The Culture War We're In
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
How are wars won?
To win a war you don't need to kill every soldier on
the other side. What you need to do is destroy the
other army as an organized force. You destroy the
ability of the officers to command and the morale of
the men. You destroy their perception of the worth
of their side and of their own self-worth.
All wars are culture wars. To win you must destroy
the values of the other side. (That is one reason
why we're losing to Islam no matter how many times
we beat them on the battlefield.) You must destroy
their sense of purpose and the values instilled in
them to break them as an organization.
That is what the left has been doing to us.
This culture war we're in is slow and subtle. It's
not always as loud and as obvious as the
counterculture was. The purpose of the
counterculture was to shatter the dominant culture.
Once that was done, the culture could be slowly
cannibalized at will until the counterculture became
the culture. And then it was no longer about freedom
or free anything, those were the disruptive tools
used to drive youth recruitment with a facade of
anarchy, and it became about conformity and control.
This culture of conformity and control is still
being sold as 'rebellious' when it's just the
establishment.
We no longer have a culture. We have a
counterculture that occasionally masquerades as the
culture.
But it's not over yet. A culture war destroys the
culture of the other side because that is the source
of its values. To completely destroy the other side,
its values must be destroyed as an abstract, its
organization must be destroyed to prevent those
values from being conveyed and the individual's own
values must be destroyed, in that order.
Destroying the values of every single individual is
the most difficult part of this project. Destroying
values as an abstract idea is the easiest. That's
why the left has made its greatest gains there.
Abstract ideas can be torn down. It's not hard. Any
college freshman can tear down a set of ideas,
honestly or dishonestly. Indeed much of the purpose
of modern education is equipping students to destroy
the ideas and values of their parents (but obviously
not those of their educators). What is difficult is
using that to destroy the culture that is based on
those ideas.
This is not an intellectual debate. People are
defined by their values. They gain strength and
identity from those values. To defeat them, you must
devalue their sense of self. You must convince them
that what they saw as worthwhile is really
worthless. That will destroy their resistance and
individualism.
The left attacked our culture in order to destroy
our communities and then finish us off as
individuals.
Americans believe that they are exceptional because
their country is exceptional. So the left eagerly
swarms to argue that America is not exceptional,
except maybe that it's exceptionally bad.
Americans believe that individuals succeed with hard
work. Obama and Elizabeth Warren bray that "You
didn't build that."
Americans believe in religion and family. The left
sets out to destroy them by proving that these
institutions are evil and oppressive. Religious
leaders are pedophiles. The family is setting for
abuse that makes gay people feel bad. When the dust
settlers, the only 'good' religion and family are
the kind defined by the left. Having destroyed the
existing system of organization, the left replaces
it with its own. That is the ultimate goal of a
culture war. Not mere destruction, but absolute
power.
The culture war begins by attacking abstract ideas.
Then it attacks organizations. Then it attacks
people.
By attacking the ideas, it undermines the
organizations based on them so that it can seize
control of them or destroy them. Once that's done,
it controls a sector of society and begins enforcing
its conformity agenda on individuals. Much of that
is underway. The war is drilling down to the
individual level. We are approaching the tyranny
threshold.
At the individual level, the goal of the culture war
is to destroy your will to resist them. The left has
many tools for doing this.
It will shame you. It will bully you. It will cause
you to despair. It will convince you that your cause
is hopeless. It will urge you to turn on each other.
It will use your children against you. It will show
you that what you believe in is a lie. It will make
you question your sense of right and wrong.
All of these serve their evil ends.
The most important thing to understand about this
phase of the culture war is that the left's goal is
to break you as an individual, to take away your
values and to replace them with their own. If it
cannot do these things, it will try to destroy you
and even use you as a cautionary tale to warn
others.
This war may be fought with social media or in
classrooms, it may be fought by bureaucrats with
pens and by movie stars in front of cameras, but
it's not all that different from a conqueror and his
army of brutes riding into a village and enforcing
his own rule of law. The forms are different, but
the underlying dynamic is the same. We are being
conquered. And we continue to resist.
The left is not fighting this as a war of ideas. It
attacks the area of least resistance with whatever
slogan or argument is most convenient at the time.
Don't debate its ideas. Indict its hypocrisy. It
mocks the values of others, but demands that what is
sacred to it be off limits. This is a weakness.
Don't defend your own values. Attack its values. You
aren't the establishment. You lost. You're the
rebels. Be rebellious. They are the owners. Wreck
what they have made without counting the cost.
The left is not an organic entity. It is a pyramid
of organizations and institutions. It needs the
support of billion dollar entertainment and media
industries. Its community organizers need jobs with
six figure salaries. The left is destroying a
civilization that it cannot survive without. It is
an artificial entity that is weak and vulnerable in
ways that the organic systems it has declared war
on, such as the family, are not.
The left is not human. It is a system.
It is a system of control. A system of organization.
A system of indoctrination. Destroy the system and
the left dies. Destroy the flow of wealth and the
control of ideas and it withers.
Like every system, the left seeks to control organic
human institutions. It fancies itself superior to
them when it is actually a parasite living on their
backs.
There are only two possible futures. Either the left
will destroy itself. Or we will destroy it.
The only question is the human cost of the struggle.
We have already gotten a taste of the cost of their
tyranny. It will get worse and worse. Ask a citizen
of the Soviet Union in 1933. But resistance is not
simply about winning fights. It is about the
struggle of the mind and the struggle of the soul.
Winning is not always about beating the enemy.
Sometimes it is about maintaining who you are
despite it. It is about surviving in gulags and
concentration camps. It is about passing on your
values despite the totalitarian state growing around
you.
It is a spiritual resistance. It is a resistance of
the mind.
We are reaching the point where the left is running
out of Republican "organizations" to fight. There is
no conservative organization on a large scale. Only
a hollow business party, its crony capitalist
attachments and its stunted media. The left will
have to fight people if it wants to completely win.
It will have to stamp out all opposition to secure
its totalitarian rule. That is what it's doing now.
Above all else, maintain your own values and your
own sense of self-worth in this conflict. The left
cannot win until it has destroyed your morale. To
win this war, it has to finish the job of breaking
the society by destroying any sources of resistance
that might coalesce into a new organization.
That is why it was so threatened by the Tea Party.
That is why it is so obsessed with destroying and
controlling decentralized religious groups. The
remnants of the establishment are no threat to it.
The Republican Party and mainstream leaders don't
even know there's a war on. They've already lost.
The left has outmaneuvered GOP commanders. They
still have plenty of troops, but no initiative.
Their command lacks flexibility. They don't know how
to use their forces and they're still playing by
outdated rules of chivalry that the other side does
not follow. They're a 19th century European cavalry
formation and the left is the Viet Cong. They have
long ceased to be a threat to the left.
What the left is worried about is that some of the
remnants of the army that they shattered will gather
together into new organizations with new tactics and
strike them hard using guerrilla tactics. It's not
afraid of the conservative establishment. It remains
worried about a populist right that stops worrying
about being nice or following the rules and hits
them unpredictably and remorselessly.
It wasn't afraid of John McCain. It was afraid of
Andrew Breitbart.
You are a cultural guerrilla in a war you never
chose. You are an anonymous soldier who has been
betrayed by his leaders. And you are a much bigger
threat than they ever were.
Armies like fighting other armies. Armies are
predictable. A Republican Party is a slow-moving
elephant. It isn't a threat. It's easy to see where
it's going and what it will do. It may win a battle
or two, but it can't go far and it will quickly tire
itself out. It has small goals and is satisfied with
holding ground. It isn't interested in conquest.
No one likes fighting guerrillas. They're hard to
find and you can never set aside your worries and
enjoy the spoils of victory when they're around. And
the left wants to enjoy its spoils of victory.
To destroy guerrillas, you either have to hunt them
all down or destroy their values, the things they
value, the hope that moves them forward and the
goals they aim to achieve.
The left is good at tearing down a culture. But its
swath of destruction creates cultural guerrillas who
carry their culture with them. Men and women whose
values cannot be broken by pop culture and social
media mobs. When those men and women form families
and communities, they become the counter-culture.
And the final phase of this culture war will be
between them and the left.
Either they will win. Or the West will die.
A culture war is a war of values. It is a war of
worth. The left seeks to destroy you by degrading
the things that you value. It knows that it cannot
dominate you as an individual until you abandon your
sources of strength. Your weapons are those
strengths. Your values are your resistance. Even if
you cannot organize, to endure is also an act of
resistance. To hold on to your values is a victory.
This culture war we're in will not be won tomorrow,
but it may be lost tomorrow. Cultures have vanished
before and been forgotten. The culture that produced
the airplane, that stood on the moon, that changed
the world, does not deserve be buried under a
cringing crawling horde of commissars.
But we do not get what we deserve. We get what we
are willing to fight for.
Wars are not always won with bullets. Armies are
expensive. Causes take momentum to maintain.
Cultures can outlast organizations. And it is an
organization that we are at war with.
The left does not have an authentic culture. Its
counter-culture culture is a machine of destruction,
a clumsily slapped-together assemblage of tools for
cracking open, destroying and dominating people. A
collection of lies and excuses, smears and bad
habits, laced over with cultural appropriation and
the fetisihization of the minority 'Other' as its
sole source of spirituality.
It has no tradition. It has no heritage. It has no
culture. It's a virus, not an organism. It is
utterly worthless and, like a virus, will not
survive the destruction of its host.
It is our task to outlive it, if we cannot defeat
it. It is our job to maintain our culture against
its attacks. And it is our mission to expose it for
what it is, a phantom made up of a million excuses
for power. Its weapon is to destroy everything that
gives us a sense of worth because it is a thing of
no worth. It has nothing. We have everything. Its
activists are a zombie army trying to fill their
maws with something by destroying us because they
have nothing. And they will always have nothing.
The left isn't strong. It's weak. It isn't moral,
it's completely amoral. It isn't replacing our
culture with something better. It's replacing it
with an engine for destroying our culture. Once
that's done, it will collapse as thoroughly as its
regimes always have because they had nothing to keep
them going.
It's not our cure. It's our disease. It's not a
culture, it's an anti-culture. It's not a people,
it's a system. It's an organization and those can be
taken apart.
We are in the same place that the left was a century
ago. We lack its organization, but we don't need its
artificial organizations. Our organizations are
organic. To win, they have to completely dominate us
with their organization. If we can maintain our
organic organizations, our families, our communities
and our religious and cultural groups, our arts and
our skills, then we will have the natural building
blocks for a resistance against them. Our lives are
a natural resistance.
By being who we are in the face of their oppression,
we become cultural guerrillas. Only our ability to
maintain our organic organizations will make an
ongoing resistance possible.
There is no party. There is no movement. We are all
there is. And we had better make the most of it.
Our family is our army. Our religion and our
convictions are our organization. Our mind is our
weapon. Our battle is keeping these alive. Every
battle we win organizes us, radicalizes us and
builds us into a movement, a resistance of
conviction and an organization of principle.
We are a human movement. Our resistance to the
system defines us. Our victory will be a human
victory. We will defeat the system by staying human,
by keeping our families and our faith.
We will destroy the system by refusing to be
controlled by it. We are not planning a revolution.
Our lives are the revolution.