As Europe commits slow-motion suicide via a
flood of Muslim migrants, and as Marxist mobs in America exploit the issue of
immigrant family separation to advance their open-borders agenda, it is useful
to step back from the hysteria and reflect on the bigger picture of the cultural
history of the West and the inimical forces seeking to subvert it.
Michael Walsh’s compact
new book The
Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the
West provides that salutary perspective. A subtitle as grand as
that promises a sweeping survey of the West’s artistic and intellectual
heritage, as well as an insightful portrait of its enemies, and Walsh is one of
the few writers who can deliver on that promise.
One
would be hard-pressed to find another conservative intellectual, or intellectual
of any political stripe, of Michael Walsh’s caliber. In terms of the depth and
breadth of his familiarity with both high and low culture, only the
iconoclastic Camille Paglia comes to mind as a rival. But Paglia isn’t also an American Book
Award-winning novelist, journalist, distinguished classical music
critic, and screenwriter. Walsh also writes political commentary for – among
others – PJ Media, American Greatness, and the New York Post
under both his own name and occasionally his alter ego David Kahane (Rules
for Radical Conservatives: Beating the Left at its Own Game to Take Back
America). He also happens to be a friend of mine, but my praise is
not simple favoritism; his accomplishments speak for themselves.
seeks to illustrate, by means of artistic
examples both high and low, an important and rarely remarked-upon truth: that
the arts give the lie to the entire cultural Marxist project by recording and
revealing timeless – and some particularly timely – truths about human nature…
What we find is a remarkable consensus about
basic principles of right and wrong; of the proper, if imperfect, relations
between the sexes; of the importance of children to the health and future of a
culture; of the nature, meaning, and need for heroism. Seen in this light, the
entire Marxist-Leftist venture crumbles into dust…
What is The Fiery
Angel of the book’s title? It is the name of a Prokofiev opera produced in
1955 whose stark originality, blunt sexuality, blend of the real and
supernatural, and “symphony of cultural references” prompted Walsh to choose it
as an “optimistic symbol” of Western culture. “[O]ur job as audience members is
to decode” the story’s meaning for ourselves, and similarly, “[t]his should
also be our approach to our own history, which is not a dusty mausoleum of
facts, periodically exhibited for our decreasing edification upon a mortuary
slab, but is instead a ripping yarn that, in teaching us about the past, is
also instructing us about the present and the future.”
Walsh’s dizzying erudition
could be overwhelming if he were a less entertaining and enlightening guide. In
any case, there is method to what another reviewer called his “chaotic
brilliance”: “[B]y tracing artistic themes and connections backward through the
ages we can, like Hansel and Gretel, eventually find our way home,” Walsh
writes, for “the way forward might just be backward.”
Along the way,
Walsh contrasts the intellectually disputatious nature of Western thought with the
ruthlessly authoritarian impulse shared by the West’s principal contemporary
enemies: Leftists and fundamentalist Muslims: “Marxism seeks to replace
pluralistic discourse with its own form of coercive totalitarianism – socialism
‘with a human face.’ That the face is not human at all, but satanic, needs
constantly to be pointed out…” And later in the book: “The key to understanding
the Left… is that it (along with Marx and his successors), utterly rejects all
previous historical facts and interpretations of history in order to
proclaim its New World Order. In order to make that case, the unholy Left must
needs overthrow and consign history itself to the ash heap of history.”
[Emphasis in original] For the same reason, “the Left has severed the great
works of Western art from their modern audiences.”
In a time in which
the Left demonstrates such a zealous appetite for destruction, as the Guns N’
Roses album title goes, Walsh explains that “the modern international Left has…
made common cause with resentful, reactionary Islam,” both “bent on the
destruction of the West.” This unholy alliance, as David Horowitz calls it, is
most recently evident in the Left’s outrage over this week’s ruling by the Supreme
Court upholding President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban, falsely
deemed a “Muslim ban” by the Islam sympathizers of the Left. Walsh’s response in
The Fiery Angel?
Western governments should make it clear that
no further Muslim expansionism will be permitted. There is no rational reason
for the cultural entity formerly known as Christendom to accept a single Muslim
immigrant unless he – and it is almost always a “he” of military-serice age –
can be shown to possess useful Western skills, not to harbor anti-Western
sentiments, not to have a criminal record or any infectious diseases, and not
be a burden on the public trust. Wahhabist Islam is not an “enrichment” the
West needs, nor one is should desire.
Walsh decries that
“the West’s agnostic loss of faith in its institutions” has led to such defeats
as the fall of English cities to Pakistani rape gangs and jihadis. “[H]eld
prisoner by ‘tolerance,’ forbidden by ‘compassion’ to articulate a coherent
defense, and in the thralls of the ‘diversity’ chimera,” Walsh writes, “Britain
has found itself morally and politically defenseless. Like the vampire, Islam
keeps coming back, as do all the enemies of the West and its civilization.”
As Walsh notes,
“[t]here is literally no idea too stupid for the Left to conceive and believe,
if not quite achieve, in its war against God, and against us.” Stupid, yes –
and dangerous and destructive as well. But as Michael Walsh demonstrates time
and again in his new book, in the epic battle between Good and Evil, our
satanic enemies are no match for the West’s heroic spirit and irrepressible
genius.
From FrontPage Mag, 6/29/18
