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.

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

An aborted postscript to my book

“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.” —César Tort

My book The Return of Quetzalcoatl is being published in the blogsite Gates of Vienna. The book explains a phrase that in the past I used in the masthead of this blog: “The legacy of Lloyd deMause and Alice Miller might unearth the psychological roots of the West’s suicide.”



Update of 3 March 2010

Seven chapters plus the Preface were published in the Gates of Vienna (GoV) blogsite. A couple of days ago Baron Bodissey, the GoV administrator, informed me that he won’t be publishing the rest of the chapters. Reason: After realizing for the first time in my life that Jewish influence on U.S. immigration has been very noxious, and saying it openly in my blog, the Baron told me that he won’t be publishing the rest of the chapters. According to him, in my blog thread I had welcomed comments from real National Socialists who believe that the Jews are inferior and that they must be exterminated!

Jesus. I was absolutely flabbergasted by this e-mail, since the long Tanstaafl article republished in my blog explicitly states: “I do not say that Whites are the master race and Jews are subhuman. I do not say that I want to exterminate Jews. I do not secretly crave such things and I resent anyone who projects their own imagined hatreds into my head.”

This projection aside, even after I rebutted the Baron about it, he expelled me from publishing in his site because I stated in my blog that I am no longer a philo-Semite.

If the Jewish question is a forbidden topic in mainstream media, supression of free speech even in the blogosphere makes one feel a little angry. I had been publishing chapters in GoV since last July, and I don’t know where the rest of my book will have a proper readership.

On the other hand, I believe it was a necessary step to say adieu to false friends: those exclusively concerned with the Islamization of the West but indifferent to the dilution, and eventual extinction, of their own ethnic group (and thus of Western civilization).

The good news is that I have made new, real friends: white nationalists.


Update of 9 March 2010

I have published Chapter 8 in this blog. Also, below I include a draft of the "Postscript to The Return of Quetzalcoatl for the GoV edition" that was never published at:




Monsters from the Id

Having in mind the excesses of the Third Reich’s violent yang, in his essay Empire of Yin Takuan Seiyo hints some dialectics: “Thus will excess yang always bring about a counter wave of yin, which will generate a third—and usually destructive—force vector.” But in the same essay Seiyo does not seem to assert in absolute terms that the Oriental concept fully explains the etiology of the current debacle in the West: “It is difficult to deal with the dystopia of the West partly because we don’t have an accurate concept of its genesis.” Furthermore, after publishing his Empire of Yin, in his book From Meccania to Atlantis Seiyo writes that 500 years from now archeologists will be slicing through the stratum of the broken remains of European and American cities wondering what had destroyed this civilization, where “all the answers are no answers” for the simple reason that “it’s not the real answer, except if this be a society of madmen.” Seiyo adds:

What we are witnessing is a voluntary self-destruction carried out by democratically elected political leaders on acquiescing populations that, largely, refuse to see The Emperor’s New Clothes even as his naked arse is at arm’s length from their faces.

Note the phrase “acquiescing populations.” Free Hal has noticed it too in a brief Gates of Vienna essay that elicited a substantial amount of comments.

All the answers about the cause of our self-destruction are ultimately no answers. However, in science and especially in medicine it is considered barely scientific to approach a disease if its cause is not well established. Mental disorders for example are so mysterious that after a century of research professionals are still debating whether they truly belong to the medical specialty in the first place.

In a similar vein of Seiyo’s, Fjordman wrote:

Well, the West is currently stark, raving mad, and sometimes actively hates itself. I’m scratching my head trying to find out where this self-loathing comes from. Maybe we feel guilty because we are so successful and rich and accomplished that we just can’t take it anymore. But where do such ideas about guilt originate from?

From an insecure attachment to our parents, of course. We are all mammals, and primates to boot. And since among the primates we have the record of the longest childhood, a super-Stockholm syndrome makes adult children of abusive parents turn the other cheek for nonexistent wrongs, as explained in my first chapter. This is the real curse of the Homo sapiens, but we are barely starting to discover it. To illustrate this hypothesis I would like follow Seiyo’s lead in From Meccania to Atlantis with still another 1956 sci-fi film: Forbidden planet, where the “monsters from the Id” destroyed a very advanced culture because of unconscious forces that the inhabitants of that planet were clueless about their existence.

In the epilogue I mentioned the ancient word “daimon,” which I first read in Stefan Zweig’s The Struggle with the Daimon. The daimon symbolizes the forces of the Id. Analyzing specific individuals, in my blog I have posted a couple of entries about these daimonic forces that nobody in the counter-jihad, or even in the broader conservative movement, seems to know. Actually, very few in the mental health professions are familiar with it, as is demonstrated in my previous books written in Spanish. In English, see for example my analysis of Teresa, an European who hates the West that I know personally. I believe that this analysis can be extrapolated to other people who, like her, celebrate mass migration in Europe.

Why do I reject the current explanations on the Islamization of the West that border on conspiracy theories? Because there are many people like Teresa among the “acquiescing populations,” not only among our ruling elites, as Free Hal has reminded us in his article linked above. We must look for a deeper psychological explanation for our self-loathing.


The Return of Quetzalcoatl

No human being has an absolutely secure attachment with his or her parents, as hinted by Colin Ross since the beginning of my book. It is no wonder, therefore, that after the two world wars, with an “empire of Yin” as the psychological Diktat for good-thinking in the ensuing zeitgeist, our inner rage could only find an escape valve by re-directing it against ourselves.

According to the late legend, Quetzalcoatl was a white god who disliked the practice of human sacrifice; he bled his penis instead. Now, in the twenty-first century, the white self-harmer god has returned. We may not perform human sacrifices, but we do self-sacrifice the yang element from our character. Liberalism—which besides the unholy trinity of race, gender (feminism) and sexual orientation includes political correctness, pseudoscientific environmental scares, demographic decline, cultural collapse in the form of mass immigration, multicultural dogma and cultural relativism; false feelings of guilt for our colonialist past, willful blindness before a revived Islam and even two minutes hate in the form of massive, anti-Western demonstrations—is but an immense teoatl: a Nahua word I mentioned only once in the book as a metaphor of an orgy of self-sacrifice. All of this teoatl has a common denominator: the debasement of our culture and ethnic group. What we are dealing with is a new incarnation of the Id monster that nobody in the West, and I mean nobody, has identified yet.

Since Lloyd deMause sides the political left, he has never used his own notion of group fantasy to analyze the present mad world where all the answers about the cause of our self-destruction are ultimately no answers. On this point I would like to make an observation. Mental health clinicians have noted that if anger toward the real perpetrators—abusive parenting—is blocked, either depression or self-harming behavior will eventually emerge. This is also the conclusion of my analysis of Andrew Solomon, a prelude of my analysis of other Western self-haters here.

In group fantasies you either sacrifice others or sacrifice yourself. Since the 1960s the West has chosen, Solomon-like, the second way, self-injury: something analogous to the deliberate infliction of tissue damage with or without suicidal intent, as the mythical Quetzalcoatl did. Since in this postscript I do not pretend to offer anything else than a prolegomena to this complex subject, let us put the working hypothesis in a nutshell: Due to unresolved childhood trauma, since the latter half of the last century the unconscious hatred toward the abusive parents has been transferred onto pathological hatred for our parents’ culture, i.e., our culture. This may sound rather far-fetched, but at least in clinical observations at the Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma it can be ascertained that the self-cutters formerly abused at home say that the cutting makes them feel alive or reborn. At least in psychiatric settings, both Seiyo’s “madmen” and Fjordman’s “But where do such ideas about guilt originate from?” can be understood under the light of the trauma model and the locus of control shift.

Even though pre-Columbian sacrifice was infinitely cruder, the unconscious drive that moves both self-harmers and the white westerners who are bleeding their civilization to a certain death might be the same. As we saw in the second part of this book, Mesoamerican sacrifice of others only replaced self-sacrifice. Amerindian sacrifice was, ultimately, the sacrifice of the ego. We also saw that, paradoxically, child sacrifice was practiced throughout history during the most prosperous times. Likewise, in an infinitely higher plane such as Western civilization, according to deMause the economic depressions in modern nations are caused by growth panics. From this viewpoint, the elaboration of fantastic climate scenarios by environmentalists is no less than their fear before our prosperity. A related suicidal ethos compels us to sacrifice the future of our children and grandchildren who might end up fleeing an Europe under Islam. From the psychohistorical viewpoint, the drive for civilizational suicide behind this unconscious force, either by Mesoamericans (whose culture disappeared cyclically) or modern westerners, has the same etiology.

Throughout history humans have identified a variety of scapegoats as substitute objects for their unresolved traumas due to poor parenting. Once the West itself is the identified whipping-boy for the current group fantasy, it is considered fair-play to project even the most psychotic forms of self-loathing onto ourselves, like president Clinton telling an Arab audience that it is “very positive” that whites will be no more the majority in America in the next few decades.

Nevertheless, I am not a psychoreductionist like deMause. Emergent stages such as economics, politics, social movements and especially art seem to move in a logic of their own. This translation of my book should be read in the context of what I call the eagles’ view in counter-jihad: the bloggers whose privileged perspective see what is happening in the world from a cloudless sky. The eagles are like geographers: they can describe the seas, the rivers, the land, the forests and even a mountain from the above. But they cannot explain why a rising volcano, or an earthquake, came up just there in their visual field. I on the other hand understand myself as a sort of geologist of the psyche. The plate tectonics of the inner, unconscious selves or daimons, explains how the mountain was formed or why the world is about to explode among the fury of pyroclastic flows and megatons of vomited magma. My chosen field of knowledge does not contradict the eagles’ point of view. Twentieth-century plate-tectonics modeling only complements and explains nineteenth-century observational geography. However, the study of the monsters of our unconscious is so disturbing that I very much doubt that conservatives will takeover psychohistory from its treasonous owners.

Why do I publish my fourth book in Gates of Vienna then?

Like Dr. Morbius of Forbidden Planet I must confess I had a premonition about the coming catastrophe. Perhaps it is too late to start looking for a Spanish publisher: it takes time to find one and still more time to see if it will ever be translated into English. I decided therefore that the manuscript should be exhumed out into the blogosphere, what Baron Bodissey appropriately calls the monastery of Lindisfarne. If there is indeed something as cataclysmic as the fall of the Roman empire in the future that might start to reverse the current paradigm, a survivor will find someday at the monastery’s library a dusty, marginal and far-fetched psychological model that might help him to figure out where could the monsters that destroyed this civilization have come from.

____________________

Update of 3 October 2010:

Presently I believe that the cause of Western malaise is threefold: (1) Liberalism, understood as the last phase of Western Christian civilization as Conservative Swede argues; (2) the Jewish problem that very strongly and efficiently catalyzes liberalism, and (3) the monsters from the Id as explained here, especially among the most extreme cases of cultural self-hatred and self-racism among whites.

An overtly “monstrous” Id is only one side of the psycho-historical approach. The Id’s revenge can take subtler forms too. Today, a poster at Mangan’s answered the question, Why did change happen so quickly in the 1960s? He responded by pointing out the unprecedented buying power of the young; and that the generation that survived the depression and that won World War II wanted nothing so much as to spare their children those miseries. The anonymous commenter also noted that those parents thus spoiled their children, the Baby Boomers, who were indulged and had money to spend.

I myself entered the discussion at Mangan’s with this comment:

Rick Darby said... “I have no all-explanatory theory of what caused this. Probably morals had been changing through the '50s, but in a clandestine way. By the early '60s, the changes surfaced in a generation that had a less strict upbringing than earlier ones.”

Perhaps psychohistory could be useful here, both Lloyd deMause’s approach (childrearing) and Julian Jaynes’ psychohistory (long time ago mankind suffered a cataclysmic breakdown from its schizoid stage). The theory is a little complex but a short post of mine in this thread at Gates of Vienna may give an idea. In a nutshell I would say that an entire psychoclass in modern times, what deMause calls helping mode of childrearing, has cataclysmically confused liberty with licentiousness.


Update of 23 December 2010:

Having read Michael O’Meara’s Toward the White Republic I realized that there is a fourth factor which should had been listed as factor #2 in the above list.

O’Meara is a nationalist who believes that the United States is “the principal enemy of the American nation.” Although he does accept the Jewish Problem as a very serious problem, he states, “this enemy is not the omnipotent Jew” “but the corporate, technocratic elite.”

Corporate capitalism is our main enemy according to O’Meara. As he states on page 93, because the system prioritizes money and greed, the country’s historical racial hierarchy was overturned; the social engineers ethnically cleansed whites through the flooding masses of Negroes; whites being resocialized as mindless, deracinated consumers. The contents of page 91 provide a very vivid illustration of how this corporate capitalism destroyed far more our traditional culture than the terrible totalitarian regimes that the people of the Eastern bloc endured:

When Thomas Molnar, who played an important role in the US conservative movement of the 1960s and ’70s, returned to his native Hungary after the collapse of the Soviet empire, he found, to his astonishment, that traditional culture and education, which had virtually disappeared in the West, were still very much alive in the former Soviet bloc.

From this viewpoint, the One Ring in the LOTR saga, the ring of greed and power, is the real culprit, as Michael Colhaze has speculated recently at Occidental Observer.