The Anti-Cultural Nihilism of the Left

The final battle lines for America are the history wars.  Conservatives are losing.

There have already been two fundamental revolutions that have reshaped, reconstituted, restructured American society.  The first was Abraham Lincoln and the subjugation of the primacy of the states, Northern and Southern alike, to the dictates of executive fiat and the federal government.  The second was Franklin Roosevelt and the subjugation of civil society to federal bureaucracy.  The first was a political revolution, the second a social revolution.  The third revolution is the ongoing cultural revolution, a revolution that includes factors such as immigration, the teaching and reception of European and North American history, and our own self-understanding as a people with an inheritance and a future.

Culture is the product of man's care and praise.  Culture, from the Latin word cultus, means care and praise.  What one cares about is ultimately what one praises.  To care for and praise something presupposes something to scorn and mock.  That which one does not care for he loathes, lets rot, and ultimately disintegrate.  Look no farther than the University of Notre Dame's decision to cover up murals of the great hero Christopher Columbus and recent decisions in California to destroy murals of George Washington.

History is not black and white.  That much is true.  But the complications and messiness of history don't, shouldn't, preclude the veneration and respect owed to ancestors as part of the general cult of filial piety.

Building an American culture was a twofold project.  First was the understanding that the roots of America lie in Europe and European history.  The fact of the matter is that the American settlers were Europeans, predominately Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish, but also including French, Dutch, Swedes, some Danes, and later Germans and Irish.  Unlike South America, North America was never truly a colony, but an Anglo-Saxon and, more broadly, European diaspora.  Second was the veneration of our Founding Fathers, like King Arthur and Alfred the Great in England or Charles Martel and Charlemagne in France, which gave us a rooted founding to celebrate.

The cultural revolution in America has been laid for a long time.  First was the cracking and chiseling of the character of the Founding Fathers, especially the slave-holding ones like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, slowly and often behind the scenes in the 1970s and 1980s.  With the sacred honor and character of Washington and Jefferson assaulted, the rest of the Founding Fathers came under critique with greater intensity by the 1990s.  Next was the slow denunciation of America's history, most especially westward expansion, and the critique of formerly venerable presidents like Andrew Jackson and James Polk.

By making us feel ashamed of our founding and history, the Left has been able to create a cultural chasm between those who have come to see, with seething hatred and foaming mouths, anything pre-1965 as racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic and those who see nobility, honor, and pride in the past.  By indoctrinating students at universities with sympathy for American Indians, Aztecs, and Mexicans, the next generation is brought up with scorn and contempt for American culture while eulogizing and sympathizing with non-American cultures.  As such, the Left has been able to foster an iconoclastic spirit toward an American culture that, as it recedes from disintegration at the hands of the new barbarians, is replaced by foreign cultures that sweep into the vacuum.

The Left is crudely nihilistic toward the established American culture rooted in Christianity, European history and identity, and the American founding.  This is a combination of the Left's hatred for the norms of American culture inherited from Old World Europe — Christianity, Christian morals and mores, and a heroic spirit that fostered Western adventure and triumph from Abraham and Aeneas down to Lewis and Clark and John C. Frémont — and its veneration of everything opposite of that: femininity, sexual licentiousness, and everything not European and Christian.  Note whom the Left idolizes in the adventures of Lewis and Clark — not Lewis and Clark, but a strong, independent minority woman.

Insofar that American history is acceptable, it is acceptable only to focus on a Pocahontas or Sacagawea.  Forget John Smith, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark.  If they are to be remembered, they should be remembered for their savagery, ignorance, and incompetence.

It doesn't matter that American Indians were far more brutal to each other than Europeans ever were to them.  It doesn't matter that the Aztecs engaged in human sacrifice and slavery at a scale that would make Baal blush and the European slave trade look sophomoric.  (When this fact is brought up, the defense is that Aztec slaves had more rights than elsewhere in the world!)  It doesn't matter that American Indians scalped and beheaded Christian missionaries and threw their bodies into rivers.

What matters is the destruction of American heritage, history, and culture to complete the subjugation of the American people to the whims of the Left's totalitarian desires to remake society along its utopian lusts.  That necessitates ignoring the savagery of the non-American cultures while condemning the American culture and portraying it as the Great Satan of the New World paradise.

One can never forget, especially in the faux right's lament for the loss of compromise and moderation, that the Left has nothing to compromise on.  All compromise benefits the Left.  Any compromise hurts the right.  Conservatives have everything to lose because they love and appreciate the real, the concrete, and the present.  Leftists have nothing to lose because they hate all that exists, and any wrecking ball to present existence, whether partial, half, or in full, constitutes "progress."

Culture is fostered by a shared sense of memory.  Instead of erasing memory, the Left has endeavored to implant new, negative memories of our past, which breeds hatred and venom on whatever issue the Left wishes to indoctrinate others with negative memories of.  Once the cultural revolution is complete, America, the America discovered by Christopher Columbus, settled by a vast multitude of European peoples, and the America which declared independence in 1776 and crafted the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, will no longer exist.

That is the final goal of the left.  Leftists have already achieved political and social revolution.  Now they are seeking to complete total revolution with the cultural revolution.  History is at the frontline of this final battle.

The battle over the good, the true, and the beautiful is at stake.  Conservatives need not compromise when nihilists are at the gates.  You just open yourself up to invasion and plunder as a result.

History and culture are tied to peoples, not abstract ideas.  People who have no attachment to a particular history will have no attachment to that particular culture.  They will become not only orphans of culture, but often militant revolutionaries in the destruction of culture.  And when no one is attached to American culture anymore, American culture will be swept away by the fire of destruction needed to purify the land of the sins imagined by the iconoclastic nihilists masquerading as social justice warriors and liberators while bringing death, destruction, and tyranny in their lustful and hateful wake.

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