Who’s to blame?

Frontispiece to William Blake's
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)
which contains Blake’s critique of
Judeo-Christian values of marriage.

Sometimes the best stuff about the whys of the West’s darkest hour is found not in the main article, but in the commenters section. Below I quote three illuminating posts from the thread “Be the Change” in Gates of Vienna (GoV).

Fjordman said...
Takuan Seiyo, I like to think of it this way: If you have one brainwashed generation then you have a problem. If you have two brainwashed generations then you have a very serious problem. If you have three brainwashed generations then you have a problem that is so big that it almost cannot be solved, because nobody in living memory can remember how it was to have a sane worldview. We are now fast approaching a point where young Westerners, indoctrinated with anti-Western hatred, not only do not receive a correction from their parents, but in many cases not even from their grandparents. By then we have witnessed a complete cultural discontinuity.

As much as I loathe to admit it, Marxists and other anti-European forces have been far more successful in staging a slow, “permanent” revolution in the West than they ever were in staging an armed revolution. They have largely succeeded in their goal of eradicating Western civilization, and are now working hard to physically eradicate the European peoples who created this civilization to ensure that it cannot be rebuilt in the future, either. They achieved this feat not by gaining control over the means of production but over the means of indoctrination, the mass media and the education system.

The only thing left to do is to let the current ruling paradigm crash under the weight of its own uselessness and work to survive so that we can build something new out of the ashes. We need a new paradigm as the current post-WWII “suicide paradigm” isn’t sustainable. The question is whether the coming discontinuity will be so severe, just like it was in the Middle Ages, that we will end up with an entirely new civilization, the third generation of European civilization.

Takuan Seiyo said…
Fjordman, I think we have to go to the giants of science fiction, maybe Philip Dick, to get an idea where this is leading. But restoring a common Western culture is no longer possible. Even intelligible conversation with the other side is no longer possible. We don’t share the same language anymore, even if we were born in the same country. Words like justice, nation, freedom, culture, racism, constitution, wealth, work, love, marriage, gender, right versus privilege etc. no longer have a common referent, and words like honor, merit, fidelity, prudence, civilization, civility, manners, graciousness, manliness, femininity, modesty, class, elegance, valor don’t even exist in the other side’s vocabulary anymore.

Or look at American films between 1935 and 1955. These are recent pop culture artifacts that seem 150 years old. See how much French or German dialogue is included in these films meant for the broad and relatively unsophisticated American audience, how good English, good manners and virtues prevail even in plots that are cynical or risqué (Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief is a good example).

I need to modify what I wrote in the previous comment. While it’s only our last three generations that have been transformed into changelings, the left has been working on all that really for 100 years, not 40. Much of what one can find in the works or speeches of Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci reads like a blueprint for a soft coup d’état, exactly of the kind as has been unfolding in the last 40 years.

Whiskey said...
I take issue with both Seiyo and Fjordman. This is not “Gramscian” stuff out of the Frankfort School. It is the natural result of Christianity. That most Christian of poets, William Blake, in Daughters of Albion compared marriage and family to slavery and prison. Mary Wollstonecroft, mother to Mary Shelley, preached free love in the 1780’s. The Oneida Commune predated Marx and the Revolutions of 1848. Much of the current morass stems [from] the Romantic poets and the thoughts of Thoreau and Whitman.

Which boil down to this: if you have some amount of money, better to behave like a depraved French Aristocrat than an upright member of the “square” bourgeoisie. Or more concretely, elites wish to maximize sexual, personal, and monetary freedom of action for themselves while cloaking themselves in Caesarian “for the people” morality.

You can’t sell things people don’t already want. The tremendous amounts of money flowing to elites, making them richer than the richest French aristo under Louis XIV, create the tremendous appetite to cast off any restriction in a decadent, depraved elite. The impact of the condom, improved female earnings, and anonymous urban living make women the natural home of the Hard Left, combining as it does “the New Aristocracy” of the Kennedys, Obama, etc. with a massive female-friendly social safety net. Anyone watching little girls play princess or adult women wanting understandably to jigger the system for them can understand this. The impact of the collapse of marriage (which ties female well-being to that of men’s opportunities) is to my mind, far more explanatory than the idea of the pod-people and bodysnatchers.

The films of Hitchcock in San Francisco reflected a married, bourgeoisie world. The current city reflects a decadent, aristocratic single world dominated by single women seeking aristocratic princesses and a safety net.

Chechar’s comment (off GoV):
I agree with Whiskey that liberalism is the natural result of Christianity. Today’s crisis can best be understood if we go beyond Gramscian or commie brainwash into a meta-perspective that involves Christian ethics.

Conservative Swede has explained such perspective here (see also here). If we keep in mind Swede’s philosophy that modern liberalism is but the last stage of a dying, giant red star, Whiskey’s answer to Seiyo and Fjordman makes sense within my framework of a noxious “helping”-mode of childrearing, because that was precisely what originated feminism (cf. my criticism of Lloyd deMause). Parents allowed their daughters to “enjoy” the new lifestyle, thus endangering Caucasians with extinction since women avoid to reproduce with healthy population-replacement levels. In the thread of one of my Quetzalcoatl chapters I commented:

This is resonant with our struggles against today’s liberals. In the last chapter I said that liberty should not be confused with licentiousness. And the big paradox with the “helping mode” psychoclass of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is that it is akin to the emergency from bicameralism three millennia ago. And so are the measures to be taken! For Con Swede, a Franco or a Pinochet is badly needed in Europe.

Reference to Franco or a Pinochet must have seemed a little rough for the GoV commentariat since I didn’t get any answer. But I must add that despite being a republican in heart the times are so dark that they require an imperial solution. It’s time for a new Caesar...


The Great Gatsby

The Jewish question has started to intrigue me. But yesterday I watched for the first time in my life the 1974 film The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow; directed by Jack Clayton from a screenplay of Coppola based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. None of these people are Jewish. But I found a subliminal message very akin to the more recent race-treasonous films that paint the whites and the West as the bad guys, quite a few of them directed or screen-written by the Jews at Hollywood. The whole point is that we must blame with equal ferocity all of the gentile liberals who also have contributed to demonize the white nationalists and the western culture. After all, it was Scott Fitzgerald, an Irish Catholic, who featured a reference to a conservative racialist author in The Great Gatsby. The film where the good guy Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford) is murdered starts with the following dialogue between Tom Buchanan (Bruce Dern) and his guest. At the end Tom is exposed as the bad guy of the movie, the one who incited the murder of poor Jay:

Tom: “Nick, have you read that book, The Rise of the Coloured Empires by Goddard?”

Nick: “Why? no.”

Tom: “Well, it is a fine book. Everyone ought to read it. See the point is that if we don’t watch out, the white race will be utterly submerged...”

[Nick’s face denotes incredulity]

Tom: “No, that’s so! It’s up to us. We, the dominant race, must watch out, or the other races will have control of things.”

Daisy [Mia Farrow] sarcastically says: “We’ve got to beat them down.”

Tom: “Daisy, it has all been scientifically proved. You see we’re Nordics. You are, and I am and... Anyway, we are responsible for all the things that made civilization: art science, and all that.”

The Rise of the Coloured Empires is a real book that today very few take seriously despite of the fact that, if the West had really watched out, neither China nor Islam would have awakened. If we look for an explanation of why Tom’s message fell upon the deaf ears of those who watch Hollywood films, the answer lays precisely in The Great Gatsby where frivolous parties ran amok in America’s 1920s, the zeitgeist when Fitzgerald wrote his novel. (Of course: today, frivolity has degenerated even further.)


Postscript of 25 August 2010:

Now that I am reordering the entries of this blog that I had written before the lightning that divided my intellectual life in twain, and removing mere copy-and-paste entries from other blogs, I see that accidentally I deleted a post with a couple of interesting comments in the commenters section. Fortunately I had saved them in my computer:

Monsieur Calguès said...
The book this conversation alluded to is The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy; the Goddard in the conversation refers to the book’s author, Lothrop Stoddard. I am not sure if you are familiar with the book. I have read it and it’s worth the effort. No author today could get away with writing some of the things Stoddard wrote. He would encounter difficulty finding a willing publisher today.

Chechar said...
Monsieur Calguès: As soon as I get a few bucks I will buy a long list of must-read books, such as this one. Here’s what an Amazon Book reviewer has to say about The Rising Tide. Ask me: who for decades have suffered the tsunami of uneducated semi-Indians that destroyed my beautiful neighborhood in Mexico City!:

“Forbidden book, very informative. I was impressed with how this work counters much of the ‘politically correct’ nonsense on campus. The egalitarian establishment would very much like to ban this work, they have already done much to keep it from potential readers. Changing demographics mated with Pavlovian ‘PC’ conditioning will allow them to ban this book soon. My advice is to get this book and read it while you still can.”

Monsieur Calguès said...
Forbidden indeed. Which makes it more surprising that I managed to find the book in a university library some time ago.

The Turner Diaries, however, would be impossible to find in any library in any form. One must access it online or order it through the mail. I believe some countries have even banned it.

But a society built on lies cannot endure, eventually it must collapse. The Soviet Union proved that maxim. There are violent times ahead for the West. They cannot come soon enough for me.

Taksei’s magnum opus

Note of 6 September 2010: This entry has been modified

Takuan Seiyo (or Taksei) is half-Jewish. Like Larry Auster, due to his dual loyalties Taksei prioritizes Jewish interests over white racial and cultural preservation. Nationalists must be aware of this fact. This said, I must add that some chapters of his book are brilliant. I’ve printed and read thirteen chapters of From Meccania to Atlantis, written by this Polish who signs his essays under such a curious penname (I say “curious” because he holds an American passport; the real persona is white, and his education thoroughly Western).

From Meccania to Atlantis, a serial being published in The Brussels Journal, is written with very florid language. Below I repubish some excerpts from chapter 1.



A body-snatched pod
in the film...

I would recommend watching the film the author chose as his main metaphor, the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 trailer here).



Excerpts of From Meccania to Atlantis, Chapter 1 (no ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs):

European Commissioners opine that “Immigration Is Moral Necessity” and “Islam Is Welcome.” A French President predicts that “Arabic Is the Language of the Future.” A Moroccan becomes Mayor of Rotterdam. Europeans who wish to assert their ethnic identity and interests versus those of aliens are roughed up.

In the United States—a country that has ruined itself through its own naïveté about human nature, about the world and about itself, the presidential election is being contested between a right-liberal candidate of the Stupid Party and a left-liberal candidate of the Evil Party. The latter’s position’s is that America’s wealth should be redistributed to the Afro-American “community” so that the country can have its salvation. He may have rephrased this idea in more unctuous words as his political shrewdness was increasing over the years, but essentially this is still the intention.

With Barack Obama in the White House and his party on the way to a supermajority in Congress, soon enough the United States will be turning from a stupid form of capitalism to a stupid form of socialism, and from a stupid form of multiculturalism to an evil one—of the Eurabian kind. It will be Sweden West, without the virtues that ethnic Swedes still possess.

To begin with, who are “we”?

One Identity

We are the ethno-conservatives—perhaps 60 million people in Western Europe, North America and Oceania. There are probably four times that number who are like us, but they are latent, unable at this time to cut through the fog of suppressive propaganda and inertia.

We are vastly outnumbered, and have few friends among the leading elites of the Western world. But it helps to remember that 185 million ex-Russia, non-Muslim Eastern Europeans are behind us. Living under Soviet tyranny has immunized them against the terrible mental virus that has ravaged the West. They have their own problems, related to economic development, but their combined weight is on our side. We ought not to forget who came to the rescue of Vienna and Western civilization in their hopeless encirclement in 1683.

Our common denominator is not white, for our most numerous and powerful opponents are also white. Rather, it is our opposition to our disfranchisement, marginalization and impoverishment by our own ruling elites in government, media, education, culture and business.

In America, we steam for having been abandoned by our government to mayhem and rape by illegal aliens. This is so obvious, that our ruling elites’ willful subversion of this precept is the greatest act of mass treason and insanity in the history of the world.

Jihad is an opportunistic infection that lay dormant as long as the West was strong and self-confident. The West’s own impairment of its cultural immune functions and the related importation of millions of Muslims has allowed the dormant jihadi virus to thaw and flourish.

We need our particular ethnicity and our singular culture, as other peoples need theirs. In contrast, the ruling American elite—including Republicans—has gone mad to such an extent that “minorities” are now over 1/3 of America’s population, soon to be half. And the EU ruling elite is welcoming, nay, soliciting, an Islamic wave that will accomplish what it failed previously at Tours, Lepanto and Vienna.

Together, they have brainwashed two generations of Westerners so effectively that the majority of whites in the world, notably among the young, celebrates “diversity”—i.e. their peoples’ and Western Civilization’s inevitable dissolution—as their core value. It is against this part of the population, and the politicians and subversive intellectuals who hold their puppet strings, that I believe we ought to define ourselves.

The Pods

Most contemporary whites are docilely or actively complicit in their own displacement, disappropriation, and disproportional share of rape, battery and murder by more savage peoples who have fewer scruples.

That’s why I think of them as “Pods” and of us as “Nonpods.” I use these words in the context of one of the great masterpieces of American cinema, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, released in 1956 and directed by Don Siegel, based on a novel by Jack Finney. In it, a doctor returns to a small California town to find out that one by one, its people, most of whom he has known all his life, have been replaced by dopplegängers.

These emotionless beings animated by a single instinct—proliferation—develop from large, foaming seedpods; in effect a biological production line for lifelike automatons, set up by evil space aliens.

One by one, real people disappear—acquaintances, friends and ultimately the protagonist’s girlfriend, until he remains the sole nonpod, encircled by human-like, giant legumes: the Body Snatchers.

Pods whose previous identities have been snatched and extinguished seem to be multiplying in our world too, and they are passionate in their hatred—of us. Middle-aged men and women who demonstrate publicly their desire for Europe to remain European are beaten up by Antifa gangs half their age and twenty times their number.

Pods view biological race and gender differences as social constructs, and therefore social group differences as an unjust inequality that must be rectified by reconstructing society. They view nation, ethnoculture, and private property as obsolete obstacles in the way of freedom, equality and fraternity of all people. Therefore, the right of anyone to immigrate anywhere precedes the right of the one suffering the destruction of his social capital by this immigration.

They view the refusal to tolerate the intolerable as unacceptable intolerance, and the desire to protect and preserve one’s family, community, country and culture as racism and xenophobia. And lastly, they have stood Jesus’ metaphor on its end, so that they fail to see the beam in the nonwhites’, non-Christians’ eye, but they see and greatly magnify the speck in their own peoples’ eye.

This is deep, delusionary dementia. This mental disorder is now the dominant orientation of the Western peoples, with its triumphant apotheosis, The One We Have Been Waiting For, coasting on the final approach to the most powerful job in the world, so that he can change the world into Pod kingdom.

Barack Obama is expected to receive 75 - 80% of the white vote in many urban areas of the United States. If this is not having one’s body and soul snatched, nothing is.


Excerpts of From Meccania to Atlantis, Chapter 11: “Mugged by Reality” (no ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs):



The Pinocchio regime

The grand Body Snatcher project of erasing race-ethnicity-religion-culture-gender distinctions does not, of course, erase them. It merely, in the manner of a babbling baby, starts calling da-da what was previously doo-doo, as if through this onomatopaeic transfiguration shit could be turned into father.

The willful lying about reality, the manipulation of language and images to disguise such lies, the teaching and enforcement of the lies and the persecution of those who challenge the lies is the chief occupation of the regime of Meccania.

Even the few politicians and journalists who take a principled stand against immigration lie. Culture can be reliably correlated with the quartet, and only the full quartet, of race, ethnicity, religion and social class. But to do that would be to commit the dreaded crime of “discrimination.” In Meccania, one cannot discriminate on pain of severe penalties. But the ultimate peril is to Meccania itself.

Reality will continue to discriminate, no matter what Body Snatchers say or do. And a clash between a reality-averse ideology and Reality has the same pre-ordained outcome as a test crash between a knockoff car and a wall. It’s only a question of the speed, acceleration, mass and distance of the lying car from the solid wall.

The virus is pitiless and catholic, though limited to the (previously) white West alone. In Sweden, there is a plague of rapes committed by Muslim immigrants. As Muslim immigrants in Malmö increased to 25% of the population, the number of rapes tripled. The Rosengård area is largely no-go even for the Swedish police. But the authorities blame the rapes on warm weather, alcohol, Internet dating sites and increase in reporting rape. Fjordman quotes a leading Swedish journalist, Helle Klein, “If the debate is about that there are problems caused by refugees and immigrants, we don’t want it.”

By the time Ms. Klein personally will have already been crash-tested by Reality. Debate will no longer be an option, only submission.

Male-dominated societies like China and Russia aggressively threaten the West’s vital interest, and Islamic patriarchal primitives ravage it from without and within, but the West is busy feminizing itself further, confusing its genders, enforcing gender and race quotas to elevate non-deserving and incompetent nonwhites or non-males, lying to itself outrageously about innate group differences.

E = mv2

The energy released by the impact of Snatcher State’s smashup against the Wall of Reality may or may not be expressible in elegant mathematical formulas, but it’s clearly related to the mass hurling forward toward the “progressive” future, times some order of velocity.

The mass is incalculably enormous. Snatcher State now controls every part of every sphere of activity in every Western country. Through Gramscian education, Snatcher State has controlled the brains of the last three generations of its subjects.

The velocity is quite dizzying too. In the Eurabian districts of Meccania, one can compute the approximate date of impact by comparing demographic data on immigration and fertility rates of Muslim immigrants versus those of indigenous Europeans. The meeting with The Wall will occur around mid-21st century.

The consequences of the impact are visible now, 40 years in advance.

The crash may take 100 years to unfold fully, just as the test truck folds in slow-motion upon meeting the wall. But its shape is on display in the once-thriving parts of Christian civilization such as North Africa, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, and in once-peaceful and Buddhist countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s on display now in every country where a minority of another race and faith lives among a Muslim majority.

Detroit has already met The Wall. Its industry is shattered. It looks like a post-Apocalypse city. It has the highest per-capita crime rate in North America, probably in all of Meccania: 1,220 violent crimes per 100,000. 84% of Detroit’s population is black, voting strictly by racial allegiance and electing criminal, incompetent mayors and a city council of crude, whitey-bashing ignoramuses.

These problems are impossible to fix, because the ruling Body Snatchers are racist cowards who tacitly hold black (and mestizo) people to lower standards of conduct than they do Whites.

It’s more difficult to know what ultimate shape America’s Wall will take, for its Snatchers (as in the U.K.) come in three flavors: “Progressive,” Liberal and Pseudo-Conservative, whereas in continental Europe they are all from the Left mold. Nevertheless, three things seem solidly in America’s future:

One is the destruction of the dollar and of America’s capitalist model itself. The second item is the inevitable crash of the global economy. In the West, this will impact the U.S. the most. In either case, Americans will have only their White Pod elite to blame, going back to 1965.

Eurabia will know it has hit The Wall when the muezzin’s call issues from the tower of the Westerkerk. Europe’s secular-socialist feminists will have experienced The Wall when they choose themselves to wear the full body chador rather than suffer spontaneous and frequent street violence. The society that swoons at transvestite politicians, gay marriage, homosexual indoctrination in schools and “empowerment” of men-hating Marxist women will know the test of Reality when its fertility rate is no longer 1.3 but 0.65.

Before the impact

The crash seems inevitable. The momentum is enormous. The steering wheel is in the unprisable grip of crash-test dummies. A large majority of the passengers are altered Pods, happy to be on a ride toward a democratic, “progressive” future—peaceful, diverse, integrated, free of discrimination, racism, sexism, homophobia, inequality and all things nasty.

Eventually, when the Wall of Reality is so close, all but the chief priests of the Pod cult will want to bail out from the speeding vehicle. There is nothing like imminent pulverization to reprogram a chip in a hurry. But by then, the velocity will be such that staying or jumping will make no difference.

We might speculate as to the full dimensions of the crash. In areas where the population is less brainwashed, e.g. some parts of the U.S., Australia, Switzerland and Italy, it may avert the crash altogether.

The way to exit the Pod vehicle is to separate from the Body Snatchers. Persuasion, rhetoric, political propaganda, electoral politics cannot do it. A chip that has been molded to oscillate only at one frequency cannot be made to vibrate to another.

Who are the anti-Pods? The “simple folks” who study and work and pay their bills and go through life under their own steam.

It’s people who volunteer for military service rather than attend pacifist demonstrations under a security umbrella provided by the soldiering of others. Who own guns and are ready to defend their families, because they know that Podism breeds crime and the police are always too late. Who marry only those with whom nature has made breeding possible, and who go through the tribulations of raising and providing for their brood. It’s a minority of professionals and intellectuals who had enough inner strength to go through years of Pod indoctrination and peer pressure at university and on the job without losing their hold on Reality’s compass.

Exodus fundamentals

First, singularity. Podism is a single viral pathogen that knows no boundary of territory, culture, language or religion, except it’s limited, as though by a genetic mutation, to people of European origin alone.

Exodus is not simply a flight from high taxes, street crime or ethnic discrimination. When the totem of faked, forced equality hovers like a giant Moloch over Western Civilization, there remains only one option for cultural survival: construct a new civilization—a new civilization that restores and reinvigorates the old one. It will be described hereafter as Atlantis.

Anti-Pods in each town ought to strive to live next to each other, on the same street, in close proximity. When more move in, more contiguous streets. A neighborhood. Anti-Pod café-salons. Anti-Pod clothing stores selling (only high-quality) clothing made by anti-Pods on patterns from the 50s. An anti-Pod radio station and Community-TV channel and an anti-Pod film theatre running only films free of Snatcher propaganda. Anti-Pod schools and kindergartens.

Right there you see the problem. For Meccania has laws that constrain its citizens’ freedom in many of these areas. In Germany, they’ll throw you in jail for home-schooling your child. In the U.S., some Snatcher judge will find a way to coerce you to accept Pod residents and employees, and rehab clinics or mosques for Pod clients, and Pod media content, and Pod schooling.

True self-government for anti-Pods will not be possible in any of the major cities of the West—except after the crash. Hence, for anti-Pods for whom it’s possible, the goal should be to move away from all centers where Snatchers dominate, to populate villages, towns and provinces that have the fewest Pods and Pod-clients.

The ultimate step would be secession.

Free speech dies in the Netherlands

Excerpts from Geert Wilders’ NY February 2009 speech:

Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me. And—to the immigration authorities—thank you for letting me into this country. It is always a pleasure to cross a border without being sent back on the first plane.

Today, the dearest of our many freedoms is under attack all throughout Europe. Free speech is no longer a given. What we once considered a natural element of our existence, our birth right, is now something we once again have to battle for.

As you might know, I will be prosecuted, because of my film Fitna, my remarks regarding Islam, and my view concerning what some call a “religion of peace”. A few years from now, I might be a criminal.

Whether or not I end up in jail is not the most pressing issue; I gave up my freedom four years ago. I am under full-time police protection ever since. The real question is: will free speech be put behind bars?

This is Europe 2009. Muslim settlers calling for our destruction, and free speech on trial. All this is the outcome of a sick and evil ideology, the ideology that is weakening us, the surrender ideology of cultural relativism. It believes that all cultures are equal, and therefore Islam deserves an equal place in the West. It is their duty, the Left thinks, to facilitate Islam. This way the cultural relativists paradise comes within reach and we will all be happy, and sing kumbaya.

Mark Steyn


Update of 20 January 2010: Mark Steyn on the trial of Geert Wilders:

A couple of years back, the novelist Martin Amis went to see Tony Blair and brought up the European demographic scenarios of my book. When the British Prime Minister got together with Continental leaders, Mr Amis wondered, was this topic part of “the European conversation”? Mr Blair replied, with disarming honesty, “It’s a subterranean conversation.” “We know what that means,” wrote Amis. “The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.”

Geert Wilders is on trial for wanting to discuss it. The European political class will not permit this—even though what is “undiscussable” in polite society is a statement of the numbingly obvious if you stroll through Amsterdam and Rotterdam, not to mention Antwerp, Clichy-sous-Bois, Malmo, or any old Yorkshire mill town. The Dutch establishment is effectively daring the citizenry: “Who ya gonna believe—the state-enforced multicultural illusions or your lyin’ eyes?” Lest you be tempted to call their bluff, the enforcers are determined to make the price of dissent too high.

In the Low Countries, a pattern is discernible. Whenever politicians seek to move the conversation from the “subterranean” to the surface, they are either banned (Begium’s Vlaams Blok), forced into exile (Aayan Hirsi Ali) or killed (Pym Fortuyn). Given that the court provided greater security to Theo van Gogh’s killer than to Mr Wilders, you might almost get the impression that the authorities are indifferent as to which of these fates consumes him.

Behind this disgraceful prosecution lies a simple truth that the Dutch establishment cannot tell its people—that, unless something changes, their nation will become more and more Muslim and, very soon, slip past the point of no return. They understand the tensions between their ever more assertive Muslim population and an aging “native” working class, but they believe that the problem can be managed by placing “the European conversation”—the non-subterranean conversation—within ever narrower constraints, and criminalizing any opinions outside those bounds. Some of them are blinkered and stupid enough to think that they need to do this in order to save the tolerant multicultural society from “right wingers” like Wilders. In fact, all they are doing is hastening the rate at which their society will be delivered into the hands of the avowedly intolerant and unicultural. In its death throes, Eutopia has decided to smash the lights of liberty.

Why do so many westerners hate the West?

This post has been moved here:

http://eliminatedleaves.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/on-a-leftist-freak/

Œdipus’ struggles with the daimon

This long article has been moved elsewhere:

http://eliminatedleaves.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/on-depression/

The paradigm has to collapse

Below I copy and paste part of one of the most interesting
posts by Baron Bodissey in his Gates of Vienna blogsite:

I have been posting quite a bit recently about the “gang wars” in Denmark and the actions taken by the Danish chapter of Hells Angels against the Muslim immigrant gangs.

This is not an easy topic to deal with. The idea that violent, criminal, or marginal people may be the vanguard of the resistance to Islamization—it just doesn’t sit well. Unless our discussion includes a deep-throated and serious disapproval, we risk being labeled “criminals” as well as “racists” and “neo-Nazis”. But it’s important to discuss the world as it is, and not as we would like it to be.

We would like our political leaders to cease importing of millions of Muslim immigrants. We would like them to show more spine in the face of Islamic intimidation. We would like our fellow voters to educate themselves so that they become aware of what’s happening and elect a new batch of leaders who will take a stand on behalf of their own people.

But in the world as it is, this shows no sign of happening. The existing paradigm—a system of lawfully-constituted democratic governance—has failed us.

If lawfully-constituted national leaders do not act, what happens? Will native Europeans go meekly to their doom? Or will those who are already lawless act instead?

In the eight years since 9-11, there has been no sign that any of the major traditional players in the existing political order “gets it”. George W. Bush fought “terrorism”, and he was the best we could hope for. Most European politicians—whether Left or “Right”—support Multiculturalism and are passive in the face of continued mass immigration. No one who wields power shows the slightest sign of dealing seriously with the coming social and financial catastrophe that the liberal welfare state has brought upon us. In the world as it is, you can either have the Hells Angels, or you can give up beer and say “La illaha ila Allah, wa Muhammadun rasul Allah!” It won’t be all that long before those are the only choices for Swedes, or Britons, or the Dutch.

I wrote a few weeks ago about what is likely to happen as the crisis worsens. Under the traditional social contract, in return for maintaining a monopoly on violence, our civil authorities are obligated to protect us from lawlessness and criminal predation. But they have abdicated this duty, and thousands of ordinary citizens are victimized every day as a result. A paralysis brought on by the twin ideologies of Political Correctness and Multiculturalism has immobilized the muscular system of the Western democracies and blocked any response to existential threats, both internal and external. Or—to switch metaphors—consider cultural Marxism as the HIV of the West. Islam is just a virus of opportunity, a pneumonia that has taken advantage of our immunological deficiencies and ushered in the onset of full-blown AIDS in our culture.

We are trapped in a device of our own making, and there is no way to escape without surrendering the deepest truths and most cherished ideals that have held sway for centuries in Europe and the European diaspora.

But not everybody is stuck in the trap. Millions of ordinary people don’t buy into the PC/MC [politically-correct, multicultural] Weltanschauung. Their opinions are not that different from those of their grandparents and great-grandparents. They don’t agree with what their leaders are doing on their behalf, but they want to get along, to live a quiet life, to keep their jobs and avoid having their kids taken away by the child care authorities. The average citizen may be angry and deeply resentful of the soft totalitarianism he’s forced to live under, but you can’t expect him to be a hero. He’s got everything to lose.

All that is changing, however. As working-class neighborhoods are overrun by “culturally enriched” crime, as unemployment rises, as governmental fiscal folly erodes the value of what little money people earn, they have less and less to lose. If official paralysis continues, eventually some of them will abandon all those decades of self-restraint and take up violent resistance. At some point people will snap. And those who go first will be the ones who are already somewhat outside the law and not averse to violence. People who have less to lose, anyway. Roughnecks, misfits, and outsiders of various sorts. In Denmark that means the Hells Angels.

Regular readers are familiar with Zenster’s prescribed solutions, and I generally agree with them: We need to target the top 2,000 or so radical Islamic leaders and send them to collect their 72 raisins. We need make sure that the Muslim world feels such an overwhelmingly decisive blow—including glassing and Windexing™ Mecca, Medina, Qom, etc., if necessary—so that they learn what a “strong horse” really is and act accordingly. We need to prepare the lamp posts, figuratively or literally, for the traitorous Leftists who are leading our countries into this mess. And so on.

But who are “we”? Who is it that will do these things? There is no sign, none whatsoever, that any Western leader—not even Geert Wilders, God bless him—will take such actions. There is no evidence that 9-11 woke anyone up to what needs to be done. And there’s no evidence that a dozen new 9-11s will change the current paradigm. When the inevitable nuclear or chemical attack against a major Western city occurs, it won’t be enough to incite that kind of response. By then the situation will be so bad that a major terrorist action will simply accelerate the descent into political chaos.

The West is done. You can stick a fork in it.

But this is no reason to despair. The end of the West is not the end of the world. There will be an interregnum of uncertain duration, and then something new will form, something built out of leftover pieces of what went before, in the same way Paris, Oxford, and Vienna were built out of the remnants of the Roman Empire.

A lengthy discussion around these ideas has emerged here on a thread that has kept going for the last few days. In the following paragraphs I’ll draw on what was said there, not just by me, but by Conservative Swede, DP111, Chechar, Watching Eagle, Furor Teutonicus, and others. Conservative Swede often refers to the imminent demise of the reigning paradigm of the liberal West. This belief system could be considered a religious orthodoxy, except that the West has largely abandoned religion in its political systems and public policy. The prevalent Weltanschauung is an article of secular faith, so call it Orthodox Secularism: a set of ideas as rigid and unexamined as anything that a Calvinist could produce.

The liberal paradigm of Western Civilization was a natural outgrowth of Christianity, but once it was fully formed, it abandoned its theological basis. Like the cire perdue in a clay cast, the core of faith melted away, leaving the hollow shell of secular liberalism. But this secular faith is unrestrained by the Christian idea that man is limited and flawed. Under the secular paradigm, humans are inherently good and perfectible, and formerly Christian ethics—unmoored from any limitations—require the secular faithful to create a perfect human society on Earth.

All the murderous totalitarianisms of the 20th century arose from various perversions of this idea. But so did the kinder, gentler socialisms of one form or another that all of us live under now. All of our societies have created fiscal and social Ponzi schemes which cannot last, which must eventually come crashing down around our ears. Because they have continued for generations, we think they can go on this way forever. But they can’t. A brief and cold-eyed look at the structure of our political economies shows that they are on their last legs. Even without factoring Islam into the equation, another generation at the most is all we’ll get.

So, knowing all that, isn’t it possible to take action? Is a collective effort to save Western Civilization even imaginable?

The current paradigm is a psychic structure that prevents our formerly Christian civilization from taking the kind of action that would allow it to save itself. At the moment this paradigm is in the process of slow-motion self-destruction, and the pace may soon accelerate so that the old framework will crumble quite rapidly in the next five years or so. The collapse of the welfare state will be the absolute limiting factor for the liberal paradigm.

That collapse, whether gentle or catastrophic, is unavoidable. In just a few short years we will either discover a different paradigm, or be in the midst of some sort of paradigm-less chaos.

The existing system has an internal logic that prevents it from correcting itself. No politician can get re-elected if he takes the necessary action and begins phasing out the welfare state. No civil servant can take harsh measures to ensure our long-term welfare, because that would be contrary to the deranged altruism of the dominant meme. The very structure of the system prevents it from correcting itself. This is the Achilles’ heel of liberal social democracy.

We can’t even talk frankly about these issues in any major public forum. This little blog is a haven for cranks and weirdos like us, but there’s no way our voices will ever be heard by a significant number of people—especially those whose hands grasp the levers of political power.

I’m still impelled towards grassroots organizing in an attempt to stave off the worst. I have a family and people I care about, so I have to believe there is still an alternative—I’m not ready to face the War of All Against All. But if a solution can be found, it is not going to come through government or military means. Those can only come after the change occurs. And we don’t have much time. In the last three years the polarization has only gotten more extreme. The PC/MC crowd is accelerating the bus towards the precipice. Barack Hussein Obama is at the wheel, and conservatives are hiding under the seats in fear of being labeled “Nazis”. The infighting will likely continue unabated until the final impact at the foot of the cliff.

Zenster is right about one thing: the Hells Angels will not be the saviors of Western civilization. But nothing else is going to save it, either. There’s no alternative: the paradigm has to collapse. The replacement paradigm—for there must be one; man cannot live without a paradigm—will be something we can’t even imagine now.

Our task is to mitigate as well as we can the period of chaos that lies between now and then. There will be no way to prevent various forms of violence and destruction—you can’t cut off life support to millions of people without lethal results, and there is a distinct possibility of geronticide in our future, whether via Obama’s health care plan or by some other means. But eventually the chaos will subside, and a new civilization will emerge. As Conservative Swede pointed out, Islam will not survive long after the old paradigm disappears—a reinvigorated immune response in the remnants of Western culture will see to that. So what will come next?

The current paradigm is based on an antipathy for what preceded it. We are modern; we are smarter and better than those who went before us, and everything prior to 1967 can be safely disregarded. Part of the modern liberal ideal is the foolish notion that we can simply abolish by fiat millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of culture, and centuries of tradition. Just like that! We wish it all away. We’ll soon find out to our chagrin how mistaken we have been. These absurd ideas will die with the liberal paradigm, and as a corrective, the successor civilization will reach back into our cultural history to find an alternative to the Enlightenment meme which is about to self-destruct.

The new paradigm and the new civilization will be built out of the fragments of what went before. So what we need to focus on is the construction of a modern version of the monastery at Lindisfarne, a networked sanctuary where what is good and valuable can be stored and kept for use in a future time after the chaos is over.

Grab an ink pot and a quill—we’ve got a lot of books to copy.

Bodissey explained the Lindisfarne analogy in another thread:

Free Hal —

“Please let’s not get sidetracked down the interesting psycho-ethical question, which I introduced, about whether anger is good, to what extent, how it is graded, etc.”

This isn’t a sidetrack, this is the main track. Whenever we have serious discussions here, whether it is Fjordman, Conservative Swede, El Inglés, or any of the others doing the talking, we are looking at a constellation of issues that rotate around these basic psycho-ethical questions.

The current paradigm is a psycho-ethical structure that prevents our formerly Christian civilization from taking action that will allow it to save itself. This paradigm is at the moment in the process of slow-motion self-destruction, and the pace may soon accelerate so that the old framework will crumble quite rapidly. As you wrote in your post, the collapse of the welfare state will soon be upon us, and that is the absolute limiting factor for the Liberal paradigm. In another generation—max—we will either discover a different paradigm, or be in the midst of some sort of paradigm-less chaos.

It’s very, very difficult for intelligent and well-educated people to find a forum in which this crisis—the imminent end of post-Enlightenment Western civilization—can be discussed frankly and civilly. We are airing ideas here that earn us the “racist” and “fascist” sobriquets, just because we aim to get at the heart of what went wrong and what can possibly be done to ameliorate the worst effects of the coming changes.

Questioning the sandy foundation on which this immense and ornate castle has been built is simply not done. That’s why all of us here are loners and misfits of one sort or another, and not on government or university payrolls—at least not under the names that are displayed with our posts.

We don’t have much time. I used to think that if enough grassroots organizing could be accomplished, there might be a way to stave off the worst. But in the last three years the polarization has only gotten more extreme. What debate there is among those on the right is more often concerned with doctrinal purity than it is with hammering together a compromise and a coalition that might actually have even a remote chance of making a difference.

So what we will have to concentrate on is the construction of a modern version of the monastery at Lindisfarne, a networked sanctuary where what is good and valuable can be stored and kept for use in a future time after the chaos is over—if indeed such an eventuality ever comes.


Conservative Swede


Lindisfarne Castle from the harbor

Today I read “I am an island” that Con Swede posted in his own blog two years ago, of which I’ll quote some paragraphs:

I’m an island. I do not belong anywhere. I’m questioning the meaning of my blogging. I’m questioning the moniker I have adapted. “Conservative” like whom? Like View from the Right? Like Paul Belien? Like Gates of Vienna? No, no, and no. And definitely not like Majority Rights or Jim Kalb. And of course not like neocons and paleocons.

The West consists of Christians and post-Christians, the latter better known as liberals. And of course the fringe group of far whitists (neo-Nazis or otherwise). All three groups having more in common with each other than I have with them.

We are witnessing the historical demise of Christianity. When a star dies, in its last phase it expands into a red giant, before it shrinks into a white dwarf. Liberalism is the red giant of Christianity. And just as a red giant it is devoid of its core, it expands thousandfold while losing its substance and is about to die. The world I live in consists of Christians and liberals. It’s their world and I do not belong to them. I leave their limited wars, knee-jerk Islam apologism and WWII mythology to them. They are not about to change. On the contrary, they are continuously generating new problems with their way of acting.

There were certain sites, certain bloggers, even certain countries, that I had put hope in. But now it has become clear that they are all part of the same big train of lemmings. Bye bye! Denmark, nope. Brussels Journal, nope. View from the Right, nope. Gates of Vienna, nope. This is the way it goes in the world of liberals/Christians. It’s their world. I can do nothing but sit on the side and laugh at it. They are too stuck in their inner fears and hang-ups to be able to do anything useful. They will do what they are programmed to do: demise.

It’s seems that politics is not something for me to be engaging in, after all. Politics is by definition a social activity, but all the other people are stuck down in [Plato’s] cave, while I sit alone at my island. Robinson Crusoe couldn’t have engaged in politics even if he wanted to. Western politics is the game of whether our nations should commit suicide fast or slowly. Conservatism is a joke. There are only Christians and liberals (and the occasional far whitist who’s often the most extremely Judaoid priestly character of them all), and they all adhere to the same Christian ethics, the same slave morality.

So what’s the future for people like me? Because even if I belong nowhere politically, I belong somewhere socially and ethnically. Well, the world is being homogenized. Tomorrow the whole world will be like the Third World. People like me, of European ethnicity, will have no home, no nation. We will live like the Jews as elites in other people’s nations (preferably a non-Muslim nation).

These people are just not prepared for a proper fight. They are too much driven by superstitious fear and emotions. And there is not exactly anyone else around.

_____________________

Chechar’s note of 5 September 2010:

“And the occasional far whitist who’s often the most extremely Judaoid priestly character of them all...”

Elsewhere Con Swede has stated several times that white nationalism is a weak movement. I disagree. Yes: the baby is still in the cradle. But it will grow. Swede mentioned the blogsite Majority Rights, which I haven’t read quite much. But the sites linked way above, at the side of the entries, give the lie to the statement that the whitist character is “extremely Judaoid” and “priestly”.

Like Swede I myself used to live in an island. The nationalists found me and rescued me from the incommensurable loneliness of the dual blues. No, I no longer feel like Crusoe...

An ugly duckling in Mexico

Chechar
at
fifteen


I was born in Mexico and lived most of my life there. Why on Earth, a casual reader may wonder, is a Mexican (or a former Mexican) posting entries on White Nationalism?

The answer is very simple. Long before Lincoln’s blunder, Mestizo America in general—“Latin America” is a misnomer: most “Latin” Americans are no Latins at all, but ugly semi-Indians—and Mexico in particular were the place of the first gigantic multiracial experiments. This happened almost half a millennia ago: the real overture of today’s multicultural tune that is conducting the West straight into the precipice.

The big difference between the English colonizers and the Spaniards is that the former migrated with their whole families, whereas the latter arrived as bachelor soldiers to the Americas, many of them in their twenties. As can be read in the delicious narrative by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the conquerors passed through the intermediate towns in their way to the magnificent capital of the Aztec Empire. Even during that first journey the natives gave the bachelor soldiers Indian girls as presents to appease them, and very few Spaniards resisted the temptation. Thus the first miscegenations on American soil were consumed a few weeks after the Spanish step on the American continent for the first time in history!

But going back to the question, Why is a “Mexican” posting entries on White Nationalism? Last month, in The Occidental Quarterly the dystopian novelist Alex Kurtagic asked another question: “What will it take for the White people to finally react and take decisive and effective action to change the status quo?” A commenter answered that “popular support for explicit white advocacy will occur in large numbers only if and when Americans are forced to deal with non-whites on a daily basis.”

That’s why.

When I was born in the late 1950s, Mexico City was not the degenerate city that it has become in the twenty-first century. Throughout my life I have witnessed, with horror and uttermost impotence, how the prolific lower classes, composed by semi-Indian mestizos, geometrically bred to the point of turning my lovely town into a nightmarish Metropolis. Let me confess that to find a leptosomatic Iberian white like me is not only extremely rare in Mexico, but in Spain where I lived for more than a year. Leptosomatics with my facial features, true Latins, are more common in France (my last name, Tort, is French). So you can imagine how a lone white swan (for Mexican standards) would have felt among dark ducks: just as the ugly duckling of the tale we tell to our little children in bedtime.

Ugly duckling longs for Swanslake… The amount of inner suffering that the adolescent I was endured trapped in Duckslake is a tragedy that many whites will experiment in their own homelands as alien immigration increases. What happened in Mexico City, which today has about 20 million of semi-Indians as ugly as Neanderthals, will happen in the U.S. The image comes now to my mind of a film in which an aged Henry Fonda said that he didn't consider Los Angeles to be part of the United States.

But in the film Fonda was married to a white woman and the elderly couple had an intelligent daughter. That makes life tolerable. On the other hand, if the commenter to Kurtagic’s article is right, only when a considerable amount of whites go through the existential agonies that I have endured in this brownish inferno (something analogous to Kurtagic’s novel), will the white people react.

Why do I believe that the people in the counter-Jihad movement are incurably myopic? Even if Islam is properly crushed—say, that Mecca is nuked—and the Muslims deported, the West cannot escape from the Mexicanization of the States and the bladerrunerization of Europe.

Unless it completely reverses its axiology.

_______________________________


P.S. note: I have already used the term “axiology” in these series and will continue to use it in the next entries. Usually defined as meta-ethics, I often use it to refer to the suicidal moral grammar of today’s Westerners; or to my new axiology that, by revaluating all of the current values, enthrones English roses as the ultimate goal in life. (Obviously the swan that I was longed for a swan-like mate.)

The Non-Discriminatory Principle

Lawrence Auster is a Jewish tribalist who prioritizes fighting “anti-Semitism” over white racial and cultural preservation. White nationalists must be aware of this. Nonetheless, unlike most people in the counter-jihad movement who are so myopic that they can only focus on Islam, Auster has exposed in the plainest, commonsensical English, the axiological principle that is destroying, and will finally destroy in the following decades, our beloved West.

The following is only a part of a speech, “A Real Islam Policy for a Real America,” that Auster delivered at a conference earlier this year. It has been recently published in a book.

The bold-typed and brown highlighting of Auster’s words—definitions and examples of The Principle—are mine:

The Non-Discriminatory Principle

To deal with the crisis facing our civilization, we must be both realistic and imaginative. The realism part consists in recognizing how bad our situation is.

The entire Western world is at present under the grip of the modern liberal ideology that targets every normal and familiar aspect of human life, and our entire historical way of being as a society.

The key to this liberal ideology is the belief in tolerance or non-discrimination as the ruling principle of society, the principle to which all other principles must yield. We see this belief at work in every area of modern life.

The principle of non-discrimination must, if followed consistently, destroy every human society and institution. A society that cannot discriminate between itself and other societies will go out of existence, just as an elm tree that cannot discriminate between itself and a linden tree must go out of existence. To be, we must be able to say that we are us, which means that we are different from others. If we are not allowed to distinguish between ourselves and Muslims, if we must open ourselves to everyone and everything in the world that is different from us, and if the more different and threatening the Other is, the more we must open ourselves to it, then we go out of existence.

This liberal principle of destruction is utterly simple and radically extreme. Yet very, very few people, even self-described hard-line conservatives, are aware of this principle and the hold it has over our society. Instead of opposing non-discrimination, they oppose multiculturalism and political correctness. But let’s say that we got rid of multiculturalism and political correctness. Would that end Muslim immigration? No. Multiculturalism is not the source of Muslim immigration. The source of it is our belief that we must not discriminate against other people on the basis of their culture, their ethnicity, their nationality, their religion. This is the idea of the 1965 Immigration Act, which was the idea of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to all of humanity: all discrimination is wrong, period. No one in today’s society, including conservatives, feels comfortable identifying this utterly simple idea, because that would mean opposing it.

To see how powerful the belief in non-discrimination is, consider this: Prior to World War II, would any Western country have considered admitting significant numbers of Muslim immigrants? Of course not; it would have been out of the question. The West had a concrete identity. It saw itself as white and in large part as Christian, and there was still active in the Western mind the knowledge that Islam was our historic adversary, as it has been for a thousand years, and radically alien. But today, the very notion of stopping Muslim immigration is out of the question, it can’t even be thought.

What would have been inconceivable 70 or 80 years ago is unquestionable today. A society that 70 years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting large numbers of Muslims, today doesn’t dream of reducing, let alone stopping, the immigration of Muslims. Even the most impassioned anti-Islamic Cassandras never question—indeed they never even mention—the immigration of Muslims, or say it should be reduced or stopped.

You don’t need to know any more than what I’ve just said. The rule of non-discrimination, in all its destructive potentialities, is shown in this amazing fact, that the writers and activists who constantly cry that Islam as a mortal danger to our society will not say that we ought to stop or even reduce Muslim immigration. Such is the liberal belief which says that the most morally wrong thing is for people to have a critical view of a foreign group, to want to exclude that group or keep it out.

The dilemma suggests the solution. What is now unthinkable, must become thinkable; what is now unsayable, must become sayable; and ultimately it must replace non-discrimination as the ruling belief in society. I know that this sounds crazy, utterly impossible. But fifty or a hundred years ago it would have seemed crazy, utterly impossible, that today’s liberalism with its suicidal ideology would have replaced the traditional attitudes that were then prevalent. If society could change that radically in one direction, toward suicidal liberalism, it can change back again. It’s not impossible.

In the same way, modern liberalism says that it is evil to believe that some people are more unlike us than others, because that would also be a violation of the liberal principle that all people are equally like us. The equality principle of modern liberalism says that unassimilable immigrants must be permitted to flood our society, changing its very nature.

This is the ubiquitous yet unacknowledged horror of modern liberalism, that it takes the ordinary, differentiated nature of the world, which all human beings have always recognized, and makes it impossible for people to discuss it, because under liberalism anyone who notes these distinctions and says that they matter has done an evil thing and must be banished from society, or at least be barred from a mainstream career.

This liberalism is the most radical and destructive ideology that has ever been, and yet it is not questioned. Communism and big government liberalism were challenged and fought in the past. But the ideology of non-discrimination, which came about after World War II, has never been resisted—it has never even been identified, even though it is everywhere. What is needed, if the West is to survive, is a pro-Western civilization movement that criticizes, resists, and reverses this totalistic liberal belief system that controls our world.

I’ve also stolen a couple of the comments from Auster’s blogsite, View from the Right:

Ed L. writes…

Your speech contains the singularly powerful sentence: “What would have been inconceivable 70 or 80 years ago is unquestionable today.”

The same is true of gay marriage, but on a vastly more compressed scale. Ten years ago, it was virtually unheard of. Until as recently as about six months ago, it was generally considered sensitive and controversial subject matter. Today, however, anybody who opposes it—or even expresses any discomfort with it—is outside the bounds of humanity, according to Prevailing Opinion. Go no further than the lead sentence in the editorial in today’s Washington Post:

“Common decency and the protections guaranteed to all citizens by the rule of law demand that the relationships of gay men and lesbians be respected and recognized.”

Any opposition is outside the bounds of common decency. Note also the pugnacious word demand, which rules out any subjectivism and any willingness to differ on a your opinion, my opinion basis. And how about the “rule of law,” as if human beings with differing opinions have never had any say in the creation or formulation of its specific content (the rule of what kind of law?).

Peter W. writes from Argentina…

Excellent, and, as usual, right on target.

I learned long ago that the ability to differentiate between and among various values, realities, and choices was a mark of a civilization that was farther along the path of being developed and sophisticated (in the truest sense), and that an inability or lack of interest in differentiation was a mark of a more primitive, “back to the primordial ooze” kind of society.

This point was made clear long ago in a commentary on a rather silly fad of the time called “unisex,” where men and women (especially in the Nordic countries, as I recall) tried to look exactly alike in their haircuts, clothing, and style. I can’t remember exactly who wrote it, but it was a William Safire-type piece in the New York Times magazine, I think.

At any rate, rising to the intellectual and emotional challenge of learning to differentiate among and between things and ideas, etc., is hard work, and a job many Americans and others seem unwilling to accept. It seems far simpler and easier not to bother with it and just assume that everyone and everything has equal and eternal value. And of course, many people feel this way right at the same time that they’re differentiating like crazy in the supermarket, the clothing store, and the dating personals.

Calling people to a higher level of thinking and behaving is indeed a frustrating thing.

Larry Auster replies…

Very interesting point. Yes, that is precisely what liberalism is about. It’s so much easier to have a simple phrase or formula (“Everyone’s equal,” “All people want the same things,” “All people long for freedom,” “Discrimination is always wrong”), than to try to understand and articulate the nature of things, people, cultures.

According to Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics, it is the very complexity of the world, specifically the complexity of the world as articulated by Christianity, that drives people to simplistic ideologies that basically reduce the world to a single idea and its evil opposite. Liberalism is one such ideology. Islam is another.


P.S. of July 1, 2010


“Liberalism is the most radical
and destructive ideology
that has ever been” —Auster


See also Auster’s Law and Corollary to this principle. At Mangan’s Ben Tillman has recently left a comment that hits the nail commenting about this sentence:

“If there is a single, overarching core principle of the modern liberal worldview, it is the rejection of any form of discrimination, and it is precisely this irrational and suicidal principle that [Geert] Wilders has bravely defied—for which he has been reviled and excommunicated by liberal elites, brought up on criminal charges, and must live under the constant shadow of death threats... In order to survive, a culture must, like a living organism, have a functioning immune system, one that can, yes, discriminate between Self and Other...”

[Tillman responds:] Exactly. Immunology is often defined as the science of self/non-self discrimination, as in Jan Klein’s title, “Immunology: The Science of Self-Nonself Discrimination”. That’s all you need to know to understand the purpose of anti-discrimination laws in Europe and its diaspora. And, theoretically, you have to ask yourself whether it makes sense to suppose that anti-discrimination mandates have been internally generated rather than externally imposed [I guess that Tillman refers to the Jewish Question: see the Blowhards comment quoted in the commentariat section below].

I’ll side with Pasteur and Koch on this issue.

On Oriana Fallaci, Melanie Phillips et al

Note of 3 September 2010: This entry has been modified

The anti-jihad barrel consists basically of fresh and good apples. But there are a few worms at the bottom of the barrel. For example, I agree with Robert Spencer that Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is an “execrable libel-blogger”. To a much lesser extent, elsewhere I have mentioned in passing that:

• I disagree with Pat Condell’s views on the British National Party;

• I disagree with Bat Ye’or’s and Fjordman’s motivational thesis that borders on a conspiracy theory (a little more about Fjordman here);

• I disagree with Bruce Bawer’s homosexual activism and his repudiation of the right-wing European parties that oppose Islamization;

• I have quoted criticism by Conservative Swede on Larry Auster’s stance against properly defeating Islam—Carthaginian Peace. And at the same time I have exposed Swede’s hypocrisy at the bottom of the same post;

• In a previous incarnation of this blog I quoted Auster’s perfect rebuttal of Daniel Pipes and also of Melanie Philips (see below);

• I absolutely reject Robert Spencer’s views on the British National Party (BNP) published in his Jihad Watch blogsite: “It’s no wonder that British citizens are turning to noxious racist parties like the BNP: the elites have abandoned them.” I would go further and say: Mr. Spencer: “racism” is a word that should never, ever be used by those in the counter-jihad movement: it is the enemy’s main semantic weapon. Only doubleplusgood duckspeakers babble that word.

In this entry I would like to point out to a critical view on another anti-Islamist: Oriana Fallaci. The following is an abridged version of the critique that appeared in Auster’s site under the title “A Wrong Basis on which to Defend the West: Sexual Liberation”.

In his blogsite Auster wrote:


Here is a passage from Oriana Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride:

Wake up, people, wake up! Intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the mainstream, that is to appear racist (a word inappropriate here because we are not discussing race, but religion), you do not understand or don’t want to understand that what is underway here is a Reverse Crusade.

You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that what is in motion here is a religious war. A war that they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that is not after the conquest of our territory, perhaps, but certainly aims to conquer our souls. To the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. To the annihilation of our way of living and of dying, our way of praying or not praying, of our way of eating and drinking and dressing and enjoying ourselves, and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if it is not opposed now, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win. It will destroy the world that good or bad we have managed to create, change, make better and render it a little more intelligent, that is less bigoted or not bigoted at all. With that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morality, values, pleasures.

Christ! Don’t you realize that [all these] Osama Bin Ladens consider themselves authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don’t wear a long beard or wear a chador, because you go to the theater and the cinema, because you listen to music and sing some songs, because you dance in the discotheques or in your house, because you watch TV, because you wear mini skirts or short pants, because at the beach or pool you’re naked or almost naked, because you make it with whom you want, when you want, where you want? [Emphasis added.] Don’t you care even about this, idiots?

While Fallaci’s passionate dread of Islam is exemplary, her description of the Western society she wants to defend from Islam is unfortunate. Virtually making soulless Playboy-style sexual promiscuity her definition of the West, she radically devalues our civilization even as she issues a call to arms for its protection.

Interestingly, the phrases used by Fallaci, “make it with whom you want, when you want, where you want” are identical to those used by Jamie Glazov in his recent debate with Dinesh D’Souza. What this kind of language plainly signifies is that any consensual act that people want to perform—wherever and whenever and with whomever they want to perform, it’s fine. If they want to commit adultery, or if they want to have group sex, or whatever, that’s fine, and of course homosexual conduct is fine too. That’s what we believe in, this is what we are, and this is the stand we take against tyrannical Islam.

It seems that Fallaci, even in her later years when illness and death were closing in and she was terrified for the future of our civilization, never went beyond the destructive mentality of the Sexual Revolution, never had any remorse about it, never had any Second Thoughts.

I like Fallaci for her fiery opposition to Islam. I wish thousands more of us, millions more, felt the way she did. But our civilization cannot be preserved on the basis of radical sexual liberation. To the contrary, the modern demand for absolute freedom in the sexual sphere is inseparable from the modern prohibition on any kind of moral or cultural discrimination—and, of course, the latter underlies the open immigration orthodoxy that has allowed into the West the Muslim hordes that so alarmed Fallaci. Sexual freedom and open borders are merely two sides of the same liberal coin. There is no indication that Fallaci understood this.

—end of initial entry in Auster’s site—

Tom S. said…

I believe that your comments about Oriana Fallaci highlight a deep divide in the leftist camp, one which is only now becoming obvious. On one side of the leftist divide stand those like Fallaci, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Joan Baez, and a few others, who really believed all the propaganda, who thought that leftism was all about freedom and human rights and sexual liberation and racial equality and feminism and joy, who were shocked by Islamic terror and thought it right to fight it. And then there are the Chomskys, the Moores, the Carters, the Myrmidons of the EU and International A.N.S.W.E.R., who know what the true meaning of leftism is.

Leftism was never about freedom—otherwise why were there so few protests when the Communists slaughtered one hundred million people? It was never about human rights—otherwise why were leftists almost silent when the Gulag and Laogai swallowed up their hecatombs? It was never about sexual freedom—else why would the left make de facto common cause with those who bury gays alive, and mutilate women? It was never about racial equality—otherwise the left would not be on the side of the slavers of the Janjaweed in the Sudan, and the murderers of the Kurds. And it was certainly never about joy—if it was, why would so many leftists ally themselves with those who ban music, ban kite flying, and forbid little girls to feel the sun on their faces?

No, leftism has but one purpose, and one purpose only: to destroy the West. Sexual liberation and free speech and feminism and “human rights” and “racial equality” were only battering rams, siege equipment, used to breach the West’s defenses. Having done their job, they can be discarded, leaving the Fallacis standing stunned, saying, in effect, “Why are we abandoning freedom and liberation? Why won’t you fight for them? Isn’t that what we were fighting for all these years?”

No, actually: you were fighting to destroy your civilization. You just didn’t realize it.

Oriana Fallaci had courage, and intelligence, and wit, and insight. It’s too bad that she spent so much of he life tearing down a civilization that she finally, almost too late, realized that she loved.

END OF AUSTERITE TEXTS (My own voice again:)

A perfect exposé of a rotten apple...

I am grateful for the work of Melanie Phillips. Her courage to speak out about the islamization of the United Kingdom contrasts dramatically with her coward countrymen. Nowadays there are no Richards the Lionheart in Britain’s political arena: only eunuchs.

However, as can be seen in the following exchange with Auster, Phillips has some limitations, too. The West’s Zeitgeist has been so polluted in the last few decades that all people in the mainstream media, including Phillips, breath in the toxic air of liberalism. As always, I won’t add ellipsis between the sentences, paragraphs and e-mails that I omit in the following excerpts:


Auster said...

Melanie Phillips replied to my article critiquing her approach to Islam and I wrote back to her. Here, with her permission, is her e-mail. Below it I repeat her entire e-mail, with my replies to her interspersed.

Auster writes:
Your basic position is that we cannot make any general statements about Islam, because such statements will perhaps not be fair to a small and insignificant number of genuinely moderate Muslims. Liberal anti-discrimination remains your highest value and guide.
For example, you think that if we present evidence to the Muslims that we are not attacking them, that will convince them that we are not attacking them, and so they will give up their hostility. That assumption is false. Their hostility is based on the fact that we are infidels. And nothing we do, other than converting to Islam, can change that. We should say very clearly that we recognize that Islam is a threat to us, and that we therefore have to defend ourselves. We must say this, not to get into a dialog with them, but to defend ourselves. We shouldn’t be concerned about saving the Muslims’ souls, since that is beyond our power.

Melanie Phillips writes:
There is a growing number of young Muslim professionals in Britain—not many, true, but once again they exist—who are impervious to the siren song of the Islamist recruiters. Brushing aside the lethal intersection of cultural alienation and predatory jihadism, as you do, on the grounds that the only analysis to be allowed is that “Islam is the problem” both ignores the actual routes to extremism and once again wrenches the evidence to fit a theory.

Auster replies:
I dismiss your alienation analysis (1) because it’s small potatoes compared to the Muslim phenomenon as a whole, and (2) because it’s typical of a certain Western approach I’ve discussed many times, the tendency to explain Islamic radicalism in terms of some discrete socio-economic phenomenon understandable in Western terms, rather than in terms of ISLAM ITSELF. Muslims have been waging jihad war against non-Muslims for 1,400 years. There are minor variations from time to time and place to place in the exact manner of this jihad war. But it all follows the same basic, Islamic-authorized pattern and comes down to the same thing. Yet Western intellectuals refuse to admit this and look for some cause, any cause, other than Islam, to explain it. Leftists explain it in terms of Muslims being upset about evil Israel oppressing the poor Palestinians. Sociologists explain it in terms of alienation attendant on immigration into the West. Bernard Lewis explains it in terms of an inferiority complex caused by the Muslims being “left behind.” I could go on and on. What all these fancy theories have in common is that they ignore Islam itself as the cause of Islamic radicalism.

Melanie Phillips writes:
You have a crude, black and white approach to this problem. I think it is much more complex than you allow.

Auster replies:
Miss Phillips, I understand that Islam is our adversary and that it is our mortal enemy. If that to you is a crude black and white approach that you disdain, then you are admitting that you will never see the truth about Islam and that, like a liberal, you will keep diddling while the West burns. The fact that you refuse to say that Muslim immigration into Britain should be stopped is proof of your ultimate lack of seriousness about the issue.
Best regards,
Lawrence Auster


COMMENTS IN AUSTER’S BLOG

Anthony D. writes:
I think this was one of your finest rebuttals. By failing to see the very simple black and white nature of Islam’s existential threat to the West, she is missing the very big and obvious picture. Liberalism demands the very notion that the savage can and may be anything other than noble. One observation is that despite all evidence that the ideology of Islam is awful, and stands against absolutely everything liberals stand for, liberals refuse to attribute collective responsibility to the millions standing in solidarity with its violence and global aspirations. Instead, the focus is placed on the minority of Moslems who may not demonstrate obvious hostilities.

Ben writes:
It’s amazing how your arguments were so clear but she just cannot grasp it. Very simply you were saying Islam is the problem. But for the liberal this issue must be complex and not black and white.

Jeff in England writes:
This is great stuff. Would Melanie have accused you of black and white thinking regarding opposition to the followers and teachings of Hitler or Stalin? She wants us all to live together in one happy world, and will in the most deceptive way pretend to be dealing with the threat of Islam in a “complex” way when she is really appeasing it. I say deceptive not to insult her but because she will never take an issue to its logical conclusions because of her liberal agenda, even if she seems to be “conservative.” It is so obvious that Islam needs to be stopped from growing in the West no matter how moderate it seems. Didn’t the recent Cartoon Affair and the Rushdie Affair before that prove that? But no, Melanie won’t confront that reality. She has to play at attacking Islamic fundamentalism while encouraging “moderate” Islam, a smokescreen for letting Islam and Muslims continue in their takeover of the West.
I asked her the simplest question: Would she support the banning of Islamic immigration?, and she wouldn’t answer me. Not to ban it means Muslims will become the majority by the end of the century. Melanie seems not to mind that, as long as there are professional, educated Muslims who may not listen to the “Islamist recruiters”.

Anthony J. writes from England:
You wrote: “Right, if Melanie represents the “conservative” side of this debate, then that means there is NO serious response to the Islam threat on the horizon.” You are quite correct; there is no serious response as of yet in current mainstream thought in the UK.

Karen writes from England:
I wonder if she will answer you and what she would think about stopping all Moslem immigration. She has never said this and I expect that if she did, her articles would not get published as she is already considered by many to be beyond the pale. She is brave in continuing to write as she does at least bringing this problem to public attention, and she had major problems getting her last book published. However, she is still in denial about the real problem, i.e., Islam itself.
The problem for liberals is that they have no religion themselves and because they believe others are like them, they cannot understand that others do believe in religions and follow them fanatically.

Matt H. writes from England:
I wondered when you and Ms. Phillips were going to “have a go” at each other. I have had a few brief email exchanges with her, poising the question of “Islamist” or Islam itself as the root problem with Britain. She doesn’t view any of this in “black and white” terms simply because to confront it publicly as such, would see a swift end to her journalistic career in this country. She is like the “black sheep” of the liberal flock of lambs that are lining up for the slaughter, and she is at least semi-conscious of this reality. If she were to take the VFR [Auster’s blog] position on Islam, she would be writing leaflets for BNP [British National Party]. (Some BNP members have publicly acknowledged her writings and criticisms.)
I do notice that when she speaks in America, she toughens up a bit more, and feels at liberty to be more frank about it. But here in Britain, there is an invisible plug that gets pulled. If I hear the word tolerance anymore in association with terrorism, I think I will get physically sick. Today, on the radio, I think I heard that word about ten times in a span of five minutes: “We are tolerant! Therefore, we will tolerate more terror!”

Charles G. writes:
I have found that when you expose the essential “liberalness” of a people’s ideas, they tend to escalate the dialog into a contentious framework. A person confronted with the truth will always be hostile initially before accepting the inevitable.

Jeff writes:
Melanie openly declares she is a liberal. There certainly are serious UK conservative (non-BNP) thinkers on the Muslim issue: Anthony Browne, Leo McKinstry, Minette Marin, Barbara Amiel, Michael Gove to name five.

Auster writes:
Suppose Melanie did come to agree with, say, the idea that all Muslim immigration should be stopped and that many Muslims in Britain should be deported or encouraged to leave, with the aim of reducing the Muslim population in Britain? Would saying that get her expelled from the mainstream? I suppose it would. After all, how many pundits in the (somewhat less politically correct) American mainstream press take that position? None. After all, even in the world of the Web, the number of by-lined writers who argue for such a position is minuscule. Can anyone give me a list of names? My sense is that it’s because people are still in a basically liberal mindset where they can’t even conceive of taking such a position.

Andrea writes:
Alas Melanie, the truth is unpleasant! She mistakes the awfulness of the truth for rudeness. Let us hope that she will really be able to see what you mean.

Scott B. writes from England:
Essentially, what Melanie Phillips seems to be saying with her comment about upstanding, professional Muslims is that we need to instill in immigrant Muslims a sense of Western identity sufficient to over-ride the jihad component of the religion, and that this is eminently possible because, well, the Sufis managed to discard jihad.
It is incoherent to believe that general criticism of fundamentally intolerant ideas is valid when directed at a subgroup (“Islamists”) but becomes invalid when directed against a more widely defined group (Muslims). Mrs Phillips however, being in a state of denial about the true nature of Islam, resorts to dismissing on these fallacious logical grounds the abundant empirical evidence that in the specific case of Islamism and Islam, the subgroup and the group are essentially and unalterably the same.

Miss Phillips wrote back:
Once again you misrepresent my views to a startling degree. I do NOT say mass immigration should continue: on the contrary, I say in terms it should be stopped. I’m afraid you clearly have not understood what I have written. I stated clearly that moderate Muslims DO exist. You have simply reversed what I said. People can judge for themselves how you have interpreted what I wrote. This discussion is now closed.

Auster to Melanie Phillips:
I’m sorry that you are closing the discussion. I have written extensively on the “moderate Islam” question, particularly on Daniel Pipes’s insistence that “moderate Islam is the answer.” However, if you do believe that moderate Islam exists, that obviously does not let you off the hook, since, as every serious student of Islam recognizes, there is no such thing.

Melanie Phillips to Auster:
For goodness sake, read the book [Phillips’ Londonistan].

Auster to Phillips:
Since I don’t have your book at hand, and many people are following this discussion at VFR right now, it would be very helpful to the debate if you would provide at least one passage from your book for me to post in which you argue that mass immigration should be stopped. It was certainly not the impression you gave at a discussion on Islam we both attended a couple of months back. You said, equally strongly, that Britain was a “liberal pluralist society”.

Jeremy G. writes:
I just read through her entire website and didn’t find any argument that mass Muslim immigration should be stopped. And why not make the argument right now? The publicity would be huge. It would sell her book by the hundred of thousands and make her a millionaire in a week. She doesn’t say it because she doesn’t believe in it...

Auster replies:
Miss Phillips writes:

Next, a properly motivated nation would set about the remoralisation and re-culturation of Britain by restating the primacy of British culture and citizenship. To do this, it would recognise that British nationhood has been eviscerated by the combination of three things: mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country’s Judeo-Christian values. It would institute a pause to immigration while Britain assimilates the people it has already got.

A “pause to immigration” means no immigration. I note again that, while I am very much heartened to learn that she has said this, if this is her position she has not exactly been consistent in stating it, and I don’t know why she has not been more clear about that.

P.S. NOTE:
It turned out, as I [Lawrence Auster] have explained in later entries, that the passage in the published version of Londonistan of which Miss Phillips had sent me her manuscript copy did not call for a “pause” of immigration, as the manuscript did, but only for unspecified “tough controls” on immigration. Thus, her angry claim that she had called for immigration to be “stopped” was blatantly untrue.

______________

Read it all here.