“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.After covering 2000 to 3000 years of history, the author of one of the rare books in FrenchThey 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
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
