[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

Editor’s Note: The following is a translation of an interview with Freedom Center Shillman Fellow and historian Bruce Thornton, conducted by journalist Davide Cavaliere and published June 11, 2024 at Atlantico Quotidiano.

Davide Cavaliere: You have written a book entitled The Wages of Appeasement, where you set out to explore the reasons why a powerful state yields to its aggressors. Can you illustrate the causes of this weakening?

Bruce Thornton: The short answer is unexamined naïve or dangerous ideas. Starting in the 19the century, many Western nations began pursuing progress in global human affairs and foreign relations. This improvement was justified by a supposed growing global “harmony of interests” based on international trade, technological innovations, and the civilizing of human nature, behavior, and values.

War was now considered an anachronism from our savage past, rather than the natural condition of interstate relations, as Plato had defined it. And war was bad for increasingly interrelated global business. Moreover, violence as a settler of conflicts could be replaced by international laws and courts, multinational institutions and treaties, and “diplomatic engagement” like the Munich conference of 1938.

Twenty years before that debacle, the horrors of World War I should have punctured those delusions about human nature. Instead, the victors spent the next two decades after 1918 creating the League of Nations and other multinational treaties and covenants, all of which were signed by the next war’s aggressors Germany, Italy, and Japan––and then violated. Their growing belligerence was met with appeasement partly because of war-weariness, movements like pacifism and socialism, and global business interests that didn’t want to spend money on military preparedness instead of growing national economies with international investments and trade.

And in a period of anti-militarism, the “new world order” idealism encouraged leaders to rely on diplomacy and treaties to stop aggression. And that policy was popular with the voters: remember that when Neville Chamberlain returned to London from Munich, he was celebrated as a global hero for avoiding another mass slaughter––only to live through the greatest death and destruction in history.

DC: The contempt we have for our own civilization has been an ongoing attitude for several decades now. The West, in the opinion of its Western critics, is responsible for all the world’s ills. What do you think are the causes of this self-hatred?

BT: What some call oikophobia––hatred of one’s country, political order, and fellow citizens––has several causes. Perhaps the most important is the influence of metaphysical materialism that rejects spiritual reality and transcendent authority, which lead to secularism, the banishment of God from our political space. As such, secularism weakens the notion of absolute truth and morality, and empowers relativism. Judgements of truth and morality then become a matter of taste, fashion, and political ideologies.

Yet Marxism and other enemies of free-markets, individualism, Judeo-Christian ethics and traditions, and personal freedom, believe that their creeds are a “science,” an objectively true descriptions of reality now and in the future. Thus our public discourse is mired in a monstrous hypocritical contradiction and self-cancelling paradoxes. Traditional principles like patriotism, truth, and empirical facts are rejected as fables that legitimize the political-socio-economic establishment and its regimes of power––at the same time that the most murderous political ideology in history with 100 million victims is considered the epitome of truth and social justice.

Finally, this selective skepticism has become a sign of status, sophistication, and higher intelligence––especially when talking about the West, the arch-villain of history that the left  will never forgive for ushering Soviet communism into the dust-bin of history and, what is worse, doing so while enriching and improving the rest of the world. This belief in the West’s unique evil is, of course, false to history. But the widespread corruption of our educational system by declining standards and the politicization of curricula, ensures that fewer and fewer college–educated “woke” people who consider themselves “brights” will likely ever know the extent of their ignorance. In such circumstances, the juvenile reflexive rejection of everything that makes them what they are, is an attractive pose of daring rebellion.

DC: You are the author of a text titled Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of the Majority From the Greeks to Obama. What are these dangers and discontents?

BT: We have been living for decades through both. For a century progressivism, socialism’s cousin, has been dismantling the Constitution’s political order of unalienable rights, and separated and balanced powers. The progressives’ aim is to create a technocratic regime that can more efficiently acquire and redistribute wealth from some citizens to other, more politically favored clients. The cost comes with the diminution of the freedom and rights of civil society, as more and more decisions impacting our live are made by distant federal agencies unaccountable to voters.

The greatest danger is the concentration of power to the point that the Constitutional guardrails against tyranny fail, which is why progressives have long desired to emasculate the Supreme Court by increasing the number of justices, or to make the Senate’s size dependent on population, or do away with the Electoral College, which protects the sovereignty of the states from more populous ones.

Equally dangerous is the degradation of the 14nth Amendment’s tenets of equal protection of the laws and due process, which the trial and conviction of Donald Trump has blatantly disregarded––in order to subvert the will of the voters and their sovereignty by usurping their voting rights. What we’re heading for is the “soft tyranny” described by de Tocqueville, one destined to harden if left unchecked.

DC: In an article for FrontPage Magazine you wrote, “The response of the U.S. and EU leadership to Hamas’ genocidal savagery against Israel, a Western liberal democracy, has been despicable and dangerous.” How to explain this new wave of antisemitism?

BT: First, we should note that significant numbers of these protestors are foreign students from Muslim countries whose rulers for years have sent billions of dollars to U.S. universities’ Middle East Studies programs. As the recent letter from Iran’s Khamenei that invites American protestors to read the Koran shows, Islamic antisemitism is a function of Islamic doctrines and efforts to promulgate the “call” to conversion that is a condition for initiating a legal jihad.

As for American protestors, they are woefully ignorant of history, particularly religious history. They find Muslims exotic “people of color,” and the war against Israel a Marxist “revolutionary” struggle against an allegedly unjust “settler colonialist” and “occupier.” So many pop-cultural tropes, internet memes, fake histories, and leftist clichés are indulged and brandished by these shows. The antisemitism, then, is a prop in this political pornography. It’s all about moral preening and the juvenile impulse to shock respectable people by breaking taboos. All this obviously does not minimize or exculpate the disgusting trivializing of history’s oldest hatred, and the unprecedented genocide it created.

DC: After the pogrom in Israel on October 7, numerous academics justified Hamas and accused the Israeli leadership of “genocide.” How can this new Trahison des Clercs be explained? Why is Israel so hated in universities?

BT: Such question-begging epithets have been a perennial tactic of propaganda for centuries. They are the “big lie,” Adolf Hitler’s term in Mein Kampf  for the propaganda tactic of telling a lie so “colossal” that nobody would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” The difference now is we are in at least the fourth generation of such badly educated students that they may actually believe such preposterous lies.

The hatred of Israel has two sources. First, it’s what I call “post-Holocaust antisemitism,” a verbal deflection of Jew-hatred from the opprobrium of the death camps. Jew-hatred then can be rationalized by “Zionism,” “settler colonialism,” “occupation,” “checkpoints,” and all the other big lies we read on the signs, graffiti, and posters of university supporter of Hamas. Now that the taboo regarding the Holocaust has been shattered by the protestors, we may see “post-Holocaust antisemitism” drop its euphemisms, as have the protestors.

Second, in effect, hating Israel is a function of Soviet Marxism, which during the Cold War divided the world into its own collectivist clients, and free-market America’s. The overwhelming success of Israel, like America’s, is a repudiation of Marxism’s failed ideology, and stokes the hatred of left-over leftists, which accounts for much of anti-Americanism in Europe.

Similarly, Israel’s success in serially defeating Muslim armies while building a powerful liberal-democratic state, is a humiliating reproach to Islam and its doctrinal hatred of the Jews, who, according to the Koran, are destined to be transformed into “apes” or “apes and swine.”

DC: Academic postmodernism (deconstructionism, post-colonial studies, moral relativism) seems to lead to tribalism, antisemitism and sectarian attitudes. Can we consider this a form of pre-modern thought?

BT: Absolutely. One of the amusing ironies of what we used to call “multiculturalism” was its championing by the left, given Marx’s contempt for the underdeveloped nations that hadn’t even reached the early stages of industrialism. Typical of his view was what he wrote for the New York Herald after the 1846-48 war with Mexico: the Americans took “California from the lazy Mexicans, who did not know what to do with it.” Even in its Cultural Marxist form––one of the creators of identity politics––the “rainbow diversity” of identity politics is just a tactical pre-modern costume, for Marxist ideology’s “new man” is the only legitimate identity for every human being.

DC: In the West, after centuries of debate and war, we have come to the conclusion that tolerance and freedom of expression are indispensable, but they have become a tool that the enemies of “open societies” use to conquer us. How can we oppose the intolerant without betraying the values of our civilization?

BT: Our problem lies with a dysfunction peculiar to modernity: the fantastical expectations for our lives that we Westerners feel entitled to. Our success in eliminating or reducing substantially the famines, diseases, disasters, endemic violence, everyday pain and suffering, brutal tyrannies, and early death that our ancestors endured, have become the default bare minimum for achieving happiness. We live like gods compared to the vast majority of human beings, yet still have fevers dreams of utopian perfection, and search for political and social perpetrators who keep the dream from coming true.

As a result, every political good we enjoy must be “canceled” if it is imperfect and exacts a price in unforeseen consequences, or injures somebody’s feelings. This childish dynamic drives the assaults on free speech and an open society, which must be silenced because such “hate speech” upsets the think-skinned “snowflakes.”

As for the question “How can we oppose the intolerant without betraying the values of our civilization?” We can’t, it seems, since we are far gone down the road of dismantling the political order that made possible a free and open society and culture that treasures freedom, ordered liberty, and unalienable rights like free speech. But that order was created by people who took human nature as it is––riven by “passions and interests” inimical to all those goods. They did not believe in utopia or “new men” devoid of human depravity and vice. Their aim was to control and limit those vices from gaining enough power to overcome the virtuous.

Progressive technocracy, like communism, does believe in perfecting human nature, so evils like intolerance, inequality, or prejudice against the politically selected “other” will disappear. But to achieve their aims they need power, the power that the Constitution limited, separated, and balanced to protect the citizens. But progressive believe the Constitution to be pre-modern, unscientific, a relic of a benighted past like Christianity.

But progressives don’t despair, for their creed is to use “any means necessary” to create the utopian “new world order.” As they have shown us for decades now, that means being  intolerant in order to strengthen what they call tolerance, even if they betray our civilization, which they hate and resent, and tell “big lies” the shamefulness of which half the population can even see.

So what do we do? What our Constitution gives us the means to do––speak our minds, challenge the big lies, and win elections.

DC: Last question, perhaps the most difficult: what can European men who do not intend to succumb to the Islamo-left?

BT: Same answer: restore, regenerate, and respect the principles, virtues, traditions, and Christian creeds of their Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman civilization and the bastions of freedom it created, and win elections.