Hammers and Sickles Coming Soon to a Town Near You

Hammer and Sickle? Who under the age of 60 would even remember that barbaric symbol of Communism? Or the tens of millions it executed under its totalitarian death grip? Or the fact that several nations still smart beneath its jackboot?

Given the degraded state of contemporary education, such ignorance is to be expected. To call this a mere problem is too benign a word, like calling the bombing of Dresden an incident. No, tragedy more befits this development.

Educated Americans sincerely query how such amnesia could have settled upon our nation. The statistics take us aback. Nearly 38 percent of Americans under the age of 30 believe socialism is better than capitalism. Take no consolation that we are speaking about socialism not communism. Hardly a hair’s difference lies between them. Communism is being garroted with a piano wire; socialism is being garroted with a silk scarf. Both are fatal.

This disturbing landscape is being dramatically brought to the forefront of American attention by the election of politicians boasting their socialism bona fides. Socialist politicians staff their campaigns, and then their administrations, with a youth brigade torn right out of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Very little difference lies between a Mamdani cabinet and a Red Guard Struggle Session. 

Take a glance at the political platform of the Democratic Socialists of America:

• abolition of police and jails
• abolition of the War Department
• abolition of the Constitution
• abolition of Congress and the presidency

It would be incautious to dismiss this as the rantings of a lunatic fringe. Doing so would be as foolhardy as the Romanovs dismissing Lenin. More disturbing is its currency with the young.

This predicament did not rise up suddenly as Athena rising fully armored out of the head of Zeus.  No, the gestation period extends back over a century. Faint echoes are present in John Dewey’s 1938 Experience and Education as well as in his entire oeuvre. Having seeded his educational antinomianism for some twenty years at Columbia’s Teachers College, the die was cast. His radical program to replace, with careful cultivation of the intellect, perennial truth with social activism was at a gallop.

Out went the millennial anthropology of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas which guided the nurturing of the human intellect. Forgotten were classics such as Fr. Edward Leen’s What is Education? or Fr. Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life. Here was the triumph of praxis over intellectus which portended dire consequences.

This frontal attack upon the metaphysical structure and thrust of the intellect cast its roots deeply among America’s intelligentsia. Soon, “progressivism” in education was setting its roots far and wide, from grammar schools to universities. Like termites chewing at a foundation, its progress was furtive, lest it alarm a naïve American public still informed by a robust Judeo-Christian ethos. 

A somnolent American public had shivers down its spine when Alger Hiss, a high official in the State Department, was convicted in 1950 of treason.

This alarming turn of events was capped by the stunning revelation of Whittaker Chambers in his absorbing account Witness, where he traces his ardent affiliation in the Communist party to his conversion to Christianity. In testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee sealing Hiss’ fate, Chambers remarked with melancholy, “I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under communism.”  

He wrote sometime later to his friend William F. Buckley Jr. with a note of apocalyptic doom: 

It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot… 

The Long March (to borrow a term of Chairman Mao) proceeded through American education with nary a whisper of alarm from the American people. The Marxist paradigm was settling in upon the academy in carefully timed increments: lessening of discipline, abolition of prayer in public schools, the introduction of new systems of mathematics and reading. History textbooks that undermined American exceptionalism and applauded non-Western thinking began to appear. Upon entering the university classroom, students were already primed for advanced indoctrination.

It would take the thunderbolt of Buckley’s 1951 God and Man at Yale to unmask the extent this perilous revolution had taken. It was nothing less than revolution infiltrating the commanding heights of American culture. 

With this inversion firmly established, a prominent academic struggled to sound a final, desperate warning bell. In 1987, Dr. Allan Bloom, distinguished professor of European Literature at both the University of Chicago and Cornell University, published his brilliant monitum The Closing of the American Mind. With a careful dissection of the roots of the decline of American education, he registered his panic that this presaged nothing less than civilizational chaos.

Yet, slowly, the demise widened. Certain flashpoints alerted the American public to the jarring crisis right at their footsteps. Such a flashpoint occurred only a few days ago. 

Scores of Americans had their jaws drop at the Congressional hearings on July 21. The Smithsonian Institution’s director, Anthea Hartig, smugly defended this venerable institution’s descent into wholesale Marxist ideology. To many an American’s astonishment, the long-hidden policy agenda of this once venerable institution was unmasked, leaving many a citizen stunned. 

Their policy list was jolting:

• Politeness, objectivity, and hard work are symptoms of white supremacy.
• Celebration of transgenderism, bondage, and sadomasochism were routinely on display in their public exhibits.
• “The Smithsonian’s woke Secretary Lonni Bunch sent curators into the streets to collect trash left behind by arsonists, vandals, and looters as ‘historical artifacts that need to be saved and collected for posterity.’”
• Anthea Hartig, who describes herself as “propped up by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeois” had the Institution speak of history as a “prime tool of social justice.”
• One exhibit listed the evils of whiteness as rugged individualism, self-reliance, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, and delayed gratification.

In a better time, the Roman Catholic Church, with her mighty doctrinal voice, daunting religious orders, and sprawling constellation of impressive educational institutions would have acted as a battering ram against this Marxist stampede. 

Today, they augment it. Official pronunciamentos seem only to act as an echo chamber of woke ideology. In lockstep with the decaying culture, many in the Church today add to the quicksand enveloping the West. Try to find a single bishop censuring his Catholic university for propping up this Marxist drumbeat. Rather, these educational Catholic institutions of higher learning are on the cutting edge of leftist ideology, especially the erstwhile gold standard Jesuit colleges and universities.

A sliver of evidence to this alliance of woke ideology and Catholic leadership was on full display only recently. In a cringeworthy letter recently promulgated by the provincial of a major religious order, he announced the redesign of one of their parishes:

I am excited by a new approach to structuring parish ministry because it reflects well the contemporary way of proceeding…discernment, collaboration and networking. By fostering collaboration amongst our priests and lay colleagues, this is a response to the signs of the times…adapting ourselves to changing resources…it embodies a networked approach to mission that enhances both effectiveness and shared commitment…

O my! 

Is this not a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth Act V, Scene V). One fears that what is afoot here is worse than mere idiocy.

The Church’s most prestigious educational institutions have been peddling Marxist and woke prattle for decades. No surprise at seeing graduates of Catholic universities excitedly joining the campaigns for Marxist candidates. They have received ample preparation, having been spoon-fed this ideology for their entire time of university matriculation. Pity that not even one bishop raised his voice against this wholesale abduction of one of the most venerable institutions of Western civilization.

Paul Johnson wrote with chilling prescience of this crisis in his magnum opus, Modern Times:

The greatest event of recent times—that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable, is beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. Among the advanced races, the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse leave a huge vacuum. The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum had been filled. Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he would call the Will to Power, which offered a more comprehensive and in the end a more plausible explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of Messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the Old Order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such a gangster-statesmen to emerge.

To Americans in general and Catholics in particular, there must be an awakening to the multi-tentacled hydra that has been growing beneath our very feet. Thinking this overwrought or to persist in leaving it to someone else to address this enormity is an invitation to demise.

Belloc’s premonitory words are still bracing. Though this author has frequently cited them, they do not cease being terribly pertinent:  

We sit by and watch the barbarian, we tolerate him. In the longest stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence. His cosmic inversion of our old certitudes and fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large unlawful faces from beyond, and on these faces, there is no smile.

Sitting idly will certainly guarantee that the hammer and sickle will indeed be coming to a town near you.