The Fight of Our Lives: Defeating the Ideological War Against the West

Civilizations, empires, great powers

can fall apart very fast.

Collapse can come suddenly, like a thief in the night.

And we should be very wary of assuming

that our civilization,

the civilization of the early 21st century West,

will oblige us by declining gradually.

I think a lot of people who look at the United States

and debate its decline, even the pessimistic ones,

assume that this will take decades

and perhaps it will be a problem for their grandchildren.

When people talk about Europe's problems,

there's a tendency to say, oh the demographic difficulties

of Europe and the slowdown in European growth

mean that over time it will recede

in its importance relative to the past.

But that may be completely wrong.

We may in fact find that Europe falls apart quite fast,

not in a Europe in the sense of the European Union,

but I mean Europe in the cultural sense,

as the heir of centuries of what used

to be called Christendom.

The mass migrations that we see into Europe

at this time, and the social consequences of trying,

and I suspect not succeeding,

in integrating millions of people

from non-European cultures,

particularly from the Islamic world,

raises the prospects of a major crisis of European culture.

And the civilization that we've grown accustomed

to thinking of as Europe may not be around

by the end of the century.

Or it may have changed so much that it's unrecognizable.

I think there are two threats

facing the West and they are linked.

There is a threat from within and the threat from without.

And the threat from without is made much more threatening

by the threat from within.

The threat from within comes from people

who want to undermine and destroy the basis

of Western Civilization, the basis of Western society.

- Europe was ravaged after a period of ultra-nationalism

and conflicts, the period between World War I

and World War II, and World War II itself

with the Shoah and the complete devastation of Europe

economically, socially, culturally.

Adorno argued that Europe actually died in Auschwitz,

that this was the marking of an end of an era

and the marking of complete devastation.

The infrastructure was destroyed, perhaps the morality,

the teachings were really called into question,

and philosophers and thinkers of the time

looked at the horrible consequences of extreme nationalism

and binary notions of identity of being and otherness.

- This continues in philosophy with existentialism

and what eventually will be known as postmodern theory.

These are the ways that you can see

that sense of doubt, of failure,

of collapse inside Western confidence and optimism.

So I think the wars really are the beginning of this,

and it continues.

It continues on to the 50s, and then into the 60s

you have another generation, a new revolutionary generation

that is reacting against everything their parents represent.

- The Baby Boomer generation of whom I am one

were extremely influenced in the 1960s

by the writing in particular of Gramsci,

the political philosopher.

And Gramsci's whole thing was effectively to say

if you're gonna wait for the workers to rise up

and seize the levers of economic and political control,

you wait forever.

A much more effective and much, much smarter way

of undermining and taking over Western society

is to attack the citadels of the culture,

the media, the universities, education, the law, the church,

all the institutions of the culture.

You infiltrate them and you undermine them from within

and you turn the mind of the West against itself.

After the turn of the century,

the dominant theory in social sciences and humanities

is postcolonial theory.

Postcolonial theory, to put it very simply,

says that all the evils in the world

were caused by Western imperialism.

Before Western imperialism,

everything was lovely in the world.

Everybody got along, there were no clear groups,

there was no war, there was no evil.

This is a kind of morphing of Lenin's theory of imperialism.

He argued that imperialist capitalist societies

would export class conflict to other societies

so that the people that were exploited

were the people in the other societies

and everybody in the home society,

the elites and the working class,

would benefit from that exploitation.

Less than 30 years after the collapse

of communism in the West,

the former communists and the Marxists-Leninists

who defended the virtues of the Soviet Union

and its worldview have managed to rebrand themselves

as champions of human rights and are able to somehow

take the lead in educating new generations,

and in shaping our public debate,

and dictating what is acceptable

and what is not acceptable anymore in the public domain.

As part of the post-modern project,

that's a fancy word for saying that there

is no such thing as absolute truth or reality,

it's socially conditioned on who has power and who doesn't.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

In that relativist world in the last 30 years

in the United States, it's manifested itself

by two or three powerful ideologies in a variety of ways.

One is Utopian passivism,

you believe that the innate nature of man is good

and that if you were to assume that everybody is good

and that they don't react to power or deterrence

or the threat of force, but they react instead

as we saw with Barack Obama's apology tour,

his Cairo Speech, then they will reciprocate in kind.

That's a tenet of this post-modern world

that says deterrence, balance of power, alliances,

that was all nineteenth century.

We've got a new paradigm, and it's contrary

to human nature unfortunately.

It's no more accurate than if you opened your backyard up

and said everybody can come and camp out,

and they're gonna cleanup,

and they're gonna be very nice and share,

it would be a mess.

The other tenet of this post-modern experiment was,

I think we would call it multiculturalism

as opposed to multi-racialism.

That is multi-racialism was the United States' ideal

that we'd have all different ethnic backgrounds and races,

but combined E Pluribus Unum under one Western paradigm.

But with hyphenation, or accented names,

or identity politics the idea became

well this common culture is not good

because it was not perfect, it had slavery,

it had sexism, it had racism,

and it conflates the idea that the sins of mankind

that everybody has throughout the world

are solely and particularly only the sins

of the West in general, the United States in particular.

So we can't be good because we're not perfect,

and therefore we're not going to stand

for the national anthem or we're going to suggest

in our history classes that we're guilty of genocide.

- Now cultural relativism developed from Franz Boas,

the founder of North American anthropology

and his students, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.

Now Ruth Benedict published a book in '37 or '38

called Patterns of Culture, it was very popular,

a very popular book.

And in it she really developed explicitly

the idea of cultural relativism by which she meant

that if you are going to try and understand somebody's life

you have to suspend your own ideas,

you have to suspend your own values,

suspend your own judgments.

And so it was a research technique

to allow you to do your job better

in understanding other societies.

Now what's happened toward the end of the 20th century

was that that idea of cultural relativism has been expanded.

Cultural relativism as a field methodology

has become ethical and moral relativism

that disallows judgments of actions

by people in other cultures.

Now if you can't judge another culture

you pretty much have to say well then all cultures

are equally good and equally valid.

- Cultures that cut off people's hands if they are robbers,

or cultures that oppress their women,

or that perform female genital mutilation,

or that honor kill women for so-called cultural atrocities

are definitely not the same as cultures that respect women,

where there is gender equality,

where there is a respect for people that follow every path.

There are cultures in which homophobia is rampant.

So I would not say that all cultures are equal.

- We should be concerned about the university

not just because of the importance

of scholarship and research,

but also because it's the training ground

for our future leaders.

- When I teach students, I look out of the classroom

and I don't just see a 150 faces,

I see a future president of the United States,

a future Chief Justice,

a future editor of the New York Times, the Washington Post,

a future senior partner of Goldman Sachs,

the future leaders.

And they are being miseducated in ways

that completely undercut Western values.

No tolerance for dissenting ideas.

They know The Truth with capital T and capital T.