Issues analysis
The early culture war (1967 - 1973)
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080728
A brief history of conservatism: Part 14
July 28, 2008
Fred Hutchison
RenewAmerica analyst
In this essay, we shall examine the early days of the culture war,
which include a frenetic prelude (1967–68), and the development of a
hideous counter-culture running from the Woodstock Music Festival to
Roe v. Wade (1969–1973).
An unjustified rebellion
Was the rebellion of the sixties a reaction to the fifties? Yes and
no. It was not a natural reaction to the bad things of the fifties,
as is often supposed. It was an evil reaction to the wholesomeness of
the fifties.
I remember observing the sixties rebellion and thinking: "Never has
there been a rebellion with so little to rebel about." Since the
affluent and pampered baby boomers had little to complain about,
their rebellion had little justification and was therefore wicked and shameful.
Those who attempted to rationalize the rebellion of the sixties often
depicted the fifties as a dreadful time and the sixties as a reaction
to the fifties. Looking through this prism, the wickedness of the
rebellion was minimized or excused.
Evil hides behind false excuses, including this false
rationalization. In this case, the rationalization was absurd because
of the wholesomeness of life in the fifties.
In praise of the fifties
The values of God, country, community, and family seemed to reign
triumphant in the fifties. In 1960, an astounding 69 percent of
Americans claimed membership in a local church. That percentage may
have exceeded the church membership of any nation at any time in
Western history. The pews of many churches were filled in the fifties
as they have not been before or since.
Most of the mainstream Protestant denominations which then
comprised about half of the church membership in America still
taught the universal moral law and traditional values. Today, these
same denominations claim 5% of church membership and most of them
never speak about the moral law.
Negative cultural indicators such as existentialism, beatniks,
greasers, bikers, early rock and roll, and cinema noir reflected
fifties subcultures far removed from Main Street America. The massive
box office hit films were not Rebel Without a Cause or A Street Car
Named Desire, but films of triumphal righteousness like Quo Vadis,
The Robe, Demetrius, and the Gladiators, The Ten Commandments, and Ben Hur.
America united
In the fifties, America's long racial nightmare seemed to be over.
Jim Crow ended in the North during the forties if not in the South.
President Truman integrated the military during the Korean War. The
integration of schools had an auspicious beginning.
The civil rights leaders of the sixties never said that there was no
progress in the fifties, but complained that progress was not fast
enough. Conservatives argued that moderate and steady progress in
racial equity, in accord with the stability and harmony of the social
order and the freedom of the citizenry, is more lasting and more
blessed than sudden revolutionary change.
The lingering bitterness of the South over the Civil War and
reconstruction seemed to be a fading memory during the fifties. We
were united by memories of a patriotic war (WWII) that we won and by
our common cause against communism. America was whole once more. The
dream of the founders seemed to have been fulfilled.
A sweet time to be a child
Economic prosperity had returned after the long nightmare of the
Great Depression and the privations of war rationing. Many Americans
could now own their own homes with modern appliances, a grassy yard,
a white picket fence, kids, and a dog.
The men generally had steady jobs, most marriages were for life, and
adultery was rare. Feminism had not yet introduced a disdain for
masculinity, or an unhealthy competition between men and women.
Mothers were at home with their pre-school children. People lived in
real neighborhoods and cared about the community.
Only a sourpuss can deny that the fifties in America were an
agreeable time and place to live for an unprecedented number of
people and a sweet time to be a child.
Fie on goodness
I argue that the rebellion of the sixties was an evil reaction
against the wholesomeness of the fifties.
In the original stage version of Camelot (1960), the knights sang the
bawdy song Fie on Goodness. They were bored with the sweetness and
harmony of Camelot and were eager to get back to the fun of bloodshed
and debauchery. The song was cut when the show went on tour because
it was considered too racy for American audiences outside New York,
but was retained when the play went to London.
Like the rowdy knights who sang the song, the rebels of the sixties
were bored with the prosperity, social harmony, and cultural
sweetness of the times and wanted to break the monotony with rioting
and debauchery. Just as the knights had no justification for their
rebellion against Camelot's goodness, the sixties rebellion against
the wholesomeness of American culture was insupportable and deplorable.
John Winthrop, a puritan father, warned that God's grace brings forth
righteousness, righteousness leads to prosperity, and prosperity
corrupts men who turn away from God and become wicked. The
prosperity, the soft living, and the pampering of kids of the fifties
spoiled and corrupted the generation of baby boomers who went on a
rampage in the sixties. The sweet fifties led to the sour sixties.
If you're going to San Francisco...
A prelude to the culture war occurred on colleges campuses and in San
Francisco in 1967 and 68. Recall the 1967 song "If you're going to
San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." The song
was about "the summer of love" that is to say, the 1967 summer of
sex. The "flower children" gathered in San Francisco and established
the town as the Mecca of depravity. The place remains the American
Sodom to this day.
Elements of this strange overture included the radicalization of the
antiwar movement, the radicalization of the civil rights movement,
and the emergence of a weird psychedelic counter-culture. An equally
weird spiritual counter-culture spirituality for the narcissist
was called the New Age Movement. Elements of the New Age Movement
included neopaganism and the occult.
During this time of deluded souls, confused minds, disordered
passions, and extreme ideologies, fringe elements of the anti-war
movement and the civil rights movement sometimes used vitriolic
rhetoric and fomented violent public insurrections.
However, in spite of florid rhetoric and riotous passions on the
streets, most activists craved participation in an improved America
of their dreams. Only where Marxist ideology poisoned the minds of
the activists was something akin to a hatred of America discernable.
Non-Marxist liberals did not yet hate America because the postmodern
program of deconstructing the Western cultural heritage had not yet
begun in earnest in America. In contrast, postmodernism in Europe
dates back to 1920.
The barbarians renounce civilization
The debauchery at the Woodstock Music Festival (1969) was a lurid and
brazen renunciation of Western culture and values. Our resilient
society can weather the storms of an overblown antiwar or civil
rights movement. In contrast, a popular renunciation of civilization
and all things decent, humane, excellent, beautiful, and true might
cause civilization to sink like a foundering ship caught in a typhoon.
We can survive our passage through many social upheavals, but a
voyage into barbarism might not offer a return passage. When Roman
civilization was inundated by the barbarians, the return to a lasting
civilization was delayed by six hundred years of barbarity. The
Woodstock revelry was the beginning of the return of the barbarians.
This time, the barbarians did not come with force of arms, but with
cultural and moral subversion.
A perverse preference for barbarism
In those days, many individuals voiced a dislike of civilization and
a preference for barbarism. Art Historian Kenneth Clark wrote in his
splendid book Civilization (1969): "People sometimes tell me that
they prefer barbarism to civilization. I doubt they have given it a
long enough trial.... They are bored with civilization; but all the
evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely
greater. Quite apart from the discomforts and privations, there was
no escape from it. Very restricted company, no books, no light after
dark, no hope. On one side the sea battering away, on the other
infinite stretches of bog and forest. A most melancholy existence,
and the Anglo-Saxon poets had no illusions about it."
Middle Earth and ancient giants
To illustrate the disillusionment of the barbarian, Clark quoted a
passage from The Wanderer, a 10th century Anglo-Saxon poem,
translated by Michael Alexander. I add a few snippets from the poem
left out by Clark and emend a few lines with substitutions from other
translations, with the substituted portions marked by italics.
"A wise man will grasp how ghastly it shall be/ When all this world's
wealth standeth waste/ Even as now, throughout this middle-earth,/
Walls stand wind beaten,/ Heavy hoar frost; ruined-habitations/ The
wine halls crumble;/ their wielders lie bereft of bliss/... And so he
destroyed this city/ He, the creator of men / That human laughter is
not heard about it/ And idle stand these ancient works of giants."
The wandering warrior returned to his old mead hall and found it in
ruins and all his tribesmen slain. He lamented the ruined state of
"middle earth." J.R.R. Tolkien, borrowed this term and quoted several
snippets from The Wanderer in his tales about the hobbits, elves, and
dwarves who live in Middle Earth.
The wandering Anglo-Saxon barbarians conquered the civilized
Christian Celts who lived under Roman rule in Britain. The Celts were
illumined by Christianity and enjoyed the brilliant Latin culture of
antiquity. If a barbarian like the Anglo-Saxon poet lamented over the
ruins of his old mead hall, how much more would a wandering Celt
lament over the Roman ruins in Britain, which were magnificent
structures destroyed by the barbarians. He would call these elegant
ruins and not a ruined mead hall "ancient works of giants" to
contrast them with the puny works of barbarians.
The boredom of barbarism
Clark said, "The boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater." As one
who cannot endure intellectual boredom, I am thrilled by civilization
and horrified by barbarism. "And so he destroyed this city; He, the
creator of men, that human laughter is not heard about it." If I was
forced to live among the boring barbarians, I should never laugh again.
Three intellectually stimulating streams of conservatism, described
in this series, stand out as the stalwart defenders of exiting
civilization and the determined opponents of boring barbarism. The
traditionalist conservatives defend the social fabric of a civilized
society. The neoconservatives uphold the literary and intellectual
classics of the West. The Christian conservatives are vehemently
opposed to paganism and the occult.
Barbarism is invariably pagan, as we learned from the Dark Ages and
from the pagan revival among the barbarians at Woodstock. In
contrast, from the fall of Rome until around 1800, Christianity was
the most civilizing force in the West. Even in the culture war of our
own day, we see doctrinally orthodox Christianity arrayed on the side
of civilization against neopaganism and neobarbarism. If our
civilization is to be saved, Christianity must defeat paganism in the
21st century as it did in the 10th and 11th centuries.
Woodstock: a declaration of cultural war
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair (8/15–8/18/1969) was the beginning
of the culture war on two fronts. It was the beginning of a
protracted battle between liberals and conservatives about certain
watershed moral and political questions.
It was also the moment when Modernism began to transmogrify into
Postmodernism in America, and the deconstruction of the Western
cultural tradition began to become a priority of the liberal elite.
In spite of their postgraduate college degrees, this subverted elite
has become the enemy of civilization. The elite is suicidal because
without civilization, there can be no college degrees and no academic elite.
Woodstock was a proclamation to the world that anything subversive
was now welcome in America. As such, it seemed to draw the postmodern
counterculture from Europe to America.
In part I of this series, I wrote, "Conservative ideals have
consistently had salutary effects upon culture. In contrast,
liberalism has never been better than a mixed blessing and was often
destructive to Western culture. It was destructive because it
propagated false views about the nature of man, society, government,
and the cosmos."
In contrast to the era of modernism, when liberalism sometimes had a
mixed effect on culture, postmodern liberalism has been almost
entirely destructive.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll
The theme of Woodstock was "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" and the
motto was "if it feels good, do it." Antiwar protests, Marxism, the
green movement, New Age mysticism, neopaganism, the occult, and
sexual perversion were secondary themes. They were side shows at the
festival, just as the freaks were side shows at Barnum's circus.
Psychedelic drugs and promiscuous sex were the main event. The young
fools went to Woodstock mainly to get stoned and to have an orgy.
After they were addled by a haze of sex and drugs, they wandered
through the side show of subversive freaks and dabbled in the sampler
of horrors according to their whims and delusions.
Woodstock popularized "acid rock" or psychedelic rock, which was
music with long, rambling, screaming solos on the electric guitar
designed to accompany the use of drugs. Acid rock was a forerunner of
heavy metal music. Hard rock music with harsh anti-social or raw
sexual lyrics was also featured at Woodstock.
It should come as no surprise that Woodstock, the most morally and
visually squalid event in American history, was accompanied by the
ugliest music ever heard by human ears. A return to barbarism
includes a preference for the music of primitivism. Woodstock's
version of primitivism included the screams of the damned.
The music of death
Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix hysterically screamed into the
microphones at Woodstock as though they were being tortured. Joplin
was addicted to heroin and Hendrix was addicted to LSD, a hallucinogenic drug.
Within little more than a year after Woodstock, both of these lost
souls were dead. Their screams of agony that had been made before
crowds at Woodstock were subsequently made in the nether regions with
no audience to listen to their wails and gnashing of teeth.
The doomed Joplin and Hendrix, who were coming to the end of their
rope, sang the music of death. The music of death was a forerunner of
the culture of death that featured abortion on demand.
In those days, I saw several rock musicians on television convulsed
by extremely violent and hideous contortions as though they were
possessed by demons. Some rock musicians of our day try to mimic the
contortions of the damned, but they come across as hokey and
laughable, like a low budget horror movie, instead of being truly scary.
During the Woodstock era, when I watched the demonically agitated
musicians on TV, it occurred to me that the foul demons who inspired
their music had no sense of musical taste and no concept of beauty.
Did muddled demons inspire the degraded musical preferences of a lost
generation? Perhaps.
A middle class revolution
For over a century, the West has had a small bohemian counterculture
that sometimes used drugs and had orgies. Woodstock dwarfed the
bohemian subculture by gathering 200,000 people in one place. The
majority were college students from affluent middle class families.
The movie Woodstock (1970) glorified the Woodstock festival and
celebrated the counterculture. The movie was cheap to make, was very
popular with college students, and made money. Millions of baby
boomers were seduced by the movie and joined the countercultural
rebellion. This hoard of rebels dwarfed the number of beatniks in
Greenwich Village in the fifties and the bohemians in Paris in the
20's. Many rock concerts since that day have become like a little
Woodstock with some of its characteristic elements of vulgarity,
rebellion, and moral decadence. America's Sodom and Gomorrah goes on and on.
History teaches that revolutions by lower classes and labor usually
fail, but revolutions by the middle class usually succeed. The new
revolution was the young middle class against the old middle class.
The Christian middle class had once supplied the moral fiber of
America. Now an entire middle class generation was leading America to
paganism and moral debauchery.
The hippies and I
By the time I entered college, I had already realized that most
people are generally deceived and that most men are rascals. This
realization was confirmed by my misfortune of attending college when
the campuses were still inundated with hippies who listened to acid rock.
I denounced acid rock to a collection of about twenty students. Word
spread through the dorm and made me a figure of controversy,
celebrity, and ridicule. My presence in a room full of hippies
sometimes inspired mock celebrations of truth, justice, and the
American way. I was the designated Captain America of the campus to
be celebrated and laughed at. I confess that I rather enjoyed playing
Captain America, and the hippies enjoyed having me to play silly games with.
I gave an impromptu lecture in the dorm living room to a group of
perhaps fifty scruffy hippies about the evils of drugs and
promiscuous sex. The spontaneous event got a good crowd because of my
colorful reputation. The mob of hippies sat in a semi-circle around
my overstuffed chair as though I was their guru. It was a farce, of course.
However, I decided to play out the farce because it gave me a chance
to inveigh against sexual immorality, drugs, and riotous living. The
merry hippies responded to my scolding as if it was entertainment,
and they laughed with gusto. I actually enjoyed the high spirits of
the goofy hippies. It was fun to be the center of attention in such a
jocund company of nitwits. Alas, my attempts to reason with them was
a little like trying to get serious with the three stooges.
I thought they were morally insane for regarding sexual and chemical
continence as a joke and probably said as much to them. Even as I was
drawn into their mood of hilarity, I felt like slapping those naughty knaves.
The conservatives were AWOL
Where were the other campus conservatives while all this was going
on? They were AWOL. The libertarians had no objection to the abuse of
sex and drugs by the hippies. The fusionists felt inhibited about
questioning the moral values of others. The budding neoconservatives
were reading the classics. The serious scholars, who comprised a
significant portion of the student body at my unusually studious
college, were in the library studying.
The evangelicals were preoccupied with evangelism and Bible studies.
They were mostly missing from action when it came to politics and
issues-oriented public forums. The evangelicals had not yet joined
the culture war.
I agreed with the evangelicals on most major points of doctrine, and
admired their penetrating Bible studies. However, I could not
understand their timid withdrawal from the world, and their strange
indifference to politics. They seemed to come alive for organized
evangelism, but to fade into the wallpaper when things got political.
However, we did recruit a few Southern Baptists for the campus
conservative club. Those born in the South seemed more gregarious and
more amenable to active politics than the timid, but well organized,
Northern evangelicals.
Ears filled with wax
I was sitting in the dorm recreation center one evening when a
strange madness enveloped the place like a steamy fog. It was the
paranoid enthusiasm of a mob. Many students rushed by me to go to the
campus riots.
Some of them charged forward with heads lowered, hoping to get past
me before I challenged them. I hailed some of them, calling them to
turn back, but they rushed by all the faster. They were like the crew
of Odysseus who placed wax in their ears lest they should hear the
songs of the sirens.
A few fellows paused and talked with me for a moment. I warned them
that what they were about to do was immoral, illegal, antisocial, and
unpatriotic. Some were pleased by the personal attention and amused
that I should try to draw them back from the course that they set
upon. After a brief exchange of words, they plunged into the dark maelstrom.
Others were annoyed by my nagging and my interference with their
personal affairs. After a few words, they waved me off and stalked
sullenly into the night. Then there were the spoiled brats. My rebuke
came as a shock to them. Apparently, no one had ever said "no" to them before.
Dust in the wind
Another kind of fellow who drifted towards the riots seemed dazed and
confused. Such ones were like the flotsam and jetsam floating on the
frothy and turbulent waves. My voice seemed far away to them as does
a voice from dry land calling to those who are bobbing in the surf.
The memory of these drifting ones reminds me of Dust in the Wind
(1977), a popular song that came out after the Woodstock frenzy had
died down. The song captured a vein of dazed resignation to endless
flux and a haunted acceptance of one's fate, with the phrase, "All we
are is dust in the wind."
Conscience cries out
I called out to the young men rushing to the riots, but none turned
back. Not one. The solidarity of the general revolt against morality
and conscience among these young white middle-class men was
reminiscent of the remarkable solidarity of the rabble at Woodstock.
Years later, I came to realize that I was the voice of conscience in
that dorm for a season. The designated public conscience has a lonely
task at a time when most of the young men have hardened their hearts
and closed their ears against their own conscience.
The first chapter of Proverbs describes wisdom crying out in public
places. Fools, scorners, and simpletons refused the rebuke of wisdom
and rushed to their terrifying calamity and destruction. That is how
it was on that dark night on the campus long ago.
The scapegoat
I was still sitting in the same chair when the young rioters stumbled
back from the riot. Some were laughing, but some were depressed and
ashamed. One of them was weeping from the effects of tear gas and
from the terror of being chased by police dogs. He railed at me and
blamed me for the malevolent whirlwind from which he had escaped.
"Your National Guard troops did this to me," he sobbed.
My National Guard? Apparently the mind of a rebel in a mob is so
darkened that he cannot make distinctions between the different
parties and groups who oppose him. In his paranoid confusion, he was
convinced that I and the troopers were somehow in cahoots. Mobs must
have their scapegoats.
I suspect that this particular young man was stung either by my
scolding of the hippies or by my warnings as he went out the door to
the riots. His wound was still hurting when he returned from the
riot, because he had not yet been able to silence the voice of his
conscience. No man is more angry than the one who is fighting his own
conscience.
The accusations of the weeping young man was one my first experiences
of being the object of paranoid conspiracy thinking by someone who
really meant it and was not jesting or playing with metaphors and
insults. I was subsequently accused by the school paper of being the
tool of the college administration.
In later years, I was accused in a letter to the editor of a major
newspaper of being the tool of the oil companies because I disagreed
with fad theories of global warming. I have been accused of being a
"neo-con," and therefore a tool of the president's cabal. I have also
been called a Nazi and a racist, of course.
Notice the similarity between the paranoia of contemporary liberals
and the paranoia of a campus mob that is seeking a scapegoat.
Conservatives, where are you?
As darkness fell on that evil night of the riots, I was alone in the
empty dorm recreation center for an hour or two. I wondered,
"Conservatives, where are you?"
All the other conservatives were either hiding under their beds or
had sneaked off to see the hideous riots out of a voyeuristic
fascination. I sat there wondering if I was the last sane man on
earth. In terms of the moral health of our culture, this was an
unusually dark time.
King Canute defies the tide
Was I foolish to make a lonely stand? Was I like King Canute, who sat
on the sea shore and commanded the tide not to come in?
Well, I suspect that during times of public madness, if even one
person publically says "no," it makes a difference. What the
conscience of a malefactor retains in memory after participating in a
lunatic mob is a little different if someone was there who said "no."
If there was no resistance or sign of disapproval, a collective event
of irrationality and malice will be remembered in a self-justifying way.
After all, a few might actually repent of their wickedness. They
should be accorded the opportunity of changing sides to join the
wiser voice instead of thinking themselves to be alone in their
renunciation of the mob.
Was I shunned because of my unpopular stand? I had more friends in my
campus Captain America days than at any other time in my life. We can
never calculate the consequences of opposing the crowd. Therefore,
dear reader, do what you know is right and leave the outcomes to God.
The high cost of sitting out the cultural apocalypse
America sat out the first three years of World War I and the first
two years of World II, for reasons most Americans accept. Less
justifiably, many conservatives sat out the first four years of the
culture war (1969–1973). As a result, the conservatives came to the
battle too late to stop the sexual revolution.
Could the sexual revolution have been stopped? Yes. Whenever large
numbers of citizens have risen up against sexual indecency, they won
if they showed up at the barricades before the libertines were able
to gain an entrenched position.
Many moons have passed since Woodstock. American sexual mores might
not be as bad now as they were in the seventies because conservatives
have made some modest gains after decades of fighting the culture
war. Nonetheless, sexual mores are vastly worse than they were before
Woodstock and Roe v. Wade. The damage to the American family has been
incalculable as a result. This is the high cost of the fact that
conservatives sat out the moral pandemic during the early phases of
the culture war.
A cure for the slumbering conservative
When I was young, the young liberals were wide awake, and most of the
young conservatives were asleep. Is there some flaw built into the
nature of conservatives that makes them slow to awaken in times of danger?
This phenomenon puts me in mind of the collection of speeches While
England Slept (1938) by Winston Churchill and the book Why England
Slept (1940) by John F. Kennedy. Churchill's lectures from 1932 to
1938 were a vain attempt to awaken a sleeping England to the perils
of Nazism and fascism.
Perhaps the young slumbering conservatives I knew in college had
always been conservatives. In contrast, men who convert to
conservatism late in life, like Reagan and Churchill, often notice an
emerging peril before other men do. They remember how crazy they were
when they were young liberals and understand how dangerous the jungle
out there can get.
Is there an elixir to awaken the slumbering young conservative?
Perhaps. The young Churchill read enormous quantities of history
during his idle time with the British Army in India. This might have
been the source of his remarkable foresight about the Nazis.
My independent readings of history as a youth might have been more
extensive than that of many of my campus conservative colleagues.
Perhaps that is why I was awake during the campus cataclysms, while
they slumbered. Or perhaps the zeal from my awakening to the pursuit
of truth several years before kept me awake. However, I acquired an
early hatred of evil, stupidity, mediocrity, mendacity, duplicity,
group think, cliques, fads, and propaganda at my mother's knee.
Some propositions: 1) Every young conservative should consume heavy
servings of history as part of his reading diet. Most will relish
this dish because it is in the nature of the conservative to love
history. 2) Every young conservative should be taught that
metaphysical truth really exists, has meaning, and is worth pursuing.
3) A young conservative who was not blessed with a mother like mine
can gain a healthy skepticism about the folly and stupidity of this
world by reading G.K. Chesterton.
What the conservatives cared about (1969–1973)
There were a few things conservatives cared about during the early
phases of the culture war. My campus conservative friends had four
major concerns that aroused them to action: 1) The takeover of the
Young Republicans by moderates, 2) creeping socialism, 3) campus
leftists, and 4) Communism.
The takeover of the Young Republicans by moderates reminded us of the
years of Republican "me too" Republican presidential candidates. We
all had read A Choice, not an Echo by Phyllis Schlafly, and fancied
that we could do for the Ohio Young Republicans what she did for
Goldwater in 1964. Our protests and credentials battles at the state
convention were an ignominious failure.
We distributed literature condemning high taxes, government
regulation, and government social engineering. Net effect: a very
small handful of students changed their minds. I debated issues with
my liberal professors in and out of class and do not recall changing
anyone's mind.
However, two initiatives regarding campus leftists and communists had
a major impact. I had a hand in both initiatives.
The campus commies and I
The big debate of the Conservative Club versus the Student
Mobilization Committee (SMC) was well promoted and we got a crowd of
perhaps three or four hundred people. I was one the two debaters for
the conservative team. The SMC, a communist front group, also had two
debaters. The topic was the Vietnam War.
The priority of the campus commies was to teach the students to hate
America. As J. Edgar Hoover had explained in Masters of Deceit
(1958), his famous book about Communism, few Americans are likely to
believe the preposterous theories of Karl Marx unless they are first
induced to hate their own country. This is precisely what the SMC was
doing on my campus. Therefore, I regarded them as in the vanguard of
the forces of evil.
My best line in the debate went something like this: "If we
precipitously withdraw from Vietnam, the press will be ejected, a
curtain of silence will go down, and the 'night of the long knives'
will begin." (This was a quotation that I read to the students. I
cannot now recover the source.) I pointed out that every violent
communist takeover of a government was always followed by a blood
purge. This was standard policy and practice for communists of the
"Marxist-Leninist" doctrine.
The night of the long knives
What I said to that crowd about the night of the long knives was
vindicated by subsequent history. President Nixon negotiated a peace
settlement for Vietnam that was similar to the peace settlement for
the Korean War. South Vietnam was saved. In a fit of madness, the
Democrats in Congress cut off all funding for the war, which forced
an instant withdrawal of Americans and a termination of aid. They
turned a tactical victory into a defeat. South Vietnam was lost. The
communists subsequently murdered about 1,000,000 civilians in South
Vietnam and murdered an estimated 6,000,000 in Cambodia.
Triumph over the malefactors
It has always amazed me how oblivious the liberals are to communist
theory and practice. During my debate with the SMC, I could see some
startled faces in the crowd when I told them that blood purges always
follow communist takeovers.
My team won the debate because our facts and logic were more
appealing than the hysterical rant of the student commies. One of
their debaters was a hot-head who actually threatened to beat up a
heckler in the crowd. After I told them that the communists murder
their opponents, they observed how a campus communist threatened to
beat up an opponent.
This victory was sweet because the true malefactors were publically
exposed as fanatics, tyrants, and bullies.
My picture appeared on the front page of the college newspaper. I was
waving my arms in a rhetorical flourish while refuting and rebuking
the campus commies. This publicity paved the way for my next stunt.
The student newspaper and I
I wrote a critique of the student newspaper, and it was published in
the student newspaper! I accused the student staff of being a
self-perpetuating clique who had turned the paper into a left-wing
scandal sheet. I argued that it was unjust that an irresponsible
paper that is unwanted by many students be supported by mandatory
student fees. After enjoying and abusing a privileged arrangement
like this, I thought the editor was self-serving and unjust to clamor
for complete freedom from supervision from the college
administration. The student editor responded in print with a long
rambling denunciation of me.
I hit a nerve. The student newspaper clique was the very archetype of
the powerful and privileged liberal establishment in all its
self-righteous hypocrisy, self-serving arguments, special pleading
fallacies, and manipulative games.
I had explicitly exposed the racket of the school newspaper. I had
implicitly exposed the self-interested game of the liberal
administration of the school. Even though the editor accused me of
being a tool of the administration, I was a thorn in the side of the
liberal administrators who ran the college.
A pawn in a chess game
However, I was permitted by the powers that be to publish my critique
in the school newspaper and to publically debate the campus
communists. Why? Perhaps in those days of campus disorders, the
administration needed a visible Captain America to prove to the
alarmed alumni that they were not in cahoots with the insurrectionists.
In the end, I was but a pawn in a chess game played by powerful men.
"We are none other than a moving row/ Of Magic Shadow Shapes that
come and go/ Round the Sun-illumed Lantern held/ In midnight by the
Master of the Show//.
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays/ Upon his Chequer-board of
Nights and Days;/ Hither and thither moves and checks and slays/ And
one by one back into the Closet lays."
LXVIII & LXIX, The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam (Persian, 1120 A.D.)
--
RenewAmerica analyst Fred Hutchison also writes a column for RenewAmerica.
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