This article was originally published at the Fleming Foundation.
When the Islamic State blows up the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, the UNESCO (the cultural arm of the United Nations) condemns the act as a war crime. UNESCO’s director-general declared that in destroying ancient monuments, IS was “seeking to deprive the Syrian people of its knowledge, its identity and history.”
In America, when political activists and legislators call for the removal of Confederate flags and symbols from public places, the destruction of Confederate monuments, and the desecration of the graves of Confederate officers, we do not hear a peep out of UNESCO. Indeed, the entire world of right-thinking men and women applauds the attempt to deprive the Southern people of its knowledge, its identity and history.
The hypocrisy of America’s ruling class would seem to be gagging, were it not for the fact that they are both too stupid and too malevolent to be capable of thinking straight on any issue that can be connected, no matter how implausibly, with the rights of blacks, women, homosexuals, or adorable lions in a Zimbabwean game preserve.
Over the centuries Christendom has endured attacks from many dangerous and pernicious external enemies: from Mongols and Huns to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but none is so persistent, so alien, and so malevolent as Islam. They rape our wives and daughters—and our sons; they burn our churches and dynamite our graves; they destroy what they could never create by themselves, namely, a high civilization. They were doing it a thousand years ago, and they are doing it today in Iraq, in Kosovo and even in Greece.
Although it has received little attention, Christian sites are also under attack in Syria. Just a few days ago, according to the Catholic News Agency, IS forces bulldozed the ancient Catholic monastery of Mar Elian: “The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, on Aug. 20 said that the Islamic State had destroyed the monastery using bulldozers. Photos of the destruction were soon released online by the militant Sunni Islamist group.”
But even the worst of our external enemies are minor threats when compared with the threat posed by the great internal enemy, which is the liberal revolution, which, since the Renaissance, has been devouring its own children in every generation. Today, so-called American conservatives speak the language of Robespierre, and self-described liberals, on moral and cultural issues, are well to the left of Marx and Lenin. They will not rest until every public manifestation of Christianity has been eliminated, until all the children of USA are taught nothing but the religion of anti-Christ and the history of Anti-West and Anti-America.
On the surface, no two groups could be more opposed than the Muslim punks who have flocked to join the IS and the effete secular liberals of the American ruling class, but they are joined at their hip in their hatred of the Incarnation and all its symbols and in their contempt for the cultural and intellectual traditions of the West, from Homer to T.S. Eliot. Western liberals may wear suits—at least they used to—and sit in legislatures and preside over courts and classrooms, but they are no less vandals than the rapist-thugs of the IS. They too destroy what they cannot create; they too have subjugated our women to the Playboy philosophy; they, too, enslave our children’s minds. In the short run, our vandals are safer to deal with than IS punks, but in the long run, the outcome is the same.
