Yes, our favorite band of anti-anti-Trumpers, proud if unknowing heirs of the anti-anti-communists1—are at it again, with a brand-new message, to wit: Yeah, sure, Trump isn’t the greatest, just like your favorite pal Bill Clintion!—but the big picture is, WE’RE ALL GOING TO HELL!
The December 11 online issue of NR took the occasion to reprint a speech by legendary anti-Soviet author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “Men Have Forgotten God”. Well, as atheist I can’t really argue with that, nor can I argue with the fact that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a very great man, a true hero of the Soviet Union, who forced thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hypocritical leftists to face the true horror of the Soviet system however reluctantly—and, even worse, however briefly—they did so. But is “remembering God” the “Answer”?
Don’t Muslims remember God? A lot? And how about the Catholic “prelacy”, as the English Puritans liked to call them? Don’t they remember God? Most of the time, at least.
Moreover, if Aleksandr were being honest, he would have called his piece “If you don’t join the Russian Orthodox Church, God is going to damn you to Hell,” because that is what he believed. Like his great predecessor, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn despised the West, the Roman Catholic Church in particular, and tended to wax just a little bit cranky whenever the subject of “the Jews” came up.2
Well, how about NR’s current crop of writers? “Partisans Prefer Legalism to Morality” sighs more in sorrow than in anger dude Jonah Goldberg, pointing out that right-wing evangelist/loud mouth Frank Graham, who lambasted Bill Clinton for his sins hip and thigh, is giving El Trumpo a “mulligan” and then going on to note that those gosh-darned Democrats are doing the same thing in reverse!
Before the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton’s defenders considered his past sexual behavior “old news”. After the revelations, they insisted that perjury about sex was no big deal. Now, many of those same people are arguing that illegal cover-ups of affairs are grounds for impeachment.
Now, Jonah concedes that “It’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but that’s irrelevant.” Yes, my comparison isn’t accurate, and doesn’t substantiate the point I want to make, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not right. It just means that you should agree with me no matter what I say.
Meanwhile, David French collects a few genuine horror stories of contemporary online harassment in his piece “America Is Intolerably Intolerant”, focusing in particular on the truly painful story of Helen Andrews, a former NR associate editor, whose life was transformed “when an ex-boyfriend went after her publicly in a viral moment that I’d long forgotten. No matter what she did, where she moved (Australia), or even that she changed her last name in marriage, the incident and video dogged her. It hindered her career, it led to continued personal and public mockery as new acquaintances consistently found her worst moment, and — worst of all — she discovered that there was absolutely nothing she could do to make it stop.”
Yes, this is upsetting, this sort of high-tech lynching—a phrase I just made up because nothing like it has ever happened before in the history of the world. But a high-tech lynching, however painful, isn’t quite as bad a real lynching, is it? Which used to happen a lot more in the old days. Sometimes, they would even burn you alive or take pieces of the rope or even body parts as souvenirs. And you know what? I bet nearly every one of the persons who took part in those lynchings considered themselves to be good Christians.
This is the sort of thing the National Review writes in lieu of simply saying “Pay no attention to that man in the White House.” Because they desperately don’t want you to.
1. Anti-anti-communists, aka “anti-McCarthyites”, wanted to believe that red-baitin’ Joe was a worse menace to freedom than Joe Stalin. That was so not true. I write about Joe McCarthy here and the Red Menace here.
2. Solzhenitsyn was not nearly the anti-Semite that Dostoyevsky was, but the record of the Russian Orthodox Church, like the record of Russia itself, when it comes to the Jews is abysmal.
