Most people’s primary association with the word “barbarians,” of course, is savage men on horseback – like ISIS jihadists – raiding and devouring a host society. But as life teaches us, sometimes the same evil can take different forms.
In fact, we don’t need to scratch very far beneath surface appearances to discover that in every meaningful way, today’s far left, which has already taken over – one might even say raided and devoured – the Democratic Party, is now dragging America down a barbaric road to ruin.
Over the centuries, this original meaning evolved into today’s darker and more universal association of “barbarians” as wildly unmoored people raining havoc and destruction on a host society.
As we will soon see, today’s increasingly unhinged American left fits both meanings of “barbarian.”
To set the stage, consider what conservative author Rod Dreher writes in his bestselling book, “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.”
Dreher observes that the cultural moment in which we live is strongly reminiscent of the fall of the Roman Empire, today’s Western World having largely abandoned both faith and reason in favor of moral relativism, emotion and maximum personal freedom.
To live in a culture like today’s America, contends Dreher, “is to dwell in a society that not only can no longer agree on what constitutes virtuous belief and conduct but also doubts that virtue exists.” To arrive at such a state of social disintegration, writes Dreher, citing moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s acclaimed book “After Virtue,” requires “abandoning objective moral standards; refusing to accept any religiously or culturally binding narrative originating outside oneself” and “repudiating memory of the past as irrelevant.”
“This state of mind,” Dreher concludes, “approximates the condition known as barbarism”:
When we think of barbarians, we imagine wild, rapacious tribesmen rampaging through cities, heedlessly destroying the structures and institutions of civilizations, simply because they can. Barbarians are governed only by their will to power, and neither know nor care a thing about what they are annihilating.By that standard, despite our wealth and technological sophistication, we in the modern West are living under barbarism, though we do not recognize it. Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes – they are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human. Our barbarians have exchanged the animal pelts and spears of the past for designer suits and smartphones.
Indeed, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, commenting recently on the wildly unrestrained, ongoing coup attempt against the Trump administration, sized up the current zeitgeist this way: “It’s as if facts no longer matter at all – only emotion, ambition and the overriding will to power. These apparently are the new rules in Washington.”
While there are many ways the new barbarism is ravaging American society – from identity politics dividing our nation into angry warring tribes, to today’s deranged gender orthodoxy encouraging men to invade women’s locker rooms and conquer the world of women’s sports – nothing more viscerally demonstrates the left’s capacity for hardcore barbarism than the issue of abortion.
When we contemplate barbarian crimes of the past, some of the most extreme examples we might mentally conjure up – like wartime atrocities of soldiers ripping babies out of their mother’s wombs – are actually being committed right now, as you read these words, here in America. Except the carnage is all clean, clinical, legal, and most of all, hidden from view.
Hundreds of second-trimester D&E (“dilation and evacuation”) abortions are performed every day on beautiful American babies, about 100,000 per year. Former abortionist Anthony Levatino, M.D., describes what the practitioner does to the unborn child after artificially inducing dilation in the mother and suctioning the amniotic fluid from her uterus:
What about third-trimester abortions, which elicited such high enthusiasm among Democrat lawmakers recently that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo jubilantly lit up the spire of One World Trade Center in pink to celebrate his state’s new law explicitly permitting abortion up to the moment of birth?
Third-trimester abortions today typically involve the abortionist injecting a chemical like digoxin into the fully formed, viable and pain-feeling preborn child to cause him or her to suffer a heart attack, then inducing labor over a period of two to three days and delivering a dead baby. Such “induced abortions” account for about 1.2 percent of all U.S. abortions, about 12,000 children per year, or 33 every single day.
‘People without historical memory’
One of the most-cited characteristics of barbarians in all places and times is that they are “people without historical memory.” Indeed, some of the most appalling genocides of the last century were committed not by wild, rudderless savages, but by people in the grip of what they believed to be morally superior utopian ideologies, holding in contempt the values, history and institutions of the society they were obsessed with “reforming.”
Modern history’s most egregious example, at least in terms of the staggering death count, would be China’s revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong, whose so-called “Great Leap Forward” between 1958 and 1962 – a campaign aimed at rapidly transforming China from an agrarian economy into a socialist utopia – caused at least 30 million deaths, with some estimates ranging up to 55 million. (Eerily, during Barack Obama’s presidency, his White House communications director Anita Dunn proclaimed publicly during a speech that Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in human history, was one of her two “favorite political philosophers.”)
To carry out such a catastrophic “leap forward” in China, Mao – just like Pol Pot and his infamous Khmer Rouge two decades later, who slaughtered two million of their countrymen in Cambodia’s “killing fields” – had to extinguish all memory of the past and begin history anew, since what came before was of no consequence or value. (Pol Pot turned the calendar in Cambodia – which he renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea – back to “Year Zero.”) This is why both Pol Pot and Mao Zedong made a point of executing teachers, lawyers, businessmen, writers, academics, scientists and other intellectuals, since they represented the impure old order that had to be purged, to allow the unpolluted new socialist utopia to be established.
The point of this brief historical review is that a barbarian takeover of a country is not possible without discrediting and annihilating the shared values, history and key institutions that have unified that society and enabled it to work.
With that in mind, consider what the left has already done to America, and what it currently – as unashamedly advocated by the various Democratic Party presidential candidates – claims it intends to do in the near future. This list is by no means complete, just a quick representative sampling.
There is one more form of barbarian invasion being both promoted and excused by the left, thanks to what author David Horowitz calls the “unholy alliance” between radical Islam and the American left, since both share a common enemy – namely Christianity. Islam, by its very nature, and as history proves again and again, tends not to assimilate but to conquer. It’s politically incorrect in the extreme to say so, but “barbarian invasion” is what Islam has specialized in for most of the last 14 centuries. A look across the pond to Europe, which has been transformed, probably permanently, by the massive legal and illegal Islamic immigration into that formerly Christian continent, is a harbinger of what America has in store if it continues down its current immigration path.
Result of barbarian invasions
In the end, what do societies look like historically after they’ve been invaded and ultimately conquered by people who don’t honor their culture, their values and their God?
That’s a simple question to answer. Their past is obliterated; ever larger segments of the population have no shared memory of their nation’s history. Their former culture and value system is replaced by an angry babble of competing languages, beliefs and moral standards. Their key institutions are invaded, subverted and transformed, if not outright destroyed. Little respect remains for the transcendent value of human life because reverence for God has all but vanished. All that was previously cherished is gone – or gone underground, to live in fear.
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