With Friends Like These, Who Needs Marxist Foes?

Understanding Co-Belligerency

Oct 03, 2022

An Ancient Proverb Examined

You’ve heard the old proverb, I’m sure, that says —

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It’s a questionable tactic for somebody to use in trying to achieve a certain goal, but has a long history. People have often made temporary peace agreements with enemies in order to fight a bigger, common enemy that they couldn’t individually overthrow. How they’ve done this differs from person to person, time period to time period, culture to culture. What hasn’t changed is the fact that in every case the two parties involved agree on the identity of the common enemy.

In our day, however, many have lost sight of the enemy facing the West. Rather than launching an attack at the root cause of the Great Reset — namely collectivism, anti-individualism, and anti-capitalism — many “conservatives” have attacked at the fruit of that unholy philosophical triad. What I mean by this is not that conservatives have teamed up with those who are opposed only to certain expressions of those evils and have, as a result of that, teamed up with individuals who are promoting the very evils responsible for what we see happening in the West and, likewise, in the world.

Sadly, though, conservative alliances with individuals and groups who are merely trying to establish their expression of collectivism, anti-individualism, and anti-capitalism are rarely, if ever, addressed. When they are addressed, they are usually dismissed or altogether ignored. Many conservatives today think they are working with co-belligerents in the war against the coming “Great Reset,” but are helping that kind of world to come into existence, albeit under a different title.

Roman Catholicism Is Not Conservative

For instance, there are some prominent men who have contributed greatly to the fight against the Great Reset while also teaming up with Roman Catholics. Not understanding the social theory of the Roman Catholic Church, they think that Roman Catholicism is opposed to the tyranny of technocrats, anti-individualism, and anti-capitalism. This could not be farther from the truth.

As I’ve explained in other articles, the World Economic Forum is currently promoting a softened version of socialism called communitarianism.1 This is the same philosophy promoted by the likes of nominal protestants like Carl R. Trueman and Russell Moore, in which individuals are inseparable cogs in the machinery of society. In this view, all individuals are to order their behavior in such a way as to achieve “the common good.” Economic relations are governed not by the free choice of autonomous, rational human beings who come to a shared agreement and hold each other accountable for keeping their end of the contract. Rather, under communitarianism economic relations are governed by the State, whose primary purpose is to ensure “the common good.”

Throughout the writings of the World Economic Forum’s contributors, and particularly in the writings of Klaus Schwab, this emphasis on the priority of the “collective” over and against the individual is repeatedly repeated. There is no lack of clarity when you read their writings. For the WEF, the individual’s is a cog in the machinery of society whose behavior needs to serve the overall goal of achieving “the common good.” Failure to act in this way will result in one being socially and economically penalized.

Communitarianism is the goal of the WEF. It is also the goal of the Roman Catholic Church. In the 1993 book Catholic Social Thought and the New World Order: Building on One Hundred Years, Oliver F. Williams makes this very clear, explaining that

Catholic social teaching has developed consciously its positions in opposition to those of the influential philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) and the school of thought known as liberalism. In “liberal” thought, society is understood as a collection of individuals who have come together to promote and protect their private rights and interests.
For Locke (1963) the law of nature is the basis for commutative justice which provides the norms for contractual and exchange relationships between atomistic individuals.
“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges everyone: and reason, which is that law, teaches all [hu]mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his [or her] health, liberty, or possessions…”
In Locke's state of nature, however, the rights to liberty and to property are in perpetual jeopardy, and thus there is need for a political body and a government; in this regime, however, government can curtail freedom or property rights only when defending the liberty or property of another citizen. These rights override all others.
Communitarianism, on the contrary, holds that the person is social by nature, not by choice. The need for others, for community, is a constitutive dimension of the person. Thus, the “law of nature” grounds not only a commutative justice but also a distributive and a social justice as well. Centesimus Annus is based on this premise.2

The Church of Rome’s teaching on this matter is not flexible, since they believe the Pope is infallible. What this means is that any “good” Roman Catholic must believe that the good and holy and godly social, political, and economic system that must be instituted by the State is collectivist, anti-individualist, and anti-capitalist. And they must also believe that their church’s “Communitarian democratic capitalism” should replace the system which the WEF and its proponents are also fighting against.

So while it’s true that the Roman Catholic church rejects Marxism, socialism, and totalitarianism, it does so because it views itself as the sole authoritative source for understanding “the common good” and whether or not the government’s actions are helping society achieve that end. For the Roman Catholic church, the State is under the implicit authority of the church, which under the “infallible” guidance of the Pope defines “the common good.” This thinking is derived directly from the RCC’s chief philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, who was primarily following the collectivist social theory of his main influence Aristotle. As James Dominic Rooney explains —

At the core of Aquinas’s approach was a notion of the natural “common good” of society. We act together in political life for reasons that benefit everyone. In light of these facts about the common good, which are objective facts, Thomas understood political decision-making in the same way as it understands moral decision-making: a matter of discovering the truth. For politics, this is a matter of discovering the truth in matters of political or legal justice, but both ethics and politics are grounded in practical reasoning, deliberating on reasons for action that arise from objective facts about the nature of human beings and their communities. From Thomas’s perspective, any political society, whether the state or the Church, are ordered to their common good—that good which is shared by all the members. The common good for both kinds of society, natural and supernatural, share important features. In sum, Aquinas calls the goal of ideal political life “peace.” Peace is cross-categorical, because it is both the natural goal of society as well as a fruit of the Holy Spirit, a supernatural gift. This is not an equivocation, however, since peace in both cases is a special kind of harmony that results from order. Peace goes beyond mere absence of conflict and is envisioned as a “moral unity” of all citizens in unified pursuit of the same goals. For this reason, perfect peace requires, beyond just relations between citizens, the personal virtue of each citizen. The individual’s reason, will, and other powers should be properly cooperative in pursuit of their proper end. Peace is then an objectively good state of relationships in society, as it is a state of being properly ordered (as an individual or group) toward what is truly good....The purpose of society is to achieve a uniquely social good founded upon relationships. These goods can only be achieved in cultural activity and political life, and thus serve as the reason for the existence of the State. Aquinas’s common good is a “relational” good, not abstract rights and obligations.3

Thus, the WEF and the Roman Catholic church are opposed to classical liberalism. Individualism is an enemy, as is capitalism. What is proposed in its place is the enforcement of its own ideals, defined by the papacy, by the State, whose purpose is to help the church achieve “the common good.”

This accounts for the close relationship that the RCC has historically held with some of the world’s worst regimes, including the Nazis. As John W. Robbins explains —

The political thought of the Roman Church-State, in which the interests of the individual are sacrificed for the common good, found an echo in the political thought of the Nazis. The 1933 Fulda Pastoral Letter from the German Catholic bishops read:
“Only if the individual sees himself as a part of an organism and places the common good ahead of individual good will his life once again be marked by the humble obedience and joyous service that Christian Faith demands....”
In the Pastoral Letter, the Roman Church-State s own authoritarian structure was offered to German Catholics as a model to support the their submission to the Hitler government.
Adolf Hitler himself was a Roman Catholic. Hitler had been reared in a traditional Catholic family. As a child and youngster little Adolf had regularly attended Mass, had served as an acolyte during Mass, had hoped to become a priest, and had attended school in a Benedictine monastery at Lambach, Austria. It was at the monastery Hitler first discovered the Hindu swastika that he later adopted as the symbol of his National Socialist movement. As an adult, Hitler remained a member in good standing in the Roman Church-State. At no time did officials of the Church-State excommunicate him. When the German military plotted to assassinate Hitler in 1944, and the plot failed, the Roman Church-State in Germany offered a Te Deum to thank God for the Fuhrer s escape.4

Similar engagements with Mussolini and other tyrannical governing authorities in history are laid out in detail by Robbins, and would occupy too much space here to repeat. The point, though, is simple: Roman Catholic social theory is in no way in agreement with, let alone amicable toward, the philosophical principles undergirding Western civilization, but are closer in substance to the precise set of ideas that are now guiding the thinking and action of the WEF’s members, including Klaus Schwab.

Concluding Remarks…

What “conservative” friendly communitarians like the RCC and other collectivist movements have in common with actual conservatives, it seems, is a superficial united opposition to various kinds of government endorsed sexual immorality that is now abounding in the West. This is not bad in and of itself. However, it does not make them the allies of conservatives. The very things which the WEF are trying to abolish have also been under attack by the Roman Catholic church for hundreds of years, and are still in their sights. What the non-Christian collectivists and the nominal “Christian” collectivists are fighting over is who gets to call the shots and stamp out life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness first.