Frontispiece to William Blake's
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)
which contains Blake’s critique of
Judeo-Christian values of marriage.
Sometimes the best stuff about the whys of the West’s darkest hour is found not in the main article, but in the commenters section. Below I quote three illuminating posts from the thread “Be the Change” in Gates of Vienna (GoV).
Fjordman said...
Takuan Seiyo, I like to think of it this way: If you have one brainwashed generation then you have a problem. If you have two brainwashed generations then you have a very serious problem. If you have three brainwashed generations then you have a problem that is so big that it almost cannot be solved, because nobody in living memory can remember how it was to have a sane worldview. We are now fast approaching a point where young Westerners, indoctrinated with anti-Western hatred, not only do not receive a correction from their parents, but in many cases not even from their grandparents. By then we have witnessed a complete cultural discontinuity.
As much as I loathe to admit it, Marxists and other anti-European forces have been far more successful in staging a slow, “permanent” revolution in the West than they ever were in staging an armed revolution. They have largely succeeded in their goal of eradicating Western civilization, and are now working hard to physically eradicate the European peoples who created this civilization to ensure that it cannot be rebuilt in the future, either. They achieved this feat not by gaining control over the means of production but over the means of indoctrination, the mass media and the education system.
The only thing left to do is to let the current ruling paradigm crash under the weight of its own uselessness and work to survive so that we can build something new out of the ashes. We need a new paradigm as the current post-WWII “suicide paradigm” isn’t sustainable. The question is whether the coming discontinuity will be so severe, just like it was in the Middle Ages, that we will end up with an entirely new civilization, the third generation of European civilization.
Takuan Seiyo said…
Fjordman, I think we have to go to the giants of science fiction, maybe Philip Dick, to get an idea where this is leading. But restoring a common Western culture is no longer possible. Even intelligible conversation with the other side is no longer possible. We don’t share the same language anymore, even if we were born in the same country. Words like justice, nation, freedom, culture, racism, constitution, wealth, work, love, marriage, gender, right versus privilege etc. no longer have a common referent, and words like honor, merit, fidelity, prudence, civilization, civility, manners, graciousness, manliness, femininity, modesty, class, elegance, valor don’t even exist in the other side’s vocabulary anymore.
Or look at American films between 1935 and 1955. These are recent pop culture artifacts that seem 150 years old. See how much French or German dialogue is included in these films meant for the broad and relatively unsophisticated American audience, how good English, good manners and virtues prevail even in plots that are cynical or risqué (Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief is a good example).
I need to modify what I wrote in the previous comment. While it’s only our last three generations that have been transformed into changelings, the left has been working on all that really for 100 years, not 40. Much of what one can find in the works or speeches of Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci reads like a blueprint for a soft coup d’état, exactly of the kind as has been unfolding in the last 40 years.
Whiskey said...
I take issue with both Seiyo and Fjordman. This is not “Gramscian” stuff out of the Frankfort School. It is the natural result of Christianity. That most Christian of poets, William Blake, in Daughters of Albion compared marriage and family to slavery and prison. Mary Wollstonecroft, mother to Mary Shelley, preached free love in the 1780’s. The Oneida Commune predated Marx and the Revolutions of 1848. Much of the current morass stems [from] the Romantic poets and the thoughts of Thoreau and Whitman.
Which boil down to this: if you have some amount of money, better to behave like a depraved French Aristocrat than an upright member of the “square” bourgeoisie. Or more concretely, elites wish to maximize sexual, personal, and monetary freedom of action for themselves while cloaking themselves in Caesarian “for the people” morality.
You can’t sell things people don’t already want. The tremendous amounts of money flowing to elites, making them richer than the richest French aristo under Louis XIV, create the tremendous appetite to cast off any restriction in a decadent, depraved elite. The impact of the condom, improved female earnings, and anonymous urban living make women the natural home of the Hard Left, combining as it does “the New Aristocracy” of the Kennedys, Obama, etc. with a massive female-friendly social safety net. Anyone watching little girls play princess or adult women wanting understandably to jigger the system for them can understand this. The impact of the collapse of marriage (which ties female well-being to that of men’s opportunities) is to my mind, far more explanatory than the idea of the pod-people and bodysnatchers.
The films of Hitchcock in San Francisco reflected a married, bourgeoisie world. The current city reflects a decadent, aristocratic single world dominated by single women seeking aristocratic princesses and a safety net.
Chechar’s comment
(off GoV):I agree with Whiskey that liberalism is the natural result of Christianity. Today’s crisis can best be understood if we go beyond Gramscian or commie brainwash into a meta-perspective that involves Christian ethics.
Conservative Swede has explained such perspective here (see also here). If we keep in mind Swede’s philosophy that modern liberalism is but the last stage of a dying, giant red star, Whiskey’s answer to Seiyo and Fjordman makes sense within my framework of a noxious “helping”-mode of childrearing, because that was precisely what originated feminism (cf. my criticism of Lloyd deMause). Parents allowed their daughters to “enjoy” the new lifestyle, thus endangering Caucasians with extinction since women avoid to reproduce with healthy population-replacement levels. In the thread of one of my Quetzalcoatl chapters I commented:
This is resonant with our struggles against today’s liberals. In the last chapter I said that liberty should not be confused with licentiousness. And the big paradox with the “helping mode” psychoclass of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is that it is akin to the emergency from bicameralism three millennia ago. And so are the measures to be taken! For Con Swede, a Franco or a Pinochet is badly needed in Europe.Reference to Franco or a Pinochet must have seemed a little rough for the GoV commentariat since I didn’t get any answer. But I must add that despite being a republican in heart the times are so dark that they require an imperial solution. It’s time for a new Caesar...
The Great GatsbyThe Jewish question has started to intrigue me. But yesterday I watched for the first time in my life the 1974 film The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow; directed by Jack Clayton from a screenplay of Coppola based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. None of these people are Jewish. But I found a subliminal message very akin to the more recent race-treasonous films that paint the whites and the West as the bad guys, quite a few of them directed or screen-written by the Jews at Hollywood. The whole point is that we must blame with equal ferocity all of the gentile liberals who also have contributed to demonize the white nationalists and the western culture. After all, it was Scott Fitzgerald, an Irish Catholic, who featured a reference to a conservative racialist author in The Great Gatsby. The film where the good guy Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford) is murdered starts with the following dialogue between Tom Buchanan (Bruce Dern) and his guest. At the end Tom is exposed as the bad guy of the movie, the one who incited the murder of poor Jay:
Tom: “Nick, have you read that book, The Rise of the Coloured Empires by Goddard?”The Rise of the Coloured Empires is a real book that today very few take seriously despite of the fact that, if the West had really watched out, neither China nor Islam would have awakened. If we look for an explanation of why Tom’s message fell upon the deaf ears of those who watch Hollywood films, the answer lays precisely in The Great Gatsby where frivolous parties ran amok in America’s 1920s, the zeitgeist when Fitzgerald wrote his novel. (Of course: today, frivolity has degenerated even further.)
Nick: “Why? no.”
Tom: “Well, it is a fine book. Everyone ought to read it. See the point is that if we don’t watch out, the white race will be utterly submerged...”
[Nick’s face denotes incredulity]
Tom: “No, that’s so! It’s up to us. We, the dominant race, must watch out, or the other races will have control of things.”
Daisy [Mia Farrow] sarcastically says: “We’ve got to beat them down.”
Tom: “Daisy, it has all been scientifically proved. You see we’re Nordics. You are, and I am and... Anyway, we are responsible for all the things that made civilization: art science, and all that.”
Postscript of 25 August 2010: Now that I am reordering the entries of this blog that I had written before the lightning that divided my intellectual life in twain, and removing mere copy-and-paste entries from other blogs, I see that accidentally I deleted a post with a couple of interesting comments in the commenters section. Fortunately I had saved them in my computer:
Monsieur Calguès said...
The book this conversation alluded to is The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy; the Goddard in the conversation refers to the book’s author, Lothrop Stoddard. I am not sure if you are familiar with the book. I have read it and it’s worth the effort. No author today could get away with writing some of the things Stoddard wrote. He would encounter difficulty finding a willing publisher today.
Chechar said...
Monsieur Calguès: As soon as I get a few bucks I will buy a long list of must-read books, such as this one. Here’s what an Amazon Book reviewer has to say about The Rising Tide. Ask me: who for decades have suffered the tsunami of uneducated semi-Indians that destroyed my beautiful neighborhood in Mexico City!:
“Forbidden book, very informative. I was impressed with how this work counters much of the ‘politically correct’ nonsense on campus. The egalitarian establishment would very much like to ban this work, they have already done much to keep it from potential readers. Changing demographics mated with Pavlovian ‘PC’ conditioning will allow them to ban this book soon. My advice is to get this book and read it while you still can.”
Monsieur Calguès said...
Forbidden indeed. Which makes it more surprising that I managed to find the book in a university library some time ago.
The Turner Diaries, however, would be impossible to find in any library in any form. One must access it online or order it through the mail. I believe some countries have even banned it.
But a society built on lies cannot endure, eventually it must collapse. The Soviet Union proved that maxim. There are violent times ahead for the West. They cannot come soon enough for me.
