by Stephen Soukup
It’s not unfair to ask, what duty do ordinary people owe to a country and a culture that loathe themselves?
In the years before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the descent of much of Europe into “the Great War,” most of the ideologues on the Left assumed that such a war was an impossibility. The workers of the world, they believed, would no longer go to war against one another. Their class solidarity was too strong, far stronger than their national allegiance and their fidelity to artificial borders and superficial ethnic differences. Engels, for one, thought the old ways had been thoroughly demystified and discredited. The “new man”—the Communist man—was better than the old man, more organized and less aggressive toward his own kind. Darwin, Engels insisted, had described “a struggle for existence” that applied to the animal kingdom, not to the expected Communist society. In 1912, the Manifesto of the Extraordinary International Socialist Congress (of the Second International) in Basel put it this way:
It would be insanity for the governments not to realize that the very idea of the monstrosity of a world war would inevitably call forth the indignation and the revolt of the working class. The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.
Needless to say, the Leftists were wrong, and the working men of Europe spent four years destroying one another, along with the last vestiges of the pre-modern world. When at last they laid down their arms on November 11, 1918, everything that existed before had been washed away with the blood and the sweat and the grime, and all that remained was despair and disorder.
There are three principal explanations for the Leftists’ miscalculation and the workers’ unwillingness to throw off their chains and unite with one another, each of which carries some merit. The first, simplest, and most obvious explanation is that Marxism is sheer crackpottery, the inane ramblings of a cantankerous, self-absorbed fool who never actually met a “worker of the world,” save Helena Demuth, the maid he knocked up.
The second, related explanation is the one that Marx himself feared and so spent much of his time and energy trying desperately to undermine. Max Stirner (i.e., Johann Kaspar Schmidt) argued that the Communist new world order would never materialize because man, at heart, is driven by his own self-interest, his own comfort, his “ego.” Why, Stirner asked, would the workers of the world throw off the chains of the old order, only to be shackled by the chains of the new order? Why would they agree to abandon and destroy the old faith, the old religion, only to be made slaves to the new faith, to the new rules, imposed upon them from above, just like the old rules? Stirner expected not the Communist utopia, but the indulgence of the self.
The third explanation was the one embraced by the postwar Communist “Reformers”—Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, the Frankfurt School, etc.—which is also probably the best-known explanation and, as such, the most commonly understood and accepted. In short, the workers failed to unite and turn against their bourgeois masters because they suffered from a false consciousness. All their lives, they had been indoctrinated—carefully, consistently, imperceptibly—with the values, beliefs, and prejudices of the existing order, the “way things are.” The tools by which this indoctrination was accomplished were the institutions of society, the arbiters and merchants of cultural norms, starting with Christianity. The Church, the schools, the media, the family, entertainment—all the institutions of cultural transmission—were complicit in creating and perpetuating the false consciousness that mollified workers and made them unwilling to rise in rebellion.
Given this, the century since the Reformers crafted their explanation/excuse has been characterized by an effort to take over those institutions of cultural transmission, what the German Marxist student activist Rudi Dutschke later called “the long march through the institutions.”
This long march has, by almost every account, been remarkably successful—or at least it’s been successful in altering the culture as well as the consciousness of the average “worker” in Europe and the United States. One hundred years of Cultural Marxism has, as the Reformers expected, undermined the old verities and the old order. Today, all of the cultural institutions (save, perhaps, one) have been captured by leftist ideologues and are used specifically to inculcate the masses with the ideology of revolution.
As I have noted in these pages before, the long march has been successful at changing the culture but far less successful at turning that change into revolution, and for that we should all be grateful. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that Cultural Marxism hasn’t had an impact. Indeed, if anything, its biggest impact was to reveal that Marx was right to fear Stirner’s forecast and to worry that man’s ego would forestall his participation in anything that would disrupt his comfort and his self-absorption.
The nihilism of the post-World War I era, the rise of “mass man,” the splintering of the Left into Soviet and fascist camps, and the hatred, death, and destruction of World War II were all signs of Stirner’s prescience, but they were also partly attributable to the aftershocks of World War I. Today’s nihilism, today’s collapse into egoism, by contrast, has no such immediate precursor. Rather, it is the result of man’s nature, unleashed upon a world with no governing order, no definitive moral authority to check his selfishness and to keep him forward-looking, focused on a larger, teleological purpose. Its only antecedent is the long march that finally destroyed the old ways.
As a result, man today is liberated from his chains but has little interest in shackling himself to anything else—especially that which might cause him even the slightest inconvenience. This is especially the case in Europe, where the irony is profound.
Recently, BBC News ran a story asking if the UK—and Europe, by extension—is “psychologically ready” for war. Drawing in part on the World War I precedent, the story warns that Europeans are not prepared for war, that they have grown accustomed to life without war, and that, like their ancestors a century ago, they will be ill-equipped and overwhelmed by war should it arise:
Europeans, and especially Western Europe’s leadership elites, have succumbed to a decades-long “crisis of disbelief,” argues Andrew Michta, a Polish-born American academic who is professor of strategic studies at the Hamilton School, University of Florida.
He argues that the UK, in common with many European nations, has very low levels of psychological preparedness, and that authorities are not being candid about the looming threats.
“The Germans have totally disarmed during the last 30 years. The UK is also largely disarmed and, most importantly, mentally. There is no readiness for what’s happening because the policy elites are not addressing their publics in a way that would honestly state the gravity of the situation,” Michta says.
Michta is right, of course, but it’s even worse than that. About the same time as the BBC ran its story, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a conservative politician, businessman, and social commentator, posted a video to social media calling for Britons—and all Europeans, by extension—to re-embrace the idea of “duty,” the belief that they owe their nation, its institutions, and their countrymen a certain deference, a willingness to give and sacrifice on their behalf. He said that this was especially true as the proverbial winds of war begin to blow across the continent again. He cited the Roman Empire and noted that its collapse was preceded by its citizens’ abandonment of their duty to defend and protect their homeland. That’s all well and good, of course, and Rees-Mogg makes a fair point. Nevertheless, what he is asking is utterly absurd.
Rees-Mogg may, technically, be on the political Right, but that’s largely irrelevant. He’s hardly alone in telling Europeans to prepare to defend themselves. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have told their nations much the same. Preparation for tough times has been a theme across the continent of late. More to the point, the European and British “Right” is far from conservative these days. Whatever Rees-Mogg’s personal preferences, his party has been complicit, likely since Thatcher left office, in the destruction of British traditionalism.
All things considered, it’s not unfair to ask: What duty do ordinary people owe to a country and a culture that loathe themselves? How could anyone expect any Briton to give up his life—much less his creature comforts—for God and country, when his leaders, his teachers, his professors, his news presenters, his favorite actors and singers, everyone in his life with any authority has spent the last several decades telling him that God is dead and that his country is a nasty, terrible, oppressive, privilege-fueled menace to all that is good and decent? Why would any Briton—or any Frenchman, or any German, or any Spaniard—fight and die for his country, for his culture? Their cultures are despotic and unjust, or so they have been told all their lives. So what if the Russians want to take over Poland and Estonia? What’s that have to do with us? Why should we care? We should be so lucky. Maybe our energy bills would go down.
A century-plus later, the European Left has come full circle. In 1914, it expected the workers of the world to unite and to throw off the chains of their nationalist oppressors. Today, it and the rest of the European ruling class expect the “workers” to fight and die for them and their prerogatives. They expect sacrifice and “duty” and psychological preparation for war to defend a land, a people, and a culture they have insisted is unworthy of defense. The Left sought to change the culture. It did so. And only now is it realizing that the people, freed from the chains of the old order, are not less egoistic, but more.
If war comes again to Europe, the Left will be disappointed. Again.
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/28/the-winds-of-war-blow-through-a-desolate-continent/
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