The Last Crusade 45: The Seven Deadly Sins and Strongholds
I have neglected the Last Crusade of late. The times call me to take up the pen, for it now seems the battle is upon us. The Last Crusade is on.
Here, I mean only to answer through what folly we have been lured to the brink of destruction, and where the main seats of power of the enemy loom. In future columns, which shall the culmination and conclusion of these articles, I will say what overall strategy may be best suited for the long siege to reclaim our legacy. Christendom will rise again.
Our society is deeply corrupt, beyond any human power to cure.
The balm of sweet reason has lured some of the undecided into the camp of the last crusade, the last stand of Western civilization against barbarians without the gate and quislings within. But the quislings themselves have lost of gift of speech, and the barbarians, with scorn, reject it.
The time for talk ended when the arsonists and rioters were aided and abetted by elected officials of the Democrat party. The enemy has entirely corrupted that party: any virtue or dignity they once possessed is long gone. They can no longer be reasoned with; they will no longer abide by the outcome of elections. Armed force alone will cow them.
They are tools and fools of the foe, but they are not the foe. They are our brethren, children of the same loving creator as are we all.
Who is the foe?
We fight against principalities and powers, thrones, dominions, and archons of a spiritual darkness. To be sure, there are those who serve knowingly: rumor of black sabbaths, spirit feasts, and pederasty rings among the rich and powerful have a disturbing ring of truth to them, the iron clang of Lilith and Asmodius and Baphomet.
The greater number, like the Eloi eaten by the Morlocks, serve in partial or total ignorance, idiotically deceived.
Do not blame the wolf cub for loving the bitch who bore and nursed him. He has never known otherwise. But neither, now that he is grown, spare him when he savages the sheep.
I do not counsel mercy. Let your sword be heavy in your hand. I mean only that we must pray for the fallen, and give them burials with all due dignity and decorum.
Let us then also care for the widows and orphans, as a work of mercy, pray that the next generation might be less stony-hearted to receive the good seed of the gospel.
How did we come to this pass?
We have been subjected for over a century to lures, temptations, lies, and a flattering sense of overweening pride, all nourishing the evil, poisonous orchids of dishonor, dishonesty, perversion, and violence. We have been lured into the politics of anarchy, the economics of cannibalism, and the glorification of the aberrant. For over a hundred years we have suffered a war of the abnormal against the normal, and, so far, the abnormal has prevailed without loss.
The enemy is a destructive and self-destructive force which rebels against both Creator and creation. By rejecting God, the enemy rejects any power higher than the human will to determine virtue, truth, and beauty. The concept of evolution, of progress, and of ever-changing standards replaces the concept of objectivity. Truth becomes relative, hence not truth; virtue becomes virtue-signaling; beauty is banished.
In a godless world, men are merely uppity animals, locked in a Darwinian struggle of all against all, a war without sense, pity, honor, or quarter.
Humanity is merely the atavism fated to be swept aside by the goosestep of history, ever-advancing toward the promised high-soaring adamantine minarets of Nietzschean supermen, which would prove to be, were they real, merely the abattoirs, dungeons, and pits of the Morlocks.
In a godless world, there is no law above human law, nor truth above human opinion, and no rules of reason. Moral qualms are signs of weakness.
In such a ghastly, airless, monochromatic lunar landscape of desolation, with neither law nor justice, truth nor reason, civilization nor chivalry, the only reality is power: the power to enslave body and mind, and to compel the unwilling to laud and glorify known and absurd falsehoods.
When the corruption is complete, the cowering and wretched of the world will voluntarily seek out the tyranny of total conformity, the intrusion of the Thought Police, and the Orwellian doublethink of Newspeak, without any need to compel them.
There is no point in pointing out the hypocrisy of souls to whom hypocrisy is the source and summit of all they crave and seek. One cannot wake up a man pretending to sleep.
But the unwary can be warned, and the disheartened inspired, of the danger the sleepwalkers pose.
Where is the Enemy Strength?
There are seven strongholds where the enemy has won undisputed control. Each was corrupted, step by step, over a space of generations, sometimes openly and rapidly, sometimes covertly and slowly.
The seven strongholds are the Press, the Cinema, City Hall, the Marketplace, the Academy, the Salon, and the Church.
They all have fallen into enemy hands, usually without a struggle, without objection.
The astonishing degree of their successive victories can be explained, not by any political, social, or economic insight, but by a simple theological truth any child from Sunday School should know: Each of these seven has a traitorous voice, lovely as a siren of myth, living in all of our hearts, tempting us to tear down our colors, trample the cross, and to lift up instead the black banner of the Great Anarchist, that fell spirit who scorns the laws of earth and heaven alike.
These are the voices of the deadly sins.
For each of these seven strongholds or seats of enemy power, let us say which of the besetting sin tempted us to surrender the citadel, and which flag flies now over each.
This is not to say that there were not a myriad of weaknesses involved, and long and complex sequence of social degeneration, in each case. But certain deadly sins, like the unmistakable returning theme in a symphony, form a persistent and particular character of corruption, which is visible in this generation as each grows monstrous through long and unopposed domination.
- The Press
In America, in the current generation, the Press is the source of news and literal facts about the world. This includes newspapers, magazines, cable and broadcast television corporations, podcasts, and nearly everything aside from AM talk radio. Even on talk radio stations, the hourly news headlines follow the talking points established by the Press, and repeat their falsehoods uncritically. Some opposition news is honest, some is merely gelded or controlled opposition.
In my youth, some half a hundred or so corporations controlled the major media companies; now it is less than ten. All the tines of the rake come from one handle. The competition for readership, in a healthy press industry, would serve as a check on corruption. When all public choirs sing from the same sheet music, there is no such check.
The scope and extent of corruption cannot be overstated: the reckless insolence of the falsehoods being spread, the appalling gullibility of the unwary if not willing victims, the reach and penetration of the mob-psychology tactics being used, is without precedent in human history. The information control in the Soviet Union was not so deep, so broad, and so entirely divorced from sanity. The Soviets claimed their defeats were victories and their poverty was wealth, but never made it a thought-crime to say that men were not women.
The Press is Wrath.
While the phenomenon of the total and complete abandonment, first of journalistic standards, and, then, later, of honesty and sanity, has been rightly called Trump Derangement Syndrome during the past three years; but the same grinding enmity was present for Bush, Reagan, Nixon, and in the writings of Mao and Marx. As Mr. Trump correctly said, the Fake News does not hate him. They hate you, and he is merely standing in their way. And, ultimately, they do not even really hate us. What threat do any of us pose to titanic media empires? They hate Him in whose name we serve. The Press seeks power through lies.
- The Cinema
The Cinema is the source of our shared imagination, the visual and theatrical. This includes the productions of the Hollywood motion picture industry, and also television franchises, theme parks, and comic book companies that the industry owns or influences. The corruption here is likewise spread widely and penetrates deeply, to the point where not a single major pop culture franchise or beloved character has not been marred, belittled, or ruined. Motion picture classics like GONE WITH THE WIND are censored, or come with warning labels, franchises such as the James Bond films, Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who, the Ghostbusters, Terminator, Predator, Charlie’s Angels, has been degraded into a malign and malodorous dumpster fires of ineffective and ugly Progressive political propaganda.
The Cinema is Lust.
The allure of the Beautiful People, with all their glamor and sex appeal, twisted the wholesome romanticism of the postwar generation, and the sweet sentimentality of the Victorian Age, into the proposition that chastity was slavery, family life despicable, and therefore sexual liberation, as the various forms of fornication, adultery, and sexual perversion were then called, was the fountainhead of liberty and power. The entertainment industry promises power through unchastity to women and men alike.
- City Hall
In America, in the current generation, City Hall, or the political power, is vested almost exclusively in an unelected federal bureaucracy, only indirectly controlled by the White House and the Congress. State and local governments have been losing power and influence for decades, and the whole course of the modern age, since roughly World War One, if not the Civil War, has been to reduce or remove the ability of the voters to say under what laws we shall be governed.
Of the enemy strongholds, City Hall (despite the old saying) is the easiest to fight and the most open to change. It is the only source of what is often called hard power, that is, coercion in the name of the law by the ministers of the law. All the other enemy strongholds are soft power, that is, position of influence, meant to allure, persuade, to gull and lull.
Be not deceived. Political power is the final goal. The other strongholds of influence and indoctrination are merely meant to soften and bewilder the people, confound their minds and benumb their consciences, in order to make the political revolution feasible.
No matter what they say, the servants of the enemy do not want political power for any lesser goal, nor to enact any rational policy, or change any law.
They want revenge. They want blood. They want to towns burn.
This pronouncement will no doubt strike many a reader as an absurd exaggeration: but then count the number of dead in the recent riots, which, to date, not one national politicians of the Democrat party has denounced, and none of their creatures occupying the chairs of news editors and television anchors have condemned.
When the so-called liberal gains final and unchecked political power, he becomes a leftist. All soft words end, and they become bloodthirsty, ravening beasts, killing the innocent in endless paroxysms of hellish malignancy, starting, as ever, with priests. See the Twentieth Century for details and examples.
City Hall is Envy.
Since before the Great War, no serious political philosophy arose to challenge the English Enlightenment principles of the equality of the natural rights of man, and the legitimacy of government by the popular mandate, curtailed by limited government. The sole opposition sprang from a perversion of the idea of equality, so that whatever man found necessary, useful, or convenient to his wellbeing, he claimed to have a right, and hence the authority to use force to get it. Hence, all the motions of the Progressive Era onward were born of and fed on envy. Newly discovered rights to privacy, and the emanations of their penumbra, authorized new intrusions by the state into the public sphere, murdering the concept of limits to government. The apotheosis of credentialed experts vitiates the concept of a public mandate. The right not to be harmed mutated into a right not to be offended, becoming a right not to be contradicted, which now is a right to silence others, which abolishes all natural rights at one blow, by abolishing the concept.
- The Marketplace
The Marketplace, or the economic influence, is centered on an organization of international banks, Wall Street trading companies, the Federal Reserve Board, all given shape and direction from international trade agreements and non-governmental organizations.
Large corporations are now large enough, and more to the point, well connected enough, to ensure income from sources less hectic and less subject to change than consumer demand. A company propped up by government support, protected by government regulation, or patronized by well funded allies overseas, need not concern itself with the sentiments of customers at home. Offending a million Americans means nothing to a shoe company with ten million or a hundred million Chinese customers.
The adoption, usually through the personnel office, of political pieties concerning diversity hires of course benefit well established firms, and the laws and lawsuits surrounding these Alice-in-Wonderland non-quota quotas hinder only the newer, leaner, and more competitive firms which have no margin of error, and so must hire on merit and on merit alone.
The Marketplace is Greed.
We were promised wealth in abundance, if only the banks and the state working together, with no gold standard to restrict them, would by wise stewardship prevent all future recessions and depressions. We believed that the natural competition for markets between corporations would make them subservient to the will of the consumers, and that in political matters, hoping for patrons from all walks of life, the business community would stay neutral. All these promises and hopes have proven false, and the mere opposite has occurred.
Meanwhile, ironic as it seems, there are clear and sound reasons for large multinationals to support radical and leftwing causes, and fund the very organizations publicly calling for the looting of the rich and the end of Capitalism. Capitalism means competition: which is the last thing a monopolist wants.
- The Academy
The Academy is both the transmission of our culture to the next generation, and the seat of our civilization’s professional intellectual life, including the scientific community. Both higher and lower educational institutions educate about as well as the Cinema entertains, which is to say, not at all.
In a well-known case, a computer-generated hoax (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/rooter.pdf) was submitted by MIT pranksters and received in academic journal after peer review. As with modern art, modern academic research is indistinguishable from randomness.
As for the scientific community, the shameful cooperation by so-called academic and scientific professionals in the ongoing Global Warming hoax shows the inability of this thoroughly politicized community to police itself and correct itself.
In the same way that the Press has no competition for readership and hence no check on its ghastly descent into a perfectly conformist propaganda tool, the Academics have no competition for prestige. Research funding and public-school dollars are controlled by the state. This monopoly has successfully silenced academic freedom, and imposed an Orwellian uniformity of thought and speech.
The Academy is Gluttony.
They eat tax dollars in the forms of student loan guarantees, direct aid, and research grants. The ability of alumni sponsors to influence school policy is minimal, and most large philanthropical education foundations are firmly controlled by the enemy, and can merely outspend and outbribe any private citizen seeking to influence the curriculum. Primary education was designed to be a trap by the socialist utopians of the turn of the last century, luring parents into putting their children into the hands of government officers rather than, for example, nuns. The Teacher’s Unions prevent any attempt at reform or improvement. The Academic world exists to eat our wealth and the souls of our young.
- The Salon
The Salon is what we might call the seat of the intellectuals. Also called the intelligentsia or the chattering class, of which this writer is a proud member, the intellectual is the amateur counterpart of the professional academic.
The intellectual invents no ideas, and discovers no truths. His role is to popularize, explain, advertise, and glorify what deeper thinkers, present or past, have invented or discovered. The intellectual overlaps with the entertainer to some degree, whenever he pens a detective novel or a fairy story, such as a Father Brown mystery or a Narnia book, using art to illuminate a point of philosophy or theology to the public eye.
He overlaps with the Press when it comes to the editorial pages (which, in uncorrupt times, are kept separate from the news reporting pages). But his role is different.
The Academic is charged with carrying over the intellectual part of the culture, the history and philosophy, the story of who and what our people are and whence we came, to the next generation.
The intellectual’s role is not to instruct but to remind the general public of the shared things of our culture; the beauties we all adore, the virtues to which our ancestor’s example call us to emulate, and the truths we hold to be self-evident.
The radical intellectual does the opposite of his role.
He glorifies the ugly, falsifies the past, encourages and lauds vice and sin, and strangles truth in the glib serpentine coils of rhetoric, sophistry, glamor, and Orwellian jargon.
Each time a mass of men can be convinced to adopt false-to-facts verbalizations, the radical has perverted his role. When normal things are called by abnormal name, as when love and romance are called cisgendered heteropatriachy, or when abnormal things are called by euphemisms, or by words having the exact opposite of their true meaning, as when sodomites are called gay, or their unnatural unions are called marriage, the radical triumphs, and the honest intellectual has failed.
Because it is the intellectual’s role to maintain the intellectual consensus of tradition, the radial intellectual is always in the false position of claiming that his innovations are somehow the true version of the consensus of opinion, or somehow the correct interpretation of ancient legacies. The example just mentioned of gay marriage was explicitly propounded by the Supreme Court to have been the intent of the Constitution, and aligned with the spirit of the Declaration of the Independence. It was said to be an application of the prime shared principle of American life, namely, that all men are created equal.
This puts the radical in the intellectually bankrupt position of forever being engaged in the falsification of history, and the removal of truth, logic, reason, and wisdom from public discourse. His task is illogical: the radical seeks to form a new consensus, which is to say, a new old idea. His task is to abolish tradition in the name of tradition. He must reason that reasoning is vain, and argue that argument is pointless, by saying all words are meaningless, and truth is relative.
No intellectual tradition and no consensus can be built on the foundation of denying the validity of tradition and consensus, for the same law is not anarchy. Each generation of radical hates and eat the prior.
It is for this reason that, once the radical intellectual has done his work, and bewildered the common man into accepting old tyrants now masked under new names, the tyrants set the radical intellectuals up against the wall first before all enemies of the state, and them shot dead, even while they blubber and blink and confess their loyalty to the new regime.
The Salon is Pride.
Only the pride of Lucifer could convince otherwise sane men of letters to adopt a worldview in which truth is not true, but each man is able to reinvent reality for himself, a little god greater than God. Only Lucifer could convince such men, in their smug self-satisfaction and self-righteousness, to call good evil, call vice virtue, call their sleepwalking ‘woke’, and in all things to call the destruction of all their intellectual faculties the proof and point of their super extraordinary intellectual superiority.
- The Church
The final stronghold that the enemy holds in this wretched generation, alas, is the Church, by which I include both the one, true, catholic and apostolic Church, as well as the various heretics and schismatics, Protestants and Evangelicals, the Greek Orthodox Church, various Eastern, Russian and Nestorian churches, and I hasten to include those Jews who take the teachings of the Law and the Prophets seriously enough to support and affirm the basic worldview of Christendom.
Some denominations are infected more entirely and deeply than others but no major denomination is immune. As a faithful Catholic, I dare utter no criticism of any other denomination: our leadership is worse than yours. The uprightness and zeal of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, on the other hand, I will laud, in order to invite admiration and emulation.
The religious thought and sentiment in America had, at one time, been the central and major part, not only of our culture, but also our politics, and formed the default worldview of the American character.
That is no longer the case: indifference to religion, and contempt of spiritual things, has not only become popular, upholding core religious tenets concerning chastity, monogamy, and sacredness of human life have become unwelcome or even unlawful. It is called hate speech to quote Biblical teaching on sodomy, and even the use of that word is frowned upon, even by the faithful who know sodomy to be a sin.
Instead of weekly and daily fiery preaching against these grave evils, the leadership of the various denominations either say nothing, or speak in favor. The shepherds help the wolves break into the fold.
And the Church, alas, is Sloth.
Sloth does not mean laziness. It refers to the despair which comes from the nonchalant indifference to spiritual things. It is the lack of zeal and passion, the lack of curiosity and crusading spirit, which makes men less than atheists. An atheist only says God does not exist. An agnostic says he does not know. But the Church of Laodicea says God exists, but then does not give a fig for anything God has ever said or done. It is not that he believes or disbelieves. He merely does not trouble about the matter at all.
The Laodicean is neither hot nor cold, and so the Lord will spew him out of His mouth. That is the state of the church in America.
Such are the strongholds of the foe, and such are the treasonous spirits, deadly sins, living in me as in all men, urging us to throw down our undrawn swords before the fray begins.
- Concluding Remark
What, then, is to be done?
In the columns to follow, only certain very basic principles of strategy can be listed. The specific tactics needed will change as the situation on the ground changes, year by year, and as the tactics of the enemy change.
The long march of the enemy through all our institutions took generations and centuries. Our battles and wars to recapture the lost territory will be more rapid, since, unlike the foe, we need not operate in secret, nor need we march toward goals that are mutually contradictory, nor make use of rhetoric that disguises rather than ornaments the truth we serve.
There is currently no institution and no party able to organize the long-term and large-scale crusade needed to save Christian civilization. The enemy has been adroit and expert at creating such parties and corrupting all institutions under the sun to their goal. For reasons unclear to this writer, no large, old, or prestigious institutions or parties of any description is willing to organize any resistance to the enemy.
Ahead lies a most difficult long-term campaign, with years and generations of political, economic, and social action, needing the coordination of institutions explicitly dedicated to the effort. Such institutions need to be built, or, if they once were wholesome, to be redeemed and cleansed and set in order.
In the short term, it would be wise to own a firearm and learn its safe and proper use, as well as to stock such food and gear as may be needed when public tumult cuts off power and water to certain areas. But this is not where we begin.
As with all things, the first step is prayer.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
