A Letter From Rocco's: Joy to the World? Christmas, 2022
(The Remnant Blog, December 24, 2022.)
“And Santa Claus has got a toy for every good girl and good little boy; He’s a great big bundle of joy, He’ll be coming down the chimney, down”. (Count Basie Orchestra, 2015)“What is all the joy about?” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Address, 1978)
Thirty years ago, it seemed as though the United States was sitting on top of the world. The Soviet Bloc had collapsed. American Pluralism had fought and won the Good Fight. History had come to an end. In no time at all, the pluralist Santa Claus would bring joy to the world and the entire planet would finally experience the peace that passes all understanding.
Yes, it was true that neo-conservatives were becoming more and more distressed by the fact that the First Gulf War had not utterly annihilated a Saddam Hussein who was no longer useful to American foreign policy ---as he had been in the recent past in his extraordinarily bloody conflict with Iran. Nevertheless, they, like their neo-liberal counterparts yearning for a global economic freedom that would ring in multinational corporate profits on a scale that Uncle Scrooge could never have imagined, felt that the future undoubtedly belonged to them. Yes, maybe the path for Santa’s sleigh might yet have to be paved by several dozen purifying conflicts, regime changes, and mass migrations of those unable to survive in their ancestral homes in our new Global Motherland. Still, they somehow knew that the New World Order proclaimed by the first President Bush would inevitably allow Santa to shove his joy-bearing toys down everyone’s chimneys as readily as one could say FBI and CIA.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn had an almost complete idea of what this pluralist victory would really mean, and years before the fall of the Soviet house of horrors. He spelled out his “prediction” in his address to the stunned Harvard Graduating Class of 1978, when he told them that although he totally condemned Marxism-Leninism as an evil, he could not recommend the American Pluralist alternative as a remedy. Why not? Because it emerged from that same, unified, anti-Christian, naturalist, materialist, Enlightenment vision that destroyed Reason and the dignity of the human person along with Faith in all of its various manifestations: in its pluralist version, by abandoning society and the individual to a false understanding of freedom ultimately drowning both them in cheap, soul-killing, sensual goods and pleasures.
Hence, I cannot imagine that Solzhenitsyn would have been surprised by what I saw and heard of on my first voyage to the “freed” East Bloc in 1991—for example, a highway defaced by endless signs saying “I am billboard, I sell you and your products”, and the tale of a friend of three generations of his family, from grandparents to toddlers, watching pornography on television because “that’s what a free man has to do”. To quote his most famous line from the Harvard Address, summarizing the underlying baseness of the whole exaltation of the Pluralist Liberation Theology: “what is all the joy about?” Liberation through advertising and filth?
But what do I mean when I say that he had an almost complete idea of the nightmare? I admit that I may be wrong in saying this, but I am not certain that he---at least in 1978---foresaw the fact that the victory of Pluralism and its degrading sense of freedom (whose practice is accompanied by a contempt for every authoritative religious, rational, and historical warning of where unbridled will would lead) could become the only serious remaining prop for a Marxism with which it shared its intellectual roots; and that it would make common cause with its chief Chinese political representative in 2022 to ensure their common profit.
Two people that I knew of at that earlier date did foresee this truth, the first of whom was an historian name Georges de Lagarde. His brilliant, multivolume work, The Birth of the Lay Spirit at the Decline of the Middle Ages, published in 1956, never translated into English from the French, was one of the most formative influences over my own career. Lagarde demonstrates how the roots of our current predicament, obviously powerfully eating away at the remnants of Christendom in his own day, can be found at the beginning of the Second Millennium, and that they involved, from the outset, a growing union of heretical movements, raw state power, money interests, and the evangelical assistance of those engaged in sophistic “word merchandizing”.
My other “prophetic voice” was that of Dr. Thomas Molnar, with whom I had long conversations in the 1970s regarding the greater similarity between the self-interested needs of the “corporate leadership” of the many different forces dominating our age than any common concerns that these corporate leaders might be thought to have shared with the ideas and people for whom they were supposed to be working or to whom they were supposed to be addressing themselves. All they needed to seal their alliance with one another was adoption of John D. Rockefeller’s warning to his fellow monopolists: “Competition is evil”. Everyone engaged in the same rip-off should work peacefully together.
Now the reason why all of this is fresh in my mind at the moment is that in 2022-2023 I am finishing the thirty-first year of a Church History program in New York City for the Roman Forum. I have finally, after all this time, reached the present---the period from 1978 down to 2013. In introducing the current era, I naturally had to lay stress on the “break” that came with the years 1989-1991. Having reached the demise of the Soviet Union at my previous talk, this past Sunday I had to outline the nature and strength of all those pluralist encouraged ideas, forces, and institutions that gained a greater chance to ply their wares in a world without the counterweight of the East Bloc, and then ask the question of what impact this would have on whatever still survived of Catholic Christendom.
The more I put my notes together and outlined for the class the elements either formed in the 1990s and their aftermath or dynamically “coming out of the closet” once this “end of history” had been reached, the greater the validity of the Lagarde-Molnar thesis seemed definitively proved. More logical (and hence less tradition inhibited) Neo-Liberals and Neo-Conservatives, Planned Parenthood, Gay and Lesbian Alliances (soon to become an enormous LGBTQ++++ Conglomerate), the World Transhumanist Movement (now Humanity+), NGOs ranging from Greenpeace, the World Economic Forum, its Young/Global Leaders Program, and the Open Society to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, all possessed the requisite Lagarde-predicted heretical passports, flashing them with diverse degrees of intellectual madness and physical passion.
Money came flowing into their coffers not only from their own specific members’ pockets, but also from the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, Warren Buffett, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley as well. Raw, American State power shocked and awed at will, defending itself from moral criticism by declaring its “exceptional” status. Meanwhile, both the United Nations and the annual Carnival organized by the World Economic Forum at Davos provided splendid venues for the CEOs of every one of these groups to join together, slap one another on the backs as they ate and drank what would soon be prohibited to everyone else, and recognize that they could all advance their corporate causes by following the model offered by the Multinational Chinese Communist Party. After all, this member of the End of History Alliance presented people who answered the question “Going My Way?” in the wrong fashion with a standard operating procedure emerging from Marxism-Leninism that could not be resisted. Molnar was right!
Additionally, lest we forget their part in all of this, the sophists of the media machine, on the lookout since ancient times for any means of gaining access to big time bucks and the titillation of a share in oppressive power, joined more and more happily in the growing multi-heretical fun to redefine freedom of speech as keeping one’s mouth hermetically sealed except to praise what was anti-Christian, irrational, inhuman, physically degrading, and, quite frankly, idiotic. Their success in bamboozling much of the “liberated” pluralist Ecumene, aided in doing so by the money and manacles of allies long dedicated to dumbing down the serfs, sadly illustrated the accuracy of the rather nasty Italian saying: “The mother of the imbecile is always pregnant”.
What, indeed, was all the joy about that Solzhenitsyn so sadly noted and so brilliantly attacked as really only a recipe for hell on earth way back in 1978? What was all the joy about that was so evangelically preached and promised in the 1990s by the Neo-Liberals and Neo-Conservatives, resulting in nothing other than the creation of super wealthy political and multinational elites on the one hand, and impoverished masses forced to leave their homes and migrate to other lands thrown into disruption along with their own on the other? What is all the joy about that it is still peddled today most elatedly by quack vaccination peddlers and eugenics-inspired, Dr. Mengele wannabes, all of whom see in every innocent victim a creature desperately longing to be butchered through transformation of his DNA, his gender, or his pathetic, inferior, pre-posthumanist body rather than to be perfected through the only transformation that can give meaning to life: transformation in Christ?
Finally, so as not to neglect the traitors in our midst, what, indeed, is all the joy about in the ramblings of Pope Francis and his Synodal Church buddies, with their claim to be leading us to a Catholic “future brighter than any past”? Their claim to possess a “discernment” of the Spirit and where it is He wishes us to go is boringly redundant. It is just another one of the endless, clever, rhetorical slogans in the grab bag of the Sophist word merchants, invented to replace a similar mantra that has outlived its usefulness in dazzling the Untermenschen. Isocrates, the greatest of the ancient Greek founders of the tribe of Sophist word merchants used an equivalent term to justify pandering to the high and mighty of his day. Rousseau preferred an appeal to his universally unquestionable prophetic “feeling” as a guide to the will of God; a box office hit of a seemingly “spiritual” signpost to follow, and one passed down to many charismatic revolutionaries, including the Liberal Catholic guru, the Abbé de Lamennais, from whom Francis & Co., whether they know it or not, ultimately inherited it. Their discernment is simply another man’s internal goo. Would that it were the case that everywhere this oozes, as James Burnham said of Eleanor Roosevelt, it would only spread a squid-like ink of directionless feeling. Alas, its direction has been made all too clear! The Omega Point to which it is leading us and to which the Vatican has already sent its representatives to announce our arrival has its capital city in Davos. Pope Francis is a mere chaplain for the New World Order, but Schwab is its High Priest.
So what about joy in Christmas, 2022? Well, to tell the truth, I have never felt more joyful in my life! Thank you Pluralist Liberation Theology! Thank you, 1990s! Thank you Davos! You have brought everything demonic lurking under the surface since the 1000s out into the open. You have done more to identify the battle of the City of God against the City of Man since the time of St. Augustine. So sharply have you delineated the forces at war in a manner that identifies the absurdity and evil of the vision that you represent and the Truth of the Faith and the Reason that you so madly assault, that you have once again shown that good always somehow comes from evil.
The specific good, the specific joy that has come to me through you is that you have made my Faith stronger than it ever has been. To keep us on the Christmas theme alone, so effective have you been in building my joy that you have ended a major source of seasonal misery for me---New York’s traditionally vulgar reduction of Advent to a sickening Holiday Shopping Season. The vigorous assault on Christianity has radically limited the entire time from Halloween to Christmas Eve being only a moment when shoppers rush home with their treasures. More than ever before in my lifetime, Christmas now belongs to believers! It is now really the source only of our joy: a true and lasting joy; a joy that is rooted in Christ; a joy that transforms everything natural around it into an honest to goodness Advent Wonderland that leads to eternal life with God in Heaven. That is what the joy of Christmas, 2022 has become for me! Moreover, I no longer have to teach in an academic environment built on a Core Curriculum of Fractured Fairy Tales that only Rocky and His Flying Friends from the 1960s could have devised! I can dedicate myself to the Roman Forum and the Catholic Church alone! Even better, I am going to be a grandfather next year for the first time as well! What more could one ask for? Aside from some warming alcoholic Christmas cheer.
Viva Cristo Rey! Joy to the world only under His scepter! And God bless an America that would shove those phrases down the chimney, hang them on on its Christmas trees, and publicly shout from Capitol Hill, the White House, and the Supreme Court what they fully signify. That would definitely make the stuff of an “exceptional” nation in which one could take a Christmas pride and which would aid in protecting the peace that honestly does pass all understanding.
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