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American Jacobins
Cancel culture is the American version of the Terror of the French Revolution. It is an American equivalent of Robespierre’s use of the guillotine. Rather than a single Committee on Public Safety, there are in America multiple committees on DEI, at virtually every public and private University, major news organization, every agency of the Federal government and most state governments, and most major corporations, every committee ready, in an instant, to cancel anyone who deviates, advertently or inadvertently, in however minor a fashion, from the ever-changing “Orthodoxy” of the Left (it is a great mystery of modernity, how an “orthodoxy” can change moment by moment, unplanned, unbidden, unforeseen, with Leftists veering, like a flock of birds or a school of fish, right and left, up and down, forward and backward, en masse, with seemingly no coordination or choreography).
The Justice Department is functioning as a National Committee on Public Safety (or Security) placing agents in Catholic Churches and investigating parents who attend school board meetings, and imprisoning any Conservative they can find who was present in DC on Jan 6. One gets the feeling that the only reason guillotines are not being used is that none can be found at present. Black Lives Matter and Antifa protestors are the equivalent of peasants storming the Bastille (or are those MAGA supporters on Jan 6?–no, sorry, wrong equivalency) and Versailles. The Radical Left is attempting a takeover of America. Our very own Jacobins. So far, so good for them, it appears. They have the dedicated support of about all of our major institutions and corporations.
The New York Met recently gave a performance of Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmelites” an opera about a group of nuns who were martyred in Paris during the Reign of Terror. Of course, that Revolution was perforce atheistic, and religion was targeted, with pretty much all of the clerics in France exiled or executed and all property of the Catholic Church confiscated by the State (a condition that holds to this day).
For me, it is hard to avoid the feeling that that performance by the Met was undertaken in an effort to curry favor with the Left, and assist in sending the signal of what the Left would dearly love to do to Christians in America. Those Met Opera stars could hardly engage in burning federal buildings or police stations, looting and attacking police, after all. But they could show solidarity with the Left by staging an Opera in which nuns are beheaded. Of course, it would be preferable to stage a performance in which Trump is beheaded, but that has already been done.
Alas, it hardly sates the Left’s lust for the destruction of Christianity to merely arrest pro-lifers praying in public in proximity to abortion clinics and prosecute them for that egregious offense. Or to legally harass, over and over and over again, a Christian baker. The Left is consumed with the bloodlust of Nietzsche regarding Christians, as reflected in his penultimate work, “Anti-Christ,” wherein he demanded the execution of all Christians.
Nietzsche’s sister, a Nazi fellow traveler who controlled Nietzsche’s estate after he went mad and died, insisted that that screed was done in a state of insanity. H.L. Mencken, who translated that screed into English, begged to differ, and insisted that it represented the core, the central tenet, of Nietzsche’s philosophy (of which Mencken, given that he translated the screed, seemed to approve).
And it is certainly a prime goal of the Left, to extirpate religion, particularly to extirpate those of a religious bent (DeSantis) who effectively oppose their radical assault on Western Civilization.
One supposes that the Left has visions of the events in Mexico following the 1910-20 Communist Revolution there (which preceded the Communist Revolution in Russia) that overthrew the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and established the “Partido Revolucionario Institutional” (The Institutional Revolutionary Party, possibly the greatest oxymoron of all time) as the governing party of Mexico, which attacked religion (the Catholic Church) leading to a shut down of Churches in Mexico. That led to a peasant uprising in defense of the Faith. Those were the Cristeros, who were ultimately subjugated. Famously, bodies of executed Cristeros were hung from telegraph poles in Jalisco, so that anyone riding the train would see, for mile after mile, the bodies of those rebels rotting in the air. I’m sure the Radical Left, in their fevered imaginations, would love to reprise that performance.
The outrage resulting from those atrocities is likely about the only thing keeping Daniel Ortega from doing likewise to the Catholic clerics and nuns in Nicaragua that he is persecuting (in seeming solidarity with the Biden administration’s ongoing–from the Obama administration–war on Christians, that has intensified since the Dobbs decision).
To me, it is remarkable that in 1953, Solzhenitsyn, who at an early age recanted his Communism and returned to the Christian faith he had been taught at his mother’s knee, foresaw all of this. In his book, “In the First Circle,” in an almost casual sentence or two, he predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also the adoption of its ideology by the Western Victors in the Cold War. And so it has come to pass. We are perforce all Bolsheviks now, something that Solzhenitsyn refused to be, for which crime he was treated to an extended stay in the Gulag and then exile.
If America is still a Christian nation, it is certainly not due to the support and approbation of the Biden administration and the Democrat party.
Published in General
Weird. So the nuns who taught me all the math and English I needed to know to get though High School, and beyond, were bad girls?
According to the Jacobins.
My devout Christian brothers & sisters who vote Democrat mystify me.
And there are lots of them.
So, so curious…
Excellent analogy, and a great opening paragraph . . .
I highly recommend “The Power and the Glory” by Graham Greene. I read it first in college (for pleasure, not assigned; even in 1974 at Dartmouth, it would never be assigned) and I was amazed. These things are never taught. I was equally ignorant of the Cultural Revolution in China. My only knowledge of the Russian Revolution came from not the history books, but from Dr. Zhivago on the big screen, when I was too young to understand.
Alas, our Democrat friends know none of this. They are naive believers teamed with others filled with bitterness, envy and resentment and heady with violence.
Its because too many things said of Republicans are true. Team identity is very powerful.
Nanocelt the Contrarian…quite the moniker…and what a professionally written piece! These times are so strange. I am very fortunate (in some ways) that, being old and retired and definitely disconnected from social media, I have very little involvement with cancel culture. However, that doesn’t keep my blood from boiling as I observe these vapid behaviors by shallow people whose self-esteem is established by their ability to hurt people with whom they disagree, and not with the use of their own internal strength, but merely by pointing a finger and screaming while their fellow worthless minions use the anonymity of the internet to destroy those who they believe are their enemies. These are times when those with faith must be steadfast. There is so little depth to the valueless left culture that all they have is destruction. Once that is done, then it will be for those with faith and understanding, and real intelligence to re-create and rebuild.
In the mid 1980s, my American History teacher in high school didn’t predicate the collapse but did say the two countries would pass each other on the political spectrum.
But he’s a Devout Catholic. /s
You confirm the old adage that real education is self education. I couldn’t agree more on Green. Pasternak for me was also a revelation, not just on history, but also the sense of the deep connectedness, as opposed to serendipity, of things
Thanks for the kind words and your excellent post.
Not only a devout Catholic, but lunch bucket Joe…
This is a great post.
The one question that I have is whether the Jacobin takeover is occurring now, or if it occurred decades ago, and is merely advancing into new areas now.
It seems to me that the relevant takeover occurred shortly before I was born, with the driving of the Christian faith out of the schools. This occurred in the public elementary and secondary schools, and also in the colleges and universities that weren’t explicitly Christian (and maybe even some of those, too).
The consequence has been a very large decline in the Christian faith, in church attendance, and in Christian values among the population. The effect has been slow, because the transformation did not occur all at once. Rather, an increasing proportion of young Americans were not Christian and did not adhere to traditional morality. The effect on society, and on the electorate, was gradual.
I think that we’ve seen this effect with respect to one issue after another — the normalization of divorce and illegitimacy, the sexual revolution and abortion, the promotion of female careerism rather than a family focus, the permissiveness toward pornography, and lately the further degeneration to the acceptance of outright perversion like homosexuality and transsexualism.
The Jacobins’ principal weapon has always been the same, I think — the use of the “anti-discrimination” principle and laws. They rarely throw people in prison, much less execute them. They just make it very difficult for those holding traditional views to hold down a job, at least if they speak out. Very few do so.
You are right. This has been going on for a long time. I first had it explained to me by a high school teacher, who elaborated on ‘secular humanism’ that had its roots in the Renaissance, it’s marked expansion in the Enlightenment, it’s first triumph in the French Revolution, went international on steroids in the 19th Century, and has been steadily pursued in America from the Progressive era on. It is always with the same agenda and similar tactics.
‘I think that we’ve seen this effect with respect to one issue after another — the normalization of divorce and illegitimacy, the sexual revolution and abortion, the promotion of female careerism rather than a family focus, the permissiveness toward pornography, and lately the further degeneration to the acceptance of outright perversion like homosexuality and transsexualism.’
Somewhere the concepts of shame and disgrace were lost, these are no longer even mentioned, fear of these things was what kept me and most people my age in line .
Oh, shame and disgrace haven’t been lost, simply redirected. And redirected towards some things that were valued in the past.