu as they could. Opposition to the Vietnam War was more symptomatic than basic. Advances in contraceptive technology and the treatment of venereal disease, coupled to a certain weary acceptance from older Americans of Boomers' promiscuity, drug use, and the toil-not-neither-spin attitude prevalent among "the kids," produced a social tableau in which everything seemed permissible and nothing was required. The hyper-hedonism of that era rejected all notions of responsibility and all thought of the future; the best possible evidence was the outright contempt so many Boomer youth showered on the American military. Their abdication from moral thought left the way clear for persons with a focus on power over others: the obstetricians of the death cults.
Not long afterward, Communism was visibly collapsing as an economic system. In the Eighties it began its final descent, and crashed and burned in the early Nineties. Today its survivals are a handful of utterly pitiable states, and less obviously, the "soft communism" that rules the welfare states of Europe. However, the fundamental assumptions of Communism, most particularly the meaninglessness of an individual life and the subordination of the individual to some "greater good," had sunk into the foundations of American thought, if that's the appropriate term for a surly unwillingness to think. Serious moral consideration of collectivist premises and social attitudes had been ruled out of bounds as an affront against "tolerance."
By the Eighties, the fetus had emerged from the intellectual womb. It has established redoubts in academia, wide-spectrum entertainment, and the literary and artistic worlds, from which it can feed on what's healthy in our culture while injecting a steady stream of venom into our veins. It has resisted all attempts to detach and discipline it.
Though we've begun to relearn our appreciation for individual rights and the sanctity of life these past two decades, the pendulum has only just begun its backswing. We're still confronted by death-cult excrescences in many venues. The unrestrained growth of all levels of government, the unlimited acceptance of abortion and illegitimacy, the propensity for medicalizing every sort of ill, the drive to normalize homosexuality, the denigration of the traditional two-parent nuclear family, the promotion of death as a solution to a wide range of old problems, and the degree of indulgence shown toward groups and creeds that claim a "right" to advance their odious causes through violence, all indicate that the demonic infant conceived a century ago still has its fangs in our neck.
More anon.
Comments
I have been following this blog for some time. Although you may feel that you are posting too much on topics relating to life issues, keep on. You literally make my day with your cogent analysis.
Posted by Linda F on 03/28/2005 at 01:09 PMI lived through those times in the late fifties and the sixties and part of the seventies while in the Military, with the everpresent threat of a nuke strike by our erstwhile ‘ex-allies’ from WWII hanging over our heads. Every time we deployed, I would wonder if there would be anything to come back too at the end of the tour. When the Soviet Union imploded I was one of the happiest people around, as I erorroneously(sp) thought that we were to now live in a more peaceful time. Well, whatever gains we have made in displacing communism, it is slowly rearing it’s ugly head again right in our southern back yard. China, North Korea, Iran, I wonder which one will be the one to try and export their missiles to Mr Chavez down in Venezulea? And just when you think Cuba is about to fall by the wayside, along comes another communist benefactor to prop him up! Jeez, will it ever end? Regards Everett R Littlefield
Posted by on 03/28/2005 at 07:40 PMHi Francis, Sorry about the above comment. I clicked on the wrong post. Age does that to you! Everett
Posted by on 03/28/2005 at 07:44 PMI agree with Linda here. As a young wippersnapper of 20, it’s hard for me to wholly understand these moral devolutions as I am not old enough to know what came before my time. The more I read these essays, the better I understand what principles I have as well as how to logically defend them. For this, I thank you Mr Porretto.
Posted by on 03/28/2005 at 09:08 PM
a few more Justin Kardels, and this old man would see some hope for the future.
Posted by on 03/28/2005 at 10:28 PMThere are more Justins than we can count. We only have to reach them. So don’t just hope--spread the word.
Posted by Scott Chaffin on 03/29/2005 at 01:48 AMUnsurprisingly, the death cult began to wax as traditional morality, embodied in organized religion, began to wane. Having stared into the abyss long enough, I believe you are correct that the pendulum has begun to swing back. These pernicious ideas, that smell of smoke, go against our nature. The trick of the enemy has been to fuse them into our minds, thereby suppressing our natural resistance to them. Excellent analysis.
Posted by on 03/29/2005 at 11:19 AMAnother persistent problem is the lack of willingness of “social humanists” - and I would be willing to argue that Marxism is merely an offshoot of socialist humanism (which sprang from the head of Darwinism, but that’s another tale) - and everyone else to recognize the essentially religious nature of leftist beliefs.
Communism was a religion.
I’ve described the phenomenon here and here against the panoply of current events, in essence arguing that social humanism is a “church without walls” ...and is deserving of the opprobrium “the religious Left”. And indeed, that leftist “thought” is essentially about the noumenon:
“...the only difference between me and you is that you are unaware that you are sitting in the pews and listening to a sermon.
“I, at least, know where I am and what it is that I’m listening to.
In that light, what we are currently seeing is less about the “growth” of a “culture of death” then it is about the further revelation of the catechism the left.
Posted by brandon davis on 03/29/2005 at 02:03 PMSeveral tropes I would like to see spread far and wide in this connection:
1) Statism kills. It has killed far more human individuals than racism ever did or could hope to.
2) The individual is the crown of creation. Therefore:
3) The concepts of a “greater good” and of “compelling public (or state) interest” are abhorrent and ought to be anathema to all good men.
Posted by Mark Alger on 03/30/2005 at 12:10 PM
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