Commentary
From the late 1940s to the 1980s, the post-war world remained full of distrust and anxiety.
The Cold War between East and West was enormously unsettling for people on both sides. Schools conducted nuclear attack drills. Trains from Berlin to Moscow stopped at the Polish-Soviet frontier to change wheel gauges and restrict cross-border transportation. Russian dissidents were sent to the Gulag. Proxy wars and an arms race stoked the fear that a final nuclear showdown might be inevitable.
In 1990, after a decade of Anglo-conservative political leadership and Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” initiative, the world stumbled into a more hopeful era.
The Cold War ended with the collapse of Soviet communism. Some predicted the permanent end of ideological conflict and the triumph of democratic-capitalism. Economic prospects were good, and the future looked bright.
Free world leaders declared that the battle was over and the West had won. Weary Cold War ideological combatants prepared to stand down and get back to the matters of family life and career responsibilities.
During the Reagan era, I had made good friends among our American neighbors, so I couldn’t resist an invitation to attend an April 1990 fin de siècle get-together at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.
It was the final meeting of the Committee for the Free World (CFW), a group of some 200 writers, academics, state officials, and politicians who generally focused on threats posed by totalitarian communism. Initially, the theme of the conference seemed out-of-step with the mission-accomplished mood among the participants. The question we were invited to think about was: Does “the West” still exist?
CFW Director Midge Decter opened the proceedings with some of her usual tough questions: “Are we a community of nations that have learned how to protect the basic liberties of our citizens? Are we a gang of friends, a congregation, a family? Or are we like one of those long sour marriages, held together for the sake of the kids and now facing an empty nest?”
Prominent speakers were skeptical about the status of the Western alliance. Some raised questions about the future of NATO. Was the pact a matter of love or convenience?
Josef Joffe, an editor at one of the largest newspapers in Germany, suggested that no alliance was likely to persist longer than the threat that had spawned it. With the Soviet Union neutralized, what remained to keep us together?
Italian scholar Giuseppe Sacco suggested there was a developing North-South front that justified continuing an entente between the United States and Western Europe. Sacco said, “The South is not only armed with unarmed migrants, but also armed with respectable chemical and possibly atomic weapons.” He suggested that threats from the South could be around for some time.
Eugene Rostow, former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan administration, warned that “Even if democratic capitalism prevailed in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the idea that we no longer have to worry about war or conflict is complete nonsense.” The Cold War had been a golden era for Western solidarity. What would transpire from here on was more difficult to predict.
After much talk about international relations and defense, the American writer and critic Hilton Kramer chaired a rather chilling discussion on “Western Civilization, dead or alive?”
Several participants suggested that newly liberated people from the East who were looking for guidance from the West were more likely to discover a society that was mired in cultural decadence and ideological civil war.
Kramer opined that “Our universities, the media, our popular culture, a great many of the institutions that we in the past have looked to as the cornerstones of Western civilization have for some years, approximately 22 or thereabouts by my calculation, been assiduously addressing themselves to the task of deconstructing the moral efficacy of our civilization and attempting to establish, with a fair degree of success, the notion that Western civilization is the cause of all trouble, and indeed evil, in the world, and that far from providing a model for others, we should all don hair shirts and repent our fallen ways.”
Not only has Western culture failed to recover over the past 33 years but our present condition is considerably worse. Progressive intellectuals continue to be our worst detractors. A systemic, neo-Marxist pathology has become deeply embedded in our institutions. That’s why Islamic terrorists, Russian irredentists, Mexican drug cartels, Chinese communists, and woke domestic militants laugh in the faces of liberal Western elites.
Examining the virtues of Western Civilization is virtually forbidden by 21st-century academics. Our education system preaches the gospel of identity politics while the once-normal middle-class cultural consensus is denounced as racist, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic.
Western educators make it almost impossible for young people to appreciate what they can become because they refuse to acknowledge anything good about what has been inherited.
Western formative institutions intentionally ignore all of the important questions. If the West still exists, where does it begin and where does it end? If our founding principles were valuable to begin with, how can they be restored and preserved?
The contemporary West is in a state of flux, with wild threats and accusations coming from all quarters. Back in 1990, the late CFW Director Midge Decter discontinued our operations with a cautionary message: “Our revels, like our labors to solidify what has been won, are far from over.”
Looking back on that counsel, one can’t help thinking that we’re now called upon to either resist aggressors or become their victims. Politely turning the other cheek may no longer be a reasonable option.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
