The E U R O P E A NC O N S E R V A T I V EIssue 15 • Summer/Fall 2018 €10 / $10

2 Summer/Fall 2018

Contents

Editor-in-Chief: Alvino-Mario FantiniAssistant Editor: Filip MazurczakUS Correspondent: Gerald J. RusselloEditorial Board: Stjepo Bartulica, Matthew Edwards, Ellen Kryger Fantini, Roman Joch, Felix James Miller, Lorenzo Montanari, G. K. Montrose, Alexandre Pesey, Matthew Tyrmand, Pr. Edmund WaldsteinAdvisory Council: Rémi Brague, Robin Harris, Mark C. Henrie, Annette Kirk, Sir Roger ScrutonContact: editor@europeanconservative.com

Guest Commentary: The Legacy of ‘68Anthony Daniels 3

On True (and False) ConservatismAndreas Kinneging 4

A Sea of Trouble in Europe: An Interview with Ryszard LegutkoKai Weiss 8

The Migration Crisis & the Culture of EuropeBalázs M. Mezei 12

Choosing Our BattlesDarragh McDonagh 20

The Weakness of the West: An Interview with Martin van CreveldStefan Beig 21

Burke, Prophet of PeaceMark Dooley 26

A Parable for the Fall of the West: A review of Le Camp des Saints by Jean RaspailFrançois La Choüe 30

The Brilliance of Aleksandr SolzhenitsynAndré P. DeBattista 34

Natural Law, Social Justice & the Crisis of the WestRyan T. Anderson 41

Krakow: The City that RemembersCarrie Gress 46

Communist Terror in Modern Film: Reviews of After Image and Bitter HarvestFilip Mazurczak 52

Miłowit Kuniński, RIPRyszard Legutko 58

The European Conservative 3

The European Conservative is a non-profit pan-European conservative magazine founded by the Center for European Renewal (CER). Written, edited, and designed by volunteers, it seeks to make available articles, essays, and reviews representing the different varieties of ‘respectable conservatism’ across Europe. We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and submissions. Back issues are available in PDF format at: www.europeanconservative.com. For information about the CER, please contact us.

About the cover: A partial view of “The Ipatiev House: The Morning After”, part of a triptych entitled “Imperial Golgotha” (2004) painted by the late Russian painter, Pavel Viktorovich Ryzhenko (1970-2014). It depicts the cellar in the house in which the Romanov family and four members of the staff were massacred on the night of 16-17 July 1918. Image courtesy of the ‘Ipatiev House’ virtual museum. More information at: www.romanov-memorial.com.

A n t h o n y D a n i e l s

I n France, every eighth year of every decade, there is an outpouring of histories, memoirs and

picture-books of the 1968 Parisian ‘events’, as they were and still are known. This will continue until the last bourgeois geriatric trying to relive the joys of his adolescence dies.

1968 was probably the only revolution in history, or attempted revolution, by spoilt brats. That they were spoilt brats is evident from the photographs of the times and films of their meetings, where it is evident that none of them ever forgot to pose. “Would they look well?” was a question that was never far from their minds.

These were no downtrodden peasants groaning under the yoke of heavy taxes that relieved them of too much of the product of their own hard physical labour. On the contrary, they were the privileged children of the elite of a country in full economic expansion — and those students who were not of this class were destined soon to join it.

So what were they rebelling against? The answer is simple: self-restraint, particularly in the sexual sphere. “It is forbidden to forbid” — them, at any rate.

For all their supposed concern for the poor and oppressed of the world, it was obvious that they had no interest in the poor and oppressed of the world. Though one of their slogans was “Imagination in power”, they were totally lacking in imagination because they were interested only in themselves. Who but people utterly without imagination or historical curiosity could have equated de Gaulle with Hitler, as was frequently done during the protests? Who but people utterly without imagination or historical curiosity could have equated the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) with the SS? And this in a country that had been occupied by the Nazis less than a quarter of a century before!

Nor was their Mao worship and Castrophilia anything deeper than a posture. They knew nothing of the real conditions existing in China and Cuba at the time and didn’t even think it necessary to know anything about them (not that, if they had known that the Cultural Revolution that they claimed to so

admire had caused the deaths of more than a million people, their attitude would have changed much). For what are the deaths of a million Chinese to set against the applause of their peers in the usurped halls of the Sorbonne?

French society was in a weak position to call them to order. The Second World War was not a period that many of their elders and betters wished to recall, and the even more recent war in Algeria was still an open wound (which has not completely healed even now). Former French President François Mitterand, for example, had been a great signer of death warrants during the efforts to keep Algeria française, quite apart from his Vichyite past. Few were the cupboards that had no skeletons, and it is difficult for adults to reprehend youth when their own moral past has been sufficiently ambiguous for them not want it too closely examined.

It is, of course, difficult to say what are the long-lasting effects of the events of 1968. Would the world have been much different from what it is now if they had never taken place? Counterfactual arguments are impossible to avoid in historical assessment, but they are likewise impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

But it seems to me that the effects were to reinforce if not to originate certain tendencies. The first is the belief in adolescence and young adulthood as periods in life of generosity, selflessness, and idealism, rather than of ignorance, unwisdom, and self-obsession. Closely tied to this is the tendency to believe that to be young is very heaven, and therefore it is a worthy aim never to grow up or to change one’s tastes. Life for many is now precocity followed by arrested development. In a sense, the pathetic 70 year-old rock stars who comport themselves as if they were still 19 are the true children of Paris, 1968.

In addition, 1968 in Paris helped to inaugurate the cult of the present moment and an attitude to the past as nothing but an immemorial waste-paper basket of useless customs, traditions, and pedantry. But how far 1968 was a cause and how far an effect no one will ever finally be able to say. Perhaps the relationship was dialectical.

The Legacy of ‘68

Issue 15 Summer/Fall 2018G U E S T C O M M E N T A R Y

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On True (and False) ConservatismA n d r e a s K i n n e g i n g

E verywhere in Europe and the US, the popularity of so-called ‘populist’ politicians and parties — many of

which call themselves conservative — is growing. So, at first sight, conservatism seems to be on the rise and doing well. But that is a misconception. Calling populist parties ‘conservative’ is like calling a cat a ‘dog’: There are some superficial resemblances, but in reality these are two very different animals. Most apparently, populist parties are in favour of more direct democracy — they believe that the populus is virtuous and must stop the corrupt elite. Conservatism on the other hand, is sceptical of the political acuteness of the common man and believes that the populus needs to be guided by a virtuous elite.

Isn’t that the conservative position? What, if anything, is conservatism, really? Let us go back in time and remind ourselves where exactly conservatism comes from, how it developed, and where it stands now.

On origins

The word ‘conservatism’ goes back no further than about one hundred years. It was first used, to my knowledge, by Lord Hugh Cecil, who in 1912 published a book with the title Conservatism. The famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which dates from 1911-12, has no lemma for the word. (It does for socialism and liberalism.) With the exception of Britain, however, the word initially did not gain wide currency, either on the European continent or in the US. And if it was used, it was as a term of abuse. It was only after Barry Goldwater and his followers began to use it as a self-description in the 1960s, that it gradually gained currency in the US.

On the European continent, on the other hand, it is still in the process of becoming ordinary and respectable. As yet, it has not become as normal and accepted a word as ‘socialism’ and ‘liberalism’. The lineage of the word ‘conservatism’ is hence quite modest. And if words and things are connected, one would have to conclude that conservatism is something of the post-1960s era — and as far as the eastern part of Europe is concerned, even of the post-1989 era. But let’s be generous and say that conservatism as we know it is a post-war phenomenon that began with the publication of Quentin Hogg’s The Case for Conservatism in 1947 and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in 1953.

Of course, like many people with modest roots,

contemporary conservatives traverse the past, looking for relatives that might make their lineage more respectable. The opinions of these genealogists differ somewhat but all agree that Edmund Burke is the founding father of conservatism, and his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) its Gospel. So the general picture, which has acquired wide currency, is that there is one conservative tradition, running from Burke to the present.

However, such general pictures with wide currency often have one thing in common: They are usually not true. In reality, Burke’s views have little or nothing in common with contemporary, post-war conservatism. If we aspire to a true understanding of the history of conservatism, we have to start making a few distinctions. Even if we limit ourselves to the last two centuries, which is anything but self-evident, we encounter not one but three types of conservatism that differ greatly — so greatly in fact, that the question arises if including them all under the same denominator isn’t (self-)deceit.

First, there is the counter-revolutionary tradition, which reached its zenith in the period from 1790 (Burke) to the 1830s. Second, there is a liberal-conservative, or conservative-liberal, tradition that came into existence after World War II and is still with us. And, finally, there is a type of conservatism in which the ideas of the counter-revolution are aufgehoben in the Hegelian sense — i.e. annulled, preserved, and brought to a higher level. ‘Philosophic’ or ‘Platonic’ conservatism would be an appropriate name for this type. It predominated in the period from the 1830s to World War II, but there are several precursory figures and it is still around. It is sometimes called ‘traditionalism’, or ‘anti-modernism’. This, in my view, is the true or the best type of conservatism. Its ideas are more acute than ever in the present time.

The counter-revolutionary ‘Banner of the Holy Wounds’, used in 1536 during the English uprising — the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ — against the supression of the monasteries.

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The counter-revolutionary tradition

The counter-revolution is the exact antipode of the French and American revolutionary ideas. Politically, the revolution stood for a (more or less) democratic republic of free and equal citizens. The counter-revolution stood for a traditional mixed regime (regimen mixtum) of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy — i.e. king, nobility, and commoners. Socially, the revolution stood for a society of individuals who are equal before the law, while the counter-revolution stood for a société des orders — i.e. a ranked society of hierarchical families, communities, and orders.

Economically, the revolution stood for a free market system, with full ownership rights and freedom of contract, while the counter-revolution stood for a corporatist system, based on guilds, with limited ownership rights and freedom of contract. Religiously, the revolution stood for secularism — i.e. religion as a private matter, separated from the government, or, in its extreme variety, for atheism (that is, a total rejection of Christianity), while the counter-revolution stood for the fusion of church and state and the ‘establishment’ of (one type of ) Christianity as the official creed, preferably shared by everyone.

In short, the counter-revolution wanted to restore the antediluvium and go back to the ancien régime or to the Middle Ages. This was also Burke’s position. But there are evidently very few conservatives in the world today who share these ideas, notwithstanding Burke’s aura as a founding father of conservatism.

Liberal-conservatism (or conservative-liberalism)

Most conservatives today are liberals of a kind. Hence the name liberal-conservatism or conservative-liberalism. This type of conservatism came into existence after World War II. Politically, it embraces the idea of a democratic republic of free and equal citizens. Socially, it stands for a society of individuals who are equal before the law. Economically, it favours a free market system with full rights of ownership and freedom of contract. And, finally,

religiously, it approves of the principle of the separation of church and state. That is to say, it regards religion as a private matter.

Hence, if we compare the positions it takes with those of the counter-revolution and the revolution in the early 19th century, the verdict is clear. Contemporary conservatism is a child of the revolution, not of the counter-revolution. Its founding father was not Burke but rather Burke’s opponent, Tom Paine. To associate contemporary conservatism in any way with Burke and the counter-revolution is preposterous. Its closest historical ancestor is the classical liberalism of the period from the late 18th to the early 20th century — the tradition that runs from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek. Contemporary conservatism is

really a kind of liberalism.Why then the fuzzy terms liberal-conservatism or

conservative-liberalism? For the single reason that there is a different social philosophy around — it’s the dominant ideology at the moment, at least in the West — that also lays a claim to the name liberalism but is of quite another nature: progressive-liberalism or liberal-progressivism.

Lord Hugh Cecil (1869-1956) Lord Quintin Hogg (1907-2001) Russell Kirk (1918-1994)George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress CCA-SA 3.0 Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal

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Contemporary conservatism and progressivism are both children of the revolution. They both embrace the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality as the highest principles there are, which makes them both liberal. But they rank these principles differently. For progressives, equality is more important than liberty. For conservatives, it is the other way round.

Equality usually does not come naturally. It has to be enforced. For that the government is necessary, enforcing the laws that make people more equal. Such laws by definition reduce individual liberty. Moreover, if true equality is to rule, the laws need to be the same for everyone — i.e. general laws, made by the central government. Hence, the quest for equality also leads to an ever increasing centralization. Liberal-progressives are in favour of big, centralized government, whereas liberal-conservatives prefer small, decentralized government.

Take human rights (or, in America, civil rights). Based on a conservative interpretation, these are rights against the government, preserving the liberty of the individual, groups, and organizations in society. However, based on a progressive interpretation, they are the rights of the individual vis-à-vis other individuals, groups, and organizations in society, guarding their equality — rights that need to be enforced by the government.

The difference between the ‘liberal progressives’ and the ‘liberal conservatives’ involves not only the ranking of liberty and equality. It is also the result of different interpretation of each. In general, equality and liberty to liberal-conservatives means what it meant to the classical liberals of the 19th century: equality before the law and (principally) freedom from government interference and surveillance. Limited government is sufficient. Liberal-progressives, on the other hand, see equality and liberty as something much broader: the first including (a degree of ) social and economic equality, the

second including the freedom from want, fear, social pressure, and religious ‘indoctrination’. Obviously, to establish equality and liberty in such a broad sense, massive government interference and surveillance is needed.

In sum: The differences between liberal-progressivism and liberal-conservatism are big and real enough. But they are similar to the differences between de Girondin and the Jacobin Party, or between Adams and Jefferson during, respectively, the French Revolution and the American Revolution. On the level of fundamental principles they are at one. For both of them, liberty and equality are the highest values. Anything that goes counter to these is ultimately regarded as indefensible and must go. This is bound to result in some serious blind spots.

Philosophic conservatism

What about the third type of conservatism that came into existence in the 1830s and dominated the Right until World War II? It is the heir of the counter-revolution, the essence of which is opposition to the revolutionary principles of freedom and equality. Instead of equality it upheld hierarchy as a fundamental principle — in the cosmos, in society, and in the soul. Equality it held to be unnatural, and so is a hierarchy in which what ought to obey, rules; and what ought to rule, obeys. Both are unstable and bound to disintegrate.

Instead of standing for liberty, the counter-revolution stood for discipline and duty towards God, the community, family, and oneself. Liberty in the sense extolled by the revolution was called licence (licentia) and regarded as a vice. The idea was that a society where licence ruled, and discipline and duty had a bad name, is bound to crumble and fall apart, or be destroyed from the outside.

The third type of conservatism is the heir of these counter-revolutionary principles of hierarchy, discipline, and

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) Louis de Bonald (1754-1840) Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821)

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duty. But this conservatism is more abstract and philosophical than its predecessor. It points out the need, not for a return to the mixed regime of old but for a political order that is a balance between the various elements of society: rich and poor, educated and uneducated, town and country, etc. Instead of defending the société des ordres, it vindicates the necessity and usefulness of virtuous elites in society. Instead of defending corporatism and the feudal order, it stresses the need for cooperation alongside of competition, and market regulation not from above, by the central government, but from below, by the stakeholders themselves. Instead of the clergy and the established church, it defends the indispensability of religion in general and Christianity in particular, not as a private matter but as a mainstay of public peace, order, and happiness.

In opposition to the revolution, it argues that a good society is not a collection of atomic individuals but of organic communities — and, first and foremost, (traditional) families. In opposition to ‘cosmopolitical’ ideas (the counterpart of individualism) it stresses the importance of neighbourhood, locality, region, nation. In opposition to the idea that the purpose of life is to satisfy as many desires as possible or to seek and ‘be oneself ’, it highlights the importance of sacrifice, duty, discipline, virtue, self-renunciation, etc.

All of this is inherent in the counter-revolution, of course. But the counter-revolution presented these ideas in a way that had become wholly unconvincing, if not utterly incomprehensible to most people. What the philosophic conservatism of the period from the 1830s to Word War II did was to detach what was essential and of timeless value in the counter-revolutionary tradition from what was secondary and historically contingent.

In doing that, philosophic conservatism did something that had been done before — most importantly by Plato in his struggle against the democratic revolution of Athens, which had also extolled liberty and equality — namely, to think through the case against these principles, to think through what principles a society really needs to function well, and to serve the bonum commune. Hence, it is fitting to call this philosophic conservatism ‘Platonic’ conservatism.

Whatever name we give it, this third type of conservatism is the most important of the three. It calls attention to a whole range of things that are crucial for a good society, many of which have been forgotten and disregarded in the post-war era, especially in the last decades. Liberal-conservatism certainly does not draw attention to them. It isn’t even aware of them, which is hardly surprising, in view of the fact that it shares the revolutionary principles of equality and liberty.

Seeking a renewed tradition

The conclusion: What contemporary conservatism needs, most of all, is a renewed consideration of the ideas of the conservatism of the period from the 1830s until the 1930s. For, even in the unlikely case that contemporary conservatism were to vanquish liberal-progressivism, the resulting world would still not be to our liking. It would still be a liberal world of sorts — and thus be, so to speak, contra naturam, a valley of tears, since some of the most important preconditions for happiness and fulfilment, peace and joy would still not be met.

You want names? I will give you some: Thomas Carlyle, Alexis de Tocqueville, G.W.F. Hegel, John Henry Newman, Wilhelm Röpke, Matthew Arnold, G.K. Chesterton, Irving Babbitt, T.S. Eliot, Romano Guardini, Denis de Rougemont, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Nicolai Hartmann, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Seek and you will find.

Andreas Kinneging is a professor at the Law School of the University of Leiden in The Netherlands. He is a founder and board member of the Center for European Renewal, and former president of the Vanenburg Society.

Spanish philosopher and politician, Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853), and philosopher and theologian, Jaime Balmes (1810-1848), in a 19th century painting by Luis Brocheton.

Real Academia de la Historia

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A Sea of Trouble in EuropeK a i W e i s s

Y ou fought against Communism, and when the Soviet Union fell, there was a lot of hope with liberal

democracy coming into Eastern Europe. But, as you explain in your latest book, you soon realized that it was not actually that different from the previous system. Could you explain how it has become surprisingly similar?

Of course there are differences because, as I write in my book, I wouldn’t have had the political position I have now under Communism for obvious reasons. But there are some similarities and my feeling is that these similarities are becoming greater.

I come from a staunchly anti-communist family, so I never had a moment in my life where I sort of flirted with communist parties or with Marxian and communist ideology. It was obvious to me from the very beginning — from the day I was born, from when I could start thinking — that the communist system was bad and evil. I was active in opposing the system. And at the same time, as a university professor, I was interested in what liberalism is, what democracy is, and I was working on the political philosophy of antiquity and modernity. I had, I would say, a good general overview of political thought.

When the older regime was falling to pieces, I had this idea that the new system would be exactly the opposite of the one we had, that there would be a lot of freedom, diversity, an exchange of ideas, and that there would be a plurality of points of view and a certain seriousness in talking about important issues. And it wasn’t the case. Of course, I didn’t see it clearly at the very beginning.

It is difficult to see things as they are because there are lots of prejudices and judgements through which you see things. But at a certain moment in my life I was starting to think: “There is no plurality.” There is a monopoly, and there is one point of view that has a monopoly. And there is this mendacity of language. There are many people who use words such as ‘plurality’, ‘tolerance’, ‘democracy’. They are the most autocratic. So I thought: “Maybe there’s something wrong with it.” So I came to this notion that there is a certain similarity which goes back to some ideas in early modernity.

Both liberal democracy and Communism tend to politicize the entire society. You have to be political. There is no space, no area, no family, no religion which is discrete from politics. Everything had to be communist — and now, everything has to be liberal democratic.

An Interview with Ryszard Legutko

Ryszard Legutko is a Member of the European Parliament, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Deputy Chairman of the Parliamentary Group of European Conservatives and Reformists. He is also a professor of philosophy at Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He has served as Minister of Education, Secretary of State in the Chancellery of the late President Lech Kaczynski, and Deputy Speaker of the Senate. His most recent English-language book is The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (Encounter Books, 2016).

Katarzyna Czerwinska / CCA-SA 3.0 Poland

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In which specific way are you using the term liberal democracy? Is it the politically correct, social justice culture, or are there already problems in libertarian, classical liberal thoughts?

My point is that it’s not just political correctness. See, political correctness is the consequence of a long process, and it’s a legitimate consequence. It’s not like, “Let’s get rid of political correctness” and then we will have the world or the system as it should be, with open space and a serious discourse of opinions. My argument, which I put forward in the book, is that from the very beginning liberalism was a very restrictive, authoritarian theory.

The word ‘liberalism’ comes from ‘liberty’, so etymologically people tend to think that whoever is liberal must be for liberty. No, whoever is liberal is supportive of a certain theory which is called ‘liberalism’. This is an entirely different thing. Now, what I object to in liberalism — and it starts with John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and John Stuart Mill — is that from the very beginning liberalism was conceived as a theory which considers itself to be superior to all others. That is: “We are better than you are, so we will organize a life for you where each of you will have an equal amount of liberty.”

This promise may or may not be true, but by the very idea, liberals position themselves above all other orientations. They say, for example: “You conservatives are one-sided, you Christians represent one particular religion. We liberals, we represent everybody. And since we represent everybody, we will take control in terms of ideology, in

terms of politics.” In fact, they become monopolists. About three to five decades ago, when you looked at

political theory, there were several political orientations, both in the real world and in the academic world. Now it’s all gone. There is liberalism. It is a monopoly. Liberalism is, in fact, the only legitimate philosophy out there. If you are not a liberal, then what are you? Either a fascist or simply crazy — because every rational, well-educated person has to be a liberal.

Now, when it comes to democracy, some people somehow think democracy is a system of freedom, a system that is ‘open’. Well, that’s not the case. It was the ancient democracy that was very autocratic. But what was eye-opening to me was reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The first part of the book is almost entirely enthusiastic about American society because there are so many NGOs — what he called associations, civic organizations. He loves that and is very much impressed by it — and quite rightly.

However, the closer you get to the end of Tocqueville’s book, you see that he is very much concerned. He sees that there is a tendency in democracy to homogenize. Democracy is not about plurality. Democracy is about homogeneity, the rule of the majority. And one of the sentences from Democracy in America that I quote in my book is: “I know of no other country in the world in which there is less freedom of thought.”

We have been living under the spell of a word — that ‘democracy’ is a good thing. But look at how it works: look at the institution in which I work, the European Parliament.

CC BY 2.0

The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, seated next to Ryszard Legutko and Geoffrey Van Orden, during a meeting with members of the European Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary grouping.

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This is a typical majoritarian institution, where the power is in the hand of the majority which has the monopoly — and whoever does not belong to the majority and does not conform to mainstream politics is marginalized.

More and more people are trying to convince us that liberal democracy is a perfect invention. It isn’t. There are a lot of dangerous consequences, and we have to be aware of those consequences, and try to either improve — or eliminate — them.

We have to be very critical. The word ‘critique’ or ‘critical’ has become one of those favourite notions of modern discourse, but this is also mendacious language. There is the typical politician, and he is not critical at all because he’s not criticizing anything. He’s an apologist of the system.

Going back to your question: No, it’s not just the recent developments in liberal democracy. Of course, the recent developments in liberal democracy are particularly acute, that’s why we can see them. But Tocqueville saw it almost two hundred years ago — and then John Stuart Mill saw it 150 years ago. It has been there, at various degrees of intensity, but it’s one of the problems of our times. The same civilization that produced Marxism and Communism also produced liberalism and liberal democracy.

But aren’t those liberal values such as freedom of speech, natural rights, and human dignity — often derived from Christianity — in and of themselves still correct, and have simply been abused?

Natural right is a very bizarre concept — the whole idea of a state-of-nature, which you can find in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, too, even though he was no liberal himself. This is a very strange notion. It is a purely fictitious picture of human beings living in a very strange place. This is a pure theoretical construction. You cannot say that it is natural. It is artificial. It’s a world of fiction. It’s a creation of human imagination. There is nothing really natural about a Hobbesian or Lockean state of nature. You cannot defend freedom on the argument that in the state of nature we were all free, because at the same time you can envisage a different picture of society, where you say in the state of nature we were all deprived of freedom, we were all in shackles. Freedom is to be defended on different grounds.

If we look at Thomas Hobbes, he had this notion of the state of nature in which all people were equal, people were free, but at the same time everybody was endangered. Then, in order to reduce this danger and increase security, you had to build a big bureaucratic state, for the creation of which you had to give up your freedom. The Hobbesian people aren’t really free people. If you look at Locke, his society is also a society ruled by a majoritarian government, so it’s not a very free society either.

I don’t really believe that if you cherish freedom, you

have to use the arguments of John Locke. Edmund Burke was a better defender of freedom, he is more persuasive. Or you have Hegel, who was a better defender of freedom than Thomas Hobbes. For some reasons, liberals reserve for themselves this role of the defenders of freedom.

Does liberal democracy in general lead to these ‘totalitarian temptations’ or can some parts be sustainably retained?

There is no inevitability. Of course, you can change the system. My idea was that a better solution is a kind of mixed regime, a mixed constitution system. Believe me, the final months of Communism, and the first months of liberal democracy, was the period when we had the greatest freedom. Before it was bad, and afterwards things have become worse and worse. I believe we can somehow change the system, we can somehow reform it if we diagnose the problems and influences.

Certainly, the system that we live in has become very constraining. There are fewer and fewer things you can do, there are fewer and fewer things that you can say, or that you can publish. This is ridiculous. Even private life and family life have been permeated by politics. Once you have made this diagnosis, you see that things are going wrong. We are more and more trapped by this politics and by this ideology, but I can see a possibility that we can change the system.

When it comes to changing the system, do you have any concrete solution at hand? Is it perhaps to strengthen civil society and the intermediary institutions again?

I long ago gave up on the intermediary NGOs. Just two hours ago, I was at a conference where a special fund for giving money to NGOs that are supportive of liberal democracy was discussed. That kills the entire concept of

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non-governmental institutions. They are governmental institutions and they are subsidized by the European Commission, which is a kind of government. I appreciate all civic initiatives; I take part in several of them myself. But let us forget about those myths. Most NGOs, and especially the most powerful ones, have been subsidized by international organizations, indirectly by the government or the European Commission, and they are part of this system.

When it comes to a concrete solution, look at my country. My country has been treated viciously by the international community, but this is a country which has in many ways preserved a kind of plurality. There are things you can say and do in my country which you cannot do here [in Brussels]. There has to be some kind of institutional plurality, and the thing to do is to break the monopoly of the mainstream. My concern is that conservatives have capitulated in most European countries and even in the United States. Of course, there have been some movements in the opposite direction, which is good. But my overall perception is still that many have capitulated. Even the Catholic Church seems to have a tendency to capitulate. “But once we become part of the mainstream, maybe things will get better”, they say. No! It’s the other way around. Make the society genuinely plural. There are liberals, there are libertarians, there are all sorts of people, but there are also conservatives. They are not painted, beautified liberals; they are conservative. Maybe they are Catholics — they are not ‘open’ Catholics. I don’t want the Catholics to be open as long as I do not see the liberals open. I haven’t met an open liberal in my entire life. They are so damn closed.

Since we are sitting here in the European Parliament, part of probably the most liberal democratic project in the post-war era, what do you see as the future of the European Union?

I speak from a position of a representative of a medium-size country, from the eastern part of Europe, the majority of whose population has supported the European Union. I see some value in institutionalized cooperation. But things have gone wrong. Today, the union is in conflict with what the Polish society really wants. This creates a tension. People in both Eastern and Western Europe are dissatisfied, and the answer from the EU is always ‘more of the same’. If that continues, the EU will be in trouble. For me, it is a very saddening experience in the European Parliament. I’m trying to make a difference, but it is a very saddening experience. And this is a parliament that has been in the hands of the same politicians for many, many years.

The whole idea of democracy is that there is a pendulum, that the government can change its position. One party is in power one term, but with each swing of the pendulum, another comes in. But not here! This is the

same coalition. It’s like the infamous Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party [PRI] which was in power for over 70 years. When the same group of people is in power for such a long time, it has to become pathological because they are no longer used to the idea that they may lose. If you look at national politics [in Poland], one always has the feeling that in the next election, one can be ‘sent packing’, that one could be in the opposition. Not here [in Brussels]! This is hubris. If the EU doesn’t change, it will sink deeper and deeper into a sea of trouble.

Well, that’s one negative ending …

That’s a negative ending — but things could get better, though probably not at the next elections. But who knows? For many years, I was living in a system, and everybody was telling me that Communism was inevitable and that it would win, that it would conquer the entire world. Well, it didn’t. History always has some surprises for us.

Kai Weiss is a research fellow at the Austrian Economics Center and a board member of the Hayek Institute, both in Vienna.

Palace of Versailles

Alexis de Tocqueville in a portrait (1850) by Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856).

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The Migration Crisis & the Culture of Europe

B a l á z s M . M e z e i

So spake he, and as if Aeolus unchained the windsso he, breaking their bonds, let loose the nations,clearing the way for war; and, that no land shouldbe free therefrom, apportioned ruin throughoutthe world, parcelling out destruction.

— Claudian, Against Rufinus (II, 22-26)

T he European crisis of mass migration is a crisis of culture. A crisis, that is to say, which deeply influences

the present and the future of a continent still recognized as the cradle of Western history, the origin of Christianity in its various denominations, and the source of good and evil which affect our contemporary world. Today the question is how Europe as the origin of our culture can not just survive the current migration crisis, but how the continent can reclaim its earlier importance. My answer, quite simply, is this: Europe can reclaim its cultural mission if and only if it understands, accepts, and develops its two thousand years of Christian heritage.

The concept that the West is in decline has been commonplace for about a century. The 1926 work of Oswald Spengler was the first important reflection on a crisis which was much more than just a military or political change after the First World War. Spengler’s book attained fame and influence not because of its unchallengeable views on technical details of Western cultural history, but rather because of its overall evaluation of the collapse of European culture in the midst of the Great War and as a consequence of it. In Spengler’s view, the decline of the West was unavoidable, because a certain rhythm of rise and fall coordinates the life of all great cultures. The emergence of Nazi Germany and the total collapse of the European powers in the Second World War have been seen in fact as the fulfilment of the downfall of Europe as the powerhouse of culture and development. The tragedy of the Holocaust is perhaps the most dreadful expression of that collapse, and the fall of the Soviet Union some decades later fits seamlessly in with the previous events of this epochal change. For the disintegration of the Soviet Empire meant at the same time the failure of the most influential vision of a new order of European origin, the Marxist utopia.

But what, you may ask, does this have to do with our own time? In the events unfolding before our eyes today,

the torrent of immigrants and asylum seekers leaving their homes in Africa and the Near East and invading many European countries, we witness a continuation, and perhaps the fulfilment, of the downfall of Europe in the last century. Europe castrated itself in the First World War and proved to be unable to maintain its common Christian heritage; in the Second World War, the self-annihilation of the European powers and the destruction of the Third Reich — together with the attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe — led to the partition of Europe between the two world powers of the United States and the Soviet Union. The fall of the latter initially appeared to some as an opportunity to reconstruct Europe, an idea deeply inspiring to my generation. This reconstruction, however, has not taken place. Among the reasons for this failure we find various economic and political interests intersecting each other and interfering with a promising perspective, or the emergence of a new threat from the East embodied in the figure of the strong man of Russia, or, as we see today, the waves of immigration from Africa and the Near East, waves which are already transforming Europe’s future. The arrival of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, in rich European countries appears to accomplish a long process of disintegration and failure and the beginning of a new era in which Europe changes its fundamental historical and cultural identities. If the collapse of the Soviet Union was the expression of the breakdown of the Marxist utopia, the migration crisis is the expression of the failure of the liberal utopia of unrestrained peace and development, a utopia already overwritten by the rise of global terrorism and the war on terror.

Three questions

In this essay, I focus on three key questions emerging from the crisis of migration: What is the cultural significance of the changes expressed by the recent mass migration to Europe? How are traditional European values, especially their common expression in Christianity, being affected by these changes? And how can European Christianity survive the present crisis?

Mass migration is, of course, not an invention of Angela Merkel or the European Union. It has been a global phenomenon for many decades. Before the fall of the Soviet Empire, Western Europe had already received thousands of guest workers from places including India, Turkey, and the countries of North Africa. The flux of peoples leaving

The European Conservative 13

Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, the migrations due to the disintegration of the Soviet bloc after 1990, asylum seekers fleeing the aftermath of the Iraqi war and the civil war in Syria, the flight from North-African countries after the failure of the Arab Spring — all these events added to the present crisis affecting the countries of the European Union.

The cultural significance of the recent waves of migration to Europe is that masses of people who are predominantly of Islamic background are leaving their ancestral homelands and entering countries with very different cultural and religious traditions. Even if European Christianity has acquired a certain cultural flexibility and openness throughout the decades of the twentieth century, the underlying psychological, sociological and cultural structures have maintained the original teachings inherited from Christ. Without these structures we cannot understand the nature of the Western world from Poland to Spain or from Hungary to Canada. Secularization could not overwrite the predominance of such structures in everyday life even if secularization made these structures more complicated. European culture, defined by Christianity, faces in its everyday life the presence of millions belonging to non-Christian cultures. And these non-Christian cultures, represented by those fleeing from their homeland, now penetrate the traditionally Christian West, a world already globalized and secularized to a great extent. What we witness here recalls the notion of “the clash of civilizations” of Samuel P. Huntington. But is this really a clash? Or is it something deeper? It may in fact be the change of all cultures involved in the process.

“The clash of civilizations” is a political thesis arguing that there is an inevitable conflict between Western-style, Christian-rooted countries and countries with other cultural identities. This thesis, originally advocated by Samuel P. Huntington in 1996, has been illustrated by the rise of Al-Qaida and the Islamic State. However, the majority of the migrants entering Europe do not belong to terrorist organizations; most often, they are not motivated politically but are simply hoping to find a new life. All they want is a secure life in a peaceful society existing on a higher technological and economic level than their homelands. The significance of the migration crisis comes to the fore at this point: even if it happens that the immigrants give up their original faith (most often the Muslim credo) and accommodate themselves to the European way of life in as many ways as possible, they still inevitably impact their

new homes and, at the same time, are themselves changed. Disregarding now the possibility of the emergence of militant movements among the immigrants, the cultural impact of the sheer presence of untold numbers of people with a deeply different cultural background living in Western societies will be enormous. Not only will the surrounding culture be changed but so will the language, and the psychological and sociological structures — that is, the entire worldview of the West.

Such a change will not reinforce traditional Christian patterns of life and belief. It is questionable that an influx of immigrants can lead to the emergence of a new cultural pattern. The more probable outcome is rather mixed: In the better case scenario, Western societies will change into a mosaic of cultural identities held together by law and order of an ever stronger organized state. The worst possible scenario is rather dim: a mosaic that cannot be arranged symmetrically or maintained orderly

“Immaculate Conception” by Peter Paul Reubens (1577-1640).Prado National Museum

14 Summer/Fall 2018

in any meaningful sense — with an ensuing chaos that endangers even the possibility of a technocratic order.

The direct consequence of either situation is the radical transformation of societies derived from Christian traditions into societies of a kaleidoscopic cultural pattern or, what is more probable, no cultural pattern at all. The ensuing situation is foreign to all that has come before. It is foreign to Christian traditions; foreign to the Enlightenment project; and foreign even to the post-Christian and post-secular structures described by such authors as Giovanni Vattimo, Slavoj Žižek, or Jürgen Habermas. If the worst scenario becomes reality, it will be very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to stop the ensuing cultural and political chaos. A France that is 30% foreign-born, an Italy with masses of inhabitants from North Africa, a Germany with many millions of Iraqi, Syrian, and Afghani refugees will have to face the immense task of a cultural and political redefinition, a task which must be completed under enormous social and political pressure.

The significance of the migration crisis, then, consists of the crisis of all existing patterns that Christian-based cultures have developed as interpretations of their historical

situation during the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st centuries. The situation is beyond any “clash of civilizations”; rather, it is about the loss of culture on each side and the challenge of a cultureless (perhaps even a civilizationless) situation that may endanger the conditions of good order. Without good order, however, the good life becomes impossible.

Tradition and innovation

Christianity has always shown a delicate balance of tradition and innovation in its concrete manifestations in religious practice. Beyond the doctrinal issues it is worth taking a look at the development of Christian art: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature show not only an unparalleled richness, but also express a continuous search for ever newer forms in which the central tenets of Christianity have been expressed. One of the striking examples of this search for conservation and renewal is the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The building today is the result of a more than 1,500 years of effort to hold fast to tradition while developing it in accordance with both the truths of revelation and the requirements and spirit of a given age. Beginning with the early Byzantine style and developing

through medieval Gothic, Renaissance Classicism and Baroque structures the basilica today contains additions and alterations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the church was under construction, as it were, from the beginning of Roman Christianity to the emergence of modern secularization. It is the process of unity and diversity, identity and change that is uniquely represented in that building. If we take into consideration the similarity and difference between a Byzantine and a twentieth century church building, or the Gregorian music and the church music of Johann Sebastian Bach, we cannot but recognize the exceptionally dynamic character of Christian art throughout the centuries. Of course, it is not only Christian art that shows such dynamism. The development of Christian art is only the expression of a deeper characteristic of Christianity itself, a characteristic that connects Tertullian’s rhetoric to Newman’s sermons, or Augustinian mysticism to the thought of a Jacques Maritain.

It is in the context of such a continuous identity and change that we can properly understand the development of the doctrinal contents of Christianity.

Nicholas of Cusa in a portrait (ca. 1480) by Meister des Marienlebens, located in St. Nikolaus-Hospital in Bernkastel-Kues, Germany.

The European Conservative 15

These contents are such that throughout the centuries, and as the result of the work of exceptional personalities, we gain a deeper understanding of many doctrines. What occurs is never change — it is the appropriate understanding of eternal truths in a given age and a deeper grasp of the world-saving message contained in those doctrines. The development of the Marian dogmas provides a helpful example of this reality. The fact of the Immaculate Conception — not to be confused with the Virgin Birth — has always been implicit in Marian piety. Yet before the dogma, which was declared in Ineffabilis Deus in 1854, the notion of the immaculate conception of Our Lady had not been officially recognized. The apparitions in Lourdes in 1858, where the Holy Virgin named herself immaculada concepciou, confirmed the dogma unequivocally. In 1950, Pope Pius XII issued the definition of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary as the fourth Marian dogma in Christian history. It is not impossible that further dogmatic proclamations about Mary may follow .

This example suffices to show that doctrinal development often displays a gradual deepening of traditional knowledge, a deepening which leads to new understandings and practices in a community always on the way to transcendent fulfilment. The essential point here is that there exists a dynamic balance between tradition and renewal in which the old is maintained and the new is organically developed. Western culture, in the sense of the Christian heritage, is precisely the dynamic and organic unity of old and new. If we follow Kant’s famous distinction between civilization and culture — in which the latter has the moral emphasis, while the former is about the technical details — we can stress the importance of culture in the historical and moral sense; and we can insist that Christianity is a unique expression of culture in that sense, that is, in the sense not distorted into mere traditionalism or superficial modernism. In other words, secularization is important for Christianity, as for instance Pope Benedict XVI variously expressed, since it helped Christians to relearn their traditions in the light of contemporary developments. Culture is always about learning and relearning of traditions in various and changing settings so that the meaning of a tradition can be grasped and developed into a more complex understanding.

Culture requires continuity. Continuity is often

superficially misunderstood as something which does not permit any disruption. In truth, disruption belongs to continuity when it is properly understood. This is so because it is only through such disturbances that man is able to focus his attention and gain new understandings that can lead to right action. On the one hand, culture is a continuous growth, a process of emerging complexity; on the other hand, cultural development is triggered by disruptions. This means that culturally continuity is best conceived not just as allowing for disruptions, but presuming them.

This understanding has always been present in Western Christianity. The first Sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 led to the creation of Augustine’s City of God; the great challenge of Arabic interpretations of Aristotle triggered the reinterpretation of Aristotle in a new light by Thomas Aquinas; the tragic fall of Constantinople helped the

First page of the 15th century manuscript, De docta ignoratia, by Nicholas of Cusa, located in St. Nikolaus-Hospital, founded in 1458.

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emergence of a new understanding of ‘religion’ in Nicolas of Cusa’s On the Peace of Faith. The epochal occurrence of the Holocaust prompted reflections in Christianity which reshaped earlier interpretations of the relationship between Jews and Christians. This line of examples can be easily continued, because if we carefully look at the background of epochal works in the Western tradition we discover the unique convergence of personal and historical occurrences which make these works possible.

What is taking place in such convergences is the creation of culture. Culture is always the result of the interplay of objective and subjective factors, but these factors do not fully determine the birth and life of a culture. There is more to a culture than just a mechanical continuity. Epochal breaks, collapses, and disruptions belong to the core of a culture. That being said, it can often be difficult to recognize what organic unity exists between past and present in times of crisis. When Aeneas fled Troy carrying his father Anchises on his shoulders and leading his son Ascanius by hand, he did not know that the destruction of his ancient hometown was the beginning of something far greater: the rise of Rome. We needed the genius of Vergil to show us this connection. And we needed artists like Raphael, Bernini, or Barocci to elevate the scene of a desperate flight to the level of an eternal archetype of collapse and rebirth. Yet this connection is clearly displayed by many other examples of the history of Western culture, such as the death of Socrates and the beginning of the Platonic Academy. Even the death of Christ, whose disciples were scattered in town and countryside, was just the prelude to something immeasurably greater: the Resurrection and the birth of the Church. Disruptions, thus, are seen always from the point of view of culture as an organic whole, and culture in the genuine sense cannot be anything other than an organic whole that succeeds in integrating its own failures.

The crisis of immigration

If all this is true, it may initially seem simple to survive the present crisis of immigration in Europe and Christianity: Europeans have only to follow the path of culture and maintain its organic character so that we may reach a higher level of synthesis in due course of time. Many believe that to be the case. Others are satisfied with the more realistic outcome of the total loss of culture in the Christian sense and are inclined even to except the complete loss of any Western culture in the traditional sense. After all, Marxism of the Soviet type did something very similar: it swept aside the main achievements of Christian culture and tried to introduce something like a ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ culture. The result is too well known: not only was Marxism unable to create anything like a socialist culture, but the attempt to obliterate Christianity proved to be self-destructive to the nations of the former Soviet Bloc. This destruction’s after-

effects are visibly present even today in these countries. That is to say, disruptions in the process of culture are to be taken seriously; there is no automatism upholding the development of a culture as though it behaved according to universal laws . Moral, intellectual, and religious efforts, sometimes astonishingly heroic efforts, are needed for the survival and renewal of culture.

The liberal attitude concerning the influx of immigrants relies on an understanding of the effects of an invisible hand of cultural history. To make integration a reality, Europeans need only show solidarity and charity, receive and assist asylum seekers, and provide them with shelter and work. Now, it is of course beyond question that solidarity and charity are of principal importance when we face people in need, as Pope Francis (among others) has repeatedly argued. Since it is about human persons, our attitude to migrants must be defined by such principles. That is a moral imperative. On the other hand, we Europeans need to think about the ways our culture and its Christian roots may be maintained and reinforced while overwhelmed by masses of people with a different cultural identity. As previously mentioned, what is at stake is not only the loss of our culture. It is also the loss of their culture, their religious background, that is at stake. If a group of people wants to maintain their traditions in circumstances different from those that originally birthed them, those traditions often become different as well. It is perhaps more important that, as examples show, the followers of “the clash of civilization” thesis may gain influence among the younger generation and trigger acts violently opposed to the idea of social and political order. Since these migrants seek their new home in our societies, it is our responsibility to offer possibilities to them to understand the nature of culture and share our experience of this understanding. For this to happen, we need to understand our traditions in the light of the present situation, that is, in the light of the epochal changes activated by the crisis of migration.

It is my conviction that Christianity is not dead; it is my even deeper conviction that the story of the Gospel is the only true story ever and that its morals, teachings, and consequences are fundamental to the thriving of any society in any age. It would be trivial to say that every genuine human life is a life of sacrifice, or that it is only by sacrifice of some sort that life becomes fruitful not only in the moral, intellectual, or social sense, not only historically, but even more importantly in a meta-historical sense, that is, sub specie aeternitatis. If this truth was just a moral truth, it would be trivial; but since it was performed really and transcendentally at the same time — in the deeds of Christ — it goes beyond triviality and becomes fundamental. The history of the New Testament is the genuine history of culture; together with the Book of Revelation we possess in the books of the New Testament an overarching description of truth that needs to be properly understood. It needs to

The European Conservative 17

be understood not only in itself but also in its historical significance, which has produced what we call today the globalized world. Gospel and Church belong together, and it is the Catholic Church which especially shows the capability of learning and relearning her own traditions. That is not to say that other confessions are of lesser value for the political rejuvenation of the West; they all belong to the one body of Christianity and beyond the differences they share the fundamentals. These fundamentals have to be maintained in such a way that the cultural disruptions caused by the present influx of migrants may be used as a new possibility to learn and relearn our traditions.

The focus of theological and philosophical efforts must concern the mystery of the Trinity. This central doctrine is the greatest power and the greatest mystery of Christianity. In an important sense, Christianity is expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity in such an essential way that after an imagined disappearance of Christianity its entire content could be reconstructed merely from the notion of the Trinity. Because the doctrine of the Trinity has a mysterious character, Christians are obligated to make an effort to understand ever more fully the truth of the unity of Being and plurality of Persons in the divine, so that our understanding is not opposed to any monotheism. The doctrine of the Trinity, nevertheless, is not only the doctrine of monotheism; it is the doctrine of the solidarity of the Creator with its creation, a solidarity expressed in the act of the Incarnation. The thesis of Athanasius — “God became man so that man may become God” — is absolutely fundamental to Christianity; it points out not only the fact of the Incarnation as an act of divine freedom, but

also the purpose of that act, human elevation, which can be realized by our freedom. Without an emphasis on the mystery of Incarnation it is almost impossible to avoid the trap of Hegel’s “bad infinity”. Infinity, indeed, is so much infinite that it imbues the finite and, as it were, embraces it. The notion of the analogy of being avoids the trap of bad infinity; in the doctrine of analogy it is noteworthy that “the always greater dissimilarity” between the Creator and the creature is recognized in the context of a transcendental similarity.

The last Roman poet

Claudian, whose Against Rufinus serves as the epigraph of this essay, was not only “the last Roman poet” but also one of the most skilful of the Latin authors with an imagination and poetic power comparable to Ovid. His descriptions of the military battles and political career of Stilicho, the last Roman general successfully defending Rome against Alaric, are striking for their power and artistry even today. Claudian’s poems are not only worthwhile for their descriptions of the last days of Rome before 410, but they also provide invaluable insight into the barbarian Germanic tribes invading the Empire in the fourth century. Claudian was a close friend of Stilicho the general; he followed him into most of his battles. The arrest and murder of Stilicho in 408 proved to be fatal to the Western Empire; while earlier the work of this great general helped alleviate the problems of German immigration and invasion — sometimes through deals, sometimes with military force — after his death Alaric and his Visigoths did not meet any resistance

Irish Naval personnel from the patrol vessel LÉ Eithne (P31) rescuing migrants as part of ‘Operation Triton’.Irish Defence Forces / CCA 2.0 Generic

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during their invasion. Rome was taken, tens of thousands killed, and centuries-old buildings were plundered, burnt, and destroyed. The entire Roman world was deeply shaken, including the Christians. Pagan Romans claimed that Christianity was responsible for the destruction of Rome because the Christian Empire forbade the worship of the old gods, including the cult of Victoria, the defending goddess of Rome.

As we know, Augustine forcefully rebutted these charges in his monumental The City of God. He pointed out that many Romans, both Christian and pagan, who took refuge in Christian churches survived the destruction. This temporary refuge in the churches, he argued, is nothing in comparison to the eternal refuge that is offered by God in His Church. It follows, then, that it is far more important to be a true Christian, a citizen of the City of God, than to survive a barbaric invasion. By meditating upon this theme over the course of the work, Augustine developed theological and philosophical positions that are fundamental to life in the West today, not least of which was the fleshing out of the Biblical distinction between the city of God and the city of man. Augustine wrote his work to all Christians of whatever background, since he himself had Punic as his mother tongue; thus he also wrote to the barbaric tribes that occupied Italy after the fall of Rome.

This fall did not begin as a military campaign. In December 406, the Rhine was fully frozen so that the tribes could easily cross with horse-drawn wagons, tents, weapons and all kinds of military instruments. On the wagons there sat their wives and children, mothers and fathers of a new civilization in Gallia and Italy. Even if Stilicho was a mighty general, he could not fight off weather, not to say history; he could not hinder the mass migration that led to the overflow of Gallia. Had Stilicho survived the coup d’état that led to his murder two years after the Great Crossing, he may have been able to find a way to settle peacefully the invaders and help them to become part of the Christian Roman world. After his murder — which might have been instigated by his rivals in Rome and Constantinople — there was no chance to find a solution. Germanic tribes overwhelmed farms and towns, killed or drove away the Roman inhabitants, took over houses, castles and temples, destroyed aqueducts, baths, theatres, and libraries. Their initial life among the smoky ruins could not foretell that along the weedy Roman roads, abandoned by the last members of the Western legions, a new world was born leading to the re-establishment of the Western Empire just some hundred years later.

Yet even through this and similar occurrences, history was effective; and even through the political machinations that led to our migration crisis today, history appears to be effective . It is not the secondary or tertiary causes we have to focus on in order to understand the present crisis, but rather the primary ones. Among the primary causes

we find the sudden growth of population in Africa and the Middle East, the collapse of totalitarian regimes, and the failure to create new and stable states in their place. Most importantly, the primary causes point to an epochal challenge to European culture that is derived from the West’s embrace of Christianity, a challenge to which we must find our response. In my view, this response must be of a cultural and, on a deeper level, a religious nature. Christianity has to keep its organic character and further develop its reality through the disruptions we face today. Christianity is not one among cultures but, analogically, it is the culture of cultures. Without its central message, no culture is capable of maintaining itself on a historical scale.

More importantly, nevertheless, we have to repeat the lesson Augustine taught us: Christianity is meta-historical and its real aim is transcendent. This meta-historical and transcendent character is that which ensures the spirit of Christianity . Inasmuch as Christianity is embodied in the Christians, that is, in us, it is our task to propose, develop and realize the ways and means by which the meta-historical and transcendent nature of Christianity can be realized in our concrete cultural settings: that is, in settings which are radically challenged by the migration crisis today, a crisis not unparalleled in our known history.

Christianity as fulfilment

Our historical and meta-historical considerations may be concluded with the following remark. The idea that history is a meaningful process leading to a transcendental fulfilment is of Christian origin. Christianity emerged as the real fulfilment of Old Testament promises found in the person of Jesus Christ. Christianity has been from its beginnings fundamentally eschatological; it always considered itself as “apocalypse”, that is, the “revelation” of divine reality in our historical dimension. This understanding of Christianity does not and, properly understood, cannot lead to the notion of a worldly fulfilment in the sense proposed by various ideologies of Gnostic origin. Yet Christianity maintains that history is a meaningful reality. Meta-historical questions really do matter, as they bring man to recognize that there is a fulfilment whose reality is approximated by and forshadowed in our earthly situations. That is why for Christianity it is important to strive for a general betterment of society and culture. Not because an ideal state can be reached on earth, but because we can always improve our moral, social and political stature and circumstances.

The real aim of the Christians is divine ransom, that is, mercy. Divine mercy makes not only the individual human life meaningful but also the life of communities and their histories. Such a meaning, just like the meaning of a person’s life, is not always obvious. In order to understand it one

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must face the challenge of brutal senselessness; one has to make real efforts to overcome the personal and historical challenges to arrive at an approximate understanding of the workings of divine mercy.

In the present crisis, we need to make a similar effort. By facing the threat of the total collapse of our culture we may recognize the aim and means of renewal. This renewal, as history teaches us, cannot be the dream of a simple restoration; nor can it be some worldly utopia. Genuine renewal must be based on the recognition of learning: re-learning the meaning of our traditions and the meaning of human history as well. Solidarity and charity are fundamental requirements, but, beyond them, we are called to discern how, in our present situation, we can maintain and renew our culture in the context of epochal change — a change that reminds us of that embodied in

the person and work of Alaric. Rome was conquered but never really died; just some

decades later its central mission was reinforced and its legacy reformulated in the framework of the epochal rise of Christianity. The culture of Europe can never really die; through the vicissitudes of a centuries long change, it still harbours the best achievements of a spirituality which points to the only true story without which the meaning of humanity cannot be properly understood.

Our task is no less than that of our predecessors: In the midst of epochal disturbances, we need to learn to truly embrace the fullness of our traditions — and thus find new ways to again formulate their perennial contents.

Balázs M. Mezei is Professor of Philosophy at Péter Pázmány Catholic University, Hungary.

Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is the most important book in the

conservative world. Published in the United States in 1953, it has never

been translated into Italian — until today.

The text traces the history of conservative thought — from

Edmund Burke to the 20th century — summarizing the ideas and positions

of its main exponents. Kirk’s book influenced the thinking of generations

of conservative intellectuals, politicians, and journalists — including US

presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and presidents Richard

Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Il pensiero conservatore can be ordered directly fromthe Italian publisher, Giubilei Regnani, at the link below:

www.giubileiregnani.com

20 Summer/Fall 2018

Choosing Our BattlesD a r r a g h M c D o n a g h

F or many European nations — Ireland included — an exit from the European Union is not truly

on the cards. Nigel Farage — whom many credit with Brexit — recently attended a conference in Dublin that was trying to establish a campaign for Ireland to leave the EU. While Mr. Farage correctly sensed some disillusionment with the EU amongst the Irish people, his belief that a referendum on withdrawal would pass there was not realistic. Indeed, this is true in most EU member states.

So this is the fundamental reality that conservatives must face: Whether we like it or not, we are part of the European project. Thus, rather than wasting time trying to replicate the UK’s secession, we must fight for conservative values.

In the aftermath of Brexit, a lot is being mentioned of ‘a new vision for Europe’. But what this entails is an even more ‘neo-liberal’ Europe, one led by French President Emmanuel Macron. For conservatives to spend their time on a battlefield that focuses on fighting for a hopeless cause, is to allow Mr. Macron and his allies to storm to victory in an entirely different and empty arena — in the end outflanking everyone around him. In this way, Mr. Macron and his allies will make gains while conservatives continue to harp on for a dream that will never come to fruition.

With the UK leaving, Europe is on the cusp of ever closer union. President Macron seems determined to establish a banking union and, even worse, a harmonised tax rate. The independence of European nations, especially smaller states, will be vastly eroded if this comes to pass. A frightening prospect for state sovereignty presents itself in the form of a ‘European Finance Minister’, another item on le président’s wish list.

While Angela Merkel may not be a favourite among some, she — along with the CDU — used to pose a far lesser threat than Mr. Macron. Now with her drastically weakened power base, along with the possibly increased influence of the SPD in the new grand coalition, integration will take on a new lease of life. Her Große Koalition’s document calls for stronger Franco-German cooperation, increasing the EU budget, and transforming the ESM into a ‘European Monetary Fund’.

Why are conservatives dreaming of greener pastures when our own pastures are about to be taken from under our own feet? We should be demanding reform — but reform which would bring more democratic accountability,

not closer integration. There cannot be a ‘Euro-zone Finance Minister’, for example: It would take too much power away from national governments.

The attitudes of the Republicans vs. Democrats in the US in the last Presidential election provides a useful comparison. The top brass of both parties had issues with very popular outsiders: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The Democrats tried desperately to damage Sanders, alienating their own supporters in the process and forcing an establishment candidate who simply wasn’t going to win on the ballot. The Republican leadership, however, once realising that Donald Trump wasn’t going away and represented the majority of its members, backed him — albeit reluctantly — and swept to victory.

Accepting the situation, even though not one hundred percent happy with it but accepting it and fighting on for the advancement of what you care about, is what is important. Now the Republicans in Congress can pursue their agenda. Conservatives here in Europe, while of a very different breed to the Americans, could learn a thing or two from their experience.

I am not a Eurosceptic. I am Irish and I have seen first-hand some of the good the European Union can do. Small states like Ireland can benefit immensely from the EU. Along with NATO, of course, it has helped keep peace and keep cooperation firmly to the fore among European neighbours.

However, at the same time, I do not want Ireland to disappear. At the end of the day, the UK may be — for a while anyway — economically worse off for leaving the EU; but many British people seem to see that as a reasonable trade-off for a reclamation of sovereignty and regaining a sense of control over the direction of the nation.

To be sure, that same desire can be found in other EU member states — and if conservatives strike a more balanced tone, there is the strong possibility of garnering support from other kinds of conservatives (like me), who would not vote to leave the EU but who do not share President Macron’s vision for closer integration. These are people who are Irish first and European second — but who still would identify themselves as a European. These are people who want to see conservative values in across all European institutions.

European conservatives must accept that the EU is here; but they must also strive to keep it a union of independent, sovereign states — and not the let it morph into a ‘United States of Europe’.

Darragh McDonagh writes from Trinity College Dublin.

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The Weakness of the WestS t e f a n B e i g

I n his recently published book, Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West, Martin Van Creveld

considers the current weakness of Western nations and the reasons why their armies frequently fail to achieve their objectives. In an exclusive interview, he discusses these issues — and highlights the many reasons for the West’s decline, including the lack of motivation of soldiers, feminism, and the presence of female soldiers in the armed forces.

In the rankings of the ten best armies in the world, the US, Great Britain, France, and sometimes Germany almost always appear. In your book Pussycats, you complain that these same armies have lost all wars in the past decades. Do such ratings have no relevance?

That’s how it is. These armies are probably the best in conventional wars such as the Falklands War or the First Iraq War. But most wars are no longer conventional and those were lost by these armies. The operations of the German Army in particular were terrible. Why should a German soldier be killed — so that Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, or Israelis no longer fight each other?

Then the mistake is in the objectives of these war missions?

Many of these interventions are completely incomprehensible to ordinary soldiers. What are they doing there? This creates problems for the motivation of the soldiers. Motivation has always been one of the most important, if not the most important factor in war. Without motivation, you fail in the face of death.

Is the technical equipment overrated?

In these wars, the technically inferior side has almost always won, even if it has paid a very high price for it.

One thinks of Afghanistan, India, Vietnam ...

These are only the best-known cases, but there have been dozens of them. Many books have dealt with it. Some blame the defeats on failed organization or the wrong goals; others think the politicians were too soft, the officers too bad, or public opinion too critical. That’s all right. But in the end, the guerrillas and terrorists were simply better. They were more motivated, obstinate, determined, inventive. You just can’t get past it.

An Interview with Martin van Creveld

The renowned Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld was born in Rotterdam in 1946 and grew up in Israel and England. He is Professor Emeritus of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is one of the world’s most influential and well-known military historians. Van Creveld has lectured and taught at virtually every institute dealing with strategic military studies around the world, and has advised various governments, including those of the United States, Canada, and Sweden. He is a frequent guest on CNN, BBC, and other international media, and has written hundreds of articles for magazines and periodicals around the world. Some of his most recent books include Equality: The Impossible Quest (Castalia, 2015), A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind (Castalia, 2015), and Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West — and What Can Be Done about It (CreateSpace, 2016).

Association of Friends of the National Defence Academy / University of Vienna

22 Summer/Fall 2018

Are such asymmetric wars, in which a technically superior civilization fights an inferior one, a specific challenge?

Of course. That creates a completely different situation. Some politicians have still not understood how self-destructive such wars can be.

The line separating civilians and soldiers is also omitted.

Exactly. Thirty years ago, I invented the term ‘Triple War’. A clear difference between government, armed forces, and civilians was characteristic of the interstate war, as Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) pointed out. From the second half of the 17th century, war was waged like this in Europe and later elsewhere. If one didn’t stick to it, it was a war crime. This division of labour collapsed after the Second World War.

Is it a psychological burden for soldiers not to know whether they are shooting at other soldiers or children?

For the soldiers this is a very big burden, especially because their opponent is so weak. It would be nice if we had conventional wars like the Falklands War again, but in many ways our situation resembles the Thirty Years’ War. In Syria there is actually no army, only different militias. Some are controlled by foreign powers. Turkey, Iran, Russia, the

US — everyone is interfering. Nobody knows what they’re doing. Only one thing is certain: The civilians are suffering terribly.

In Gaza and Lebanon, too, the distinction between soldiers and civilians no longer applies. How does Israel deal with this?

This problem cannot be solved well, but Israel has solved it well enough to survive — so far. The impact on Israeli society is very harsh. One problem is that the army loses unless it wins. The guerrilla wins as long as it doesn’t lose. That’s why there’s never-ending war, knife attacks, suicide attacks, and rockets.

You see feminism and gender as important causes for the weakening of Western civilizations. You think the situation would be better if only men were in charge?

The men have almost given up without a fight. Women need us men for two purposes: fathering children and protection. Both are omitted today. We’ve grown weak. That may be the secret of feminism. It is not for nothing that Putin is against feminism. The Russian soldiers are ready to do things that others no longer can or want to do. In war, you need not only good technology but people who are willing and able to cut throats. Maybe the Russians have the best army today.

A 19th century portrait of Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) by the German painter Karl Wilhelm Wach (1787-1845).

Josephus Daniels (1862-1948), who served as US Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1921.

Naval History & Heritage Command

US Department of Defense

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Russian soldiers marching during a ceremony welcoming then-US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in March 2011. “Maybe the Russians have the best army today,” says Van Creveld.

In history, there used to be important female rulers. What is the main problem with the role of women today?

A society is born in which there is simply no more room for men. You can hardly make a move or say a word without being accused of sexual harassment. Right now the whole world is making fun of Europe, the US, and Canada. They’re not men anymore, they say. They can’t handle their own women. How are they supposed to fight? Feminism is the largest and best organized penis envy in the world. Women always believe that what men do is more important and better than what they do. But they always start 100 years too late. When the men jump off the rooftops tomorrow, the women will follow them.

Do you criticize the acceptance of women as soldiers in the army?

The US Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels (1862–1948) once said: “You can’t treat a woman like a man.” It won’t work. When you have women with you, the disciplinary problems start. You have to draw a line, and that line is on the fighting troops. Otherwise you will be left without men in the long run, because they will say: If women can do it, it is no longer an honour for me to do it.

Sport is taken much more seriously today than war. Nobody lets men fight women there. The stands would be empty. Also in the gladiator games of the Romans, opponents were as equal as possible. It’s different with the army because we don’t take war seriously anymore.

Should migrants from patriarchal societies be enticed to join our armies?

That’s what the ancient Romans did. From the time of Augustus they allowed more and more Teutons into their armies. In the end, there was no Roman army any more. Up to the commander, it consisted only of Teutons and barbarians, and they no longer defended the Roman Empire. What was worse, there was a separation between government and soldiers. Those who could fight could not rule, and those who ruled could not fight. This separation is very dangerous in the long run.

In your book you criticize today’s education in family and school. You claim it leads to a lack of independence. Is independence important for a soldier?

War is marked by insecurity, more than any other human activity. That’s why everything goes wrong. It doesn’t work

24 Summer/Fall 2018

without independence. War requires the independent cooperation of all soldiers, from the common soldier to the general. In addition, the battle varies greatly according to war and enemy. The ability and willingness to take initiative and work independently are therefore indispensable. The main problem is: How to combine independence with discipline?

Which armies have solved this problem best?

The German armies between 1870 and 1945; ideally, discipline and initiative should mutually reinforce each other. That’s the ideal. How to do this is a difficult question and it also depends on the culture. Some things can be demanded from a German soldier but not from an American soldier and vice versa.

And Israel’s army?

Israel is the most undisciplined country in the world I know. It used to be an advantage in terms of initiative. Today, I’m not sure anymore. The main problem is that

for years we have been fighting people who are so weak that they are not really opponents. When you fight a weak opponent, you become weak. That’s the same with games.

Books have been written about war games, according to which there is a lot of similarity between war and games.

Many rules of the game apply to war and vice versa. In many ways, war is not a continuation of politics but a violent form of play.

You have a high opinion of the present Russian army. How do you see China’s army?

It’s hard to say. The Chinese haven’t fought a war for many years. They’ve never been a military people. The Mandarin [civil servant of the Chinese state administration] was always above the military. It’s a Confucian society and Confucius was everything but a militarist. I met many young officers during a two-week visit. The commands go from top to bottom, but no proposal goes from bottom to top. If China is ever in battle, I believe that the soldiers’

This map, property of the Department of History of the US Military Academy, shows some of the tactics used along the Western Front during World War I.

US Department of Defense

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lack of independence will be a problem. They are not used to thinking for themselves. When they have to, they feel insecure.

You’ve written 33 books. Your last one, Hitler in Hell, is a fictional autobiography, not a non-fiction book.

It’s not a novel either. Nothing is fictional. Everything is based on facts. I tried to write a fictional autobiography, as Hitler would have probably written after his death. Like so many historians, I’ve been involved with Hitler for years. But three years ago, I noticed something: Nobody wrote about how Hitler saw himself. I found this question very interesting. Hitler always saw himself as a good person who, if it had only been for himself, would not have hurt a fly. “But when it comes to the interests of the people, I get ice-cold”, he said. I thought: Perhaps this is the true core of Hitler, at least in his own eyes. He was not like Stalin or Göring, who were not interested in human suffering. Hitler felt responsible for the death of every soldier. That’s why he never wanted to see cities destroyed.

But Hitler’s last order was against the German people.

This happened in a moment of despair. His will (testament) doesn’t mention it. It says there that the German people will continue to exist. What distinguishes Hitler from other terrible personalities of history is that he acted against his will. He kept saying that. In my opinion, Hitler forced

himself internally to commit these terrible crimes, and that is exactly what made him so terrible himself. There is something unnatural about it, something perverse. Stalin was not a pervert but a Caucasian tribal chief who had grown a hundred times larger. Genghis Khan apparently had no problem with his crimes either. It’s not like Hitler. He wasn’t comfortable with it. It has also given him a certain humanity.

Your family and your people have suffered more under Hitler than under any other ruler.

It is impossible to write a good biography if you hate the person portrayed as much as practically all Hitler biographers do. Therefore I hesitated for years until I started to write a different kind of Hitler biography. To explain this, I added a few pages at the end of the book about my family and myself.

The last four years of his life, when the war was already lost, Hitler put all his energy into destroying the Jewish people.

That’s right. He wrote about it again in his will. It was demonic, but what made it more demonic was that he didn’t feel comfortable with it. This man had something profoundly perverse that is not so easy to find in other mass murderers.

Stefan Beig is a freelance journalist in Vienna.

26 Summer/Fall 2018

Burke, Prophet of PeaceM a r k D o o l e y

R ussell Kirk begins his wonderful biography of Edmund Burke, A Genius Reconsidered, with the following

observation: “In College Green, at the gate of Trinity College, near the heart of Dublin, stand the handsome statues of Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith.” In the final chapter of that book, Professor Kirk reflects:

“If the fine statue of Burke stands beside that of his friend Oliver Goldsmith in College Green, Dublin — why, they will remain as symbols of a human order that has not been pulled down altogether. But if those statues of Burke are one day no longer to be seen — well, their vanishing will be a sign that humankind has been expelled from what Burke called ‘this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue’. Humanity will have been thrust into Orwell’s dystopia — into the realm of Chaos and old Night, described by Burke as ‘the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow’.”

The good news is that those statues are still standing today. The sad truth is that this monument may be the last remnant of Burke’s legacy in Ireland. In 2016, when the Irish were celebrating the birth pangs of their State in 1916, there was scant mention of Burke in the media or in official commemorations. Is it that Ireland has, in fact, fallen into the “antagonistic world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow”?

The complexities of Irish identity

Many Irish people would claim that, with the receding influence of the Catholic Church, we have indeed opted for madness over the world of reason, order, peace and virtue. While that may be so, it still does not account for the fact that Burke is largely absent from the modern Irish imagination. After all, in a country that has been under siege from Jacobinism of various strains for the past century, you might think that Burke’s passionate plea in defence of decency over destruction would still resound. That this is not the case, has, I believe, more to do with the complexities of Irish identity than with any outright repudiation of Burke’s enduring message.

Firstly, the identity of modern Ireland is bound up with the so-called ‘Rising’ of Easter 1916, when a group of revolutionary idealists sought to win independence from Britain. It was a violent uprising that lasted less than a week, but which caused mass casualties and untold carnage. Had the British not responded by mercilessly executing the protagonists, the whole episode would have been written

off as a disaster. However, once the executions began, the Rising took on a mythic dimension which has ingrained itself in the Irish psyche. The leaders, such as Padraig Pearse and James Connolly, are now revered as martyrs through whose ‘courageous sacrifice’ the Irish State was born.

The most significant consequence of the Rising was that it eclipsed the noble tradition of peaceful nationalism. Those who had sought to achieve ‘home rule’ without resort to the gun were consigned to oblivion. Those, in other words, who believed Ireland could achieve independence through reform rather than revolution were rejected in favour of those committed to ‘blood sacrifice’. I do not say that the leaders of the 1916 Rising would have approved of the so-called ‘armed struggle’ waged by the IRA through the decades that followed. What is certain, however, is that the fanatical Jacobins of Irish republicanism sought to justify their terror campaign by posing as heirs to the 1916 ‘martyrs’.

I think it true to say that Burke would have perceived both the leaders of 1916, and the nationalist terror squads that subsequently claimed their legacy, as enemies of “the ancient civil, moral and political order”. There is little doubt that he would have sided with those who sought to secure independence by purely peaceful means. This, however, is not because he wanted to uphold the British ascendancy in Ireland. What is often overlooked is that while Burke’s father was a Protestant, his mother’s family, the Nagles — with whom the young Burke lived for six years in Cork — were members of the Catholic gentry. Indeed, his mother’s deep devotion to the old faith inspired Burke to become one of its most ardent defenders. Reflections on the Revolution in France was, lest we forget, written in furious opposition to the anti-Catholic invective of a pamphlet produced by the Revolutionary Society in 1789. What most vexed Burke was that the Society found common cause with the French Jacobins because both were dedicated to eradicating the old Catholic order.

It is true that Burke was committed to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and to the Protestant succession. This, however, did nothing to dampen his zeal in defence of the subjugated Catholics of Ireland. While living in Cork, he had seen the effect of the anti-Catholic penal codes under which his family were forced to live. That is why, throughout his life, he sought to have those codes repealed, and it was due primarily to him that the Catholic Relief Act was passed in 1778. This act, which Burke drew up, gave property rights to Roman Catholics in both England and Ireland. It led, in 1780, to the infamous Gordon Riots — Lord George Gordon himself accusing Burke of having been directly responsible for the whole fiasco. It also resulted in Burke losing his parliamentary seat for Bristol.

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Even as his life drew to an end, Burke persevered with his moral crusade on behalf of Irish Catholics. In this regard Professor Kirk highlights a relatively unknown but most significant fact:

“One product of the old Burke’s wisdom … was the foundation of the seminary for Irish Catholics in Maynooth, in which Burke had a large hand. Maynooth was meant to elevate the intellects of the Irish priests, so helping to save Ireland from Jacobinism; and very much had Maynooth been needed. Though Burke failed in his attempt to place control of the college entirely in the hands of the Catholic clergy, its establishment with governmental approval and participation was Burke’s final success in his war upon the Penal Laws.”

It is largely thanks to Edmund Burke, therefore, that Ireland’s national seminary was established. Why, then, has subsequent history failed to acknowledge, let alone thank him, for this remarkable accomplishment? As I see it, the answer lies in the fact that the Irish Church did not, as Burke had hoped, always stand between Ireland and Jacobinism. Indeed, there were moments in Irish history when the Church became synonymous with the nationalist cause. That is, rather than defending Ireland from what Burke called “a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists”, the Church often took their side.

To repeat, Burke would have considered the seizure of the General Post Office (GPO) by the insurgents of 1916, as an act akin to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Likewise, the ‘armed doctrine’ of Sinn Fein and the IRA would have appalled him, as would the current attempt by Sinn Fein to “massacre by judgments, or otherwise, those who make any struggle for their old legal government, and their legal,

hereditary, or acquired possessions”. Surely, however, what would have wounded him most was the way in which the Catholic Church very often gave comfort to those Irish Jacobins in their so-called ‘armed struggle’ — a struggle that traced its origins to the Jacobin-inspired uprising of 1798 by Theobald Wolfe Tone. Hence, no Burkean could have supported violent nationalism as it evolved following 1916 because no Burkean could ever subscribe to any movement that uses terror or tyranny to perfect people against their will. Consequently, once Irish Catholicism bedded down with nationalism, Burke was simply eclipsed in the Irish mind — even by those constitutional nationalists who also clearly perceived the link between the French Jacobins their latter-day Irish descendants.

The admiration of a liberal

One person who did evoke him, most notably in his book The Great Melody, was UN statesman, scholar, parliamentarian and Irish journalist, Conor Cruise O’Brien. O’Brien’s Burkeanism was formed from his equally intense detestation of ‘armed doctrine’, a fact that led him to become the most trenchant critic of Sinn Fein-IRA in Irish politics until his death in 2008. In fact, as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, it was O’Brien who, through Section 31 of Broadcasting Act, banned Sinn Fein-IRA from the Irish airwaves. Throughout his long career, O’Brien was to Sinn Fein-IRA what Burke was to the French Jacobins. For example, in his book Ancestral Voices, he writes:

“For most of my life … I did not seriously question what Irish nationalism was about. I was led to do so when the offensive of the Provisional IRA began in 1971. This was,

A view of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, near Dublin, which was officially established in 1795.Finaghy

28 Summer/Fall 2018

and is, a major convergence of religion and nationalism: a Catholic and nationalist offensive, not only (as claimed) against a British occupation but against the Protestant and unionist population of Northern Ireland: a kind of Holy War.”

Despite his deep admiration for Burke, O’Brien was not a conservative in the Burkean mode. He was a quintessential Enlightenment liberal and a member of the Irish Labour Party. And, like all good Enlightenment liberals, he perceived the main threat to the Enlightenment as stemming from religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Writing in On the Eve of the Millennium (1994), he states: “Around mid-century, with the processes of thought that led to Vatican II, the Church had seemed to be coming to terms with the Enlightenment. But the present Pope [John Paul II], with formidable pertinacity — and an ingenuity which had seemed hardly less formidable until recently — has managed to repeal Vatican II in spirit … beyond that, the objective is nothing less than the repeal of the Enlightenment itself.”

Responding to such regular pronouncements, Roger Scruton wrote in a 1986 review of O’Brien’s book Passion and Cunning: “Those who speak for Reason tend to see only darkness and superstition in their opponents. People like the Pope, therefore, who believe that a world without obedience is a world without sense, are scarcely likely to make any impact on the apostles of Enlightenment.” Scruton concludes, however: “On the other hand, O’Brien is a student of the French Revolution. He is aware that Reason too can become a god.”

O’Brien was indeed aware of this, which is why he could write with confidence that, while it seems to be widely assumed in “most circles to the left of centre, that

the true liberal must be sympathetic, if not necessarily to all revolutions, at least to the French one, whose intellectual origins were in the later Enlightenment and whose most memorable rhetoric is resolutely liberal. Yet surely there is validity, from a liberal point of view, in the Burkean distinction between limited revolutions, like England’s Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution, and limitless, totally innovative ones, like the revolution in France, which claim to extend the boundaries of liberty but in fact result in successive mutations of despotism.”

While Burke would have wholeheartedly supported O’Brien’s contention that the “communists were the direct heirs of the Jacobins”, I doubt he would have been so quick — given his history — to subscribe to O’Brien’s view that religion was the problem and not something which could also supply a cure. Indeed, the fact that Sinn Fein have subsequently been revealed to be, what Burke described, as “a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists”, people for whom Marxist dogma is still the only respectable political creed, only proves that they were, in reality, contemptuously hostile to all religion.

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke spoke of the Church as the “first of our prejudices, not a prejudice destitute of reason, but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom”. He would, to repeat, have decried any unholy alliance between the Church and the new Jacobins, but he would have also insisted that, in opting for Enlightenment over religion, we “cast away the coat of prejudice” leaving nothing but “naked reason”. For it is only prejudice — as custom and virtue — which “renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts”. As such, Burke — as he did in his lifetime thanks to the influence of his Protestant father and Catholic mother — would have looked to both the Protestant and Catholic traditions in order to find common ground and to conserve the best in both. He would have done this because he believed the churches, despite their flaws, “do not look to the paltry pelf of the moment, nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence, in the permanent part of their nature”.

Ireland’s prophet of peace

One person who recognised this was public commentator, former senator and journalist, Eoghan Harris. Having made his own journey from socialism to sanity, and having publicly supported O’Brien’s silencing of Sinn Fein-IRA, Harris saw much more clearly the full scope of Burke’s political philosophy and vision. It was Harris who wrote David Trimble’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1998. Trimble was former First Minister of Northern Ireland, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and architect of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. In his capacity as adviser to Trimble, Harris penned a speech that would dramatically

Spudgun67 / CCA-SA 4.0 International

A plaque honouring Burke in Leicester Square, London.

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resurrect Burke as someone whose insights could bring lasting peace to Ireland.

Harris’s speech was not only littered with references to Burke, but it employed his political vision as a roadmap for lasting peace in Ireland. Both “the Catholic and Protestant communities of Northern Ireland” must, Harris wrote, leave behind the “dark sludge of historical sectarianism” because “both created it”. He continues: “Each thought it had good reason to fear the other … Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down. None of us are entirely innocent. But thanks to our strong sense of civil society, thanks to our religious recognition that none of us are perfect, thanks to the thousands of people from both sides who made countless acts of good authority, thanks to a tradition of parliamentary democracy which meant that paramilitarism never displaced politics, thanks to all these specific, concrete circumstances we, thank god, stopped short of that abyss that engulfed Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia and Rwanda.”

That is something you would never have read in Conor Cruise O’Brien, but in that statement we see the true spirit of Burke. In those words, we hear Burke the Catholic, Burke the Protestant, Burke the statesman, Burke the anti-utopian pragmatist, Burke the anti-fascist — Burke the prophet of peace. Unlike O’Brien, Harris saw clearly that Burke would have been the first to recognise the threat faced by Ulster Unionists from Nationalist Jacobins. Conversely, he would also have been the first to declare that Northern Ireland was indeed a “cold house for Catholics”, and that the long history of Irish Catholicism could not be reduced to those elements within the Church that gave blessing and support to armed doctrine. In reviving Burke from the ashes of historical amnesia, and in rescuing him from “the whole clan of the enlightened among us”, Eoghan Harris showed how his genuinely conservative vision provides the best path forward for modern Ireland. For this is a vision of reconciliation in which, as Burke put it, the “errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable”. Still, “we compensate, we reconcile, we balance. We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men. From hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition.”

The statue of Burke still proudly stands in the grounds

of Trinity College as a reminder of the ever-present threat from our homegrown Jacobins. This is not the Burke of Conor Cruise O’Brien but the Burke of Russell Kirk, Eoghan Harris, and Roger Scruton. It is a monument that stands before us not as an appeal to Enlightened reason, but as a warning against those armies of darkness which perennially threaten the fragile forces of democracy and decency. And it is a warning that tells us simply that “life being short and experience limited, the individual — even the wisest man of his age — is comparatively foolish; but through the experience of man with God, and through the experience of man with man, over thousands of years, the species has a wisdom, expressed in prejudice, habit, and custom, which in the long run [always] judges aright.”

Mark Dooley is an Irish philosopher and writer. He is the author of several books, including The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard‘s Ethics of Responsibility (Fordham UP, 2001), Roger Scruton: The Philosopher of Dover Beach (Continuum, 2009), Why Be a Catholic? (Burns & Oates, 2011), and Conversations with Roger Scruton (Bloomsbury, 2016). He writes a regular column for the Irish Daily Mail.

The famed statue of Edmund Burke at the entrance of Trinity College Dublin being admired by two gentlemen in December 1869.

30 Summer/Fall 2018

A Parable for the Fall of the WestF r a n ç o i s L a C h o ü e

I f you open the most recent French edition (2011) of Jean Raspail’s masterpiece, Le Camp des Saints, you

might be startled. In the new preface, mysteriously entitled “Big Other”, the novelist reflects upon the reception of his book over the years. Raspail estimates that 87 criminal charges could be filed against him if Le Camp des Saints were to be published today. Hatred, racism, xenophobia, white supremacism, a lack of compassion for so-called ‘refugees’: Long is the list of Raspail’s alleged sins against the dogma of ‘political correctness’.

Fortunately, Raspail’s novel — the very first of his books, actually — was published in 1973 in a France that still granted citizens much more freedom of expression than it does today. This is why the author of Le Camp des Saints escaped any attempts at censorship. Nevertheless, his book has never ceased to be controversial — and as the subject of his infamous work of fiction has increasingly become reality, the debate over his novel has become more heated than ever.

The novel in brief

The genesis of the book began in the 1970s in southern France. Jean Raspail was then a young and quite inexperienced writer. He was enjoying the pleasant weather of the French Riviera immersed in thought as he stared at the deep blue horizon of the Mediterranean. He then anxiously wondered: “What if they came now?” And the young author took out his pen and began to write, as the idyllic landscape around him inspired the fictitious tale of the fall of the West.

He began to narrate the tale of one million immigrants fleeing the shores of the Ganges where they were suffering from starvation; men, women, children: a peaceful army without weapons with nothing to lose — and everything to expect from the Old World, Europe, the West; countless ships — rusted and antiquated vessels — setting sail from the Indian subcontinent. Long, perilous, and inhuman would be their maritime journey across the oceans. Many would drown or die from thirst.

But Raspail’s narration does not solely focus on the immigrant fleet, though he offers rather vivid descriptions of their poverty, grime, promiscuity, and misfortunes. His main interest is describing the reaction of the West. From Paris to Washington, from Rome to Geneva, a vague anxiety is what first greets news of this wretched flotilla. Soon, however, calls for charity, welcome, and

Le Camp des SaintsParis: Robert Laffont, 1973

Earlier French editions of the much reviled dystopian classic.

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brotherly love for the poor and the stranger soon prevail. Politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and clerics across the Western world all come together under the naïve ‘Gospel’ of welcoming these immigrants — whatever the cost may be.

Only a tiny minority of people are sufficiently awake to realize how much their civilization is in danger. Only two countries publicly refuse the eventuality of welcoming the fleet: Australia and Afrikaner South Africa. Meanwhile, in Europe, infernal propaganda is manipulating people’s consciences so that they may more easily let go of any sense of cultural resistance against the foreign ‘invasion’. Radios and newspapers are full of repentant manifestos and appeals to multiculturalism and cultural diversity. A nearly religious frenzy gains hold of French minds.

In Raspail’s novel, only one conservative newspaper is bold enough to publicly break with the growing symphony of ‘welcome’. But its dissident voice is hardly heard. When it is finally clear that the exotic armada of immigrants is disembarking in Provence, the whole nation descends into chaos.

Terrified by the prospect of cohabiting with absolute strangers, the southern half of France chooses the way of exodus. Only a minority of soldiers is brave enough to desperately gather on a strange frontline: on the beaches of the French Riviera. There, led by a French colonel called Constantin Dragasès, these ultimate partisans of European order face the quiet masses of immigrants waiting eagerly to disembark and invade French soil. To shoot or not to shoot? That is the question.

Prophet of submission?

With 15,000 copies sold in 1973, which quickly reached 40,000 in 1975, Le Camp des Saints quickly became a bestseller. Raspail’s success rapidly crossed

French borders. Praised by the late Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations (1996), Raspail’s novel was most notably read — and appreciated — by President Ronald Reagan himself. In conservative circles worldwide, the book has become a true classic in just a few decades. In April 2017, Steve Bannon — then a Donald Trump advisor — explained that the immigration crisis in Europe was actually “an invasion”. He then specified: “I call it The Camp of the Saints.” This was proof that Raspail’s apocalyptic novel has stood the test of time.

Of course, there are some differences between the events painted by the novelist and today’s crisis in Europe. In the novel, immigrants come in one, single wave; they are undoubtedly peaceful but no further details are given about their religion (which is probably Hindu). In today’s Europe — mainly France, Italy, and Germany — many illegal immigrants come from Africa or the Middle East. A great number are Muslim and some have arrived in Europe with nothing less than aggressive and violent intentions. Indeed, some of the terrorists involved in the 2015 Bataclan slaughter in Paris had originally come to Europe as ‘refugees’.

Still, the thesis of Le Camp des Saints does indeed eerily resemble the situation that we in Europe are currently experiencing. Some examples? The intense “refugees welcome” propaganda; the suicidal blindness of the so-called elites; and the absolute reign of political correctness. In France, when a terror attack occurs, the priority of journalists is to remain sensitive and prevent lumping terrorists together with immigrants, rather than to question the ideology of multiculturalism that has facilitated the occurrence of such incidents in the first place.

One major theme in Raspail’s book is the attitude of the Catholic Church, whose inordinate compassion for

This small sail freighter carrying 162 Haitians was intercepted by US Coast Guard personnel.

US Coast Guard

32 Summer/Fall 2018

the incoming fleet relegates the Church and its followers to civilizational suicide. This aspect of the novel echoes powerfully with Pope Francis’ current pontificate and His Holiness’ repeated appeals to welcome indigent foreigners. Philippe de Villiers, a Catholic and prominent French conservative, has even nicknamed Francis “the Pope of Le Camp des Saints”.

Raspail himself, quite pessimistic about the possibility of the West to prevail over “migratory submersion”, stated in 2011 that “in order to push back immigrants, we ought to be firm. But that is impossible because Christian charity prohibits it. In some way, Christian charity leads us to disaster”.

Although Raspail himself is a traditionalist Catholic, he has thoroughly developed the idea of “the treason of clerics”, thus echoing G.K. Chesterton’s criticism of “Christian ideas gone mad”. Nevertheless, intellectual integrity must lead people to recognize that Christian social doctrine — especially Thomistic thought — preaches filial piety and reasonable patriotism. It also legitimates the defence of national identity against foreign threats.

It is worth recalling that the title of Raspail’s novel itself is a biblical quotation from The Book of Revelation: “They surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city”. Taking up this theme, the African prelate, Cardinal Sarah, last year confessed to a French right-wing media outlet: “I fear that the West might die. You are being invaded by other cultures, other peoples that will dominate you”.

Many people consider Raspail a prophet, which seems especially apt when one remembers that his dystopian

novel was written forty years ago. However, he himself is averse to such notions. If one were ever to meet Raspail and congratulate him for his foresight and wisdom, he would surely ridicule you. He is fond of reminding people that he is neither an oracle nor a theorist. He is merely a novelist. Le Camp des Saints is nothing more than a work of fiction — and the author offers no solutions at the end of the book. The tragedy is that reality today now resembles what was supposed to be a mere fiction.

Preserving ancient roots

A prolific writer, Jean Raspail has published forty books, ranging from his famed apocalyptic novel to travel writing. Born in 1925,

his literary oeuvre is broad and eclectic — and cannot be limited to Le Camp des Saints. His works are, however, all characterized by a sense of decadence and the fear of loss — the loss of an established civilization, one ruined by vulgarity and the ‘God Progress’.

At the same time, this gentleman-writer has explored countless countries on the other side of the world. In 1949, with fellow Catholic boy scouts, Raspail canoed from Quebec to New Orleans, in the footsteps of the French missionaries and explorers who built ‘New France’ during the 17th and 18th centuries. In his logbook, entitled En canot sur les chemins d’eau du Roi (By Canoe on the King’s Waterways), Raspail pays tribute to the deep respect French adventurers showed to Indian tribes, which was directly opposite to the English attitude.

In fact, there is a long-running romance between the writer and the Americas: In 1952, Raspail organized a motorized tour from Patagonia to Alaska. These travels provided Raspail with enough material to write numerous books dedicated to ‘Tierra del Fuego’ and to the last indigenous tribes living in those remote and frozen lands.

Raspail’s works are full of disdain for the absurd ‘cult of progress’ that has ended in the total destruction of those primitive yet noble cultures. Raspail has even expressed a somewhat astonishing enthusiasm for a French adventurer who, in the 1860s, became the self-proclaimed ‘King of Araucanía and Patagonia’ and dedicated himself to the preservation the Mapuche Indian tribe. (His Moi, Antoine de Tounens, Roi de Patagonie, published in 1981, tells this tragic tale.) Having defended the rights of indigenous populations to live on their land according to their own

Jean Raspail in his apartment in Paris in December 2015.Fabrice Bluszez / CCA-SA 4.0 International

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ancestral customs, how can anyone now accuse Raspail of racism?

He is also a recipient of two French literary awards: the Grand Prix du Roman and the Grand Prix de literature, awarded by the Académie française. If one had to categorize and qualify the literary genre in which Raspail works, ‘exotic’ might be a good adjective. The last compilation of his works, published in France in 2015 under the title Là-bas, si loin (Over There, Far Away) perfectly illustrates how his novels are an invitation to travel — travelling across oceans, travelling across ages. Raspail’s own dreams of a restored French monarchy — Sire (1991) and Le Roi au-delà de la mer (2000) — and his evocations of fictional city-states of Eastern Europe — Sept cavaliers (1993) and Les Royaumes de Borée (2003) — have become legendary in French literary (and conservative) circles.

It is only by reading his works — and getting to know that Raspail’s work is not built on heartless satires

or ridicule of ‘the other’ but rather on the amazement and enchantment one encounters when encountering the stunning beauty of deep-rooted civilizations — that one discovers the ‘secret message’ of Le Camp des Saints: Behind the bitter depiction of a society in decline is a poignant love song to Christian and Roman culture.

If we truly cherish the fruits of European culture and Western civilization, Raspail urges us, then we have the moral duty to defend it. Otherwise, we may face the fate of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI Dragasès Palaiologos (after whom the French colonel in Raspail’s prophetic novel is named), who was killed while defending the walls of his beloved city of Constantinople from the Ottomans. This is a struggle that is still going on today — as the last sentence of Le Camp des Saints seems to remind us: “The fall of Constantinople is a personal misfortune that happened to us last week.”

François La Choüe is a writer in Paris.

Hungarian National Gallery

“Nikola Šubić Zrinski’s Charge from the Fortress of Szigetvár” (1825) by the German-born Austrian painter Johann Peter Krafft (1780-1856). The siege of Szigetvár in 1566 was, according to Cardinal Richelieu, “the battle that saved civilization.”

34 Summer/Fall 2018

The Brilliance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A n d r é P . D e B a t t i s t a

I n his somewhat autobiographical novel, The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes: “A great writer is, so to

speak, a second government in his country and for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.” This statement best captures the life and work of Solzhenitsyn. He was undoubtedly a great writer — a defining author — who shaped Western attitudes to the Soviet Union. It is through his work that the West got its first glimpse of what life was like in the Soviet Union — the Gulag in the harsh Siberian winter, the pain of internal exile, the soul-crushing atmosphere of a socialist state, the absurdity of trumped up charges, and the tragic reality of living in fear. These images are far more lasting than anything the Soviet Union could have achieved in its, mercifully-brief, 74-year existence.

However, at one point, Solzhenitsyn seemed to fall out of favour

in the West, too. In his famous Harvard Commencement Speech delivered in June 1978, he bemoaned the state of things in the political system where he was living in exile. This was a rallying call for humanity to re-discover its spiritual roots:

“We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the

West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.”

Whether one agrees or not with his assessments, one cannot deny that he had the right credentials to make such statements. A century from his birth and a decade from his death, it is right and fitting to remember this literary giant.

The author as a young man

Solzhenitsyn was born on 11 December 1918. His father died before he was born while his mother refused to re-marry fearing that a new husband would be too strict a stepfather for the young Aleksandr. He spent most of his childhood in the town of Rostov-on-the-Don. He claims to have had a vocation for writing from

a very young age: “Even as a child, without any prompting from others, I wanted

to be a writer and, indeed, I turned out a good deal of the usual juvenilia.” Literature and writing would be a love that would consume him throughout his entire life. In the 1930s he tried to get his writings published, but all his manuscripts were rejected. Mathematics was his second choice.

He began his studies at the University of Rostov. While not his first choice, mathematics would prove to be both a life changer and a life saver. In October 1941, after war broke out, Solzhenitsyn was commissioned to be a driver of horse-drawn vehicles in the Red Army. His mathematical

The European Conservative 35

background saw him transferred to an artillery school where he completed an abridged artillery training programme. He served the Red Army on its front in the Battle of Kursk, in Poland and Eastern Prussia, until 1945. He was then promoted to the rank of Captain and received the Order of the Patriotic War Class II and the Order of the Red Star.

Becoming Ivan Denisovich

During his last year in the army, he corresponded with a school friend. Disenchanted by some aspects of Marxism, his letters contained veiled criticism directed towards Stalin. In the introduction to one of Solzhenitsyn’s most celebrated novels, the poet and essayist, Yevgeny Yevtushenko reflected on the significance of the aftermath of this episode: “His friend, in the name of patriotism, had turned him in. Solzhenitsyn spent a total of eleven years in a special prison, in the camps, and in exile. But the system, for all its cruelty and deceitfulness, turned out to be stupid. It had taught its future gravedigger how to wield a shovel.”

After a harsh and gruelling time in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn had

his life saved after he was transferred to a special camp for scientists to teach mathematics. In 1950, he was sent to a camp for political prisoners in Kazakhstan where he was to serve the last three years of his sentence. His experience as a bricklayer and a labourer within the camp were immortalised in his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In 1953, in the same year in which Joseph Stalin died, he was transferred to perpetual exile in Southern Kazakhstan.

Three years later, in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his explosive speech, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”. It was a speech which was critical of Stalin’s

personality cult and the purges enacted during his time in office. It proved to be providential for Solzhenitsyn. He was freed from exile and returned to Russia where he continued to teach mathematics to support himself.

He wrote in his spare time. In 1958 he completed the manuscript for what would be his first novel — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — finally published in 1962. He would later reflect that he was convinced that he would never see a single line of his work in print during his lifetime.

The political significance of his first novel cannot be underestimated. Its content was undoubtedly explosive. Yevtushenko reflects that Solzhenitsyn “was the first to cut the barbed wire of the camps with the blade he found, and he let in millions of readers, Russian and foreign, to see the Gulag through his eyes and be horrified by it. Reading the book is an excursion inside the shame of Russia and humanity”.

Nonetheless, the novel had a political aim which did not necessarily

please the Gulag survivors. Khrushchev was aware of its publication. He went to great lengths to make sure it was published since he “decided to put his money not on Stalin but on Ivan Denisovich”.

Paradoxically, “the ‘Ivan Denisoviches’ were not particularly thrilled with the book,” says Yevtushenko, “and probably most of them did not even read it. It was the Soviet intelligentsia, which Solzhenitsyn did not like or trust, that raised this novel as its banner.”

Full-time writing

The success of this novel enabled Solzhenitsyn to quit teaching and write full-time. For a while, he seemed to

Dutch National Archives / CCA-SA 3.0 Netherlands

Solzhenitsyn, at the home of Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, speaking to the press, after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

36 Summer/Fall 2018

have been embraced by the Soviet establishment. This began to change after Khrushchev was forced to retire in 1964.

In that same year, editors questioned his novel The First Circle. In 1965, the KGB took possession of his manuscripts and his private archives. In 1966, censors would also take issue with The Cancer Ward — yet another semi-autobiographical novel.

The novels were smuggled and published in Russian outside the Soviet Union. Unauthorised excerpts and translations also appeared in the United Kingdom and Western Europe. Two years later, in October 1970, the Nobel Committee awarded Solzhenitsyn the prize for literature “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”.

The Soviet Government condemned this award and called it a “politically hostile act”. KGB Chief Yuri Andropov was concerned that “[i]f Solzhenitsyn continues to reside in the country after receiving the Nobel Prize, it

will strengthen his position, and allow him to propagate his views more actively”.

Solzhenitsyn was thus forced to decline the opportunity to accept the award in person fearing that he would be barred from re-entering Russia following the ceremony. This did not diminish his determination to chronicle the horrors of the gulags.

In December 1973, the first volume of his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago, was published in Paris. In 1,800 pages, Solzhenitsyn weaves the story of nameless innocent victims and others who “did not live to tell” the tale. It is based on the testimony of some 200 survivors as well as the author’s own experience of a labour camp and exile.

The three volumes tell a story of collective slavery enforced through vast camps and prisons, secret informers and spies, brutal officials and interrogators. Citizens report on their fellow citizens if they believe a “crime against the state” has been committed. These crimes are often

Antonu / CCA-SA 3.0 Unported

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trivial remarks or insignificant actions. The governors and the administrators are both complicit and enslaved. The overall effect is that of a dystopian fantasy (which, unfortunately, was a harsh socialist reality). It popularised the word ‘Gulag’ and highlighted the horrors of the Soviet system. Pravda called it “a fabrication” while foreign radio stations began to broadcast the text. An abridged version of about 470 pages was later published.

KGB arrest and exile

In February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by KGB officers. He was stripped naked, interrogated, charged with treason, and deprived of his citizenship. Later, he was expelled from the Soviet Union. Before his deportation, he predicted that Russia would be free during his lifetime. Leading Sovietologists laughed off his remarks. However, Solzhenitsyn proved to be prophetic.

Before settling in the northeastern US State of Vermont in 1976, he lived in Switzerland for two years. His time in exile was equally productive. During this period, he wrote his multi-volume historical epic on the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel. For many years, only the first two volumes were available in English translations. In early 2017, an anonymous donor funded the complete translation of this work.

In 1978, he was asked to give the Commencement Address at Harvard University. During this speech, he delivered a harsh but pertinent analysis of the problems plaguing the West. His remarks remain as valid now as they were then. He noted that the West was experiencing a decline in courage at every level of governance. He

bemoaned a society obsessed with the letter of the law: “The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyses man’s noblest impulses.”

Spiritual mediocrity, he argued, was forming the basis of a crisis: “The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilisation on the dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs.”

He ends his speech with a rallying call for change: “We shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.” This was Solzhenitsyn at his best and his most prophetic.

Back in the USSR

There is indeed something prophetic in the pronouncements of Solzhenitsyn. He was correct in his arlier prediction that he would return to Russia in his lifetime. In 1990, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, restored Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship. A year later, the charges of treason were formally dropped.

In 1994, Solzhenitsyn made his return trip to Russia. His time in exile had come to an end. He was received by President Boris Yeltsin; he addressed the Russian Duma, had a bi-monthly television programme where he spoke

“First Russian editions of each volume of [Solzhenitsyn’s] ... masterwork, preceding the English translation. ... All three volumes are inscribed and dated by [the author].” Only US$22,000.

Raptis Rare Books

38 Summer/Fall 2018

on various topics, and toured Russia. A writing prize in his name was established in 1997.

His political views remained consistent. He implored Russia to be mindful of its historical roots and not to adopt the western liberal-democratic model indiscriminately. In this regard, he was rather disappointed with both President Gorbachev and President Yeltsin’s reforms.

A WikiLeaks cable sent in the wake of a meeting between US Ambassador William J. Burns and

Solzhenitsyn notes the following: the Russian author “positively contrasted the eight-year reign of Putin with those of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, which he said had ‘added to the damage done to the Russian state by 70 years of communist rule’. Under Putin, the nation was rediscovering what it was to be Russian, Solzhenitsyn thought.”

Nonetheless, this support wasn’t unqualified. He was saddened at the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and was critical of Vladimir Putin’s decision to have

Gaspard / CC BY 2.0

A modern artistic woodcut made by one of Solzhenitsyn’s many admirers.

The European Conservative 39

all regional governments appointed rather than elected. By the time this meeting had taken place, Solzhenitsyn’s health had deteriorated.

He died of heart failure on 3 August 2008. His body lay in state at the Russian Academy of Sciences where thousands of mourners came to pay their respects. His funeral service was held in the historic Donskoy Monastery according to the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church. President Dimitri Medvedev and then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were in attendance. He was buried in the grounds of the monastery. Outside the gates of the monastery lies a mass grave which contains the remains of many who died during Stalin’s purges.

A warning to the West

As an author, Solzhenitsyn was an observer, a commentator, and an activist. Through his work, the reader gets a glimpse of the emotions, the concerns, and the hopelessness of life in Soviet Russia. His use of language reveals the extreme inhumanity of the Gulag system. His words immortalised the pain of those whose lives had been conditioned by Soviet terror. Solzhenitsyn was unique in that he was truly a product of the Soviet Union.

Yevtushenko reflects: “It is important to remember that no matter how much Solzhenitsyn hated Soviet power; he was not a pre-Revolutionary intellectual, but very much a Soviet one.” Having been raised in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was a committed atheist. However, he emerged from the Gulag as a committed Christian.

His re-discovery of Christianity — specifically Russian Orthodoxy — would shape his worldview. It moulded

his understanding of the human person. However, it also shaped his political views. He was suspicious of the prevailing models of Western democracy because they did not take into account the historical and the cultural roles of Christianity. Democracy which is based on the ‘letter of the law’ can never help the human person or society reach fulfilment. Spirituality was not a tangential aspect but a necessity.

The Christian dimension of Solzhenitsyn is often overlooked. When interviewing Solzhenitsyn for his masterful biography, Dr. Joseph Pearce noted that when presented with a list of great Christian authors — including Chesterton, Belloc, Tolkien, Waugh, and Newman — the author “chuckled infectiously” and signalled that he knew of such authors and their current unpopularity in the West. Pearce argues, “he evidently saw them as kindred spirits who had shared a similar fate to his own at the hands of the West’s secular humanist critics”.

Solzhenitsyn was, thus, more than the author who shed light on the Gulags. He was also the chronicler of a society that wilfully rejected God, imposed its own secular religion, and destroyed itself in the process. He wrote of a society that had rejected the idea of humanity being created in the image and likeness of God, and which had instead proposed that it should be moulded into a new socialist creation. His work sounded warning bells for our times. Alas, they have not yet been heeded.

André P. DeBattista is a researcher and occasional columnist. He is a Visiting Lecturer at the Pastoral Formation Institute of the Archdiocese of Malta.

Amazon.com

40 Summer/Fall 2018

Natural Law, Social Justice & the Crisis of the West

R y a n T . A n d e r s o n

S ome people think social justice is a 20th century invention of left-leaning thinkers, but this starts the

history of social justice midstream. To understand its true meaning, we must look farther back to its real historical origins.

The first known use of the phrase ‘social justice’ was by a Jesuit Thomist, Luigi Taparelli, in his multi-volume work published between 1840 and 1843 titled  Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto (A Theoretical Treatise on Natural Law Resting on Fact). I want to emphasize two arguments that Taparelli highlighted by coining the new phrase ‘social justice’: first, that man is social by nature and belongs to many societies and, second, that man has natural duties to others in justice.

Taparelli created the phrase ‘social justice’ to highlight that there are societies in between individuals and governments. He wanted to avoid both the individualistic and the collectivistic temptations. He wanted to point out that the truth was somewhere in between. He wanted to highlight that, as a matter of nature, man is a social being. This places duties on individuals — duties people have to their family, to their church, to their community. It also places limits on government — that government is limited by the reality of the natural family, that government is limited by the prerogatives of religious communities, that government is limited by the authority of local communities.

But I want to focus here on the duties because one aspect of the crisis of liberty in the West is that we no longer realize we have unchosen duties. A sound understanding of our duties, however, gives us one of our best reasons for respecting liberty — to have the freedom to fulfil our duties.

This, after all, is precisely how James Madison understood religious liberty. As he wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance, “[t]he Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man” because of a prior duty to seek out the truth about God and the created order. “What is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”

Indeed, one can understand many of the religious liberty threats in the West today as partly the result of people no longer thinking there are duties to the Creator. If there are no special duties to God, then there should be no special religious liberties either.

Something similar may be the case for the economy. Economic freedom is meant to give us the space to fulfil our economic duties: the duty to work to support our families, the duty to work hard and be a good employee so as not to waste our talents or our employer’s time and money, the duty to serve our customers, the duty to serve our communities, and so on. The purpose of economic freedom was to allow people the space to fulfil these duties.

Social justice is about fulfilling our duties to the various societies of which we are a part, and it is about the state respecting the authority of the many societies that make up civil society.

Take, for example, the society known as the family. The family is a natural society with its own nature and integrity. Because of the natural reality of the family, we have certain obligations. If you are a husband or a wife, you have

Archivum Romanum Societatis Jesu

A portrait of Itaian priest Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio SJ (1793-1862), who seems to have coined the term ‘social justice’.

The European Conservative 41

certain duties to your spouse. If you are a parent, you have certain duties to your children, regardless of whether or not you ever chose them. And children, not Social Security administrators, have duties to their parents, especially as they age. It is the natural reality of father and child, mother and child, that creates the relationship of authority and responsibility.

This places limits on what the government can do. The government is not free to recreate the family. The government is not free to usurp the authority of parents over the education of their children or adult children over the care of their elderly parents.

The same is true for religious organizations, especially if you believe that your church has a divine origin, that it is a divine creation. Government is thus not at liberty to recreate it, to recreate its authority or structure, or to recreate its teachings. Your church is something that is entrusted with a stewardship. The nature of religious authority thus places limits on political authority and places duties upon members of the church.

The state and social justice

None of this, however, says that the state has no role to play in economic justice. It simply means that it must respect

the proper authority of society — a society of societies — as it does so. And this means that the state must also respect the proper authority of economic societies — employees and employers, consumers and producers.

But while respecting their authority and the markets that allow them to interact and fulfil their duties, government can perform certain welfare activities, as Hayek taught us, without distorting market signals and processes. Insofar as government programs are intended to ameliorate the forces of globalization and new technologies distort markets, they are likely to simply make matters worse by prolonging the dying process of outdated industries and preventing the necessary transitions. What a natural law account of social justice would suggest are policies that would empower more people to engage for themselves in the market and flourish.

I can illustrate this with some examples. Consider education. Some ‘taxation-is-theft’ libertarians say children should receive whatever education their parents, extended families, and charities can provide and that there is no role for government. Liberals say education of children is a matter of public concern, and thus government should run schools and most children must attend them. Conservatives have traditionally said, yes, education is a matter of public concern, but justice requires us to respect the authority of parents, and whatever assistance we provide must empower, not replace them. Hence conservative support for school choice: vouchers, education savings accounts, and charter schools — programs that help all students get the best education they can without giving the government an unhealthy monopoly on schools.

The same is true for health care. Consider the standard false dichotomy: If taxation is theft, then we should just leave health care to the market and charities; if health care is a matter of public concern, then government should run it and finance it — the typical libertarian and liberal pitfalls. The conservative alternative has been to create markets in health care while empowering patients to choose, whether through premium support, health care vouchers, tax credits, or what have you.

The details of policy need not bog us down; the concept

A portrait of James Madison, fourth US president, by John Vanderlyn (1775-1852).White House Historical Association

42 Summer/Fall 2018

is what matters. We need to make markets work better and work for more people by empowering more people to be market actors — empowering them to take control of their own lives and flourish.

So now the question is what can be done for working-class families, especially for workers who find their skills less and less marketable in ever-changing markets because of the forces of globalization and new technology. Appeals to natural rights or utilitarianism will not allow us to think

best about the justice in the distribution of costs and benefits of the creative destruction of free trade and globalization and how best to smooth out the rough patches. We need to think through the appropriate roles of various institutions: What does justice require of families and churches, of workers and business owners, of civil society and charitable organizations, of local and national governments? What rights and duties do these various individuals and societies have?

The grand tomb of Leo XIII, who was Pope from 1878 to 1903. Designed by Giulio Tadolini (1849-1918), it is located in the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome.

Marie-Lan Nguyen / CC BY 2.5

The European Conservative 43

In a certain sense, the economic challenges I have mentioned can be classified as partly the result of a deindustrialization making way for the knowledge economy. If Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, which inaugurated modern Catholic social thought, was a response to the industrial revolution, what we now need is a response to the de-industrial revolution. What to do is a question for policymakers. That we need to think about what to do is a demand of justice, and the principles of natural law should inform how we think about it.

Our spiritual crisis

But the challenges of the present moment can be overstated. They can be phrased in a way that makes it seem as if globalization and new technologies simply make people into pawns in a giant chess game, victims of global economic and technological forces outside of anyone’s control. This entirely ignores the importance of human agency and personal responsibility.

Public policy and governmental programs are not, at the end of the day, the main solutions to what threatens freedom in the West. Yes, economic anxiety is a problem, but economic anxiety is partly a result of an underlying anthropological and spiritual crisis that has resulted in an emaciated civil society uniquely ill-equipped to handle our current challenges.

We are all aware of the West’s problems — the empty pews and the drug addictions, the problems of falling male employment and the breakdown of family that results in fatherless children, and the widespread belief that there is no truth, particularly moral truth. Some of these problems have been caused by various economic and technological changes in the past several decades. But I am not a Marxist. I do not believe that the changes in our values and beliefs are simply the result of material forces. Some spiritual crises are the result of bad ideas and ideals, and these bad ideas and ideals have exacerbated our economic challenges.

Bad anthropology has given us natural rights without foundations or directions — a freedom of indifference but not for excellence. Bad anthropology has debased modern man’s mind so that it is unable to distinguish liberty from license, rendering man unable to think about which desires should be acted on, which preferences should be satisfied. Bad anthropology has sought to liberate man from the very communities where he finds meaning and purpose, alienating man from work, from family, and from God.

The result is a working class without the values and virtues needed to flourish in the condition of freedom, and a ruling class more devoted to a global community of elites than to its own communities. The result is a working class increasingly isolated from meaningful relationships and thus more anxious about its future in an age of economic

uncertainty and a ruling class increasingly isolated from its working-class neighbours and thus unaware of their anxieties. The result is a nation — both working class and ruling class — that increasingly lacks a transcendent orientation and thus fails to have even a decent humanistic vision.

If we do not have God for a Father, we will not see our fellow man as our brother. If we are not made in the image and likeness of God, we will not treat every life as created equal and endowed with unalienable rights — indeed, we will view our neighbours as random, meaningless cosmic dust that gets in our way.

The challenge before us, then, is to recover at the very least a common understanding of what human flourishing looks like and how all of us should help to make it a reality for more people. It requires a better intellectual foundation for freedom. It requires the hard work of rebuilding civil society. It requires acknowledging our duties — not to the abstraction of ‘humanity’ but to concrete, particular neighbours. And it requires respecting the freedom of religious communities to do the important work of ministering to the peripheries and forming disciples with loyalties beyond the state.

This means that now is the time for more engagement in the public square, not less. Now is the time for greater involvement in our local churches and synagogues and mosques, for greater involvement in our schools and little

Sean O’Connor / CCA 2.0 Generic

Alasdair MacIntyre speaking at a conference in Dublin of the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry in 2009.

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leagues and less time on our smartphones. And now is the time for more political engagement, not less, pursued more thoughtfully.

Remembering who we are

Everything I have said above has been a reflection on man’s nature as a “dependent rational animal”, in the words of Alasdair MacIntyre.

First, we are animals. We have a nature. Certain things are good and bad for us given the type of animal that we are.

Second, we are rational. We can know our nature and direct our actions accordingly, or not. We do not get to choose what is good or bad for us; we simply get to choose whether we will live in accord with our nature.

Third, we are dependent. We are social creatures. We enter life entirely dependent on our parents, and many of us will exit life in a similar condition of dependence. And all along the way we will depend on family and friends, neighbours and colleagues — farmers and artisans, merchants and bankers.

Our mistakes take place when we forget that we are simultaneously dependent and rational and animal; when we reduce ourselves merely to the level of animal and embrace a crude materialism; when we deny that reason can know truth and embrace scepticism; when we refuse

to embrace our dependence under the illusion of a false sense of self-sufficiency and individualism or when we locate our dependence primarily on government rather than on family and friends and markets and God; when we propose that the government should provide for all our physical needs and that our culture should encourage us to act on our every animal instinct.

We must see that our rational capacities can know the good and that, being self-authors, we must choose the good for ourselves. Of course, there is no such thing as the good life but as many good lives as are imaginable. These good lives will be various ways for dependent rational animals to flourish, and that means that initiative and enterprise, free choice, self-determination, and community are just as truly basic needs as food and shelter — and that fulfilling our duties to God and neighbour is why we were given freedom in the first place.

Ryan T. Anderson  is William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, and is the founder and editor of Public Discourse. This essay is adapted from the annual Calihan Lecture delivered in London in December 2016 at a conference sponsored by the Acton Institute. It originally appeared in Public Discourse and is published here with permission.

Cringe Core / YouTube

Today’s ‘Social Justice Warriors’ have never met an issue that cannot be made into a cause.

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46 Summer/Fall 2018

Krakow: The City that RemembersC a r r i e G r e s s

I t’s a small thing, scarcely noticeable at first. And then as the hours continue, it happens again and again. What is

that trumpeting? And where is it coming from?This is something almost every newcomer to Krakow

has experienced. It is just one small reminder that Krakow is a city of living memory. Every hour on the hour, a trumpeter plays a tune out of the four windows of the bell tower of St. Mary’s Church. It is the hejnał, the warning tune of an impending attack. The song, however, abruptly ends mid-melody, never to finish — a reminder, according to legend, of the Tartar arrow that pierced a medieval trumpeter’s throat. Most would think this nearly 800-year-old event far too lost in history to bother — but not Cracovians. The 1241 invasion is still fresh in their minds.

Krakow is a city with a long memory. Wars, battles, betrayals, saints, heroes, cowards, geniuses, and friends are all themes that have left deep impressions and scars

upon Poland’s second largest city. Today it is vibrant and alive, recovering from the dark, grey, hungry days of Soviet domination, once again reclaiming its unique, urban character that has been honed through one thousand years of East meeting West.

Many associate Krakow with stag parties or Schindler’s List and the nearby former concentration camp Auschwitz. Those dark, dark days when the ashes of fellow-countrymen covered the city in soot from the death camp have also not been forgotten. There is, however, much more to know about Krakow than those terrible five years of terror.

Situated along the Vistula River on flat terrain with no natural defences, Krakow has a history that illustrates why geography matters. The river and surrounding plains gave it a thriving trade economy. Goods and immigrants flowed in from all directions, with invaders not far behind. During its Golden Age of the 15th and 16th centuries, Krakow was a major international centre for trade, exporting salt, lead, and textiles. Throughout most of its history, however, the city lived under the constant threat of aggressive invasion with little to no warning.

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When approaching the city, the first thing one encounters is the Planty Park, or what used to be the first line of defence against invaders. Known today just as the Planty, it is one of the largest parks in the city built upon the plot of land where the Medieval city walls once stood to protect against frequent sieges. The Planty Park includes nearly 2.5 miles (four kilometres) of walking paths that ring the city centre. Fifty-two acres (21,000 square meters) of grass are a ‘green belt’ around the paths, adorned with monuments and fountains. With the exception of Wawel Hill, which had its own fortifications, most of the historic sites of the city are inside the Planty or just beyond it.

After crossing over the Planty, all roads lead to the old city centre: the Rynek Główny, or Market Square. The Rynek Główny holds a special place in the hearts of all Cracovians, and even all Poles. Today the square remains a hub of activity, where one can find all the essentials of daily life, including commerce, news, entertainment, prayer, and food.

The Market Square — or Rynek, as it is commonly referred to — is formed by brightly colored, four and five-story palaces. On the ground floors of many of these buildings are restaurants, cafes and shops, with the upper floors serving as residences.

The Cloth Hall, or Sukiennice, is a long, rectangular commercial building and museum that sits prominently in the square’s centre. It is flanked on the southwestern side by a bell tower, and on the southeastern side by the tiny dedicated to St. Adalbert (or St. Wojciech), the bishop of Prague who brought Christianity to Poland in the 10th century. On the northeastern side of the square, sitting at an angle, is the towering brick Basilica of Our Lady of the Assumption, or Bazylika Mariacka, as it is commonly known. Originally built in 1222, the church predates the square, which is why it does not line up the rest of the square’s symmetry.

The Cloth Hall or Sukiennice, built as a centre for trade during the height of the city’s popularity, is considered the world’s oldest shopping mall. Today, the first floor of the hall is still a place of commerce where artisans sell their handcrafted goods, while the upper floors house the recently renovated Sukiennice Museum, part of the National Museum of Krakow.

This is generally the face of Krakow — what is seen by overnight ‘stag parties’ or quick trips to this intriguing destination — but there is much beyond this vibrant square. Krakow is both the cultural and spiritual heart of Poland, but the city’s history must be looked at more carefully in order to grasp why.

Arkadiusz Frankowicz / CCA SA 4.0 International

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Krakow’s early history

Few cities can claim to have built their history on the legend of a dragon. Smok Wawelski, the dragon who lived at the base of Wawel Hill, was reportedly terrorizing the neighbourhood. Gobbling up livestock, the hungry dragon turned to eating people when the beasts of burden had all been consumed. Many knights bravely fought the dragon, but Smok Wawelski over-powered all of them, making them midnight snacks. That was until the clever prince Krakus (sometimes also called Krak) thought up the ingenious plan to feed the hungry dragon a meal of lamb packed full of sulphur. It turned out to be Smok’s last meal, and the town was free of the dragon menace. The grateful residents made Krakus king and named the town after him, Krakow.

Until the Polish state was formed under the Piast Dynasty, Cracovians were members of various tribes, including the Vistulans, Moravians, Hungarians, and then finally Bohemians. Not coincidentally, Poland as a state came into being under Prince Mieszko I, who was also Poland’s first Christian ruler. Influenced by his wife, Princess Doubravka of Bohemia, the Prince was baptized, along with most of his royal court, on Holy Saturday, 14

April 966. Several decades later, the entire population had abandoned their pagan ways and embraced Christ.

After Christianity spread to Krakow, the city was anxious to establish its Catholic bona fides by naming a patron saint. Since no Cracovian had yet achieved sainthood, they did the next best thing and imported one (after all, trade is their specialty). After negotiating with Roman Church officials, Austrian-born St. Florian (who died around 304) was moved to Krakow in 1184. Legend has it that the horse pulling the wagon with the holy relics stopped just outside the city walls and could not be cajoled into going any further. Deciding it was a sign from Providence, the church of St. Florian was built on that site. The baroque church still stands today despite several fires and new construction.

First Saint

It wouldn’t take long for Polish Krakow to produce its own local saint. Stanisław Szczepanowski (1030-1079) was born of a noble family in Lesser Poland. After studying abroad, the young ‘Stanislaus’ returned to Poland to be made one of the first bishops of the newly converted country. He served

Pko / CCA-SA 3.0 Unported

A view of Market Square in Krakow from the tower of St. Mary’s Church.

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first as the auxiliary bishop and then bishop of Krakow.As bishop, Stanislaus had several run-ins with the

local king, Boleslaus the Bold II. Though historical records are spotty, it is clear that Bishop Stanislaus excommunicated King Boleslaus, probably for his sexual libertinism and cruel treatment of his subjects. The king, in turn, sentenced the good bishop to death for treason.

Though instructed to carry out the death sentence, the king’s henchmen wouldn’t touch the bishop. King Boleslaus was forced to do the dirty work himself, attacking the bishop while he was saying Mass. The king tossed the hacked-up pieces of the holy man into a nearby pond. Miraculously, and much to the king’s dismay, the body of Bishop Stanislaus was later found in one piece. The king fled Poland and was exiled in Hungary, never to return to his homeland. St. Stanislaus was canonized in 1253 and made the patron saint of the country, replacing St. Florian as the Patron of Poland.

Not surprisingly, devotion to St. Stanislaus is still alive today, making the Church of Skalka — the site where the bishop was martyred — the second holiest site in Poland after Jasna Gora, home of Our Lady of Czestochowa. His feast of May 8 is celebrated annually by thousands of people

with a procession of the saint’s relics from Skalka to Wawel Cathedral, where is remains are interned the rest of the year.

The miraculous reconstruction of the saint’s body has taken on deeper meaning in Poland’s history. The country’s Achilles’ Heel in the centuries that followed was political disunity. Poland, in fact, had the largest percentage of noblemen of any European nation, with 8-10% of the population claiming the honour, compared to 2-3% elsewhere in Europe.

While its purpose was to prevent a dictator king, the swelling noble class eventually gave way to a power struggle between them and the ruling elites. This struggle often weakened the great nation and provided opportunities for outsiders to capitalize on weak spots. This, along with an almost chronic inability by the kings to produce a male heir, led to a crisis of authority at crucial points in the country’s history, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries when Poland was partitioned by opposing empires.

St. Stanislaus, as the martyr who was made whole again, became an intercessor for all Poles. He offered a model for unity through the miraculous reunification of his own divided body.

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The interior of St. Mary’s Church (more precisely known as Church of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven).

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Wawel Castle and Cathedral

For centuries, the political heart of Poland beat at Wawel Castle. In the 14th century, King Casimir the Great (1310-1370) was said to have “found a country of wood and made [it] into a country of stone”. The good king expanded Poland’s borders, from the Baltic Sea to the banks of the Black Sea, and fortified the country economically, politically, and culturally. He also invited many Jews to Krakow, giving them privileges and making the city a centre of Jewish life in Medieval Europe at a time when other rulers were expelling and persecuting Jews.

At the height of Krakow’s cultural and political influence, considered ‘The Golden Age’ (1466-1576), the Wawel Court rivalled those anywhere in Europe, hosting nobility from all over western and central Europe. In 1517, King Sigismund the Old married a well-connected Italian, Bona Sforza. The Sforza queen brought the best of the Italian Renaissance with her to Krakow — architecturally and culturally — including many of the best Italian artisans of the time.

More important than the political heart of the castle, however, was the spiritual heart that also beat at Wawel in the cathedral. Starting with the newly established pilgrimage site to venerate the relics of St. Stanislaus in the 14th century, Wawel Cathedral also became the natural location for coronations. Monarchs were anxious to

display the fealty they felt toward the late archbishop, slain at the hands of another king. In 1320, King Władysław the Elbow-high was the first monarch to be crowned at Krakow Cathedral, followed by the coronation of other kings for centuries.

Among the many leaders and holy men and women buried in the Cathedral is St. Jadwiga (Hedwig in English). Canonized by Pope John Paul II, she was a holy leader. Her lasting legacy is establishing the Jagiellonian University (called the Academy of Krakow until 1817) in 1364, making it Poland’s oldest university, which still thrives today. The good queen died prematurely after childbirth in 1399 and bequeathed her fortune to the university. For centuries, the university educated the noble classes in Poland and those of other nations. Its most famous students include Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus), who studied liberal arts there during the years 1491-1495, and Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, who studied there in the 1940s, before and after World War II.

Wawel’s political decline in power and influence can be traced back to the establishment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1596. Because of the new alliance, Wawel and the city of Krakow were edged out of political activity and Warsaw rose in influence because of its close proximity to the vital capital of Vilnius.

Unfortunately, the centuries of the city’s decline were marked by unrelenting difficulties, including political in-fighting, invaders, disease, famine, and fires, only to be topped by the loss of national sovereignty in the 18th century when Poland was partitioned three times by rivalling neighbours. For 123 years, there was no country on the map called ‘Poland’. Though their country was gone, the Poles held onto the national pride and culture. Wawel Cathedral, with its interred saints and national heroes, became a pilgrimage site and rallying point for those thirsting for a lost-Poland. Sovereignty was finally restored at the end of World War I.

City of Saints

No mention of Krakow would be complete without further mention of its most famous resident, Karol Wojtyła, or Pope Saint John Paul II, as he is known today. Wojtyła’s sanctity didn’t spring up out of nowhere, but was honed and shaped by the Catholic ethos that is still alive in the ancient city. Saintly men and women helped build the city and the Church in Krakow, such as St. Stanislaus, St. Jadwiga, St. Stanislaus Kostka, St. Faustina, St. Maximillian Kolbe, St. Simon of Lipnica, St. Hyacinth, and St John Cantius, along with many beatified Catholics (the last step before sainthood in the Catholic Church), and those whose sanctity is remembered today by God alone. Called “the little Rome”, there are few other cities that can boast as many saints or churches as Krakow.

St. Stanislaus in a 16th century painting.

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Today, Krakow maintains its international flair. It is still a crossroad for students, tourists, and pilgrims. The crumbling, grey façades of the communist era have been painted over and repaired. New restaurants and hotels populate the city centre. Hotels like Hotel Stary and the Bonerowski Palace capture old elegance with modern conveniences on the edge of the Rynek, while Hotel Copernius offers similar luxury closer to the Wawel Castle. Fare from near and far can also be found, from street-side kebab shops, to French (Michelin recommended Cyrano de Bergerac), and even Mexican food (Alebriche). But Poland’s own food still gets top billing, from the 800-year-old Wierzynek, to the newcomer, Szara, which features Polish food, along with French and Swedish influences. Krakow turns up the charm with bars and restaurants that dot the city featuring cozy cellars for those frozen winter months.

Unlike other places in Europe, Krakow has maintained its sense of the sacred and Catholic ethos. The city’s living memory, full of recollections of feast, famine, fires, invaders, feuds, and changing fortunes, are a reminder to its people not to get too caught up in fads, fashions, pleasures, and fancies. These are all passing and ultimately unsatisfying. Krakow is a city that remains the wise old aristocratic and faithful woman of Europe who has seen too much, lived through too much, lost too much. And yet, despite all of this, her heart, vibrancy, and spirit have never been snuffed out.

Carrie Gress is a faculty member at Pontifex University and Editor-in-Chief at HelenaDaily.com. She is the author of numerous books, including The Marian Option: God’s Solution to a Civilization in Crisis (TAN Books, 2017), and co-author with George Weigel of City of Saints: A Pilgrim’s Guide to John Paul II’s Krakow. She has lived and worked professionally in Washington, DC, and Rome, and her work has been translated into seven languages. She received her Ph.D. from the Catholic University of America.

Wawel Castle

Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa.

Interior of the Bernardine Church at the foot of Wawel Hill.

The Church of Skalka.Pistal / CCA SA 4.0 International

Jakub Halun / CCA-SA 3.0 Unported

Jerzy Szota / CCA-SA 3.0 Poland

Jorge Lascar / CCA 2.0 Generic

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Communist Terror in Modern FilmF i l i p M a z u r c z a k

L ate last year, we marked two very somber anniversaries: the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution

and the 85th anniversary of the start of the Holodomor, Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine. These were perfect opportunities to educate the world about the horrors of communism. The West desperately needs a crash course in this history. Just recall Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s open praise of Cuban butcher Fidel Castro in

2016, displaying his complete ignorance of the 94 million human lives, according to the Black Book of Communism, that the most murderous ideology in human history claimed during the 20th century.

Two recent films, George Mendeluk’s Bitter Harvest and Andrzej Wajda’s Afterimage, seek to bring the story of communist persecution to international audiences. While the two films are very different, and Bitter Harvest has its obvious flaws, they are moving glimpses of the refusal of both the individual and the nation to give in to communist terror.

Bitter Harvest deals with the Holodomor. If you are asking yourself what the Holodomor was, then you are proving just why a film on this tragic event is necessary. According to a state investigation in post-Soviet Ukraine, the Holodomor claimed four million human lives. In his book Harvest of Sorrow, an account of the enormous human cost of the Soviet collectivization of agriculture,

the late British Sovietologist, Robert Conquest, gave a slightly larger death toll of five million. The Holodomor ranks alongside the Holocaust and Armenian genocide as one of the biggest mass murders in 20th century European history. However, it is much less known than the other two tragedies.

From 1928 to 1932, Joseph Stalin embarked on his ‘Five-Year Plan’ of developing heavy industry and collectivizing agriculture in order to modernize the Soviet Union. The latter met with enormous resistance among the Soviet peasantry, especially in Ukraine. Armed

rebellions broke out, and when Communist Party officials began to requisition grain and livestock, peasants would slaughter all their animals so that they would not have to hand them over to communist thugs.

In order to crush resistance, the Soviet government began to steal firearms from the peasants, while Stalin signed an order for “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class” on 29 December 1929. The ‘kulaks’ were broadly understood to be well-off peasants, although the Soviet state failed to define a kulak with any degree of precision. In an act of class genocide, kulaks were to be shot or deported to Siberia.

Although himself the son of a Georgian cobbler, Stalin became completely Russified to the point of being a racist Russian chauvinist. Starting in 1939, the anti-Semitic Stalin purged the state apparatus of Jews. In 1937, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, initiated its ‘Polish Operation’, ordering at least 111,091 members of the

CCA-SA 4.0 International

The Holodomor Memorial to Victims of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932–1933 in Washington, DC.

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Soviet Union’s Polish minority to be shot and deporting many more to Central Asia.

Stalin didn’t care much for the Ukrainians, either. Stalin scoffed at the notion that the Ukrainians were a nation distinct from the Russians, and so in the 1930s he embarked on a Russification campaign of Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (an eastern rite Catholic Church that recognizes the pope and is in union with Rome but has a different liturgy than the Latin Church) were criminalized and driven underground. Its leaders were sent to the gulags. (It’s worth noting that the Soviets failed to eradicate the Ukrainians’ Christian identity; since 1991, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has experienced an impressive revival.) This was more than just atheism under state communism. The Soviet regime detested these churches because they were distinctly Ukrainian.

In 1932, Stalin also began his war against the Ukrainian peasantry. Between four and five million Ukrainian peasants — a fourth of the rural population of Soviet Ukraine — were starved to death. This was deliberately done to quench Ukrainian peasants’ resistance to collectivization. Stalin ordered that Ukraine produce extraordinary amounts of grain each year. The targets Stalin had demanded were, of course, impossible to attain. Thus, he used this as a pretext to send Komsomols and Communist Party activists to the Ukrainian countryside to requisition every bit of grain. Meanwhile, watchtowers were set up in fields across Ukraine to prevent peasants from taking any grain for themselves and the borders were heavily guarded. Ukrainian peasants trying to flee to neighboring Poland or Romania were shot on sight.

One would think that taking the grain from starving peasants would soften the hearts of at least some communists sent on requisitioning missions, but their testimonies reveal that they were overwhelmingly unaffected. They were genuinely convinced that starving millions of Ukrainians to death was a sacrifice necessary for the party.

Ukraine can boast of the most fertile soil in all of Europe. Under normal conditions, a famine would be impossible there. But the Komsomols were very effective in stealing all the Ukrainian peasants’ grain. Consequently, millions died of starvation. Ukrainians ate everything from the chaff of wheat to horse manure (which contained bits of grain) to stay alive.

Hunger is a dehumanizing state that leads man to cruel, unsavory things. In desperation, some Ukrainian peasants engaged in cannibalism, and there are accounts of parents eating their children to stay alive. Cannibalism has been a source of shame for the Ukrainian diaspora. Sadly, this is how men, regardless of nationality, are sometimes forced to act when trying to survive extreme hunger.

While for years the Holodomor has been little known outside Ukraine, in recent years there have been some attempts at educating the world of this massive crime against humanity. In 2015, a large Holodomor memorial was unveiled near Union Station in Washington, DC. Then, in 2017, George Mendeluk’s film Bitter Harvest was released.

Bitter Harvest

By any measure, the film was a failure. It grossed just half a million dollars on a $21 million budget. The reviews were scathing. According to the film review aggregate site RottenTomatoes.com, only 13% of reviews of the film were positive. Several reviewers noted that while a film about the Holodomor is necessary, this was a wasted opportunity. Is Bitter Harvest really that bad?

Having seen the film, I can say that it was mediocre rather than terrible. It certainly did not deserve such disdain from film critics. Parts of the film are genuinely moving. Its major flaw, however, is that the plot revolves around a very simplistic love story. If Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor is any indication, making a film about ‘love’ set against the backdrop of dramatic historical events is a recipe for disaster.

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Bitter Harvest follows the love story of Yuri and Natalka. (For the record, Yuri is Ukrainian for George.) The rather unoriginal symbolism of Yuri/George fighting the communist, Russian dragon is directly referenced. In a voiceover early in the film, Yuri says: “Before I grew up and learned that dragons are real, and evil roamed the world, I fell in love.”

As a little boy, Yuri falls in love with Natalka, the beauty of his village. While his friends go off to Kyiv to study, he stays behind to be with his beloved, who eventually reciprocates his feelings. However, as the Holodomor starts to devastate Soviet Ukraine, Max finally does go to the big city to study at the art academy. He and Natalka send each other letters. His professor is deported to Siberia. Not even Stalinist genocide can deal a blow to Yuri and Natalka’s love, and they try to escape the surrounding horrors and flee to Canada together.

Sound original? The plot of Bitter Harvest is by no means innovative. Natalka and Yuri are pretty one-dimensional characters; their main features are that they love each other and are proud Ukrainians (and, of course, Yuri is a promising, talented painter). While Yuri and Natalka are forgettable characters, Bitter Harvest does

have its merits. The scenes showing starving Ukrainians are genuinely unsettling without being graphic. The film conveys the sense of looming terror well.

Above all, Bitter Harvest is a moving tribute to the Ukrainian people and their attachment to their national traditions and faith. The film shows an idyllic view of pre-Holodomor rural Ukraine. The Orthodox Church is shown to be at the center of Ukrainian life, and all the characters respect the local priest, Father Ostapovich. (One wonders if perhaps the film’s pro-Christian tone was one reason for Bitter Harvest’s poor reviews in the mainstream media.) As part of their campaign of eliminating the “opium for the masses,” communist thugs steal and desecrate icons from local priests. Father Ostapovich hides the icons and bravely refuses to hand them over, which leads to his martyrdom. This scene by no means idealizes the clergy. Ukrainian priests, both Orthodox and Greek Catholic, steadfastly refused to renounce their faith despite the threats of shootings, prison, and ten-year gulag sentences.

While Bitter Harvest is an average film in terms of its artistic merit, it deserves to be seen by more viewers for its moving depiction of the Ukrainian people’s fidelity

Jaroslaw Goralcyk / CCA-SA 4.0 International

The ‘Memory Candle’ monument, part of the Holodomor Victims Memorial in Kiev, Ukraine.

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to their traditions amidst great persecution. Perhaps in time it will inspire another filmmaker to direct a movie of greater depth and humanity that will be to the Holodomor (and, more broadly, to communist terror) what The Pianist is to the Holocaust.

Afterimage

From an artistic perspective, Afterimage, the other recent film depicting the horrors of communism, is much better than Bitter Harvest. It is the last film by the late Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), one of Poland’s great filmmakers. Wajda’s career spanned more than six decades. A part of Poland’s resistance movement against Nazi Germany during World War II, Wajda frequently depicted Poland’s tragic recent history, including its devastation during the war and fight for freedom from the communist regime.

Wajda’s best-known film is Ashes and Diamonds (1958), starring Zbigniew Cybulski, “the Polish James Dean.” Martin Scorsese named Ashes and Diamonds as one of his 10 favorite films, while in a poll by the Village Voice film critics named it one of the 100 greatest films of all time. Set on the last day of World War II, Ashes and Diamonds tells the story of Maciek, a member of Poland’s anti-Nazi and anti-communist resistance who is ordered to execute Szczuka, a local Communist Party chief. In one of the film’s most moving scenes, Maciek

and a comrade-in-arms are in a bar and light shot glasses of vodka to commemorate their friends who died fighting the Third Reich. While Wajda’s Szczuka is not an entirely unsympathetic figure, his Maciek is a Polish patriot ready to risk his life fighting against all shades of totalitarianism.

Whereas Ashes and Diamonds was, politically, a cautious film, Wajda became increasingly critical of the Communist regime over time. His Man of Marble (1977) tells of the downfall of Mateusz Birkut, a model bricklayer once feted by the regime. Man of Iron, the Palm d’Or-winning 1981 sequel, depicts ‘Solidarity’ right as it was unfolding. Showing footage of Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa, Man of Iron is a loving tribute to Solidarity and was banned by the Communist Party.

Perhaps Wajda’s best-known film on communism (at least to contemporary audiences) is the 2007 Oscar-nominated film, Katyn. It depicts the massacre of 22,000 Polish reserve officers (including Wajda’s own father) by the NKVD. However, the Soviets did not admit to their culpability for the crime until the Gorbachev era, instead placing the blame on the Germans. Only the last scene of Katyn depicts the shooting of Polish officers. In fact, the film is arguably less about the massacre itself than it is about the lie concerning the slaughter in the Katyn Forest. This is a fitting metaphor for Poland’s communist

CCA-SA 4.0 International

A close-up of the plaque at the Holodomor Memorial in Washington, DC.

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regime (and any communist regime, for that matter), which was based on lies.

Afterimage is an effective coda to Katyn. Even if it is not one of Wajda’s greatest films, as many Polish critics have argued (the film received better reviews outside Poland), it is still a powerful swan song for Wajda. This sad, deeply affecting film depicts the true story of Władysław Strzemiński (1893-1952), who within just a few years went from being one of Poland’s most successful painters to dying of tuberculosis penniless, malnourished, and abandoned. His rejection of the socialist realist philosophy of art was what caused his reversal of fortune.

Strzemiński — played convincingly by Bogusław Linda, who starred in Wajda’s Man of Iron — was a World War I invalid missing an arm and a leg. He became a leading avant-garde painter; he collaborated with Chagall, Malevich, and Kandinsky, among others; and his art was exhibited around the world. He founded the art museum in Lodz, one of the world’s first modern art collections. Although as a young man he believed in communism, Strzemiński eventually came to believe that art should represent the subjective visual experience of the painter rather than promote a political ideology.

Wajda himself studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, and he expertly portrays the contrast between Strzemiński’s vision of art and that of the regime. Strzemiński’s lecture at the academy of fine arts in Lodz is interrupted by regime functionaries. Suddenly, the minister of culture gives an unannounced lecture. “Art that proclaims a lack of ideology is the enemy of the working man,” he says. Strzemiński’s books are banned by the regime, but he dictates his ideas on art to his students, who illegally transcribe them. One student is especially devoted to Strzemiński, with whom she is in love, although when arrested even she spills details about him during a police interrogation, presumably under torture (the interrogation takes place off-screen). Wajda ruthlessly shows that totalitarian ideology can break even the most loyal and honest of people.

Strzemiński disagreed with the regime’s ideology of art, and his disagreement cost him dearly. Wajda disturbingly shows how Poland’s Stalinist regime was bent on destroying Strzemiński for having views on art different from those of the regime. Strzemiński is expelled from the state artists’ union; consequently, he cannot find work, buy paints, or even obtain food ration cards. In one

IMDB.com

German-born director, George Mendeluk (right), alongside actor Tamer Hussein on the set of Bitter Harvest in Ukraine.

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scene, the woman who cooks for Strzemiński pours him a bowl of soup, telling him that he owes her two months’ worth of money. When Strzemiński says he does not have the money, she pours the soup back in her pot and leaves. The hungry Strzemiński proceeds to lick the empty bowl clean of every bit of soup residue.

Meanwhile, functionaries of the communist regime storm into galleries and museums to destroy Strzemiński’s valuable works. One of them is a polychrome relief titled Colonial Exploitation, which depicts Africans carrying heavy objects for European colonizers. Even though such subject matter should seem appealing to a communist regime, this does not matter. Strzemiński and his work are simply to be destroyed. (This scene reminds the viewer of the protagonist of Arthur Koestler’s classic 1940 novel on Stalinist terror, Darkness at Noon, who, despite being a lifelong Marxist, is deemed suspect by the Soviet regime and undergoes imprisonment and tortures.)

Like other films by Andrzej Wajda, Afterimage is replete with haunting imagery. In an early scene, Strzemiński is preparing to paint. Just before his brush touches the canvas, it turns completely red. This confuses the viewer, but it quickly turns out to be the reflection of a giant red banner with the slogan “Long live Stalin” carried at a communist rally just outside Strzemiński’s window. This scene brilliantly foreshadows the Stalinist attempt to gain full state control over art, something that Strzemiński would very brutally experience himself.

Afterimage will not go down in the history of film

as one of Andrzej Wajda’s greatest or most noteworthy works. However, the film portrays one of the great anthropological lies on which communism is based quite well. One of the reasons why communism failed is that it falsely saw humans not as individuals but merely parts of a collective group, such as a class. Such an ideology cannot tolerate individualism and in order to get closer to the goal of creating a classless society it must brutally crush all dissent. Władysław Strzemiński’s individual nature and non-Marxist view of art made Poland’s Stalinist regime seek to destroy him. Afterimage is, in reality, less a biopic and more a meditation on totalitarianism’s attempted destruction of the individual.

In recalling the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution and the 85th anniversary of the Holodomor late last year, it is worth seeing Afterimage and Bitter Harvest. Although the latter film is definitely a missed opportunity, it is not as bad as its reviews would suggest. While very different, both films are a tribute to the very things that communism unsuccessfully tried to crush. Although millions of Ukrainian peasants were starved to death by Stalin, and Poland’s communists destroyed Władysław Strzemiński’s career and reduced him to penury, communists could not crush the human spirit. In the end, it was they who ended up on the losing side of history.

Filip Mazurczak is Assistant Editor of The European Conservative.

Piotr Drabik / CCA 2.0 Generic

Andrzej Wajda at a recent film and television event.

58 Summer/Fall 2018

OBITUARY:Miłowit Kuniński (1946–2018)

R y s z a r d L e g u t k o

M iłowit Kuniński, professor at the Jagiellonian University, was one of the best known Polish

historians of philosophy in recent decades, and a well-respected and admired teacher. He was a scholar and a gentleman. Superbly educated and impeccably well-mannered, he represented the best of what the Polish academic tradition has stood for. He not only led his students through the complicated paths of European

philosophy of the modern era but also, indirectly, influenced them by his own example and the power of his personality.

From the first days of the anti-communist opposition in Poland in the late 1970s, he was politically active. As academics were at that time rather notorious for their docility, his involvement was not a common attitude. When the Solidarity movement was

Rafal Guz / Wiadomosci w Onet

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formed in 1980, Kuniński became one of the natural leaders in the Krakow academic community. When General Jaruzelski introduced martial law in 1981, Kuniński was busy organizing clandestine work and distributing samizdat publications. In those difficult years, he and his charming wife Jola were the people one could always turn to for help, information, and recent samizdat.

After the regime fell, Kuniński continued his involvement, trying to respond — as an activist and as a scholar — to the political and intellectual challenges of the new liberal democratic order. He was deeply aware of the specificity of Polish culture, which he thought both an opportunity and a problem for the new times. He believed that in a new political situation Poland might be one of the few places in the modern world in which liberal and conservative traditions might not only be reconciled but somehow lead to a dynamic synthesis.

However, he thought this required a deeper understanding of the civilizational processes in the modern world. With that purpose in mind he co-founded the Centre for Political Thought, a private institution, which was to become a major conservative organisation devoted to education and research. He was also among the first ‘Vanenburgers’, one of the founding fathers of the Vanenburg Society and the Centre for European Renewal.

Kuniński’s conservatism was temperamental — resulting from his natural moderation and a well-balanced mind — but also intellectual. As a historian of philosophy well-acquainted with the wealth of human thought since antiquity, he could not be lured by sudden outbursts of intellectual fashions, philosophical revolutions, hasty generalizations, and ideological shortcuts. In other words, he knew so much about the peregrinations of the human mind throughout our history that he could not but be a conservative — that is, a person full of respect for the philosophical heritage and for the wisdom of the classical thought, organically resistant to the leftist desire of social engineering.

Under his tutelage, the Centre of Political Thought steered exactly in this direction. In its emphasis on liberty, it did not limit itself to the liberal tradition

from Locke to Rawls but focused on classical, medieval, and non-liberal modern thought. For Kuniński, a particularly valuable part of European culture was Christian philosophy which, he believed, revealed a crucial dimension of human nature, not to be ignored in any sound moral and political philosophy. A practising Roman Catholic who took his faith very seriously, he was particularly sensitive to the religious and theological assumptions and implications of philosophical theories.

His best-known theoretical work was on the philosophy of F. A. Hayek. The book [titled Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics in F.A. von Hayek’s Thought], however, was more than an analysis of a particular thinker. Kuniński made an attempt to advance a ‘liberal-conservative’ theory — that is, a theory which would combine a defence of the free market with a classical Aristotelian view of human nature. He argued that such a combination is not a priori impossible, and that one could construct a consistent set of principles which would do justice to both basic liberal notions and the classical concept of man. Kuniński’s book was, in my opinion, the most persuasive study — at least in Eastern Europe — of this oxymoronic theory which came to be called ‘liberal conservatism’ and which many regarded as philosophically untenable.

Unfortunately, Western civilization was moving further and further away from its conservative foundations, and Kuniński was aware of it. He became increasingly disappointed with the onslaught of liberalism and upset by its destructive effects, also in the academic life. He was one of those who did their best to continue the noble traditions of university education and to keep it safe from the ideological madness that again, two decades after the fall of the communist regime, has begun to paralyse the life of the mind.

Miłowit Kuniński died in Kraków on 9 June 2018. He is sadly missed by his friends, students, colleagues, and all those who had the privilege to know him. Requiescat in pace.

Ryszard Legutko, MEP, is professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

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