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Protecting Christian values in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond

10.06.2016, 11:13
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Humanity needs leaders to pull itself out of global governance’s highway and discover the narrow path that leads back to the Father of all. Is it not humanity’s deepest aspiration today to return to reality, to truth, beauty, happiness, love - to return to our loving Father?

The globalization of the western cultural revolution

Political Forum, Kiev, June 1-3, 2016

An hour of hope

Marguerite A. PeetersOne generation has passed since the independence of former Republics and satellite countries from the Soviet Union. Twenty-five years ago, in April 1991, I came to your beloved country, Ykraïna, for the first time, as a journalist. It was a year and a half after the fall of the Berlin wall, just a few months before Ukraine declared independence.

What an amazing hour of grace! How could one forget the tears of joy and hope on the faces of people who sensed they were on the threshold of liberation from decades of brutal Marxist Leninist oppression? With what emotion they were meeting westerners, their brothers and sisters from the “free world”, from what they saw as the Judeo-Christian West, their friends and allies, they thought and hoped, for the first time in their life! The soul of a nation, buried under the snow of a tragically long and harsh winter, timidly started awakening. There was a sense of not just “freedom from” (repression), but “freedom for” – something beautiful, the realization of the human heart’s deepest and most authentic longings.

Believers discern in the events that put an end to the Cold War a providential character. Humanity as a whole participated in the celebration of a liberation that had for so long seemed humanly impossible, in the celebration of a miraculous unfolding of events.

Living in Ukraine until April 93, I witnessed at the beginning of my stay the exhilarating manifestation of a set of very pure, interrelated aspirations: first among them the aspiration to freedom of course, in particular religious freedom, self-determination, the freedom to determine oneself according to one’s cultural identity or vocation as a nation, according to what is universally recognized as good for the people, the aspiration to global peace, to social, civil and political order and economic development, to East-West solidarity and fraternity, to subsidiarity and the decentralization of power, to a return to existential reality, as ideologies had proven their illusory character. There was an awareness of the need for healing. A few among the most sincere or generous also expressed a desire for reconciliation with the “enemy”, for forgiveness.

The deepest and most real aspiration was a return to the concrete human person as made in the image of God, that is, out of love and for love, a desire for a new and global type of civilization, founded on the recognition of our universal brotherhood, a civilization in which love, and therefore the family in particular, would recover its central place. These aspirations were divinely inspired. They were strongest in this part of the world. But this part of the world then played a role in reawakening them in all human hearts. They were those of humanity as whole in the new era it entered into in 1989.

Disillusionment

The hour of grace was short-lived. Quick and bitter disillusionment succeeded the hope that post-1989 aspirations would be quickly or easily fulfilled. People realized that the fraternal help they could legitimately expect from western nations did not come, at least not in the measure nor in the way they had hoped for. The West was not what those completely cut away from it for decades thought it was. The mafia quasi immediately took over. Corruption settled in. People became progressively aware of the state of civil, political, social, economic and cultural destruction of their post-communist societies. The scope of the anthropological cataclysm that Marxism-Leninism had operated was devastating. Courage was in order. Daunting was the challenge of rebirth. People realized reconstruction would be laborious; it would probably take generations. Discouragement frequently won the day.

From the external enemy to the enemy within

The West, meanwhile, was triumphant. In 1989, it proclaimed the end of ideologies, as it identified Marxism-Leninism to all ideologies. Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history, by which he meant the definitive triumph of the western model: freedom, equality, rights, human dignity, the rule of law, democracy, market economy. Is that not what former communist countries aspired to, and also in fact African, Asian, Latin American countries, in this era of globalization and instantaneous communication?

But who, in the West, was courageous enough to take a realistic look at the moral and spiritual state of western societies in 1989?

This brings me to my topic: the globalization of the western cultural revolution.

During the Cold war, the “enemy” was considered to be exclusively external to democracy and geographically circumscribed to the communist countries. But what many have failed to discern up to this very day is that the western model has had, for generations, an enemy “within”, hidden “within” democratic values, institutions and processes, within the language expressing “universal values”.

Over the course of the last centuries, a quiet revolution has led the modern and Judeo-Christian West – two characteristics we need to carefully distinguish – to postmodernity and radical secularism (“laïcisme” in French) or post-Judeo-Christianity, putting at stake the very identity of the so-called “western model”. It is the responsibility of Christian politicians to challenge the actual content of the western model.

The sexual revolution [1]

Last century’s sexual revolution was the chief driver of the cultural revolution. The sexual revolution hijacked “universal values”. The individuals and organizations advocating access to, or the right to free love and contraception, then to abortion, voluntary sterilization, in vitro fertilization, prostitution, euthanasia, assisted suicide, choice of one’s sexual orientation and “form of family”, same sex marriage, surrogacy… have operated in the very name of civic liberty, equality and rights, democracy, human dignity and compassion. Doesn’t the transnational same sex lobby present its claims as matters of equal rights, human dignity and liberty?

As a result, the core content of our traditional concepts has become highly ambivalent. No one can be sure of how policy-makers now interpret rights (women’s rights, children’s rights…), freedom, choice, human dignity, for instance. In fact, the words expressing universal values can now mean exact ideological opposites - for or against motherhood and life from conception to natural death, for or against marriage between a man and a woman, for or against the family founded on marriage. Language has become a battlefield. The strongest, the most powerful wins the battle and imposes his interpretation on all. In most western countries, the balance of power has tilted on the wrong side. Those who push for global educational, political and juridical reform and cultural transformation in the favor of the deadly ideological agendas we just mentioned are supported by a critical mass of western politicians and decision-makers.

At the beginning of last century, the various components of the sexual revolution agenda were illegal. Margaret Sanger, one of the spearheads of the feminist and sexual revolution - she wanted to liberate women from what she called “the slavery of reproduction” -, the foundress of the IPPF, went to jail on several occasions. Well before the end of the 20th century, the sexual revolution had won the day. Its components, one after the next, started turning into rights, laws, policies, culture, towards the mid-1960s. After May 68 western culture as a whole shifted to the side of the revolutionaries. The sexual revolution turned into a cultural revolution[2].

An anthropological cataclysm resulted from the cultural revolution, whose bitter fruits are all too well-known to us: an epidemy of divorce, broken families, disorientation and despair of the young, solitude of the elderly, the unfathomable existential consequences of abortion, Europe’s demographic winter. The western anthropological cataclysm took place by free, rebellious choice, in the name of freedom. In this part of the world, it took place by way of repression.

The dramatic acceleration of secularization and loss of faith in western Europe in the last several decades has been both the cause and the consequence of the sexual revolution. If, in 1989-91, the West deceived the expectations of countries just liberated from communist oppression, is it not because of its unfaithfulness to its Judeo-Christian identity?

European societies turned into a desert

The 20th century was a dark century. Ideologues, the minorities who initially followed them and created NGOs and pressure groups, and then societies themselves culturally murdered the father, deemed to be the author of our repression (the death of the father was a major theme of May 68 - but 18th century deism was, by the way, the backdrop for the foundation of western democracies – deism having killed the fatherhood in God). Then came the murder of the mother (liberate women from motherhood), of the spouse, replaced by a multiplicity of temporary partners, of the child, treated exclusively as an “equal citizen”. This series of cultural murders of the different components of our universal human identity turned western societies into anthropological deserts. Gender ideologues stepped in to fill the void. They declared motherhood and fatherhood, our spousal identity, the complementarity between the sexes, the family based on marriage between a man and a woman, femininity and masculinity to be mere social constructs – constructs they deemed contrary to equality and discriminatory, therefore to be deconstructed by all means: education, culture, policies and laws.

In 1989, in the backdrop of fast accelerating globalization, the unrepentant and arrogant West proclaimed the universality of its model. Because of the moral and spiritual state the West was in at the end of the Cold War, the global imposition of its “model” was doomed to have tragic consequences for humanity.

An ideological post-Cold War “global consensus” set to govern us until 2030

But here is what is worse: the agents of its feminist, sexual and cultural revolution, having grabbed power at the level of global governance, managed to turn their ideological objectives into global political norms, no sooner did the Berlin wall fall. How did this happen?

One year after 1989, the UN launched a conference process (9 conferences between 1990 and 1996) to build a so-called “new global consensus” on the norms, values and priorities of international cooperation for the 21st century. Among these conferences: the Fourth UN Conference on Population and Development (Cairo 1994) and the Fourth UN Conference on Women (Beijing 1995).

At these two conferences governments adopted a series of “new paradigms” that have been at the core of the global governance agenda ever since and have been effectively treated as “global political norms”. The names of these “global norms” are well-known to you: reproductive and sexual health, reproductive rights, comprehensive sexuality education, safe abortion, confidential services for young people, informed choice, the family under all its forms, sexual diversity, the gender perspective and gender equality, social constructs, deconstruction of stereotypes and so on. Reproductive and sexual health, reproductive rights, gender equality are umbrella concepts. They are prominent in the global development framework adopted at the UN last September for the next 15 years, which is supposed to remain valid until 2030: the Sustainable Development Goals. The language of global governance is manipulative. It hides an agenda: a postmodern, post-Judeo-Christian ethic, and which has not only imposed itself on our governments, but already trickled down to the local level.

The UN paradigms of the global sexual revolution impose objectives such as universal access to the full range of contraceptive methods irrespective of your marital status or your age, so-called safe abortion, a sexuality education not only deprived of morality but altogether immoral in its content, the cultural deconstruction of motherhood and of sexual identity etc.  The imposition takes different forms: conditions for development assistance, political pressure to reform health and education policies and laws, power grab by the transnational agents of the global sexual revolution.

It was wrong for the West to triumphantly proclaim the end of ideologies in 1989. Ideologies transform themselves. Genderism is neo-marxist. Ideological residues pervade the current agenda of global governance.

A political revolution

Do the “global norms”, which govern us surreptitiously but effectively, express the will of the people? Were they ever the object of an open democratic debate at the national level? Who forged them? Their authors are none others than the very agents of the western cultural revolution (individuals within international organizations – WHO, UNFPA, UN Women… - working in partnership with NGOs – for instance, reproductive health comes from Margaret Sanger’s discourse about “reproduction”). These agents have always had an internationalist perspective (the IPPF was founded in Bombay) – and this internationalist perspective became a globalist one in 1989. They have been working hand in hand with population control institutions and the United Nations ever since the 60s, in the shadow of the Cold War. In 1989, they were at the rudder of global governance: they were the UN’s primary partners in the areas of population, women’s issues, development.

A political revolution has taken place since the end of the Cold War. It has shifted power from the people, rooted in a culture, a nation, a faith, to those globalist, special interest groups that have “participated” in policy-making at the “global” level in unprecedented ways during the UN conference process of the 1990s. This political revolution put in place a functional global “partnership regime”, through which national governments de facto became the equal partners of transnational NGOs and pressure groups operating at the UN level.

Dear friends, democracy is power by the people for the people. Politicians are there to serve the people, not ideological lobbies.  Through global governance, however, lobbies often dictate our national policies, in a number of areas that has kept on increasing since the 1990s. This all takes place under the cover of “democratization”. Soon after Ukrainian independence, I was told the ministry of education of this country signed a contract with the IPPF, granting it a monopoly over sexual education in Ukrainian public schools. This is called the “democratization” of countries in transition. Hillary Clinton considers African alignment along the LGBT perspective to be an essential part of the “democratization” of the African continent.

Leading the way back to the Father

Dear friends, since their liberation from communism, Central and Eastern European countries have had a paradoxical attitude towards the West. On the one hand, they, especially the young people, remain - too often indiscriminately - attracted by the so-called Western model, seeing in it the exclusive recipe to development and happiness. On the other hand, they do perceive in their conscience that some of what has already been culturally and politically imported from the West since the opening of borders does not match their real aspirations as human persons created in the image of God. Yet in spite of their disillusionment, a great many have allowed themselves to be entangled with western ideological agendas and the Diktats of global governance.

What is the way out of this unhealthy, paradoxical situation?

When night is the darkest, the stars are the brightest. Darkness cannot overpower light (cf. Jn 1 5).

Central and Eastern Europeans have been purified by suffering. They have experienced in their own flesh the trauma that ideological views of equality and liberty can provoke. If they listen to their heart, they will know that they don’t want to shift from one type of totalitarianism to another type, operating in white gloves within democratic institutions and processes. If they listen to their heart, they will find in it very pure, divinely inspired aspirations. The experience of oppression has sharpened their discernment. Moral resistance to communism and ideology has granted them an authority. They know what language manipulation can lead to. They have, therefore, a special responsibility towards humanity.

But they must be aware of this responsibility. They must exercise it. They must do the laborious work of discernment. They must not be intimidated by western and global governance pressures. They must lead.

Three clarifying statements are long overdue. Let us take leadership, first, in publicly identifying the ideological framework that governs us top-down, its paradigms, norms, language and postmodern ethic, the hidden agenda in order to prevent and overcome manipulation. Let us secondly publicly expose the political revolution, the effective usurpation, at the supranational and global levels, of the power that belongs to the people and the influence wielded by the agents of the cultural revolution on education, health, environment, family policies. But the most important clarifying statement to be made is the identification of the real, humanly universal, divinely inspired aspirations of people today. Let us pay greater attention to the secret workings of the Holy Spirit in people’s hearts and in cultures globally than to the state of deconstruction of eastern and western societies.

Humanity needs leaders to pull itself out of global governance’s highway and discover the narrow path that leads back to the Father of all. Is it not humanity’s deepest aspiration today to return to reality, to truth, beauty, happiness, love - to return to our loving Father?

Dear friends, humanity’s post-Cold War aspirations remain its aspirations today. The time has come, one generation after 1989, after a time of confusion, to work at realizing them, taking the human person, made in the image of God, as our starting and end point. These aspirations are our primary political and cultural platform.

These are Christian nations. Cyril and Methodius, the apostles of the Slavs, evangelized Bohemia-Moravia, central Europe, in the 9th century. Miesko, the first Duke of Poland, was baptized in 966; Vladimir, the first prince of the Kievan Rus, was baptized in 988 together with his people. Saint Stephen, first king of Hungary, founded 7 dioceses and several monasteries. How does one reawaken the soul of a nation, the intuition of who we are as a people? How does one reawaken the consciousness of our universal filial identity?

Sooner or later, global governance’s Berlin wall will fall. People themselves, with the help of the Holy Spirit, will pierce a breach in the wall separating humanity from reality, love, our eternal destiny. Each one must do the work assigned to him or her alone.

Let us hope this our meeting achieves a breakthrough and be a turning point.


[1] I’ve amply written about these topics in my books: The globalization of the western cultural revolution; The gender revolution; The new global ethic: challenges for the Church; The citizen and the person: rebellion and reconciliation...

[2] In 2015, western Europe’s contraceptive prevalence rate, including that of immigrant women, which is much inferior to that of westerners, was 70%. Worldwide, it was 64%.

By Marguerite A. Peeters