Alexander Maistrovoy is the author of Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger), available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
France is burning; so are Brussels, Milan, and Turin. Barbarians run wild beneath Palestinian and Algerian flags. Politicians are impotent, law enforcement is helpless, and the media lament the ‘difficult conditions’ these ‘poor children’ face in their schools.
If this is not yet a total collapse, it is certainly the harbinger of one.
Western Europe has administered a lethal dose of poison to itself and is now writhing in convulsions. And this process began long before the advent of multiculturalism, progressives, globalists, or the ‘red-green alliance.’
Below, I shall attempt to reconstruct the story of a suicide committed by a once-great culture.
Since the French Revolution, the soul of the Western intellectual has been poisoned by the deadly passion for the revolutionary madness and the dream about a “strong leader".
Thomas Carlyle didn’t hide his admiration of “the Incorruptible" Robespierre (“the incorruptible sea-green Robespierre"), and the French Revolution with its Jacobin terror and mass atrocities, calling it “the crowning phenomenon of our Modern Time."
The 20th century created new idols. Walter Duranty, an Anglo-American journalist who served as the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times, denied the Holodomor ardently: “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation… Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda." (Up to 4.5 million people died in Ukraine alone during the Holodomor of 1932-1933. Today the same New York Times grieves over ‘famine in Gaza’, where about 560 tons of food are delivered per day).
Bernard Shaw and Romain Rolland, Aragon, Barbusse and Jean-Richard Bloch glorified Stalin! Rolland praised Stalin for his “modesty and humanism."
Bernard Shaw fully agreed with him. From his point of view, everything was just marvelous. The Holodomor? “…I saw no underfed people there; and the children were remarkably plump". (Cannibalism was the norm in many places in Ukraine). The “Red terror"? It was “Malicious inventions driven by class hostility." “The Dictatorship of Proletariat"? In Russia “Proletariat is much more effectively dictated to for its own good than under our system."
Admiration of Lenin, Stalin, and the Bolsheviks however did not preclude him from admiring Hitler and Mussolini. He felt a strong sympathy for a “personal friend of mine Sir Oswald Mosley."
Barbusse was the author of the apologetic biography of Stalin: “Stalin. A New World Seen Through the Man". He is convinced that the establishment of the Soviet Russia is “the greatest and most beautiful phenomenon in world history."
Let’s guess: who is writing about whom? “Lonely overbearing man… damned disagreeable," “ friendly and commonplace," possessing “an intelligence far beyond dogmatism"..., “sucked thoughtfully at the pipe he had most politely asked my permission to smoke… I have never met a man more fair, candid, and honest". Got it? That was Stalin, pictured by Herbert Wells. They were talking for three hours in Kremlin and …“discussed liberty of expression".
“I would do nothing against Stalin at the moment, I accepted the Moscow trials (against Trotsky-Zinoviev 'traitors"'- the author’s comment) and I am prepared to accept those in Barcelona", - said French novelist Andre Malraux during a massacre of anarchists from POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) by Communists in Barcelona in 1937 during Civil war in this country.
Mao Zedong, “The Red Sun in Our Hearts", threw light on the way of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The “Red Guards" of Chairman Mao caused deadly convulsions of China and ecstatic rage of Jan Myrdal, Charles Bettelheim, Alain Badiou and Louis Pierre Althusser.
In Paris, Barbusse and Aragon created “the pocket monster" - Enver Hoxha in Albania; at Sorbonne University, Sartre worked out “The Khmer Rouge Revolution" of Pol Pot, Hu Nima, and Ieng Sary. The driver and bodyguard of Sartre was Hans-Joachim Klein - the member of hostage taking in OPEC headquarters in Vienne and the comrade of the famous “Jackal" - Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. Together they visited the leftist extremist Andreas Baader, one of the leaders of The Red Army Fraction (RAF) known as “Baader-Meinhof Group", in Stammheim Prison in December 1974.
The hatred for the “petty bourgeois philistine", as Trotsky named ordinary people, together with the dream about guillotines, bayonets, and “red terror" keep inspiring Western intellectuals.
Juan Benet, a famous Spanish writer, declared “I am strongly convinced that while people like Alexandr Solzhenitsyn exist, concentration camps will and should operate. Probably it’s worth strengthening the guards, so that people like Solzhenitsyn would not escape".
Gareth Porter, the American historian, investigative journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, said in May 1977: “The notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people was …a myth". (Up to 3 million people died in Cambodia at the hands of the ‘Khmer Rouge,’ led by Pol Pot. Please, tell me again about this ‘genocide in Gaza.’).
Noam Chomsky characterized the proofs of Pol Pot’s genocide as “third rate, … vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign against the Khmer Rouge". The experience of Khmer Rouge regime impressed him.
Brothers Alexander and Andrew Cockburn (Los Angeles Times) published their opuses periodically) explained that Stalin did not murder millions of people.
All of this was accompanied by a burning hatred for West, American values, white people, and for Judeo-Christian ideals. Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe, the author of the book “White Savagery: Hidden Genocide from 1492 to Today", uses such notions as “White savagery" and “White ferocity" (“La férocité blanche"). The history of the white race has been an endless appalling horror, claims Louis Sala-Molins, a contemporaneous philosopher (as if the history of other races is different).
According to Susan Sontag, an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, “The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."
Since the middle of the last century ‘Red bacilli’ mutate with the speed of Drosophila: The New Left, Neo-Marxism, Trotskyism, Pacifism, Maoism, Structural Marxism, Anarchism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Libertarian socialism, The New Anticapitalist Party, Marxist Humanism, Freudo-Marxism, etc.
Their adherents go to the streets holding red flags, portraits of Trotsky and “Che" Guevara and dream to ‘F--- the System’ like their idol Abbie Hoffman. They fawn on despots and bigots and entrust sadists with romantic glory.
White European Males" (DWEM) is the term invented by modern Western intellectuals to characterize classics of European literature, philosophy, and Art. The main word here is “white". Nobody would ever dare to name Africans “black", Asians - “yellow" and Indians - “red".
Only “whites" “deserve" such a singling out.
Pascal Bruckner, French writer and one of the “New Philosophers", wrote that the “middle class turned out to be captured by “bourgeois-bohemian Bolshevism". Whether artist, actor, or journalist - they all imagine themselves subverters, especially if such subversion is generously paid. Every socialist leader, according to him, dreams to throw forward a clenched fist and sing the “Internationale" after every party convention.
The “red bacillus" has penetrated deeply into all social structures of Western civilization. At the beginning of the new millennium, these Universalist theories blossomed into a lush and poisonous color. New concepts emerged: Identity Politics, Critical Race Theory, Institutional Racism, Intersectionality, “White Privilege/ Male Privilege" etc. The product of vicious love of Red and Brown dogmas, all of them are pseudo-scientific and they divide people into racial-class categories with a rigid hierarchy.
Evil has reached a qualitatively new level.
And then came Islam, and the Western elite embraced it enthusiastically - as a harbinger of the Great Truth -opening their arms wide to welcome it. Michel Foucault, a leading contemporary philosopher, compared Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Martin Luther and described the unfolding events as an example of a new “political spirituality" (‘spiritualite politique’). Jean-Paul Sartre sang the praises of Ali Shariati, the ideologue of the Islamic Revolution. Legal philosopher and international law scholar Richard Falk met in person with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 in Paris.
They were crazy about the ‘Palestinian resistance’ and full of admiration for Arafat. The French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze published a famous essay with the direct title ‘The Greatness of Yasser Arafat’ (“The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat’), and the equally famous writer and playwright Jean Genet wrote an enthusiastic novel about him and Palestinian Arab fedayeen murderers, ‘Prisoner of Love’. After Arafat’s death, all their ardent, passionate love shifted toward the Islamists.
For Judith Butler, Hamas and Hezbollah have become “part of progressive social movements"; prominent Italian postmodernist philosopher Gianni Vattimo has called on Europeans to launch a fundraising campaign to “buy better rockets for Hamas"; Chomsky hailed Hezbollah as a ‘liberation movement’; Norman Finkelstein praised the Hezbollah for its courage and discipline. Leading intellectuals drew inspiration from September 11 and October 7. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
With the zeal of deranged cultists, they have brought in Muslims from the darkest cloacae of the Third World; they handed them over their own wives and daughters to be preyed upon; they allowed them to desecrate their own sacred sites, to rob, humiliate, and terrorize their fellow citizens. They permitted Islamists to establish a cult of a ‘Palestine from the River to the Sea’, and to transform the keffiyeh into a false symbol of freedom and virtue.
Now we are witnessing the conclusion of this drama - without pity and without regret. For it is impossible to feel pity for those who have condemned themselves to a harrowing demise.
The ‘Red Plague’ has returned to where it came from. Let us wish it every success. It will help preserve whatever remains normal in this world.