For America’s neocons and their stooges abroad — their “useful idiots,” to use the epithet allegedly coined by Lenin — the January 7, 2015 killings in Paris of staffers at the Charlie Hebdo rag was the most insolent triumph since the invasion of Iraq 12 years before. Once again, the neocons demonstrated a malice surpassing even their arrogance, and an arrogance surpassing even their ignorance.
Not only did they defame those who had woken up to their moral blackmail during the 1990s. They also defamed those who had spent decades appeasing them. One who discovered this the hard way was Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League since 1993. Mr. Donohue might have thought that after years of involvement with the Heritage Foundation — as genteel, unprovocative, and intellectually vague an organization these days as can be envisaged — he would be forgiven for pointing out such obvious facts as the evils of blasphemy, the pathological opposition that Charlie Hebdo had always demonstrated toward Christian life, and the irreconcilability of sacrilege with Christianity in any form. Not so. Those who joined the lynch-mob against Mr. Donohue included not merely the usual Christophobic suspects, but such notional Fox News right-wingers as Hugh Hewitt and Megyn Kelly.
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It was left to Patrick J. Buchanan, and to a handful of like-minded genuine conservatives such as Scott P. Richert of Chronicles magazine, to state the matter’s hard truths. Messrs. Buchanan and Richert both have bitter memories of the last time popular culture rang to squawks of “Je suis Charlie”: namely, the Vietnam War and in particular the 1968 Tet Offensive, when the name “Victor Charlie” was understood by both the friends and the enemies of civilization to denote the communist-controlled Viet Cong.
Nor did the blatant hypocrisy of “the liberal death-wish” (a phrase coined by English broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge) end there. Those who shriek loudest in praise of “free speech,” as defined by neocons, are the first to demand an end to free speech when it takes the form of, for example, defending historians such as David Irving. To quote Mr. Buchanan’s Creators Syndicate column of January 13:
Muslims in the banlieues [Paris’s poorest suburbs, with exceptionally high Islamic populations] wonder why insulting the Prophet is a protected freedom in France, while denying the Holocaust can get you a prison term…. Moreover, all this chatter about freedom of speech and of the press misses the point. It was not the right to publish that provoked the slaughter, but the content of what was published. What the commentators seem to be saying about the assault on Charlie Hebdo is that not only is what is spoken or published protected by the First Amendment, but those who print and publish vile things must never suffer violent consequences. People who believe this is attainable are living in a dream world, and may not be long for this one. Even as children you knew there were words you did not use about someone else’s girlfriend, mother, family, faith or race, if you did not want a thrashing.
Mr. Richert, for his part, had to deal with some pseudonymous clown who had infested the Chronicles website’s combox with such assertions as “Hebdo, for all its true blasphemy, was an ally.” To this impudent tripe, Mr. Richert retorted: “Anyone who regards an enemy of civilization as an ally simply because that enemy attacked a second enemy is motivated more by hatred for the second enemy than he is by love of the civilization he is putatively defending.”
All perfectly accurate, of course. The mere fact that it needs to be spelled out, and that anyone should imagine that spelling it out would be controversial, is an indication of how utterly nihilistic the Western world’s masters have grown. But there is an aspect of the subject which neither Mr. Buchanan nor Mr. Richert has stressed nearly as much as, some would argue, they might have done.
That aspect is this: For Charlie Hebdo, jeering at Islam was never more than a side-issue. And jeering at Judaism was never on the agenda at all (no Charlie Hebdo staffer who interpreted “freedom” as freedom to mock Benjamin Netanyahu or any other Israeli politicians had the slightest chance of keeping his job). No, Charlie Hebdo’s producers — like their best-known spiritual ancestors, the Jacobins during the French Revolution — had as their main, self-avowed purpose destroying Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular.
By now, the sheer filth that constituted Charlie Hebdo’s endeavors to this end has been so widely disseminated over the Internet (has indeed been difficult to avoid) that one hesitates to supply further details. The most notorious instance of it had as its immediate target Cardinal Vingt-Trois, the Archbishop of Paris, who had affronted Charlie Hebdo by daring to oppose moves toward so-called “same-sex marriage”. For his pains, the archbishop was subjected to what could well be the most disgusting and ethically bankrupt political cartoon ever to have been conceived since Julius Streicher — publisher of Der Stürmer, and thus the Nazis’ pornographer-in-chief — met his unlamented end on a Nuremberg gallows in 1946.
Yes, Hugh Hewitt and Megyn Kelly, that is the sacrilegious ordure you insist on defending. That is the sacrilegious ordure that you imagine to be somehow protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: as if the Founding Fathers were half-witted frat-boys.
And here we come to a sad reality that has been too often unmentioned in public discussions of the whole case. It is a reality that perhaps a certain type of American is likelier than, for instance, a certain type of Western European to overlook. The reality is this: In our battle against godless tyranny — against what The New American’s Gary Benoit has himself called “The Total State,” and what the late Hungarian-American commentator Balint Vazsonyi (1936-2003) called “The Idea” — we are stark-staring insane if we look to cultural Marxists for allies.
Let there be no doubt: Cultural Marxists would love to make us do their bidding, still more than we do already. Mainstream official “conservatism” is awash with purportedly apostate terrorists who now talk the language of freedom.
England’s Brendan O’Neill, an erstwhile media officer for the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party, now edits Spiked Online and is unstoppable in his defenses of a mysterious “right” to porn, child as well as adult. “If we are serious about freedom of speech,” O’Neill burbled in London’s Telegraph on December 7, 2013, “then everyone must have it.” (By O’Neill’s logic, this “everyone” includes D. B. Tinsley, who over a 13-year period produced, for Larry Flynt’s Hustler, the “Chester the Molester” cartoons. So avid was Tinsley in taking his own artistic advice that he served 23 months in jail for molesting his teenage daughter.)
In fact, whenever an ostensibly conservative public figure starts championing Charlie Hebdo, one is forced to wonder precisely what he is championing, and why. Take Ed (James) West, deputy editor of yet another British publication, The Catholic Herald. Scarcely had the last massacre victim entered the morgue than West was positively baying — not merely shouting, baying — on Charlie Hebdo’s behalf: “Sometimes,” according to West, “there is a moral duty to mock religion … while mocking a religious group may be unkind, once members of that group begin to threaten people for doing so then making fun of them becomes a duty.”
It is impossible to read this outburst of West’s without asking: Could there possibly be any hidden agenda in West using a religious magazine (rather than, say, Penthouse or Maxim) as a vehicle for his pagan rants? Yes, there could be and there was. A little sleuthing reveals the name of West’s own first book, issued in 2006: How To Pull Women, a witless exercise in adolescent smut — although West was already 28 at the time — curiously missing from the British Library’s catalog (where he is required by law to deposit such a book) but readily traced via the Worldcat.org bibliographic data.
There are two and only two possible explanations for West being permitted to remain on The Catholic Herald’s payroll. Either he has mendaciously concealed from his employers the fact that he had published a 10th-rate imitation of Hugh Hefner. Or else his employers knew from the beginning about this 10th-rate imitation of Hugh Hefner, and either tolerated it or else actively applauded it.
Whichever of those explanations might be valid, West’s own credibility on moral issues is zilch. Moreover: How many other of Charlie Hebdo’s ostensibly Christian defenders have likewise given hostages to fortune by their authorial zest for propitiating green-toothed, malodorous, dirty old men in soiled raincoats?
There is no genuinely conservative government of modern times that has interpreted “freedom of speech” as a charter for Gomorrah. Fr. James Thornton, in his profile in The New American (October 25, 1999) of Portugal’s long-serving Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar, noted with approval that under Article XIV of the Portuguese Constitution that came into effect during Salazar’s reign, “abortion, pornography, anti-family propaganda, and the like were strictly prohibited (as they once were in America).”
In other words, Salazar realized back in the 1930s — however incapable the Hewetts and the Kellys and the O’Neills and the Wests are of realizing it in 2015 — that Marxism, by its very nature, takes two forms: political and cultural. To pretend that one can defeat the first, while groveling to the second, is arrant lunacy. Alas, that lunacy passes, within the howling desert of the modern neocon “mind,” for thinking.
We have every right to uphold the First Amendment. But we have not the shadow of a right to elevate the First Amendment above the First Commandment.
R. J. Stove is an author and organist who lives in Melbourne, Australia. An adult convert to Catholicism, his articles were regularly published in The Catholic Herald until he severed all connections with that periodical, upon his discovery in January 2015 of Ed West’s background.
