“This is sin”, said a bloodied Muammar Gaddafi to his tormenters in a last moment of humiliation. “Do you know right from wrong?” After NATO airstrikes destroyed his convoy and forced him to flee on foot through Sirte, Libya’s deposed leader was seized from a drainage ditch. Footage off of a captor’s cell phone shows a howling rebel mob parading him along the dusty city blocks of his birthplace. Beaten, pistol-whipped and sodomized with a knife, Gaddafi was then summarily executed with a gunshot to the temple. His body was displayed as a trophy of war, and his secrets were effectively buried, never to be revealed at another farcical international tribunal in The Hague.

U.S. policymakers weren’t likely planning on the mass release of a Gaddafi snuff film. In their jubilation and braggadocio, the Libyan “freedom-fighters” ruined the enjoyment of a private viewing session available only to a chosen few within the Beltway. And so an eccentric dictator with a terrorist past and delusions of pan-African grandeur evoked unforced human sympathy as he suffered and died before a world audience. Colonel Gaddafi knew grave sin well; this was the man who ordered the passengers of Pan Am 103 blown out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. He had since come to terms with the West, paying restitution to the victims’ families and scrapping his nuclear weapons program in favor of restored diplomatic and commercial ties eighteen years later. Yet when Benghazi and the rest of Cyrenaica rose up against the regime in early 2011, Washington, London and Paris smelled blood in the water.

Surely, only a Western academic leftist could come up with something as stupid as this. This is reminiscent of when the late televangelist yahoo Rev. Jerry Falwell suggested the Teletubbies were really just a bunch of closeted homos working subversively to turn good Christian children into fudge-packers. Totalitarian humanism is the fundamentalist theocracy of our era. Burn the universities!

Are the Smurfs crypto-fascists?

Editor's Note: The following article comes from Worldcrunch, an innovative, new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. This article was originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur.

By Tristan Berteloot, Worldcrunch

The stars of an upcoming summer blockbuster, the world-famous Smurfs are once again the talk of the town – though not necessarily for all the right reasons.

Known as Schtroumph in the original French, Puffi in Italian, Pitufos in Spanish, Stroumfakia in Greek, Kumafu in Japanese and Schlümpfe across the Rhine (since “schtroumpf” means “sock” in German), the little blue imps have been going strong for more than half a century, entertaining children the world over in comic books, animated cartoons and feature films.

More recently, however, the Smurfs have also caught the attention of a controversial French academic who says there may be more than meets the eye when it comes to the pint-sized characters. Hidden behind their charming veneer are some pretty dark undertones, argues Antoine Buéno, whose work “Le Petit Livre Bleu” (The Little Blue Book) accuses the Smurfs of being maybe just a bit fascist.

Buéno, who is both a senior lecturer at SciencePo University in Paris and a novelist, never set out to destroy the magical energy that emanates from these blue-colored characters. Nevertheless, he analyzes their society and ideology – Smurfology – through an unforgiving political lens.

“Le Petit Livre Bleu” focuses specifically on the man behind the cryptic cartoons, original Smurf author Pierre Culliford, aka Peyo. Whether he meant it or not, Culliford endowed his magical little creatures with some Stalinist, racist and anti-Semitic leanings, argues Buéno.

Read: Here comes the McBaguette.

Buéno first questioned the Smurfs' biological nature and sexuality: by the way, why is there only one Smurfette? Then, he tried to show that Smurf society is the archetype of a totalitarian utopia marked by Stalinism and Nazism.

Peyo came up with the word “Smurf” while dining in 1958 with his friend André Franquin. Peyo reportedly asked Franquin: “could you pass me the Smurf?” He meant to say “could you pass me the salt?” The rest is cartoon history.

The spirit of an era

Born in 1928 in Brussels, Peyo lived in German-occupied Belgium. As an adult, he did not look back fondly on that time in history. Nonetheless, Buéno thinks that “a piece of work can convey an imagery that the author himself does not support. Thus, the Smurfs seem to reflect more the spirit of an era than Peyo's political leanings.”

The Smurfs are self-sufficient. Smurf society is collectivist and interventionist. Its only leader, Papa Smurf, is all-powerful. And, like Stalin, his favorite color is red.

They all eat at the canteen and are all ridiculously puritan. In “The Black Smurfs” album, racism is obvious: blood purity becomes something vital and the dark brown Smurf is referred to as "the ugly one." In another album called “Smurfette,” Buéno notes how the Aryan blond is idealized.

The Smurfs are also united against a sworn enemy called Gargamel, a large-nosed, black-haired possibly anti-Semitic caricature, and his cat Azrael.

Smurf lovers have been quick to challenge Buéno’s “Little Blue Book,” saying his arguments are neither serious nor credible. “Generally speaking I’ve gotten two types of knee-jerk reactions: people saying that I’m either an idiot, or a crook,” says Buéno’s.

“But my analysis isn’t just coming out of nowhere,” he goes on to say. “People from other institutions have been looking at [the Smurfs] before me. People in the United States at one point suspected Peyo’s Smurf albums of being socialist propaganda, going so far as to say the word Smurf was actually an acronym for ‘Small Men Under Red Forces.’”

After Peyo died in 1992, his son, Thierry Culliford, continued to draw the Smurfs. Culliford's albums offered a much more educational approach. According to Buéno, that explains why “the Smurfs' village becomes more explicitly a metaphor for reality.”

The Smurfs make their next big appearance this summer in a 3D live-action movie directed by Raja Gosnell. The blue-colored creatures will besiege New York City for the occasion.

But before the movie is released, the Lombard Editions will publish a 29th album called “The Smurfs and the Golden Tree,” and in November, “the Smurf Encyclopedia”.

In the desperate war for the soul of the West, we witness another atrocity. And this time the perpetrator was neither a Bolshevik nor a disciple of Mahomet. Last week Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, gunned down 68 unarmed Labor Party youth activists on an island camp outside Oslo after bombing government offices (where eight died). The deed, he announced, had been wrought in the name of traditional Europe. Breivik’s massacre seems designed to inflict maximum damage to the European cause, but at this point it looks to be the well-planned and executed work of a dedicated madman.

Breivik claims to have acted on behalf of Christendom, and so appropriated its heroes and imagery in his propaganda. In this we uncover the tragedy of his recourse to murder, as well as an element of the diabolical. Speaking on the inversion of symbols, the great French traditionalist René Guenon would warn:

“It sometimes so happens that people who imagine that they are fighting the devil, whatever their particular notion of the devil may be, are thus turned, without any suspicion of the fact on their part, into his best servants!”

This past June Rome’s Circus Maximus, where chariots were once raced in honor of emperors, was the site of the Europride-2011 festival. The Continent’s annual celebration of homosexuality also featured a special performance by a disturbingly popular entity known as Lady Gaga, a vocal supporter of the gay agenda[1]. The show was doubtless a hit with the million-strong crowd, and the carnival deemed a success, if only to remind the Vatican it operates in enemy-held territory. Yet Mme. Gaga wasn’t originally on the Europride billet- she needed some special persuasion from behind the scenes to make her grand appearance.

As it turns out, we can thank U.S. diplomacy for another round of last-minute heroics in the defense of freedom. American Ambassador to Italy David Thorne was ‘instrumental’ in bringing Gaga to the event, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed. But the Rome concert only serves as a symbol of the U.S. campaign to normalize homosexual practices throughout the world. In her address to the organization GLIFAA (Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies) last week, Clinton enumerated State’s achievements on this front, from U.S. embassy employees helping organize a ‘pride’ march in Bratislava, Slovakia, to new gay-friendly UN resolutions and specialized aid for LGBT (in commissariat-speak, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) refugees and sex workers. She then rallied the troops with this St. Crispin’s Day barn-burner:

I’ve always believed we could make progress because we were on the right side of equality and justice. Life is getting better for people in many places, and it will continue to get better thanks to our work. So I ask all of you to look for ways to support those who are on the front lines of this movement, who are defending themselves and the people they care about with great courage and resilience. This is one of the most important human rights struggles of all times. It’s not easy, but it is so rewarding.

Who today remembers the once-mighty Warsaw Pact? Not the punk rock group, of course, but the Soviet Bloc’s formidable answer to U.S.-led NATO. Twenty years have now passed since it was peacefully dismantled in what was a finishing touch on the collapse of Communist power and the end of the Cold War. Yet unlike the Warsaw Pact, the North Atlantic alliance did not disband; it steadily pushed east toward an exhausted Russia and then metastasized. Like any successful multinational, NATO went global.

Largely through its role in NATO, the United States had applied generations of resources and manpower in containing the Soviet threat, and its investment paid off. America’s triumph against such a dangerous peer competitor was total and unambiguous- the one state that spanned the length of Eurasia had fractured into fifteen. The End of History was at hand, and with Marxist management practices discredited only one contender for humanity’s future remained. A democratic-capitalist world system, already organized in the post-war years, could now be fully implemented under Washington’s benevolent aegis.

One Cold War veteran who can well recall the course of this vast transformation is Robert Gates. After all, he operated behind the scenes and at the highest levels of power during critical moments of the U.S.-Soviet struggle. A career CIA analyst, Gates was National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s staff aide when the Carter Administration launched a covert action program to aid the Afghan mujahideen in 1979. The White House signed off on the order six months before the Politburo in Moscow committed to an invasion of its southern neighbor, along with a disastrous occupation that would cripple the USSR.

This particular controversy, which is ironically transpiring in the former capital of the Confederacy, may well symbolize the present state of Western Civilization as much as anything fostered by the forces of PC to date. A writer of absurdist fiction who wished to illustrate the madhouse that modern society has become would have a hard time thinking up something this good. The piously politically correct folks at the Federal Reserve may have destroyed the economy, but at least they are inclusive. Un-effing-believable.

The Richmond Federal Reserve Bank's attempt to show inclusiveness in the workplace by flying the rainbow flag outside its building has reignited a divisive gay-rights debate.

Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Prince William, is calling on the bank to remove the flag, terming its presence "a serious deficiency of judgment by your organization, one not limited to social issues."

In a letter to Richmond Fed President Jeffrey M. Lacker, Marshall says the homosexual behavior "celebrated" by the bank "undermines the American economy."

"What does flying the homosexual flag, or any other similar display, have to do with your central banking mission under the Federal Reserve Act passed by Congress?" writes Marshall, one of the General Assembly's most conservative members.

The Fed, which deems itself an independent entity within the federal government, placed the flag at the request of PRISM, a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender bank employees, to coincide with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

Jim Strader, a bank spokesman, said the flag was raised to fly for the month of June, and that there are no plans to change the timetable. It hangs under the American flag on a pole in front of the building.

"We are flying the pride flag as an example of our commitment to the values of acceptance and inclusion," Sally Green, the bank's first vice president and chief operating officer, said earlier this week.

Opponents in the battle over gay-rights expansion in the state staked out familiar positions, with the conservative Family Foundation saying it's "disappointing" to see the bank participate in the "celebration."

"At The Family Foundation, we will simply choose to use this flag, like the view of Mr. Jefferson's Capitol, as motivation for the work that lies ahead," said Victoria Cobb, president of organization.

Equality Virginia, a Richmond-based gay-rights group, threw its support behind the Fed's decision on Friday, criticizing Marshall and the Family Foundation as "Virginia's self-styled morality police."

"The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond should receive accolades for its decision to recognize and celebrate its GLBT employees, customers and vendors during Pride month," said EV's Executive Director James Parrish.

Parrish took issue with the Family Foundation's claim that state residents spoke on gay rights when they voted 57 to 43 percent in 2006 in favor of the state's marriage amendment. He argues that people's attitudes on gay-rights issues have evolved and pointed to more recent polling.

The Fed is "a private business and should be able to make its own personnel and corporate policy decisions without Bob Marshall's guidance or the Family Foundation's approval," he said.

Marshall wrote in the letter to Lacker that homosexual behavior is a Class 6 felony in Virginia, referring to the state's sodomy law. That statute remains on the books despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared unconstitutional a Texas law that prohibited private, sexual acts between consenting same-sex adults.

Brian Gottstein, spokesman for the Virginia Attorney General's Office, said its attorneys "have not heard of a scenario in recent decades, even before the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, where a consenting couple acting in private was prosecuted."

That's consistent with the experience of Richmond Commonwealth's Attorney Michael N. Herring, who said "To my knowledge no one enforces consensual sodomy as a result of [Lawrence v. Texas]."

On Palm Sunday of this year Charles Martel, victor of Tours, could smile upon his descendants. A small band of Franks wielding hammers again rose in defense of the West. The action was local-scale and humble; there was no smashing of the Saracen horde. Four young men entered art mogul Yvon Lambert’s gallery in Avignon and destroyed the Piss Christ, a world-famous image of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine (It had previously been attacked in Australia; the coup de grace fell to the French). Their raid does nothing to shift the odds against traditionalists- it is rather an emblem of resistance, akin to stealing a general’s banner from the enemy camp. In such symbols the struggle endures.

The story of 20^th-century art is one of subversion, the use of creative media for purely destructive ends. Painting, music, literature and sculpture were used as refined weapons in the avant-garde’s rebellion against Christendom. The enterprise was wildly successful- a witch’s brew of Freud and Marx prepared by the Frankfurt School would only accelerate the dominant liberal trajectory toward cultural dissolution. By 1987 an “artist” like Andres Serrano, with the patronage of collector-oligarch Charles Saatchi, could display his Piss Christ in America to the widespread approval of the elites. Its veneration in public as an object of beauty only highlights the Revolution’s progress.

Before the onset of post-modernity, art diverted from its original purpose, transcendence, still had the capacity to seduce. Escaping the boredom of late 19^th-century bourgeois Europe, stockbroker Paul Gauguin could cast idyllic scenes of Tahiti’s primitive splendor and indulge himself with its native women. And the bored bourgeoisie back home were captivated, at least for a time. Under Gauguin’s influence Pablo Picasso would then paint the lascivious and animalistic Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, portending the rise of a cruel and inhuman spirit that would characterize the coming decades. Fedor Dostoevsky had already spoken of beauty’s elemental danger in The Brothers Karamazov:

Beauty! I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty heart and mind begins with the ideal of Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom…Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind, beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? What’s awful is that beauty is a thing mysterious and terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

The battles won and lost in these dark recesses produce visible consequences. In our time Sodom would triumph; rejecting the Madonna, civilization proudly set its faith in reason while pursuing desire. Gauguin would die of syphilis, and within the generation Europe experienced a new phase of revolutionary politics and the savagery of mechanized war so well depicted in Picasso’s Guernica. Traditional culture and polity in the West, what Fr. Seraphim Rose termed the Old Order, recognized beauty as an expression of divine hierarchy. Yet the forces of the new era worked to annihilate any such notion. Sic transit gloria mundi- the glory of the modern was truly fleeting, and the false beauty of Sodom would be unmasked in spiritual alienation and death.

With today’s regime committed near-religiously to transgression, there is no further need for seduction in art. Refined weapons have become blunt instruments of demoralization. The repulsive and perverse are simply proclaimed beautiful, and all are expected to accede to the lie. Nobility is mocked, higher love altogether denied, and Eros grotesquely parodied in pornography. Art and its applications in mass entertainment are best identified as profit-driven psychological warfare. In concert with the machinery of political economy, contemporary culture robs the peoples of the West of their identity and denigrates their ancestral faith. In return it offers filth and fun. The alleged consummation of human development, the Open Society has descended to a condition of sub-humanity.

The Piss Christ was exhibited in the United States and Europe for years and served as a testament to the values of the new era. Calculated blasphemy became a holy relic of “our treasured freedoms” for leftists, and American conservatives did nothing besides run through well-rehearsed motions of hapless opposition to gain votes and raise campaign funds from gullible donors. Republicans would never violate the dogmata of secular pluralism in order to defend Christianity and the Western heritage. Their ultimate loyalty has always been to Mammon, the god of liberal democracy. One need only witness calls by U.S. senators to outlaw Koran-burning, as Washington’s trillion-dollar mission to transform Afghanistan into a Muslim Mayberry could be jeopardized by one such stunt! Meanwhile our finest art galleries maintain warehouses of sacrilege and obscenity, with similar content beamed daily to the proles via television.

It is not farcical elections and their attendant theatre that will save the West; it is the strength of will of a blessed few. The now-mangled Piss Christ confirms this. How heartening it is that the men of Avignon evinced not the least concern with sacrosanct rights of expression, the marketplace of ideas, or any other regime methods of division and control. They showed the courage to shatter a minor idol of the age and dent, however slightly, the liberal order’s myth of invincibility.

A genuine Counterrevolution in the Occident will be creative, and moved by the force of love- not just for beauty, Truth and the Good, but for their reflections in our brothers and friends, our kith and kin. In all its glamour and power, the regnant anti-culture will have wrought only its own negation; so it was attested on a Palm Sunday with the defiant swing of a hammer.

It is fitting that the initial phase of the U.S. attack on Libya was overshadowed in the media by college basketball finals, popularly and quite appropriately known as March Madness. Wars, akin to dated sitcom reruns, have no hope for ratings share considering the competition. And a company like Sony won’t pay to advertise its new Playstation game Kill Zone 3 during scripted and predictable news of another desert intervention. Perhaps the press should have just phoned in coverage of the action by playing clips from the films G.I. Jane and The American President, both depicting a conflict with Tripoli. The public would doubtless be comforted that Commander-in-Chief Michael Douglas has sent Demi Moore and her fellow-SEALs to teach the Libyans a lesson in democracy.

Our absurd fantasy state reflects the approach of a monstrous reality- a world empire, declaring itself the embodiment of universal good, moves to subjugate any points of opposition to its rule. From this chaos emerges a counterfeit order, and before us appears a premonition of Yeats’ rough beast, “with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”.

The January 24^th terrorist bombing at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow serves as a reminder of why Russia throughout its history has dwelt in a state of mobilization. The vast spaces of the Eurasian heartland have concealed a wide array of adversaries, from Poland’s Winged Hussars and the Grande Armée to Turkic nomads and rebellious Caucasian mountaineers. War is a reality that manifests itself here with depressing regularity, and it has been firmly impressed in the Russian historical memory. From fields of battle to the dark recesses of the soul, Russia more than other cultures is defined by struggle.

And so the carnage persists into our brave new twenty-first century; this time a suicide bomber killed 35 innocents during the hours of Monday-morning travel. The attack was most likely carried out by a cell of the Caucasus Emirate, a jihadist umbrella organization. It was calculated to further destabilize the republics of the North Caucasus and possibly drive inter-ethnic tensions in Russia’s major cities to a breaking point. Retribution, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remarked, will be inevitable. But in calibrating a response, the Kremlin is placed in an extraordinarily difficult position, as it must attend to a situation that could quickly spin out of control.

In his comments on my discussion of alternate modernities, Paul Gottfried observes that in our present situation there's no educational program, system of alliances, or political and cultural strategy that seems likely to get us out of the hole we're in.

I agree. If we start with what I called the modern "attempt to base social order simply on this-worldly empirical man," we can't get anywhere, because we can't escape the problem of conflicting wills fighting over who gets what. The only way to deal with that problem is by some combination of force and fraud, and any new combination of programs, alliances, and strategies is just going to be one more configuration of force and fraud. Why should our force and fraud work out better than everyone else's? Haven't the possibilities been tried and found wanting?

The problem, it seems, is the basic modern understandings that make our present situation what it is and so condition all the programs, alliances, strategies, and so on that now seem reasonable and practical. Things won't get a whole lot better until those understandings change, and that won't happen because some group of activists and theoreticians puts together a system of understandings that's more to their liking and tries to get them adopted by the dominant forces in society.

In particular, as Paul notes, right-wingers aren't going to create a better world by getting together and aligning themselves with selected religious institutions, "command[ing] the political class and its allies in the media, the entertainment industry, and public education to change their worldview," and educating the masses into an outlook more to their liking. Among other problems, religious institutions themselves are affected by the dominant understandings.

But what then? If we don't like the way things are there must be some response--alcohol, skydiving, suicide, whatever--that makes sense even if political maneuvering is not likely to do much for us.

My proposal was to "go back to first things." What defines the political situation is what seems best and most real to the people involved, and if the situation is impossible those things must change. Current understandings have basic problems that (among other things) lead to a view of man as essentially asocial and eventually mean various forms of tyranny as well as "mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled."

It follows that the dissatisfied need first of all to understand the world better, and in a way that enables them to live in a manner more worthy of human nature. That, of course, is a prepolitical issue. It's worth dealing with in itself, since doing so will help ourselves and our families and friends. It's more than just a personal matter, though, since such initiatives can spread and transform social life. At some point some initiative will--it's happened before and will happen again--so why not ours if it's superior?

The present setup has basic contradictions, and won't last forever any more than other social arrangements have. With that in mind, those with an outlook and way of life that is more true and more worth living by should make their pitch and see what catches on and endures. As I commented, "revolutions begin in thought, and the way of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually."

The proposal sounds impossibly conjectural and long-range, but when there is no obvious quick fix you drop day-to-day events as your reference point and do what you can for what could work in principle. If what's needed is a change in basic understandings then that's what you should pursue. Modernity makes effectiveness the measure of thought, but to deal with the world effectively you have to deal on their own terms with issues that precede effectiveness, like what is real and good.

Such an approach might get results soon: things might be better than they seem, late modernity might be a bubble about to burst, the Church (which like everything else has its own characteristic way of functioning) might be about to revert to type, or something nobody has thought of might happen. Or it might take effect slowly or not at all. The same is true of every approach, though, and the basic point is that this approach--unlike others--could work in concept, and is worth pursuing on its own terms even if it does not.

The big question is what a superior way of thought would be. On that point opinions differ and discussion is necessary. In order to deal with man as he actually is and the problems politics actually present we need an outlook that's adequate to the world as we experience it. It seems clear, to me at any rate, that such an outlook requires an understanding of practical rationality not limited to technology and of knowledge not limited to modern natural science.

Otherwise we cannot, among other things, understand people. To understand and deal with life and human beings as we find them, I suggested that "something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good" is necessary. Whether I'm right on that is a matter for discussion. Still, each of us in his manner of life displays what he thinks is most real and most worth living by. We're more likely to make progress on basic issues to the extent we articulate and examine such commitments. Our problems today really are that basic, which is the reason there seems to be no exit from them.