The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton

  “Anti-Americanism is no longer a mere fad of Marxist university students; it’s a profound reaction of traditional societies against a corrupt and corrupting modernization that is being imposed on them, by both violence and seduction. The very word values implies a whole modern culture of moral whim, in which good and evil are matters of personal preference and sodomy and abortion can be treated as ‘rights.’ Confronted with today’s America, then, the Christian Arab finds himself in unexpected sympathy with his Muslim enemy”.2

  American strategists acknowledge the USA’s cultural pathology as a weapon by which the entire world can be infected and so weakened as to succumb to the money-empire. This is the moral, spiritual and cultural equivalent of bacteriological warfare. U.S. strategists during the Cold War realised that cultural contagion could be used as a weapon to subvert and destroy the moral fabric of enemy states. In 1949 the CIA recruited disaffected anti-Stalinist Bolsheviks, Trotskyites and Mensheviks into the Congress for Cultural Freedom to try and subvert the Soviet bloc and impose “American” values over the world in the name of “freedom of artistic expression.” Their favoured media were Abstract Expressionism and jazz.3 The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was established under the presidency of Marxist intellectual Professor Sidney Hook, a “lifelong Menshevik”, who was awarded the Congressional Medal for Freedom by President Ronald Reagan for his services to American internationalism. Hook had been Trotsky’s leading defender in the West when Stalin had purged him from the USSR. The same year the CCF was formed, 1949, the Stalinists launched their counter-offensive against “rootless cosmopolitanism” in the arts.4

  While the CCF was dissolved, having been thoroughly exposed and discredited as a CIA front, the cultural offensive against the world did not dissipate. The favoured music of the purveyors of cultural contagion is no longer jazz of course, but hip hop, which is promoted by the U.S. State Department, especially among disaffected migrant youth in Europe. Such a cultural offensive is seen as a means of harnessing youth to the “American Dream”, rather than becoming anti-American.5

  Perhaps the most cogent and frank explanation on the use of culture-pathogens to infect states as a geopolitical weapon is provided by Major Ralph Peters, subsequently lieutenant colonel, a prominent military strategist who served with the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. Peters wrote in Parameters, journal of the U.S. Army War College, “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”. Peters stated that the “global information empire” led by the USA is “historically inevitable”.

  “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”.

  “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.”6

  Peters lauds the “cultural power” that will addict the masses throughout the world. America’s “lethal culture”, exported to the world, is that of “comfort and convenience – ease – and pleasure”. This is precisely the ingredient for the decay of cultures and the regression of character. The military role is contingent: “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”. He calls this “constant conflict”. Peters states that “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 the future”.7

  Peters uses the terminology of cultural pathology, with words such as “plague” and “infectious”. He sees this as America’s strength. A parasite only lives as long as its host, and America seeks to kill its hosts – the entirety of the rest of the world. America’s “plague” across the world is from its own infection. The USA is not a quarantined purveyor. It spreads infection from its own terminal disease. The USA deludes itself, like a psychotic with AIDS, that it is strong because it can infect and kill others, but it must succumb to its own illness.

  Dr. Michael Ledeen, who has been a consultant for the U.S. National Security Council, Defense and State Departments, has referred to the USA as inherently revolutionary and its globalist ideology as “creative destruction”. In defending this ideology from a critique by Congressman Ron Paul in 2003 Ledeen wrote:

  “He conveniently leaves out the context, which is a discussion of the basic conflict between us and the terror masters: a conflict between freedom and tyranny. I argue, as I argued during the Cold War with regard to Communism, and as I argued in my books on fascism earlier, that the conflict between America and tyrants is inevitable. It stems from the very nature of America, from our unique freedom and creativity, which has often been described as ‘creative destruction.’ Every serious writer about America has noticed the amazing speed with which we scrap old ideas, technologies, art forms and even the use of the English language. And it’s obvious that more rigid societies, particularly those governed by tyrants, are frightened by the effects and the appeal of freedom on their own subjects. Our existence threatens them, undermines their legitimacy, and subverts their power”.8

  For a traditional conservative, there is no need to quote Ledeen out of context. What he calls “freedom” is nihilism. What he calls “tyranny” is the desire to maintain tradition. Ledeen states that the USA is innately “destructive”. This he calls “creative” because it is designed to destroy anything that thwarts the “end of history, as Fukuyama calls it, to remake the world on America’s terms.

  With this so-called “neoconservatism” there is a fundamental Marxism: In The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx called movements that thwarted the “wheel of history” “reactionism”. Ledeen uses the word “tyranny”. Ledeen, like Peters, unequivocally states that the USA is inherently opposed to traditional cultures; that all must be in a perpetual state of flux, or what Leon Trotsky called the “permanent revolution”, when he writes of America’s “amazing speed with which we scrap old ideas, technologies, art forms and even the use of the English language”. When someone as significant as Russian geopolitical analyst and state adviser Dr. Igor Panarin states that, “Trotskyist ideas won at the end of the 20th century in the USA and brightly manifested themselves in the ideology of the liberal globalism of a part of the contemporary American political elite”,9 we can be encouraged that the political and academic elite in Russia precisely knows the character of the struggle for supremacy between world-views.

  * * *

  1 Alexander Stille, 2003, xiv.

 
; 2 Joe Sobran, 2001.

  3 Frances Stonor Saunders, 1999.

  Also see the CIA website: “Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50”; https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v38i5a10p.htm#rft1

  4 K. R. Bolton, Stalin: the Enduring Legacy, 28-54.

  5 K. R. Bolton, Babel Inc., 189-199.

  6 Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict”, 4-14.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Michael Ledeen, “Dishonorable Congressman”, 2003.

  9 Igor Panarin, 2006.

  Rise of Russia

  While Russia has the same demographic problem as the West, there is a crucial distinction. For the West the sudden realisation of demographic decline is based on how profits will be impacted by aging populations. The answer for Western states is immigration. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been the only major political leader to understand the historic meaning of population decline, stating in his 2012 election programme:

  “About 40 per cent of global mineral resources are located in Russia, whereas Russia’s population makes up a mere 2 per cent of the global population. The implications of this disparity are obvious. Unless Russia implements a long-term comprehensive agenda for demographic development to build up its human potential and develop its territories, it risks turning into a geopolitical “void,” whose fate would be decided by other powers’. Putin spoke of firstly, supporting ‘families with multiple children [with] measures for mitigating the temporary financial strain that affects many families with three or more children’. Unlike Western states Putin advocates ‘a smart migration policy… which would prevent the risks of ethnic or cultural clashes’, based on a migrant ‘applicant’s ability to embrace our culture and our values’. ‘We must arrange our … policies to address the task of boosting Russia’s human potential. It must serve a long-term strategy with historic implications, not merely a campaign agenda”.1

  With the resurgence of Russia has come a resurgence of population. Britta Sandstroem, a Danish population expert, states that “Contrary to popular belief, Russia’s demographic situation is improving as Western fertility rates continue to plummet”. The population growth level is at least 2.1 children per woman, but in the European Union it is 1.3. The global population trend is 2.3. Sandstroem refers to the lessons of past civilisations: “This decline in Western fertility rates attracts no interest from Western politicians or mass media. They remain stuck in the short term. This mirrors the attitudes of other societies that fell into crisis because of low birth rates: the Roman Empire, Etruscan society, the Abbasid Caliphate etc”.2

  A World Bank report states that the Russian birth rate increased from 1.34 in 2009, to 1.54 in 2013 and is currently at 1.60. “This rise is almost unique in Europe”, according to Sandstroem. “Since President Vladimir Putin acted to address the problem, Russia has been one of the few countries in the western hemisphere to have registered a stable rise in its fertility rate”. Sandstroem comments that while Western population decline is compensated by immigration, “If fertility rates continue to grow in Russia and continue to fall in the West in line with present trends then the future belongs to Russia”.3

  The Western High Culture was over 500 years old when the Russian culture-organism coalesced at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. Then Moscow became the focus of a new Russian ethnos that had been fermenting since the adoption of Christianity in 988. The defeat of the Mongols by a unified Russian force not only formed the Russian nation but made the Orthodox Church the foundation of Russian culture. Saint Sergy of Radonej had worked among the numerous principalities to gain allegiance to the Principality of Moscow. By the time of Kulikovo he inspired the Russian forces to victory. His Trinity Monastery became the symbol of Russian unity. The first to die in the prelude to battle was a monk, Aleksandr Peresvet, from Sergy’s Trinity Monastery, in single combat against the Mongol-Tatar champion, Chelubey.

  Russia is Orthodox Christianity, just as Western High Culture was Gothic-Catholicism. Russia became the centre of the Orthodox faith when the Byzantine Empire ceased in 1453. Hence, Russia is called the “Third Rome”. It sees its mission as one of universal Christian brotherhood, contra the world-missions of the USA, China, and Israel. Russia appeals to the heart, Islam reaches for the sword, the USA and Israel for the missile, China for the cheque book. Sergey Lavrov, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, stated:

  “We believe that human solidarity must have a moral basis formed by traditional values that are largely shared by the world’s leading religions. In this connection, I would like to draw your attention to the joint statement by Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis, in which, among other things, they have expressed support for the family as a natural centre of life of individuals and society”.4

  Lavrov was expressing the traditional Russian perception of her world-mission: universalism as distinct from “globalisation”.

  The Soul of Russia

  Russia has regarded herself as European, as Asian and as Eurasian. Sitting between Asia and Europe, Russia has been continually subjected to invasions and migrations from East and West. Her life-course has “zig-zagged”, as the Russian ethnologist Lev Gumilev calls such history;5 but Russia has, far from being obliterated, proceeded in vigour. She has done so through synthesis and symbiosis while rejecting both inner parasitism and outer domination. Russia was formed from the synthesis of Graeco-Byzantine-Rus, as Western culture was formed by a synthesis of Italic-Frankish-Gallic. The Russian is a superethnos that has synthesised other ehtnoi through complete absorption or symbiosis, revolving around the axis of Faith and Motherland vis-à-vis the challenges of geography and invasion.

  Spengler regarded Russians as formed by the vastness of the land-plain, as being innately antagonistic to the machine, as rooted in the soil, irrepressibly peasant, religious, and “primitive”. When Spengler wrote of these Russian characteristics he was referencing the Russians as a still youthful people in contrast to the senile West. Hence the “primitive” Russian is not synonymous with “primitivity” as popularly understood in regard to tribal peoples, much less to historically-exhausted Fellaheen. To Spengler, the “primitive peasant” is the well-spring from which a race draws its healthiest elements during its epochs of cultural vigour.

  The basis of the Russian soul is not infinite space – as in the West’s Faustian6 imperative, but is “the plain without limit”.7 The Russian soul expresses its own type of infinity, albeit not that of the Western which becomes enslaved by its own technics ,8 and is destroyed by its hubris. It is after this Western decline that Spengler alluded to the next world civilisation being that of Russia.

  Nikolai Berdyaev in The Russian Idea affirms what Spengler described:

  “There is that in the Russian soul which corresponds to the immensity, the vagueness, the infinitude of the Russian land, spiritual geography corresponds with physical. In the Russian soul there is a sort of immensity, a vagueness, a predilection for the infinite, such as is suggested by the great plain of Russia”.9

  The connections between family, nation, birth, unity and motherland are reflected in the Russian language:

  род - [rod]: family, kind, sort, genus

  родина - [ródina]: homeland, motherland

  родители - [rodíteli]: parents

  родить - [rodít’]: to give birth

  роднить - [rodnít’]: to unite, bring together

  родовой - [rodovói]: ancestral, tribal

  родство - [rodstvó]: kinship

  Western-liberalism, rationalism, even the strenuous efforts of Bolshevik dialectal materialism, have not been able to destroy, but at most repress, these conceptions of what it is to be “Russian”. Spengler, even during the early period of Russian Bolshevism, already predicted that this would take on a different, antithetical form, to the Petrine10 import of Marxism.

  “Russian Socialism”

  Of the Russian soul, the ego/vanity of the Wes
terner is missing; the persona seeks impersonal growth in service, “in the brother-world of the plain”. Orthodox Christianity condemns the “I” as “sin”.11

  A comment by an American visitor to Russia, Barbara J. Brothers, as part of a scientific delegation, states something akin to Spengler’s observation:

  “The Russians have a sense of connectedness to themselves and to other human beings that is just not a part of American reality. It isn’t that competitiveness does not exist; it is just that there always seems to be more consideration and respect for others in any given situation”.12

  Of the Russian traditional ethos, intrinsically antithetical to Western individualism, Berdyaev wrote:

  “Of all peoples in the world the Russians have the community spirit; in the highest degree the Russian way of life and Russian manners, are of that kind. Russian hospitality is an indication of this sense of community”.13

  Taras Bulba

  Russian National literature starting from the 1840s began to consciously express the Russian soul. Firstly, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s Taras Bulba, along with the poetry of Pushkin, founded a Russian literary tradition; that is to say, truly Russian; distinct from the previous literature based on German, French and English. John Cournos states of this in his introduction to Taras Bulba:

  “The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day”.14

  Taras Bulba is a tale on the formation of the Cossack folk. In this folk-formation the outer enemy plays a crucial role.