The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Opelousas Catholic High in Louisiana has the distinction of being the first U.S. high school to ban the work of Flannery O’Connor, perhaps the finest Catholic fiction writer of twentieth-century America. Black parents and a black priest at Opelousas Catholic demanded that O’Connor’s collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, containing the short story “The Artificial Nigger,” be removed from school reading lists.64

  But, as Catholic film critic and New York Post columnist Ron Dreher writes, O‘Connor, by featuring “white bigots as protagonists,” “exposes and condemns the hellish pride that leads these characters to dismiss black people as ‘niggers’ and ‘pickaninnies.’”65 He writes that “The Artificial Nigger,” which O’Connor considered her best work, “offers a psychologically penetrating portrait of cracker racism.”66

  Bhp. Edward O‘Donnell initially fended off demands for O’Connor’s purge from the curriculum by pointing out that her books were taught at Xavier, Grambling, Southern, and other black colleges. But His Eminence quickly capitulated and ordered that all O‘Connor books be removed from diocesan Catholic schools and that “no similar books” replace them.67 Any book containing racial epithets is forbidden, no matter the context, which would seem to rule out not only Twain, O’Connor, and Harper Lee, but William Faulkner and black authors Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Writes Dreher:

  “Essentially, O’Connor is not about race at all, which is why it is so refreshing, coming, as it does, out of such a racial culture,” the black novelist Alice Walker once wrote about O‘Connor. “If it can be said to be ‘about’ anything, then it is ‘about’ prophets and prophecy, ‘about’ revelation and ‘about’ the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don’t have a chance of spiritual growth without it.”68

  “Prime stuff, you would think for study in a Catholic high school in the deep South,” Dreher adds.69 Yes, you would think so.

  • In 1999, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was admonished in a formal resolution by the National Bar Association for singing “Dixie” at the judicial conference of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.70 Rehnquist annually attends and leads the sing-along.

  Yet “Dixie” was ordered played by Lincoln himself when he visited the Confederate capital after Richmond had fallen to Grant’s army. For generations after the Civil War, “Dixie” was as popular at Democratic party conventions as “Happy Days Are Here Again” after FDR. Yet the National Bar Association insists that the song is a “symbol of slavery and oppression.”71 Here are the words; let the reader be the judge:

  First Verse:

  I wish I was in the land of cotton,

  Old times there are not forgotten,

  Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land.

  In Dixie land where I was born in, early on a frosty mornin’,

  Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land.

  Chorus:

  Then I wish I was in Dixie, hooray! Hooray!

  In Dixie land I’ll take my stand, to live and die in Dixie,

  Away, away, away down south in Dixie,

  Away, away, away down south in Dixie.72

  Not as weighty as the Cantos of Ezra Pound, but what does this little ditty have to do with slavery and oppression? In Gaslight Square in the St. Louis of the early 1960s, the black Dixieland jazz band closed each nightly performance with a rendition of “Dixie,” followed by “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” All mellowed patrons stood, sang, and cheered both. How insensitive we all were.

  By 1999, however, Justice Rehnquist was already a citizen under suspicion by the thought police for refusing to redesignate the Supreme Court’s Christmas party as a “Holiday Party.”73 The singing chief justice apparently also insists on taking the lead in warbling the Christmas carols his colleagues have outlawed from America’s public schools.

  • Though the Cross of St. Andrew only flew over the Civil War battlefields for four years, the American flag flew for more than four generations over a country whose constitution countenanced slavery. It was thus inevitable that the turn of Old Glory would also come. And so it has. In the spring of 2001, Democratic representative Henry Brooks of Memphis, former membership chairman of the NAACP’s Political Action Committee, refused to stand in the Tennessee legislature during the Pledge of Allegiance. Said Brooks: “This flag represents the former colonies that enslaved our ancestors.”74 While the NAACP “did not respond to requests” for comment on Brooks’s defiance, columnist Julianne Malveaux did. It is “ridiculous,” said Malveaux, for African Americans to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, for the words “are nothing but a lie, just a lie.”75 For some Americans, racial consciousness now conflicts with, and supersedes, national consciousness.

  But the war on the past is not unique to America.

  The new mayor of London, “Red Ken” Livingstone, wants to knock off their pedestals British generals whose names are associated with empire and rule of peoples of color. Among the statues the iconoclastic mayor wanted down are those of Adm. Sir Charles Napier, who conquered Sindh in 1843, and Sir Henry Havelock, who suppressed the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857.76 Napier is remembered for having sent back to his commanders the coded message “Peccavi”—Latin for “I have sinned.”

  But the most famous of those whom Red Ken no longer wants in his London is Maj. Gen. Charles “Chinese” Gordon, who suppressed the Taiping Rebellion in China, helped end the slave trade, and died in Sudan when his small force suffered the fate of Custer’s, fighting the dervishes of the Mahdi.77 Gordon’s head was put on a pole and brought to the Mahdi’s tent, to the immense consternation of Queen Victoria. Two decades after that battle of Khartoum, the British took their revenge at Omdurman, where eleven thousand wildly charging dervishes were cut down by the rifles and Maxim guns of General Kitchener. Among those making history’s final great cavalry charge was young Winston Churchill. The Anglo-Egyptian army lost forty-eight men, and Hilaire Belloc tipped his cap to British technology:

  Whatever happens, we have got

  The Maxim gun, and they have not.78

  Kitchener proceeded to desecrate the Mahdi’s tomb and thought of using his skull as an inkstand, so perhaps his statue should come down as well. In the 1966 film Khartoum, the Mahdi was played by Lawrence Olivier and General Gordon by Charlton Heston, currently of the National Rifle Association. Meanwhile, plans advance to erect in Trafalgar Square, where Adm. Horatio Nelson’s column stands, a nine-foot statue of Nelson Mandela.

  France also hosts the new iconoclasts. When the government tried to organize a 1996 celebration to mark the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, king of the Franks, Socialists, Communists, and all the parties of the Left—half of France—protested any commemoration of the year that France became Christian.79

  WHAT DO THESE incidents tell us? That those who loudly preach diversity often do not practice it, that those who decry intolerance may be found among the most intolerant. Like the Taliban and the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan, our cultural revolution intends to tear down all the flags and statues of the old America that it abhors. And it will hear no appeal.

  Whether a state chooses to honor Dr. King or Robert E. Lee should be a decision for its own people. No stigma should attach to any state that chooses to honor one, both, or neither. But that is unacceptable. Not to honor Dr. King today is intolerable. When Arizona voted not to have a holiday for King, the state was threatened with loss of the Super Bowl and convention boycotts, and berated by the national press.80 The pressure and abuse were so unbearable that the state overturned a popular vote and ratified the holiday. Only then was Arizona permitted to rejoin the Union.

  THE CITADEL IN South Carolina, one of two U.S. colleges with an all-male cadet corps, a 150-year-old tradition, was the target of repeated and bankrupting court challenges to force the school to admit women. The Citadel wanted to keep its tradition. The women of the Citadel—wives, sisters, mothers, daughters of graduates—wanted to keep the tradition. So did South Carolina. But what people
want no longer matters in America. A federal court ordered the Citadel to bring women into the cadet corps.

  In our Orwellian world of Newspeak, diversity means conformity. In the name of diversity, every military school must look alike. None may be all-male, even if that is what those to whom the school belongs desire. Is this freedom? Is this democracy? No. Orwell got it right: “One makes the revolution … to establish the dictatorship.”81 The French and Russian and Maoist and Khmer Rouge and Taliban revolutions all dethroned the old gods and desecrated their temples. So it is with our cultural revolution. It cannot abide dissent. Only after Senator McCain apologized for not having denounced the Confederate battle flag over the South Carolina capitol, and confessed to opportunism and weakness, was he restored to the good graces of the revolution.

  THE NEW HISTORY

  “Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor.”82 So said Noah Webster. So we once believed. But the cultural revolution is purging the history “of those illustrious heroes and statesmen” from public schools to prepare a new curriculum, to separate children from parents in their beliefs, and to cut children off from their heritage. Said Solzhenitzyn: “To destroy a people you must first sever their roots.”83 To create a “new people,” the agents of our cultural revolution must first create a new history; and that project is well advanced.

  In 1992, UCLA was awarded two million dollars by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education to develop new National History Standards for the textbooks for children from the fifth through twelfth grades.84 In 1997, UCLA completed its assignment. In the history texts to be studied by American children in the public schools of the future:

  • No mention was made of Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or the Wright Brothers.

  • There were seventeen references to the Ku Klux Klan and nine references to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.

  • Harriet Tubman was referenced six times, while Robert E. Lee was ignored.

  • The founding dates of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women were recommended for special notice.

  • Instructions for teaching students about the traitor Alger Hiss and executed Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who gave the atom bomb secrets to Stalin, urged “leeway for teachers to teach it either way.”

  • The Constitutional Convention was never mentioned.

  • The presidency of George Washington was unmentioned, as was his Farewell Address. Instead, students were “invited to construct a dialogue between an Indian Leader and George Washington at the end of the Revolutionary War.”

  • America’s 1969 moon landing did not appear, but the Soviet Union was commended for its great “advances” in space exploration.

  • The only congressional figure included was House Speaker “Tip” O’Neill, cited for calling President Reagan a “cheerleader for selfishness.”

  • Teachers were urged to have their pupils conduct a mock trial of John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil.

  • Students were instructed to “analyze the achievements of and grandeur of Mansa Musa’s court, and the social customs and wealth of the kingdom of Mali,” and to study Aztec “skills, labor system, and architecture.” No mention of the quaint old Aztec custom of human sacrifice.

  Were the National History Standards “flushed down the toilet,” as Rush Limbaugh recommended? It would not appear so. In December 2000, the Washington Times reported on the new Virginia State Standards for Learning History.85 First graders will find Pocahontas gets equal time with Capt. John Smith. In introducing younger children to the Civil War, teachers have dropped Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson. Third graders will study the “highly developed West African kingdom of Mali” of our old friend Mansa Musa. A new emphasis is to be placed on Confucianism and Indus Valley civilization. Who and what were dropped to make room for Confucius? Paul Revere, Davy Crockett, Booker T. Washington, John Paul Jones, Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims, Independence Day, and Virginia statesman Harry F. Byrd, Sr.

  THE WAR ON America’s past and the dumbing down of American children—to make their minds empty vessels into which the New History may be poured—is succeeding. In a recent student survey, 556 seniors, from fifty-five of the nation’s top-rated colleges and universities, were asked thirty-four questions from a high school course on U.S. history. Four out of five flunked.86 Only one-third of the colleges seniors could name the American general at Yorktown. Only 23 percent named Madison as the principal author of the Constitution. Only 22 percent linked the words “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The good news—98 percent knew rapper Snoop Doggy Dog, and 99 percent identified Beavis and Butthead.87

  “We cannot escape history,” said Lincoln. But thanks to our cultural revolution, the Gen-Xers may have just done it.

  Ten years ago, Jesse Jackson led a Philistine parade across the Palo Alto campus of Stanford chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go.”88 Faced with so convincing an argument, Stanford replaced its required course in Western civilization with a new one, “Culture, Ideas and Values.”89 Today, not one of the fifty-five elite colleges and universities, as rated by U.S. News and World Report, requires a course in American history to graduate.90

  “The debate about curriculum,” writes Dr. Schlesinger, “is a debate about what it means to be an American. What is ultimately at stake is the American future.”91 But what will America’s future be when it is decided by a generation oblivious to American history and suffering from cultural Alzheimer’s?

  About the time the UCLA standards became public, the Smithsonian Institution held its fiftieth anniversary exhibit of V-J Day. That exhibit, which featured the cockpit of the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay, had ignited an explosion of veterans’ and public wrath for its portrayal of America’s war in the Pacific as racist. Columnist John Leo of U.S. News took the occasion to visit other museums on the Mall that teach tourists and schoolchildren about America’s past.

  At the Museum of American History, Leo found the “Science in American Life” exhibit to be a “disparaging, politically loaded look at American science, concentrating single-mindedly only on failures and dangers: DDT, Three Mile Island, the ozone hole, acid rain, the explosion of the Challenger, Love Canal.”92 At the Air and Space Museum, he found the airplane indicted as an invention whose primary use has been for mass slaughter. In future scripts, however, Leo found that Japanese kamikaze pilots, whose suicide crashes took a terrible toll on U.S. Navy ships and American sailors, would be painted as heroes of the air. The children of Gramsci had captured the museums of America.

  Almost alone, novelist Tom Wolfe noted the astonishing absence of any celebration of the “First American Century” at its close on December 31, 1999, the eve of the millennium.

  Where was I. On the wrong page? The wrong channel? Outside the bandwidth? … [D]id a single solitary savant note that the First American Century had just come to an end and the Second American Century had begun?

  Was a single bard bestirred to write a mighty anthem—along the lines of James Thomson’s “Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves! Britons never shall be slaves!” for America, the nation that in the century just concluded had vanquished two barbaric nationalist brotherhoods, the German Nazis and the Russian Communists, two hordes of methodical slave-hunting predators who made the Huns and Magyars look whimsical by comparison … .

  Did any of the America-at-century’s-end network TV specials strike the exuberant note that Queen Victoria’s Diamond jubilee struck in 1897?

  My impression was that one American Century rolled into another with all the pomp and circumstance of a mouse pad. America’s great triumph inspired all the patriotism a
nd pride … all of the yearning for glory and empire … all of the martial jubilee music of a mouse click.93

  Who looked back in pride at all America had accomplished in the century just ended? In all the celebrations from London to New York to Tokyo to Beijing, who looked back to the Man whose two-thousandth birthday it was? Almost none, for, by the coming of the new millennium, Americans were living in a civilization, culture, and country that, in its public life, was well along the way to de-Christianization.

  EIGHT

  DE-CHRISTIANIZING AMERICA

  Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,

  And unawares Morality expires.1

  —Alexander Pope

  A people without religion will in the end find that it has nothing to live for.2

  —T. S. Eliot, 1939

  In the Great War of 1914-18, Catholic France fought Catholic Austria, and Protestant Germany fought Protestant England. Nine million Christian soldiers marched to their deaths. Yet only Orthodox Russia succumbed to a Communist revolution, and that was more coup d’état than mass conversion. Gramsci concluded that two thousand years of Christianity had made the soul of Western Man impenetrable to Marxism. Before the West could be conquered, its faith must be uprooted. But how?

  Gramsci’s answer—a “long march” through the institutions. The Marxists must cooperate with progressives to capture the institutions that shaped the souls of the young: schools, colleges, movies, music, arts, and the new mass media that came uncensored into every home, radio, and, after Gramsci’s death, television. Once the cultural institutions were captured, a united Left could begin the de-Christianization of the West. When, after several generations, this was accomplished, the West would no longer be the West, but another civilization altogether, and control of the state would inevitably follow control of the culture.