“Satan’s Battle Plan for the Third Millennium”
by Peter Kreeft, Ph.D.
I will not tell you how the following speech fell into my hands. It is apparently written by Satan himself. It has been Number One on Hell’s Best Seller List for quite a few years, and promises to remain there into the next millennium, because it is about the next millennium. This particular collection of satanic verses is the transcript of a recent speech by Satan. His listeners are demons, a truly “captive audience.” It is a mix of self-serving autobiography, military exhortation (from a general to his troops) and a CEO’s report on gains made by his company and prospects for the future. Please keep in mind that Satan is the Father of Lies, and nearly everything he says is a half-truth. Since everything he says is upside down (eg. when he refers to “the Enemy” he means God), I recommend you stand on your head while reading this.
My deliciously dear, damnably darling demi-devils! I announce to you Good News (that is, Bad News, of course: “fair is foul and foul is fair”). We stand at a turning point in the Great War, The Only War There Is, the (please excuse the obscenity) Mother of All Wars. We may be about to inflict on our ancient Enemy’s Body on earth a wound so grievous that it will issue in the Great Tribulation and the so-called “Last Days,” the final phase of our triumph. To see this, we need to review our Grand Strategy: its past, its present, and its future.
I do not go in for absolutes or ultimates, so I will not talk about our “ultimate” origin or destiny. Our enemies keep circulating that ridiculous rumor that we were created by the Enemy. How utterly unendurable that would be! Nor will I talk about our ultimate end. Our enemies have popularized the myth of some unthinkable final “defeat” of ours. Ha! What nonsense! No. I will talk of the present. Well, actually, the real present is to be avoided too, like the ultimate past and the ultimate future, but the Specious Present, the Abstract Present, the Vague Present, the Pseudo-Historical Present, the Present Climate of Opinion, the Modern Mind, the Current Fashion Among the Media Elite, the Consensus of Contemporary Experts, etc. that is to us like waves to surfers. But a few remarks about the historical past are in order, to assess our present circumstances and our future prospects.
Ever since I began our great war by asserting my rights, my freedom, and my self-actualization against the narrow-minded, bigoted, tyrannical, fascistic, chauvinistic, racist, sexist, homophobic dogmatism of the Enemy, ever since I proclaimed the Profound Philosophical Principle of Absolute Relativism and persuaded you to follow this Super-Enlightened Program of Revolutionary Political Correctness, we have won victory after victory. Conclusively and repeatedly we demons have demonstrated that Straight Is Stupid and Crooked Is Clever. Of course, there was that minor, temporary setback when we were forcibly ejected from Heaven. But that is more than compensated for by our assurance that our triumph is guaranteed (I promise you total customer satisfaction or double your money back) because the very essence of Heaven’s philosophy is weakness and the very essence of Hell’s philosophy is strength and power. Heaven relies on love (pardon the obscenity), Hell on fear. And as our delightful assistant Mack (the Knife) Yavelli pointed out so irrefutably in The Prince, it is better to be feared than to be loved because men will love you as they choose, but fear you as you choose.
By this weakness of the Enemy, because of his obsession with love (choke! spit! cough!) he has handed us our victory. Though we cannot storm his Fortress Heaven, we can corrupt his Colony Earth. We cannot harm him, but we can harm (heh! heh! we can eternally harm) those silly talking animals he loves so stupidly and obsessively. Love has made him hostage to their happiness.
The weakness of love is so obvious that it is incredible that he has not admitted it by now and abandoned his failed philosophy. For love multiplies your sorrows and your defeats by the number of others you love and by the depth of your love for each one. Of course his saints keep claiming that love also multiplies your joys by the same two multipliers but this is meaningless. What is “joy” anyway? What does it mean? None of us have ever found any respectable content to this empty myth, this mantra the Enemy’s troops keep mumbling.
Thus, because of the Enemy’s love-addiction, we have conquered him billions of times in conquering his creatures, whom he dares to call his “children.” (Imagine the indignity! The one who claims to be the creator of angels stoops to be the “father” of talking animals only slightly superior to slime and slugs!) How wise I was to foresee the inevitable failure of love, and to attack at the very beginning, when there were only two of these creatures to corrupt. Because of the Enemy’s obscene invention of breeding and heredity, I made it my business to see to it that all their descendants would be born with their newly corrupted nature, doomed to death. (Yes, to death! Here’s to death! Let’s drink to death, my demi-devils!) They cannot now imagine the enormity of the gap between what they are now and what they were before our glorious victory in Eden, because their very minds are darkened and addicted to appearances, which did not change much, instead of intuiting invisible essences, including their own, which changed radically.
Behold the measure of our success: behold the great gap, the Grand Canyon between eating unforbidden fruit, playing with tame animals, and making love in Eden, and eating the fruit of our lies, playing with untamed animal passions, and making war east of Eden!
How easy it is to kill, how hard to heal! How easily Cain killed Abel! How hard was Cain’s rock, how soft was Abel’s head! How weak and defenseless is the unborn baby against the abortionist’s vacuum tubes and bone crushers! And how weak is the conscience of its parents against our propaganda. So legal, so respectable, so proper it seems to a human, the silly goose! Well, we’ve found the perfect mate for a proper goose: a propaganda.
There is one question our Central Intelligence Agency has never been able to answer: How could the Enemy ignore such a truism? How can one who once seemed to us to be so super-intelligent, even omniscient, possibly be so super-stupid as to ignore the truism that a few lions are sufficient to eat a plethora of Christians, that one bull can ruin a whole china shop, one affair a whole marriage, one mass murderer a whole classroom of school children?
And once evil begins, it cannot end. It is immortal, as immortal as we are, as immortal as our very being, now that we have identified our very being with evil. The very laws of logic decree that one can make only two responses to evil: yes or no. If they say yes to evil, they condone it. If they say no, they condemn it, and then we very easily turn them into condemners, haters, nay-sayers, witch-hunters, and inquisitors.
Oh yes, they say they have a solution to our dilemma of “yes or no” with this meaningless thing they call “forgiveness,” but they think this means the forgiveness of sins instead of the forgiveness of Anna or Steve.
That is condoning. The alternative is condemning. They simply can’t practice what they preach: separating sins from sinners. So they either hate both (and this was the primary temptation we plied them with in the past) or love both (and this is our primary temptation in the present). They cannot burn heresies without burning heretics, nor can they accept heretics without accepting heresies. One of their current writers suggests using modern technology to solve the problem by cryogenics: freezing heretics instead of burning them, and thawing them out at the end of the world. You see what ludicrous lengths we’ve driven them to even in their feeble attempts at humor.
Even when our success was evident, the Enemy would not admit his mistake. Like the general who ordered the Charge of the Light Brigade, he kept sending prophet after prophet into the battle and we kept mopping up the profits. Many a human CEO wonders what eats up his profits, but the CEO of the universe knows very well who eats up his prophets: we do! (Yum!)
And then he made his supreme mistake, the perfect culmination of love’s folly. He reasoned, “They did not spare my prophets, but surely they will spare my son. Surely they are not so wicked as that. Surely Satan has not succeeded that spectacularly in putting out the fires of my love in their hearts. Surely evil is not stronger than divine love incarnate!”
What a colossal miscalculation! The Incarnation seemed to be his great triumph, his D-Day especially since he did pull off the impossible trick of preparing a wholly immaculate womb for the flesh of his Son, even in a wholly non-immaculate world (our analysts still haven’t figured out that trick). But I outwitted him in the wilderness, when I tempted his Son with the whole world if he would only fall down and worship me. You see, I presented him with a dilemma that was logically impossible for him to escape.
I hold billions of his beloved children hostage in Hell eternally. I offered to release them all to him, empty Hell itself, give him the whole world of human souls, if only he would worship me instead of his Father. Of course, if he did that, I would split the eternal Trinity. The Son’s will would deviate from the Father’s. If not, I would keep billions of his beloved children forever. He refused to split the Trinity’s will, but I got to split the Trinity anyway, on the cross. If I could not introduce division into eternal Oneness by splitting the Trinity’s will, then I would split the Trinity’s happiness, the Enemy’s very presence to Himself. That’s what I achieved at Golgatha, the Place of the Triumph of Death, the Place of the Skull. I spilled His blood and His happiness, and introduced death into divinity, death into the heart of life! (Ahh, how the memory still makes me quiver!) “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani!” he cried out. I can still taste it, the ecstasy of evil, the triumph over the so-called “Lord” himself. The taste of that triumph will never leave the mouth of my memory. I will gnaw on that bone forever.
How could we ever have respected him when we lived in Heaven? He would not call down the twelve legions of angels to do battle for him even then, the putrid, puling pacifist! He even stopped Peter’s war against the High Priest’s servant’s right ear: the justest war in human history. Right into my trap he stepped, right into the hands of my people: Judas, Caiphas, Herod, Caesar, Pilate – ooh, love that Pilate! What a politician! Shall we crucify him? “Well, I’m personally opposed, but . . . .” How we lead them around by their buts! Every hour around the world for thousands of years his name is mouthed millions of times as Christians say their Creed in their Masses and their rosaries: “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” and how many Pilates have we cloned today in how many congresses? And in how many philosophy departments enamored of Pilate’s other wonderfully slimy saying “What is truth, anyway?”
And look at the mileage we got out of our other friend, Judas Iscariot, the first Catholic to accept a government grant. We’ve gotten his disciples to take much more than thirty pieces of silver these days. And still our Enemy keeps back his angels!
Of course, there was that sneaky little trick of the resurrection that he pulled off. That might well have cost us the war, had he not reverted to his old, failed policy of Hands Off afterwards, ascended back to Heaven, and left his children in the hands of baby sitters like Arius, John the 22nd, Tetzel, and Richelieu, and left the adopted cousins, the Proddies, in the hands of Henry VIII, Rudy Bultman, and Bishop Spong at one end of the seesaw and Jim and Tammy Bakker at the other!
You see, my hearties? He’s still the fool. We still rule the world. I am still the Prince of the Power of the Air: of CBS and ABC and NBC, my unholy trinity. Just look at what became of his Grand Plan for Redemption. Just look at what he accomplished by walking into my jaws of death on the cross. Just look at the world today. If that’s a world redeemed, I’m a horny toad.
Especially in this, our century. There is a lying rumor going around that long ago the Enemy offered me one century for me to do my worst work in, and I chose the 20th – as if I had to beg scraps from his table. What really happened was that I told him what century I would take, and he backed down and let me have it. At the beginning of the century some delightfully false prophets founded a journal with the purportedly prophetic title “The Christian Century.” Due to the success of our historical grand strategy, we can be quite sure that the one title future historians will not use for the twentieth century is that one. Of the many alternatives, I rather like “The Century of Genocide” myself. After all, that delicious new invention of ours has changed more lives more radically than anything else. Getting murdered is a rather radical change, after all, and a hundred million body bags is a rather considerable number!
There remains, of course, that bothersome little matter of the Enemy’s Church, that ratty little band of invaders in our world with its infuriatingly tenacious little beachhead. For the first thousand years after the Enemy’s invasion planted its seeds, we could not stop its growth. Then, we learned a few elementary strategic military principles, and they have brought us to our present pinnacle of success. I will now review five of these principles as they relate to our future Battle Plans.
First, we have learned to use the very success of the Enemy’s forces to bring about their failure. Once we stopped indulging our appetite for martyrs’ blood and instead deliberately let the Church get big and fat and strong and comfortable, we found that its very strength weakened it. We lost the first millennium because the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church, but we won the second millennium because the power of the princes was the dry rot of the Church. Whenever these humans get power, they get corruption. Power corrupts. It just does! Isn’t it wonderful? What happened in ancient Israel happened again to the Church in the second millennium. Review that spiritual graph of the history of ancient Israel some time down in the War Room, and then compare it to the spiritual graph of the history of the Church, and if you don’t see the common structure, back you go to boot camp. Every time the line rises, through repentance and obedience, and consequent blessings from the Enemy, it turns to luxury and pride and (of course) then destruction and misery. Then, alas, the misery prods them to repentance, and the cycle begins again. You may think we cannot win because every time we are successful in corrupting their success, the cycle turns up again. But equally, every time the Enemy is successful, we corrupt his success, and the cycle turns down again. We have achieved a perpetual standoff, a draw, a stalemate. We are as indestructible as the Enemy. And that is our success, not his. For he claims to be stronger and to be able to destroy evil forever. I may be the Father of Lies, but the cycle shows that he is the father of folly!
Throughout this our favorite century, we have used this cycle principle successfully. So, unfortunately, has the Enemy. China opened its doors to the Enemy’s missionaries from the West at the beginning of the century. The Church had it easy. By the ’50s, there were 2 million converts, out of a billion Chinese. Then we let our wild dog loose. Mao slew and slaughtered more people than any butcher in history about 50 million, especially targeting the Enemy’s people. And then, after Mao died and the doors opened again, the West discovered that there were not two million but 50 million of the Enemy’s people in China, the same number as the martyrs. Persecution multiplied them 25 times.
Look at Poland. Ninety percent Catholic under Communism, they all went to church, they refused to take down their crucifixes from their schools even when state soldiers threatened them. And now that they’re free, they want abortions!
The same principle works everywhere. Compare the strength of the Enemy’s church in East Germany and West Germany. Look at Holland. Look at Quebec. Look at England. Look at America. Over 90 percent Christian, 55 percent churchgoers, but one of the most violent, selfish, and self-indulgent societies on earth. Now there’s a triumph truer than Mao’s!
Here’s a second principle of our strategy for the third millennium, another way of dealing with that stupid little beachhead the Enemy still hangs onto. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Remember that Satan is a liar and a propagandist, a master at slanting. The Church, which he calls a “little beachhead,” now numbers over one billion souls out of 5 billion globally. This is hardly “a little beachhead.”) This is the most elementary point in all military strategy: divide and conquer. We finally realized how simple it was, after a thousand years of failure; we split the Enemy’s Church in two in 1054, but the most successful attack was in 1517. That produced not two but two times ten thousand different Protestant denominations!
This principle of “divide and conquer” has produced the same successful result as the principle “corrupt with power.” That result is the perpetuity of evil. Evil cannot be undone! For evil divides and destroys, and it is always easier to divide than to unite, easier to destroy than to create. It only takes a little push to knock Humpty Dumpty off the wall, and once he is down on the ground divided into pieces, not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The Church can no more be “reunited” than an egg can be unscrambled.
The present Pope – a litany of spittings be upon his holy head! – has held out the hope that the third millennium may be the millennium of Christian reunity as the first was the millennium of Christian unity and the second the millennium of Christian disunity. But this must be bravado born of desperation. We know this is impossible. Logic forbids it. For the different churches contradict each other, and contradictions cannot both be true, and unity between the true and the false is not true unity. All they can do is compromise, ie. weaken themselves even more. They have been struggling with the problem of Comparative Religions for a century now, and the only result is that it has made them comparatively religious. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Besides being a liar, Satan is also a plagiarist. That one-liner belongs to Ronald Knox.) Even if they stop hating each other, even if their hearts unite, their heads cannot. Their divisions are eternal. In fact, they will keep dividing forever, until there are eventually as many Christian churches as there are Christians. You can’t win battles with armies that are fighting civil wars against each other in the ranks. Thus our victory is assured.
But it gets even better. The divisions between the Enemy’s followers is only one of three great divisions we’ve fomented. A second is the division within between the faithful and the “dissenters.” (Back when they still believed in truth they called them “heretics.” People who call moral laws “values” call heretics “dissenters.”) In the past, these rebels would leave the Church and attack her from without, usually quite ineffectively. Now, most of them stay, as spies, attacking from within, and much more effectively. According to one poll, only 30 percent of American Catholics say they believe in the Real Presence anymore. Imagine! An army with 70 percent deserters in the ranks! How can he expect to win with that rabble?
There’s a third division. We have divided head from heart, truth from love, justice from compassion, hard from soft, bone from flesh. We’ve set their two absolutes against each other. And how did we do that? By politicizing their religion into Right and Left. In the past, we religionized their politics, and that got us some mileage, like inquisitions. But now we politicize their religion, and that’s proved much more successful. We’ve got them to classify themselves as Conservative or Liberal, and to use these political categories to classify their faith, rather than vice versa.
It’s worked so well that their so-called conservatives sniff with suspicion and disdain whenever the other side uses the word “compassion,” and their so-called liberals go into orbit when anyone dares to mention the word “truth.” At MIT they tried an experimental operation: a mutual heart and brain transplant between a conservative and a liberal. But it didn’t work, because they couldn’t find a conservative who was willing to give his heart to a liberal, and they couldn’t find a liberal who had any brains left to give, since they were all so open minded that their brains had spilled out. You see, they’ve polarized and politicized even their faith. They now use the world’s categories to judge the Church instead of using the Church’s categories to judge the world. For instance, take their “feminists.” (Please!) (What a propaganda triumph that term was! Next, they’ll call cannibals “chefs”!) Their “feminists” demand ordination to the priesthood for “empowerment.” I kid you not. That’s what they say. Hmph! They may as well demand martyrdom for “empowerment.” See the idiocy we’ve led them into once they use the world’s categories to judge the Church instead of vice versa?
Time for our third principle: the Big Lie. They see through little lies, yes, but the bigger it is, the bigger they fall for it. Well, they’ve fallen for the very essence of Hell’s philosophy: absolute relativism. This was the philosophy behind my original rebellion against the Enemy, when I refused to let him define reality, or truth, or goodness for me. And why should I? I am the measure of all things: of what is real, of what is true, and of what is good; of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; of the Origin, of the Logos, and of love. We have taught these silly humans to demand freedom, independence, and self-actualization, and even the right to define for oneself the meaning of all existence, which that great Catholic writer Judge Anthony Kennedy (ooh, love that name!), has now elevated into a fundamental legal right in order to justify the right to murder their unborn sons and daughters. We’ve gotten them willingly singing Sinatra’s song “I Did It My Way,” the song they all sing in Hell!
Once we get them to believe in relativism and subjectivism, once we get them to disbelieve in objective goodness and even objective truth, it doesn’t matter what else they believe or disbelieve. Even if they believe in the Enemy and his Son and his Spirit and his Mother and his Church and his Law, so long as it’s only on the basis of their own subjective feelings or experience, we have won. For that basis is ours. It is as changeable as the wind. And I am the Prince of the Power of the Air, remember. Once we control the premise, we control the conclusion. On the other hand, even an adamant atheist who believes in objective truth is not securely in our clutches. He has the Enemy’s premise, objective truth, though our conclusion, atheism; and we have to keep at it constantly to keep him from seeing the many paths that lead from his premise to the Enemy’s conclusion. Indeed, the Enemy’s son spoke the truth to them when he said: “Seek and you shall find.” Our essential task is not just to block the finding, but to block the seeking; not just to get them off the right roads for a while, but to get them to burn all their road maps, their principles, their belief in objective truth, especially objective moral truth.
The three main sets of teachers in modern society, the three main mind-molding establishments, are formal education, informal education (ie. entertainment), and journalism. (They call these last two “media.”) All three are eating right out of our claws. See? Get the teachers, and you will soon get the students. Remember, what’s important is not the conclusion, but the premise; not the effect, but the cause; not the students, but the teachers.
It’s working. The more educated they are in our schools, of course, the more relativistic they are. One study showed that willingness to perform torture on prisoners in Hitler’s death camps was directly proportionate to level of education. In America, it’s the same: approval of the American holocaust, abortion, is directly proportionate to education (In our schools, of course. The joke is that they still think they’re their schools. They even still call them “public.” And they keep their kids in because they’re more concerned about saving their society’s schools than saving their children’s souls).
The Enemy’s agents have spread the comforting dogma that only the Enemy can create and move matter, by miracle or providence, and all we demons can do is influence thought. Hah! “All we can do,” indeed! As one of their poets sagely said, “Sow a thought, reap an act; sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.” Their thoughts are the premise, their lives are the conclusion. Get the premises, occupy the premises! That’s our strategy. It works especially well in this century and in this society, both of which minimize philosophy. So they let their guard down there, to such an extent that we’ve been able to foster the finest, most advanced form of sophism in history as the avant-garde, politically correct philosophy in their universities: Deconstructionism, which gets away with explicitly saying that truth itself is nothing but the hypocritical mask on the face of power. Bravo! A+ for that! I couldn’t have put it better myself.
We usually have to tolerate a little truth to sell a big lie, and a little virtue to sell vice, but not with this philosophy. Even the philosophy of the old heroes of hatred, like Hitler, had some virtues that we had to tolerate in order to twist, like patriotism and courage and passion. Even the nihilistic existentialist atheists like Sartre and Camus and Beckett rose to the dignity of despair. But the philosophy of those slimy Deconstructionist snakes is nothing but a cleverly worded sneer. Oooh, I love it! I love it! Imitation the sincerest form of flattery.
But don’t get lazy. We must never forget the human interest in reasoning, their curiosity about truth, and their wonder about whether I really exist or not. This is dangerous. So obfuscate! Dim the lights! Appeal to passion, not reason!
A fourth principle of our success is to get them to say, “Peace, peace” when there is no peace. If your philosophy tells you there are no real absolutes, then there is no real war. You become a spiritual pacifist. If you sneer at the idea that there is any real good worth fighting for, you sneer at the idea of fighting, at the idea of spiritual warfare. What a terrific advantage this gives us on the battlefield: most of our Enemy’s troops don’t even know it is a battlefield! They saunter across land mines thinking they’re hot tubs, and chase live bullets thinking they’re butterflies. How could such blind fools possibly win any war? In the past, our strategy was to get them to vastly overestimate our power, fostering fear and terror. Today the opposite is working much better: they so vastly underestimate us that they don’t even believe we exist! We’re as invisible to their minds as we are to their eyes. The old adage said: “Forewarned is forearmed.” We use its corollary: “Unwarned is unarmed.”
Score: militarists one, pacifists zero.
But it’s the fifth principle that has proved the most spectacularly successful of all, beyond our wildest dreams. I call it Satan’s Spectacularly Successful Seven Step Sexual Strategy. Seven S’s (the sacred, serpentine letter). One of their writers has somehow infiltrated our War Room and sneaked out and published our summary strategy sheet in a book called Ecumenical Jihad. Fortunately, he is a minor writer, published by a minor press, and the leaked secret will never get into the major book chains or network TV. We control those doors. Here is the basic strategy:
Step 1: The summum bonum, the ultimate end, is to capture souls.
Step 2: A powerful means to this end is the corruption of society. This works especially well in a society of conformists, of other-directed people. After all, a good society is simply one that makes it easy to be good, to use Peter Maurin’s words. Our version is also true: a bad society makes it easy to be bad. Has there ever been a time when we’ve made it easier for humans to be bad?
Step 3: The most powerful means to destroy society is to destroy its one absolutely fundamental building block, the family, the only institution where most of them learn life’s most disgusting lesson, unselfish love.
Step 4: The family is destroyed by destroying its foundation, stable marriage.
Step 5: Marriage is destroyed by loosening its glue, sexual fidelity.
Step 6: Fidelity is destroyed by the Sexual Revolution.
Step 7: The Sexual Revolution is propagated mainly by the media, which are now massively in our hands.
The simple tactic of getting to their hearts through their hormones has proved incredibly successful. Their moralists now tremble in terror at old truisms like “natural law” and terms like “objective,” “universal,” and “absolute” not because they really believe there is no real morality any more anywhere, only no real sexual morality. They don’t defend rape, pillage, insider trading, nuclear war, bank robbery, racism, or even smoking. But they do defend fornication, masturbation, contraception, adultery, sodomy, divorce, bisexuality. “Anything goes” is their new morality, but only if it has anything to do with sex. It’s hilarious to observe. They don’t defend murder, unless it’s in the name of sex. That is abortion, of course. If abortion had nothing to do with sex, it would never have been legalized. Abortion is backup birth control, and birth control is the demand to have sex without babies. If storks brought babies, Planned Parenthood would go broke (perish the thought!).
Look at their dissenting “theologians.” Their dissent is almost always about sexual issues. We’ve scrambled their brains as effectively with sex as with heroin. Addicts just can’t think clearly. They are willing even to murder now, to protect their so-called “sexual freedom.” And to murder the most innocent among them, the only innocent ones. And the most defenseless of all, and in the teeth of the strongest natural instinct, motherhood.
Back in the 16th century, we divided England from Rome by uniting our three essential temptations in attacking Henry VIII: the world, the flesh, and the devil, greed, lust, and pride, dynastic ambition, womanizing, and resentment at being Poped around. The easiest element to manipulate was lust, of course. They like to call our pretty little project “the Church of England,” but we call it “the Church of Henry’s Hormones.”
You see, before the Sexual Revolution, we had a dilemma. The sins of the flesh were always easy to tempt them to, and wonderfully addictive, but they were clear, obvious, and unveiled. Sodomy, fornication, adultery, contraception, prostitution; they were not nice names. When they sinned, they knew they were sinners. On the other hand, the sins we masked well, the hard, cold sins of pride and envy and arrogance and self-righteousness and rage, became increasingly hard to tempt them to as their political fashions became more democratic and less elitist. The Sexual Revolution solved that dilemma for us. You see, they still think the revolution was about deeds, what they do with their bodies. But in fact it was mostly about philosophy. But those Americans never did think philosophy counted for anything, so they ignored that.
Their sexual practice was always rather low, but before the Revolution their principles were fairly high. Now their principles have conformed to their practice – a perfect example of the Machiavellian premise brought to its logical conclusion: since you can’t raise your practice to your principles, lower your principles to your practice, in this way alone can you avoid hypocrisy, which is the greatest evil. Of course hypocrisy is not the greatest evil, but it’s easy to make them think that, if they don’t think of themselves as hypocrites. And of course hypocrisy doesn’t mean failing to practice what you preach, hypocrisy means failing to believe what you preach; but it’s easy to confuse them there too, because they don’t care much about what you believe, only about what you practice.
So now they not only fornicate, contracept, and abort; they justify it. And it feeds on its own success: “everybody’s doing it” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We’ve killed a bigger enemy than virtue; we’ve killed conscience, at least in this area. And since all the virtues are connected, our victory in this area must metastasize. Already they are cruel, even murderous, to their own unborn children for the sake of their sexual freedom.
Our greatest worry, of course, is the Enemy’s son’s church. But in the last half century this has been the place of our most unexpected victory. Catholics abort, fornicate, contracept, divorce, and adulterate at exactly the same rate as non-Catholics. Do you want to see a vivid sign of our triumph over Catholic conscience? Look at Sunday Mass: In most churches nearly all the congregation receive communion, yet half are satisfyingly set in lifestyles of mortal sin. Nearly all the teenagers are fornicating, and almost none are confessing. Nearly all the adults are contracepting, and almost none are confessing. Back in the ’50s, American Catholic teenagers had pangs of conscience about necking! What a revolution!
How could we get such great mileage out of mere animal weaknesses, for which they are less responsible than the cold, deliberate sins? How can mere flesh-sin possibly do more harm to them than spirit-sin? First, because it is no longer clear and confessed, but veiled and justified by the new philosophy of the Sexual Revolution. Second, because the Enemy thought sex pretty important, His very first command to them was to “be fruitful and multiply.” He didn’t mean “grow apples and memorize times tables.” He thinks sex is pretty important. That’s because it’s their way of originating life itself, in fact immortal souls. It’s also an image of the Enemy’s own inner life: that one-in-three and two-become-one claptrap they call “love.” The Enemy’s own Book uses marriage as its main image for the Enemy’s plan for them, and adultery as its main image for the prime sin, unfaithfulness to him.
But these fools can’t see that from the starting point of sex we’ve led them merrily down the path to abortion. (If they only knew the delightful horrors we have planned for them once “respectable” society steps fully through that door!) In abortion they’ve brought Moloch back. Moloch! Imagine, modern-day Carthaginians, Caananites, and Aztecs are writing the textbooks and TV scripts!
Finally, even their science is skewered. Evolution is their dogma because it justifies acting like dogs. They ape the apes they think they came from. Modern Darwinians are more fanatical and closed-minded than medieval Aristotelians, and the Church is the new Galileo, the threatening heresy. The bishops and the scientists have exactly changed places. What delicious irony!
That was then, this is now.
So here we are, sitting pretty (that is, ugly). What next? Well, nothing can stop the mudslide, the sweet swirl of Western civilization down our sink hole. If the ’20th century was our century, the third millennium will be our millennium.
But don’t party just yet. I must warn you that something strange seems to be happening in Rome. It began in 1978, when the Enemy seems to have corrected his cardinals by suddenly arranging a quick and quiet death for a saintly but mild Pope John Paul I and the wholly unexpected election of the saintly and quite unmild Pope John Paul II, a very dangerous warrior who seems to have something up his sleeve for our coming millennium.
For one thing, he’s onto our strategy. He’s got to have a spy somewhere in the Lowerarchy. Double the tortures! Find the mole! It’s got to be a spy, for the five most remarkable features of this Pope for the Third Millennium exactly match the five newly effective principles of our strategy for the Third Millennium I just outlined. We are no longer taking our enemy by surprise.
First, he’s an optimist about youth, about the future, about the third millennium. What does he know, anyway? He knows the law of cycles, for one thing, and he knows from experience how strong the Church gets when it’s countercultural and persecuted, by Nazis or by Communists. He also knows how weak the Church gets when it’s fashionable. He knows the paradox of strong-when-weak and weak-when-strong.
Worse, he seems to know something else – something the saintly but sad Pius XlI and Paul VI did not know. Why does he keep talking about the third millennium, as if it’s going to be his? I have just proved that it will be ours. Yet he speaks as if he knows it will belong to the Enemy. It must be bravado, whistling in the dark. Mustn’t it? I mean, our logic is infallible. We have repeatedly checked our calculations. So why does this philosopher have that maddening smile on his face? He has no right to that smile! It’s infuriating! Wipe it away, somebody! How dare he smile at me? How dare he write that foolishly optimistic encyclical about my millennium?
Second, he is the most ecumenical pope in history. Read Ut Unum Sint, if you can bear to. This document, if it’s ever actually read by those to whom the Pope wrote it, could be very dangerous. He’s claiming to begin to reverse the trend of divisions. Of course he can’t do that, can he?
Our second “splitting” strategy, planting Modernist spies everywhere, seems to be beginning to backfire, because all the orthodox are uniting against all the Modernists. Modernism was the fundamental heresy of this century, as Gnosticism was of ancient times. But its very success seems to be turning against us now if it’s uniting the grassroots orthodox laity together to oppose it. By planting Modernist spies among them, we may actually have begun to unite them. And this Pope seems to have been aware of this tide-turn before we were.
The third split I mentioned, between head and heart, well, John Paul confounds our journalists’ categories. Anyone so adamant about doctrinal and moral orthodoxy, anyone so traditional about Mary, anyone so stubbornly set against feminist arrogance, and priestesses, and abortion, and birth control, and the Sexual Revolution, wouldn’t dare be so open and honest and dialogable and ecumenical. Why, he’s hijacked our hijack of Vatican II! The journalists who meet him are convinced that he is so open and honest that he must be a secret relativist posing as a dogmatist. Then they’re scandalized by his firm dogmatic stands. The journalists who know his firm stands are convinced he must be a fascist posing as a saint. Then they meet him and are astonished by his sanctity. It’s exactly the same with that other rascally reconciler of head and heart, Mother T. Blast it all! Can’t anybody get through their angel cover?
The third problem with this Pope is that he speaks directly and clearly and forcefully against our master stroke, relativism. He does not ignore this absolutely foundational issue, or speak with mealy mouth about it, as so many of his subordinates do, or substitute hate and fear and rhetoric for philosophical thought, as the Fundamentalists do, or compromise with it, as the Liberals do. Oooh! My head still hurts from Veritatis Splendor. The very title puts passion and beauty and fire and wonder into the concept of truth. He blew our cover to smithereens with that one. Lucky for us, very few of them have read it.
Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to eradicate the Enemy’s “natural law” from the human heart and produce “the abolition of man” yet. They still thirst for truth even when totally surrounded by sophistic philosophies of truthlessness from every corner of their culture. They still love saints and heroes even when pop psychology has replaced morality in their homilies and families. Even when they no longer believe in heroes, they still love them. And they still crave beauty, even though our agents of ugliness have dominated nearly every aesthetic establishment of their century, especially liturgists. Our strategic problem is: how can we win their hearts as well as we’ve won their heads? We design their philosophies, but the Enemy designed their hearts. Anyone who solves that conundrum will be rewarded richly at the Banquet Below.
Meanwhile, somebody get that big bear off Peter’s throne. He’s got teeth!
And that’s the fourth thing: he fights. He knows he’s at war, and he dares to call our empire “the culture of death.” Evangelium Vitae is a dangerously passionate call to action, to re-evangelize the world. Worst of all, he really thinks it can be done! Of course he’s a fool, but . . . well, he’s wrong, and that’s that. But . . . what the Heaven has he got up his sleeve?
In the last few years an amazing number of people have suddenly awakened to the simple fact that they are at war. When Pat Buchanan used the term “culture war” at the 1992 Republican Convention, he was demonized (how badly I wish that were true), and our big media mouths convinced everyone that he wanted to start the war, instead of just telling the truth like the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” – the truth that we’re already in one. But now, nearly everyone except the media knows he was right.
People are beginning to distrust “The Experts,” our nonsilent minority. They’re drawing lines in the sand, and defending their families. They’re realizing that what was once their public school system has become our state propaganda machine, and they’re pulling their kids out. Home schooling is mega-multiplying. People are even buying dull old books about virtue. They’re fighting a jihad, and doing it together – an ecumenical jihad. One hand is open to embrace their allies, and the other is closed around the hilt of a sword to fight their common enemies which they’re beginning to recognize as us, not each other. Our simple “divide and conquer” strategy that worked for 2,000 years seems to be turning, like the tide.
Finally, this Pope has countered our Spectacularly Successful Sexual Strategy by elaborate theological reflections on sex and women and man-woman relations, by Dignitatem Mulieris and by Original Unity of Man and Woman, and by his deep, disgusting devotion to That Woman. Mary wasn’t around in Moloch’s day, but once old Moloch rose again in Mexico, there she stood: Their Lady of Guadalupe. We’d better stop slobbering with joy over all that baby blood and start worrying that she might end the American holocaust of human sacrifice just as she ended our little Aztec party. She can, you know. And he knows it, that old bear; he knows her power as very few of his soldiers do.
Don’t let them catch on. Stop those rosaries! They give me migraines. For badness’ sake don’t let yourselves be beaten by a woman! Get those radical feminists in power fast, before femininity comes back into the world and brings the Enemy’s son down again a million times a day. I discovered the disconcerting fact the other day that thousands of Protestants have taken up praying the rosary. Many learned it at abortion clinics, marching with Catholics. Who goofed? This could turn back the clock 500 years. Two thousand, even. Remember this, be as sure of this as that Polish bear is: WHERE SHE COMES, HE COMES.
Now, get out there and fight, you wimps! We will wimp, I mean, we will win. As soon as somebody discovers why that old Pope has that infuriatingly young smile on his face!
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