A treasonous, self-lacerating and nihilistic worldview is now institutionalized throughout academia, the press and political class, which funds with taxpayer dollars the very activists and agitators whose goal it is to sow the ideological contagion of shame and self-loathing.
Can the West save itself? Or will it decline and collapse, like all the great civilizations of the past? There are many components of civilizational decline, but one of the most important is demography, involving a plummeting birthrate and a large scale invasion of legal and illegal immigrants, as I pointed out in an earlier Quadrant article, “How Civilisations Die”. This is complemented by another component, which involves the collapse of the culture that sustains the civilization, usually involving the treason of the intellectual and political elites. These become cultural quislings, turning their backs on the very culture that sustains them in their privilege, proudly declaring themselves enemies of their own civilization, and working actively to undermine it, effectively handing over control to the aggressive invaders.
The paradigm for this intellectual treason was established by the Comintern nearly a century ago, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when Lenin decided that the new Soviet Union slave state would only survive if it was able to foment revolution in the West and could mobilize the intelligentsia to achieve this. The poisonous message these intellectuals were to carry, an ideological contagion, was enunciated vividly by the leading French communist ideologue, Louis Aragon, in 1925:
“We will destroy this civilization that you cherish … Western world, you are condemned to death … We will awaken everywhere the germs of confusion and malaise. We are the agitators of the mind … those who will always hold out our hands to the enemy.”
This treasonous, self-lacerating, and nihilistic worldview is now institutionalized throughout Western academia and it has an ideological stranglehold over political activism, as we see in Australia with the Green-Left. These academics and activists live in a parallel universe where the source of all evil in the world is their own society, in which they posture as reluctantly privileged rebels. Consequently, as Pascal Bruckner observes in The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010), “nowadays all it takes to attack Europe is a bit of conformism” to the all-pervasive hatred of the West that constitutes the intellectual monoculture of our society.
The West must repent continuously and unreservedly for the vast litany of sins for which it is held responsible. Indeed, “from existentialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West”, which is depicted as “the very figure of Satan”. According to this fashionable nihilism, “we Europeans are born with a burden of vices and ugliness that marks us like stigmata”. Indeed, “a curse is hidden behind our civilization that corrupts its meaning and mocks its grandeur … The whole world hates us, and we deserve it.”
This grotesque vision of their own civilization as a global predator has been systematically promoted throughout academia, the schools, and the media for decades and has poisoned the intellectual atmosphere. Excellent current examples of how this self-lacerating ideology operates at the personal level is the infamous Safe Schools program and the new $22 million ‘respectful relationships’ education program that is also presently being imposed on Victorian school students. It exemplifies Bruckner’s observation that the white male is now a pariah, a monster “genetically determined to kill massacre and rape; he has split himself off from the rest of humanity in order to enslave it”. Consequently, under the new program boys and girls will be taught that males are violent, powerful, and privileged predators:
“Proposed lessons will introduce students to the concept of ‘privilege’, which is described as ‘automatic, unearned benefits bestowed upon dominant groups’ based on ‘gender, sexuality, race or socio-economic class’.”
In particular, boys will be taught in Years 7 and 8 that they enjoy “male privilege” that encourages “control and dominance”, and that:
“Being born a male, you have advantages — such as being overly represented in the public sphere — and this will be true whether you personally approve or think you are entitled to this privilege.”
As with the Safe Schools propaganda, this new program is really just an ideological Trojan Horse dominated by radical ideology, as Kevin Donnelly points out (“Marxist Agenda in Anti-Violence Campaign”), Apparently, whether they are just intellectually thick or utterly cynical, Premier Daniel Andrews and his education minister, James Merlino, are proud to preside over the pedophile grooming, ideological indoctrination, mass brainwashing, and terrorizing of school children.
