Donald Trump’s Warsaw speech has reignited a controversy about the superiority of Western civilization.  He is being excoriated for dog whistling a variety of taboo assertions.  The Atlantic accuses him of racial and religious paranoia.  The New Republic claimed the speech was an appeal to the International Brotherhood of White Grievance.  His main offence was to declare that Western civilization is superior to others and that it is under attack.  Educated people have been taught that all societies are equal and to claim otherwise is racist.  This fact is codified in United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.  It asserts, “all doctrines, policies and practices based on or advocating superiority of peoples or individuals on the basis of national origin or racial, religious, ethnic or cultural differences are racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust.”  Therefore Mogadishu is equal to Malmö. 

Trump’s position is similar to Italy's Silvio Belusconi who commented shortly after the 9/11 attack: "We should be confident of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion.  This respect certainly does not exist in Islamic countries.”  Belusconi was immediately set upon by the pack of independent minds. The Belgian Prime Minister, Guy Verhofstadt responded, "I can hardly believe Mr. Berlusconi made such remarks because the EU is based on values such as multiculturalism and the meeting of different civilizations."  The head of Italian Jewish organizations, Amos Luzzatto, told the newspaper La Repubblica, ''In my opinion, one can not speak of the superiority of one culture over another.''  Belusconi received so much criticism that he felt it necessary to apologize.  It was a demonstration of the power of the charge of racism.

No other societies have such a reluctance to declare their superiority.  This was explained by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.  He wrote, “There is a self-hatred in the West that can be considered only as something pathological. . . . it no longer loves itself; it now only sees what is despicable and destructive in its own history, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure there."  This pathology is not an accident.  It is the product of years of indoctrination.

The primary promoter of this indoctrination was the Communist Party.  An early Communist master propagandist, Willi Munzenberg, said, “We must organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink!”  Judge Robert Bork related a story about Yale University proposing a study of Western civilization.  He tells how an English professor exploded: "Western Civilization?  Why not a chair for colonialism, slavery, empire, and poverty?" while a history professor said: "The major export of Western Civilization is violence."

This hostility to things Western gradually morphed into an anti-white prejudice.  Susan Sontag famously declared, "The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." Entertainers like actor Donald Sutherland have declared that they are “ashamed” of being white”  Sutherland continued, “It’s interesting to realize that you are seen as an integral part of a group that many of whom are mendacious, misogynist, of bigots, racists, and it’s appalling.”

Mona Sahlin, former leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, responded to the question what is Swedish culture? “I cannot figure out what Swedish culture is. I think that is what makes many Swedes so envious of immigrant groups. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that binds you together."  Former British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, reportedly said, "the English as a race are not worth saving".  German Leftist politician Gregor Gysi declared, “Every year more native Germans die than there are born.  That is very fortunate.  It’s because the Nazis are not very good at having offspring”.  Salafism expert and Green party member Kurt Edler suggests that Germany has no real culture.  He claims, “the indigenous people themselves have completely disintegrated. The common word is dominant culture. There is none. There are lifestyle milieus.”  According to Edler, “the West has long since perished.”  This is also the conclusion of  Vladimir Putin who declared, “In a European country, a child is raped by a migrant, and the court releases him. It doesn’t fit into my head what on earth they’re thinking over there. I can’t even explain the rationale – is it a sense of guilt before the migrants? What’s going on? It’s not clear….A society that cannot defend its children has no future.”

There was one glaring error in Trump’s speech.  He stated, “we have never given up on freedom and independence as the right and destiny of the Polish people, and we never, ever will.”  The Poles in his audience undoubtedly noticed this error and were reminded of some unpleasant memories at the end of World War II.

John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing).  He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency.