The Return of the Repressed Cultures

Harvard professor Samuel Huntington described what he called the clash of civilizations. In the twentieth century, for instance, Western liberal democracies clashed with socialist dictatorships. It fought a hot war against the Teutonic monstrosity called National Socialism and fought a Cold War against totalitarian socialism, aka Communism.

Culturally speaking, the two socialisms were not exactly identical. Naziism asserted the notion that raw power, and unabashedly shameless brutality could win out over a culture that valued gentility and social harmony. Communism proposed that a culture based on big ideals could defeat nations that valued empirical science and pragmatic solutions. 

They both lost out in the clash of civilizations. And yet, some defeated cultures do not go quietly into the night. It has been millennia since the monotheistic culture established by Moses overwhelmed pagan idolatry, and yet, we still hear calls today, from our celebrity necromancers to our psycho therapists to return to paganism, to bring back whatever remains of these dead cultures. They pretend to be seeking a higher truth, but they end up finding a lower truth.

As we watch the heirs of the Storm Troopers producing pogroms in America’s cities, we become persuaded that the Nazi threat has not receded. It has returned with a vengeance, through the activities of young people who consider themselves to be leftists. What was Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, if not yesterday's Portland, Minneapolis and Seattle.

After all, today's students have been taught the practice called deconstruction in college. I suspect that they were not taught that it was concocted by a Nazi philosopher. And that it is really nothing more than a fancy term for pogrom. So, they are out in force practicing what they were taught.

So, Naziism is not dead. It has returned to America in activities practiced by brainwashed young people. One might say that we are seeing the return of the repressed, but it would be more accurate to say that we are seeing what happens when young people are stupid enough to believe in the return of the repressed. People will go to great lengths to prove that they were not wrong, were not conned, were not gulled, were not seduced.

I know that everyone believes that they want power, buy I respectfully demur. If they had power they would be held accountable for their actions. And that is something they cannot abide. No, theirs is a pure will to destroy, to destroy what others have built, the better to pretend to be stronger-- even though they are incapable of building anything.

The pogromistas are sore losers. They are being led by Hillary Clinton and today’s Democratic Party. For all their drooling over democracy they have consistently refused to accept the result of a fair election. They are a disgrace to democracy.

And, of course, Communism has not died. It has merely resurfaced in the Democratic Party platform, influenced by Soviet-loving socialist, Bernie Sanders and the band of imbeciles called the Squad.

True believers in the religion of socialism are at war against capitalism-- because they could not stand losing. In many ways these groups are more communistic than the Chinese Communist Party. They are certainly interested in shutting down dissident speech, because, to their minds, anything that defends capitalism or the religion of the patriarchs must be shut down.

So, today’s socialists, with their grandiose offers to give people everything they need, without anyone's having to earn it, repudiate the Protestant Work Ethic and an economic system that produces wealth. As everyone knows, the socialist dream appeals mostly to children and to overgrown children and to sore losers. It appeals to people who expect to be provided for, because they are lovable.

As you know, and as Margaret Thatcher famously opined-- socialism works until it runs out of other people's money. Socialists do not consider for an instant where the money is going to come from.

You would have thought that the countercultural silliness about the Revolution would have gone away, what with the defeat of socialism. And yet, such is apparently not the case.

Roger Kimball explains (via Maggie’s Farm):

We look at the streets of Portland and other cities, we listen to the Marxist rhetoric strained through the filter of racial redress, and we—some of us—feel that some great wrong is being expiated. In reality, the old wrong of that Hobbesian “perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” is making its way in the world in a new disguise. But the fact of the disguise is hardly surprising. “Seldom,” Burke writes, “have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief.” 

He continues:

That is where we are now, in the midst of a howling “juvenile activity” that would destroy the United States, even as our guardians, long marinated in the liquor of bootless feelings of guilt, make themselves unwitting collaborators in their own destruction. 

It’s all about resentment and repudiation. It’s about people who have bet on the wrong horse, wanting a do-over, refusing to believe that their horse lost.

History to the revolutionary spirit is but a gigantic warehouse of resentment and a toolbox of repudiation. Who is pure enough to survive such scrutiny? “It is not very just,” Burke writes, “to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors; but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age.” 

And,

History to the revolutionary spirit is but a gigantic warehouse of resentment and a toolbox of repudiation. Who is pure enough to survive such scrutiny? “It is not very just,” Burke writes, “to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors; but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age.” 

Yes, indeed, it reminds us of the first great modern revolution, the French Revolution. We know how that worked out.

The messengers have changed their garb, but the hooligans smashing up courthouses and police stations as they pursue a course of indiscriminate carnage are fired by that same unholy “train of disorderly appetites” that Burke anatomized. We’ve been here, done that, and believe me, it does not end well. 

Here’s a fun fact to close. Modern French intellectuals used to say that the peasants stormed the Bastille in 1789 because they wanted to liberate its most famous inmate. That would have been the Marquis de Sade. Why was de Sade in prison? He had gotten into the habit of drugging and raping women. Evidently, this made him a hero to the revolutionaries and to subsequent generations of French intellectuals.

It resembles the idea that American women mounted a campaign against sexual harassment, marching in pussy hats in the name of the nation’s leading enabler of sexual harassment. So embittered were they that they had lost the ability to think.