East is West: How Eastern Europe Became the Centre of Pre-1960s Western Civilisation

Modern Western culture has little in common with the pre-1960s West. The values which pertained in Western Europe up to the 1960s were based around the traditional family, with homosexuality and abortion being taboo and/ or illegal. This contrasts with the relatively recent obsession with the promotion of homosexuality, abortion, and transgenderism. Additionally, when the European Convention of Human Rights was written in 1950, capital punishment was considered consistent with human rights, though now it is not.

It was in the 1960s that Western countries began moving away from their traditional values and towards their present decadence. This entailed the cultural dominance of pop and rock music, and the decriminalisation of sodomy, abortion, pornography, and prostitution. A Westerner from the 1950s would recognise their values today in the societies of Hungary or Poland more so than in a Western European country.

From the death of Stalin, the whole of Eastern Europe, which had been oppressed under his totalitarian rule, began to proceed towards the ideals of dignified persons within a family and within the Nation-State. This has been a long, slow process which has led to the present situation whereby the countries of Eastern Europe somewhat resemble the societies of Westen Europe from before the 1960s. They are ethno-states which oppose mass migration, and which are opposed to the LGBT agenda.

Following the death of Stalin, popular discontent in Hungary forced the removal of Matthias Rakosi, and while the Hungarian Revolution failed, it demonstrated the desire of Hungarians for liberation. The Prague Spring was also popularly supported, and its ideals lived on with the Charter 77 movement which criticised the Czechoslovak government. Mikhail Gorbachev stated that his Glasnost policy was predicated on the policies of the Prague Spring, while the Polish Solidarity movement was successful in ending Communism in Poland.

The mutual transformation of Western and Eastern societies was described in the commencement speech that Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave at Harvard University in 1978 in which he outlined how Western culture had already by then reached a state that he could not recommend for Russia. This author’s article intersperses Solzhenitsyn’s speech within the text in italics.

Changing Consciousnesses

Under Stalin, and to a lesser extent until the end of the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc was oppressed by Communism which “spiritually trained” those populations, as Solzhenitsyn stated at Harvard:

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time, we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being. Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points.

This domination by Communism strengthened the resolve in the peoples of the Eastern bloc, which spurred the end of Communism; and since when, there has been no impediment to the development of a more organic culture. By contrast, in the West, egoism became dominant from the 1960s, and as described by Solzhenitsyn:

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

East and West have now two completely distinct attitudes towards “same-sex marriage”; while in Western Europe there is largely cross-party support in favour of this, in Eastern Europe there is cross-party support against it. This demonstrates how Eastern and Western European politics occur on different planes of consciousnesses, given that on social issues Polish liberals are to the right of Swedish conservatives, and Dutch conservatives are to the left of Hungarian liberals. It is the Eastern attitude which is organic whereas the Western attitude is symptomatic of a very modern decadence.

Execution and Abortion: A Western Inversion

Another illustration of this can be seen in regard to Western attitudes to execution and abortion. That the law regarding abortion and capital punishment changed around the same time in certain countries demonstrates how internally logical these issues are. In Britain, the last execution took place in 1965 while abortion became legal in 1967. In France, the law introducing abortion came into force in 1975 while the last execution took place in 1977. In the Unites States this can be seen by contrasting Roe v Wade with Furman v Georgia and Gregg v Georgia.

In Roe (1973), the Supreme Court found that there was a constitutional right to abortion, while in Furman (1972) execution was found to be unconstitutional due to inconsistent application; though this was then overturned in Gregg (1977) which found that execution was in general constitutional. In Roe, the two dissenting judges— Justices White and Rehnquist — were in the majority in Gregg, while the two dissenters in Gregg- Justices Brennan and Marshall — were in the majority in Roe.

In Gregg, Brennan stated that “The calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person’s humanity […] An executed person has indeed ‘lost the right to have rights.'” Brennan did not reason thusly in Roe with regard to unborn babies but then as described here, being pro-abortion and anti-execution are logically correlated.

Thus, from the 1960s to 1990s both East and West displayed different forms of egoism:

…boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The transformation of Western and Eastern consciousnesses had occurred to such an extent by 1978 that Solzhenitsyn found that the West was not an attractive alternative:

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

Into The West

The reburial of Imre Nagy in 1989 at which Viktor Orban gave a speech demonstrates the continuity between Nagy and Orban. In Poland the two main parties, Law and Justice and Civic Platform, are descended from the anti-Communist Solidarity movement. In fact, Viktor Orban, Robert Fico, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Călin Georgescu are the heirs of Imre Nagy, Alexander Dubcek, Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, and Solzhenitsyn. It is therefore clear that since the 1990s Eastern Europe possesses family values in contrast to the permissive values of the modern West; this is the opposite of the nature of these societies before the 1960s.

It could be asked whether rising affluence in Eastern Europe could bring an end to their current cultures. This likely will not happen due to another factor unless there is an upsurge in Jewish influence. In the West, Jews have been at the forefront of making and promoting pornography and other degenerate media culture, and they are a pillar of the cultural left generally. Not coincidentally, the rise to political and cultural power of the Jews in the West, after increasing gradually throughout the twentieth century, surged after World War II, reaching a dominant position in the 1960s — exactly the period during which the dramatic changes alluded to above occurred throughout the West, and in addition saw the beginnings of replacement-level immigration of non-Europeans into the West, exemplified by the 1965 immigration law in the United States.