One of the most puzzling events of the first 100 days of the Biden Administration was the president’s decla­ration that the deaths of Armenians that occurred in 1915 constituted genocide. Was Hunter Biden dating Kim Kardashian? That was certainly more plausible than Joe dating Kim, but not really an explanation of what was actually going on. The New York Times made a stab by invoking the Biden administration’s “commitment to human rights,” which according to the Times was “a pillar of its foreign policy. It is also a break from Mr. Biden’s predecessors, who were re­luctant to anger a country of strategic importance and were wary of driving its leadership toward American adversaries like Russia or Iran.”1 Did that explain why the president said that, “Each year on this day, we re­member the lives of all those who died in the Otto­man-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again oc­curring,” Mr. Biden said in a statement issued on the 106th anniversary of the beginning of a brutal cam­paign by the former Ottoman Empire that killed 1.5 million people. “And we remember so that we remain ever vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”2

Traditionally, only two groups were concerned about the use of the term genocide: the Turks and the Jews. This standoff has been complicated by the fact that the Armenian genocide story has been absorbed into the Holocaust narrative. Like the Jews, the Armenians have attempted to make their genocide “a closed issue similar to the Jewish holocaust” and any denial of it a form of hate speech punishable by law. Three years before France officially recognized what happened to the Armenians as genocide on May 29, 1998,3 Ber­nard Lewis was found guilty of violating that country’s hate speech laws by taking the Turkish position on the matter. Lewis was sentenced on June 2, 1995, but only a token fine was imposed as punish­ment, thereby making a dead letter of the law and keeping the contro­versy alive.4 One pro-Armenian au­thor “has suggested that denial of the Armenian genocide represents hate-speech and therefore should be illegal in the United States,”5 but Lewis remained undeterred in his determination to dissociate the two events.

On March 25, 2002, Lewis “once again reaffirmed his belief that the Armenian massacres in Ottoman Turkey were linked to the massive Armenian rebel­lion and, therefore, were not comparable to the treat­ment of the Jews under the Nazis.”6 Lewy has adopted Lewis’s view, affirming that: “The Armenian commu­nity in Turkey was not simply ‘an unarmed Christian minority,’ and it is not acceptable to discuss the events of 1915-16 without mentioning the fifth-column role of the Armenian revolutionaries.”7 According to this reading, the Armenians have no right to claim Holo­caust victim status because their armed rebellion was different in kind from the behavior of the unarmed Jews who fell victim to the Nazis.

Israeli historian Yair Auron, however, takes a dif­ferent tack by linking Germany to the Turks and claiming that Germany “was involved directly and indirectly in the Armenian genocide.”8 Auron’s claim has no basis in fact. Evidence suggests that the charge stems from allied propaganda during the war years. In fact, there is overwhelming archival evidence that the German government, while accepting the military ne­cessity of the relocations, “repeatedly intervened with the Sublime Porte in order to achieve a more humane implementation.”9

The claim that the Germans “bear some of the re­sponsibility and even some of the guilt for the mass murder of the Armenians in World War I”10 would seem to rehabilitate the Armenians’ status as victims. Unfortunately, even a link to (albeit, pre-Nazi) Ger­many fails to create an equivalence between Armenian and Jewish suffering in the eyes of Israeli historians like Auron. Like most Israeli historians, who “seek to emphasize the singularity of the Holocaust,”11 Yehuda Bauer claims that Jewish suffering is unique, even while keeping the Armenian story in play by adding that “The Armenian massacres are indeed the closest parallel to the Holocaust.”12

[…] This is just an excerpt from the June 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

On Monday, March 8, Ali Breland introduced himself to me via e-mail as a reporter for Mother Jones who was planning to do an article on Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, a media platform which over the past few months had become the refuge of those who had been banned from Twitter.

The most famous refugee from Twitter was Donald Trump, who got banned from the platform he made famous with his tweets on January 8, 2021 under the preposterous pretext that calling his supporters “patriots” and refusing to attend the inauguration of the people who had stolen the election from him violated Twitter’s “glorification of violence policy.”[1] Concluding that President Trump was guilty of “incitement of violence,” Twitter closed ranks with other big tech Internet oligarchs and kicked the president of the United States off their platform as a way of showing him and anyone who voted for him who was running the country.

Within hours of getting banned on Twitter, Torba welcomed Donald Trump with open arms to Gab. “It’s happening,” Torba said. “This is Gab’s moment, one that we have been preparing for now for over four and a half years.”[2] Capitalizing on the de-platforming which spread through the Internet in the run up to the theft of the election, Gab branded itself as the free speech alternative to cancel culture and was immediately branded in return as a “haven for right-wing terrorists.”[3] Big Tech’s attempt to demonize Trump and his expulsion from Twitter became a windfall for Gab, whose traffic increased by 120 percent in the 24 hours following the Capitol riot.

One month later, on February 7, Torba admitted that Trump had not migrated to Gab. In fact, he never used the platform.[4] In a statement he posted on Gab, Torba wrote: “@realdonaldtrump is and always has been a mirror archive of POTUS’ tweets and statements that we’ve run for years. We’ve always been transparent about this and would obviously let people know if the President starts using it.” Torba went on to blame “media outlets that falsely reported that Trump himself was posting to the account” as the source of the misinformation.[5]

At this point, Gab started having technical problems as increased traffic caused Gab to crash on a regular basis. Others felt that deficient security rather than increased traffic was behind the technical problems. As if to prove that group right, Gab suffered a massive hack on February 28, 2021, then another one in early March which provided the basis for the Mother Jones article.

Did Torba allow the attacks to happen? According to an article in Wired, Eugen Rochko, the developer of a source codebase known as Mastodon, which Gab used as a basis for its website from early 2019, believes that “poor security practices played a significant part in the breach.”[6] By relying on Mastodon, “Gab’s programmers introduced two serious security vulnerabilities into its code,” according to Rochko, one of which was publicized by early February. Rochko says that Gab did little to address these “obvious” problems, adding: “I’m not aware of them ever adopting our bug fixes, including important security fixes.” In an article in The Guardian, Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University and a “longtime researcher on the far right’s use of internet technologies,” said that “Gab was negligent at best and malicious at worst” in its approach to security. “It is hard to envision a scenario where a company cared less about user data than this one.”[7]

Gab, according to Mother Jones is “a Twitter clone that boasts that it ‘champions free speech.’” Ever since Torba created Gab in 2015, “it has served as a haven for alt-righters, QAnon supporters, and other far-right groups banned from mainstream platforms.”[8] In his brief message, Breland asked me about “leaked messages between Andrew Torba and Roosh V,” in which Torba claimed that “he was a fan of yours” and wondered if I “could comment on the veracity of this.”

Thus began a skirmish in the culture wars which gave not only a good indication of how warfare is fought in our day, and the location of one of its most important fronts, but most importantly its main weapon, which is the charge of anti-Semitism. It is impossible to understand the battle against free speech in our day without mentioning the Jews’ role in that battle. This became obvious once Breland’s article appeared in Mother Jones. The article’s tone of moral superiority was belied by the fact that Breland was the beneficiary of criminal activity. The article was based on an “immense cache of stolen Gab data,” which Breland received from “a hacker who goes by JaXpArO and provided to Distributed Denial of Secrets, a website that calls itself a ‘transparency collective.’”[9] Given an announcement this dramatic, the reader was primed to expect the worst—anything from sexual scandal to criminal activity—but the only criminal activity was on the part of the Mother Jones designated hacker, and the only scandal, the fact that he used that material with impunity when people like Julian Assange are still in jail.

Instead of the smoking gun which the reader had been set up to expect, Breland lamely cited a routine e-mail exchange in which Torba welcomed Roosh Valizadeh to the Gab platform, as something intrinsically sinister and qualifying Breland as a candidate for a Pulitzer prize in investigative journalism, or as he put it in his breathless prose:

This immense cache of stolen Gab data includes a conversation in which Torba welcomed Daryush Valizadeh, a misogynist and anti-semitic right-wing internet figure, to the platform. Valizadeh, a pickup artist, video maker, and blogger known as Roosh V within the online “manosphere,” has bragged about committing acts of sexual assault and derided Jews. While he’s taken steps to distance himself from the alt-right, he has had ties to the movement and supported Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who gave it its name. None of that history stopped Torba from extending what Valizadeh called a “warm welcome” to Gab.[10]

Breland failed to specify the charge of sexual assault and ignored Roosh’s conversion and his repentance at the life he had lived as a pick-up artist. He also fails to mention the positive influence I had on leading Roosh out of a life of sexual decadence. Boiled down to its gist, the article was a strained attempt at guilt by association, the main guilt being imputed being anti-Semitism as defined by the ADL and the SPLC, which means anything Jews don’t like. Continuing down this line of “out of their own mouths” rhetoric, Breland reveals damning information like the following exchange: “Thank you for the warm welcome on Gab. I enjoy not having to self-censor like on Twitter,” Valizadeh wrote. “You’re welcome brother, pray for us. We need it,” Torba responded.

Now we get to the really damning part:

In a subsequent message to Valizadeh, Torba praised E. Michael Jones, a prominent anti-semitic writer and publisher whose work has been tracked by the Anti-Defamation League, and who Valizadeh has interviewed several times on his podcast.

“I am a huge fan of EMJ too, he has an account but hasn’t logged in for some time,” Torba wrote, seeking Valizadeh’s assistance in getting Jones to use his dormant Gab account more—especially to host his videos, which regularly appeared on the video streaming site, BitChute. “Would love to get all his videos on Gab TV, very important for the distribution and preservation of truth. If you can send him a note, I tried emailing the email we have on file but it bounced.”

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

— Pogo

First of all, let’s announce the good news. Professor David Hawkes has declared war on the forces of anti-Logos in our age, telling us that the “profound hostility to logos,” which “permeates every aspect of modern and especially postmodern culture” is “only the latest in a long historical series of dialectical clashes between logos and eidolon.”1 Eidolon is the Greek word for idol, which is his word for graven images of the sort which should be immediately smashed. Professor Hawkes’ book announces his engagement with the forces of anti-Logos, but does this mean that he supports the Logos? His attack on eidolon gives us some indication of where his sympathies lie, which is another way of saying that Professor Hawkes is an iconoclast in the 16th century meaning of that term.

If conservatism is invariably a defunct revolutionary movement, viewed through the lens of nostalgia, as a way of dealing with the revolutionary spirit’s most recent manifestation, the one currently in power, then David Hawkes is a revolutionary conservative. In this Hawkes is not unlike Edmund Burke, who opposed the French Revolution by being a supporter of the Glorious Revolution in England. When Mary Wollstonecraft, the proto-feminist, asked how far back in English history Burke’s conservatism was willing to go, and whether he was willing to return to the time when Englishmen worshipped bread as God, no answer was forthcoming.

We can say something similar about David Hawkes, whose position is based on an amalgam of obsolete revolutionary movements. He is a nominalist, an iconoclast in the tradition of Andreas Karlstadt and Leo Jud, and a paleo-Marxist who hates the Foucaudian transformation of economic conflict over the means of production which characterized proto-Marxism into the sexual identity politics which characterizes left wing politics in academe today.

Hawkes is also an English professor at the University of Arizona who has been fighting a losing rear-guard action against the queer studies and critical race theorists who have turned our universities into one big Cambodian re-education camp where students squat in the hot sun chanting incomprehensible phrases from Gramsci, Foucault, Joe Buttigieg and a host of lesser lights in the grand climactic battle against Logos in our day. Hawkes is annoyed that “first women, then African-Americans, then homosexuals and, most recently, the queer movement in general, have replaced the working class as the vanguard promoted by revolutionary intellectuals,”2 and his book is an attempt to settle that score. Hawkes is determined to turn back the clock to a time before classical Marxism was superseded as the avant garde of the revolutionary spirit in human history. That moment happened when “the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci . . . first distinguished between the ‘war of position’ (a struggle for physical control of state institutions like parliament, police, and the armed forces) and the ‘war of maneuver,’ a battle for cultural influence in such institutions of ‘civil society’ as the church, the media, the creative arts, and the education system.”3 By the time Hawkes became an English professor at the University of Arizona, “Gramsci’s ‘war of maneuver’ within the cultural institutions of Anglo-American capitalism had effectively been won,” and Hawkes, who had studied English literature under the classical Marxist Terry Eagleton, found himself “marginalized,” along with a “proletariat, whose institutional and ideological power had been decisively crushed over the same period.”4 Thanks to academic interpreters and translators like Cornell West and Joseph Buttigieg, Gramsci got weaponized against the communists themselves as racial and sexual minorities shoved the proletariat aside as the main beneficiaries of a marginality which had become “an end-in-itself.”5

By leaving Michel Foucault out of this equation, Hawkes misses an important fact contributing to this marginalization, namely, the capitalist class’s embrace of sexual liberation. This embrace on the part of both the financial oligarchs, symbolized best by the Rockefellers, and the New Left, symbolized best by the neoconservative David Horowitz, then got weaponized and codified by the CIA, who began studying Foucault in the 1980s. With the collaboration of Buttigieg pere at Notre Dame, the government’s intelligence agencies combined with government funding created the current unwritten constitution of academe, which was then able to engrain in three successive generations the motto of the new regime, which was “Give us unlimited sexual liberation, and we will become docile wage slaves and won’t trouble the oligarchs with demands for economic justice.” This shift of emphasis from decent wages for the working man who needs to support a family to discos and set-asides for queers who are controlled by their sexual compulsions is one of the main reasons why the homosexual replaced the worker as the avant garde of the revolutionary movement in our day.

As Hawkes correctly notes, Buttigieg pere et fils played a major role in this transformation. Gramsci, according to Buttigieg pere, who wormed his way onto an endowed chair at Notre Dame University on the basis of a warmed over doctoral dissertation on James Joyce which retailed all of the modernist cliches he would later ridicule, used “the phenomenon of marginality” to dispossess the proletariat, which had always proven to be ideologically feckless and more interested in banal issues like higher wages, and handed their banner over to truly “marginal” groups like homosexuals, whose war against nature was better suited to the ontology of revolution, as E. M. Forster had pointed out in his homosexual novel Maurice.

The man who carried the Gramscian virus out of its academic host and into the world of national politics was Buttigieg fils, a man Hawkes rightly characterizes as someone who “could not be less interested in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. To the contrary, Buttigieg Jr. is deeply committed to consolidating the rule of financial capital. He is just as committed to furthering the assimilation of homosexuality into mainstream culture. The obvious question raised by his candidacy is the nature of the connection between these commitments.”

Having lost that war, Hawkes has been forced to conduct a rearguard action from the academic equivalent of the caves in Okinawa after World War II. But in the 1520s, Hawkes would have been fighting on the front lines of the revolutionary movement, at the side of Thomas Muenzer in the Bauernaufstand. Without losing his place at the heart of the struggle, he then could have migrated north to Muenster, where in the 1530s with Jan Bookelzoon, the tailor king as his spiritual guide, he would have joined forces with the horny nuns and priests who flocked to Bookelzoon’s banner in support of the communality of property (but perhaps not the communality of wives) as a proto-Marxist avant la lettre. Hawkes would have then joined with Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli in their attack on the Catholic notion of transubstantiation. Finally, as an iconoclast he would have picked up a crowbar and engaged in the Beeldenstorm in Antwerp in 1566 after having had his mind wrecked by the Scholasticism of William of Ockham, from whom he received the final component of his eclectic identity as a nominalist.

No one was more qualified to write a book on beauty than the late Sir Roger Scruton. He was a man of impeccable taste and cultivated manners who could charm an audience even when, after being invited to a symposium at Notre Dame to talk about beauty, he ended up talking about wine instead. He most probably could have come back in a year and talked about beer and charmed that audience just as much a second time, but death intervened.

He was especially qualified in the field of music, having not only the ability to play an instrument but the ability to compose musical pieces as well. Das Rheingold is a brilliant critique of the mythic origins of Capitalism in theft, but Scruton turns his review of it into an attack on the failed revolutionary socialism—Wagner took part in the revolution of 1848 with Bakunin—which motivated Wagner to take to the barricades in Dresden and write the opera in the first place. When Scruton turns Nibelheim into a “police state” which is “perhaps the first premonition in Western art of Orwell’s 1984,” instead of viewing it as the City of London and symbol of capitalism as state-sponsored usury, he misses the point in a way that defies explanation. His analysis of Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold is musically acute but philosophically and economically tone deaf because the same conservative world view which allowed Scruton to charm his audience at Notre Dame is based on an ethnocentrism which blinds him to the reality of what Wagner is saying here. Scruton can’t seem to get over the fact that Wagner had the misfortune of being born a German, and that he needs to turn him into a proper English conservative by dragooning him into the anti-Communist crusade to make up for that birth defect.

What is true of his book on music is a fortiori true of his book on beauty. Scruton aspires to universality when he defines beauty as “a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature.” Because of its firm foundation in Being, “the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world.” Unfortunately, Scruton then loses his train of thought along the way of telling us what he means by those and other undefined terms. Scruton traces his understanding of beauty back to Plotinus, referring to beauty as a transcendental, a notion which still had not been universally recognized at the time of Aquinas, who dealt with it as an addendum to his thought on Being. According to Plato and Plotinus, “beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given.” Scruton then compares beauty to truth and goodness, making it “one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.” Scholastics called those “ultimate values” transcendentals, which meant that they, along with “the One,” described the fundamental and ultimate aspects of Being, or as Scruton put it “Why believe p? Because it is true. Why want x? Because it is good. Why look at y? Because it is beautiful.”

Instead of accepting the ontological foundation of beauty as the platform upon which he erects his own aesthetics, Scruton begins to quibble with the Angelic Doctor, accusing Aquinas of making “theological claims” about beauty, when this is not the case. Scuton undermines his whole aesthetics by erecting a roadblock which divides its history between then and now when he says apodictically that the Angelic Doctor’s “subtle and comprehensive reasoning” is “not a vision that we can assume.” As a result, Scruton proposes “to set it to one side, considering the concept of beauty without making any theological claims.”

Throughout Scruton’s book we are subjected to the same self-defeating behavior. Scruton opens the door to what seems like a promising solution to “a deep difficulty in the philosophy of beauty” only to slam it shut again after we have been granted a tantalizing vision of our goal. In this regard, Scruton tells us that Aquinas’s understanding of beauty is “worth noting” because he “regarded truth, goodness and unity as ‘transcendentals’—features of reality possessed by all things, since they are aspects of Being, ways in which the supreme gift of Being is made manifest to the understanding.” Beauty is a manifestation of Being, and this fact provides the best response to those who claim “that beauty is a matter of appearance, not of being.” Then after affirming that beauty makes a reasonable claim about its object, Scruton takes it all back again by claiming that these “reasons do not compel the judgement, and can be rejected without contradiction,” forcing him to wonder “So are they reasons or aren’t they?” Whenever Scruton is on the verge of drawing definite conclusions, he has to run the idea first by his ethnic superego, an imaginary figure made up of the ghosts of people like John Locke and David Hume, who have the final say on everything, “creating a soothing and harmonious context, a continuous narrative as in a street or a square, where nothing stands out in particular, and good manners prevail.”

Pace, Sir Roger, but there is nothing theological about Scholastic aesthetics. Aquinas’s ontology has been influenced by Revelation, but the rudimentary aesthetic principles we can derive from that ontology do not determine his aesthetics, nor does it determine the aesthetic theories of those who paved the way for a deeper understanding of beauty.

Why then does Sir Roger feel that the Angelic Doctor’s “subtle and comprehensive reasoning” is “not a vision that we can assume.” In his autobiography Gentle Regrets, Scruton tells us that “there is consolation without truth, as we know from the history of religion.” The real question is, however, whether Scruton believes that there can be beauty without truth.

Solemn Rituals

Sir Roger Scruton was born into a troubled lower middle-class family and grew up “in a nondescript corner of post-war England,” where “nothing could conceivably happen . . . except the things that happen anywhere: a bus passing, a dog barking, football on the wireless, shepherd’s pie for tea.” After discovering the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Scruton realized that art provided a way out of that dreary existence. Scruton associated art with the English upper class, who lived hidden behind a wall which he could see from the library that provided the Hermetic texts, which he “read like an alchemist, searching for the spell that would admit me to that secret world, where shadows fall on tonsured lawns, and the aesthetic (or was it ascetic?) way of life occurs in solemn rituals after tea.”

After serving his apprenticeship as “a barbarian let loose in a library” (a phrase he appropriated from Ezra Pound, Scruton ended up at Cambridge University, where he had the misfortune to study philosophy as “bequeathed by Russell, Wittgenstein and Moore.” Logical positivism convinced him that any philosophy with any connection to the Logos of human existence (or its rejection, as in the case of Nietzsche) was founded on “nothing more than megalomaniac fantasies, implausible analogies and false distinctions founded neither in logic nor in fact.” Realizing that “the new philosophy I studied proved no more satisfactory to me than the science it had replaced,” Scruton gravitated toward culture as a “more important way of seeing things,” and that eventually led him to aesthetics.

On October 3, 1998, Pope John Paul II beatified Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac at the national shrine of Marija Bistrica in front of 500,000 Croats.1 The next step was canonization. On February 10, 2014, the memorial of Blessed Stepinac, Cardinal Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, announced that the canonization was possible in the year 2015 during the Eucharistic celebration over which he presided at St. Jerome’s church in Rome.2 What looked like a sure thing in 1998, however, never happened, and why it never happened has become an object of intense speculation and discussion ever since.

The Croats, as we have come to expect, blamed the Serbs, largely because Pope Francis convoked “a commission of Catholic and Orthodox leaders,” under the presidency of a representative of the Holy See, to examine the wartime record of Blessed Aloysius. Pope Francis established the commission in “May 2016 after receiving a letter from the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church Irinej, who stated his opposition to the cardinal’s canonization.”3 Instead of coming to an agreement on the life of one of the most heroic figures in the post-World War II Church in eastern Europe, the commission concluded its work within the foreseen time frame of one year, it terminated its investigation in the summer of 2017 without reaching any results “agreeing to disagree about the Croatian cardinal’s cause for canonization.”4

When Pope Francis was asked about Stepinac on his return from Bulgaria on March 17, 2019,5 he replied:

The canonization of Stepinac is a historic case. He is a virtuous man for this Church, which has proclaimed him Blessed, you can pray [through his intercession]. But at a certain moment of the canonization process there are unclear points, historic points, and I should sign the canonization, it is my responsibility, I prayed, I reflected, I asked advice, and I saw that I should ask Irinej, a great patriarch, for help. We made a historic commission together and we worked together, and both Irinej and I are interested in the truth. Who is helped by a declaration of sanctity if the truth is not clear? We know that [Stepinac] was a good man, but to make this step I looked for the help of Irinej and they are studying. First of all, the commission was set up and gave its opinion. They are studying other sources, deepening some points so that the truth is clear. I am not afraid of the truth, I am not afraid. I am afraid of the judgment of God.6

As in so many instances lately, Pope Francis once again spread confusion in the very act of making a clarification. If Stepinac’s life is an example of heroic virtue, as Pope John Paul II claimed, what’s holding back the canonization? Or is he, as the pope says, “a virtuous man for this church” alone? And if so, what does that mean? At what point did his status become unclear after his beatification? Shouldn’t the committee which approved his beatification have looked into unclear, historic points before beatifying him? Or are we talking about the difference between John Paul II, who like Stepinac lived under both Nazi and Communist rule, and Francis, who experienced neither? According to Matija Stahan, the Serbs presented no new evidence and Irinej made use of sources that have “perpetuated allegations fabricated by the Yugoslav government after World War II to remove Stepinac from the public as a symbol of Christianity and Croatian patriotism.”7 As proof that Stepinac was not guilty of the crimes which Patriarch Irinej laid at his feet, Stahan cites evidence from Stepinac: His life and Time by Robin Harris, who refers to the campaign to defame Stepinac as the “project”:

That project—as Stepinac himself well understood—meant that, in practice, the Yugoslav Communist Party and elements within the Serbian Orthodox Church, which otherwise had nothing in common, shared a joint goal. This consisted of demonizing the Catholic Church (to which nearly all Croats belonged) and the Croatian nation (which numerically, culturally and economically was, alone, in a position to challenge Serbian supremacy). The existence of this unholy and unspoken combination helps explain why the black legend against Stepinac was so persistent and its promotion so effective.8

The bland tone we have come to expect from press releases issued by official Vatican commissions failed to allay the outrage and betrayal Catholic Croats felt at the hand of the Vatican. Catholics had been suspicious of the commission from its inception. In 2016, Professor Ronald J. Rychlak, who has written about Pope Pius XII, whose canonization had been stalled by the Vatican for lack of a miracle—even though he had been proclaimed “venerabilis” in 2009—announced that the Serbian case against Stepinac was “a false narrative created by Soviet agents.”9

Stepinac’s sermons were “prohibited … from being published, because they were so strong against the Ustashe,” Rychlak said. Instead, his words were secretly printed and circulated and occasionally broadcast over the radio. He also severely condemned the Ustashe’s destruction of Zagreb’s main synagogue in 1941 and in an October 1943 homily, the archbishop condemned notions of racial superiority.

Robin Harris’s 2016 biography of Stepinac joined the chorus of outrage which Rychlak articulated in the same year. Stepinac, according to Harris, was the victim of a Serbian-Communist conspiracy. His show trial was Serbian payback for the show trial of Draza Mihailovic, the Serbian leader of the guerilla group known as the Chetniks, to whom Harris attributes war crimes of the same magnitude as those committed by the Ustashe, the Croatian fascist state. “The stoking of hatred against the Catholic Church remained a means of keeping the Serbian Orthodox Church and Serb nationalists sympathetic to the regime. Tito, under pressure from the Americans, would later justify his reluctance to free Stepinac by referring directly to Serbian Orthodox sensitivities.”10 According to Harris, the controversy which surrounded the canonization of Cardinal Stepinac in 2016 can be laid directly at the feet of the Communists, who “had systematically played on Serbian desires for revenge by knowingly exaggerating Catholic Croat misdeeds.”11

Serbian nationalism may be responsible for slandering Stepinac’s memory in the former Yugoslavia, but Harris attributes the ongoing animus against Stepinac abroad which stalled his canonization to “propaganda from Communist circles.”12 “Lenin’s imitators in Yugoslavia,” Harris continues “have, indeed, found plenty of ‘useful idiots’ in the West, though the idiocy is often concealed behind a veil of erudition.”13

It is worth noting that Harris wrote these lines 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and 36 years after the death of Tito. To say that “Lenin’s imitators” were hard at work in the West stalling Stepinac’s canonization in 2017 is nothing short of preposterous, but the fact that Harris made the claim is a significant lead and needs to be examined more closely in order to discover the true identity of the group which is hiding behind the cover of a now defunct communism.

Harris spends a lot of time defending Stepinac’s actions during the war by rebutting the allegations of writers like John Cornwell, who claimed that “priests, invariably Franciscans, took a leading part in the massacres”14 of Serbs at concentration camps like Jasenovac, where a renegade Franciscan who came to be known as Brother Satan engaged in the slaughter, but only after he had been excommunicated by the Church as soon as they found out what he was doing.