Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Western elites have lost their backbone. Because of this, they are failing and growing more desperate. If Western Civilization falls because of a betrayal by its own elites, it will not be a miscalculation. It will be cultural suicide.
This all matters to us here in the United States. Forces across the Western world are desperately trying to destroy our freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. They would deny our God-given and inalienable human rights and collapse our functioning republics.
Those who would terminate the West and replace it with “Utopia” are operating throughout the English speaking world, and, more broadly, across the entire Western world. Europe is about two generations “ahead” of us in these developments, and the condition in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is roughly one generation more “advanced”.
Why would the primary beneficiaries and natural leaders within the Western world collude to bring about its destruction? What rational motive could lead people to abandon their own inherited cultural legacy and identity?
Motives for cultural suicide defy logic. Those anti-Western Western elites are acting out of motives rooted in passion rather than in reason. Raw emotion has more to do with their cultural self-loathing than does any appreciation of objective reality.
Sometimes, very privileged children end up despising the very parents who provided them with everything that a child could possibly want. Instead of feeling any gratitude or appreciation for their relative good fortune, they embrace a self-destructive, hedonistic nihilism. Such people can bring great harm to themselves and others before they grow up, fade away, or burn out.
Since World War II, the Western world has become prosperous and comfortable for an ever-increasing proportion of its people in a way that has no precedent in human history. Even during historic times of relative peace and prosperity such as the Pax Romana, the Han Empire of China, and the Victorian Era, security and comfort were only enjoyed by a relatively small segment of society.
The Pax Americana since 1945 is different. Living standards have improved and life expectancy has increased for most types of people in most places touched by the West. Has our society become a paradise? Of course not! However, for a greater proportion of human beings than ever before, life is neither short, mean, nor brutal.
This period since 1945 has been, by all measures, a Golden Age. Distinctions of one’s birth now matter much less than one’s talents in pursuit of success than ever before. Neither race, sex, religion, nor even sexuality bar the way to opportunity as they once did. The scale and scope of prosperity and opportunity are so much greater today than ever before. Almost anyone with drive and a functional work ethic can reasonably hope to earn some kind of success in life.
In the midst of such plenty, many who have inherited the greatest wealth and deepest privilege have violently rejected those very cultural qualities that built and sustain this unprecedented peace and prosperity.
One chief reason for this rejection is that, throughout the West, the very most prestigious preparatory schools, colleges, and universities have become possessed by post-modernist deconstructivism. This particularly pernicious nihilism was born in France’s bloodletting during the First World War and its defeat in the Second.
Existential doubt in such basic components of human civilization as truth, law, justice, sanctity, honor, property, and liberty were stoked by philosophers like Jacques Derrida. The very value of human life, itself, was called into profound doubt. Totalitarianism and abortion “rights” both benefitted from this devaluation.
Our cultural heritage was recast into an indefensible caricature by movements such as the Frankfurt School, which stripped any legitimate virtue from anything within the Western heritage. The study of Western Civilization’s history and culture has been systematically excised from prestigious school curricula for well over sixty years.
Generation-by-generation, systematic anti-Western propaganda deepened. Today, there are almost no Teachers, Professors, or Administrators in any prestigious school at any level from pre-Preschool through post-Doctoral who are not ideologically Woke.
Inevitably, the young increasingly abandon a cultural heritage which has either been comprehensively defamed or was simply never taught. Any society that fails to acculturate its youth will soon suffer cultural amnesia and then death.
The spoiled children of privilege are particularly vulnerable to this anti-Western indoctrination. Pressure groups such as the interests of George Soros and the World Economic Forum actively groom and recruit the most promising young potential leaders into their worldview. Both Canada’s Justin Trudeau and France’s Emmanuel Macron are products of these programs. They have been taught to work in common cause to undermine and replace the Judeo-Christian West.
To many of these most idealistic haters of the West, we are damned because we have failed to fulfill our promise. Alone among world civilizations, the West professes liberty, equal rights under the law, and freedom of conscience. The very fact that the West aspires to such virtues and consistently fails to live up to them makes it far more damnable in their eyes than overt savagery or oppressive medieval autocracies and theocracies.
It is, indeed, a strange reaction to the imperfect execution of the West’s humane ideals to hunger for its destruction and replacement. It is similar to the intensity with which advocates of different denominations within the same religion can dispute with one another more intensely than they ever dispute with those from beyond their faith.
Today, any hope for the perpetuation of Judeo-Christian Western Civilization and its liberty, free speech, and creativity lies beyond the elites. Americans, Europeans, Aussies, and Kiwis with no particular pedigree and no outstanding wealth or education are the truest believers in the promises of a free society. If we are to have a future that is free, it will be despite the elite children of privilege and not because of them.
