It's not every day that you open a French book that shows the conclict between right and left to such an extent and to such a depth that its translation into English is a must. But La Guerre Culturelle (The Cultural War) is "the product of more than twenty-five years of reflection and personal archives collected daily", and we can rest assured that it will remain the masterpiece of Évelyne Joslain's œuvre.
Having written outstanding books for the French public on Donald Trump, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and America's Think Tanks, Evelyne Joslain proves to be an unbeatable woman on the subject of everything concerning the United States, and, as we are going to see before we've even finished the book's first chapter, on a whole spectrum of subjects, from the ancient Greeks to Belgian serial killers.
One is thunderstruck by the knowledge of a woman who, page after page (if not paragraph after paragraph), seems to produce revelation after revelation, whether explaining the influence of Epicurus on Thomas Jefferson, the historical difference between Whigs and Tories (which even the majority of English-speakers barely know), or the contrast between the humanism at the heart of the Renaissance and current environmentalism.
I remember that Gorbachev, during a speech some forty years ago, decided to praise the revolutions of History; however, the leader of the USSR only mentioned the French and Russian revolutions, but not the American one, which raised an (entirely justified) outcry in the U.S. (even among left-wing newspapers — after all, "Gorby" was their darling, which contributed to the fact that the Russian "supertsar", but not his American partner, Ronald Reagan, was alone in being a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize).
We can count on Évelyne Joslain to get to the heart of the problem and find the explanation:
The French Revolution was bloody and genocidal, and turned its back on the Renaissance, making a clean sweep of the past. It is the example to be avoided and yet the one that has been most imitated while the American Revolution, which has everything to inspire, remains without imitation and becomes the object of neo-Marxist hatred. The former, France's bloodthirsty revolution, is therefore a truly 180º revolution, while the second, the American Revolution, is a 360º revolution, in other words it returns to the traditional English norms resulting from the Magna Carta of 1215. It restores the rights of the English in America, violated 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 did not understand that the Bill of Rights of 1689 should also be 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
La Guerre Culturelle attempts to go back to the sources of the cultural left and analyze all its aspects, and there is so much to digest that the present article will only consider the book's first chapter (The Ancient Roots of the Culture War).
Indeed, it turns out that the modern conflict between right and left "has existed since the dawn of time" — "their roots in times immemorial and in ancient myths" — and from the first chapter, we are introduced to the likes of Ovid, Socrates, and Cicero.
Never, perhaps, has it been so well illustrated to what extent the writings of Socrates and Aristotle correctly describe the conflict of our day. Never, perhaps, has it been so well illustrated to what extent Diogenes (plus his "cynicism") and Heraclitus (plus his "Hedonism") of Ephesus are the ancestors of today's leftists.
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
The radio host of the Libre journal du Nouveau Monde program on Radio Courtoisie (where — full disclosure — I have been a guest a number of times) for many years, Évelyne Joslain continues with a refusal to participate in the usual praise of figures as disparate as Napoleon and Voltaire, regarding both the "hateful atheism" of the latter along with that of his emulators and that of Karl Marx.
Like Paul Johnson, Évelyne Joslain sees the decline of religion as a disaster:
Christianity remains the religion most frequently mocked, ridiculed, and covered with blasphemy because it reaffirms some disturbing principles such as the free will of each person, responsibility, duties, and because it places man at the center of nature. .
At the same time, Évelyne Joslain manages — even though she was hardly asked to do so — to explain in a single sentence the difference between Western and Eastern Christendom and, by extension, 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 praise 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" who is reminiscent of the people described in Paul Johnson's book, Intellectuals (From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky). This generic philosopher, this intellectual, who is “illuminated by contact with Ideas (i.e., with the absolute truth), is therefore ideally suited to impose on the human magma swarming below the rules which ought to govern them.”
Intellectual imposture cannot be right-wing. This has always been the work of the left-leaning mind. In the distant past as today.
A columnist at Les 4 Vérités for a number of years, Évelyne Joslain moves effortlessly from Charlemagne to Descartes via Marc Dutroux, a notorious child murderer (deliberately?) forgotten by everyone these days. (I was surprised to learn, also about thirty years ago, that one of the parents of one of the murdered girls had tried to enter politics, only to have his embryonic career scuttled by the Belgian élites before it even began. Another question mark from my youth to which the remarkable Évelyne Joslain provides the answer)
This first chapter covers 2000 to 3000 years of human history and the author of one of the rare books in French which tells the truth about Barack Obama transports us to the 20th and 21st centuries.
We come to Saul Alinsky and his book, which is the key manual for VIPs such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Rules for Radicals is
[their] bible and Alinsky is [their] mentor; the master of the inversion of everything, values, concepts, vocabulary, excellent at blinding unsuspecting right-wing people.
Again, we can only hope that Americans will hurry to have this work translated...
More details about the book next week…
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