the devil's pitchfork
SEEKING THE ORIGIN OF OUR PRESENT TROUBLES
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012.His latest
book is Notes
from a Derelict Culture. A CD of his original
songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
The progressivist campaign to destroy America is three-pronged,
the tines of the devil’s pitchfork, namely: de-individuation,
de-historicizing, and what I’m tempted to call pre-eminent
domain (the power of the state to take more than one’s
physical property). In other words, it is a war against three
intimately related phenomena: self-governing personhood, historical
memory, and the possession of property, whether intellectual
or private property as understood by John Locke.1 Thus our ideas
are no longer our own but state-injected bromides, history has
been co-opted in the service of a political fantasy, and ownership
is the prerogative of the state.
It
is clear that the entire sensibility of the age, and certainly
of the coming era, has changed dramatically, not only as the
result of the onslaught of lethal political and cultural viruses
like democratic socialism, “social justice,” postmodern
relativism and radical feminism, but of the “Information
Revolution” and its carrier, the Internet, in particular
the social media platforms run by a cabal of corporate oligarchs.
The ideological trifecta appears to be irresistible:
The leftist rot
has burrowed so deep into the timbers of the nation that it
is moot whether it can ever be pumiced clean. The minions of
the left -- unhinged academics, ignorant politicians, radical
feminists, “social justice” warriors, global warmists,
Deep State operatives, the Democrat party and similar political
organizations throughout the West, media fifth columnists, the
various agents of institutional culture, left-wing sans culottes,
union syndicalists and metrotextual intellectuals -- contend
for a millenarian utopia of uniform contentment and enforced
equality, oblivious of that resonant Yogism: “If the world
was perfect, it wouldn’t be.” The real world of
inevitable differences in talent, drive, intelligence, character,
and accomplishment is given short shrift, to everyone’s
imminent cost.
Where did all this
come from? A starting-point is always elusive -- one recalls
the lone provocative idea of deconstructionist Jacques Derrida,
namely, that origins always recede. Was the Revolutionary War
a blunder that has come to haunt a nation of immature colonists?
Did the Founding Fathers sow an abstract and hypocritical ideal
into the fabric of the Republic? Was slavery an original sin
for which there is no redemption? Were these the origins of
America’s cultural malaise? We may as well return to the
singularity at the Big Bang or to the Garden of Eden and the
first bite of the apple -- as revived in a computer company
logo. All such explanations are, to be candid, utter nonsense.
They are mere hypotheses, unmoored theories, with no basis in
empirical fact. One recalls another pertinent Yogism: “In
theory, there is no difference between practice and theory.
In practice, there is.”
We can say that
the early communist John Dewey’s theories of child-centered
(or whole child) “progressivist education” exerted
a salient bearing on the infantilization of American pedagogy
-- “snowflake” psychology is a distant relative
of this academic heresy. A more immediate cause can be found
in the rigorously leftist Frankfurt School (aka the Institute
for Social Research), a collection of émigrés
from Nazi Germany -- Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Erich
Fromm3 and Herbert Marcuse among the most significant -- who
by their presence and/or writings infiltrated the echelons of
higher education and eventually came to dominate its curriculum.
The hordes of ignorant, lifelong-indebted, disposable epigones
rioting in the streets are the legacy of these socialist ideologues.
One of the core
concerns of these scholars was the rise of “mass culture.”
They believed that the underlying reality of American life and
mores was intrinsically fascist and could only be saved if the
hoi polloi were guided by a wise and highly educated elite embracing
the neo-Marxist maxim of Antonio Gramsci and Rudi Dutschke --
the “long march through the institutions.” The subversion
of free-market dynamics, democratic processes and the Judeo-Christian
framework of Western civilization was understood as obligatory.
In the course of time they took over the education establishment,
their influence spreading to the media, the entertainment industry,
the corporations, and what Angelo Codevilla calls the political
Ruling Class and Donald Trump calls “the Swamp.”
There is not the slightest doubt that the soil for revolution
was richly fumetted in the post-WW II university.
The graduates of
the ideologically contaminated universities of the sixties,
seventies and eighties became professors carrying the torch
of so-called “Critical Theory,” including feminism,
critical race theory, critical pedagogy and post-colonial critique,
all seeking to deconstruct the concepts of truth, reason, merit
and scientific objectivity and to destabilize the norms and
usages of traditional society in the name of “liberation
from slavery.” As noted, the students and riffraff we
see wreaking havoc in our cities today, burning, looting, maiming
and even killing, are the grandchildren of the revisionist doctrines
of the leftist universities, the cultural arsonists of our day.
They are precisely those who have suffered the demonic triple
immolation -- the thrust of the devil’s trident -- having
been despoiled of responsible and conscientious individuality,
scoured of historical memory, and their most intimate property,
their minds, seized by the left as society’s droid-like
settlers of account, as righteous criminals given license to
destroy what they do not understand.
I regret to say
-- for I will be asked -- that I have no solution to offer for
the devastation we have brought upon ourselves, or what amounts
to the same thing, the solution I would propose, and have proposed
in previous writings, would be unacceptable to many people,
including conservatives. I have argued that if America -- and
the West -- is to survive its own craven and misconceived prudence,
it has no option but to attack the left and all its institutional
manifestations root and branch, whether through legislation,
executive action or, should there be no choice, martial initiatives.
There are historical precedents for determined responses to
national subversion. To mention only three: Lincoln in 1861,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who abolished the Ottoman Empire
in 1922, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of my own country
who put down a violent and murderous insurrectionary movement
in 1970.
Selwyn Duke argues
persuasively that it is far too late to rescue the Republic,
and that the only answer to the coming calamity is nullification
after the country dissolves -- that is, what Thomas Jefferson
called the “rightful remedy” to Federal overreach,
which in practice amounts to secession. Or is the battle still
winnable, for a truce or an armistice is clearly impossible.
Dinesh D’Souza concludes his recent The United States
of Socialism by reminding us that the left “has unleashed
their fury against us, just as they did a century and a half
ago at Fort Sumter. Let’s unleash out fury against them,”
he urges, “as Lincoln did in response to Fort Sumter…
it is time for us to put on our battle fatigues.”
Whatever strategy
or initiative we adopt, we need to remember that demurral has
its price, which is why, absent decisive action, it looks like
the left will eventually triumph and why we may one day find
ourselves living in a politically laundered version of CHAZ/CHOP,
skewered by the devil’s trident.
