^{Wealth & Poverty Review} Nixon and Khrushchev Were Both Right

There is a hope among many of my conservative friends that our recent plague of leftist mendacity, cancel culture and violence is merely a stage through which our nation is passing, and that we will right ourselves soon, through elections in 2022 and 2024. I think they’re naïve.

We have lost our nation, and we will descend far below the leftist dystopia we are in now. This is just the beginning.

Deep insight into the process we are in was provided by Malachi Martin in his fascinating book The Keys of this Blood. Vatican insider Martin recounts the struggle for control of the new world order between the Catholic Church (in the person of Pope John Paul II), the Soviets and Western economic and cultural interests. He makes the case that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a tactic to strengthen Marxism, not to abolish it. The Soviet Union was a rotted husk of Marxism’s failures, and as long as it was visible on the world stage, advance of Marxist ideology in the West was hamstrung. No Marxist could credibly tout the wisdom of his ideology while the gulag and Lenin’s corpse were on public display.

Fr. Martin argues that the way forward for Marxism was laid out by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist imprisoned in Italy for his leftist activism. Gramsci understood that despite Leninism’s success in grasping power in the Soviet Union and the success of Lenin’s congeners in China and other Asian Countries, Leninist Marxism was dead in the West. He understood that Marxists could never rise to power again in the West because Western cultural and economic institutions were too strong and Leninism was in utter disrepute. Gramsci understood that in order for Marxism to triumph in the West, it was necessary for Marxists to work insidiously from within—to corrupt the religious, educational, economic and social institutions of Western civilization and to coopt Western industry and capital. This invidious corruption has been termed ‘the Long March through the Institutions.”

We in America are well along in the Gramscian March through our institutions. The belief (hope really) among many decent Americans that we will overcome this infestation is in my view naïve. Although cancel culture is very unpopular with the American public, our nation lacks the cultural and spiritual resources to overcome it. America is like an AIDS patient with a minor infection, naively believing that it can recover yet not realizing that its immune system is decimated and its vital organs are laid open to conquest.

In the Kitchen Debate in 1959, Richard Nixon told Nikita Khrushchev that his Russian grandchildren would live in freedom, and Khrushchev told Nixon that his American grandchildren would live under communism.

They were both right.