"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." - Edmund Burke
We grew up in the midst of the aftermath of turmoil and revolution of the 1960s and 1970s only to find that the radicals were now high school teachers and at university faculty members and Administrators. Using their positions to indoctrinate and continue to advance a radical agenda that had been rejected at the ballot box through the institutions. In the case of Florida International University years later in 2007 a couple were arrested by the FBI and revealed to be agents of Fidel Castro's communist dictatorship. Apparently, this was not an isolated incident.
It was our natural reaction against this that led a group of college students of different backgrounds to seek out and form a chapter of Young Americans for Freedom at Florida International University back in 1992. The first president of YAF-FIU was Craig Herrero, followed by myself, and Cesar Vasquez.
Throughout our years of existence, YAF-FIU attended Florida conventions hosted by the Young America's Foundation, attended Leadership Institute trainings as well as Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum Collegiate's first annual leadership seminar. YAF-FIU also lobbied to bring conservative speakers starting with Phyllis Schlafly, with the help of Young Americas Foundation, Jack Kemp, and later Pat Buchanan.
Aside from our own newsletter, VOX LIBERTAS, which was regularly distributed, YAF-FIU also distributed CAMPUS: AMERICA'S STUDENT NEWSPAPER, Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) publications and Campus Report, produced by Accuracy in Academia.
FIU-YAF fought battles on the cultural and political front for more than a decade before the increasingly restrictive university policies nibbling away at student freedoms finally took their toll. FIU-YAF fought the battles greatly outnumbered at times by faculty and administration with an apathetic student body untroubled by the loss of their freedoms on campus, and a student newspaper with a left-wing tilt.
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts." -Edmund Burke
In many ways what took place at Florida International University mirrors what has happened both in Miami-Dade County and in the country at large. The question that gnaws is what can be done about this?
"We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation." -Edmund Burke
There are a number of texts and thinkers out there that provide a diagnosis of the crisis and the onslaught against American freedoms and the West in general. Identifying the problem and recognizing that the America we group up in is disappearing replaced with new generations that are much more passive and obedient to bureaucratic controls. Continued mass immigration combined with multiculturalism is fracturing the American identity and whatever homogeneity existed before which is perfect for the managerial elite because it gives them excuses for more bureaucracy and more controls.
"If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing." - Margaret Thatcher
Much of these revolutions undermining the United States have taken place under Republican presidents and were not reversed even when both the executive and the legislative were controlled by the Republican party.
"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe." -Edmund Burke
Add to that conservatives going along with the party line defending George W. Bush as he trashed America's reputation abroad and demonstrated incompetence (one hopes) domestically ending with massive federal bail outs of companies "too big to fail" and as Herbert Hoover prepared the ground for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s so Bush did for Obama today.
"People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors." - Edmund Burke
These failures on the political front pale in comparison to the failure to transmit American traditions and concepts of liberty to the new generations in the public schools. Conservatives have retreated into home schooling that is doing the job with a select few children, but the vast majority have been lobotomized by the education establishment and an increasingly toxic popular culture. This is what Gramsci described as the long march through the institutions by cultural Marxism.
Sadly these trends are not new William F. Buckley Jr. identified it in 1955 stating "The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity)."*
The buzz word of today's Utopian is globalization but what is being globalized? Vaclav Havel offered the following observation last week: "We are living in the first truly global civilization. That means that whatever comes into existence on its soil can very quickly and easily span the whole world. But we are also living in the first atheistic civilization, in other words, a civilization that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity. For that reason it prefers short-term profit to long-term profit. What is important is whether an investment will provide a return in ten or fifteen years; how it will affect the lives of our descendants in a hundred years is less important. However, the most dangerous aspect of this global atheistic civilization is its pride. The pride of someone who is driven by the very logic of his wealth to stop respecting the contribution of nature and our forebears, to stop respecting it on principle and respect it only as a further potential source of profit." What Havel is describing is the triumph of cultural Marxism.
Finally, the Sharon Statement is as relevant today as it was in 1960 including its plank on international communism. A large part of humanity continues to live under Marxist-Leninist despots in China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and are threatened by executives that would like to impose it in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Ecuador undermining basic political freedoms. Jesse Helms in his memoirs written long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 2005 said it best: "It was never a mistake to give our support to the person or group who did not embrace Communism rather than a person or faction who did. Communism has been tried and found wanting in countries around the world. In every case, the rule of Communism brought the death of dissidents, the banning of religion, the destruction of revered cultures and the devaluation of human life. … Communism is not truly dead.”
Dear friends you are in my thoughts as you observe the half century mark of Young Americans for Freedom at the national convention but frankly there is much left to do if the United States is to be saved and if Western Civilization is to survive. A suggestion: pick up copies of Richard Viguerie's Conservatives Betrayed and M. Stanton Evan's Blacklisted by History and read both carefully. Young Americans for Freedom can still save the day.
*William F. Buckley Jr. "Our Mission Statement" in National Review (19 November 1955)
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