American culture war’s long history

Editor:

America’s current culture wars originate from the values conflict found between two revolutions: America’s in 1776, and France’s (1789-94).

In the American colonies, the Great Awakening Christian revival (1720-60) changed the life focus for tens of thousands pre-revolution colonists.

They awakened to biblical beliefs and relationship with God through Jesus Christ, stronger spiritual interest in every area of life, duty to neighbors and self-government and away from atheistic views spread by skeptic French Enlightenment philosophers.

Americans did not revolt against their own systems, they revolted against tyrannical foreign control of their own lives and existing social and economic systems.

In pre-revolution France, morals eroded, lewd theaters thrived and multiplied. Voltaire, an anti-Christian philosopher, constructed plans to exterminate faith in all of France and launch a compulsory system of godless irreligion and atheism.

His atheism-based efforts tried to move France away from biblical absolutes of right and wrong to devolve it back to a primitive honor-shame culture. The goal: control people through publicly honoring or shaming them and make all people decide based on the emotion of fear rather than logic.

Those who displayed behavior judged acceptable were honored by media, entertainment and in academics. Those viewed as unacceptable were publicly shamed. This tactic is also in Saul Alinski’s Rules for Radicals, which is followed by America’s “woke” culture.

Disinformation (fake news) was part of Voltaire’s plan (Rule 5): “The fabrication of books of all kinds against Christianity, especially such as excite doubt and generate contempt and derision.”  

French revolutionaries promised “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

“Equality” in America meant equal treatment before the law. In France, “equality” meant everyone having an equal measure of possessions. “Fraternity” in France meant the socialist order of society. So, if the French “fraternity” (socialist state) thought someone had too many possessions, it used state power to take them away.

Who decides what is “equal”? Who does the redistributing? These socialist questions are still unanswered today. Why? Because whoever decides and redistributes in that way becomes the ruling deep-state elite that no one can or dares to oppose: a dictatorship.

French socialist agitators demanded all their actions must be tolerated.

These included tearing down statues, defiling churches, robbing indiscriminately, and desecrating graves to erase France’s Christian heritage and starting their ‘Reign of Terror’ (1793-4) with zero tolerance for anyone resisting their new secular state.

The revolutionaries beheaded their own king and 40,000 others by the guillotine and 300,000 more were slaughtered in the Vendee region of France alone for resisting the revolution. They destroyed their own countrymen who had any association with the old order.

Voltaire also systematically took all the awards and highest honors of the French Academy, the most respectable literary society in the country, for his disciples and followers so they would be considered the only persons of great literary and intellectual distinction and thus could dictate all literary opinions to the nation.

This 1789-94 French Revolution became the model for all later bloody socialist revolutions: in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Poland, North Korea, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, China, Tibet, North Vietnam, Guinea, Cuba, Yemen, Kenya, Sudan, Congo, Burma, Angola, Benin, Cape Verde, Laos, Kampuchea, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Vietnam, Somalia, Seychelles, Afghanistan, Grenada, Nicaragua and others. After the revolution chaos passed, the French people were ripe for someone promising to restore order. Along came Napoleon, who seized power and ruled as a dictator.

France has had more than a dozen different forms of government since its revolution. The United States has had one form of government since its revolution.

Peter Ready

Albany

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