“Through 1789, 1917, and 1945 the ‘substance of inner life,’ as Salazar put it, evaporated, although after each date some, always fewer, old forms still survived, creating the impression that the loss had been tolerable. Thus after each turning point, the domain of what the counter-revolutionaries considered as _essential_ diminished, while increasingly more had to be jettisoned as _inessential_. This was not a philosophical choice, but a political one, enforced by necessity. Counter-revolutionaries know that a civilization decays in proportion as it consents to jettison more and more of its substance, which it then calls a no longer useful ballast, or ‘inessential.’ But from the point of view of Western civilization it is hard to tell which of the two losses is greater, more ‘essential’: the communization of Eastern Europe or the elimination of Latin from curriculum and liturgy.”
-- Thomas Molnar, The Counter-Revolution (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), p. 158.
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