Who is a vandal? It is absolutely not the illiterate peasant who in a fit of fury sets fire to the rich landowner’s mansion. The vandals I myself run into are all of them educated, pleased with themselves, socially well situated, and not especially resentful toward anyone. The vandal, rather, is that prideful narrow mind, pleased with itself and ever ready to claim its rights. That proud narrow-minded fellow believes that the power to fit the world to his own image is among his inalienable rights and, since the world is largely made up of matters beyond his capacities, he adapts the world to his image by destroying it. Thus, an adolescent knocks the head off some statue in a park because the statue infuriatingly seems a better human than he; and since any act of self-affirmation brings man satisfaction, he does it with delight. Men who live only their own contextless present, who know nothing of the historical continuity around it and who lack culture, can transform their nation into a desert with no history, no memory, no echoes, and untouched by beauty.
Vandalism in our time comes not only in forms condemned by the law. When a committee of citizens or bureaucrats managing a project decrees that some statue (or château, or church, or age-old linden tree) is useless and must be eliminated, that is just another form of vandalism. There is no great difference between legal and illegal destruction, just as there is none between destruction and prohibition. A member of Parliament recently demanded, in the name of twenty-one deputies, the banning of two major Czech films, both difficult—one of them (what an irony!) that “allegory of vandalism,” Daisies. Unabashed, he attacked the two films readily admitting—his exact words— hat he hadn’t understood them. The illogic of his complaint only seems obvious. The worst crime he charged to the two cinematic works is just that—by surpassing their judges’ capacities, the works had offended them.
In a letter to Helvetius, Voltaire wrote this magnificent line: “I do not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Here you have the articulation of the basic ethical principle of our modern culture. He who regresses into history before the birth of that one principle thereby abandons the Enlightenment and returns to the Middle Ages. Any repression of an opinion, even the brutal repression of wrong opinions, essentially goes against the truth—that truth that is found only by setting free and equal opinions one against the other.
That was an excerpt from “Address to the Czech Writers’ Congress: The Literature of Small Nations” by Milan Kundera, 1967. (Thanks to the Darkhorse Podcast for bringing this speech to my attention.)
So how did Kundera describe American vandals in 2024 when he was describing Czechoslovakian vandals in 1967?
It is almost as if the same force is at work for the same purpose.
We could say they are communists or Marxists, but who is empowering these useful idiots–these “vandals”? Who is maintaining the illusion of legitimacy? Who is playing us?
Who among those playing us are at the …. um …. apex?
Who are the Apex Players?
Among their thousands of ops and psyops, they: 1) created the Federal Reserve, 2) let Pearl Harbor happen, 3) killed JFK (even though he worked for them), 4) tried to sink the USS Liberty, kill all the Americans onboard, and blame Egypt, 5) created radical Islam, 6) perpetrated 9/11, 7) created the global warming hoax, and 8) created the Covid scam. They enslaved the Africans. They neutralized the native Americans and the peoples of Russia, Germany, China, Cuba, and so many more.
They created America …. well …. they stole it from the Puritans and the Native Americans, but for decades, they have been neutralizing the American people, whom they see as the last thing standing between them and total global control.
We are now in their end game.