This month our “lead book” is Douglas Murray’s War on the West, reviewed by James Bradshaw. Here, Murray – one of the “most able and eloquent defenders” of the Western tradition – exposes the violence of the ceaseless attacks now being made on Western Civilisation. On the basis of Bradshaw’s recommendation (yes, the editor too takes Position Papers book reviews seriously) I have listened to War on the West on Audible and it is gripping. The constant stream of crazed denunciations of key figures and institutions of the West which Murray describes are reminiscent of the situation presented in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, in which he describes waves of prisoners shunted off to the Gulags – “our great prison sewage disposal system” – for imagined crimes against the Revolution. Among them are pre-revolution revolutionaries; soldiers returning from the First World War; the intelligentsia; rebellious peasants, sailors, and students; alleged wreckers and saboteurs; Trotskyites; kulaks; agronomists and illegal gleaners…. The list goes on and on since the appetite for denunciation is insatiable. Our contemporary Western Gulags take the form of social ostracisation, sackings, and ritual humiliation for crimes such as micro-aggression, various types of phobia, and hate crimes.
Of course communist regimes were the setting for the most brutal of the persecution of Christians during the last century. Robert Royal’s The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History catalogues stories of the twentieth century persecution of the Catholic Church in countries such as Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Albania, Ukraine, Korea, Vietnam, and China. As the reviewer, Fr Donnelly, says: “The martyrs staked their lives on a truth beyond all human powers.”
Commitment to the truth at the expense of one’s life, or even at the expense of one’s good name or career is a very difficult thing, and commitment to truth includes not just bearing witness to truth, but the desire to know the truth. And finding out what is true is not always such a simple thing. The Power and the Story: the Global Battle for News and Information – an interesting sounding analysis of the global state of journalism, is reviewed for us here by Pat Hanratty. The work shows how much the media around the world is manipulated by those with the power to do so. Vladimir Putin comes in for special mention as we might expect. He came to mind recently when I came across a line from Solzhenitsyn in a 1992 interview in which he said, speaking of the new Russia emerging after the collapse of the Soviet Union: “The system that governs us is a combination of the old nomenclatura, the sharks of finance, false democrats, and the KGB. I cannot call this democracy – it is a repugnant, historically unprecedented hybrid, and we do not know in which direction it will develop … [but] if this alliance will prevail, they will be exploiting us not for seventy, but for one-hundred and seventy years.”
Thirty years on and his prophecy still stands. This seems to be same thing as the “new Russian fascism” warned of by the Russian Orthodox priest Father Alexander Men, as described in George Weigel’s article. Father Men, who was murdered in 1990, urged the Russian Orthodox Church to repent of its cooperation with the communists during the Soviet era, and was a beacon for the “road not taken” by the Orthodox church – the road away from subservience to political power. A road sadly not taken.
We see something of this missing unflinching commitment to truth, and willingness to speak truth to power in a group of four women philosophers discussed in Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something reviewed here by Margaret Hickey. The four extraordinary philosopher friends: Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillipa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch “found common ground in asserting the objective nature of evil in energetic opposition to the prevailing dogmas of the academy” in the Oxford of the World War II period and after. That prevailing orthodoxy embraced by some of Britain’s most prestigious academics asserted that “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong” were purely subjective categories. These four women exposed the vacuity of such mumbo-jumbo, especially in the light of the undeniably evil acts that had been perpetrated during the war (including the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Anscombe stridently asserted).
Closer to home, Tim O’Sullivan warns of the dangers inherent in a State monopoly and control over the health system as is being increasingly advocated here in Ireland, in particular in the context of the controversy surrounding the re-location of the National Maternity Hospital. Something that has been particularly striking in the public debates surrounding this matter has been the animus directed against the Religious Sisters of Charity now that they are being pushed out of involvement with the maternity hospital. Those who protest against their presence in Irish healthcare (principally because they refuse to abort unborn children) are quite content to forget all that these women have done in their two hundred years working in Irish society, including from 1821 beginning visitation of women prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol, caring for the victims of a cholera outbreak in 1832, founding in 1834 St Vincent’s Hospital open to all denominations, and pioneering the Hospice movement with their opening of Our Lady’s Hospice at Harold’s Cross in 1879.
This brings to my mind a profound observation on gratitude made by Douglas Murray in a section in his War on the West:
Without an ability to feel gratitude, all of human life and human experience is a marketplace of blame, where people tear up the landscape of the past and present hoping to find other people to blame and upon whom they can transfer their frustrations. Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment. Because if you do not feel any gratitude for anything that has been passed on to you, then all you can feel is bitterness over what you have not got. Bitterness that everything did not turn out better or more exactly to your liking – whatever that “liking” might be. Without some sense of gratitude, it is impossible to get anything into any proper order.