The Devil's Pleasure Palace

by Michael Walsh

  In 1988, Joseph Campbell sat down with PBS’s Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary under President Lyndon Johnson, to discuss his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The topic was the power of myth and legend, and their continued importance in our modern lives. Referring to Prometheus and Jesus, the prototypical Light-Bringers who delivered the world from darkness, Moyers offered a solipsistic analysis: “In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.”

  To which Campbell replied:

  But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules. . . . No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

  As we have seen, Life is Light. Darkness is Death and the world of the undead: Stoker’s vampires; Meyerbeer’s nude nuns; the “willies” of Puccini’s early opera Le Villi (set, fittingly, in the Black Forest of Germany during the Middle Ages), vengeful, wronged female spirits who force the opera’s hapless hero to dance himself to death to atone for his infidelity with a seductive siren and for abandoning his lover, who died of a broken heart in his absence. Darkness envelops the Devil’s Pleasure Palace, is home to Weber’s Black Huntsman and Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, stalks London in the unholy form of Dracula, and dates your daughter in Twilight. He can only be defeated by the Light, which is Love.

  The word “vitality” means full of life, and it is the heroic spirit that infuses both Love and Light into the world and gives it renewed Life. You don’t have to be a Christian to understand the impact Jesus had on the world, creating through a schism with Judaism (which awaits the Moshiach, the Redeemer, the Messiah) the world’s largest religion, Christianity. Roughly a third of the world’s seven billion people are professed or baptized Christians, far outnumbering Muslims (which are about 23 percent) and all other faiths.

  So, naturally, Christians have become the target, not only of a renewed and aggressive Islam but of the non-Christians and the anti-Christians in the West, who regard the faith as something akin to Chesterton’s Fence—something to be rashly torn down for its perceived uselessness (or actual malignance), instead of something to be studied and appreciated for what it has accomplished. The baleful Alinsky’s Rule No. 4—“Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules”—has been unleashed with brute force upon the Christians sects. For leftists, the good-enough must always be the enemy of the perfect. “Good enough” mean imperfection, and that is their weapon.

  They believe that a single failure renders an entire system false, and they have convinced a guilty and gullible, largely irreligious media to join them in this belief. No allowance is made for mere mortals, much less (in C.S. Lewis’s phrase) “mere Christianity.” They, who celebrate human weakness and moral deformity in all its guises, can find no tolerance—otherwise, one of their favorite words and most important “moral” principles—for fallibility when it comes to the West and Christianity. Zero tolerance is the order of the day, but only for things the Unholy Left cannot tolerate.

  In battle, the high ground is always preferable to the low. The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 and the attack at Gallipoli in 1915 failed precisely because the attackers (always at a disadvantage against a well-entrenched enemy) rushed pell-mell into the teeth of withering fire, needlessly sacrificing their young men for no strategic advantage. And yet there was heroism in these risky advances, heroism that echoed down the ages to the Allied landing on the beaches at Normandy during Operation Overlord. Without the earlier examples, would the American, British, and Canadian soldiers who hit the beaches on June 6, 1944, have otherwise rushed toward what was sure to be, for many of them, certain death? And yet, in the face of murderous machine-gun fire from Wehrmacht units atop the cliffs, they established a beachhead and kept on moving, crossing the Rhine and finishing whatever hopes the shrinking Third Reich had of staving off the advancing Russians and striking a separate peace with the Allies.

  It is telling that, since that June day in 1944, the United States has failed to win a single military campaign. The battles of the Korean War etched a series of memorable moments for the United States Marine Corps—at Pusan, Inchon, Seoul, and the Chosin Reservoir—but no clear-cut American victory. Vietnam ended ignominiously with the American abandonment of its erstwhile allies in South Vietnam and the humiliating spectacle of American helicopters fleeing from the advancing North Vietnamese. The campaigns in Iraq (a foolish war waged by a failed-president son of another failed president) and the embarrassment of Afghanistan (a war easily won and then, with great difficulty, lost under a Democratic president) point not to a failure of American military prowess or tactics, but to a lack of political will to finish the job. In the aftermath of the clear-cut, unconditional victory in World War II, that will has been poisoned, soured in part by the ethos of the Frankfurt School, which whined “Why not?” when the question should always be “Why?”

  Speaking at the funeral of his assassinated brother, Robert, the late Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy quoted his fallen sibling: “Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?” Telling words, which reveal which side of Chesterton’s Fence these two Kennedys were on, and how much cultural mischief they have caused. Conservatives believe there is a reason—a very good reason—why things that never were, never were.

  And where did that line, uncredited, come from? From this passage in George Bernard Shaw’s 1921 play Back to Methuselah: “I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’ You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’ ”

  The speaker is the Serpent.

  Once safely in the United States, the Frankfurt School sappers had one philosophical objective: to remove the moral high ground of the American Way and replace it with self-doubt. Having lost Germany to an equally murderous leftist ideology, Nazism, the Communists of the Frankfurt School were perfectly content to sit out the war for ideas in the safety of Morningside Heights. There, they unabashedly continued the undermining of Western civilization that they had begun at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Puny avatars of Mephistopheles, they determined, for reasons large and small, to turn Siegfried into Faust, cut him down to size and send him to Hell.

  Near the end of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the final opera of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Siegfried has a flash of clarity in which, freed from his magic-potion spell, he fondly recalls the moment he walked through flames on the mountaintop to free Brünnhilde from her magic-fire-induced slumber. At that moment, two ravens fly squawking out of a bush, circling Siegfried and then disappearing into the air. Hagen, the vengeful son of the dwarf Alberich, asks the hero, “Can you understand those ravens’ cry?” Siegfried is following the ravens’ flight, and he can understand their speech. Before he can reply, Hagen cries, “Rache rieten sie mir!” (“Revenge, they cried to me!”) and plunges his spear into the hero’s back. Game to the end, Siegfried turns on Hagen and attempts to crush him with his now-useless shield, but his great strength fails him as his life ebbs away, and he topples backward upon his shield, dead.

  The key word in this passage is “rache,” revenge. The word has given its name to an entire genre of Hollywood films (think Taken, along with numerous Clint Eastwood Westerns, including, most memorably, Unforgiven). “Rache” is also the clue scrawled in blood upon the walls in the London flat of the very dead Enoch Drebber in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet. (Scotland Yard’s bumbling Inspector Lestrade immediately mistakes the word for an incomplete attempt at the name Rachel.)

  Revenge is one of the most primal human emotions—after sexual desire, perhaps the most elemental—at on
ce both destabilizing and stabilizing, restoring a temporary balance to wrongs committed by force. It is the fulcrum of the seesaw of human battles, of the endless tide of war between two roughly equal adversaries. It spurred the attacks of 9/11 on New York City and Washington, D.C., and the quick rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the crushing of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Iraq (although in the latter case the revenge was on behalf of the Bush family, rather than the United States of America). And it will be the wellspring of many other atrocities and retaliations in the future.

  But what, precisely, was the target of the Frankfurt School’s revenge? Their war with God is well documented, as is their war on Western institutions. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Protestant who died in 1937 after a decade-long stint in a Fascist prison (“we must stop this brain from functioning,” said the prosecutor), advocated a boring-out of the system from within—the successful “long march through the institutions”—in order to achieve “cultural hegemony.”

  For Gramsci, always playing the long game, incrementalism was a byword. Like Satan, the Marxists of the Frankfurt School realized they could not storm and conquer the West from the outside, either militarily or economically. Rather, the hollowing-out had to begin from within and do its work over the course of decades. The slowly boiling frog comes to mind.

  And so if the moral high ground was occupied by the still-Christian West after its spectacular victory over neo-pagan “Aryan” National Socialist Germany and the cultish, tribal emperor worship of Imperial Japan, the task was not to frontally overcome the West but to imprison its citizens with the bands of illusion, to make them think that, “really,” war was peace, freedom was slavery, and ignorance was strength.

  In other words, the mission was to make reality negotiable: subject to analysis, reinterpretation, nuance, parsing. Otherwise rational people could be brought to doubt the empirical evidence of their own senses; they would stare at the evidence so long that it turned upside down and sideways. Everyone has had such an experience: Merely contemplate a single word long enough, and soon you will doubt the correctness of the spelling, the pronunciation, even the meaning.

  Even after a half-century and more, the Kennedy assassination in Dallas is proof of this theory. It was a simple Texas murder: Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine sharpshooter and self-described Marxist and Castro sympathizer with all the motive in the world to attack an anti-Castro president, saw the route of Kennedy’s motorcade published in the newspapers that day, brought his rifle to work (concealed in a curtain-rod tube), went up to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, and shot John F. Kennedy at relatively short range with a scoped rifle in a classic United States Marine Corps shot pattern: Miss, hit, kill.

  Still, JFK conspiracy buffs peer into the fine grain of old photographs, search endlessly for clues, seeing things that drive them, literally, crazy. (James Pierson’s 2013 book on the assassination, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered Liberalism, is indispensable on the topic. For a more literary treatment of the assassination, please see my novel Exchange Alley, based in large part on the CIA and FBI files in the National Archives.) It is, for many, inconceivable that the president of the United States could have been killed by a pisher like Oswald, except that most assassins are nobodies with a chip on their shoulder and a grudge that can be settled only by what they see as revenge. Stephen Sondheim wrote an entire musical on the subject, Assassins (1990). The Left tends to believe in the Great Man theory of history only when the Great Men are on their side; otherwise, the impersonal forces of dialectical materialism go on about their grinding, impersonal millstone work.

  If we can make the JFK assassination negotiable—despite its being one of the most photographed events in American history—then anything is negotiable. Once you begin as a matter of course to call into question the evidence of your own senses—in other words, once you become a lifelong graduate student, a junior-league Faust perpetually engaged in the study of everything, and therefore nothing—nothing is off-limits. Nothing is so ridiculous that you might not some day come to believe it. As Pontius Pilate said before condemning Jesus to death: Quid est veritas? What is truth? For one possible answer, let’s go to the Christian world’s foundational text, John 18:37–38, from the King James Bible:

  Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this I was born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

  And as the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan added centuries later, perhaps mindful of his own membership in the Nazi party when it stood him in good stead with the German authorities: “The truth is nowhere.”

  But everything should not be negotiable. The Unholy Left would like it to be so, since negotiability is crucial to Critical Theory: What is truth? The truth is nowhere, answer the National Socialists. And yet, for leftists, their own philosophy is very much not debatable. Along the one-way street that is Marxism-Leninism, whether of the political or cultural variety, what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable. It’s a Three Stooges routine that’s lasted long enough to achieve some sort of authenticity. As Noah Cross says to Jake Gittes in Chinatown: “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

  On the high ground, there is no negotiating. Only those on the low ground seek an advantage through palaver, temporary truces, and false flags. The Germans, faked out by Allied disinformation, were not entirely prepared for the D-Day onslaught. Other assaults on impregnable redoubts have been repelled, unless a siege finally starved out the defenders. The Germans besieged Leningrad for almost 900 days and still failed to take the city.

  The classic ratio for attackers to defenders is three to one; and if the defenders have the odds on their side and open supply lines, they can last indefinitely. Vastly outnumbered by the forces of the Mahdi, General Gordon held out in Khartoum for ten months in 1884 and 1885, waiting for Prime Minister Gladstone to send a relief column, which arrived two days late; Gordon’s head was cut off by the Mahdi’s dervishes and stuck up in a tree, and his body was thrown into the Nile as food for the crocodiles. In an act of then-characteristic Western vengeance, shortly after the Mahdi’s death (probably from smallpox), General Kitchener annihilated the Muslim forces at Omdurman, outside Khartoum, destroyed the Mahdi’s tomb, severed the corpse’s head, threw the bones in the river, and either retained the skull or, by some accounts, sent it to Queen Victoria as a souvenir.

  Today, the West takes the news of the latest Islamic beheading video in stride—that’s just what those Muslims do, people seem to think—but would never think of reciprocating in kind should the need arise. Indeed, the American way of warfare is to do nothing to “insult” the enemy except, perhaps, under exigent circumstances, kill him. Wars are no longer run by generals in the field but by lawyers; in Afghanistan, the decision to kill even a midlevel Taliban commander had to go through layers of sign-offs before a drone or sniper could take a shot. What wonders what Kitchener, who mowed down the Mahdi’s men without compunction, would have made of this moral cowardice disguised as morality. As Hilaire Belloc’s famous couplet has it: “Whatever happens, we have got / the Maxim gun and they have not.” But now we won’t use it, lest it be deemed “disproportionate,” “unmeasured,” or simply “unfair.”

  The loss of cultural confidence was precisely what the Frankfurt School and its descendants sought and still seek to engender. It is their only path to victory, which is why—even as they have seized the high ground of the academy and the media—they continue to roll over and expose their bellies like whipped curs whenever they are directly confronted. Pleas for “tolerance,” a weakness masquerading as a virtue, still serve them well. It is long past time to giv
e them a taste of their own “repressive tolerance,” à la Marcuse, to mark the boundary clearly between dissent and sedition, between advocacy and treason. By consistently claiming that some solutions are “off-limits” to “civilized” peoples, they undermine the very principles of civilization they pretend to advocate—the first of which is the right to civilizational and personal self-defense. They are a suicide cult enticing the rest of us to join them.

  But the moral high ground is not yet theirs, as much as they would wish it so. Constantly forced into a strategy of subterfuge, dissimulation, misdirection, and open deception—I have dubbed it “American taqiyya,” a counterpart to the Muslim concept of religiously acceptable dissimulation—there is no lie the Left will not tell in the furtherance of its sociopolitical goals. To maintain the martial metaphor, they are essentially double agents, operating behind the lines of Western civilization. That they are not called out and dealt with aggressively in the court of public onion and, when necessary, in courts of law, is one of the shames of our age. The only weapon they have is words—but we can hear the music behind them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  OF WORDS AND MUSIC

  A free society is one marked by what you can say, which is and should be just about everything. We thought we had enshrined this principle in the First Amendment, which applies primarily to government censorship of speech, both at the federal and, latterly via the doctrine of incorporation, among the several states. In a free society of free citizens, speech is the medium and proof of freedom itself.

  An unfree society, on the other hand, is noteworthy for what you cannot say, which is just about anything that might disturb the overall leftist narrative or that might be at variance with an ever-changing series of politically expedient norms. In an unfree society, people keep their heads down and their mouths shut, fearful of exposing themselves in any way to such treatments as one might find in Room 101 of Orwell’s Ministry of Love.