To our new cultural elite, America's Civil War was a revolt of slave owners and traitors to destroy the Union to preserve their odious institution, and the Lost Cause was ignoble and dishonorable. Strikes at the passions of what we all as a nation should be most concerned with-our preservation and our posterity. On the subject of the press, Spengler said that instead of conversations between men, the press and the "electrical news-service keep the waking-consciousness of whole people and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year.

On top of that, of course, we're not allowed to eat in restaurants or do all kinds of other things, but hey, we can take it. Mao's essays were prescribed reading for the Herbert Marcuse-generation of the 1960s, who now run our cultural institutions.As the conclusion of a Culture's arc of growth, Civilizations are described as outwardly focused, and in that sense artificial or insincere. Baby boomers were unknowingly following a script that ran parallel to the party line laid down by the Moscow Central Committee in 1943: 'Members and the front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics.

However, he maintains a distinction between world-historical peoples, and ahistorical peoples—the former will have a historical destiny as part of a High Culture, while the latter will have a merely zoological fate. America has thrown overboard the moral compass by which the republic steered for two hundred years, and now it sails by dead reckoning. According to Buchanan, while revolutionary Marxism died throughout the world, cultural marxism was inseminated in the American academy by these scholar-revolutionaries, and from the sixties to the present American leftists conducted a successful "long march through the institutions", seizing the cultural high ground from which to shape, change, alter, de-christianize and destroy traditional American culture. org as under a Creative Commons license, or the author or publishing house agrees to publish the book. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.This criticism runs deeper than Buchanan allows because he implicitly contrasts this faith in comfort with the faith in Christianity.

He reportedly read it in one night and settled on his plan to organize life in the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Buchanan is not shy of tracing this trail of death and hedonism back to its origins: "Is it not a remarkable coincidence how global capitalism's view of women - as units of production, liberated from husbands, home, and family - conforms so precisely to the view of the fathers of global communism? Spengler invested certain terms with unusual meanings not commonly encountered in everyday discourse.

modern art- long separated from the idealism of Manet, Degas, Cezanne and Rodin- had become the purveyor of a destructive, degenerate, ugly, pornographic, Marxist, anti-American ideology. The Death of the West is a solid, gripping read, although it is depressing and melancholy in only the way that a eulogy to a once vital civilization can be. Buchanan projects that if current population trends continue, America and Europe will be third-world countries with alien cultures by 2050.

The difficulty with this dichotomy is that comfort has been the primary pursuit of Christianity for centuries. Second, by capturing the institutions where the young spend most of their waking hours- MTV and prime-time, movies and magazines, schools and colleges- the revolution is able to shape the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the young. And the medium, now matured, no longer the fifties fiefdom of Howdy Doody and Matt Dillon, could not only transmit the new ideas, it could reinforce them by creating new visual realities. With its talk of casual concentration it sets up a soulless concentration of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are expressing themselves—secrets that cannot be inspected and measured, but only livingly experienced from eye to eye.If you feel everything is in good shape,don't bother reading this book,just go on believing all the ills are caused by the religious right and racists. Even though the book starts off with some false presuppositions,in particular, those involving Russia's current status, the degree to which it is cited and sourced in the controversial areas is beyond outstanding.