The Last Crusade 00: Behind Enemy Lines
We are behind enemy lines. A darkness is haunting the world. The lamps are going out. As the lamps die one by one, the darkness grows.
For too long, far too long, we have patiently watched the denigration, the desecration, and the destruction of all cherished things in life, great and small. We have seen our freedoms eroded, our wealth robbed, our culture corrupted, our laws and customs turned from loyal watchdogs to ravenous wolves, trespassing on the very rights they were erected to protect.
Nor is the corrosion limited to politics. The political order is the fruit of but one branch; the culture is the trunk; the soil is the moral foundation of the people. The bedrock is faith.
But in these days the rock is shattered, the soil is poisoned, the trunk is hollow, so the fruit is maggoty and putrid. The religious, moral and cultural sources from which politics spring have also been savaged, beaten, and exiled. A whole world has been buried under a bottomless trashheap of lies and curses.
All branches of life are afflicted. The enemy is victorious on all fronts.
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The past is hated and forgotten, that all men be amnesiacs, and the ancient covenant between ancestors and posterity be broken. Reason is lobotomized, that we be all hysterics. Justice is dismembered and disarmed, that all our private property and personal dignity be defenseless. Virtue is castrated and manliness is scorned, that all men be mewling cowards. Debate is deafened. Truth is blinded. Not just science, but all rigorous thinking, is outshouted by mobs grown drunk on self-righteousness. Art, and all voices of beauty, have their tongues cut out. Faith is scorned as an instrument of ignorance, an opiate of oppression, and has been torn form the heart of the world, that we die.
Love, except for indecency or perversion, is scorned as inequality. Sex, except when used to sell commodities, is sterile, public, and loveless. Children, except when slain in the womb and their organs harvested, or when sold as sexual objects for perverts, are despised as weak and useless. Family life is hated. Patriotism is insulted. Civilization is dying.
Those whom we trusted, or we thought it too costly to oppose, have betrayed us. Our scholars bury our ancestors and slander them; our professors indoctrinate the young, to render the student narrow-minded and stupid; our judges rewrite the law to suit themselves; our lawmakers erect unelected bureaucracies; the press lies; our poets utter only ugliness; our philosophers unskeptically prate unreason; our politicians dismantle our political order, luring ever closer the twin monsters of anarchy and tyranny; our preachers teach the doctrines of men, and scorn the word of God. Christ is held in contempt as a figure of fun, or an eccentric private hobby.
We need a new spirit to enter the broken corpse of our culture, a new light to dawn. Where in the lifeless gloom can life be found anew? Where is light in a world of night?
We all hear the ringing alarm, the clamoring tocsin, the battlecries, the clash of arms. We all hear the roars of the savages calling out the names of their unholy god and their false prophet as they saw off heads with knives. We all hear the practiced sneers and insults directed by the perverse against the wholesome, the sinful against the decent, the insane against the innocent. We all hear the protests chanting blasphemies and bloody threats. We all hear the gutter-talk, the treason, the shrieking insanity. We all hear utter nonsense and gibberish uttered in calm and patient tones by professors. We all hear shameless propaganda spoken smoothly by smooth-faced, well-groomed anchormen.
We all hear it. Who will answer?
The First Crusade was preached by Urban II in reply to the cry for help issued by Emperor Alexis I, for Byzantium was hard beset by paynim barbarians, enemies of civilization and foes of Christ, and the Pope knew, as all men in those days knew, that the East was the levy holding back the flood, and if it broke, the deluge would come. Jerusalem fell in 1070. It was retaken by the Crusade in 1099.
Schoolbooks teach nothing about these years that does not mock and belittle the Crusade. It is routinely forgotten, kept in well-guarded dungeons of invincible ignorance, that the Muslims were attacking, raping, and looting innocent Christian cities, breaking aqueducts, turning fertile croplands into dry wastelands as they have remained to this day. It is routinely forgotten that the First Crusade was victorious, and achieved its aim: it was the first stroke Christendom ever dealt to drive back the barbaric heathens.
The foe in that day was open and obvious, and crooked scimitar was in his hand and the crooked battlecry calling Christ a man, but the Koran divine, was in his mouth. In these days, the might of the West is unsurpassed. Not any military force in history, no, not even if all of them from all ages were gathered together as one, could face the force the United States could bring to bear in open combat.
Therefore the foe comes with pen and book in hand, not sword and shield. He comes with the hypnotic eye of the electronic mass media to addict us to distraction, and the endless, anonymous sewer of the internet to render us drunk on sarcasm and scorn, rudeness and crudeness, and hate. Bile is a drink never to quench, but instead to provoke a thirst for ever-greater mugs of ever-hotter bile.
He comes in the mortarboard and gown of the academic; the white coat of the scientist; the black robe of the judge; the evening gown of the famous actress; the suit and tie and coiffeur of the newsman and politician. He comes speaking in all the voices you trust, uttering lullabies to dull your reason, blunt your conscience, suffuse your senses with drowsiness, while at the same time barking shrill shrieks of panic and scorn in your ear, to make you panicked and angry, fearful and stupid, and join your body to the violent mob. The lullaby winds the blindfold around your head; the shrill shrieks goad you to leap.
The foe comes to talk us into inching ever more nigh to the crumbling ledge, and then to jump.
Before the Christian princes answered Pope Urban’s call, however, a spontaneous march against the foe had already begun. This is remembered as the People’s Crusade or the Pauper’s Crusade. It was led by Peter the Hermit. Many an historian has mocked this effort, but, without the pauper’s rising, the pope and the princes might not have stirred a foot, and the victory of the First Crusade been stillborn of history.
No one asked Peter the Hermit to speak up. He saw the need; he spoke. If we who are poor in spirit, the unprideful, the common man, the sheep in the fold, now do as he did, and speak what must be spoken, and speak softly the word that thunders with the truth like a million trumpets, the great will follow the humble.
I am no one. I am merely a layman in the Church, a citizen of the commonwealth of Virginia, hence a citizen of the United States, and an heir to all the cultural heritage of the West. Every triumph from the scientific method to the architecture of cathedrals, from polyphonous choirs to perspectival drawing to double-entry bookkeeping to the alphabet, from the abolition of slavery to the enfranchisement of women is my legacy just as much as any other man of the West. Christendom is for Christians to keep or to lose. We need no higher warrant.
All this is threatened, all this is being taken from me and from my posterity by grinning jackals within the city walls and thrown to the jeering and dull-eyed barbaric monsters at the gate.
Even as Peter the Hermit and all who heard his word preached and decreed the First Crusade even before it was officially proclaimed, so do we, the Men of the West, the son of Liberty and children of the Holy Mother Church, together with all men of goodwill, now by these words proclaim and preach and promise a Last Crusade.
It is called the Last Crusade because we proclaim ourselves to be one in spirit with all men or any generation hereafter who take up this cause. We expect no victory while the world lasts, for the prince of this world, and all the idols and secular ideals worshipped as gods, are our foes. The sword of this crusade will not sleep in our hands, not from now until the Second Advent. To free the Holy Land is too mild an ambition for us. We are joined in an high and holy effort to serve Christ, sustain liberty, defend the Constitution, and devote our full strength to wars both spiritual and material, both invisible and visible, for truth, for virtue, for beauty, and for life itself.
It is called the Last Crusade because it is not a mere political party, not some new brand or revision of a faction concerned with merely laws and policies. Politics is one branch, but so is philosophy, economics, art, culture, history, and every area an empire of lies now rules. It is not a revolution with a finite goal, nor a movement of men. It is a spirit from heaven send to bring life where there is now no life. It is a crusade.
Our is not a battle about this issue or that, with only one good thing at stake. In these days, all things are threatened. Ours is a battle with all things at stake.
The Last Crusade has but a single requirement to join: willingness to serve. Youth or age, wealth or poverty, high or low, means nothing. Even a cripple in a deathbed can contribute by prayer and fasting as much to our cause as nations fielding armies against the Muslim abroad, or millionaires funding cause, colleges and charities at home.
We mean to humiliate, silence, rebuke, and condemn all the false ideas that have addicted our world to falsehood; we mean to cast down false idols and raze their high places; we mean to cure and convert the unbeliever and the heathen; and we mean to act, by peace where possible, and otherwise to draw the sword of Christendom. The foe has no hesitation to riot, to loot, to torture and maim and kill, and to record of all his dark deeds on film and boastfully spread them abroad.
We mean to change culture. We mean to change history. We mean to restore liberty and the rule of law in lands where once these blessings were known, and to spread the word of Christ to lands now gripped in the terror and darkness, and to slay the tyrants and despots who prey on Christians. We mean to carry out the great commission given all followers of Christ, and baptize the world.
We mean to focus efforts on three main points of attack:
First, to restore the Constitution of United States, as this nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, is the sole nation in history whose founding was entirely in keeping with the Christian principle that all men are created in the image and likeness of God. This nation is born of a social covenant of men related, not by blood nor race but only by likemindedness, a brotherhood of the spirit.
Second, to restore Chivalry to men, as without the warlike yet courteous spirit unique to the Christian soldier of ages past, no man can be a true man, no wife can love and serve a true husband, no child be reared by a true father.
A knight is more than a warrior. In other days before or since, the warrior served for pay, as a professional, or perhaps as a hireling, but in the ages of the most enlightenment, particularly among the Normans, the knight served under oath, as a personal and local loyalty bound him to his lord. High ideals moved him, a goal even nobler than the noble goal of patriotism. This created the sole period in history when the horror of total war was reined back, and civilized usages of war emerged. Chivalry is a nuanced and organic concept with many aspects, and we support the restoration in its entirety of this elevated and shining dream.
Courtesy is not the least aspect of what a chivalrous gentleman and warrior must discipline himself to embrace. We now live in the most uncouth, foul-mouthed, insulting and frivolous era in history. Never before has a man been at liberty to utter so many blasphemies against God and slanders against his fellow man with so much impunity, and never before has a man been so helpless against being slandered. The Last Crusade means to restore courtesy and common decency to common discourse.
Third, to restore Christ to the hearts of men, and throw the godless, the impious, the heathen and the atheist from the halls of power. A Christian commonwealth can tolerate a non-Christian minority if the minority can and will abide by the civilized standard of Christian decency, monogamy, honor and honesty in business dealings, and so on.
But sad history has shown, beyond any ambiguity, that non-Christian commonwealths will not tolerate a Christian minority. Muslim nations persecute them now, as the Soviets in Russia and the National Socialists in Germany in open and violent oppression. The secular nations oppress and persecute them by law and regulation and relentless propaganda, without open violence, but their vitriolic hatred is just as great.
The heart and soul of the West did not die in a day. It was a program, deliberate, careful, painstaking, by the enemies of Man and Christ enduring with satanic patience over a period of decades beyond a century. Its root are in an eternal struggle, an invisible war that rages all around us, whose No Man’s Land runs through every race and tribe and divides the heart of every man.
The war will be long and hopeless and difficult. Setbacks, disasters, and defeats are inevitable. And final victory is likewise inevitable, but not until the final generation is born, that generation destined to ascend into the air to greet the coming Christ at his triumph and return as he descends.
Then we shall bend our sword into plowshares. Only then. That is why this crusade is called the last.
We need men of all kinds: warlike men to be knights in our cause; scholarly men to be clerks and apologists; thinkers, writers, poets, philosophers, missionaries, men with no talent other than the strength of spirit to love and serve the Lord.
This land is ours, and it belongs alike to our ancestors and our posterity; this language and culture is ours; Christendom is ours.
We vow on the altar of Almighty God that in His name, we shall reclaim all we have lost, throw down enemy strongholds, destroy all their molten images and demolish all their high places, end their abominations, and conquer new worlds the future reveals.
In this hour, this crusade is nothing, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand seen wandering over the sea. It may take years, decades, generations, and eons, but there is no end to what is last.
And if God wills, we shall be antediluvians of a deluge of light, and hope, prosperity and happiness and peace for whose cause we fight.
As of this day, this hour, the Last Crusade winds the trumpet and calls forth all champions to defend our cause, and we alike cry defiance to all foes.
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In days to come, the philosophical foundations of the Last Crusade will be set out in more detail, and the political and cultural aims and strategies discussed. Much needs to be done, and many hands are needed, for the harvest is great.
We cannot hope to prevail without the aid, love and command of heaven. Let us ask Saint James the Greater, called Matamoros, the Moorslayer, to join us in prayer and intercede for us, and bring our petition to the heart of Jesus and the throne of God, that we may be blessed with strength of spirit, courage of heart, and victory over enemies both seen and unseen.
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.
