Do You Think Cultural Collapse in the West is an Accident?

Think again. 

A few days ago I began rereading the novel Victoria: a Novel of 4th Generation War by William Lind under the pen name Thomas Hobbes. The blurb at Amazon describes the book saying:

Victoria is more than a conventional novel and involves considerably more than mere entertainment. In much the same way Atlas Shrugged was the dramatization of a particular philosophical perspective, Victoria is the dramatization of a new form of modern war that is taking shape as the state gradually loses its four-century monopoly on violence. It is a book that informs, even teaches, through example. And sometimes, the lessons are very harsh indeed.

The protagonist of the book, a cancelled Marine, John Rumford, returns to his home state of Maine to become a central figure in the culture war. The United States is breaking up into factions with competing philosophies taking over sections of the country. As the Amazon description states the book does inform and teach. 

The education begins with Rumford meeting a retired Dartmouth professor, Gottfried Sanft who was "driven out by the weirdos who then populated college faculties -- the feminists, freaks, and phonies. who had replaced learning with politics." I couldn't help thinking of Anthony Esolen when I read that, driven out of a supposedly Catholic university.

Rumford's meeting with Professor Sanft sets him on the path to understanding the culture war and recognizing the deliberate agenda of Marxist change agents to destroy the West.

I decided to reread the novel and actually follow some of the research paths beginning with looking up the Frankfurt School. I'm familiar with it, but how many people in the country realize that its leading figures aimed very deliberately at annihilation of the United States through breakdown of morality?

Bill Muehlenberg at Culture Watch has an excellent brief article on the Frankfurt School and its war on the West:

Many important names are associated with the School: “The School included among its members the 1960s guru of the New Left Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, the popular writer Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Jurgen Habermas – possibly the School’s most influential representative.”

Their success at infiltrating the schools was already apparent when I was at Trinity College (now Trinity University) in Washington, D.C.  My moral theology teacher didn't use the Fathers of the Church or great philosophers to engage us in exploring the moral teachings of the Catholic Church. He served up a satanic meal for the mind. Erich Fromm was on our reading list as well as the father of situation ethics, Joseph Fletcher. I was young, naive and trusted those in authority, especially at a Catholic school, to speak the truth. I didn't recognize that I was being fed poison until later. 

Muehlenberg goes on: 

So what was the aim of these men? “Basically, the Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief – or even the hope of belief – that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation that they considered necessary to provoke socialist revolution. Their task, therefore, was as swiftly as possible to undermine the Judaeo-Christian legacy. To do this they called for the most negative destructive criticism possible of every sphere of life which would be designed to de-stabilize society and bring down what they saw as the ‘oppressive’ order. Their policies, they hoped, would spread like a virus—‘continuing the work of the Western Marxists by other means’ as one of their members noted.”

They devised strategies by which the destruction of the West could quickly and effectively take place: “To further the advance of their ‘quiet’ cultural revolution – but giving us no ideas about their plans for the future – the School recommended (among other things):

“1. The creation of racism offences.
2. Continual change to create confusion.
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children.
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority.
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking.
7. Emptying of churches.
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime.
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits.
10. Control and dumbing down of media.
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family.”

Wow! Every single one of these goals has been achieved in my lifetime. The sexual revolution, the attack on the family, the drugs-sex-rock&roll culture, feminist attack on men... they all marked my younger days. And it's obvious that the Church was not immune. I was an eye witness to the violent dissent to Humanae Vitae, the radical changes in the liturgy, and the attack on doctrine after Vatican II. And in the past decade we've seen the advance of the LGBTQ agenda as insanity on steroids and the open borders invasion with the help of a corrupt government and media.

Muelhenberg attributes much of the disintegration to the Frankfurt School:

If anyone is wondering why the West is embarked upon sexual suicide, much of the answer can be found in the Frankfurt School: “One of the main ideas of the Frankfurt School was to exploit Freud’s idea of ‘pansexualism’ – the search for pleasure, the exploitation of the differences between the sexes, the overthrowing of traditional relationships between men and women. To further their aims they would:

“• attack the authority of the father, deny the specific roles of father and mother, and wrest away from families their rights as primary educators of their children.
• abolish differences in the education of boys and girls.
• abolish all forms of male dominance – hence the presence of women in the armed forces.
• declare women to be an ‘oppressed class’ and men as ‘oppressors’.
Munzenberg summed up the Frankfurt School’s long-term operation thus: ‘We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks’.”

If you're in a war, you better know your enemy and Victoria, published in 2015, identifies a good many. The novel is insightful although I can't see the liberal northeast being the epicenter of a return to morality. Also many episodes show the protagonists failing in their own professed Christian beliefs. The novel begins with the burning at the stake of a new-age, idol-worshiping Episcopal priestess and some other episodes of extreme violence against enemy states take place. Several of the critical reviews on Amazon make interesting points particularly this one by K Craig. Nevertheless, Victoria invites serious reflection on where we are, how we got here, and the change agents who hate us.