“The totalitarian Left pushes forward like a steamroller, crushing
everything in its path in order to impose its inverted reality, its
absurdities, its neuroses, its psychoses, and its ideologies, all of
them anti-humane if not outright criminal, and totally indifferent to
the suffering of those infidels who will never give in to them"
— Evelyne Joslain, La Guerre Culturelle
One of the most important books of the past half century appeared last Spring. La Guerre Culturelle is in French, but Evelyne Joslain's
masterpiece shows the conflict between right and left to such an extent
and to such a depth, coupled with a clear-eyed vision and the
exposition of the internal dangers facing America and the West, that its
translation into English is a must. Indeed, the contents of The Cultural War are so important that it deserves an American (and an international) readership at the very earliest moment.
It's
not every day that you open a book that is "the product of more than
twenty-five years of reflection and personal archives that have left a
lasting impression." However, this is the case with Évelyne Joslain's latest opus, which will remain, it is safe to bet, the masterpiece of a lifetime.
Évelyne Joslain's
genius is to have a total vision of the dangers — above all, the
internal dangers — which threaten the West and, if there are numerous
books (in French as well as in English) which focus on one specific crisis or another created by the melodrama enthusiasts, aka the drama queens, to have the temerity to bring together all these elements (in four distinctive pillars) and to demonstrate that the decadence, depravity, self-hatred and barbarism (obrigado to Sarah Hoyt)
all come from the same cynical master plan and from the same
destructive vision, highlighting unsuspected links between all these
actors and groups.
An example of Évelyne Joslain's 3-D chess mind is taken from several parts around the book, showing how the
Vietnam war ties in with the sexual revolution and the (undeclared) final goal of the Great Reset:
For
the attacking cultural Left, the defeat in Vietnam was the first
victory in a Cultural War that the right, attacked on all levels, was
still struggling to recognize [p 154] … Chirac's attitude [during the
Iraq conflict], considered "wise" by some, demonstrated that the cultural war
had broadened to geopolitics and that the divisions in the Western camp
served the plan of the transnational Left which was to weaken and
discredit our country [France], the entirety of Western civilization,
and primarily America [p 265] … Promoting sexual deviance and
perversions, normalizing the abnormal, inverting universal values,
cultural Marxists know that the sexual license of an entire population
greatly facilitates societal and political revolution and that a society
given over to vices will be weakened, in addition to being despised by
its external enemies [p 276, "From American Psycho to Nip/Tuck"] … [These policies] went in the direction
desired by the “global élites” [foreign as well as domestic]: a weakening of America allowing for a
new world order to take shape, that of a multi-polar, multilateral
world, where regional powers, Russia, the European Union, China, and
Iran would no longer be confronted with American omnipotence and an
order based on laws supposed to be recognized and respected by all [p
314] … Destroying society from within, bringing about the suicide of
peoples and the end of Western civilization, knocking America off its
pedestal [e.g., Vietnam] and reducing it to the rank of a ruined and weakened regional
power, are no longer extravagant fantasies, but a reality in the making
[p 475].
The Four Pillars of the Left's Culture War
A century of hatred
for the traditions of Western culture, by individuals such as Woodrow
Wilson and Joe Biden or such as Soros and Schwab, began to gain traction
more than half a century ago when, in order to
destroy Western society, smarter (and more vicious) Marxists understood
from Gramsci on that the right angle of attack was to seize not
production goods in the economic sector, but production goods in the
cultural field.
What follows is "a long march through institutions", which aspires to
undermine a society, a nation (and the entire West), to overthrow the
pre-established order, and to take control of said institutions in order
to have them filled by Neo-Marxist brothers-in-arms.
The four pillars of this Culture War are
- race,
- sex,
- climate hysteria, and
- intensive immigration.
“All this is linked and must lead to complete and inevitable globalization.”
The “current cultural war is America’s Hundred Years’ War” affirms
Évelyne Joslain. And not just in the United States, she adds;
the Culture War is taking place all over the West.
After writing outstanding books on
Donald Trump,
Barack Obama, the
Tea Party, and
L'Amérique des Think Tanks,
Evelyne Joslain
proves to be an unbeatable woman on the subject of the United States,
and, moreover, she is one on a plethora of subjects, from the ancient
Greeks to Belgian serial killers.
The knowledge of this "Américaniste", whose writings have been featured on American Thinker,
is striking, page after page, seems to produce revelation after
revelation, whether explaining the influence of Epicurus on Thomas
Jefferson, the historical difference between Whigs and Tories (that even
the majority of English-speakers barely know), or the contrast between
the humanism at the heart of the Renaissance and the current era's
environmentalism.
I remember that Gorbachev, during a speech about 35 years ago, decided
to praise a number of revolutions throughout History; yet, the leader of
the USSR mentioned only the French revolution and the Russian
revolution, leaving out the American revolution, something which raised
an (entirely justified) outcry in the USA (even among left-wing media
outlets — "Gorby" was their darling, after all, which contributed to the
fact that the Russian "supertsar", but not his American partner, Ronald
Reagan, alone received the Nobel Peace Prize).
We can count on
Évelyne Joslain to get to the heart of the problem and find the explanation: Just like the Russian Revolution,
The French Revolution was bloody and genocidal, turning its back on the
Renaissance and making a clean sweep of the past. It is the example to
be avoided and yet the one that has been the most imitated, while the
American Revolution, which has everything to draw inspiration, remains
without imitation and has become the object of neo-Marxist hatred.
The former, our [France's] bloodthirsty revolution, is therefore a
truly 180º revolution, while the latter, the American Revolution, is a
360º revolution, in other words one which returns to the traditional
English norms resulting from the Magna Carta of 1215. It restores the
rights of Englishmen in America, flouted by George III.
Following Britain's "politico-religious standoff" (with "brutal
savagery") and the Glorious Revolution (also, it turns out, ignored by
Gorbachev; in fact, here too we are faced with a "semi-revolution …
without a drop of bloodshed") in the half-century between the 1640s and
the 1690s, the English monarchy realized that it was prudent to refrain
from trampling on the rights of Englishmen. However, George III failed to
understand that the Bill of Rights of 1689 also applied to
English subjects in the colonies of America (and elsewhere), and treated
his subjects there with the absolutism of his ancestors.
Returning to the motto of the French Republic, however,
Évelyne Joslain is concise and blunt:
Liberty and Equality are mutually exclusive [while] Fraternity… cannot be decreed
Illuminating Issues Galore
An unbeatable debater, Évelyne Joslain
manages to take just about any subject under the sun and come out with
an explanation, often incisive, which sheds sunlight on said subject:
On the Civil Rights Act (working from Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement [America Since the Sixties], duly mentioned), Évelyne Joslain puts a lot of today's miseries at the feet of LBJ's "rival constitution", aka the Riot Constitution of 1964 or the “new constitution written to cancel the Constitution of 1787 (!)”:
The 1964 law having invited subversion, all these “cultural revolutions” (sexual, feminist,
artistic, ethnic, and others) shelter behind this law to end up
erecting an absolutism and intolerance never before known in the United
States, the very opposite of the country's founding philosophy. The
primary goal is to delegitimize all those who resist and all the
institutions that have not yet fallen. The Left is responsible for
sweeping away all the “tiresome old certainties” of the conservative
majority who find themselves having to prove the correctness of their
views. In other words, it is those who are culturally attacked who must
justify themselves to their attackers!
On the Iranian revolution coupled (yes, yes) with the Russian intervention in Afghanistan:
Holy war or jihad [by Iran] against the "Saturday people", Israel and
the Jewish dispora, then against the "Sunday people", the Christians,
the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Europe. Sensing this
weakness, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December [1979], thereby
expanding the Cold War theater into the Middle East (to its future
misfortune).
On the Arab Spring and the Syrian massacres:
Obama is jubilant because it is his beloved Muslim Brotherhood which is
leading the revolt [in Egypt, which] will elect Mohammed Morsi in 2012.
Obama was letting go of a valuable ally of the United States — as the
Democrats know how to do so well. [As for Damascus and "the red line not
to be crossed",] because Assad was well-liked by the Ayatollah
Khamenei, Obama had no desire to harm the Syrian leader.
On the CCP in Beijing:
China's attitude demonstrates that it has no doubt about its manifest destiny, which is to triumph over the West.
On the reluctance of many Americans to support Kyiv, Évelyne Joslain,
a regular guest columnist on
the Dreuz website, heads back 20 years:
This Iraq war, or rather the spectacle that was given of it, knowingly
orchestrated by the media [foreign as well as American], explains why
fly-over America is hardly interested in the situation in Ukraine
[especially if and when the U.S. is only] to ultimately be poorly
thanked and invariably criticized, while also having to assume all the
costs.
On the Left's century-old tactics, exemplified by the colors the media chose to distinguish between Democrats and Republicans:
The patron saint of libertarians, Alfred J. Nock, lamented in a 1936 article in the Atlantic Monthly that the term liberal, coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1824, had been odiously perverted by the Left, and warned citizens against "imposture-words". The perversion of words that began with “progressiveness” remains a classic in the strategic arsenal of the Left in the United States.
… the Marxist far Left therefore adapted by changing its name, the word socialist having too pejorative a connotation in public opinion, hence the idea of monopolizing the term liberal,
which is positive. It was the first lexical diversion in a long series,
a tactic tested by the masters of the Kremlin themselves: empty a word
of its meaning and load it with another in order to cloud minds
… The media decided to build a contrast between' "red states" (conservative, although red was traditionally the color of Marxist revolutionaries!) and "blue states"
(democratic, socialist states) distributed on both coasts. It was an
inversion typical of the Left, one deliberately intended to sow
confusion
Moreover, believe it or not, this Frenchwoman turns out to be something of an expert on the history of military strategy:
The idea of “unconditional surrender”, a formula tried and tested from
General Ulysses S. Grant until the Second World War, was becoming an
improbable concept.
In fact, by dismissing General MacArthur in April 1951, Truman
unknowingly created a new concept, that of "limited war" (an oxymoron
used by General Marshall to define the Korean War), which would become
the rule for future conflicts.
While it is
undeniable that Truman was firm on freedom in Western Europe, he was
“soft” on communism in Asia. After losing China in 1949, he seemed to
lose interest in China and the countries that the latter nation
attacked.
On the 2020 election, Donald Trump, and January 6:
… the increased detestation [of Donald Trump]
by the transnational Left, primed to sympathize with external enemies …
For the first time, an election had been decided by America's enemies,
the domestic enemies within allied with the foreign enemies without … without November 3, 2020, there would have been no January 6, 2021
… Through a stunning inversion of the facts and a complete perversion
of vocabulary, this vicious, insatiable, implacable Left accuses the
“enemies of democracy” of the transgressions that it itself had
committed. No one in their right mind could accept this crude
narrative.
On the Left's "Nazi" demonization (tied in the excerpt below to Brexit) — in a couple of sentences, Évelyne Joslain manages to shed to pieces 80 to 90 years of the Left's fraudulent ad hominems and its upside-down assumptions:
What
the multi-lateralist detractors of [say] Brexit never managed to analyze
is that, in the term “Nazi”, where the evil lay and lies was and is in
the Socialism part and not in the Nationalism part, something which is
perfectly honorable when it is synonymous with patriotism: economic
nationalism, national pride, national feeling. On the other hand,
socialism, a precursor to communism, has never brought anything
positive, yet it is prospering!
Regarding anti-war demonstrators (of the Vietnam conflict), praised to heaven for over half a century, Évelyne Joslain gives no quarter — none whatsoever:
the sophisticated class, privileged cowards who posed as virtuous
conscientious objectors, accused the soldiers who returned, mutilated or
traumatized in their stead, of being war criminals.
Hard Truths on Common Subjects
Let us tip our hats to Évelyne Joslain
for expressing innumerable hard truths, all of them difficult to
counter, on a myriad of subjects, whether on student strikes ("an
aberration since the students do not 'produce'
anything and the harm caused is first and foremost to their own
selves"); on "migrants" (a "politically correct term for 'illegal
immigrants', deliberately misleading by evoking the natural migrations
of birds"); on “populism” (“the disdainful term for any protest of the
people”); on the media (“masters of lies by omission”); on the green
transition (it “is nothing other than crony communism recycled"); on the
real goal of ecologists ("it is not at all to 'save the planet', but to
redistribute the wealth of the North towards nations in the South,
through the process of bestowing themselves with imaginary sins"); on
Howard Zinn ("a false historian, but a real Marxist activist"); on the
Neo-conservatives ("pro-American anti-communists and hawks on military
matters"); on Europe ("foreign pseudo-allies"); on France ("We are
surely the country which has the most useless ministries, sporting
ridiculous names, occupied with treating the same equally ridiculous
fake problems"); and, last but not least, on Lenin's tomb in the Kremlin
("One might ask if the Germans would have found it normal, had his body
been available, to have Hitler's mummy enthroned in front of the
Brandenburg Gate").
Regarding the sexual "liberation" dating from the 1960s, here are some more hard truths from Évelyne Joslain, sans merci: 
on
(a) sexual orientation ("we note that the innocuous word "orientation"
has definitively replaced the words "anomaly" and especially "vice",
removing responsibility from the person concerned who follows their
orientation like the weather vane follows the wind"), on sexual license
(it "shelters behind the egalitarian pretext and the aspiration to a
so-called spirituality to flout all laws, civil and religious"), on the
LGBTQ+ movement (homosexuals dreamed up the term "'gay sexuality', thus
forever ruining the positive connotation of an innocent adjective"), on
transgenders ("what in the olden days would have been called
'trannies'"), on abortion (it "must be remembered that the idea of
legal abortion, approved or even provided by the State, was introduced
in 1921 by the Bolsheviks with the explicit aim of breaking up
families"), and on the "religious right" (a "scarecrow agitated by the
sexual Left"), as well as on the New Wave (a "French cinematographic
movement which invented the jaded antihero and features free love along
with non-conformist, nihilistic, and neurotic behaviors").
In the same way, Évelyne Joslain
shares with us her admirable knowledge on the presidents of the 20th
and 21st centuries, managing to provide a remarkable short description
of each occupant of the White House: Woodrow Wilson was the first
president who dared to attack the spirit of the Constitution as well as
the country's institutions, Lyndon Baines Johnson the first president
responsible for the Culture War, Richard Nixon the first Republican
president confronted with the culture war and viciously harassed by the
opposition, Jimmy Carter the first 1960s president of the United States,
Bill Clinton the first fully 1968 president, George W Bush — the
president who unleashed “a hatred never before seen against a
Republican, worse even than the hatred against Nixon” — Barack Obama the
first president elected thanks to affirmative action and the first
Marxist president of the United States, one who had played the race card
to the fullest, exploiting the color of his skin to hide the color of
his politics, Donald Trump the gladiator president. As for Joe Biden, you will have to read the book (you will not be disappointed)...
The
host of the
Libre journal du Nouveau Monde on
Radio Courtoisie (where, full disclosure, I have been a regular guest) for many years,
Évelyne Joslain
continues with a refusal to participate in the usual praise of figures
as disparate as Napoleon and Voltaire, both "the hateful atheism" of the
latter and that of his emulators as well as that of Marx.
Like
Paul Johnson, Évelyne Joslain sees
the decline of religion as
an unmitigated disaster:
Christianity remains the religion most frequently mocked, ridiculed,
covered with blasphemy because it reaffirms some disturbing principles —
such as the free will of each person, his responsibility, his duties,
and because it places man at the center of nature.
Although nobody asked her to do so,
Évelyne Joslain
manages to provide a single-sentence summary of the difference between
Western and Eastern Christianity and, by extension, an important
explanation for
the war in Ukraine:
Western Christianity distinguishes between what is God's, like nature,
and what is Caesar's; unlike Eastern Christianity, in which the Orthodox
Church does not distinguish the regal from the spiritual.
Now we can better understand the lionization for Putin's presidency expressed by
the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Évelyne Joslain has little more respect and patience for the generic "Philosopher" which brings to mind
Paul Johnson's book,
Intellectuals
(From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky). This generic
philosopher, this intellectual, “illuminated by contact with Ideas
(i.e., absolute truth), is therefore ideally suited to impose the rules
which govern mankind on the human magma swarming below him.”
Intellectual imposture cannot be right-wing. This is the work of the left-leaning mind. In the past as in the present.
From Diogenes to Marcuse:
25 Centuries of Drama Queen Strife
A columnist at the 4 Vérités weekly for many years, Évelyne Joslain
moves effortlessly from Charlemagne to Descartes via Marc Dutroux, a
notorious child murderer forgotten (deliberately?) by everyone these
days. (I was surprised to learn, also about thirty years ago, that one
of the fathers of one of the murdered girls had tried to enter politics,
only to have his budding career scuttled by the Belgian political
élites: Another question mark from my youth to which the remarkable Guerre Culturelle provides the answer).
Évelyne Joslain's
work, which adapts Shakespeare's words to the modern world ("To be woke
or not to be"), attempts to go back to the sources of the cultural Left and analyze all its aspects.
Indeed, it turns out that the modern
conflict between right and the Left's drama queens "has existed since the dawn of time" —
"their roots in immemorial times and in ancient myths" — and from the
first chapter, we are alongside Ovid, Socrates, and Cicero.
Never, perhaps, has it been so well described to what extent the
writings of
Socrates and Aristotle describe the conflict of our day.
Never, perhaps, has it been so well illustrated to what extent
Diogenes
("cynicism") and Heraclitus (Hedonism) of Ephesus are the ancestors of Kinsey and Ginsberg, not to mention
such leftists as the Frankfurt
School's Herbert Marcuse.
They touted unhealthy and cynical pleasures of the same type [as
today] … the pleasure of soiling the sacred … the pleasure of soiling
beauty … and the pleasure of soiling childhood
… this self-destructive pattern is repeated today from Europe
to the Pacific, where the decadent elements which constitute the
internal enemy work in concert with the external enemies
After covering 2000 to 3000 years of history, the author of
one of the rare books in French 
which tells the truth about
Barack Obama transports us full circle back to the 20th and 21st centuries.
We indeed arrive at Saul Alinsky and his manual, Rules for Radicals,
which is the key book for "statesmen" such as Hillary Clinton and Barack
Obama. It is
[their] bible and Alinsky, [their] mentor; the master of inversion of
everything, values, concepts, vocabulary, the one who excels at duping
unsuspecting right-leaning people.
At the end of this work of horrors, there still remains a glimmer of hope:
If the evil
Left
has the money and the power, the healthy right has the people, and
therefore the numbers. If every citizen of the silent majorities (of all
Western nations) rises up and begins, each within the limits of his or
her means, to demonstrate his or her indignation and his or her refusal
to follow, there remains a chance for Western civilization...
We can only hope that America will hurry to translate this outstanding
description of the internal dangers which threaten the West.
“…to cover its excesses and its outrages, the irrational cultural Left has
added the ad hominems 'conspirationist' or 'conspiracy theorist' to its long
list of hackneyed slurs and insults (racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic,
homophobic, transphobic… ad nauseam) to silence those who resist and cut short debates it cannot win"
— Evelyne Joslain, La Guerre Culturelle
