Culture Wars: Volume 38 Issue 11

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“No social progress outside the moral order.” VOLUME 38, NO. 11

Table of Contents Letters Editor: E. Michael Jones, Ph.D. Business Manager: Ruth P. Jones Typesetting and Layout: Ultramontane Associates, Inc.

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Culture of Death Watch Sidney Rittenberg:

The Jew Behind Communist China by David Martin

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Buyers Remorse in Ireland © Copyright Ultramontane Associates, November 2019 (Volume 38 No. 11) Culture Wars Magazine is published monthly, except for a combined July/ August issue, by Ultramontane Associates, Inc. (ISSN 1080-9058) Subscription price in U.S. is $49 per year; $90 per year outside U.S. Single issue price: $5.00 + $1.75 Shipping. Visa & Mastercard accepted. All subscription requests and changes of address may be sent to: Culture Wars Magazine 206 Marquette Ave., South Bend, IN  6617 Or by E-Mail: [email protected] Send editorial mail and nonreturnable manuscripts to the address listed above, or via E-Mail to: [email protected] Fax: (574) 289-1461 Phone: (574) 289-9786 General inquiry: [email protected]

Nostalgia for Bad Roads by Geraldine Comiskey

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Features Greta Thunberg:

Climate Change & Mental Illness by E. Michael Jones

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Reviews Fatally Flawed

A Review of Taylor Marshall's Infiltration by Jonas Alexis

Bullets by James G. Bruen, Jr.

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LETTERS THE APOSTASY OF IRELAND In the September issue, Geraldine Comiskey describes the apostasy of Ireland after centuries of being known as the isle of saints and scholars. She shows how the void created by abandonment of Christ tends to be filled by paganism, sexual perversion and witchcraft, which are actively promoted by the state. It is a pattern that can be recognized in other previously Catholic countries. One example is Italy. The former chief exorcist of Rome, Father Gabriele Amorth, punctuates his books with stories of the way in which many Italians have given up on the Church and instead consult astrologers, warlocks and various satanic conmen to heal their aching bodies and disturbed souls. Father Amorth notes that this lamentable tendency is not always the fault of the individuals seeking help. Sometimes they tried first to obtain assistance from a priest, but were rebuffed, especially if they expressed fear of a possible diabolical cause behind their woes. At the end of the article, Geraldine Comiskey quotes from a book by Zachary King who apparently used to participate as a “wizard” in satanic abortion rituals. (She does not say what he is doing now.) King rightly observes that Catholics are the preeminent object of hatred among members of Wicca and other anti-Christian popular movements. However, King wrongly goes on to say that this hatred is a sign that the devil is afraid of well-formed Catholics who understand their faith. He claims that the devil does not want to do battle with such individuals.

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This false assertion is contradicted by Sacred Scripture and the lives of the saints. In the Old Testament, Satan certainly wanted to do battle with Job who was an upright man. God permitted Satan to temporarily ruin Job’s life, though not to touch his person. In the New Testament, Satan did not hesitate to tempt Christ Himself, proving that the evil blasphemer does not tremble even before perfect holiness. Countless saints have testified that they were directly and literally harassed by demons. In some cases, an increase in holiness only seemed to make the attacks worse. St. John Vianney was mocked and terrorized by demons for so long that he eventually took it all in a day’s work, even when demons set his bed on fire. St. Gemma Galgani experienced actual demonic possession during which she would break her rosary into pieces and fling it away in a rage. In our own day, Padre Pio said unequivocally that God permitted demons to beat him to a pulp. So let us not imagine that the devil fears anyone’s sanctity.

Lise Anglin Toronto

UNAVAILABLE PSYCHOLOGISTS I am concerned by what I read in various Roman Catholic media stating as if it is universally available that so-and-so should be seen by a psychologist, because I have learned that the specialty is difficult to complete, taking a decade, and few are successful even with their Ph.Ds. I bring to you for your consideration, that the solutions to the issues brought up by vari-

ous Roman Catholic media need to be addressed without relying on psychologists if psychologists become increasingly unavailable to provide care. My psychologist says many hospitals, including his E.R. son's hospital, would provide him with an office tomorrow, but many of the patients who would be sent to him would not be interested in seeing him, but rather, would be required to see him. Apparently only 50 percent of patients follow doctors orders, which explains why his E.R. doctor son saw a man with a black leg who said in reply to being told he was being sent upstairs to have surgery, which would probably require part of his gangrenous leg to be removed above the knee, "Can't you just prescribe me antibiotics (to clear it up)?" This 75 year old Catholic psychologist is retiring September 20, 2019, and will take on the roll with the Catholic Psychology Association of recruiting Catholics to join in the four northwestern states; the Association has psychologists willing to be identified Catholic in the Southeastern states, but few in other parts of the country. He is originally from New Jersey (after 6 years at Catholic Charities Drug/Alcohol Program, did 21 years supervising over 24 psychologists at the state of N.J. mental health/drug/alcohol hospitalization program [better because the mental health component meant they could attract psychiatrists who prescribe medicine helping addicts get off drugs and alcohol, with the additional benefit of psychiatrists being able to bill insurance companies along with psychologists]). He is also a 26 year Deacon of our Church and does the homily on Wednesday, 8 a.m. mass, Holy Rosary Church, Ed-

monds, WA. Edmonds has many well-to-do, like Mercer Island, both by Seattle, where young people, not only Asian young people, who fail academically will sometimes commit suicide. His background was lower and upper seminary with the Columban Fathers, who taught him to cut hair so that he could earn money; I do not know when his parents died, but he was still in formation to become a priest, but instead of finishing, joined the Coast Guard toward the end of the Vietnam War and was a "Radar (as in M.A.S.H.)" on an old U.S. Navy WWII vessel that patrolled at least in the Caribbean. He married, studied at Fordham after winning a seat in their Ph.D psychology program, but since the thesis adviser professor transferred to New York University, Fordham had to pay extra to keep her as his advisor (no one else at Fordham did his chosen specialty, which was Marriage and Family). Later, he taught for 10 years at Princeton, courses to mostly employed people taking time off work to study "Conceptualizing," a key term in psychologists' treatment of patients' psychological problems, which is why psychologists ask their patients "how are you today and with what are you dealing?" Unfortunately, with so many being in sole practitioner office arrangements, and the insurance industry no longer using one clearing house for In-Network and Out-of-Network Provider designations, but instead being required to be on many clearing house lists, he says the psychologist of today can either "chase the money" or "provide psychotherapy." As he has set-up his retirement for September 20th and notified these clearing houses, their

computer programming is so inefficient, that they closed his account immediately instead of closing it after the retirement date! Another problem in the way computer systems are set up is that if even one question of a bank of questions is not answered, one cannot submit claims for payment. Why would anyone go into this field under the current business conditions? My psychologist recalled a sweet story of an Archbishop or Cardinal who had attended Vatican II. In speaking to a U.S. congregation, he explained that he was giving up his train style robe to the Little Sisters of the Poor for them to make "Cardinal Dolls," because Vatican II taught simplicity! Oh, for the days when doll making was something women had time to do.

Rosemarie Dickson Cook [email protected]

BURNING MAN The topic of last month’s issue is extremely interesting and it made me wonder if you have ever heard of an event called Burning Man, which takes place every year in some desert in the USA during the time of equinox between summer and fall in the northern hemisphere. This is probably the biggest neo-pagan event taking place in the world in our times. In 2017, a man ended up dying in the fire, which inevitably makes us think of some kind of human sacrifice. According to what I read some time ago on Wikipedia, the creators of such hedonistic artsy-fartsy festival deny having had the Wicker Man as inspiration to this, but the similarities are more than blatant.

Mirella Maines [email protected]

Culture Wars welcomes letters to the editor. Preference will be given to letters which deal with topics discussed in the magazine. Letters should ideally be limited to one single-spaced page, but we know how difficult it is to follow ideals in this world. Letters can be sent by fax to 574-289-1461; or by electronic mail to [email protected].

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TROTSKY'S ROLE After reading the letter from Per Berglund, PhD in Culture Wars Oct. 2019, I got the sense that I needed to discard all of the “conspiracy infotainment circuit” books that I have collected and read after my first conspiracy book, The Unseen Hand, by Ralph Epperson, back in the early 80s. It seems that one of the main points of the ongoing conspiracy is not what it appears to be. In fact, according to Mr. Berglund, “The Bolshevik takeover in Russia as a Rothschild conspiracy through Jacob Schiff, head of Kuhn & Loeb,” was nothing more than his agent, Leon Trotsky, getting Rothschild his Baku oil fields back and undoubtedly also plunder[ing] Russia….” And to do this “his job was to infiltrate and subvert the Bolshevik Revolution….” I am not sure if Mr. Berglund is trying to dispel from our minds an evil “Rothschild conspiracy,” but in a quick perusal of my collection of e-books I came up with so many hits on “Rothschild” that I am thinking: “How could a family name be so much in the conspiracy circuit and yet somehow be innocent of anything having to do with the ultimate takeover of a country as large as Russia by a small bunch of revolutionaries? The thing is that Mr. Berglund says one thing about the Rothschilds, while so many authors disagree with him: David Allen Rivera, Christopher Story, Jim Marrs, William T. Still, Eustace Mullins, Gary Allen, and many others. But to get back to the issue of “Who Leon Trotsky really was?” Was he only a harmless agent of Jacob Schiff, or something more

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sinister? From the author, David Allen Rivera, I find that, “Official records, later declassified by the Canadian government, indicate that they knew Trotsky and his small army were ‘socialists leaving for the purposes of starting revolution against present Russian government....’ The Canadians were concerned that if Lenin would take over Russia, he would sign a Peace Treaty and stop the fighting between Russia and Germany, so that the Germany Army could be diverted to possibly mount an offensive against the United States and Canada” (Final Warning: A History of the New World Order, by David Allen Rivera). Leon Trotsky left the United States by ship on March 27, 1917—just days before America entered the war—along with nearly three hundred revolutionaries and funds provided by Wall Street. Trotsky, whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was being trailed by British agents who suspected him of working with German intelligence since his stay in prewar Vienna. In a speech before leaving New York, Trotsky stated, “I am going back to Russia to overthrow the provisional government and stop the war with Germany.” Winston Churchill seems to agree that Trotsky’s intention was to overthrow the provisional government. In a February 8, 1920 article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald, he wrote: [From] the days of Spartacus Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, to those of Trotsky, Bela-Kuhn, Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldman, this world-wide conspiracy ... has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definitely recognizable role in the tragedy of the French Rev-

olution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads, and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews.

From Christopher Story I get the following on the real purpose of revolutionaries like Trotsky: Chaim Rakover (a.k.a. Christian Rakovsky), a Soviet Ambassador who had formerly been a very close associate of Rothschild’s agent, Leon Trotsky—noted Rakover’s assertion that “Communism cannot triumph unless it suppresses the ‘still living’ Christianity.” This claim was vehemently reaffirmed by the Jewish Illuminist President Mikhail Gorbachev on 15th December 1987, when addressing a group of Communist Party cadres, officials and Soviet military personnel in Uzbekistan: “There must be no let-up in the war against religion, because as long as religion exists Communism cannot prevail. We must intensify the obliteration of all religions wherever they are being practiced or taught.” Chaim Rackover then referred to the “Permanent Revolution”—which was always thought to have been the evil Trotsky’s invention—as dating from the birth of Christ, adding that “in reality, Christianity is our only real enemy since.... Christianity control-

ling the individual is capable of annulling the revolutionary projection of the neutral Soviet or atheist State.” Extracting this statement from its redundant historical context, the crucial truth revealed here is that this late “Devil” knew who Jesus Christ was—and, moreover, knew that He was “the enemy” from his birth, rather than from his Crucifixion and Resurrection. To make this distinction requires considerable understanding of the reality that Jesus Christ was and is the enemy of evildoers from the beginning—which Chaim Rakover, though a Jewish Communist friend of the demonic Trotsky, knew perfectly well, not least because he was an educated Jew (The New Underworld Order: Curse of Criminalism, Christopher Story.)

Even the motives of Jacob Schiff comes in for critical examination where, according to the New York Journal—American, “[I]t is estimated by Jacob’s [Schiff’s] grandson, John Schiff , that the old man sank about $20 million for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.” So it appears that the story of both Trotsky and Jacob Schiff are not exactly what Mr. Berglund says they are. I could go on and list all of the inherent problems with the Rothschilds down through history, but that would take an entire article of its own. Be that as it may, there must have been something of great importance going on in Russia at the time for Our Lady to appear to three poor shepherd children at the same time in Portugal as a warning to the world; there must have been more than Trotsky going to Russia as an agent of Jacob Schiff to acquire some oil fields. Or was this all just a coincidence of timing? So what could be the reason for

the going on in Russia at the time? From the writings of Gary Allen: One of the best sources of information on the financing of the Bolshevik Revolution is Czarism and the Revolution by an important White Russian General named Arsene de Goulevitch who was founder in France of the Union of Oppressed Peoples. In this volume, written in French and subsequently translated into English, de Goulevitch notes: “The main purveyors of funds for the revolution, however, were neither the crackpot Russian millionaires nor the armed bandits of Lenin. The ‘real’ money primarily came from certain British and American circles which for a long time past had lent their support to the Russian revolutionary cause….” (None Call it Conspiracy, Gary Allen with Larry Abraham).

On top of that, we get the explanation for the funding of the Bolsheviks from the conspiracy writings of Jim Marrs: Some conspiracy authors have seen a dual purpose to the funding of the Bolsheviks. It is clear that revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky were being used to get Russia out of the war, to the benefit of Germany. And communism was being supported by the globalists to advance their plan of creating tension between the capitalist West and socialist East. A. K. Chesterson, a right-wing British journalist and politician, who in 1933 joined Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists, observed that to understand politics one must make a study of power elites. “These elites, preferring to work in private, are rarely found posed for photographers, and their influence on events has therefore to be deduced from what is known of the agencies they employ.” He once wrote in his magazine, Candour, “At times capitalism and communism

would appear to be in conflict, but this writer is confident that their interests are in common and will eventually merge for one-world control” (The Rise of the Fourth Reich, Jim Marrs).

If I would go farther I could say that E. Michael Jones has been right all along by his portrayal of the “Revolutionary Jew.” According to the American Hebrew of September 10, 1920: “The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was the work of Jewish brains, of Jewish dissatisfaction, of Jewish planning, whose goal is to create a new order in the world. What was performed in so excellent a way in Russia, thanks to Jewish brains, and because of Jewish dissatisfaction and by Jewish planning, shall also, through the same Jewish mental and physical forces, become a reality all over the world.” In addition, I came across this information, by David Allen Rivera, that sheds much needed light on an issue that has been covered before in this magazine. It appears that Mr. Schiff has been busy fomenting trouble in other areas of concern, as it were. What Mr. Rivera was exposing was that “Jacob Schiff, the Rothschild’s man in America, decided that the best way to create racial tension was to establish leadership among the Blacks. In 1909, he laid out plans for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).” This line of action was later written up by the communist agitator Saul Alinsky to “rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression” (Rules for Radicals). Alinsky was subsequently mentor to both Barack Obama and

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Hillary Clinton, as well as the radicals Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The “ClowardPiven Strategy,” as it came to be known, was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine: it seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. And isn’t this what happened in Russia way back in 1917 with the financial support of big money? After all, subversives can get only so far without the funds to back them up. As far as the seeming contradiction of why would big money interests fund groups that seem to be against them, and one of the biggest reasons that these kinds of conspiracies fall on deaf ears, author Gary Allen explained: In the Bolshevik Revolution we have some of the world’s richest and most powerful men financing a movement which claims its very existence is based on the concept of stripping of their wealth men like the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Schiffs, Warburgs, Morgans, Harrimans and Milners. But obviously these men have no fear of international communism. It is only logical to assume that if they financed it and do not fear it, it must be because they control it. Can there be any other explanation that makes sense? Remember that for over 150 years it has been standard operating procedure of the Rothschilds and their allies to control both sides of every conflict. You must have an “enemy” if you are going to collect from the King. The East-West balance-of-power politics is used as one of the main excuses for the socialization of America. Although it was not their main purpose, by nationalization of Russia the Insiders bought

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themselves an enormous piece of real estate, complete with mineral rights, for somewhere between $30 and $40 million (None Call it Conspiracy).

In addition, Lord Alfred Milner, wealthy English man and front man for the Rothschilds, served as paymaster for the International bankers in Petrograd during the Bolshevik Revolution. Milner later headed a secret society known as The Round Table which was dedicated to establishing a world government whereby a clique of super-rich financiers would control the world under the guise of Socialism (my emphasis added). The American subsidiary of this conspiracy is called the Council on Foreign Relations and was started by, and is still controlled by Leftist international bankers. According to a report on file with the State Department, Jacob Schiff’s firm, Kuhn Loeb and Co. bankrolled the first five year plan for Stalin. So after all the evidence I have provided to the contrary, does Mr. Berglund still believe Jacob Schiff and the Rothschild family to be nothing more than fairly disinterested observers of the Russian Revolution, except to get the Rothschild Baku oil fields back through his “agent” Leon Trotsky?

Mike Steil [email protected] MEDJUGORJE AND A FALSE APPARITION SERIES IN POLAND Recently you talked about the phony apparition in Medjugorje. You countered the “good fruits” argument by pointing out to the undoubtedly bad fruits. Personally, I can hardly stand the

“good fruits” argument not only because there are the bad fruits, but because it is based on an error– it is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Let me give you an example. In 1983 we had similar phenomenon in Oława near Wrocław, which you visited. A man from Oława, Kazimeirz Domański, claimed that he had apparitions. Most likely it was a spin off of the M phenomena: if they have it in M, why can't we have it in Oława? The movement gained popularity due to the local media and a TV programme, and some were enthusiastic to be a part of a movement apparently lead by the Holy Mother. The followers started to build a church, which was in private possession. However, this time the church authorities were very sceptical. They started to investigate. They prohibited the faithful to come to the parish where the alleged apparition happened, and only the parishioners were able to visit the parish church. It worked, the flow of inquisitives and “pilgrims” was to a large extent stopped. Then the authorities made a statement that the apparition are not supernatural, like the local bishops in M. This terminated the movement with the exception of a few enthusiasts and the “visionary”. There was to some extent a happy end to this story, because the “visionary” before his death made a confession and was reunified with the Church, and the private church build in Oława was transferred to the Catholic Church. Today, if you asked a young person in Wrocław about those “apparitions,” then probably he/she would not know what you are talking about and the elderly would call them ‘phony’.

I am telling this story to show that the good fruit argument does not work. If the Church authorities did not prohibit the visits, then people would flow in, would pray, confess and go to Holy Communion, as they do in M. So, the promoters would be able to use the “good fruits” argument. Of course, there were deeper reasons for this phenomenon due to the crisis of the Church and the ongoing modernist revolution within it. However, the modernists did not like them, unlike those ones in M, so they did not oppose its termination. The easiest way to terminate M would be to celebrate the TLM there and pronounce the authentic Church teaching. Of course, it will not happen, but if it happened, then the reaction of the Church authorities would be swift and brutal. At some point, you criticized the cooperation of bishops with the civil authorities. It sounded a bit like the catchphrase about the separation of Church and state. However, the Church always condemned the separation, and obviously, if the Catholic Church is the Church of God, then it must not be separated from the state. The Church is the soul of the state. As you know, the separation means the death, and this is what we see now: the separation of the state and the Church, and the death of both. By the way, in your short replay, you have assured me that there would be no doctrinal errors in your new book. Obviously, it is badly necessary, however my doubts after listening to your conversations still remain. My main problem with your concept of Logos and its “progress” is that

it is very naturalistic, i.e., the supernatural dimension of logos is lacking, and the concept of man does not take into consideration the Original Sin and the resulting fall of man. Thus, they are of the doctrinal, metaphysical and anthropological nature. In your concept of logos there is only the truth and the truth, once revealed to the people, self-propels (by the way, I wonder if this is what you mean by the “progress of logos”). The concept can be proved wrong by examples of supressing certain ideas by civil authorities, say in the former Soviet Union. Your concept sounds a bit like the Hegel’s progress of the spirit, or like de Chardin’s cosmic evolution propelled progress. However, we Catholics know that any progress requires grace from God, and without grace we can do no good. Another indicator of a possible naturalism is the twisted definition of the concept of the City of God by St. Augustine you have given in your recent interview: The City of God is where people love one another. Well, St. Augustine defined it differently, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. There is no mention of loving one another, loving one another is merely a consequence of loving God above everything since man is created as the image of God, and thus it is not possible to love God without loving man made in His image. Your concepts remind me of the “civilization of love versus civilization of death” ideology developed and propagated by JPII–actually, on your the CW web-page there

is a reference to the "culture of death." It is a perversion of the concept of St. Augustine deprived of its supernatural core and extended to all people and to false religions like pagan cults, buddhism, hinduism, judaism, …, protestantism and orthodoxy. We may call it Pelagianism, we may call it naturalism, however, the Church teaching is different: the vehicle to unite the whole world is not the “civilization of love,” as Wojtyła wanted it, or any other natural mean, but the Catholic Church. All nations and people are obliged to enter it. I do not want to make my e-mail too long, thus, I will point only to the book The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, by Rev. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp. (available online). It summarizes the Church teaching and extensively quotes various popes. It is a great reading on the supernatural dimension of our existence, which is to a large extent missing in your narrative. Actually, I wonder if you read it, because some of the concepts you advocate are already in his writings. By the way, today people have problems with the supernatural, they are immune to it. Thus, avoiding it in writings makes them more accessible and attractive, however this is of course at the cost of truth. It reminds me of the Gospel passage where Jesus Christ announces the Holy Eucharist and the Jews abandon him because they hopped for a natural messiah [J 6,58-69]. Actually, the Pentecostal movement in the Church (the renewal in the Holy Spirit) is of this kind – they want to fill, to touch, to have, not to believe and trust.

Piotr Ziem [email protected] November 2019 / 7

Culture of Death Watch

SIDNEY RITTENBERG: THE JEW BEHIND COMMUNIST CHINA Sidney Rittenberg died on August 24 of this year, ten days after his 98th birthday. He was probably the most famous American collaborator with the Chinese Communist regime of Mao Zedong (We are not counting Chinese government official, Israel Epstein, as American, although he had his book, The Unfinished Revolution in China, published during the crucial five years in which he lived in the United States). Like Epstein, Rittenberg got long obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post. They might not have been as glowing as Epstein’s, but they were far from being as negative as they might have been for

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this long-term leading turncoat among the population, Mr. Rittenand propagandist for the murder- berg was rewarded with appointous Mao regime. ments at Chinese news and propaAlthough the Times seemed ganda agencies.” to treat him with some approval John F. Kennedy would certainly by headlining its obituary, “Sid- have taken issue with The Post’s exney Rittenberg, Idealistic Ameri- tremely simplistic, pro-Mao, if not can Aide to Mao Who Evolved to to say, pro-Communist view of the loss of China. Counsel CapitalAlfred Kohlists, Dies at 98,” by David Martin from the perspecberg, an Amertive of any rightican businessthinking anti-Communist, The man with many years of experience Post’s article is much the worse with China, would no doubt have of the two. One sentence in The said that The Post is just continuing Post’s obit says it all, “After Mao’s to perpetuate the pro-Communist seizure of power in 1949 over the propaganda with which the Amercorrupt U.S.-backed Nationalist ican mainstream press was packed Party, which enjoyed little support in the 1940s.

Sidney Rittenberg SOUL MATE RITTENBERG? As surprising as it might seem in light of all the anti-Communist writing that I have done, I can easily identify with Rittenberg, although I make no excuses for his actions. We are both Carolinians and we both received some education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My time was spent there getting a Ph.D. in economics after service as an Army lieutenant. Rittenberg entered as a freshman and either attended only briefly before dropping out to become a labor organizer or graduated with a degree in philosophy, depending on whether you believe the Post or the Times obituary. The Times assertion seems to be more plausible, because Rittenberg got the sort of U.S. Army assignment, though a private and not a lieutenant, that would more likely go to a college graduate, as a language specialist, becoming fluent in Chinese and being sent by the Army to China at the close of World War II. Oh, but Rittenberg was Jewish, you say, and a former member of the American Communist Party. On the latter point, I have certainly never been a Communist Party member, but I can attest to the truth of the old saying that if you’re not a socialist when you’re under thirty you have no heart, and if you are a socialist when you’re over thirty, you have no brain. Chapel Hill was certainly a place to feel right at home as a Leftist when I was there, and it was probably more so when Rittenberg was there at the tail end of the Great Depression. Consider the fact that when I was there the most powerful voices against the Vietnam War, which most of us despised, including vir-

tually every fellow veteran that I encountered, were from the Jewish Left. We looked forward every two weeks to reading I.F. Stone’s newsletter, and Noam Chomsky’s anti-war treatises in the New York Review of Books seemed to be the most persuasive. The first verse of my poem, “A Chomsky Dissenter,” captures my attitude toward the man at the time, and well into the years that I taught economics in college: When I trusted Noam Chomsky, I had a cozy home. With my academic friends, I did not feel alone. In 1970, the very pro-Mao article, “Maoist Economic Development: The New Man in the New China,” by respected mainstream economist, John W. Gurley, was all the rage among us graduate students, even though it was weak in

analysis and practically devoid of facts, an ideological screed dressed up in economic jargon which has aged very poorly. About the same time, I also read Jack Belden’s China Shakes the World, and was very favorably impressed, as I see many more recent readers are, too, even years after the horrors inflicted by Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution— admittedly well after the period that Belden reported on—have become known. It’s not at all hard for me to put myself in the young Rittenberg’s shoes and being won over by Mao and his fellow revolutionaries. It’s not like Rittenberg deserted from the Army and went over to the enemy like my very misguided fellow rural Eastern North Carolinian, Charles Robert Jenkins, did in Korea in 1965. Rittenberg stayed in China after his Army tour was over, worked for a

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time in United Nations famine relief, and then joined up with Mao, becoming a propagandist for him. But, again, there’s the matter of Rittenberg’s Jewishness. Wouldn’t that have set him apart from me? To the contrary, for a number of reasons; when I was of the same age as he was when he went over to the Reds, it would have probably made me identify with him even more closely. In the first place, the stereotype of white Southerners generally as prejudiced against Jews and non-whites is simply not true. There are lots of relatively broadminded liberals in the South, and my family liked to count themselves among them. If there is any group of fellow whites that the average Southerner is likely to have some prejudice against, it is Roman Catholics, for doctrinal reasons. That’s because most Southerners are Protestants—Southern Baptists more than any other group, as my family was—and many of them descend directly from religious sects in Europe who were on the Protestant side of the Reformation, when people took those religious differences very seriously. Sunday school instruction in Southern Baptist churches is steeped in Old Testament stories. So was the child’s story Bible from which our second-grade public school teacher read to us regularly, and I imagine that she was hardly unusual as a small-town Southern elementary school teacher. Although the fundamentalist evangelist Oliver B. Greene was ubiquitous on the radio in the South when I was growing up, I can’t say that he had any influence on me or anyone I knew, but his influence in the region had to have been substantial. Many

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times, I heard him offer as a “gift” to anyone sending him money a copy of the Scofield Bible. I have never seen a Scofield Bible, and I was well into middle age before I was to learn that it is an annotated work with a very strong Zionist slant.

What he has just told us is that by one major act of disloyalty to the United States government, he was instrumental in the Communists coming to power in China. Harry Golden’s 1955 book is entitled, Jewish Roots in the Carolinas: A Pattern of American Philo-Semitism. I have not read it, but from my own education and experience I can say that the average rural to small-town Southerner, at least at the time that I was growing up, was much more likely to have a positive rather than a negative attitude toward Jews. Most are unlikely to have known any Jews; I know I didn’t. When I thought of Jews, I thought mainly of those Old Testament characters. I didn’t even think of the numerous comedians I saw on television like Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, or Phil Silvers as Jews or of my beloved Mad magazine as a Jewish publication or the popular Tin Pan Alley music composers as Jews. If I had, it would have only made me more philo-Semitic. I think the only person that I ever laid eyes on in person whom I

knew to be a Jew was that self-same Harry Golden from Charlotte, who wore his Jewishness on his sleeve. He actually came and gave a talk at our church one Sunday evening. I recall that he was an entertaining and likable-seeming fellow, although I don’t recall what he had to say. Only in researching this article did I learn that Golden was actually originally a New Yorker who ended up making his career in Charlotte, settling in the Southeast probably because he had been sent to the Federal Penitentiary down the road in Atlanta for five years for mail fraud when he was living in New York City. He was a popular celebrity, though, by the time that he was invited to speak at our church.

SOUTH CAROLINA VERSUS NORTH CAROLINA As for the Jewish roots in the Carolinas, my impression is that they are much deeper and more important in South Carolina than in North Carolina. There is certainly no North Carolina Wikipedia page to compare to “History of the Jews in Charleston, South Carolina.” From that page we learn that in 1800 South Carolina had the largest Jewish population of any state in the nation. It would not surprise me if North Carolina had the smallest. Rittenberg was a fairly representative Charleston Jew. His father was the head of the of Charleston City Council and his grandfather was a prominent state legislator. Up the road in Dillon County on the border with North Carolina, Alan Shafer was the long-term corrupt Jewish political boss. Judah Benjamin was born in Charleston, but he made his mark

Sidney Rittenberg politically as a U.S. Senator from Louisiana and later became a powerful figure in the Confederacy as Secretary of State. I know of no even near-equivalent person to any of those people in North Carolina. In North Carolina, what few Jews there were at the time I was growing up followed the pattern described by sociologist John Dollard in his classic Caste and Class in a Southern Town. They might own clothing stores and other retail establishments, but they seldom got involved in politics. Their public profile was typically low. It never even occurred to me that Epstein’s and Rosenbloom-Levy, a couple of the clothing stores in the nearby city of Rocky Mount, were Jewish-owned. As Dollard observed, they might have been more liberal in their dealing with blacks than most, but they never felt that they were in any position to rock the boat socially. Though generally accepted on account of their money and skin color as social insiders, they usually felt a little bit like outsiders on account of their roots in the distinctive Jewish culture. The role performed by Jews in South Carolina and much of the rest of the nation was performed in North Carolina during my early childhood by…Martins. One of my father’s older brothers was the chief lobbyist for Wachovia Bank in Raleigh and he was the liberal Democratic chairman of the state party during most of the 1940s. According to family lore, he was also the power behind the throne of alcoholic Governor R. Gregg Cherry, who physically prevented Cherry from taking the delegation out of the 1948 Democratic Convention and throwing in with

Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats. The brother had been a football player at Wake Forest College. The oldest Martin brother was the long-term editor of the liberal Winston-Salem Journal. At one of our last family reunions, his son, in an address to the group, told us that Jonathan Daniels, the editor of the very influential Raleigh News and Observer, told his father that he often looked west to his newspaper to get an idea what his position should be on a particular issue. He also told us that the Jews of Winston-Salem had praised his father for the solid support of his newspaper for the state of Israel.

PHILO-SEMITIC EXPERIENCE By that time, I had learned enough to be a strong dissenter from such a position, but in my youth, there was another reason for me to be even more pro-Jewish than the other Martins. I was in a much better position to identify with those Jewish-fish-slightly-outof-water in Dollard’s book than other family members. My father

became the principal of a school 50 miles east of Raleigh when I was one year old, in Nash County, and I grew up there. He and my mother were from Yadkin County, the next county west of Winston-Salem’s Forsyth County. People from Yadkin and Nash County have the Baptist Church and the English language in common, but that’s about the extent of it. Yadkin was settled largely by Scotch-Irish and Germans who moved down from Western Pennsylvania. Their forbears had largely come to the New World for religious reasons. Nash County was settled by English people who came largely for commercial reasons. Large tracts of land were devoted to commercial farming, requiring slaves, in Nash County. In the northern half of the county where we lived the population was more than half black. The land was largely owned by large landowners and worked by tenant farmers. (The “sharecropper” expression was not used where we lived.) The more enlightened and liberal-minded of the landowners had mainly white tenants who got enough of the share of their labor to be considered a part of the middle class. But there were plenty of the other type of landlords who took advantage of the ignorance of their tenants, either black or downtrodden white, many of whom lived in what one might call “vagabondage,” to coin a term. In my all-white elementary school, we had a number of very poor kids, both from an economic and educational standpoint, come through before moving to another farm out of the school district. The class size shrank rather drastically after the mandatory schooling age of 16 was passed.

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Support for secession and the Confederacy had been, of course, total among the whites in Nash County. Such was not at all the case in my parents’ native Yadkin County, where land tenure was pretty much on a one-family-onefarm largely subsistence-farming basis and slaves were virtually absent. My father’s maternal grandfather hid out in the mountains during the war to avoid service, and later served in the carpetbag government in Raleigh as a legislator. His paternal grandfather fought with Lee and was captured twice, but his son—my father’s father—died before Daddy even knew him and was therefore unable to be much of an influence on him. His mother, the daughter of the carpetbag legislator outlived her husband by some forty years and was therefore a much greater influence on my father’s views. At Davidson College, my experience gave me still more of a natural affinity for Jews. Once again, I was a fish out of water. Only fifteen percent of the student body was not in one of the 12 Greek letter social fraternities, and I was among that former group, which included the one Jew at the college whom I got to know. He was from Philadelphia, and I hit it off with him quite well. I knew of only one other Jewish student. Wouldn’t you know, he was from South Carolina and he belonged to one of the more prestigious social fraternities, no doubt befitting the social status of his family back in the Palmetto State. I encountered no Jews at all during two years in the Army. There was a guy named Nussbaum from Miami in our platoon at ROTC summer camp, between my junior

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and senior years at Davidson, who was the most Jewish looking guy you have ever seen, but he took exception to people who, from offhand comments, gave the impression that they thought he was Jewish. I never sat down and talked to him about that.

GRADUATE SCHOOL REINFORCEMENT In graduate school, it was not just the Jewish anti-war writers who intensified my philo-Semitism. That was the first time I worked and interacted with quite a few Jews. I answered an advertisement and found myself living in the three-bedroom apartment with two Northern Jews right off the bat, sociology and political science graduate students. The sociology guy introduced me to the New York Review of Books and caught me up on a lot of the best pop culture that I had missed the year before while stationed in Korea. We both detested the political science guy, because he would do no household chores and because he was basically an arrogant jerk. The sociology guy told me that the difference between them was that he himself was a Russian Jew while the other guy was a German Jew. That sort of identity politics at that time was completely beyond my ken. To me the political science guy was simply a garden variety jackass. In the first summer school session, I took only one course, one on the history of China to get back into the academic flow, and because my just-finished Army tour in Korea had given me an interest in China. It had surprised me that the South Koreans had a long-term positive view of China, in spite of

that country having been their enemy in the Korean War. All of their animus still seemed to be reserved for their former colonial masters, the Japanese. I liked the young professor of Chinese history, who came across as about as sympathetic to the Communists as the author, Belden. Only in retrospect has it occurred to me that, with his German name, the professor was likely Jewish. The same can be said for one of the two guys with whom I shared a calculator the second summer session in my statistics course. He was from Alabama or Mississippi, with a matching accent, and though he had a name that is probably more typical for Jews than for an average Southerner and perhaps a bit of a Jewish appearance, it never occurred to me that he was. He only mentioned it much later when I encountered him working in Washington, DC, for a non-profit organization. The first professor for whom I was a teaching assistant was Jewish. He was a technocratic Keynesian, and I never got into the subject of politics with him. Keynesianism is, of course, highly political, but like the typical technocratic economist, he seemed to be unaware of the fact. My office mate from the second year through the fourth was also Jewish, and we became good friends, as I was with the one other Jewish graduate school classmate whom I knew to be Jewish. The only time I recall discussing Israel with any of them was with the office mate, who brought it up with a question as to why Americans so heavily favored Israel over the native Palestinians. I responded that I thought it was mainly on account of the heavy propaganda we get. I don’t think he disagreed but said

that he thought that it was mainly fight and possibly die in a war in against the Japanese and not the because we could much more eas- which we did not believe, but the forces of General Chiang Kaiily identify with the Jews in Israel professor’s first concern, it would Shek, the leader of China whom because they were Westerners like appear, was the well-being of the we supported. Perhaps we can cut us. My impression was that he, by state of Israel. “This guy is living him some slack for his decision contrast, held Israel’s Jews at arm’s in the wrong country,” I thought, on that account. It would be an although he was a born-and-bred open-and-shut case against him if length. My professor of comparative American. I was to learn later, in Rittenberg had fulfilled his role of economic systems might well have fact, at a house party he hosted, China’s lead propagandist during been my favorite, and I think one that his son, who was approaching the Korean War, when Mao’s Chiof the two known Jewish class- college age, was planning to immi- na came in in force on the side of North Korea to oppose the U.S.– mates might have summed him grate to Israel. up best as the “very epitome of the The negative stereotype of Jews led United Nations forces on the New York Jewish intellectual,” and as disloyal to the country in which side of the South. I would imaghe meant it in the best sense of the they live could hardly have been ine that we would be thinking of term. more vividly displayed than it was Rittenberg now in the same way Not counting that disagreeable by this professor, and he was quite in which we think of Tokyo Rose. house mate, the But from 1949 one exception to 1955 he was I got a very clear statement from General to my overall locked away as Marshall’s attaché, General Henry Byroade, favorable ima political prispression of Jews that the Americans were definitely going to let oner, upon susat Chapel Hill raised the Nationalists attack and annihilate these 60- picions came in the perby Joseph Stalin 70,000 Communist troops in that area. that he was realson of the second professor ly a U.S. spy. for whom I was a teaching assis- open about it. He clearly cared Before that time, though, he pertant, and it was a real eye-opener. more about the people of Israel, formed, in his own words, at least The Vietnam War was still raging, that is to say, the Jews who lived one very disloyal act on behalf of and I gathered that he, like the there, than he cared about the stu- the new objects of his affection. rest of us, was strongly against it. dents he was teaching, at least if This comes from a very favorThinking I was talking to an ally, they were not Jewish. I must stress able interview article published in I made an offhand favorable com- that he was the definite exception 2013 in The Atlantic, entitled “The ment to him about something the among the Jews I knew at Chapel American Who Gave His Life to influential anti-war Senator J. Wil- Hill, insofar as I perceived them, Chairman Mao”: liam Fulbright, the Chairman of but the impression he made was I was able to give them some importthe Senate Foreign Relations Com- jarring and unsettling. ant information about the American mittee, had said. His response realdecision to allow Chiang Kai-Shek to ly took me aback. “Fulbright,” he RITTENBERG, THE TRAITOR? wipe out Communist troops in that sneered, “is a big enemy of Israel. I area. At the time, the local leaders, never listen to him.” Did Sidney Rittenberg display Li Xiannian and his colleagues, were That was my first encounter with the same sort of disloyalty to the in dispute about the intentions of a died-in-the-wool Zionist. The United States when he threw in General Marshall and the American war at that time could hardly have with Mao and the Communists in role in the Chinese civil war. Some been a more immediate concern. China? We had just finished fightpeople, including the then-political To give a deserved failing grade to ing a major war in which the Comcommissar, felt that the Nationalists a male student could result in his munist Soviet Union had been our would not be allowed to attack them flunking out of college, losing his ally, and so were Mao’s fighters as and wipe the Communists, who were outnumbered four or five to one in draft deferment, and being sent to long as they directed their efforts

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that area, out. Others believe that Marshall would let them be killed. I got a very clear statement from General Marshall’s attaché, General Henry Byroade, that the Americans were definitely going to let the Nationalists attack and annihilate these 60-70,000 Communist troops in that area. I took that information to the local commanders, Li Xiannian and so on, it proved to be right, and they totally escaped from encirclement. And when they came back to Yan’an, they thanked me and told me how correct my information had been. And in his memoirs, Li recalls this story and my role, which he exaggerates—my role wasn’t probably the decisive factor, but it was helpful. And then, these two commanders, who were both Central Committee members, Li Xiannian and Wang Zhen, became my two sponsors in joining the Chinese Communist Party.

What he has just told us in, so many words, is that by one major act of disloyalty to the United States government, he was instrumental in the Communists coming to power in China. One can’t help but wonder what Alfred Kohlberg would have said about that had he known it when he testified before Congress in 1952. Interviewer Matt Schiavenza just let it pass, though, and the obituary writers for The Post and The Times made no mention of it. My first thought upon reading the first sentence of Schiavenza’s piece was that he was in error: “From 1944, when the 23-year-old Sidney Rittenberg first arrived in China with the U.S. Army, to his departure 35 years later, no other foreign national played as important a role in the country.” Surely that designation belongs to Israel Epstein, I thought, a man

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of whom Schiavenza seems to be unaware. Epstein became a high government official, after all, while Rittenberg was just a propagandist, and he spent 16 of those 35 years as a political prisoner. He would do another 10-year stint in the clink after having been denounced by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, during the Cultural Revolution. Epstein, too, spent five years in prison during the Cultural Revolution, but that early act by the young Rittenberg, if taken at face value, is what probably tips the balance in favor of Schiavenza’s opening observation. It makes Rittenberg, in fact, a very important player not just in Chinese but in world history. I doubt very strongly that my professor of Chinese history knew anything about this episode, or perhaps anything about Rittenberg himself, when I took his course, or he would have told us about him, what with that Chapel Hill connection. Someone else who I suspect did not know about Rittenberg when he published his book, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History back in 2008, is the Roman Catholic writer, E. Michael Jones. Rittenberg’s career was the embodiment of the book’s title. The volume is 1,159 pages long, not counting the index, and neither Rittenberg nor Israel Epstein make an appearance, although there are two other Epsteins in the book’s index (neither one of which is Jeffrey, either). This revolutionary spirit thing is something of which I was largely unaware at the time that I was a graduate student and how deeply it runs in Jewish history and culture, which we learn from Jones’ book. Although my heritage, experience,

and education made me lean to the left politically at the time, I do not come from a background of people with a strong tendency toward violent insurrection against the prevailing power. Such knowledge of Jewish heritage, in retrospect, certainly does make me tend to identify quite a bit less with the late Rittenberg. The first knowledge I received of the man’s death, in fact, of the man himself, came to me in the form of an email from a person whom I do not know. He and a correspondent, also unknown to me, had some rather favorable pungent commentary on a linked article whose title will tell you that it was designed not just to make you not identify with the guy, but to hate and despise him, “Old Jew Who Helped Kill Millions of Chinks Dies.” To say that the article is less nuanced than mine is a considerable understatement. It comes from a supposed white nationalist site that calls itself The Daily Stormer. By coincidence, shortly after getting the Daily Stormer article, I received an email from a long-time contact that linked to an article entitled, “Why Are Jews Leading the Alt-Right & ‘White’ Nationalist Movement?” It is on a web site that I had not heard of called Christians for Truth. Right off the bat, we find this statement in the article: “It is no secret that the Daily Stormer is run by Jews and not-exactly-Whites with a subversive agenda. This has been known for years.” It would appear that what the Daily Stormer is up to with its Rittenberg article is something that I call “divisive mischief ” in “The Charlottesville Operation,” but that’s a topic for another article.

Mao's Communist China

ADDENDUM After completing this essay, I established communication with my old professor of Chinese history at Chapel Hill. He’s still there. He tells me that in 1968 he had heard of Rittenberg, but only in a “sketchy fashion” from someone at a Vietnam Veterans against the War rally at Fort Bragg. I don’t know if that would have been before or after I had his course in that first summer session, but he would not have known enough to discuss the subject in class, at any rate. In a short Rittenberg biography that he has prepared, he also provided a lot of important information that isn’t in any of the articles to which I have linked. Both The Times and The Post are wrong about Rittenberg’s UNC education. He dropped out after his junior year to do labor organizing work, but shortly afterward was drafted into the Army. When he first returned to the United States in 1979 for a four-month visit, at the invitation of my former professor, he came and gave an address on campus on U.S.–China relations, a gathering at which there were a number of protestors. During that visit, Rittenberg inquired about transferring the credits that he had earned at Stanford University while at the Army’s language school. Dean Frederic Vogler checked his Stanford transcript and then wrote Rittenberg informing

him that, indeed, he had accumulated enough credits to be deemed a graduate of the University of North Carolina. Upon receipt of Vogler’s letter, Rittenberg wrote in reply, “it was difficult to articulate my pride and joy at your letter, and the feeling it gave me that my long, deep love for our school has been requited. . . How I wish Dr. Frank could know and see this all taking place.” (more about Dr. Frank Graham below) I also learned from the professor’s Rittenberg biography that the two obituaries omit important academic work by the man upon his permanent return to his native country. In 1993 he was appointed the Frey Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor at UNC and began teaching in 1994. From 1995 to 1998 he taught two courses a year at UNC, in Chinese history and Asian studies, usually in the spring semester, as the Edward M. Bernstein Professor of History. From 1997 on he was Visiting Professor of Chinese Studies and Senior Adviser at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Upon graduation from high school, Rittenberg had scholarship offers not only from Princeton, as the obituaries have it, but also from the University of Virginia. He specifically chose UNC because of its president, the illustrious liberal and social activist, Frank Porter Graham. Ironically, it was Graham who encouraged the young

Rittenberg to drop out after his junior year and pursue his passion as a labor organizer. Graham is another point of intersection between Rittenberg and me. Graham was one of my father’s liberal political heroes. Another was Governor W. Kerr Scott, who appointed Graham as U.S. Senator to fill out the term of J. Melville Broughton, who died in 1949. The next year, at the end of the term, Graham was challenged in the Democratic primary by the conservative Willis Smith. One of my earliest political recollections was attending a rally at which Graham spoke in Rocky Mount. It made a big impression on me because they handed out Graham crackers. The runoff campaign, which Smith won after Graham narrowly failed to gain a 50% majority on the first vote, was marked by scurrilous red-baiting and race-baiting advertisements against Graham. I would learn many years later that future U.S. Senator Jesse Helms was behind those advertisements, and that he later became Smith’s top aide in Washington. David Martin is the author of The Assassination of James Forrestal and co-author with Hugh Turley of The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation. www.dcdave.com

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BUYERS REMORSE IN IRELAND NOSTALGIA FOR BAD ROADS by Geraldine Comiskey In July, 2018, just two months after Ireland voted foe, philosopher, and cognitive neuroscientist Sam three-to-one to legalize abortion, something happened Harris. They were, of course, all very interesting as inthat puzzled the national media (the cultural cognos- dividuals, but it was clear to those who attended the centi), all the main political parties, most of the elected talk, including reporters in the mainstream media, independents, the civil service including the forces of that Peterson was the main attraction. Not only that, law and order – indeed the entire spectrum of main- but at least three-quarters of the crowd was male and stream Irish life. The Establishment was basking in the aged 20-35. Struggling to explain the phenomenon, afterglow of “Repeal” by which they meant not just the media collectively decided that Peterson was “conthe repeal of the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Con- troversial,” “alt-right,” and even “dangerous.” And yet, here he was, doing a peculiar kind of Pied stitution protecting the life of the unborn; the word had been adopted as a mantra, a totem, a cultural term Piper routine. For all the comfort the Establishment and even the title of a book. The two-thirds of the elec- had taken in emasculating young men, this Canadian torate who had removed the right to life of the unborn bogeyman was re-masculating them right before everywere still congratone’s eyes! So popular, and oversubscribed, ulating themselves Jordan Peterson was the main was his talk that Peteron having put an attraction. At least 3/4 of the crowd son was booked to end to Old Ireland and were looking return three months was male and aged 20-35. Struggling forward to building to explain the phenmenon the media later, all by himself. a shiny new nation Those tickets rapidly decided Peterson was controversial, in which the spirit sold out too. alt-right, and dangerous. of Repeal would go As a mainstream much further. This journalist, freelancing would be a liberal nation, symbolized by the rainbow for a tabloid newspaper at the time, I was keen to inflag, celebrated in Gay Pride marches, and made up of troduce Jordan Peterson to our mass readership of men the young Irish diaspora who had returned en masse to and women of all ages and asked the editor who regusign the death warrant for the very young. larly commissioned features from me if she would be But as Old Ireland died and the embryonic New interested in a piece on some of Peterson’s young male Ireland approached viability, there was a blip on their fans, with whom I was in contact. It would be an unscreen: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. The Canadian profes- biased article, of course; as an ordinary reporter, I did sor of psychology came to Dublin for a talk on “Win- not have the privilege of sharing my opinion with my ning The War of Ideas,” chaired by author Douglas readers. My editor demurred. “Not saying no to this Murray, in which Peterson was pitted against his old one just yet because I need to learn a bit more about

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Jordan Peterson this guy!” she emailed me, adding that she would “suss it out” with the senior editors, and “if they’re keen then we’d probably do something a bit closer to the time [the upcoming second visit].” In what was probably the longest, most rambling, and most passively dismissive reply to a one-line pitch I had ever received from her or any other editor, she appeared to be tactfully making excuses for her bosses’ reluctance to commission a piece on Dr. Peterson, who had clearly become a threat to the New Ireland: “Obviously if there’s a genuinely new political party then we’d be interested in that, but we’d want the members to be able to respond to each of his most controversial beliefs. The problem is that...his ideas are very long-winded and open to interpretation and not exactly easy to distil... Can we boil it down to bullet points like: he’s against gay marriage, doesn’t believe in white privilege, thinks women shouldn’t get paid as much as men – and then get his Irish fans to defend these claims? I see he has written a lot about freedom of speech and Marxism but our readers won’t care about any of that, nor will they be interested in his fans waffling about his theories. But if it can be boiled down into a very straight story then I think it would work, ie, ‘fans of JP have launched a new political group, and they’re hoping his extreme right wing views on women / gay marriage etc etc can help them get elected.’ Sorry if this has turned into a stream of consciousness as I’m trying to figure out how it might work for us! I’d say don’t start doing any work on it just yet, but let me know if you think it could be a runner in the way I’m suggesting. I’m just thinking of past experiences when we’ve had Irish people supporting madcap beliefs and their contributions often tend to be so long-winded and baffling that they just don’t work for our short and snappy style.” Closer to the date of the talk, I reminded her about it, and was met with a polite refusal – no excuses this time. The broadsheets did cover the Peterson talks, and tried to get a handle on his fans, but no one seemed willing to talk to these young men – except Peterson himself. A year on, I am keen to get an accurate perspective on this countercultural rebellion, and indeed into the culture wars currently raging across the ancient battlefield of European civilization: the former Island of Saints and Scholars. Ireland has undergone such a radical transformation in the past two years that it is unrecognisable even to those of us who have been here to see it happen. The former mission territory of Saint Patrick now not only has the most liberal abortion

laws in the world bar New York (where it is allowed up to birth); it has embraced identity politics with a zeal unsurpassed anywhere except in Canada. Ireland’s tricolour has been replaced by the rainbow flag, flown with indecent enthusiasm by the police [Garda], Army, State transport system and all government departments as well as all the major private companies in the land; the Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) has marched in Pride parades even outside the country, and led the recent campaigns to legalize abortion and to give homosexual unions a legal status equal to the marriage between a man and a woman. Former President Mary McAleese, now a theologian, also marched in Pride and has in recent years led an increasingly strident attack on the Catholic Church from within; the organization she set up with lesbian journalist Ursula Halligan had a name that sounded like a hostile takeover: “We are Church.” Priests throughout Ireland angrily swatted away the protests of their parishioners who were uncomfortable with what they saw as McAleese & Co. appropriating their religion. Even the network of gaelic sports clubs, the GAA, which is the cornerstone of community life in every town and rural village in Ireland, had been given a glittery gay make-over, with respected sports stars in a scrum to “come out” publicly, on radio, TV and in front of their community.

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Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia

And yet a counterculture is emerging from the ashes. The war may have been lost, but the battles for Ireland’s heart and soul take place every day; these are battles between the Cross and the Rainbow, between Truth and Anything Goes, between Reality and Illusion. Ironically, Ireland’s Head of State is a man who looks like one of the fabled leprechauns said to be guarding the Crock O’ Gold at the bottom of Finian’s Rainbow – and he calls his pet dog Bród, the Irish word for Pride. In this brave new Ireland, Conservative Catholics are making their views known to their local priests and flocking to other parishes to attend Latin Mass. New political parties, espousing libertarianism, nationalism and even Donald Trumpism, are demonstrating on the streets and clashing with pro-immigration communists. Pro-life activists of all religions and none are bearing witness to Ireland’s Holocaust outside the National Maternity hospital which now doubles up as an abortion centre. Social media, which is heavily subsidized by the Irish taxpayer, is a victim of its own success, as its efforts to silence protestors, such as Anti-Corruption Ireland leader Gemma O’Doherty and “Grand Torino” vlogger Rowan Croft, have failed because their followers share all their banned content and energetically argue with Establishment trolls (the online conflict is like Lernean Hydra vs. Whack-aMole). The mainstream media, of course, has become so untrustworthy that it is economically unviable and patently exists only as a propaganda tool for the minority who still buy newspapers or subscribe to them online. Not even the brainwashed citizens of this culturally hollow nation bother with newspapers and, if it wasn’t for the compulsory TV licence, the national broadcaster, RTE, would struggle to stay on air, as

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they are constantly reminding the public. This would explain the surge in support for volunteer-produced newspapers such as “Alive!” and “Catholic Voice,” new websites such as Gript (an Irish version of LifeNews, which puts a Conservative, pro-life slant on stories culled from the mainstream media), and blogs such as Kilkenny Photographer which focuses on issues the mainstream media deem too “politically incorrect.” Collectively, this diverse group of citizen journalists, disgruntled political Conservatives, traditional Catholics, ethical atheists, academics, taxpayers, responsible parents, and middle-of-the-road, common-sense, upstanding members of society are labelled “Alt-Right” and branded, without any sense of irony, “Nazis” and “Fascists.” Having lost three Constitutional Referenda in as many years, they are now a hated minority, to be crushed by the iron fist of “liberalism.” While the footsoldiers of Ireland’s Countercultural Rebellion are reclaiming their country, street by street, Tweet by Tweet, they are treading in the footsteps of a small group of social commentators who spotted the signs of decline decades before it happened and used their position in the mainstream media to warn the public at large. Journalists John Waters and Mary Kenny could not have been expected to predict the suddenness of Ireland’s descent into Hell, but they sounded the alarm while the rest of Ireland was snoozing. They are in a unique position to comment on the aftermath and possibly lead Ireland and the Western World out of this valley of despair. These are the Prophets of the Countercultural Rebellion.

HOPE: MARY KENNY, FEMINIST FOREVER Given that all of the Rainbow-Flag bearing people would describe themselves as feminists, who better to ask for an insight into all of this than the foundress and ringleader of the country’s Women’s Liberation Movement, who also happens to be a veteran journalist, author, intellectual, social commentator and devout Catholic? As the archetypal militant feminist, Mary Kenny did for young women in the ‘70s what Jordan Peterson is doing for young men today. Now a regular contributor to both the Catholic and mainstream press, she has managed to hang on to her feminist friends notwithstanding their radical parting of the ways on issues such as abortion and gay “marriage.” She also has many friends in all spheres of Irish and British public life.

St. Katharine Drexel Indeed, like John Waters, Kevin Myers, and David Quinn, she could be regarded as one of the prophets of the Irish countercultural rebellion, given that she was in tune with the rise of Conservative Catholicism even before Liberal Atheism scored its biggest goal last year. We meet in a corner of the drawing room of Dublin’s Buswell’s Hotel – just across the road from the front gates of the country’s Houses of Parliament. It’s a popular spot for politicians to meet up when they want to be seen, as well as a symbol of old, decent Ireland. She looks at home in the tasteful surroundings, petite and elegant in a bohemian way, in vivid red trousers teamed with a chic jacket and scarf and a hat with flowers around the brim. Her punky purple hair is a reminder that she is still the rebel who once shocked polite Irish Catholic society with her miniskirts and publicity stunts (especially the Contraceptive Train in 1971, when she was one of a group of notorious militant “Women’s Libbers” who travelled from Dublin across the Irish Border to Belfast to buy before the other States. There were studies in Ireland condoms and pills, which were at the time only avail- about this too, interestingly. Agriculture could produce a kind of equality because men and women had able on prescription for strictly medical reasons). I ask her why she thinks young Irish men packed to work together on the farm. More women were seout the halls on the two occasions when Professor Jor- questered where men were going off to work in offices and women dan Peterwere kept son visited Grow up, be a man,take responsibility. more in the Ireland. I think they see him as the strong father home.” She carefulI ask her ly examines they don’t have. Their own fathers are weak. what the earher own theory: “He’s very austere, isn’t he?” We talk about ly feminists would think of today’s #MeToo virtue-sighis message to young men: Grow up, be a man, take nallers who have been brewing up a caustic cauldron responsibility. She says: “I think they see him as the of victimhood, paganism, and atheism, all in the name strong father they don’t have. Their own fathers are of #Feminism. Not much, she says. “If we go back to the American roots [of feminism] in the 19th century, weak.” This seems to be the same reason the early feminists with people like Susan B. Anthony, it was very much rebelled against their mothers: because they were weak. linked with the abolition of slavery and it was actualBut it’s not as simple as that, Kenny says, explaining ly quite a strongly Christian movement at that stage. that, long before “feminism,” women were strong and They were usually non-conformist Christian women, equal in status to men – even though they played to and that was true on this side of the Atlantic too – different strengths. She points out that the early fem- that it arose out of concern about slavery and so on. inists in the U.S. were Prohibitionist because women And, of course, the other strand that very much fed at the time depended on their husbands’ incomes and into it was education; that big issue in the 19th century an alcoholic husband could literally ruin a woman’s was getting the women educated, and, there, the femlife. “Camille Paglia has written about this very well; inists drew very much on the tradition of what nuns the States which were most Prohibitionist about li- had done, because the order of nuns started in the 15th quor were the most feminist [and were also] the States century with St. Angela of the Merici, and they started which were the most agricultural and also had the vote educating women at that stage.”

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Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger I suppose to some extent that has happened: working-class men have been the cultural losers in more recent times.” The losers today are, again, working-class men – which would explain Peterson’s countercultural appeal. But a certain class of man has benefitted greatly from the modern fake feminist movement, Kenny believes. What changed the agenda was birth control, and this didn’t really come from feminists; it came from the sexologists – people like Marie Stopes (mother of the UK’s abortion industry) who became a feminist but was very much supported by men; her movement was not a feminist movement. She was a eugenicist: she wanted fewer children from the working class and It was specifically Catholicism that continued to fly more children from the ‘brainy’ classes. And Margaret the flag for feminism during the Reformation, because Sanger, her U.S. counterpart, had that agenda as well. the Protestants, including Martin Luther himself, dis- “It was after the Second World War, and as we came approved of nuns. “They closed down the convents – into the era of the [contraceptive] Pill, that feminism and it was then taken up after the 19th century [when] began to focus much more on things like sexuality, the women who were battling for education drew on so I suppose there you have a kind of clash with the that tradition. So you have those roots which were Christian tradition.” It’s the opposite now, Kenny says. “The National very Christian, very much for the education of womCouncil of Women in Ireland don’t accept pro-life en – and, of course, that led onto the campaign for the vote. The Suffragettes were high-minded. Some women. There you have a kind of deliberate exclusion. Even the [British] of them House of Comagain came "We should hire three or four colored mons tradition from reliministers, preferably with social-service was that this was gious backbackgrounds, and with engaging personalities... always an issue grounds.” of conscience. I M a y b e We don't want the word to go out that we want think that should today’s antito exterminate the Negro population. be applied at the Catholic — Margaret Sanger very least in all feminists professions.” have someCampaigning to legalize abortion would have been thing in common with their Suffragette sisters, because both rode the crest of a cultural wave; feminism unthinkable to the early feminists, she says. “Absothen, as it does today, “reflected the times,” Kenny lutely they were [against abortion]. There was a very maintains. Like all the most popular movements, it nice phrase used about a historical figure I was reading was aspirational in its appeal. While today its heroines about recently; she was described as a maternal femimight be Meghan Markle, Hillary Clinton, or indeed nist. She cherished the maternal tradition.” Kenny, herself a mother of two sons, could be deany one of a wide range of famous virtue-signalling women, from Hollywood stars to leading politicians, scribed as a maternal feminist, but is anxious not to the feminist heroines of the 19th century were aris- be seen as an “earth mother” and disagrees with the tocrats, who inherited a self-esteem that immunized Catholic Church’s stance on contraceptives. “I would them from any wish to court popularity. “The cri- favour responsible family planning, responsible fertiltique of the Suffragette generation was that a lot of ity control, because it does help women’s health, and the Suffragette women were quite upper-class, and the I actually think the Catholic Church should revise opposition was sometimes some people saying work- Humanae Vitae, because women’s health does depend ing-class men would lose out if women got the jobs. on spacing their children. But I suppose once birth

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Eugenicist Marie Stopes control was won [by feminists], then they moved onto abortion ‘rights’, and that’s I think where there is very much a clash with ethical Christianity – and what’s a paradox is that in the last 30 or 40 years there’s been a tremendous development in understanding embryology and foetology of the unborn; we know more about it than ever before, and it’s interesting how, when a woman becomes pregnant, the first thing they do is send an ultrasound picture.” So how does that fit in with the fact that the “right” to kill one’s own child is the Holy Grail of mainstream feminists? Kenny points to existential feminist Simone de Beauvoir who is to be the subject of her talk at the Iona Institute in Dublin in October. “This is where de Beauvoir comes in: she really hates pregnancy. She hates the way Nature takes over. She says: ‘A pregnant woman is Nature’s plaything’. And she has that thing that, because she’s a super-rational person, she should be as free as a man. And of course intellectually she was as free as a man. “But I think that this [abortion ‘rights’] is a step too far, because it’s not recognizing that Nature does exist. So this is where the problem arises; it’s become a bit of a war against Nature.” She adds that even the CEO of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Ann Furedi, “is very critical of this phrase ‘reproductive rights,’ because people think they can always choose to have a child. If we had reproductive rights, I’d have the right to have a child now.” Kenny is a surprisingly youthful looking 75. Indeed, in her book “The Moral Case for Abortion,” Furedi seems to be arguing counterculturally. “Even though her attitude is totally pro-choice, nevertheless she does make some honest concessions in this book – she says: ‘Yes, it is a killing.’” Kenny’s own book ‘Am I a Feminist? Are you?’ quotes obstetrician Dr. Lisa Harris’ account of carrying out an abortion while she was also pregnant; both she and her patient were eighteen weeks pregnant. “I realised that I was more interested than usual in seeing the fetal parts when I was done, since they would so closely resemble those of my own fetus...I picked up my forceps and began to...remove the fetus in parts...I felt lucky that this one was already in the breech position – it would make grasping small parts (legs and arms) a little easier. I could see a small foot hanging from the teeth of my forceps. With a quick tug, I separated the leg. Precisely at that moment, I felt a kick – a fluttery ‘thump, thump’ in my own uterus...There was

a leg and foot in my forceps, and a ‘thump, thump’ in my abdomen. Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes...” she wrote in the U.S. journal “Reproductive Health Matters.” She went on to perform more abortions, but wrote: “Dealing with any little infant parts of my born baby only made dealing with dismembered fetal parts sadder.” Maybe the Counterculture begins with stories like that – maybe female obstetricians will soon be joining the young men at Conservative rallies. Or maybe not: Irish women have also embraced witchcraft, openly, in a manner that would have been shocking four years ago. Kenny asks me what I think motivates the witches I have interviewed over the decades as a journalist, and I say I don’t know for sure, but with the benefit of hindsight, I think that they are full of hatred; they hate everything, even life itself: they claim to worship Nature, but they seek to control it and go against it even to the extent that they celebrate the destruction of new life in their own wombs. Even Kenny is shocked by the neo-pagan aspect of the abortion campaign, which manifested itself grotesquely on the day the Referendum was passed. “What shook me most of all was the dancing in the street – to celebrate!”

November 2019 / 21

Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir

I mention the priests who remained silent on the subject of abortion – or, worse, appeared to endorse it from the pulpits with phrases such as “There’s no right or wrong” and “The Church has to change with the times,” as they stampede in their haste to support everything “liberal.” Kenny, a devout practising Catholic, stops short of condemning them: “Perhaps they feel they have to conform to the spirit of the age.” But she is scathing of former Irish President Mary McAleese, who claims to be Catholic but openly campaigned for abortion and homosexual “marriage equality.” Kenny says: “I was shocked that, when Mary McAleese was asked would she support the abortion Referendum, she said: ‘In a heartbeat, yes!’ I think what happened with Mary is that she terribly strongly identified with her gay son. The maternal instinct came to the fore and she absolutely went into battle on behalf of Justin – and so she took on every cause.” What would Mary Kenny’s friends in the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement think of her pro-life stance now, when it is so countercultural? “We’re all much older now. It did come up a little bit just before the Referendum but it’s not something that older women are all that comfortable talking about because maybe they feel more nuanced than they would like to admit. Nell McCafferty [another renowned Irish feminist and veteran journalist] did a very interesting piece coming up to that Referendum [in which] she said she’s pro-choice because she feels that’s what feminists should be, but nevertheless she

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said she was absolutely appalled when she began to research what happened [in abortions]. So she had this honesty to admit that she was appalled, and I suppose probably a lot of older women would feel that they don’t want to get too involved in that area anymore because I suppose older people are less adversarial – they’re less inclined to be in the battlefield, as it were. I’ve just seen a couple of old feminists and they were saying we accept differences much more in old age than we did when we were young; that couple of feminist friends would have been very against religion of any kind, and now they’re much more inclined to say, ‘Well, look, if faith helps people, why not?’ They’d be inclined to say that now, rather than ‘Yeah, right on! Atheism – bring it on!’” Abortion “wasn’t on the agenda at all” in the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement back in the ‘70s. “It was just a step too far, I think. And people felt there were other issues that were very important. I suppose a lot of those [other issues] have been [dealt with], and now [feminists] are taking on Nature. I suppose the culture war thing – maybe it has to run its course. “I feel there’s a lot of groupthink. If you look at [Irish national broadcaster] RTE, for example, they have quite interesting discussions, but very often people are all on the same side. What’s worrying is that there is that conformity – that a newspaper mightn’t report a story.” (I had told her about several incidents in which the national newspapers turned down stories that reflected badly on migrants.) Counterculturalism is taking the form of a rebellion in Ireland, but in England where Kenny lives most of the time (she divides her time between both countries), the counterculture co-exists peacefully with the mainstream, she says. “It is considered shameful to be a Conservative in Ireland, whereas in England there is a tradition of philosophical Conservativism, which someone like Roger Scruton would represent, and they would claim the tradition of Conservatism – although he was an Irishman.” Kenny herself is often described by her peers in the Irish media as a “Catholic feminist,” in tones which suggest that she is an anomaly. She says: “I think Christian feminists should try to reclaim some of the ground and affirm the fact that there was a strong tradition of women of faith or women not necessarily left-wing in every way.” A strange countercultural aspect within feminism is the #MeToo movement, which Kenny reckons is “an

outgrowth of the permissive society.” She recalls her ‘anything goes’ motto. Even renowned tennis chamhusband talking about a “code” in the 1940s and ‘50s pion Martina Navratilova was branded a TERF after “about what was kind of acceptable and what wasn’t she complained about men taking over women’s sports. acceptable, and how far you would go, and how you Kenny believes this latest battle is a catalyst for femihad to judge it; to step over the mark would be regard- nists to become the independent thinkers their predeed as very ‘bounder’ish – only a bounder did that, you cessors were. “I think the penny is beginning to drop know? A ‘cad and a bounder.’ And then the Sixties now. I think the most salient point is in the athletics came in and my generation were all part of it – you field.” know, ‘Anything goes’ and ‘We’re all up for it.’ So then Gay parenting poses another dilemma for modern I think a lot of guys maybe just took that literally and feminists who would once have felt the urge to show they said, ‘Well all women are up for it!’ and maybe solidarity with homosexual couples seeking to start the codes broke down. Maybe there’s a kind of re-set- a family. Kenny has mixed feelings on this. “I would ting of the boundaries or something like that.” have a liberal view about how people have all kinds of She believes that the concept of “equality” is only unusual childhoods where they were [raised by two compounding the current confusion. “There’s a lot of men or two women] but it’s not equal to [heterosexuconfusion – are we equal or are we different? I would al] marriage.” She mentions the actor Richard Burton take the view that men and women are different on who came from a poor coalminer’s family but was takthe whole and they’re complementary, and I would en under the wing of a bachelor schoolteacher. “This call myself a feminist in terms of education, politics, made Richard Burton the Shakepearean actor. That opportunities, and everything like that – respect. But was a kind of interesting example of an informal adopI think it’s a denial of Nature to say that we’re exact- tion which opened a door to somebody. I had a gay ly the same. This comes up in surveys all the times. guy I knew who always said that that was the evoluThere’s a new survey out saying that women still do tionary reason to have a bachelor uncle.” This is also a more housework than men. Even at the end of the view publicly expressed by the openly gay Irish Senator day most men aren’t as bothered by a messy bathroom David Norris. as women are. We’re cleaning up after them because we care. I’ve No one would take me just as I was, heard women say, ‘Having it all means doing it all.’ When you had no one loved me; I shall love myself enough... a notion of division of labour, you to make up for this abandonment by everyone. had that idea that there were jobs — Simone de Beauvoir that men were supposed to do; that was based on the agricultural model where the men did the big animals and the Yet Kenny dislikes the Pride parades with their endwork in the fields, and the women did the hens, the less procession of wacky ideologies that seem to have chickens, the dairy; they equally contributed to the been foisted on the Irish people all of all ages, and is family farm. When I was growing up the men would wary of indoctrination of children and society in gendo the outside jobs: they would bring the coal in. I eral to normalize homosexual unions. “It’s all very suppose the more we’ve been mechanized the more Weimar Republic, isn’t it? I would always have talked physical strength doesn’t matter and I think everyone about ‘same-sex marriage,’ but it’s referred to formally should be free to follow their own disposition, what- as ‘equal marriage’ – and that’s of course to put across ever it is.” the idea that a marriage between two people of the Possibly the biggest challenge for today’s feminists same sex is the same as a marriage between a man and is the bizarre phenomenon of men “self-identifying” a woman. I think that is a distortion; it’s more of the as women. Feminists who have spoken out about same thing of trying to change Nature, because marthis have been branded “TERF”s (“Trans-Exclusion- riage is Darwinian: it goes right through the evolution ary Radical Feminists”) – and marginalised by other of humans. However way you conceive a child, there’s members of the LGBT community whose rainbow always a father and a mother.” She jokes: “I always say flag does not include those who disagree with the I’ve never encountered an equal marriage .”

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John Waters

DOOMSDAY: JOHN WATERS, FROM ROCK JOURNALIST TO APOCALPYTIC In his book, Give Us Back the Bad Roads, John Waters shares a plausible theory to explain how Ireland has so openly and gleefully abandoned its Christian heritage in the last four years. It was not by chance that this little island was chosen to be the world’s poster child for everything “liberal,” he says: Ireland in 2015 was targeted by the international LGBT lobby as a ‘trophy country’...Ireland had been seen as a beacon of Catholic faith in the world...This could be used by the LGBT lobby to advance its agenda elsewhere. After all, if backward little old Ireland was prepared to go that far to accommodate its demands, how could any country professing to be ‘modern’ possibly resist what in most cases would be far more modest and restrictive provisions? Ireland was also a small, relatively unitary country that could be propagandised and controlled much more easily than a larger, more fractured country.

Waters can speak with more authority than most on the subject, having trudged the rocky pilgrim path from hipster media star. He began his journalistic career writing for rock magazine Hot Press, went on to interview just about everyone in Irish public life, edited political magazine Magill, and wrote a column in The Irish Times, and through the prism of journalistic experience and his personal life, grew disillusioned

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with politics and the legal system. The frustration is palpable as he talks about the state of affairs in what could be called Ireland’s Post-Civilization period: Ireland, The Year 1PC. Little more than twelve months after the country voted away the right to life of babies in their mother’s wombs (Year Zero), he is still shocked by this catastrophic event which led to the introduction of one of the world’s most liberal abortion regimes. We meet in the very civilized surroundings of the Royal Marine Hotel, Dun Laoghaire. Through the ornate windows, the view of the picturesque harbour and Victorian promenade are obstructed by the brutalist architecture of the Dun Laoghaire ‘Lexicon.’ Indeed, Dun Laoghaire’s recently built, pretentiously named modern library seems to be mocking the olde-worlde gentility of the 191-year-old hotel. At 64, John Waters too is a relic of a more civilized time – as indeed is anyone over the age of 35 in a country that lost its soul in the tsunami of “liberal-progressive”ideology. Waters believes the words “liberal” and “progressive” have come to mean something that is anything but, and he’s been saying this for nearly 30 years. Having begun his career as a music writer in ultra-hip Hot Press magazine, and gone on to write opinion columns for the Irish Times newspaper, he lost his membership of the cool club when he had the temerity to challenge his colleagues’ politically correct dogma. “Back in the early Nineties I was obsessively refusing to use the word ‘liberal’ about these people. They’re the opposite of liberal; I would call them pseudo-liberals. And I think that’s very important, because, in spite of ourselves, when we hear this word ‘liberal,’ it still continues to have a positive resonance.’ When you use a word like ‘liberal’ you actually unconsciously assist them in continuing to believe that their mission is a good one. So I wouldn’t call them liberal at all; I call them fascists, which is what they are. I mean they really are fascists. There’s a line, I don’t know who said, it, but the line is ‘When fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-fascism.’ But do the people out there have any capacity to see this? I don’t know.” Likewise the word ‘progressive,’ he says: “Everybody wants progress, but they’re not progressive. They think that because it’s 2019, then that must mean it’s time

for abortion, so in 2020 it’s time for ‘trans’ and everything has a clock – that’s the whole totalitarian nature of progressivism. C.S. Lewis said that when you’re on the wrong road, the most progressive person is the one that turns back.” The author of nine bestselling books says even he has no more words for what is happening to the former Isle of Saints and Scholars. “Ireland is in a terrible state, it’s beyond any words of mine.” The behavior of the mainstream media in particular, Waters says, is “beyond moronic – the word ‘moronic’ is inadequate, the word ‘crazy’ is inadequate; there are no words that approach the gravity of where we are now. It’s much worse than anything we have words to reach.” Not even the authors of dystopian fiction such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley could have predicted the present situation in which a man can declare himself a woman (or vice versa) and be entitled to prosecute anyone who denies this. “We talk academically, abstractly about dystopias, but we actually think of this as an interesting academic exercise or an interesting kind of analysis to compare Orwell or Huxley to the present, but the present is the reality, and it’s worse than anything. It’s more unhinged than anything that has ever been dreamt of in fictional terms, and therefore I don’t see where people are saying the optimism can come from. I think it’s Endgame, unless – and this [‘unless’]is an interesting word that reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre in his introduction to [Frantz Fanon’s] ‘Wretched of the Earth’; [Sartre] was warning about the unfolding of the catastrophes that Fanon had predicted and he said at this point you have nothing to say unless you do something – well, there’s no ‘unless’. There’s nothing to be done now!” Waters is one of many in Ireland targeted by the increasingly aggressive bunch of people claiming to be victims. They fight dirty, employing the machinery of mainstream media, social media, street harassment and the laws of the State to silence anyone who disagrees with their agenda. Dissenters can expect to be physically assaulted, fired by employers or even charged with a criminal offence for questioning any aspect of the Rainbow Philosophy and its increasing-

Irish activist Rowan Croft (L) attacked by Antifa

ly oppressive presence in both public and private lives. Words and terms such as “compassion,” “live and let live,” and “love is love” are clumsily re-engineered as euphemisms for murdering babies in the womb, paying taxes for an education system that indoctrinates very young children in LGBT ideology. The term “Homophobia” is misused to describe people who dislike homosexual behavior or aspects of the LGBT agenda such as declaring their civil unions equal to heterosexual marriage, and hiring surrogates to produce children who will be told that they have two fathers or two mothers. “Transphobia” is Newspeak for the practice of disagreeing with such outrages as men using the ladies’ toilets and “self-identifying” as female when they are challenged. These come under the umbrella of “hate speech.” Meanwhile, the seven deadly sins are now virtues and Pride in particular is glorified. Waters was a sacrificial lamb to this celebration of savagery, losing his career and even his health (he suffers from Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, which he was told can be triggered by stress). As a man who made a successful career out of words, he mourns “the destruction of free speech; the destruction of the idea that you are entitled to speak without being attacked.” He has been verbally attacked for the sin of questioning the LGBT/“liberal” agenda on television, online, and on the street by random people, and even senior colleagues at the prestigious Irish Times newspaper – while he was working alongside them. Especially shocking is the fact that the paper’s Religious Affairs Correspondent, Patsy McGarry, who he thought was a friend, used a false Twitter profile to engage in a ten-month campaign of semi-literate harassment of Waters on Twitter. Waters describes the incident in his book Give Us Back the Bad Roads.

Meanwhile, the seven deadly sins are now virtues and Pride in particular is glorified.

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If anyone thought the storm would abate after the “liberals” won the abortion battle, they were wrong. Waters’ friend, journalist, and campaigner Rowan Croft, was temporarily blinded when the daughter of a former Government Minister hurled a liquid containing turmeric in his eyes, because she took exception to his comments about Ireland’s Open Borders policy. There have been similar incidents in England, where Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage were pelted with milkshakes, and, horrifyingly, several Trump supporters including an old man were beaten and kicked on the streets of London. And an army of online trolls continues to harass anyone who dares to complain. “To now justify the idea that somebody can be physically attacked because of something they believe [has been until recently] unheard of,” says Waters. Fighting back only results in a bigger backlash, as Waters discovered when he successfully sued Irish broadcaster RTE over a defamatory comment made by a drag queen on a chat show; the hate campaign against Waters intensified, and he was subjected to random intimidation attempts, which made him wary of walking around his own neighbourhood and indeed anywhere in Ireland. On one occasion, while he was in a Dublin café with his teenage daughter, a man in his twenties approached them and a made a gun sign at him, accompanied by vocal special effects. For a man accustomed to dealing in words, Waters deeply felt the loss of the pleasure of civilized discourse, which was replaced by nonsense. While he was campaigning for Ireland to retain the ban on abortion last year, he had a conversation with an ex-colleague who, he thought, would have been capable of reasoned argument. “She said, “Would you not trust women?” “To do what?” She meant abortion. I said I wouldn’t trust women if they wanted to kill children. “Well, would you trust your daughter?” “Not if she wanted to kill children.” Then she said, “Well with all this homelessness and child abuse and everything.” “But what’s that got to do with it?” And then: silence. “They don’t have to be [rational]. I mean that’s part

of their strategy, to confuse, they believe that when they’re confusing people they’re actually winning. And they’re right. I had a significant number of experiences during the campaign which convinced me that most people hadn’t even the faintest idea what was happening and had constructed verbal rationalizations in their heads, and repeated them like mantras, and they didn’t mean anything, and when you asked them questions generally they just went crazy because you were getting close to the hard centre of their irrationality. “They’ve been taught that you’re evil. They’ve been told that I’m a bad person, I’m immoral because I don’t have compassion for certain categories of people and therefore they don’t have to take anything I say seriously. “The fundamental problem is that this is a global network of bullies. They do not take “No” for an answer. They do not engage in democratic discourse. Anyone who has even a glimmer in their eye suggesting that they might have a question about anything these people want – these people will be attacked and eviscerated by this mob. And that’s what I object to. If they want to make a case, in normative democratic terms, fine, do it; I will engage, maybe I won’t, but we have the right to oppose, and they do not have the right to bully and lie and demonize people the way they have done, and to call what they have achieved “democratic” is a lie. People have a right to dissent without being bullied, lied about, savaged. That fundamental right is gone from our civilization. We do not have a democracy therefore. That is the most important thing; it’s not really about abortion or gay marriage – these are issues which, had we a fair fight, we could have dealt with, but it was never a fair fight. In a democracy you can actually argue about these things and you could win. And then in abortion, we voted on the right of a category of human person to have the right to life – who’s next?” We trade war stories from the battlefield of this Not-So-Brave New World. I tell him Twitter blocked me for twelve hours after I responded to a tweet from

For a man accustomed to dealing in words, Waters deeply felt the loss of the pleasure of civilized discourse, which was replaced by nonsense.

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the Sisters of Mercy, in which they had issued a welcome to the “LGBT+ community.” I asked them if they knew what the “+” in LGBT+ stood for and if it might possibly stand for bestiality or sex with inanimate objects, given that they were the only sexual activities not covered by the alphabetti spaghetti. Waters was non-plussed at the Twitter ban and the possibility of nuns going into full Rainbow mode. “They’re notorious at this stage. There are so many lesbian nuns out there now, God knows.” Lesbian nuns used to be a joke, I remind him. He is not laughing as he replies: “All the things that were funny are now true.” He adds: “These people are just programmed to behave in a certain way. It’s just chaos. They don’t know what they’re saying, they don’t know who they are. They’ve allowed themselves to become programmed. “They’re trading off all the time all these things, this idea of ‘homophobia.’ They’ve put themselves across as victims. Overwhelming in the world gays have many multiples of the wealth of heterosexuals. I don’t know if they were victims, but [based on] my experience where I come from, they were left alone; nobody interfered with them. They constantly say that it was illegal to be gay. It wasn’t; it was never illegal to be gay. Buggery was illegal – the actual act of buggery was illegal. The implication is that people actually care what they do in their private lives, in the middle of the night, with each other – and I frankly couldn’t care less!

THE END OF DEMOCRACY “What I do object to is when they try to bully me into silence when they try to destroy something about the Irish Constitution, or the rights of other categories of people, or marriage as an institution which is the central molecule of our civilization. And [I care] that nobody else will speak out because they’re terrified of these goons, and I have to speak out because nobody else is speaking out. And then they try to destroy you, they obliterate you, they destroy your livelihood, they destroy your reputation, they take away your friends, they turn your family against you – they can do all that! “We’re on the losing side and you see all the consequences of that: you become unemployable, you don’t have any friends, or few friends left – well, the ones you lose aren’t really friends – but you know, your life is taken away from you essentially as you knew it, and this didn’t use to happen in Ireland. It used to be pos-

sible to be involved in political debates and still survive as a professional person and as a journalist or commentator. Now it’s not; if you’re on the wrong side you’re basically driven out. And this is actually something that there’s no voice to commentate upon in our culture, because the media are corrupt. Fundamentally, what I keep coming back to is the corruption of the media.” He says even those who agree with him are resorting to using “trite mantras” to avoid having to express views which would make them targets for attack. “If you attempt to initiate a discussion on any of these things that are happening, you will see people locked into silence, and if you pursue it you will hit upon a variation of the following phrase: ‘Ah, sure, you can’t say a word! You can’t open your mouth!’ You can’t have a civilization if you can’t speak.” At least he is going to keep speaking, I suggest, to which he replies: “Well, I don’t know that I am. I don’t necessarily guarantee that I will. I mean, there comes a time when you have to admit defeat; otherwise, you just go mad [in the Irish context, this means crazy, not angry; Waters is beyond anger at this stage]. I don’t feel that I can necessarily do anything any more – don’t know if I ever did.” A typical cant of pro-life campaigners is that journalists are entirely to blame, and not, for example, teachers who have greater power to spread the message than a humble journalist pitching stories to editors. When I put this to Waters, he says: “You actually have proLGBT teachers who have been evangelizing for years, and nobody said boo to them. [But] I think it is legitimate to say that the core problem is the media. When you take away from the people the right to a conversation, and media is the instrument of conversation, that’s how people [in wider society] talk.” He cites the Tuam Babies story, which continues to engage the Irish media even though the story has been discredited. Even had it been true, it would have been irrational to complain about “evil nuns burying dead babies in a septic tank” whilst simultaneously campaigning for the legalization of abortion which kills babies and dumps them in medical waste incinerators. Waters says: “You can’t analyze any of that in any rational terms because there’s no rationality in it; it’s the opposite of rationality. The Tuam story had one function and that was to push abortion through. Journalism is profoundly corrupt.” I ask him if he is being fair to ordinary journalists

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who do not have the privilege of deciding what goes into a newspaper and are simply covering the news or writing features on other topics – isn’t it the case that they can’t be held responsible for the editors’ and columnists’ agenda? “That isn’t true. They twist everything. They’re not journalists. I heard a report on RTE last week, that referred to Matteo Salvini as the ‘Far Right Interior Minister.’ That’s corrupt journalism. Does the same journalist, when he’s writing a report about the British Labour Party, refer to Jeremy Corbyn as ‘the Far Left Leader of the Labour Party?’ No, he doesn’t. As a result of that kind of journalism (socalled), you have the ordinary citizen who is duped into thinking that Hillary Clinton is a good person and Donald Trump is a bad person. You see the backwardness of Ireland in so many ways. Go into any room in Ireland and make a bad joke about Donald Trump and everybody will agree with you. It used to be the function of journalism to examine the function of a phenomenon like Trump from a rational, sociological and philosophical point of view. There’s none of that.” Among the media’s failures was a refusal to put twoand-two together when it became clear that voter fraud was at play in the abortion Referendum. “If you do a google search for Newstalk electoral register 2016, you will find an article there which says that there is a very high probability that the Irish electoral register is about half a million oversubscribed. But I could find no report linking this with the outcome of the Referendum.” Waters is immune from criticism of “The Media” now, because he has turned his back on his 40-year career. “I stopped being a journalist in 2014,” he says. I point out that his book is journalism. “Yes, but that book came out last summer and it has yet to receive a single mention in a national newspaper. By now it has sold something like five thousand copies. But the only interest the media has shown in it is I got one missed call from a journalist at the Sunday Times and he had heard, he said, that a book which sounded very much like mine – and even had the title [which would be a massive coincidence given that “bad roads” is an Irishism which is barely remembered by anyone alive today, and even then only as a term they heard in childhood] – had been turned down by the Revenue Commissioners for tax-free status, and could I confirm whether this was true or not? “All I wanted to do [with the book] was that I could

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put down a marker that at some point in the future people might come along and say how did this begin and what happened, at least they would see that I said something against it. That’s as much as you can hope for, then there’s some hope that somebody will reconstruct the truth.” His air of pessimism doesn’t need any help from a humble journalist, but, seeing that my clumsy attempts at getting a positive message from him have failed, I share my own doom-laden prophecy regarding his book: Despite his hopes that his book will be read by people in the far-off future who may seek to understand this period in time, they may be so illiterate that they will need a dictionary to understand most of the words, and, with no paper dictionaries on hand, will have to rely on politically engineered definitions provided by Google or Alexa – who might define a woman as “a person who has decided to be a woman.” He manages a sardonic smile, saying: “I wouldn’t be in the business of asking [Alexa].” I ask him what his next career might be. “I don’t know. Do I have one? In this country, it’s not possible.” He is even more pessimistic for Ireland. “I can’t emphasise this enough: this country is finished – culturally, intellectually, morally, ethically; in every conceivable way, it is finished. Unless we get rid of these people – unless we get rid of the Varadkars [Prime Minister, aka Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar] and the Zappones [Children and Youth Affairs Minister Katherine Zappone], the Michael Martins [Leader of the Opposition to the Irish Government], everybody. “Even if I did want to be positive I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything positive about what’s happening now. ‘Catastrophic’ is not adequate – none of the words are adequate. When you find that Ireland’s highest-paid media people are professional atheists who go on radio and television precisely to desecrate the beliefs of a nation and they’re paid a half a million quid a year for that, how can you be surprised by any of this?

A CIVILIZATION IN RUINS “I would never have been an Apocalypic because I grew up in the civilization and took it for granted and assumed that its dynamics would sustain themselves through my lifetime and beyond. Now I know that that’s probably not true. But there are an awful lot of

people who are ovecome by a complacency who still can’t believe that we could actually be approaching an Apocalytic moment, and I think that the evidence is overwhelmingly on the side that we are – because so many things are being disintegrated. “The whole problem here is that there is nowhere, short of a Divine intervention, from where some kind of rescue could be mounted. So either Jesus comes back and saves everything or it’s all kaput. That’s A or B – and I don’t see a C. Option A: Jesus comes back; Option B: kaput; there is no Option C when you destroy the educational system of the civilization, when you destroy the conversation of the civilization, when you destroy the political system to the extent that there is no longer an opposition, which is the most fundamental thing in a democracy. People like [Opposition leader] Michael Martin don’t even understand what it means to be leader of the Opposition; his job is to oppose the Government’s policies, not because he disagrees with them but because they need to be tested. The Opposition has stood down completely. You have to ask yourself is there any possibility in Ireland that we might throw up a figure like Matteo Salvini.” Indeed, Italy’s Interior Minister is one of several key politicians throughout Europe attempting to row back against the tide of Open Borders in terms of immigration and morals. “Right across Europe for the last five years there’s been a sea-change and you can see it in Italy, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, and Eastern Europe of course, and Britain – but it’s like nothing’s happened at all in Ireland. Tell me any minister we have who’s actually fit for the job! “So tell me where the Salvation to come from, other than that Jesus comes back – and we wouldn’t recognise him if he did.” I point out that Jesus came as a baby last time, but this wouldn’t work now, and that in fact if Jesus came as a baby again they wouldn’t wait until he was 33 to crucify him: they’d kill him in the womb. I mention the destruction throughout Ireland and mainland Europe of churches, cemeteries and even corpses, including the mummified remains in the crypt of 924-yearold St. Michan’s church in Dublin where one, believed to be a Crusader, was decapitated.

“These are all symptoms of a society that’s in a deeper malaise and my analysis of that is that it is what Alexander Mitscherlich, the German psychoanalyst who fought the Nazis, was referring to when he wrote a book called Society Without the Father, and he talked about the Sibling Society in which there would be no adults, or generations of half-adults. So that’s all we have now: generations of half-adults. Adulthood is the ingredient that is missing from everything, from politics, from media, from academia, from all these central institutions which have been vital for the maintenance of civilization there are no adults in them. There are no adults left. This is one of the fundamental problems with our civilization. Without responsible adults, without leadership, without a conversation, there’s no hope.” He adds: “There are all these trends that show that the world actually is in a final meltdown. There is nowhere it can come back from. This is the mistake that people are making, that somehow there will be a correction, but then you have to ask where will the correction come from, from what sector of humanity will the correction come. There’s no possibility because the educational trends are continuing, the media trends are continuing, the social media trends are continuing, [and] they will continue to have the influence that they’ve had unless we actually stop them – unless we literally take Twitter off the air then you won’t get a change in our cultural drift.” Why, I ask him, are people all over Europe focussing their hatred on the Catholic Church, and accusing it, for example, of institutionalized misogyny when a more appropriate target would be the Muslim church whose members are bypassing Islamic countries in huge numbers to resettle in Europe? Waters explains: “The Catholic Church is the repository of the wisdom of the ages, the mainstay of the old civilization which retained the archives of knowledge and wisdom that had been accumulated through the ages; it is the voice of God in the world; the other religions are not relevant. In one of my books I talk about [an occasion when] I was at a meeting of Atheist Ireland: I walked in with a friend of mine and just sat there, listening, and one guy who was actually a well-known figure

Without responsible adults, without leadership, without a conversation, there's no hope.

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stood up and said ‘We have to make alliances with Moderate Islam against Catholicism’ – well, that’s brutality! Look, this is a kind of sabotage of our culture. They’re actually welcoming hordes of Islamists into Ireland; this is one of the hotspots of Jihadism in Europe because it’s not Catholic.” The calls from Pope Francis for all Western countries to fling open their borders cannot have helped, nor has the Pope’s insistence on courting the Climate Change protestors whose bogus agenda is destroying the economy and making life miserable for people who need cars, central heating, and other civilized comforts. “They’re not really Catholics,” says Waters. “[The Church’s Climate Change campaign] is only a tactic; the LGBT do that as well.” He adds: “The Church has been destroyed not by its enemies, but from within; it is now no longer the Church.” This was clear to Waters during the abortion Referendum campaign, when he was one of several high-profile speakers who toured Catholic parishes to argue passionately for the right to life of the unborn. “We spoke in churches, and that was a salutory experience where you were treated basically as a pariah. People walked out, you were put on after Communion. The Irish [Catholic] church is in really bad shape.” Ironically, those who remain faithful to Catholic doctrine are shunned from within and outside the Church. “There is a new trend that they dismiss the voices of those who defend the right to life on the basis that they are simply parroting a religious dogma, so that if you believe certain things which are fundamentally true, and you own up to being a Catholic, then you might as well not have opened your mouth.” I point out that atheists too have been vilified for expressing pro-life opinions. “Well they don’t like to hear it from them because that doesn’t suit the argument. But essentially it means that we’re in a world that by definition the truth cannot be spoken because the truth is deemed to be prejudicial and so that’s the end.” Catholicism, Waters believes, is what made Ireland a magnet for the globalist puppetmasters behind the “liberal” agenda. “We’re a trophy country because we were Catholic; it’s using the fact that we were Catholic as the trophy – that’s the trophy.” The fact that Ireland is such a small country also makes it easy to brainwash the population; the island is frequently used by companies to pilot new products and test advertisements. While some might say that the “liberal” agenda has

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some positive elements, Waters doesn’t agree. As an example of how people self-soothe even as they are sowing the seeds of destruction, he cites the infamous Stanford Prison experiment in 1971 in which a group of young men were divided into prisoners and wardens, and the Milgran experiment at Yale University in 1961 in which people were given the means to give electric shocks. “The conclusion was that there was a very dark side to human nature and that they were easily led and easily told that they were acting under instruction. The Sandford Prison Experiment has been grossly discredited for all sorts of reasons, but there was something that we didn’t know about both of those experiments at the time, and we were not told, and that is that it was a central element of the instruction of the people involved that they were told that what they were doing would be ‘to the betterment of humanity.’ And we can see this so strongly now: that the people who are doing the most evil in the world today think they’re doing good; they have been persuaded that they’re doing good because of the warping of language. “They’re pursuing freedom, they’re pursuing an idea of freedom and, because they have such a belief in this, it’s almost like a talismatic belief in the power of this idea. They’re unable to actually stop and look at the effects of all this even in their own lives when what’s actually happening to them is the opposite of freedom. You can see this in the way that women, for example, who are told ‘you can go and work, you need to work to be equal – equal pay!’ and then they work and postpone their families and then they hit middle age and they’re appalled suddenly that their life seems to have passed them by, and they blame men or they blame society. But doesn’t it occur to them that actually they were the ones who pursued this false idea of freedom? Nobody points it out that forty years ago you could have a house on one salary. They conceal from themselves the evidence of their enslavement. They’re essentially being enslaved, and they call it freedom!” The deaths of Vincent Lambert in France and baby Charlie Gard in England are chilling examples he cites of the power of the State over the right to life of individual citizens. Both were taken off life support against their parents’ wishes, though in Lambert’s case, his wife agreed with the doctors, who allowed him to starve and dehydrate to death. Waters says forced euthanasia is “a new trend – the State decides [whether you have a right to life or not.” He says people who

Charlie Gard & Parents, United Kingdom

feel that they might be a “burden” on their society would be encouraged by peer pressure and Government policy to opt for euthanasia. He feels that he has been fighting, Canute-style, against a tide of insanity and inanity. “The human race is getting stupider. We see this, it is objectively measurable now, there have been numerous surveys which show that over the past half-century the intelligence of the race has declined and is accelerating now particularly since the onset of the Internet. There is the thing that I talk about in my book which is the loss of the connection that humans have with reality through touching things, through the senses. If you watch a baby for a couple of hours, a nine-month old baby just learning to crawl, what does he do? He goes around touching everything, eveything he can find he chases and touches it, he looks at it, he turns it around, he puts it in his mouth. This is how the human being learns about reality. But now there is a point of interrupption where you cease to learn in that way and you learn at second-hand where everything comes to you by somebody else’s direction, somebody else’s interpertaion, somebody else’s moderation, and so at a certain point you become unmoored from reality intellectually, mentally, and that’s what has happened now to all the generations that are alive today under the age of about 35, they have lost the connection that they had as children. Now they only know things as abstractions. Our young people aren’t able to live any more. They are full of fear and anxiety. Does nobody look at these things? They’ve invented all these constructs. “For 30 years I’ve been trying to say: Talk about the past and try to derive from the past certain essences

of thought or behavior or culture that were so fundamental, based on such a fundamental need or urgency that we need urgently to look at them. But invariably what I run into is the same old cliché which is: ‘Oh, you can’t go back to the past,’ and I say: ‘No, I’m not trying to go back to the past, I’m trying to look at the past and derive from the past the essence of something vital.’ They can’t hear it – our society refuses to hear it because then these gobshites – so-called Liberals, socalled pluralists – they can turn everything into basically: ‘You want to bring back snagging turnips!’ you know?” Such bland dismissals ignore the motivations behind the “liberal” agenda, he says. “Why do Google and Facebook and Twitter want abortion in Ireland? Because they have a huge staff, half of which are women, and they don’t want them going off and getting pregnant.” While he believes the globalist industrialists, media, and politicians are pulling the puppet-strings for financial gain, he doubts that the ordianary Irish citizens have given much thought to what havoc they’re unleashing when they campaign for abortion or wave the Rainbow flag. They don’t have a purpose; this is just activity. They are trying to give meaning to their meaningless lives by opposing everything that is. You see, once you take God out of reality, this is what happens inevitably; without a transcendent idea, life becomes meaningless, so they have to generate meaning. So their meaning is a negative one which is that they’re opposing all that came before, all the forces of tradition, all the forces of the past, all the forces that actually created the glue that holds civilization together. So by definition they’re disintegrating civilization. Waters has given up looking for the silver lining on the other side of the big gay Rainbow, and resents the “moral pressure” to offer hope to people. “I remember at a summer school a couple of years ago having this row with the chairman and he said ‘Well, can you say anything positive?’ and I said ‘No.’ ‘But you must say some positive message!’ ‘No I don’t have a positive message – how could I? How can I have a positive message in the midst of all this? And why should I? That would be a lie.’ I don’t see much cause for positivity. They have destroyed our civilization. We are walking through the ruins of our civilization at this moment.” Endnotes available online:

culturewars.com/news/buyers-remore

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FEATURE GRETA THUNBERG: CLIMATE CHANGE & MENTAL ILLNESS “This is happening to tens of thousands of Swedish families.”1 – Melania Ernman, Scener från Hjärtat The conventional narrative on climate change got a he served on the board of the Intergovernmental Pannew lease on life when Greta Thunberg, the 16-year- el on Climate Change.4 It was the IPCC’s predictions old Swedish environmental activist, arrived in New about carbon dioxide which played a crucial role in York to address the United Nations General Assem- converting Greta’s mother to the climate change cause. bly in September. As if to lend heightened drama to Or as she put it: her entrance, Greta arrived from her native Sweden Around 30 years ago, James Hansen stood before the not by plane but by sail boat, crossing the Atlantic US congress and explained why global warming wasn’t a at the height of hurricane season with her father to myth. “We can say with 99 percent certainty that global lessen their carbon footprint. The fact that the sailwarming is not caused by natural variations but rather by boat was in fact one of the Rothschild family’s racing human releasing CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into yachts came out only after the fact, as did the fact that the atmosphere.” He declared on June 23, 1988.5 the entire crew along with Greta and her father were Missing from Ernman’s account is the fact that scheduled to fly back to Sweden after their stay in Gavin Schmidt: America, but these inconvenient truths exposing who was behind the agenda did little to Jim Hansen’s successor at NASA’s diminish the drama surrounding New York shop, GISS, has remarked by E. Michael Jones her arrival.2 that “general statements about exThe main-stream media greeted tremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular Greta as the child Messiah of climate change. Influmedia.” He went on to say that it takes only a few secenced by all of the hype emanating from New York, onds’ thought to realise that the popular perceptions that the Church of Sweden, which was the state church “global warming means all extremes have to increase all until it got disestablished in 2000, re-tweeted their the time” is “nonsense.”6 “Announcement!” of December 1, 2018, declaring that “Jesus of Nazareth has now appointed one of his Henrik Palmgren, founder and editor of Red Ice, successors, Greta Thunberg.”3 documented Greta’s connection to Swedish political The Swedes had a long history of turning climate circles, calling her “a manufactured asset constructchange into a sacred cause. In an article which dis- ed by the very elites she claims to be fighting.” 7 missed the climate change hysteria surrounding Her fame comes from the fact that she organized a Thunberg’s visit as a moral panic, retired MIT clima- school strike for climate on August 20, 2018, all by tologist Richard Lindzen mentioned the crucial role herself, or at least that was how it was portrayed in which Swedes like Olaf Palme, the father of Swedish the main stream media. Missing from that account social engineering, played as early as the 1970s, when was any mention of Ingmar Rentzhog, director of

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Melania Ernman the organization known as Climate Change: We Don’t Have Time, who just happened to be walking by the Swedish Parliament on the morning of August 20, 2018 and just happened to bump into Greta. 8 Rentzhog was a graduate of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, who shared the stage at the Climate Parliament with Melania Ernman, who just happened to be Greta’s mother. Rentzhog had been informed of Greta’s protest a week before by another Swedish climate activist. Far from being a loner, Greta was the flower of what Henrik called “an incestuous circle of energy sector social democrats,” in addition to being the product of four generations of social engineering in Sweden. She was also—perhaps because of that fact— mentally ill, a fact which prompted Fox News commentator Michael Knowles to claim that “the climate hysteria movement is not about science.” If it were about science, Knowles continued, “it would be led by scientists rather than by politicians and a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left.”9 Knowles’ claim James Delingpole of the Telegraph coined the term prompted a “visceral reaction” from liberal pundit “Climategate” to describe the scandal which emerged Christopher Hahn, who abandoned his role as com- from e-mails which got leaked from Climatic Research mentator and became instead a defender of the con- Unit of the University of East Anglia. The revelations ventional climate narrative by portraying Knowles’ as were significant because the professors associated with that university played a crucial role in generating con“a grown man . . . attacking a child.” “Shame on you, skinny boy,” Hahn shouted at cern over climate change because of their connection Knowles. “She’s trying to save the planet because to the United Nation’s Interogovernmental Panel on your president doesn’t believe in climate change. Climate Change (IPCC).12 Professor Philip Jones, diYou are despicable for talking about her like that rector of East Anglia’s CRU, was in charge of the data on national television and you should apologize to on global temperatures which led to Michael Mann’s now famous “hockey stick graph,” which showed that her right now.” Fox News spared Knowles the effort by apol- “after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their ogizing for him. highest level in recorded In a statement to Greta was the product of a history” and became as The Daily Beast, a campaign of social engineering a result “the central icon spokesman for Fox of the entire man-made News said, “The comwhich took place over four global warming movement made by Migenerations in Sweden ment.”13 chael Knowles who When, in 2003, Cawas a guest on The Story onight was disgraceful—we apologize to Greta nadian statistician Steve McIntyre called into quesThunberg and to our viewers.”10 Fox News later told tion the entire statistical basis of the IPCC’s concluThe Hollywood Reporter’s Jeremy Barr that it has no sions and the CRU data upon which they were based, Dr. Jones and his colleagues reacted by engaging in plans to book Knowles again as a guest.11 The confrontation of Fox News provided drama “devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing to a narrative that has been in trouble for over a de- their data to outsiders under freedom of information cade before Greta’s arrival in New York. In late 2009, laws.”14 Jones’ actions involved criminal behavior be-

November 2019 / 33

Michel Foucault, Uppsala, Sweden

cause he urged colleagues to delete crucial data after they had received freedom of information act requests. The so-called “science” behind climate change, it turns out, was deeply politicized. All data had to be manipulated “to lower past temperatures and to ‘adjust’ recent temperatures upwards in order to convey the impression of accelerated warming.”15 In addition to suppressing their own data, “the hockey team” conducted a ruthless campaign to silence the scientists who disagreed with them, thus “ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.”16 Completely ignoring the East Anglia scandal, Prince Charles made a statement in 2014 calling climate change “the most defining and pivotal challenge of our time,”17 but he could not stem the tide of climate skepticism which the CRU scandal had unleashed. Shortly after Greta arrived in New York, 500 scientists issued a statement claiming that there was no scientific basis for claiming that CO2 emissions were responsible for climate change.18 Those scientists went on to say that “There is no climate emergency. . . . “There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. . . . Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.”19 One of the scientists who signed that statement was Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of

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Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 2013. Lindzen, who is the author of over 200 papers on meteorology and climatology and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, characterized the claim that climate can be controlled by a single variable—namely, carbon dioxide—as “based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking.”20 When politicians magnify these figures even more, Lindzen is forced to conclude that the real force driving the climate change movement is not science but rather “political actors and others seeking to exploit the opportunities that abound in the multi-trillion dollar energy sector.”21 It was at this point that Lindzen mentioned former Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme, as a board member of the IPCC, and one of the political actors driving this agenda. Lindzen then explains that elites are particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation because: 1. They have been educated in a system where success has been predicated on their ability to please their professors. In other words, they have been conditioned to rationalize anything. 2. While they are vulnerable to false narratives, they are far less economically vulnerable than are ordinary people. They believe themselves wealthy enough to withstand the economic pain of the proposed policies, and they are clever enough to often benefit from them. 3. The narrative is trivial enough for the elite to finally think that they ‘understand’ science. 4. For many (especially on the right), the need to be regarded as intelligent causes them to fear that opposing anything claimed to be ‘scientific’ might lead to their being regarded as ignorant, and this fear overwhelms any ideological commitment to liberty that they might have. None of these factors apply to ‘ordinary’ people. This may well be the strongest argument for popular democracy and against the leadership of those “who know best.”22 Scientists are useful because they comprise the quintessential group of those “who know best.” They reinforce the celebrities in their belief that they understand the problem because together, the scientists (some of whom also aspire to be celebrities) and the elites, can create a conventional narrative in the mass media which leads to “the huge increases in funding that have accompanied global warming hysteria.”23 The purpose of these claims, according to Lindzen, “is obviously to frighten and befuddle the public, and to

make it seem like there is evidence where, in fact, there is none.”24 Lindzen concludes by saying that none of the measures proposed to halt climate change will have “much impact on greenhouse gases.” The swindle involves the hijacking of trillions of dollars of resources that could help alleviate poverty in poorer sections of the world by demonizing development based on prudent use of energy. Environmentalism has always been a project promoted by the world’s elites, who have always used some looming catastrophe like over-population, AIDS, or global cooling as an excuse to promote the agenda of the oligarchs. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from Lindzen’s analysis is that the cause of global warming is psychological. Former Fox News commentator Michael Knowles was, of course, right in claiming that Greta was mentally ill. Greta has repeatedly stated that she is suffering from a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome, and in fact brags about it. As the headline of one article put it: “Greta Thunberg became a climate activist not in spite of her autism, but because of it.”25 As Greta herself put it, “I have Aspergers . . . so I don’t really care about social codes.” Being “neurodiverse” gives her a superpower to think outside the box. “Without my diagnosis this would not have been possible because then I would have been just like everyone else. Now I overthink everything.” As one journalist noted:

do the same thing for hours.” Thunberg then turned her own mental illness into the norm for everyone else, claiming that “she couldn’t understand why everyone on the planet wasn’t similarly obsessed with preventing [climate change].”27 Far from being a handicap, Greta’s mental illness has turned her into a visionary. In addition to knowing the capitals of every country in the world and all of the elements on the periodic table,28 Greta, according to her mother, “is one of the few people who can see carbon dioxide with the naked eye. She sees how greenhouse gases pour out of our chimneys and rise into the wind, where they turn the atmosphere into a gigantic invisible garbage dump. She is the child. We are the Kaiser, and we are all naked.”29 The man who turned the mentally ill into visionaries on a global scale was Michel Foucault. He came to this conclusion after spending three years in Sweden during the high water mark of their social engineering experiment in the 1950s. It is no coincidence that Michel Foucault, the man who claimed that all lunatics were visionaries, wrote Madness and Civilization during his stay in Sweden. Foucault, the homosexual philosopher, was both attracted and repelled by the Swedish commitment to create a sexual utopia through social engineering. In order to resolve his contradictory feelings, Foucault spent three years at the French institute of the University of Uppsala hiding out from the “silenced Swedes,” writing what would become Madness and Civilisation (Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique), in a form that he hoped could secure him a PhD.30 Instead of acceptance, Foucault ran into the “cold positivism” of Professor Sten Lindroth, who was unimpressed with Foucault’s dissertation, dismissing it as “not serious, historically poor, filled with speculative assertions, and too literary.” The Swedes have been kicking themselves ever since, because Madness and Civilization “is unanimously considered as one of the important books of the second half of the 20th century. In the last 30 years, the book was quoted in more than ten thousand academic

Foucault also wanted to be punished for his transgressions, and it was clear that that wasn’t going to happen in sexually liberated Sweden. As a result, “Foucault left Sweden disappointed”

A few years ago, Thunberg’s ascent to fame likely would have been framed in the media as that of an inspiring young girl “overcoming” her disability to become the leader of a worldwide movement. But Thunberg herself makes a different, more radical argument: that she became an activist not in spite of her autism but because of it.26

Greta then went on to explain to New Yorker reporter Masha Gessen, “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective. It’s very common that people on the autism spectrum have a special interest. … I can

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cities which had modern plumbing and other amenities. In doing this they reduced the time women spent in the home from 14 to four hours per day, allowing Swedish women to invest those surplus 10 hours in careers which involved jobs outside of the home.35 The architects of that plan, as I mentioned in my review of Midsommar in the September issue of Culture Wars, were Harry Schein, Ingmar Bergman, and, most importantly, Olaf Palme. Greta was the product of a campaign of social engineering which took place over four generathe mutism of the Swedes, their silence and their habit of tions in Sweden that had uncanny similarities to talking with elliptical sobriety, which prompted me to start the trans-generational decline from Aristocracy to speaking [writing?] and develop this endless chatter that I Timocracy to Plutocracy to Democracy and finalbelieve can only irritate a Swede. [… In Sweden], a huly Tyranny which Plato described as the trajectory of man is but a moving dot, obeying laws, patterns and forms Greek city-states in his Republic. in the midst of a traffic that is more powerful and defeats This decline in Sweden began when the aristocracy him/her. In its calmness, Sweden reveals a brave new world 32 stole the property of the Catholic Church in the lootwhere we discover that the human is no longer necessary. ing operation known as the Reformation. Greta, of course, You were damn well goint to Over the course of suffers from the make up for your neglect... I didn't four centuries, aristocsame mutism which Foucault found to racy degenerated into realize I hated you. I was sure we be such a repugnant the plutocracy which loved each other. I couldn't hate part of the Swedish came to be known as you, so my hatred turned into an personality. Melacapitalism. From Grenia Ernman, Greta’s ta’s perspective, the insane fear. mother, described drama of decline be– Autumn Sonata the details of Gregan in earnest when the socialists repreta’s mental illness in detail in her memoir Scener från Hjärtat or Scenes senting what Plato referred to as democracy stole the from the Heart, which has not yet been translated into mantle of governance from the Swedish Lutherans English.33 Ernman was a famous Swedish opera sing- and created in place of Christianity the sexualized verer who became even more famous when she won the sion of heaven on earth. This corresponded to Ingmar Eurovision song contest in 2009. Ernman, who was Bergman’s struggle with his Lutheran pastor father, born in 1970, came from a well-known family which and the triumph of socialism in the years following the included prominent Lutheran ministers, but as a child Second World War, when Swedish socialism became Ernman lived in a household where Humanism was the paradigm for development in America as well. Ingconsidered the ultimate commandment.34 mar Bergman was born in 1915. His films became faErnman came into this world at the end of a ruth- mous as a rationalization of atheism, but not without less transgenerational campaign of social engineering exploring the guilt which accrued from abandoning which removed the last vestiges of Christianity from Christianity in favor of sexual liberation. Sweden, as we have already indicated, played a cruSwedish public life and put in its place a plan of sexual liberation which distracted the public from the conse- cial role in developing that agenda. By the time Mequences of the spiritual vacuum which socialism had lania Ernman came into this world in 1970, that batcreated in Swedish culture. tle was over in Sweden. The socialists had won, and From 1965 to roughly 1973, the Swedish gov- social mores based on sexual liberation had become a ernment built a million dwellings in order to move commonplace of everyday life. Taken together BergSwedes off of the land and into settlements in the man’s generation and Melania’s, represented the initial articles throughout the world. In 2014, the fourteenth annual meeting of the International Foucault Circle was hosted by the university of Malmö, in the South of Sweden.”31 Foucault was drawn to Sweden because he saw that country as a place where he could act on his illicit sexual desires, but Foucault also wanted to be punished for his transgressions, and it was clear that that wasn’t going to happen in sexually liberated Sweden. As a result, “Foucault left Sweden disappointed” by:

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Ingrid Bergman & Liv Ullmann, Autumn Sonata 1978

assault and ultimate triumph of Swedish socialist democracy over the Lutheranism of Bergman’s father’s and Melania’s grandfather’s generation. By the time Melania reached sexual maturity, sex was no big deal. The moment that a culture loses its sexual compass is the moment that psychological problems begin. In 1978, when Melania was still a girl, Bergman directed Autumn Sonata, a film which resonates uncannily with Melania’s memoir. Both Bergman’s film and Melania’s memoir concern famous mothers who neglect their daughters and the identity crisis which flows from that neglect. Feminism had triumphed in Sweden. Melania tells us that her spouse Svante became a house-husband because, as he told her, “You earn much more than I do.”36 By the time Melania became an adult, everything was perfect in the feminist paradise known as Sweden: We continued in this way for 12 years. It was challenging but also crazily beautiful. We would stay for two months in one city and then travel to the next venue: Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Barcelona. On and on. We spent summers in Glyndebourne, Salzburg or Aix-en-Provence, which is the way it is when you’re an opera singer. I would practice for 20 to 30 hours a week, and the rest of the time we had to ourselves, totally free with no constraints. No relatives other than Grandma, Svante’s mother. No friends, no invitations to dinner. No vacations. Just us.37

Melania lived the life that every feminist longs for. She has a handsomely rewarded career as an opera singer which allowed travel throughout the world and universal adulation. That adulation reached its peak in 2009 when in addition to her career as an opera

singer, Melania won the Eurovision Song Contest. Greta was six years old at the time. One can imagine her watching mommy on television38 and thinking, ‘Everyone loves my beautiful mommy. She spends her time singing for these people in Moscow. If she loves me, why doesn’t she spend time with me?’ Roughly five years later, in the fall of 2014, at the start of the Swedish equivalent of fifth grade and at the height of her mother’s fame, Greta entered puberty. The most striking aspect of Greta’s psychic development is “the timing” of the onset of mental illness which she shared with her sister Beata. “In terms of her age,” Melania wrote referring to Beata and Greta, “the explosion took place at exactly the same moment: just before puberty between the ages of 10 and 11.”39 In Sweden the onset of puberty coincides with sex education. In 1955 Sweden became the first country in the world to make sex education mandatory nationwide.40 When they reach the age of 11, all Swedish girls are required to take that country’s public school sex-ed course. In addition to providing “the basics of puberty and bodily development,” Sweden’s schools also “have the task of contradicting traditional gender patterns,” according to Johan Lilly Gyberg, researcher for the National Agency for Education. Swedish teachers “should provide opportunities for all students to develop their interests and abilities without gendered restrictions.” 41 The prime gendered restriction is, of course, women staying home and raising children. Since that option disappeared in Melania’s generation, there was no way that either Melania or Greta could articulate it as a problem. In Melania’s generation, sex education involved having 11-year-old girls watching a film of a mature couple having sexual intercourse. By the time her daughters reached the fifth year of primary school, that film had been replaced by a cartoon which was, by that fact, less graphic in its details but more explicit in its message because it contained a scenario in which a teenage couple engaged in sexual intercourse. So, if

November 2019 / 37

Melania Ernman & Greta Thunberg

Melania learned in a very explicit way that this is the sort of thing adults engaged in, Greta and Beata were confronted by the fact that people their age or slightly older were expected to have sex, a fact which only increased the psychic pressure on them to conform to the sexualization of their lives at a time when all girls their age are feeling particularly vulnerable and in need of guidance from their mothers, and not from peers, especially boys, who had a vested interest in certain outcomes. Having seen children roughly their age engaging in sexual activity, the 11-year-old girls who watched the sex ed cartoon were supposed to conclude that they could or should engage in that activity themselves or not resist when boys pressured them to. That is the subliminal message of the new sex-ed course, and judging from the reaction that the film created, the boys got one message and the girls got another after viewing it. It turns out that most Swedish girls did not like what they were learning in school. In fact: In a 2011 survey of female students and recent graduates, 96% thought sexual assault was insufficiently covered in schools, and more than a third thought the knowledge gained from their sex ed was “poor” or “very poor.” 42

Melania refers to these sexual assaults obliquely as bullying (or to give the word used in the German translation, “Mobbing”). “Getting bullied is bad enough,” Melania tells us, “but getting bullied without knowing that you’re getting bullied is worse.”43 “Greta,” Melania continues, “tells us that she

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gets beat up on the school yard and lured into out of the way places. She tells us that she has been systematically marginalized and that her only refuge is the girls’ room, where she sometimes hides and cries, until the recess patrol forces her back into the schoolyard” (my emphasis).44 Swedish girls were encouraged to question gender roles. Their teachers were encouraged to “invite female rights advocates for guest lectures to celebrate International Women’s Rights day,” but they were not encouraged to report incidents of sexual assault, something the author of the article attributes to “lack of dialogue.” Whatever the cause, it was the Me Too movement from the United States and not Swedish representatives of gender equality which got the dialogue on sexual assault started in Sweden. “Hundreds of female students and alumnae took to Twitter to share experiences with sexual assault under the #Tystiklassen (silence in the classroom) hashtag,” because “many said they hadn’t felt comfortable reporting instances prior to the movement.” 45 Unable to discuss the legitimacy of a program of sex education, which had been a fixture of Swedish life for generations, with either her mother or her teachers, Greta, like many of her peers, decided to take matters into her own hands. It was at this point in her life that Greta suddenly stopped eating. Melania’s shock is palpable. “It’s late,” she tells us: The children are asleep. Everything is collapsing around us. Greta just entered fifth grade and is not doing well. She cries in the evening when she’s lying in bed. She cries on the way to school. She cries during class and during recess, and her teachers call Svante just about daily to tell him to come and pick up Greta and take her home to Moses, our golden retriever, because only Moses can help her now. Greta sits next to him for hours petting his fur. We try everything within our power but to no effect. Our daughter disappears in to a kind of darkness and stops functioning. She stops playing the piano. She stops laughing. She stops speaking. And she stops eating.46

It’s not difficult to understand why Melania referred to the time leading up to this moment as “wonderful years,” but that was evidently not Greta’s view. Feminism meant that mommy was no longer in the home. Feminism meant that the girls of the next generation were left to their own devices when it came to sexual assaults from their sexualized male classmates. Girls

disorder is “not unusual among girls at the onset of puberty,” according to the doctor there. “The causes are frequently more psychological than medical in nature.” Greta’s parents place all of their hopes in the Swedish psychiatric profession in the hope that they will find the correct diagnosis for their child. When the Swedish psychiatric profession fails to come up with a cure, the family falls into despair. Svante can’t stop crying. “You’ve got to help us,” he sobs over and over again.52 Greta, Melania tells us, “cries full of despair in my arms, and that’s terrible,” but, she adds significantly, “at least I can feel like a mother whose child needs her.”53 Svante tries to fill the vacuum in the home which Melania created by cooking gnocchi, “lithas to avoid stepping on certain paving stones [on her way tle potato dumplings in the shape of a rugby ball and to school]. She has to begin walking with her left foot first, as large as bonbons,” according to Greta’s exact specifiand if she fails to do this she has to start all over again. cations. If he deviates at all from the strict regimen his And I have to walk the same way as she does, which is difdaughter has established, Greta can’t eat them. Svante ficult because my legs are longer than hers. We must make then makes a memo of each meal. During one particua strange impression on people as we walk back and forth lar lunch, Svante duly notes that Greta took two hours this way on the street. and ten minutes . . . Beate can’t tolerate to eat five gnocchange.47 One must learn to live, I practice chi.54 everyday. My biggest obstacle is I Eventually GreGreta’s eating disorta triumphs by der turned her mothdon't know who I am. I grope blindly. bringing mom er’s ideal world upside – Autumn Sonata back into the down. “Everything,” kitchen. “‘Please as she puts it, “began in the ambulatory health center roughly one month eat,’” say Svante and I together. At first calmly. Then after school began in the fall of 2014.”48 Confronted with more emphasis. Then full of the total frustraby the disruption of her life Melania tries to make tion and impotence that we feel. And finally we start sense of what happened, convinced that “Between the screaming full of anxiety and despair, ‘Eat! You have lines there is a story which no one can tell.”49 After to eat, do you understand? You have to eat, otherwise looking more deeply into the matter, Melania discov- you’re going to die!’ At this point, Greta succumbs to her first panic attack. She brings forth a sound which ers that: neither of us has ever heard, never, a cry from the abyss The incidence of mental illness among children between which lasts 40 minutes.”55 the ages of 10 and 17 has increased in the past decade by Given the situation at home, it comes as no sur100 percent. . . . According to a study conducted by the prise that Mom feels more comfortable on stage than Swedish central bureau for health and social well-being she does with her own children. “No matter how bad conducted in December 2017, nearly 190,000 children I felt otherwise,” she tells us, “I always felt good on and young adults in Sweden suffer from some form of stage. The stage was my secure harbor. But now I had mental illness.50 . . . . The group affected the worst is girls stepped over the line, and every performance of Xerxes and young women, 16 percent of whom have had contact was one of complete darkness. I don’t want to remain with psychiatric institutions for children. One in every sev51 there. I want to be at home with my children.” But, of en girls in Sweden is affected. course, she does not want to be home with her chilAfter she takes Greta to the Astrid Lindgren Chil- dren if it takes two and a half hours for one child to dren’s Hospital, Melania learns that Greta’s eating suddenly confronted by the changes to the body that come with puberty were left to discover their identity on their own. Abandoned by their mothers, these girls discovered that their only source of information was a sex-ed program which trained boys to be predators and girls to be their victims. Confronted by a body that was developing in a way that was frightening and inexplicable, and parents and teachers that condoned if not encouraged sexual activity, the only way that these girls could take control over their lives was by becoming neurotically in control of the details of their lives, no matter how insignificant, and using OCD as a coping mechanism. Greta stopped eating, but Beata, Melania tells us:

Continued on page 47 November 2019 / 39

REVIEWS FATALLY FLAWED

A REVIEW OF TAYLOR MARSHALL'S INFILTRATION Reviewed by Jonas Alexis If you have read E. Michael Jones’ Libido Dominandi, Is Notre Dame Still Catholic?, The Jews and Moral Subversion, The Catholic Church and the Jews, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, and David A. Wemhoff’s John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition: How the C.I.A.’s Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church, then you will find virtually nothing new in Taylor Marshall’s new book, Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within. Infiltration is disappointing largely because it miserably fails to name names and identify the real antichrist that has been waging a cosmic or universal war against the Church for the past two thousand years or so. Instead of calling out the real enemy, Taylor Marshall deliberately uses vague terms like “Liberalism,” “Modernism,” “Crypto-Modernism,” “Socialism,” or even “Communism” to describe the diabolical forces that have come to challenge the Catholic position in the culture wars. What is the ethnic group behind Communism? Protestants, Catholics, or Jews? Well, Marshall completely and astonishingly avoids addressing that issue, presumably because that could get him into trouble. And he obviously doesn’t want to

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tread down that path. It seems that Marshall hasn’t picked up a copy of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, which is published by Princeton University Press. Perhaps Marshall hasn’t read the book because he is a secret philo-Semite, as indicated throughout his book The Crucified Rabbi: Judaism & the Origins of Christianity. “God quickened the process of my conversion to the Catholic Faith with an insight that I gained from a Jewish rabbi,” Marshall writes.1 He moves on to misrepresent the Catholic position on the Jews by saying: We must note that it is not correct or fair to speak of ‘the Jews’ as corporately rejecting Christ. The early Church was almost entirely Jewish. All the Apostles were Jewish and Saint Paul himself was a Jewish Rabbi. The Blessed Virgin Mary was Jewish.2

So two thousand years of Church’s teaching on the Jews has just been debunked in just four sentences with no serious examination. Surely Marshall knows that the central issue has absolutely nothing to do with race or biology. Surely he knows that Catholic thinkers throughout the ages were aware of the fact that the early Church “was almost entirely Jew-

Sophia Institute Press; Crisis Publications, 2019 224 Pages, ISBN: 978-1622828463

ish” in an “ethnic” sense. So Marshall is subtly building a straw man here. What Marshall doesn’t tell his readers is that by the time a person gets to John chapters 8 and 9, the word “Jew” ceases to be an ethnic term and takes on a theological meaning. For example, John tells the story of a man born blind, and by the middle of that story we read: “These words spake his parents, because they feared the Jews: for the Jews had agreed already, that if any man did confess that he [Jesus] was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue” (John 9:22).

Taylor Marshall Wait a minute. St. John, the author of the gospel, was a Jew. In fact, both the protagonists and the antagonists at the time were all Jews. So why did St. John specifically say that the parents of the man born blind were afraid of the Jews? Well, as E. Michael Jones cogently argues in The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, by this time in the gospel the word Jew is no longer an ethnic term. The word Jew is now defined as a categorical and metaphysical rejection of Christ. This has been a turning point throughout the book of Acts. And this metaphysical rejection is still the major issue today. Alan Dershowitz, of all people, agrees. He writes in The Vanishing American Jew: “In America, and in other nations that separate church from state, one’s Jewishness is a matter of self-definition and anyone who wants to be considered a Jew or a half Jew, or a partial Jew or a person of Jewish heritage has a right to be so considered.”3 Everyone can become Jew if he has “Jewish blood,” but Christians, Dershowitz clarifies, are not entitled to this definition. “I do not mean to include former Jews who practice Christianity under the deliberately misleading name of Jews for Jesus. A Jew for Jesus already has a name: a Christian.”4 Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner concurs, saying that “Jews who practice Christianity cease to be part of the ethnic Jewish community, while those who practice Buddhism remain within.”5 This attitude stretches into history as well; Jewish historiographer Heinrich Graetz notes that “an actual line of separation was drawn between Jews and Jewish Christians; the latter were placed below the sect of Samaritans, and

in some respects below heathens. It was forbidden to partake of meat, bread, and wine with the Jewish Christians, as had been the case shortly before the destruction of the Temple with regard to the heathens, and to the same end—that of preventing closer intercourse with them. The Christian writings were condemned, and were put on par with books of magic.”6 As we shall see later, even the nation of Israel has proved that the issue has virtually nothing to do with “race” and has everything to do with rejecting Christ or Logos. St. Paul declares: “For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men” (1 Thessalonians 2:1415). Again, didn’t Paul know that he was an ethnic Jew? Or could it be that Marshall’s interpretation is wrong? And why didn’t Marshall discuss passages like this? Things get more complicated by the time we reach the book of Revelation: I know your tribulation and your poverty: but you are rich, and the blasphemy by those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan…. Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie” (Revelation 2:9; 3:9).

Who call themselves Jews today? The Chinese? The Japanese? The Belgians? The Jamaicans? You see, Marshall’s view is neither theologi-

cally sound nor intellectually plausible or coherent. In any event Yuri Slezkine, who is a Jewish professor at the University of California, begins his study by saying that “The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century.” Slezkine continues to say that “Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.”7 Russell Jacoby, another Jewish historian at the University of California, writes in his book The Last Intellectuals: The Jewish contribution to the Left in the United States during the twentieth century ranks the highest of any immigrant or ethnic group…American Jewry has provided socialist organizations and movements with a disproportionate number—sometimes approaching or surpassing a majority—of their leaders, activists, and supporters.8

So is it really bizarre that Marshall would spend one chapter after another talking about Socialism or “Liberalism” without even suggesting that its roots are largely Jewish? This categorical blunder has intellectually crippled Marshall.

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the Sacred Heart on the campus By failing to address the root of audiences in which they agitated of the University of Notre Dame, Socialism, Marshall surreptitiously against the suppression of literature Catholics were told that ‘Nicodeabsolves the Jews of any responsiand art, presenting the relevant mus visited Jesus by night out of bility in the culture wars. E. Miarguments to authors, publishers, fear of the Temple Authorities,’ a chael Jones has dealt with Cathoand general audiences who were passage which deliberately censored lics who are not holding Jews reunlikely to consult articles in legal the Gospel of St. John, which responsible for pushing things like journals. Some Jewish judges also ferred to ‘fear of the Jews.’ gay marriage and pornography in exerted substantial influence on the culture in his the development book Catholics and of the law of obPeople like Larry David and the Jew Taboo. Inscenity. For exSarah Silverman “are challenging stead of identifying ample, in 1933, America’s powerful religious, family- Benjamin Greenthe ethnic group that has universally friendly culture and asserting their span, a founder changed the culture, of the Wall Street Jewishness by glorifying obscenity. says Jones, archSynagogue, ruled bishops like Charles against the supChaput chose to use vague terms If you think Jones is a vicious an- pression of Erskine Caldwell’s novlike “secularizing activists.” This ti-Semite or that what he says here el God’s Little Acre.9 implicitly tells us that Catho- is farfetched, then crack-open just Lambert sounds as if he is talking lics like Chaput have become, in a few scholarly studies and see who to people like Taylor Marshall Jones’ words, “symptomatic of the is attacking the Church’s position when he writes: problem.” on marriage and abortion. Jewish Cultural and legal historians and In that sense, Catholics like scholars, historians and activists literary scholars who have studied Chaput and even Marshall have have known for years that Jews literary obscenity in the United invariably internalized the com- have challenged virtually every States and England have tended to mands of their virulent enemies. moral law in America—and, unlike avoid the question of the relationJones writes: “Catholics have been people like Taylor Marshall, they ship of Jewishness to their subject. losing the culture wars for the past are not afraid to name the actual Not wanting to reproduce the na53 years because Catholics can’t ethnic group responsible for this. tivist anti-Semitism of Comstock identify the enemy, and they can’t For example, in his book Unclean and other antivice crusaders or to identify the enemy because they Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and Ameriprovide support for the racist claims can’t say the word ‘Jew.’” In order can Culture, which is published by about Jewish sexuality trumpeted to make progress in this cosmic New York University Press, Josh by avowed anti-Semites, serious battle, Jones declares that we must Lambert of the University of Masscholars of American law and culbe “willing to hold Jews respon- sachusetts writes: ture tend not to dwell on the Jewsible for what they brag about in ishness of so many of the figures In the postwar decades, many of their own magazines.” Why? Bewho played key roles in the history the most influential lawyers who of obscenity and pornography in cause Jews: broke through public resistance in the past on issues ranging from school prayer to pornography to abortion to homosexuality….The battle that the Jews won 50 years ago in the public square is now being fought in the sanctuary of every Catholic Church during Holy Week. At the Stations of the Cross held during Lent at the Basilica of

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took on obscenity cases were also Jewish…Stanley Fleishman was the most prominent First Amendment lawyer in Los Angeles for several decades; and Ephraim London argued key film-censorship cases in front of the Supreme Court.

In addition to their legal work, these lawyers also wrote or edited books and essays for popular

the United States, even while these same scholars do attend scrupulously to the religious and ethnic affiliations of Protestants and Catholics. Jewishness is typically mentioned in the finest books on this subject only when it is raised unavoidably by the participants themselves, and scholars then typically eschew any commentary.10

Director David Cronenberg In a similar vein, Jewish scholar Nathan Abrams declares in his book The New Jew in Film: “[O] lder generation of Jewish filmmakers and actors, here [Woody] Allen, [Stanley] Kubrick and [Ron] Jeremy, arguably not only increased the Jewishness of their work, but updated it to match the new post1990 sensibility by defining it in increasingly sexualized (and pornographic) terms.”11 Lambert declares that Jews use pornography and most specifically obscenity “to fight anti-Semitism…”12 He adds that people like Larry David and Sarah Silverman “are challenging America’s powerful religious, family-friendly culture and asserting their Jewishness by glorifying obscenity.”13 Similarly, Abrams declares that “Jewish involvement in porn” is actually “the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion.”14 How? Well, ask Jewish director and producer Eli Roth, who said unequivocally that his movies, specifically his Netflix series Hemlock Grove, aspire to “fuck up an entire generation.”15 What if an entire generation does not want to be screwed and resists Roth’s subversive ideology? Obviously Roth and his Jewish brethren will call those people anti-Semites. In fact, those who dare say that Hollywood is controlled by Jewish revolutionaries have been labeled anti-Semites. But there is no doubt that Jews in Hollywood are largely using movies to subvert the culture. Director David Cronenberg is a classic example. When asked by the Rolling Stone, “Does the artist have any moral or social responsibility?”

Cronenberg responded: “No… Your responsibility is to be irresponsible.”16 William Beard of the University of Alberta has pointed out that Cronenberg’s philosophy is nothing but “the disappearance of ethics.”17 It is actually “a world of unimpeded desires without consequences, where ‘everything is permitted.’”18 Cronenberg admits: “Whenever I kill somebody in my films I’m really rehearsing my own death.”19 No responsibility, no morality, no ethical values, and no limit, nothing but ultimate meaninglessness and existential hell in movies. Existence itself, as indicated in Cronenberg’s movie eXistenZ, means corruption, moral degradation, and ultimately pathetic death. The axiom of eXistenZ is that “nothing is true; everything is permitted.”20 Cronenberg said in an interview: For me, all art is subversive. And that means that you cannot possibly abide by the rules of politeness and decorum that many mainstream

movies thrive on…Real art must be subversive to the status quo to some extent. It doesn’t mean that you’re preaching political revolution necessarily—although that would be a possibility. It’s inevitable if you consider yourself an artist, then you are going to bother people, that you’re going to disturb people, that you’re going to knock over a few walls…. There is an urge to get under the surface of things. Sometimes I do that literally… . That does upset a lot of people.21

Catholics like Joseph I. Breen understood Jews like Cronenberg when Breen said way back in the 1930s: They are simply a rotten bunch of vile people with no respect for anything beyond the making of money. . . . Here [in Hollywood] we have Paganism rampant and in its most virulent form. Drunkenness and debauchery are commonplace. Sexual perversion is rampant . . . any number of our directors and stars are perverts. . . . These Jews seem to think of nothing but moneymaking and sexual indulgence. The vilest

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kind of sin is a common indulgence hereabouts and the men and women who engage in this sort of business are the men and women who decide what the film fare of the nation is to be. They and they alone make the decision. Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth.22

presumably positing truth claims while denying truth exists! He is trapped in his essentially Talmudic matrix. Cronenberg cannot apprehend truth because he does not want to submit his will to the moral life. In that sense, he is both intellectually and spiritually crippled. As E. Michael Jones puts it in Degenerate Moderns:

That is an issue which Jones pursues in Libido Dominandi. In fact, the man who coined the term “sexual revolution” was none other than Wilhelm Reich, the author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich specifically declared how subverters like himself should overthrow the sexual order among Catholic priests. Reich wrote:

order to apprehend truth, which is the goal of the intellectual life, one must live a moral life. One can produce intellectual product, but to the extent that one prescinds from living the moral life, that product will be more a function of internal desire—wish fulfilment, if you will— than external reality. This is true of any intellectual field and any deeply held desire.24

the ‘conquering of the flesh’ made the guiding principle of morality!26

Breen essentially articThe first prerequisite for ulated the Catholic posiLike Winston Smith in healthier human and sexual tion in Hollywood, and relationships is the eliminaGeorge Orwell’s 1984, the American culture was tion of those moral concepts blessed because of the these people hate morality, which base their demands on Motion Picture Producbut they are condemning allegedly supernatural comtion Code. Contrast that mands, on arbitrary human a system or institution on to our day, where Jews regulations, or simply on tramoral principles. like Cronenberg have dition… . We do not want to been given the license to see natural sexual attraction subvert the moral law. Listen to The intellectual life is a function stamped as ‘sin,’ ‘sensuality’ fought Cronenberg here: of the moral life of the thinker. In as something low and beastly, and Nothing is true. It’s not an absolute. It’s only a human construct, very definitely able to change and susceptible to change and rethinking. And you can then be free. Free to be unethical, immoral, out of society and agent for some other power, never belonging. Ultimately, if you are an existentialist and you don’t believe in God and the judgment after death, then you can do anything you want: You can kill, you can do whatever society considers the most taboo thing.23

Cronenberg’s calculus here is logically and philosophically incoherent and existentially worthless. If “nothing is true,” then Cronenberg’s statement that “nothing is true” is not true. In order for the statement to make sense, Cronenberg has to assume that it is true! And if it is true, then “nothing is true” is categorically false, which means that his entire argument collapses. In short, Cronenberg is

44 / Culture Wars

WHO SEXUALIZED CATHOLIC PRIESTS? This brings us to a central point in our discussion: If Jewish sex therapist Ruth Westheimer is right in saying that “Judaism is intensely sexual” and that “sex, in and of itself, has never been a sin for Jews,”25 then is it possible for Jewish revolutionaries to consciously attempt to seduce priests and nuns into a diabolical and sexual ideology?

Reich discovered from the very beginning of his subversive enterprise that sexual deviancy, particularly masturbation, can be used as a weapon to destroy Catholic priests and nuns. If you can get priests and nuns involved in masturbation and sexual debauchery, then the idea of God or morality will eventually evaporate from their minds. As Jones writes in Libido Dominandi: What Reich discovered…was a fundamental truth of sexual politics, one discovered by the Catholic Church long ago. It can be formulated in either of two ways: either masturbation destroys your prayer life, or prayer destroys your ability to enjoy masturbation. The two forms of activity are psychically mutually exclusive. Anyone interested in changing the default settings of the culture would notice that the settings are binary as well: either/or.

Wilhelm Reich subversive music. Their poThere are only two cultural litical agenda came directoptions. Either the state fosters ly from Reich…. [Reich] prayer, belief in God, the authority mentions “clerics” who find of the father as God’s representait impossible to continue in tive, and the social order based on their vocation once they have morals, or it fosters masturbation, “felt on their own body” the which is to say, illicit sexual activ“physical consequences” of ity, which brings about an inabilisexual license.” ty to pray, the “death” of God, the loss of authority by the father, revCarl Rogers and others olution, and—the evidence from were indirectly harnessthe Russian Revolution which Re- ing the sexual possibiliich ignored—social chaos. ties that people like Reich As Jones further explains, Reich had already set in motion understood that “he who controls and projected them onto sex controls the state…. The illu- priests and nuns, who then sion of the Enlightenment, the il- dropped their morals and lusion which Reich shared when vows and began to get inhe formulated his idea of some volved in sexual debauchself-regulating sex economy, is that ery. As Jones historically vice may be harnessed for the gen- documents, this was largely leaving subsequent generations to eral good.” Reich theorized in the the beginning of sexual deviancy puzzle over an incident which had Mass Psychology of Fascism: “We do among nuns, particularly the nuns become a classic instance of renewal not discuss the existence or nonex- at the Sisters of the Immaculate gone wrong in the aftermath of Vatistence of God, we merely elimi- Heart of Mary in Los Angeles. ican II. nate the sexual repressions and dis- Jones writes: solve the infantile The logic is pretties to the parents. ty straightforward: We do not want to see the The inescapable though Reich and "conquering of the flesh" made conclusion of all Rogers never seemed this is that a clear the guiding principle of morality! to have read each othsexual consciouser’s work, their worlness and a natural dviews ideologically By the spring of 1965, James Francis regulation of sexual life must foregradually merged. As the United Cardinal McIntyre, archbishop of doom every form of mysticism; States Body Psychotherapy Journal the archdiocese of Los Angeles, had that, in other words, natural sexuputs it, Rogers’ and Reich’s “writbecome upset at the large number ality is the arch-enemy of mystical ings about human nature, science, of Immaculate Heart nuns who had religion.” Jones concludes: and the nature of the universe are asked to be dispensed from their remarkably similar (Davis, 1997). vows. Large, as time would show, The logical conclusion of this is So too are their views of society was a relative term in this respect. also clear: the total sexualization and their prescriptions for movSoon the number of nuns asking to of a culture would mean the total be laicized would turn into a flood, ing beyond individual and group extinction of the Church and the and the sensitivity training which neurosis toward a full life (Reich, classical state based on the moral Carl Rogers would unleash on the 1948; Rogers, 1977a).”27 Reich’s law. The real revolutionaries could order under the auspices of the Edideas have been highly praised in triumph over repression—and this ucation Innovation Project would academic circles because he atwas the program of the ’ 60s—just play a major role in their leaving. tempted to deconstruct what Kant by having a good time, by smoking By the time the experiment was calls the categorical imperative or dope, getting laid and listening to over, the order would cease to exist, practical reason in the cultural fir-

November 2019 / 45

mament. But most people could there are no moral standards! Like you doubt this, then listen to Wilnot or did not want to see the Winston Smith in George Orwell’s liam Coulson, a protégé of Rogers moral and intellectual consequenc- 1984, these people hate morality, who accompanied him on his trips es of Reich’s ideas, which can be but they are condemning a system to nunneries and seminaries: or institution on moral principles. reduced to simple, logical steps. [Our] theories made priests and nuns If there are no moral standards, One needn’t be a logician to realize feel good about being bad. Once then there are no right and wrong. that this edifice is philosophically we began to peel the onion at these If there are no right and wrong, incoherent and existentially indeworkshops, there was no end to the then there are no sexual ethics. If fensible. shocking things people would say. there are no sexual ethics, as AlThey became persuaded of this subdous Huxley himself puts it in MARSHALL’ jective theory of morality which says S INFILTRATION Ends and Means, then sexual free- AVOIDS DEEP ISSUES that the highest morality is the one you locate within you. And after a dom—freedom to do just about while these religious forgot about the anything—should be encouraged The fundamental question is this: teachings of the Church. or applauded. If sexual freedom is does Marshall’s Infiltration address the key, then things like rape and some of these deep issues? Does it After our workshop at Alma pedophilia are plausible and even really detail how the forces of dark- [the Jesuit seminary then in Calpermissible. Marquis de Sade, ness attempted to seduce priests ifornia], one of the young Jesuits Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean Paul and nuns with what Reich himself wrote, “Never in my life before Sartre understood this logic pretty called “sex economy”? Of course that group experience had I expewell. not. In fact, Infiltration doesn’t rienced me so intently.” The FranRogers himself indicated that he even remotely touch on how Wil- ciscans were so enamored with our was interested in a field in which helm Reich, Sigmund Freud, Carl psychology that they introduced he would have unlimited freedom. Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and it to Saint Anthony’s seminary in He said: “I wanted to find a field the entire humanistic psychology Santa Barbara. Years later, 11 or in which I could be sure my free- which spiritually stemmed from 12 friars were accused of molesting dom of thought would not be lim- “the smoke of Satan,” created con- 34 high school boys. I’m afraid we ited.”28 Rogers also made it very fusion among Catholic priests and planted the seeds and they carried the clear that he “could not work in nuns in the 1960s and beyond. seeds to the next generation and they a field where I would germinated.32 be required to believe There you have it: Reich's association of sexual in some specified reliRogerian or Reichian repression with Nazism and gious doctrine.”29 Rogtheory planted the seeds fascism… came to be widely ers found “religious of sexual rebellion into doctrine” repulsive, accepted by American cultural the minds of Cathobut he himself conpriests and nuns. critics in the following decade lic sulted an actual Ouija Coulson quoted Roger board through which himself saying that he As Lambert puts it, “The Rei- “greatly underestimated the realihe contacted the spirit of his dead chian association of sexual repres- ty of evil,” hoping that “Rogerian wife.30 The interesting thing is that sion with Nazism and fascism… theory goes down the drain.”33 The Catholic priests who were too came to be widely accepted by sad thing is that Marshall’s Infilnaïve or stupid enough to follow American cultural critics in the fol- tration doesn’t even explore those Rogers’ or Reich’s wicked ideolo- lowing decade.”31 We can conclude covert activities which ended up gies to their practical conclusions that humanistic psychology and weakening the spiritual lives of are now universally and ontologi- Rogers’ “encounter group” were in- Catholic priests and nuns. [...] cally being condemned as perverts deed the forces of darkness attackContinue reading online: by the same people who said that ing Catholic priests and nuns. If

culturewars.com/news/infiltration

46 / Culture Wars

Cont'd from pg. 39: Climate Change & Mental Illness

eat five gnocchi. And so Melania is conflicted and feels guilty: “Our life is chaos, and every logical explanation seems infinitely far away.”56 The fact that eating disorders are so common among pubescent girls in Sweden indicates that we are talking about something more than one particular family’s problem. The problem is systemic and transgenerational in its etiology. Consumed by guilt, like the mother in Autumn Sonata, the feminist mom has to find a surrogate to take the blame. The child is in the same situation. Greta does not want to blame her mother, but her resentment at being abandoned for her mother’s career can only be suppressed for so long before it begins to emerge and she becomes, in Melania’s words, “furious,” and begins leveling accusations that imply that her famous mother’s fame is the source of the problem. “Name one single famous person who is concerned about climate change,” Greta shouts at her mother. “Name one single famous person who is willing to give up the luxury of flying all over the world.” Wounded by the accusation, all that Melania can say is, “I am, of course, part of the problem.”57 Melania is, of course, more than just part of the problem. She is the source of the problem because, as all of the evidence indicates, the problem began when women left the home in search of careers. Neither Greta nor Melania can face up to this fact, and so together they collaborate in finding an acceptable substitute for guilt on the part of the mother and hatred on the part of the daughter which is tearing them apart. Eventually they find that substitute in climate change. After admitting her guilt, Melania deflects the blame away from feminism to climate change by adding, “At the current rate of CO2 emission, it will be all over in 18 years.”58 At this point it comes as no surprise when Melania claims that climate change made Greta mentally ill, something she does by tracing Greta’s illness back to a specific moment in school when “during one of her classes, Greta’s class viewed a film about ocean pollution. In the South Pacific, there is a floating island made up of plastic that is larger than Mexico. Greta bursts into tears during the film. Her classmates are moved to tears too.”59 After discovering that global warming drove Greta crazy, everyone in the family heaved a sigh of relief. The family was saved because its members had found a common enemy. Climate change drives Swedes crazy, or as Melania puts it:

We find ourselves in the middle of a sustainability crisis, which manifests itself in among other things global warming. But if this crisis manifests itself as mudslides in West Africa and drought in large sections of the Middle East, and in the islands of the Pacific as rising sea levels, it manifests itself in our neck of the woods in the form of stress illnesses, segregation and ever longer lines in child and youth psychiatric clinics.60

As Plato could have predicted, the triumph of social engineering as the operating system of Swedish socialism led to sexual anarchy, and anarchy, again as Plato predicted, led to the arrival of tyranny. Ingmar Bergman’s film Silence broke the code in Germany in the mid-60s. What followed was the sexualization of Germany’s teenage girls over the course of the 1970s, as evidenced by the fact that 12 sequels to the original version of Der Schulmaechen Report got produced over this period of time. Over the course of the 1980s, Hollywood produced exactly the same number of remakes of the horror film Friday the 13th. Sexual liberation led to horror on a global scale during this period of time. As in horror movies, the disappearance of guilt is immediately followed by the arrival of horror. The monster articulates the problems which result from abandoning the moral law. It is the return of the supressed conscience demanding retribution. Greta is simultaneously the monster who arrived after sexual liberation became widely accepted in her parents’ generation and the tyrant who shut down her famous mother’s career. Eventually, it was the threat of being committed to a psychiatric hospital that cured Greta of her eating disorder. “If no change occurs after the weekend,” the doctor told her, “we will have to check you into the hospital.” On the stairway heading to the exit, Greta turned around and said, “I want to begin eating again.” “When we get home, we can start with a banana,” Svante replies. “No, I want to eat normally.” Melania unsurprisingly attributes the cure to climate change, and in some sense she is right. The climate movement has a key that fits in every door,61 because “solving the problem of climate change will also solve the related problems of class conflict, mental illness, and sexual discrimination,”62 by distracting everyone, for a time at least, from the real cause of the problem.

Endnotes available online:

culturewars.com/news/greta November 2019 / 47

Bullets Jewish Privilege. “The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington,” reported Politico. “But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior.” Pope Francis, 82, is rigidly opposed to “young, rigid priests.” “One of the highlights of my life. I felt encouraged, consoled and inspired by the Holy Father today,” tweeted Fr. James Martin, S.J. after a private audience with Pope Francis on September 30. We are rigidly opposed to what Fr. Martin encourages men to do in private. Subtle Anti-Catholicism. Washington Post editorials now refer to Catholic bishops as “Mr.”—Mr. Chaput, Mr. Dolan, Mr. Gregory, etc. Moral theologian Pete Buttigieg says inaction on climate change a “sin.” Sodomy is a sin, Pete. It cries to heaven for vengeance. In the Message Of His Holiness Pope Francis For The Launch Of The Educational Alliance, the pope adopted Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village approach. He seems intent on giving us a clearer understanding of the scope of papal infallibility. A French court ruled that a man who died from a heart attack after having sex during a business trip had suffered a work-related accident, so his employer was liable. Makes us wonder what his job was.

48 / Culture Wars

Jewish Privilege and Academic Freedom. The U.S. Dept. of Education ordered Duke and UNC to recast their joint Middle East studies program, saying it had a biased curriculum that violated the terms of a federal funding grant. The order, Zoha Khalili of Palestine Legal told the NY Times, “sends a message to Middle Eastern studies programs that their continued existence depends on their willingness to toe the government line on Israel.” Hillary Clinton says Donald Trump’s an “illegitimate president” who “knows” he stole the 2016 election. We wonder whether she’s tried to form a legitimate government in exile. While training as a disability assessor in a government agency in England, Dr. David Mackereth was fired for refusing to use the preferred pronouns of transgender clients. The Employment Tribunal upheld his dismissal: “belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.” The idea that God created man in his image, male and female he created them, is the basis of human dignity, not an affront to it. The New York Times dubbed DaBaby “this year’s inescapable, breakout rapper.” We’ve managed to escape him. The anonymous whistleblowers who ignited the impeachment

furor come from within the intelligence agencies, yet some people deny there is such a thing as the Deep State. The concerted efforts to depose Pres. Trump that began even before his inauguration are culminating in impeachment proceedings that are unlikely to result in his conviction and removal from office. The larger question is whether they will fuel or instead frustrate his reelection. Self-appointed as God’s spokesman, Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson criticized Pres. Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces in Syria. “I believe, he said, “the president of the United States is in danger of losing the mandate of heaven if he permits this to happen.” But it’s comforting to know, Pat, that Trump’s had heaven’s mandate thus far. Non Credo? Did Pope Francis tell journalist Eugenio Scalfari’s that “Jesus of Nazareth, once he became a man, even if he was a man of exceptional virtue, was not a God”? Who knows. And that’s a shame.

JAMES G. BRUEN, JR.

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