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.

Symphonic call to civil war!

First ten minutes of my father’s piece

A few days ago Fjordman wrote in the Gates of Vienna (GoV) forum:

One title you could look into is How the West Was Lost by Alexander Boot, an ex-pat Russian who fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s, only to discover that the West he admired no longer existed. He traces the development of Western civilization through art and ideas, but especially music.

You can successfully track the rise and decline of Western civilization through music. There are other ways, of course, but music is as good as any, and better than most. Through the likes of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven we created greater music than any civilization on this planet has ever done before us. During that same time period Europeans also made advances in science and technology which went far beyond what any other civilization had ever done before.

Europeans could still make good music in the nineteenth century, although we did not quite match the names of the eighteenth, and a few names were produced in the early twentieth century, but hardly anybody in the second half of the twentieth century. By the early twenty-first century, not only do we not produce anybody remotely close to the greatness of Mozart, we don’t even listen to the ones we once produced. The only people who take European Classical music seriously today are, ironically, East Asians, and maybe, just maybe, some people in the eastern half of Europe, the only half of the continent that still actually looks like Europe. If you want to see a simple illustration of cultural decline you can listen to basically anything by Mozart and then turn on the TV and see some young men doing drugs, talking about their “gangster” lifestyle and their prostitutes. Alexander Boot has a very Christian view, which I do not always share, but he brings fresh and unusual perspectives, which is good. His basic conclusion is that the West is dead, but as a Christian man he also believes in life after death. Maybe that’s not a bad conclusion. The West is dead. Long live the West!

_______________

Fjordman’s post fascinated me and I pointed out that there’s still some good music, such as the “symphonic call to civil war”. What I didn’t tell GoVers in that thread is that my father composed the music I linked. In a previous GoV thread, “A History of European Music”, I had commented:

_______________

Chechar said… (Note of 25 August 2010: I have slightly modified some of my comments below)

Music is one of the psychological markers from which an extraterrestrial could know the level of cultural development of a species, or if their culture is degenerating. Since the last decades our musical culture has been degenerating: a claim impossible to demonstrate objectively, since music is an intra-psychic, psychogenic evolutionary mystery of the emergent species. (If you ignore the new age nonsense that Robert Godwin wrote in his book One cosmos under God, he has some good points about what music is; and Oliver Sacks’s 2007 Musicophilia is quite interesting: some people are a-musical: they cannot grasp subjectively what music is.)


My father started his career as a composer of classical music. His orchestra pieces were played in the early 1960s in the U.S. (something horrible happened and he interrupted his very promising career). My mother has been a piano teacher since she was a teenager. My brother gives music lessons to children in Paris. One of the problems with intra-psychic emergency is that it cannot be communicated downhill; only equals can understand it. I don’t want to elaborate much this point. Suffice it to say that, just as a classic ballet dancer can dance everything but a disco dancer cannot dance ballet, someone who understands classical music can understand all musical genre including disco music, even if he abhors it.

Music represents states of psychogenic development. When Solzhenitsyn said in the U.S. that some American pop music was disgusting, or that it was better the regime of Francisco Franco than the ultra-liberal regimes in Germany or France, he seemed totally detached from reality.

But he was right…

It is no coincidence that the 18th century Europeans who treasured classical music would never have allowed masses of incoming Muslims into European soil. Every time I listen the garbage music in Spain’s supermarkets—where I’m living for the moment—I “know” for sure that Europe is committing cultural suicide. I place quotation marks because this is a subjective knowledge, impossible to express by rational arguments (that’s why I referred to the books of Godwin and Sacks). Conversely, if the westerners still identified themselves with Bach, Mozart or Beethoven (personally I also like Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky) it would be easier to detect the bull of politically-correct multiculturalism. Psychogenic emergency is like Moonwatcher touching the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But oh destiny!: instead of a Star Child, in the year 2001 we got a gigantic evolutionary step backwards: September 11. Nowadays cultural relativists almost want us to believe that the heights of musical achievements are on the same level of black rap, and Muslim polygamy or homo marriage at the same level of a stable heterosexual marriage. Instead of the promised Star Child what we are getting in this century is degenerate music and a legion of Neanderthals.

Félicie said...

Chechar, the points you are making are very thought-provoking. I wish you could elaborate about intra-psychic emergency. Personally, I can only listen to classical music. All other “music” is the worst sort of torture to me. I am literally languishing in the modern world that is subject to noise pollution. Pop music is everywhere. It is pouring out of my neighbors’ windows, it is in all the shops, hairdresser stores, cafes, restaurants, public transportation, business waiting rooms, on-hold telephone signals. It is inescapable. And on top of it, people walk around with ipod earphones glued permanently to their ears! It is like the world is terrified of silence and the more gentle sounds that it reveals. Students do their math homework while listening to music. What kinds of problems can they solve? Only the ones that can be done automatically. What kind of genius ideas can the world come up with if it is constantly listening to music? To think that smoking has been practically eradicated, but no one attacks noise pollution. I want to go to sleep and wake up in another century! Thanks for listening to my rant.

Chechar said...

It’s not a rant but the pure truth. And thanks for sharing: it’s good to see that there are still people of my own species in a planet which is becoming more and more like the planet of the apes. I also suffer incredibly on the streets and even in the complex of flats where I am presently living when I listen to what we may call Neanderthal music.


I alluded to the film 2001 in my previous post. Let’s follow the film’s metaphor. “Moonwatcher” is the character name in Arthur Clarke’s novel for the Australopithecus guy who first touched the monolith. If a member of our tribe doesn’t touch the monolith—symbol of a psychogenic leap forward—s/he would never have a clue of why latter-day Moonwatchers, i.e. Starchilds, cannot stand miscegenation (ethics) or junk music (esthetics). The leap belongs to the aesthetical and emotional intelligence rather than to our cognitive faculties.

Free Hal said...

Hi Chechar, Felicie, and Laine. Western music, of the three branches of art (visual art and literature the other two), is the best evidence of the grandeur of western culture. The breathtaking genius of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert may one day be surpassed but we can’t see how right now. Two very good essays from Theodore Dalrymple (classical music at least makes people no worse), and playing Bach clears hooligans away... As you know, Chechar (please see my “Rollback” essay) I think there may be ways to prevent Europe entering a dark time.

After a couple of months of not posting in that thread, I finally posted an abridged reply of what I say below:

Chechar said...

Orchestral music is not only the classical rococo of Mozart and Haydn. Writing about Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, Pierre Boulez stated that it was the comeback of barbarous hordes in our century, what I may call the Id’s revenge.

In the 1960s my father was influenced by Stravinsky. Carlos Pellicer’s poetry in my father’s symphonic piece “La Espada” (The Sword) is an homage to Morelos; its spirit glorifies independence wars. Since Beethoven’s Eroica many pieces have been composed that broke away with the Ancien Régime and the zest produced by classical rococo. While several other classical composers composed war-like music, present-day music that produces a sense of zest is, in a certain sense, analogous to the rococo, albeit of a much inferior quality.

But I don’t want zest. I have stated that nations are born stoic and die epicurean. What we need in the following decades is the most austere form of Roman severitas. This painting of Roman swords represents pictorially what I have in mind musically.

People in the counter-jihad movement are not warriors. Like the rest of the westerners they smile. In contrast, the above-linked painting depicts a solemn owe to Roman swords. In the acclaimed Civilisation Kenneth Clark commented about that painting that after the Enlightenment there were “no more smiles”. In his 1969 TV series it was Clark the one who first showed me the need of Roman severitas during decadent times. In a recent post I spoke of the necessity to overthrow most Western governments through civil war. Of course, although “the true Viking spirit is that two is enough to make it happen”, as I quote a GoVer in the longest entry of this blog, I perfectly knew that I was talking to myself.

Music conveys the psychic state of a man like no other art. While my father had in mind the 19th century civil wars—listen to his music: the link is at the top of this entry—, in the 21st century I am still imbued with this symphonic call to belligerent action; and I find it dismaying that counter-jihad bloggers, like the pacifist Hal and many others, are deaf to it.



Postscript of 25 August 2010:

“This chapter began with Houdon’s statue of Voltaire, smiling the smile of reason; it could end with Houdon’s statue of Washington. No more smiles.” —Kenneth Clark

Although my father’s music refers to a Mexican war, I never really felt like a Mexican. I’d like to say that, from this time forth, until an American revolution arrives there is no reason to smile.

Pat Condell & Fjordman - friends or foes?

Note of 13 September 2010:
This entry has been modified



Fjordman’s philo-Semitism in a nutshell

“It appears that the only people who can denounce genuine anti-Semitism yet at the same time criticize liberal Jews are people who are part-Jewish themselves, such as Larry Auster or Takuan Seiyo.” —Fjordman

Gosh! And these are the defenders of the West! Go figure. Only the Jews can criticize Jews in spite of the fact that the Jew Genrikh Yagoda is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people in the century when I was born! (the Soviet government killed over 20 million of its own citizens, the vast majority in the first 25 years of its existence during the height of Jewish power). No ethnic group has had such privileges after World War II. No one.

“Pay no mind to jews, except you must send your sons to die serving them, you suicidal morons!” —Tanstaafl

That’s Tan’s abstract of Fjordman’s de facto stance on Israel and the Jewish question. See the full thread here (though I don’t like that black background for an otherwise important blog).

Criticism of Fjordman aside, his Defeating Eurabia has some merit:

• Maybe the West will “celebrate diversity” until our countries fall apart, and global leadership will be transferred to East Asia.

• Freedom is free speech, that’s the simplest definition of it... The European Union [EU] is a slow-motion coup d’état conducted against dozens of countries simultaneously. It is designed to empty all organs subjected to the popular will of any real power and transfer it into the hands of an unelected oligarchy. In fact, it’s worse than a coup d’état because this traditionally implied that a group of people seized control over a country. The EU doesn’t just want to seize control over nation states; it wants to abolish them. The EU is organized treason.

Pat Condell

I have moved the text I posted last year at the bottom of this post because I have changed my worldview even further. The fact is that in other videos Condell has stated vehemently that there are no races and that he wouldn’t tolerate going back to the times when in the United States negroes had to take the back seats in the buses. Condell has also stated that he spares the Jews from his anti-religious diatribes because in his opinion they are decent people.

It is true that the Jewish question requires an effort to wrap our heads to get it. However, since virtually all of westerners’ minds—including Condell’s—have been snatched, counter-jihad speakers like he and Robert Spencer are doing a great job to disabuse a few Body-Snatched Liberal Pods regarding, at least, some of the viruses that the snatchers have programmed in our minds. In Realpolitiks, therefore, counter-jihad may thus function like a baby step toward white nationalism (such baby step worked in my case to get rid of my old, body-snatched head).

____________________

Old, 3 September 2009 text:

While I disagree with Pat Condell’s opinion expressed elsewhere about the British National Party, the only party that actively defends the United Kingdom’s ethnicity and culture against the traitors, Condell is nonetheless a superb speaker. He has several internet videos on the suicidal Islamization of the West. This is one of the best that I have watched until now:



Condell on March 2008