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From the Occasional Papers of the Conservative Citizens Foundation Issue Number Four: 2000 and After (2000) Pages 6-12.
by W.A. Borst
When the year 2000 finally arrived last January, the American people were able to breathe a collective sign of relief after the cataclysmic predictions of computer meltdowns, food riots, and general political and social anarchy did not materialize. However it is apparent that they failed to look past the shouting and clanging of the millennial scare's noisy cymbals to a more pernicious enemy that still threatens the country's historic existence. Its subtle enemy is apathy, the constant refrain of it doesn't matter whether the president has degraded his office, severed our faith in the US Constitution, or lied to the American people. It doesn't matter that our students can read and write properly, have babies out of wedlock, abort their children, or dance the night away in orgiastic abandonment with Gerry Springer. As long as the economy is flourishing, the stock market is at Himalayan heights, unemployment low, and inflation minuscule, and Clinton is in his White House, all will be right with America.
With apologies to Winston Churchill, Americans have become lulled to sleep by a constant diet of Oprah, MTV, ESPN, and talk shows that meticulously dissect OJ and Bill Clinton's legal complexities. Any attempt to wake America from its indifferent slumber is swiftly relegated to the hate crime folder. Paradoxically, the nation's moral lethargy, as it was in the thirties in Europe, lay beneath a thin layer of civil unrest that is approaching the level of a new American civil war. Since the struggle is based on ideological visions of the country's future, it approximates a new cold war more than a bloody war. This harsh debate is being waged daily within the dark corridors of the American soul. But most people are not interested! Conservatives are just beginning to recognize the damage that liberalism has done to the nation with its relentless scoffing at ordinary prohibitions and decencies and its gnawing advocacy of alternate lifestyles that ordinary people are unable to accept let alone practice. The progressive social mores of tolerance, diversity, and caring have quietly replaced the Ten Commandments' relation to public and private behavior, without any apparent general public reaction.
Cultural warriors often use the idiom of the slippery slope to demonstrate the ease with which liberalism's quiet seduction can lead to civil destruction. Whenever the vehicle of state is out of control, the gravitational pull of history will drag it faster and faster down the slope. If America does not wake up soon, no one will be able to brake the speeding cultural vehicle before it crashes into the graveyard of history. Historian Arnold Toynbee once remarked, nations don't die, they commit suicide. The United States is at the stage where it will take more than a degree or two change in direction, or a modest reduction in speed, to prevent a cultural and economic crash. It is this historical inertia put in motion by decades of moral relativism, secular humanism that has put America on its downhill slide. Any attempt to stop the ball of moral decline from cascading down the hill has been met with derision, hostilities, and threats of violence.
As we become more attuned to the liberal's slope, it is a certainty that the right to die will devolve into the responsibility or the duty to die, The nation's elderly, a drain on the economy, will be encouraged to get out of the way. Life will be reduced to a political and economic formula calculated by faceless bureaucrats. The situation is accelerating its move toward the proportions the Charlton Heston movie, Soylent Green, a dystopia, set in a grimy New York City in the year 2020. Most people are out of work. They sleep on stairways and young women have been reduced to furniture that goes with apartments if one was lucky enough to get one. Edward G. Robinson, an elderly police book seeks out God in one of the city's termination centers. Amid a plethora of sensuous and breathtaking sights of natural beauty, he fades literally into the sunset, because death is preferable to the life he is forced to lead under the government. Thorn tries to stop him but it is already too late. He follows the body to the processing center, where he learns that soylent green, a form of nutritious plankton, is made from human bodies.
It should not be long before euthanasia approximates abortion as a growth industry. Legalized or assisted suicide is another step down the slippery slope in the culture war. America has become a crueler society, where the strong, healthy and powerful make rules for the weak, sick and unborn. Due to a combination of Nietzschean power and Darwinian natural selection our nation finds no legitimate state interest in the continuity of life, robbing it of its moral content. Human life becomes strictly utilitarian.
Another issue that has contributed enormously to the civil war atmosphere is multiculturalism. The denigration of Western Civilization, especially American history and the United States Constitution, serves to undermine all the necessary political and social virtues that are important to the intellectual progress and social development of the next generation of American citizens. Multicultural thinking is Turning America into a nation of tribes instead of a nation of individuals. Vice-President Al Gore has turned the meaning of e pluribus Unum from many—One to from One—many, perverting in Orwellian fashion the unitive aspects of our culture. The American people are losing control of their language and their ability to think analytically. Americans will no longer be able to aspire to what Daniel Webster once proclaimed as one nation, one people, and one destiny. America will become a collection of many subcultures, fighting over their piece of the American pie. In his book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork reiterated that multiculturalism is essentially an attack on white people, their European origins, and the standards that they have established in this once great nation. He underscored his belief that if multiculturalists were truly interested in other cultures they would not spend their time in the deconstruction of the American civilization-the pointed undermining of three hundred years of American culture. State-sponsored multicultural policies encourage the development of separate, competing, ethnic identities. These groups serve to weaken the glue that holds the elements of a national identity together. If the United States is to survive, those who remain loyal to its heritage will have to find new leaders to win the war for their own civilization.
On the sexual front, conservatives celebrate women's special responsibility for children as natural while feminists dismiss it as an oppressive myth. In their unrepentant quest for economic and sexual equality with men, women have lost sight of the undeniable fact that the hand that rocks the cradle truly rules the world. Their quest for political and economic power is silly. Women have always been superior in the subtle use of their wiles, wits, and ways to influence men and mold their children. The women's movement has perverted the traditional relationship between men, women, and children. As a society and as a civilization, the United States may never regain that delicate balance between the sexes that provided a sense of order and predictability to family relationships, prior to the women's movement. A close second behind the women's movement for audacity is the homosexual lobby's quest for power. Their concerted maneuver for social acceptance, through a hostile agenda of gays in the military, homosexual marriages, AIDS research, the religious bigotry of Act-Up, and the elevation of their agenda to the exalted status of civil rights, has seriously threatened our way of life.
These identity groups have coalesced into a solidarity movement that continues to weaken and may eventually destroy the fundamental pillars of American civilization. Religions, especially the Catholic Church, have unwittingly contributed to this decline. They have failed in their role as gatekeepers of traditional morality by allowing and even encouraging a wider role for the federal government, with its corruptive bags of taxpayer money to seduce and undermine the essential character traits of the American people. Americans used to hate the idea of a dole. The worst thing a man could do was to accept government largess, even in time of need. The Great Depression changed the old mind set while the New Deal idealized the notion of a guarantor state, symbolized by the Social Security system. The G. I. Bill was enough to make the most productive generation look to Washington for a guaranteed future. Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty amounted to a war on poor people. Johnson's policies created a generation of dependency that still eats at the nation's moral fiber.
This pervasive hand of government is at work in every aspect of our culture. No sector is more at risk than the education of the nation's children-the future leaders of the country. In his column in the New York Times, William Safire stated that political control of thought debilitates a country. He felt that scientists, artists, and financiers need an unimpeded flow of information. To compete on the high seas of high tech, a thinking population needs instant information. This can not happen in a country that plans to devalue college education and with it the liberal arts that would provide so many of the leaders Safire said are necessary. 'Educators are purposely modifying the standard curriculum so that the students of the 21st century will fit more easily into the programmed society that has been planned for them.
In higher education, the prospects are just as alarming. Former Hillsdale College president, George Roche predicted in his The Fall of the Ivory Tower, that the corruptive influence of federal money had left it virtually dependent on the government. Federal largess has shielded colleges and universities from errors and responsibilities that would have ended private businesses. By trying to be all things to all people, the academic welfare state has failed the people it has an obligation to serve first its students. The government dole has bloated universities who would not be able to exist without federal support. Hillsdale has gone against the grain in refusing government aid since 1971, leaving it free to be a small but influential conservative liberal arts college. Futurist Marshall McLuhan had his own vision of education for the next millennium and it was not a positive one. Though he had high hopes for the global village in the sixties, he was forced to admit that primordial and tribal feelings would dominate the country in future generations, ultimately resulting in a decline among the literacy level of the general population. The ability to speak well will be measured in
terms of volubility or quickness, not in terms of whether or not someone has anything germane to say. History will be reduced to a comic book rendition of the past, with a commensurate distortion of the facts and with excessive visual emphasis. Libraries will have more audio-visual material than books. There will be little apparent difference between one's speaking and written vocabularies. Spelling will be phonetic, with many variations acceptable. Punctuation will be voluntary. Many teachers already call themselves facilitators. Many have already been reduced to mere baby sitter unschooled masses that populate the concrete and glass temples of ignorance m the future. Those who like to read will be reduced to an isolated existence where they can meet in small groups that can only speak to one another. Intelligent people will denounce TV as a harmful addictive drug for the mind, or simply stop watching it because of its boring and mindless content. Instead of inspired missionaries, eager to proselytize the written and spoken word, the literati will become monks in tiny hermitic cells.
McLuhan's nightmare vision foresees the pragmatic union of Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street with spokesmen moving unnoticed from one venue to another. The swift rise of MTV, with its youthful mixture of sports, commercials and political commentary, which played a vital role in electing Bill Clinton twice, is an indication that this is already happening. Television as a source of political and economic power will sap the last remaining strength from churches and homes, which now rely on interpersonal contact for their influence. Traditional Americans are already finding themselves isolated from the mainstream of American political and economic life.
The Information Age is also part of the menace of the future, especially its effects on the media and the people's capacity to fathom the megatrillion bits of information thrust at them. The superabundance of information, records, files and opinions virtually imprison the citizenry in a surfeit of data bits, making it more susceptible to central control. Ironically, the smaller the world becomes the more easily one group or an oligarchy of groups can control it. The future will employ individual lifeguards or monitors to help surfers stay within the borders of truth and accuracy.
Technology also offers the unique opportunity of establishing a world organization under whose authority the whole technology-rich planet would be placed.
This will include nuclear weapons, the innovations of cyberspace and microprocessing, space travel, eugenics, and other large-scale projects of industrial, agricultural and medical science. The needs of servicing a planet-wide technology will require a universal cohesion. To ensure this, technology could also be used to enslave mankind through computer data banks, identity cards, and highly sophisticated sensory means of surveillance and privacy invasion.
Utopians delight in the prospects that technology will serve as a means of accelerating the restructuring of mankind. The problem with this approach is that the New World Order that utopians would create out of technology would tend to be nihilistic, without immutable rules, standards and codes embedded in a transcendent, yet benevolent universe. Without spiritual and moral underpinnings, the New World Order will lack the trust and fidelity of purpose that is absolutely necessary for the planetary citizen, an improvement over Woodrow Wilson's world citizen. Without trust, disarmament programs, world order, and peace will never work.
There is sufficient evidence that the plan for world government is being put into effect right now. The U.N.-funded Commission on Global Governance has completed its three-year study and has now announced publicly its plans to implement world governance by the end of the year 2000. American citizens should have no fear of a foreign invasion. There will be no black helicopters hovering over the Pentagon. That won't be necessary. Liberals in both parties, with the Council of Foreign Relations and its influential members in business, the media, the schools, and the State Department, have been conditioning the American people to think of themselves in terms of global citizens and not Americans for the past fifty years. With the ensuing collapse of American civilization, it should be easy for proponents of the NWO to achieve their ultimate aims.
To effect this, the U. N. wants a plan of Global Governance ratified by the year 2000. They have detailed this plan in a 410-page report, published by Oxford University, and entitled Our Global Neighborhood It states categorically states that global governance does not imply world governance or world federalism but then spends 400 pages describing in minute detail just that: world governance. Global governance amounts to an international socialism, resulting in a loss of national sovereignty, private property rights and all hopes of achieving individual prosperity. Its new values also revolve around a new earth ethic, which is counter to American sovereignty and property rights. As the report clearly indicates, the impulse to conquer territory is a powerful one for all species yet for global governance to succeed, this territorial imperative must be overcome. There is an egalitarian principle that underscores this document that will have fatal consequences for American's future if something is not done to dispel or defeat it.
The Commission believes that the world is ready to accept the proposition that there can be no justice without equity. The notion of economic leveling has permeated our society, making the country ripe for seduction into the NWO. The Commission intends for the United Nations to level the inequities in the world by taking wealth from the rich and giving it to the poor. This new earth ethic ignores the fundamental values upon which this nation was founded - free enterprise, individualism, and meritocracy.
The vision of these international social planners has great ramifications for every human being on this planet. They want to assume trusteeship over the global commons, which they define as the atmosphere, outer space, the oceans, and the related environment and life support systems that contribute to the support of human life. This definition embraces virtually all biodiversity on the earth and places it control of the U. N.
The utopian goal of the world under the suzerainty of the United Nations evokes visions of empire that has inspired megalomaniacs from the time of Alexander the Great through the fascist and communist exigencies of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. The mechanisms have already been set up in over 300 treaties that the U. N. already administers, treaties that can overrule American laws. It is becoming apparent that the U. N. plans to use the millennium to effectively organize, control and rule the world. Any nation or country that refuses to comply will suffer invasion or ostracism from the global community. If something is not done soon, as Clinton State Department under secretary, Strobe Talbot says, we will all be citizens of the world whether we like it or not.
The future does not augur well for the traditionalist side of the culture war. Do I fear the worst? Should we expect an Apocalypse Now? Or will we be part of a secular Inquisition? Perhaps! You can bet that if a militant cultural warrior were ever to be elected president, any overt attempt to re-institute the traditional virtues of the Judeo-Christian code would immediately be met with demonstrations, riots, and disturbances. Liberals will not stand idly by and let conservatives recapture the civilization. We have witnessed their strident reaction during the tenure of the last three Republican Congresses. Not bound by any absolute principles, the left uses any
means necessary to thwart the will of the reform agenda of the Republican Party. They have displayed a willingness to shut down the country in an effort to maintain the direction of the national agenda. They were the ones armed, not with pitchforks but semi-automatic weapons fighting for the conservation of their power.
While the situation of our cultural decline is critical, it is, by no means, a fait accompli. Before Americans can think of reorganizing, they must first wake up and reaffirm their belief in their American heritage. America has broken its contract of an eternal society. Liberalism is responsible for our lost moral legacy. The nation has lost its historic sense of social obligation or noblesse oblige that used to dominate the upper class at the turn of the century and collegians during the early sixties. The U.S. must reestablish the missing link between morality and the happy life.
The religious right has to recapture the culture from the movies, radio television, law, schools, and universities. It has to cut off their money with a tax revolt, vote for candidates that will clean up the culture, and strengthen what remains of our cultural pillars — the military, church and police — so that they all survive the left's vicious assault. It must create a hospitable atmosphere for women in a crisis pregnancy and emphasize taking responsibility for one's own sexuality. Abstinence programs should be promoted because they respect traditional morality and they work. Cultural warriors must bombard the newspapers with letters, phone calls and canceled subscriptions, demanding that the media show a greater respect for the traditions of this country. Most importantly, they must take a stand in their daily lives. How many have heard someone talk of being pro-choice and did not speak up because they did not want to offend? The new morality has been a blatant failure. Conservatives and honorable liberals must show that legal abortion and assisted suicide attack the very foundations of our society and will not be tolerated. Americans must repudiate the secularist agenda of the Democratic Party, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the NEA and the United Nations who have wrongly led the nation's culture into a miasma of unbridled sexuality, suicide, sickness, disease, illness' and death.
To turn the tide, the legacy of the French Enlightenment must be undone. The country is faced with a confrontation not between enlightenment and prejudice but between two conflicting moralities, competing in a zero sum game. The country needs a return to morals, rooted in the Judeo-Christian code, to an atmosphere where civility and respect are fostered rather than despised. America needs a re-conversion of America to the virtues that once inspired the country to great things. There has to be an American spiritual revival of the proportions of the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. America must reject the Gospel according to Jean, Karl, Charles, and Sigmund for that of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Conservatives must enlist computer technology to increase personal freedom, especially with access to alternate media and mass information. The computer can serve to lessen the controls Big Government has over the dissemination of information and the ability of citizens to make informed decisions. Technology will allow citizens to have a new check on the misuse of power. It offers the promise of allowing each citizen to spend more of our time developing unique talents, rather than serving the dark whims of a Nietzschean superman. Technology can also serve to reverse the cultural trends that are sending us over the precipice of history.
Now is the time for all good cultural warriors to pick up their lances and charge the cultural windmills before American Civilization is blown off the pages of history. We must do it in the trusting spirit of John Quincy Adams who avouched, the duty is mine and the outcome belongs to God