The world today is more violent and ominous than at any time in my lifetime, since World War II. The good news: demise of moral confusion and return of clarity and certainty.
The political world of my childhood/youth (1947-65) was one of luminous clarity and serene certainty. This was due to my natural immaturity, but also to the objective structure of the world.
Bad: Soviet Gulags and totalitarianism; Nazi concentration camps and genocide; the attack on Pearl Harbor; slavery of the Africans and Jim Crow; selfish, rich capitalists; and Mike Fink, King of the River.
Good: USA, allies and the entire generation of our parents who prevailed against the Axis powers; Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement; labor union, the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church; and Davey Crockett.
That lucid, bi-polar, night-day world collapsed, after 1965, into a deep fog of confusion, complexity and ambiguity. The Vietnam War: resistance to imperialistic Communism or arrogant repression of a national movement? Capitalism: freedom of enterprise or oppression by the rich and powerful? Masculinity: heroic or misogynist and toxic? Aid to the undeveloped world: humanitarian generosity or cultural imperialism? Authority in all its manifestations: a radiance of the Fatherhood of God or dominance by the powerful? Compulsory integration of schools: justice for minorities or violation of family rights?
This moral disorientation has clouded domestic and foreign policy for over half a century: our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan: liberation or colonialization? Communist China: future friend or foe? Capital gain tax cuts: boost to the economy or favoring of the already rich? NATO: protective of Europe or provocative of Russia?
With the invasion of the Ukraine, the massacre of Jews near Gaza, and the emergence of a new Axis (China, Russia, Iran) we again enjoy both clarity and certainty. We see here Evil in pure, undiluted form. We are engaged again...in global war. Putin must be resisted! China must be restrained! Hamas must be destroyed! Iran must be opposed.
There is an interior peace, stability, strength and even joy in such certainty. Such passionate, consuming agonistic engagement with Evil.
Sources of Continued Moral Confusion
1. Woke Oppressor/Oppressed Paradigm. The left sees all political life simplistically through the model of powerful over weak: black/white, male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, transphobe/transgendered, Israeli/Palestinian. And so we witness now an exaggerated sympathy for the underdog moving into antiSemitism and other pathologies.
2. Isolationism. Fatigue with costly and apparently futile combat in the Middle East has drawn our younger generation away from the American internationalism of the last 75 years. This combines with residual Boomer anti-Vietnam anti-Americanism in a failure to see that our county, with allies, is the only force holding back the new Axis of darkness.
3. Naive Liberalism. Secular, humanistic progressivism, even more than a denial of God and heaven, is a compulsive avoidance of Lucifer and deep evil. Obama took office, confident that rid of the oil-obsessed Republicans, his reasonable, genial warmth for the Muslim world would usher in a period of peace. The opposite occurred: that world exploded in violence. Biden has continued the appeasement of Iran, giving them billions of dollars which fund Hamas and others. Pope Francis, who should know better, has assumed a "Spiritual Emperor of the Globe" role as he presumes to transcend binaries (West/Russia, Israel/Palestine, Religious Freedom/Communism) and bring peace by a moralism of equivalence, holding NATO partially responsible for the Russian invasion, downplaying the radical evil of the new dark Axis and advancing his own clericalist agenda of open borders, disarmament, and environmental justice.
Conclusion
Today's news is that Russia is devastating the Ukraine because our aid to them was so long delayed by the hard right and Biden is withholding arms from Israel due to pressure from the pro-Palestinian hard left. Our current President and his entire team epitomize the moral weakness, degeneracy, indecision, confusion, timidity and cowardice that descended upon our political left in the Cultural Revolution. Trump is another, if lessor, symptom of that malignancy, as are the Clintons and the Obamas.
Can our younger people overcome the moral decadence of the boomer generation and retrieve the heroic moral loyalty of the Great Generation? We hope and pray for that!
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