"It's all going to be all right" is the cheery refrain of Spiritual War, Right Said Fred's rousing song for our times. It's backed up by a powerful, hopeful image from Bob Moran, with the forces of darkness disoriented and in retreat.
Are they right? There's a lot at stake, and you could get more than you bargained for. If it is a spiritual war, what does that mean, exactly?
Jonathan Wong (Twitter @WGthink) is in the right area when he describes the existential threat:
"'Culture war' does not fully encapsulate the totality of the conundrum the West is currently facing. It is a war for the continuation of lineage, cultural heritage, and the spiritual embodiment of the West for generations to come. It's a Spiritual War."
We know how it goes. The attempt to impose authoritarian rule is a full-spectrum assault that targets everything. It is not just getting money or political power; it aims for control of every aspect of human life. In a vivid interview from 2020, below, Orlando Gutierrez-Bornot describes how this played out in the takeover of Cuba after 1959.
A tyrant will burn his country in order to rule over the ashes. Your life, your family are the ashes they are hoping to rule over. Day-to-day spiritual war is the messy effort to maintain every source of meaning, every source of strength you have, before it is too late.
Orlando Gutierrez-Bornot, interview with Joshua Philipp. Dec 2020.
“The Cuban community in Miami, Florida, recently united in a mass rally to oppose socialism. Among the organizers was Dr. Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, spokesperson for the Cuban Democratic Directorate, who warns that America risks repeating the same mistakes Cuba made. In this episode of Crossroads, we sit down to speak with Orlando about what life is like under socialism, and what America risks losing.”
Joshua Phillip
What is it that motivates the Cuban community here in Florida?
Orlando Gutierrez-Bornot
This is a community that's very modern, very successful but also very traditional. The family is our basic unit, the authority of the family. And our families have undergone the experience of communism first-hand. We've seen what it is like to have a regime that persecutes religion, that persecutes spirituality, that does everything it can to destroy the nucleus of the Cuban family; that destroys our property; that eliminates the individual freedom we have.
You know, most Cuban families have somebody in the family who's either spent many years in political prisons or has been murdered by the Castro regime. We can't forget that because it's a life experience that history has imparted to us in a very bloody manner. So, that wisdom, that knowledge, has been passed from one generation to another. And no matter how many phony polls, how much fake news saying that the younger generation of Cuban exiles don't sympathize with the views of their parents - all that is false. It's a unified community - diverse in many ways, but unified and condemning and rejecting the communist totalitarian state. Because we know what it does.
Joshua
Cuba was, of course, a pretty modern country for a long time. What happened?
Orlando
Cuba was a western prosperous nation. It was one of the leading economies in Latin America. Cuba had been devastated in the last war of independence, but between 1902 and 1959 an economic miracle took place in Cuba, from being a country that was desolate. Before 1959 Cubans turned our country into one of the leading Latin American economies. Did it have political problems? Yes, it did. But those were being solved progressively, by Cubans. The Castro regime came in with the promise of elections within 18 months of taking power over restoring the constitution of 1940. They did none of that. They turned Cuban farmers into the slaves of the state. They took over all industries. They took over all communication media. They took over the universities. They completely controlled any means citizens had to be able to unify, and express their desire for change... It's not a government. You don't have a normal society, with authorities elected by the people. You have a communist occupational regime that lives off the people.
Joshua
It is a system that destroys the values of the targeted society and then feeds off the people by stealing from them the products of whatever they produce. You know, communism always runs like this - that it feeds on the bourgeois, so to speak, in its own words. It feeds on other nations - the wealthy. And because it can't produce anything, it often times looks to find new things to feed on. Would you say this is an accurate description?
Orlando
The great Austrian-American philosopher Eric Vogelen called marxism the Satanic intelligence. And it is exactly that. It's a rebellion against the just order of the world. It's rebelling against God. So what communism tries to do is - since it knows that individuals are the sensorial antenna of any society - it clamps down on individuals. It tries to destroy the individual's link with their own culture, their own history; and therefore to control and restrict their own spirituality, their faith in their own transcendence. They did that in Cuba by clamping down on the Catholic Church, by clamping down on all expressions of human spirituality, by trying to destroy the link between parents and their children...And, through that effort, it sought to create individuals with no history, no culture, no spirituality, who could be transformed into members of a mass. And that mass would simply proclaim Yes to anything the state said. That is the diabolical plan to destroy human beings, to reduce the transcendent dimension of human beings; to make them more easily controlled by the state.
We're seeing this in the US, right now.
Joshua
A lot of people in the West talk about communism as just an economic theory: Oh, it's about sharing wealth, it's about state-owned systems. At the very most they view it as an economic theory. And a lot of conservatives tend to only debate it on economics. You're talking about a very different perspective - more of a spiritual side..?
Orlando
Communism is first and foremost a doctrine of power, a doctrine of history and a strange new type of religion. A religion that seeks to turn the material world into the replacement of heaven. The last thing it is is an economic system. Communism has experimented continuously with capitalism to survive - Lenin did it, Mao did it, the Castros will do it if they need to - it is based on what it seeks to do on its goal of power.
There's been a progressive takeover of culture and media and education by those who believe in marxism. Marxists don't subscribe to a certain theory about politics or economics. Marxism is a religion. It's a way of understanding reality. They have gained a great deal of power in culture and media and education; and what they have created is a rejection of the values of the sacredness of individual freedom, of private property or the right to life, of the rule of law which are basic to people being free, to people being able to have moral responsibility over their own lives. So that kind of strategy has created a mass of people who are enamored of a utopia that will never take place, and don't appreciate the reality of living in a free society.
Living as a free person is very rigorous. You have to make a lot of decisions. You have to be responsible for your own actions. You have to be accountable to yourself. Whereas socialism promises to liberate you from all that. If you give full allegiance to the state then the state will alleviate the tension of your daily life. That is a utopia. It doesn't exist. It's just a way to fool you, and trap you, and imprison you.
Joshua
Now, I know a lot of people - when they call for socialism - it is on things like free health care, free schooling; the government kind of works as a safety net for society. They talk about equity now - they're talking about this forced equality ... making equity. How do you view these things?
Orlando
Nothing is free. There is no free health care. There is no free education. When they tell you "free education" that means you can't choose what your children learn, where your children will learn; you have to send them to one school where what's taught is mandated by the state. There is no such thing as free health care. It means that doctors cannot practice independently. And the state will deprive you of health care if you disagree with the state. A society is where everything is controlled by the state is a society without options for individuals. It's a society that that has no freedom or choice.
There's nothing free. Everything has to be paid in some manner. And the way that people in communist regimes pay for education, health care is by surrendering other freedom and other rights.
Joshua
And when they talk about creating equality now, a lot of young people especially, get behind the idea because they see it as caring for others who are maybe less fortunate. How do you view this?
Orlando
What communism does is it deprives you of all control over your own life. And it gives you a great deal of power over the life of your neighbours, and of people that you know. How do you get that power? Because by reporting them to the state, by reporting on their activities, by informing on what they do, you can destroy their lives. So what does communism do? It builds on the worst aspects of human personality - envy, hatred, class hatred, egoism - it builds on all that to create people who incarcerate themselves. It doesn't lead to a more humanitarian society. It leads to a society where everybody distrusts everybody else.
I think that there are very similar processes no matter where it happens. People lose faith in their own ability to participate in the political process. They lose faith in the values of freedom that uphold the process. They lose track of the importance of maintaining individual freedom, and of the importance of traditional values in society; and that erodes the moral basis of society. It becomes a lot easier for those promising ultimate paradise by granting authority and power to the state to consolidate their hold over society.
Joshua
Now. you've talked a lot about morals, traditional values, belief, the family as being things that communism tries to destroy. You've discussed communism as a more of a belief, a religion - one that aims to destroy these things for its own validity. In your understanding, why does it target these things?
Orlando
It targets these things because these things are the ones that give human beings true freedom over their actions, through freedom over their thoughts. It these are the channels - the venues - that human civilization, human culture have created for human beings to stay connected with the innermost parts of themselves, and also with the order - the logical order - of the universe.
If you're disconnected from that, the vacuum, the void is filled by temporal power. It's filled by the exercise of state power in one way or the other. And that state power can never really fill that void. What it does is create a pseudo reality, a false reality, a shadow reality - where you lose your life in something that is tantamount to nothing. In other words, as we saw in the novel 1984 you live all your life - and you waste your life - for things which are not ultimately real. They're only the result of the power that a few men will exercise over the rest of society.
Joshua
How do the criminals take over a system like this? Because you would think that a lot of times it's the ideological people - ideologues - they they think that they can create goodness for humanity. A lot of times, politicians, even these on the socialist left in this country - this is how they portray themselves. How do they go from that to becoming like these regimes you discussed?
Orlando
I think there's two types of people who are used to create a regime like that - the Sophists and the Gnostics. The Gnostics are those supposed idealists who want to build a better world - people like Che Guevara... They don't want to accept human nature as it is, in all its expressions. They want to rebuild or reconfigure human nature, like in Frankenstein... So the Gnostics want to transform the earth ...by blunting everybody else's natural human impulses.
The second type of people are the Sophists. They want power by any means, and they use the Gnostics. They use the supposed idealists to build their power and then get rid of them. For example, Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky thought that the task of building human nature was incomplete, that the state had to complete God's task of building human nature. So he was willing to kill thousands to rebuild human nature. As soon as his task of controlling society was done, then a sophist like Stalin came and got rid of him. And then throned himself in power.
The same thing with Cuba. Castro was the Sophist. He wanted power at whatever cost. And he used somebody like Guevara to do all the killing and all the destruction. And once that was done, he got rid of Guevara, and then he had full power. So, it's two types of people who work here - fanatics and criminals. And the criminals are very good at manipulating the fanatics.
Very good, tx. For me summarising in a simple way - you rip a person's faith and morality away, tear the cultural and historical relevance of said person and / or Country ...and then to add good measure, destroy the social fabric of society (especially that of the family).. adding all you say above regards general life, work etc ... THEN, do you still have a person, an individual or some zombified clone / worker ant that can be fully controlled ?.