Polite Kid

Just to let everyone know, I seem to have beeen hit hard by some kind of respiratory bug. So if I am missing in action tomorrow it will likely be because of that.
I hope you all will excuse any incoherency in my previous post; my brain seems not to be functioning at optimum tonight.
And I'll leave you with a link to a great blog post by Irish Tory, (H/T Flanders Fields) which paints a rather stark picture of our predicament in the West but which at the same time is eloquent and inspiring. I hope you find some inspiration in his words of exhortation. We all need it at this point, I think.
This hope is not in politics, it is not in arguing with our enemies, it is not in letter writing or pointless protests, it is not in powerless 'constitutional monarchies', it is in our souls, in our spirits, our peoples, the men of the west.
Read the rest at the link.

Labels: Blogosphere, Blogs, Christendom, Western Civilization, Western Decline

In response to a recent blog entry of mine, on pop culture and politics, the subject of television and the role it has played in the dumbing down of our culture, including our politics, was brought up.
I had been thinking of the huge role that the advent of television had in the social revolution that we mostly associate with the Sixties, and with my generation, the baby-boomers. While I acknowledge the foolishness of my generation and the responsibility we bore for some of the social destruction which was in full swing in the 60s and thereafter, I have argued that the changes we all recognize were in fact already well under way when my peers and I were children in the 50s, and even before.
Television, which began regular national broadcasting in the late 1940s, was a huge factor.
Television became an incredibly influential medium, which truly revolutionized the world.
This piece by Hereward Lindsay, called On the Decline of Our People, deals with the changes wrought by television, and the deleterious effects on our culture.
A friend recently sent me an email that concluded:
The cathode ray tube was the most powerful invention of the 20th century. I defy anybody to prove that wrong.
He didn't get any defiance from me. The malevolent impact of television is a subject I have thought about a lot. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that my hyper-Calvinist ancestors were right in their suspicion of drama and actors. (Socrates, by the way, had somewhat similar ideas. Read Plato's dialogue the Ion and you will be astonished at how timely it is with its warnings about actors trying to influence government policy and their inherent bad character as people who are professionals at creating illusions and fantasies, i.e. trained deceivers and people whose minds are not grounded in the concrete and real.)
All of us American dissidents (or "thought criminals", as might be more appropriate) have lain awake at night throughout our adult lives trying to figure out how our race and civilization have collapsed. There is no subject more important and more entitled to consideration.''
[Emphasis mine]
Lindsay goes on to tie together certain trends in our society, factors such as decline in the number of self-employed individuals, and the concomitant decline in the thinking skills and independence of mind of Americans. I am not clear, actually, how he correlates the advent of television with, say, the dwindling number of small independent farmers, but I agree with his argument that television has wielded enormous power in spreading a uniform set of ideas, which have become a stultifying orthodoxy. Received opinion dominates the national discussion, such as it is, thanks to the ubiquity of television, and the monolithic party line which is handed down mostly by that medium.
Newspapers are less and less influential; subscribers are fewer with each passing year, and many newspapers have disappeared because of dwindling readership. But cable news (and to some extent, the internet) are taking over the role once played by newspapers.
Lindsay writes about how the domination by the means of images rather than the printed word has made for more passive, less engaged, less imaginative citizens. It used to be said that radio, in its heyday, was the 'theatre of the mind', requiring considerable powers of active imagination and concentration on the part of its listeners. The visual media like TV, movies and videos, relying on pictures rather than words on a page, tend to 'dumb down' the populace, and literacy declines, along with the attention span.
Lindsay also mentions how political debates have become more simple-minded and devoid of serious content. This is obvious, however it may be less apparent to those who don't remember any other state of affairs. In the past, after some of the early ''debates'' in our present campaign, I drew my readers' attention to a website which contains transcripts of past presidential debates and of course there are now video clips of such debates.
The debates, even as recently as the 1960s, were true debates, and not merely 'panel discussions' and staged, scripted events which our recent debates are. However, the first series of televised presidential debates, in 1960, was the beginning of the trend of focusing on appearance, as Richard Nixon appeared nervous and sweaty on camera, while Kennedy appeared composed and confident.
I've blogged before, too, about our present society's obsession with 'image' and style, and the apparent preference for the telegenic and media-savvy candidate, no matter how inconsequential his ideas or his message. There are limitations to this analysis; if looks were all, John Edwards would be the Democrat candidate (even though some Republicans like to ridicule his looks or hairstyle, he is a telegenic, attractive man). And surely McCain would not be a frontrunner ,as he appears to be, if looks were all. But the truth is, being telegenic and glib, and facile with sound bites and one-liners counts for more these days than it did back in the days of Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, or Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.
One of the criticisms most frequently made of Tom Tancredo, who has now dropped out of the Presidential race, was that he was a 'poor speaker', too hesitant, not confident enough. On the other hand, we hear that Barack Hussein Obama's voice is supposedly a great asset. Personally, I think his voice is reminiscent of actor Ted Cassidy's.
Again, critics (most of whom, I would say, are already against Ron Paul) criticize and ridicule his 'nerdy' demeanor and his less-than-commanding voice. I say this is a shallow criticism. It is said that Thomas Jefferson had a very weak speaking style, despite his great facility with language in the written form.
Of his first Inaugural Address, it was said that
The speech was delivered in so low a tone that few heard it. Mr. Jefferson had given your Brother [Samuel Harrison Smith, editor of the National Intelligencer] a copy early in the morning, so that on coming out of the house, the paper was distributed immediately.
The second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805, like the first one, "was only partly audible."
Jefferson was by all accounts a shy and retiring man, hardly one of those back-slapping, smarmy politicians who are considered the ideal today. If today's superficial standards had applied in his day, we would have been deprived of his great genius in shaping our country.
The emphasis on looks, style, and image over substance and character are in some part a legacy of television.
Mitt Romney is considered by most to be the most 'attractive' Republican candidate (which is not saying much, considering the pickings). However I find him rather artificial and false, and I usually have a very good nose for insincerity. I was warning people about Bill Clinton from the git-go, and few were willing to be wary then; he seemed so friendly and warm, and people are so easily gulled these days.
But this is the result of looking only at the surface of people and things.
The way the primary season is shaping up, it looks as though Americans are gearing up to elect themselves another silver-tongued deceiver of whichever party, and to give a cold shoulder to principle and character.
The political campaign is just one manifestation of how television has deeply affected our society. The overall picture is that television has ensured that a single set of very liberal beliefs dominates our society, and this set of beliefs was in reality revolutionary, overturning the mores and habits of old America. The pernicious system we call 'political correctness,' which paralyzes us when it comes to protecting our territory and our people and culture, would not be possible without the role played by television in establishing 'respectable' opinion. One need not watch the cable ''news'' channels to be indoctrinated by the pundits and political hacks; one can get the party line via the favorite sitcoms, crime shows, reality shows, MTV, and even Country Music Television. And even if you manage to avoid all those, the commercials also carry the required memes. There is literally no escaping the 'message', the agenda.
And if you don't recognize that there IS an agenda and a message that is relentlessly pushed by television (and movies, and the music industry, etc.) then you are merely so used to it that you no longer see it. It is so ingrained in most Americans (and all Western peoples) these days that no one even notices it, or thinks it to be propaganda. It just 'is.' And for the younger generations, it's all they've known. So it becomes invisible, and second nature to most of us.
Lindsay correctly describes the entertainment industry in general as being about deception. And yes, some entertainment is innocuous, but few today have the discernment to sift the wheat from the chaff.
So we are easy prey for 'whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.'
It's facile to blame the 'liberals' or the baby-boomers for all that is amiss in our world, but the fact is, the process has been under way for some time, and it is not merely 'the liberals' or 'the hippies' who created the monster. It has been a process of collusion, unwitting or witting, between the ideologues who have set out to remake the world, and the people who are out to make a buck via the bread and circuses of television and the entertainment industry. The latter are happy to present subversive material if there is profit in it, and if revolution and transformation of Western society are good for their bottom line, they will happily collude. I don't know who is using whom in this strange alliance of leftists and corporate interests; I think they are both manipulating us.
As I've said, we have to free ourselves from the paralyzing effect of the prevailing orthodoxies and opinions, and as long as we are glued to the mass media, whether it's 'entertainment' or junk news on the cable news channels, we cannot extricate ourselves from the snares laid for us.
Fortunately we do have a choice; we can become aware of these destructive influences, and we can walk away, and we can create alternatives. It will be a long-term effort, and distressingly, we have a short time frame in which to try to reverse course, but we really have no choice but to try. The present course is taking us perilously close to a point of no return.
Forum comments here.

Labels: Corportate Media, Entertainment Media, Identity Politics, Junk News, Propaganda, Societal Decay, Television, Western Decline

The Cambria Will Not Yield blog has had a spate of wonderful posts lately, and this latest is another worthy one.
...What then do we lack that our ancestors had? We lack the heroic, integral way of responding to adversity. We no longer see an evil and say, "this must not go on," (1) and strike out at the evil. Instead, we form "think tanks" and study groups. We spend years of fruitless effort in trying to get someone elected who will address the particular evil we are trying to combat. In short, we are Hamlet prior to his conversion from confused graduate student to the lawful King of Denmark. We are "crawling around between heaven and earth."
[...]
Our ancestors who built Christian Europe lived life in the heroic mode. They did not feel called upon to match wits with the devil. They felt called upon to defend their souls and their civilization from the onslaughts of the devil. The Christian hero cares only about one thing: Is his cause God�s cause? And if it is, he sallies forth and leaves the rest to God.
There's a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be now, 'tis not to come: if it be not to
come, it will be now: if it be not now,
yet it will come; the readiness is all.
Since no man has ought of what he
leaves. What is't to leave betimes?
Every society has men of courage. But it takes more than courage to maintain a Christian civilization or to mount a counterattack against a satanic civilization. It takes courage and vision. And the "vision thing" of which George Bush senior was so dismissive is what has been lacking and is still lacking in the ranks of the far right.''
By all means read the rest.
CWNY makes one point which I have alluded to a time or two: when, as frequently happens these days, somebody on our side is decrying Christianity as the cause of our decline in the West, they often add that we need a new religion, one which will strengthen our side, unlike Christianity. Or, more likely, they say we need to go back to our 'old' religions, which presumably our ancestors held to before Christianity.
Now, I take exception to that line of thought because, first of all, being a Christian and a student of history, I think it's a groundless accusation to indict Christianity for our post-modern failure of courage and will. I won't go into that again now. But even were I not a Christian, I would find fault with this notion that we need to order up a 'better religion'.
CWNY quotes such critics here as implying:
"We need a religion to beat the barbarians � let�s buy one at the religion store." It doesn�t work that way, of course. European man has a religion, he has the religion, and it has always been his religion.
Even before I was a Christian, when I was still a spiritual seeker, I knew that "picking a religion" was not, as CWNY says, like shopping at a store and picking out the most suitable one or the best bargain. Only an atheist at heart would imagine that one 'picks a religion' as one picks out an article of clothing. If religion is a matter of expediency, or of its usefulness to us as individuals or as a people, then there is no God at all, just a series of roughly equivalent personal preferences in the line of religious merchandise, according to your tastes and lifestyle. Religion is not a consumer product that one takes back to be exchanged if it doesn't 'give us our money's worth', or if it doesn't serve as a talisman that brings us good luck and good fortune. To regard religion in that way is on the level of superstition.
Stray into your local barrio or ghetto and you will see stores peddling 'good luck' candles and scents and powders; you will see 'wangas' or fetishes meant to bring love or sexual conquests or power or money. Is this what our people think religion amounts to? We know that the more primitive peoples certainly believe so. Their religion is meant to provide power or material goods or 'love'; their 'gods' or spirits are like the genies in the old Arabian Nights stories, to be conjured up to serve them, not vice-versa.
However anyone who thinks deeply about religion or about a God ought to realize that if there is a God who is the Creator of this universe, and who created us, we ought to be in great awe of Him. We would surely not try to summon up such a Being and demand favors from him; we ought to be on our knees, not attempting to extort things from him.
I have had considerable first-hand knowledge of people who dabble in the 'natural' religions, and ultimately they all believe that their will should come first, and religion, which often amounts to little more than ritual and ceremony, ultimately is meant to be a servant to their wills. They thus see themselves as 'gods' of a sort, who wield power over supernatural forces.
In other words, they don't believe that there is one transcendental and yet immanent God, but they may believe there are multiple 'gods' who can be put into harness to serve their ends.
In that sense, I would call them unbelievers. They simply don't believe in one Creator God who is to be served, but they see themselves as small-g 'gods' and 'goddesses' who can shape reality to their wills.
Isn't this what the people are saying who claim that we have to go back to worshiping some nature 'gods'? The idea is apparently that these gods will empower us to be successful and dominant as our ancestors supposedly were in some pre-Christian 'golden age'. So we order up some gods who will act as our personal genies and who will lead us to victory.
Either there is a God who created this universe and all that is in it, or there are only small-g 'gods' who are thus not really gods at all, just some kind of magical beings who can be pressed into service towards our ends.
So the non-believer who proposes we scrap Christianity because our team is losing too many games, and we need a new mascot, truly does not understand what religion is, or what deity means. Religion is ultimately a matter of truth. If religion is not based on truth, but only on its usefulness to us in our worldly needs or on its expediency, then it is not religion in the true sense; it's magic or superstition.
Either a religion is true or it is not.
I strongly suspect that those who propose we wheel out the old pagan deities and put up altars to them don't for a moment believe that those 'gods' even exist; I suspect they believe that religions are meant to be some kind of psychological crutch or pep-talk to help us toward success. Religion would seem, to these people, to be no more than a kind of self-help system that we employ.
Our forefathers prospered and succeeded when Christianity was at its Zenith. Our fortunes in the West have waxed and waned with Christianity. But that is not a reason to be faithful to Christianity; Christianity is not a mere means to an earthly end. But it's apparent that we were blessed when we were faithful, and we've lost that blessing to a great extent as we've strayed from the faith of our fathers.
I believe, as CWNY says, that our Christianity is part of our blood and our substance, and to the extent that we have walked away from it, or have in some cases perverted it into a caricature of its real self, we have forfeited our sense of our identity and our heritage as Westerners, heirs of Christendom.

Labels: Christendom, Christianity, Western Civilization, Western Decline

The story of the British ship HMS Bounty and the infamous mutiny, which has been told in books and in several Hollywood movies, is one that has for some reason fascinated me over the years. I haven't read the book on which the movies were based, but I've seen three versions of the film: the one with Errol Flynn, then the Clark Gable version, and the Marlon Brando version. There was a more recent film with Mel Gibson I believe, but I ignore more modern movies.
In my college anthropology class, we spent some time studying about the Bounty, mainly in the context of the 'Founder effect' as seen in the Pitcairn Islanders, who were the descendants of the Bounty mutineers and the Polynesian men and women who went with them to Pitcairn.
I suppose the story was fascinating to me in that I found it hard to envision how a group of English sailors could simply blend with a group of South Sea Islanders. The two peoples and their ways of life seemed so profoundly different, to me.
What could motivate them to do such a thing?
Here, The Narrator, who blogs at Signals From the Brink, writes a very interesting essay on the HMS Bounty, the mutiny, and the resulting Pitcairn Island society. He makes a novel analogy between the Mutiny and the present Western crisis.
There are various ways of describing and understanding the unfortunate turn many in Western Civilization have taken over the past century. Comparing events to "revolutions" and the course of specific nations to the Titanic striking the iceberg are common (engaged in by this writer as well). But every now and then a new perspective may help better see the possible causations as well as the potential remedies/outcomes to our plight.
"History repeats itself" we are told and sure enough that seems to most often be the case. More than that, specific historical incidents seem to foreshadow events on a greater scale and era.
Such an event is the Mutiny On The Bounty. (I should state that I�m no expert on the subject and that my casual interest in it was sparked by viewing the 1984 film �The Bounty�.)
That mutiny, wherein a group of men from a civilized Western nation, having temporarily grown accustomed to a leisurely life of hedonistic nihilism on a tropic Island, rebel against their commander when faced with returning to a orderly and disciplined, (Western) way of life, has a general theme which can be applied to our current situation.''
It's a fascinating piece. He makes a case that the mutineers acted of their own accord to rebel against the Western (and I would add, Christian) society into which they were born, and to start a new life of 'noble savagery' with their newfound Polynesian companions. As history has shown, the paradise went awry fairly early, as such efforts always do, especially when 'diversity' and culture clashes are built-in.
An overview of the Pitcairn Island history is here, at this Seventh Day Adventist website. The Adventists brought their faith to the mutineers' descendants, and though the article notes that there are only small numbers of Adventists there now, they don't even hint at the troubled nature of the society on Pitcairn, which is dealt with here in a Vanity Fair article. It seems that the Christian veneer of the Islanders was rather skin-deep, and the sexual mores of the people seemed to follow the kind of anything-goes approach to sexuality so admiringly cited by anthropologists like Margaret Mead, who wrote of the casual attitude to sex in the South Seas. From the VF article:
Headlines around the world had focused on the criminal case: Pitcairn�s cloud of vice. But a more dramatic story lay buried in the thousands of pages piled high on a table partly shielding the Privy Council lords from the commoners facing them.
For most of its history, Pitcairn lived with a secret sex culture that defined island life. Adultery was not just routine but pervasive, as was the sexual fondling of infants and socially approved sex games among young children. Incest and prostitution were not unknown. The criminal charges stemmed from a longtime island practice of "breaking in" girls as young as 10.
The legal case had dragged on for eight years and threatened the island�s survival. Sharp divisions existed over Mother England�s fairness in forcing the weight of English law onto a tiny population as isolated and lost in time as Pitcairn�s. Colleen McCullough, the Australian author of The Thorn Birds and wife of a well-known Pitcairn descendant, harshly criticized the British for prosecuting what even the Foreign Office grudgingly conceded was a "cultural trait." She said, "It�s Polynesian to break your girls in at 12."
Typical liberalism: "who are we to judge other cultures? If pedophilia is 'their culture,' who are we to judge? So say the multicultists.
This National Geographic article also deals with these scandals, and the 'cultural differences' rationalization.
As The Narrator says in his essay,
This hedonistic utopia was, ironically, founded by people of low character and no qualms about disloyalty and lack of honor or restraint. It�s not difficult to imagine how well that worked out.
Bligh addressed the temptations to which they had yielded in his published account of the mutiny in 1790, writing:
"It will very naturally be asked, what could be the reason for such a revolt? in answer to which, I can only conjecture that the mutineers had assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheiteans, than they could possibly have in England; which, joined to some female connections, have most probably been the principal cause of the whole transaction.
The women at Otaheite are handsome, mild and chearful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people, that they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made them promises of large possessions. Under these, and many other attendant circumstances, equally desirable, it is now perhaps not so much to be wondered at, though scarcely possible to have been foreseen, that a set of sailors, most of them void of connections, should be led away; especially when, in addition to such powerful inducements, they imagined it in their power to fix themselves in the midst of plenty, on the finest island in the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond any thing that can be conceived."
It would appear that the combination of their isolation from civilization and perhaps the character of the founders of this 'utopia', they inevitably degenerated.
An interesting side bit of trivia is the linguistic degeneration. The descendants developed a kind of bastardized English or pidgin dialect:
...an amalgam of 18th-century English and Polynesian that the old-timers still use among themselves. This pidgin language was developed as a way for the English sailors and the Tahitians to communicate, and it features some words I could discern, such as musket (gun), and others I couldn't, such as tin-tola (girlfriend) and wettles (food). Brenda helped translate.
Len: "Nava bin doun Gudgeon fer long time." Brenda: "No one has been down to Gudgeons in a long time."
Len: "Mebe gut sum good side fer clime Down Rope." Brenda: "Maybe there's some good climbing at Down Rope."
Could this be the kind of change we will see in our English language? Will our descendants, if they speak English at all, speak this kind of dumbed-down pidgin dialect?
The Narrator's point is that the mutineers chose their fate; they knowingly decided to abandon their people.
There is no doubt that those outside groups who would wish us harm today have encouraged and cheered on that percentage of us who seek to mutiny against Western Civilization in favor of a multicultural hell. But the fact is it takes a willing participant to be led. And sadly there are not only all-to-willing followers amongst the disloyal, but leaders as well.
In the end we must be careful in our duty of defending the honor or our people, not to deify them or absolve them from the treachery that many of them so willfully engage in.
To be clear, this is not an advocacy of abandoning the resolve to expose the activities of those who might wish us ill, but rather a call for a little more focus on the inward development of the qualities that are needed for the difficult task of preserving and nurturing our people and their civilization back to a safe harbor. We need to once again champion the virtues which established our great societies but which have, of late, fallen out of favor. And part of those virtues was the belief that every man is to, ultimately, be held accountable for his own actions regardless of circumstance or whatever outside influences might have swayed his behavior or actions.
It is indeed a question of character. Some men have poor character and give heed to whatever impulse happens to strike them, while others remain true and honorable no matter how enticing the deceptive voice whispering in their ear is.
There has been a mutiny on the HMS West, and those who remained true to their own have been set adrift. But we must keep hope, for upon reflection of past events we can see the inevitable fate of each group based upon the path they have chosen.''
One or two of the commenters think The Narrator's analogy is not truly apt, because we in the West have not instigated a mutiny; instead we are having it imposed by outsiders against us, or being manipulated into embracing a destruction of our way of life and our people. I suppose there's truth in that, but still, I think the Narrator's point is worth considering, too. But are we to be the mutineers, refusing to follow a derelict captain and a corrupt and oppressive system, or are we the mutiny-resisters? Are our 'leaders' the mutineers against the legitimate order, setting a course to their own misconceived multicult utopia, with unwilling passengers on board?
I've often wondered, myself, why our society and our era has been so vulnerable to these manipulations. Every generation has its malcontents and traitors and those who want to tear down the existing order. In a healthy age and a strong society, those people are ignored and given no legitimacy; people in general are not led astray by them. Why is our age and why are our people suddenly such easy prey?
We've discussed all kinds of factors: the media and its enormous power, the prosperity of our time which makes us soft and hedonistic, the loss of our Faith, and of course the influence of subversive outsiders whose interests conflict with ours. Ultimately, though, are we all just pawns, or do we have the ability to discern, to reject the manipulation, and to choose for ourselves?
And if we still maintain that this situation was forced on us, by guile and manipulation or by force, then does this amount to a plea of helplessness and an abdication of responsibility? Or are we still strong enough in ourselves to assert our own will and act in our own interests?

Labels: Death Of The West, History, Libertinism, Moral Relativism, Multiculturalism, Utopianism, Western Decline

From the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog:
Two weeks ago we asked readers for their suggestions for reforming the Refugee Resettlement Program of the US State Department. Today we heard from reader Paul Nachman of Bozeman, Montana who suggests doing away with it altogether.
Ryan Mauro wrote a brief article, appearing today in FrontPage Magazine, about the wonderfulness of having Somalis in Tennessee. Near its conclusion he wrote:
'These issues, of course, do not mean that all Somali immigrants are problems, but it is clear that the government needs to find better ways to assimilate those who travel to the U.S. in large numbers as refugees.
I think the logical solution is to end immigration of Somalis and deport those who aren�t yet citizens.
Maybe my suggestion will surprise people, but why shouldn�t we be thinking along the line I suggest? Our basic question should be: Does their (or any immigrants�) presence do the U.S. any good? If not (and generally one�s answer, after thinking about it, will be "No"), then why permit their immigration in the first place?
There�s an even more basic question out there: What is the purpose of the United States? The answer is "To benefit the citizens of the United States." Authority for this conclusion is found in the Preamble to the Constitution, where it says ".. to ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity �" So the benefit to our citizens should be the starting point for all U.S. laws, including immigration laws. (This doesn�t mean we should run roughshod over the rest of the world. But **benefits** to the rest of the world should be decidedly secondary or tertiary motives.)
Some folks will probably come back with pleadings about "refugees." Please don�t. I put the word in quotation marks for a reason: Back in 2003, I had an in-person conversation with Prof. Jan Ting of Temple University Law School. Upon learning that he�d been Assistant Commissioner of the INS during the senior Bush�s presidency, I asked him, "Is it true that 90% of all refugee and asylum cases are fraudulent?" Without missing a beat he replied, "95%."
Let�s think outside the box of cliches and slogans: It�s time to shut down the refugee program in its entirety.'
I agree with that, and I like the writer's directness. I like the fact that he asks ''What is the purpose of the United States?'' and even more, that he answers ''To benefit the citizens" and quotes the Founding Fathers' words alluding to ''ourselves and our posterity.''
And please note the part wherein he quotes the professor as saying that ''95 percent'' of refugee and asylum cases are fraudulent. This is the reason for my often using quote marks when I write the word ''refugee'' because it's clear that in many cases, motives are economic or social rather than a matter of finding safe haven from true and life-threatening persecution.
It's vexing to note that most people have bought the idea that America (or any Western country) somehow owes it to the downtrodden or the poor the world over to bring them to our countries and take care of them at our collective expense. Many Americans honestly believe that our government was established more or less for that purpose, to provide for the 'huddled masses', and that not doing so would make us morally derelict in our duty to whoever claims the right to come here.
Even if we have money to burn, which we don't, there are costs that go far beyond the monetary, as most of my readers are well aware, but the average American seems to think that we owe the poor of the world a home, and have a duty to provide for their posterity.
The writer quotes the Founding Fathers to the effect that this country was created 'to ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.' And that posterity means us, the descendants of the old-stock Americans. When they wrote about their 'posterity', they surely did not think that included the whole world.
An illustration of the kinds of troubles that all too often occur when refugees are dropped into a small town in a White, Western country is this story from Sweden:
Nearly half of the predominantly Iraqi-refugees residing in Vännäs in northern Sweden have decided to permanently move out of the area after being terrorized by what police called "a lynch mob" in early May.
"I thought that Vännäs was the perfect place for us. And there are many, many friendly people here. But we still don�t dare to stay; I�m seriously concerned about my children�s safety," said father of five Ismail Ramadan to the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.
Ramadan�s family and several others have decided to abandon plans of starting a life in the small community outside of Umeå less than two weeks after a group of 30 to 50 young people assembled outside the apartment building in which the refugees lived and began shouting threats and throwing stones.
The May 9th incident resulted in several broken windows and many frightened refugees.''
Usually this kind of thing is sensationalized and played up as a story of racism and ''hate'' by the media, but at least this source acknowledges that the troubles did not originate with the townspeople:
According to the Västerbotten-Kuriren newspaper, the dispute began when a group of local youths confronted a refugee boy about the assault of a local girl which took place Tuesday night.''
The discussion at Gates of Vienna is here.
The popular stereotype of Scandinavians is that they are the most ''tolerant'', liberal, and passive of all the Western countries. So, even allowing for the exaggeration that is inherent in that image, it is surprising that this incident happened in Sweden -- although we have to notice, too, that there were the typical liberal brainwashed who made it a point to apologize and court the refugees.
Why does any attempt to stand up for our side always have to involve apologies and grovelling by somebody among our ranks? It's pathetic.
Granted, I don't advocate harassing people without cause or taking the laws into one's own hands, but what, as Fjordman points out in the comments, happens when the supposed enforcers of the law refuse, or fail, to protect the citizenry? If they want to avoid situations like this, the authorities have to do their job in protecting the rightful citizens of the country, and uphold the laws of the land. Too often these days they refuse to do so, from the highest levels on down to the lowest, and then what?
The purposeful 'planting' of refugees and assorted others in small towns throughout the Western countries has all the appearances of being an act of aggression or hostility by those in power against their (supposedly) own people.
We are told that our countries are obligated, by the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which was originally set up under very different circumstances:
The convention was approved at a special United Nations conference on 28 July 1951. It was initially limited to protecting European refugees after World War II but a 1967 Protocol removed the geographical and time limits, expanding the Convention's scope. Because the convention was approved in Geneva, it is often referred to as "the Geneva Convention," though it is not one of the Geneva Conventions specifically dealing with allowable behavior in time of war.''
At that time, obviously there were genuine refugees who had ben displaced by war and the upheavals following World War II, and today the situation is very different. The millions who are roaming the world now in the attempt to find better economic conditions, in most cases, are not comparable to those who genuinely were displaced or homeless as a result of war and the changing boundaries of nations.
The definition of a refugee is this, established in 1967:
A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.''
How many of today's country-shoppers and 'better-life' seekers fit that description? And since 1967, a great many spurious claims have been made, and the definitions expanded to include homosexuals or transsexuals who claim they are ''persecuted'' for their sexual predilections, or people with certain PC diseases who claim they cannot get treatment in their own countries, and so on.
And even the claim of poverty is not sufficient, under the definition, to claim the right to live here, yet it's due to that claim that many soft-headed Americans accept mass illegal immigration as unavoidable. They think it's the least we can do to welcome all these poor people who 'just want to work'.
Yet when people like the two men from the UK, Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle sought asylum based on their conviction on 'hate-crime' charges in the UK, they were denied. Granted, they may not appear as sympathetic figures to most media-indoctrinated Americans or Britons, for that matter, but the fact is, they were exercising what we in the US consider a right: free speech.
And we, meanwhile, see fit to welcome 'refugees' from countries which have shown hostility towards us in the past, Somalia, for example. Has everybody forgotten about the events in Mogadishu back in the Clinton era?
Actually, I suspect many Americans don't make the connection. I recently had someone ask me, ''where's Mogadishu"? when the name was mentioned.
The fact is, we need to reconsider our ''commitment'' to accepting refugees. Why can't we simply withdraw our participation in these agreements? Even in these hard economic times, the government, and indeed all Western governments, are working fast and furiously to bring more ''refugees'' to ''enrich'' our bankrupt countries.
No, we don't owe the world's hard-luck cases. There is a limit to what we can do, and we have no moral obligation to solve all the world's problems, the U.N. notwithstanding. In fact, as has so often been proposed, we need to get out of that misbegotten, failed, corrupt organization and they need to find a new home, or better yet, close up shop. The world will be so much better a place when they do so.

Labels: Ethnic Conflicts, Multiculturalism, Racial Dispossession, Refugee Industry, Refugees, United Nations, Western Decline

In my previous post, the issue of a Catholic Bishop's liberal position on illegal immigration was raised. Unhappily, there are many Protestant clergy and lay people who share the post-modern liberal interpretation of Christian doctrine.
The problem is such that it is becoming increasingly hard for the faithful Christian to answer the ever-louder voices of the critics on the right who say that Christianity is to blame, solely or in part, for the fall of the West and the threatened loss of our country.
AmRen in particular, among racial-realist websites and forums, has its insistent critics and enemies of Christianity, a couple of whom regularly post quite disparaging comments about Christianity and Christians. I can only assume that their viewpoints are agreeable to the moderators of AmRen if not also to the site owner. It's a fact that many comments in general do not get past the moderators, so those which do see the light of day are apparently agreeable to the mods and/or to the site owner.
I know some will say this is just even-handedness. It's not. Islam has its critics on AmRen, but none as insistent as the regular anti-Christian voices. Judaism is not considered fair game for criticism on AmRen, presumably because this is a group which is being courted and whose support is apparently valued more than that of Christians. This makes little tactical sense, because Christians make up a much larger demographic.
For whatever reason, Christians are now on the defensive on the right as well as on the left, and Christianity's detractors are stubbornly unwilling to listen to any defense of Christianity.
It's noteworthy, and heartening, that a British clergyman, Reverend Robert West of the British National Party, has spoken out on the issues of immigration, race, and repatriation in light of Christian belief.
Whilst the BNP is a secular and not a religious party, its views generally agree with the Bible�s own teaching that we are to live as nations, in our nations, and not to submit to a "resurrection" of the Babel thesis of one undifferentiated mass under some form of, probably dictatorial and very unstable, world governance.''
To the credit of AmRen, the issue of Christianity's culpability for the decline of the West was debated there some dozen years ago, and this piece by H.A. Scott Trask was posted there later, although I do wonder if something similar would be posted today. (Incidentally, thanks to Dr. D for calling Trask's piece to my attention once again.)
The Christian Doctrine of Nations
Biblical law respects boundaries of race and nation
by H. A. Scott Trask
In the September 1997 issue of AR there was a debate on whether Christianity is at least partly to blame for the demise of Western Civilization and the suicidal course being pursued by Western peoples. Both positions were ably argued, and on the whole I had to agree that the key to the controversy was a distinction between historical Christianity and contemporary Christianity. As Michael W. Masters ("How Christianity Harms the Race") acknowledged implicitly and Victor Craig ("Defense of the Faith") acknowledged explicitly, the two are not the same; and, as Mr. Craig argued persuasively, historical Christianity has not been indifferent to the fate of the European peoples.
The situation today is quite different. Whether Catholic or Protestant, conservative or liberal, all Western churches have embraced leftist dogmas on questions of nationality and race. The only difference appears to be that the more liberal churches openly support the multicultural and anti-white agenda, while the conservative churches ignore it. Of course, ignoring an agenda that pervades everything from politics to advertising is a form of tacit acceptance. The question is not whether Western churches are betraying their predominantly white congregations; they are. The question is whether they have doctrinal justification to do so.
It would be hard to overestimate the extent to which churches have surrendered to the leftist racial world view. Two years ago, the Pope said this about the inundation of Western countries by Third-World "refugees:" "These foreigners are above all our brothers, and no one should be excepted for reasons of race and religion." Of course, one could argue that race and religion are the two most important reasons to prevent foreigners from settling in one�s homeland. A common race is the foundation of any true nation, while a common religion is the foundation of a common moral code.
Leaving aside the race question for a moment, what kind of insanity has gripped the Catholic hierarchy that it would maintain that a Christian country should not keep out non-Christians? Whatever the answer, Protestant churches in Northern Europe and North America suffer a similar affliction. While liberal Protestants prate about the endless benefits of "diversity," conservative Protestants boast they will convert the newcomers. So lost have they become in the mists of political correctness, so effeminate has become their Christianity, they do not realize the erection of mosques, Hindu temples, and Buddhist shrines in the formerly Christian lands of the West is not a sign of progress in world evangelism but is terrible regress and defeat.
If the children of these pagan newcomers are, indeed, to be converted from the religions of their parents the contest will be between evangelicals and hedonistic liberals. Is there any doubt that the latter will sweep the field? These children�s parents came here to enjoy the good life and escape the challenges of building up their own nations. Their children will inherit this materialistic and self-seeking orientation. Christians can boast all they want about tolerance and love of foreigners, but immigration is only further marginalizing Christianity in our culture.'
[...]
Most Christians never mention, much less oppose, policies that directly harm whites: racial quotas, affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws, forced busing, extortion-motivated "civil rights" lawsuits, black-on-white hate crimes, interracial marriage, and Third-World immigration. They believe Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American Christian hero who truly deserves to be the only American with a national holiday in his honor. They believe "racism" is a sin, but a sin only when it is white racial consciousness or loyalty, never non-white racial consciousness or identity. They believe whites have a moral and Christian obligation to "bridge the racial divide," integrate their churches, reach out to people of color, etc. It therefore seems a bad joke to speak of Christian conservatives or the Christian Right, for there is nothing conservative about acquiescing in a demographic revolution to turn whites into a minority.
White Christians became racial liberals mainly because the Church has been besieged by the same forces that now dominate every other Western institution. The universalistic and egalitarian ideas of the Enlightenment have now fully penetrated Western culture. Feminist and socialist values have worked their way into Western culture and have overthrown traditional ideals of manhood, patriarchy, and chivalry. Biblical illiteracy, illogic, and historical ignorance have created an environment in which the Scriptures have been perverted into a religious justification for racial liberalism.''
Trask goes on to refute the frequently-cited interpretation of Galatians 3:28, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus".
I will let you read the entire essay for yourselves. It's a very thorough job of answering the liberalized postmodern Christians who have no problem with breaking with two millennia of Christian belief to embrace the 'one-world' agenda. I often repeat this, and it doesn't seem to pierce through the indoctrination, but how do such Christians reconcile their radical departure from what their parents and grandparents and so on, as far back as you can go, believed? Our Christian parents and our forefathers did not believe there were no nations or races; they did not believe we were to drop all barriers and tear down borders and fences and become one undifferentiated mass of humanity, as today's PC pharisees have decreed we must do.
If we believe that the traditional understanding of nations, as laid out in the Bible and by centuries of custom and tradition were not only mistaken but sinful and immoral, where does that put our ancestors, who held such 'immoral' beliefs and lived by such 'hateful' customs? If today's politically correct believers are right, most of our forefathers will not enter the kingdom of heaven, having not known the 'truth' according to today's wisdom, and having lived what today's generation would call 'racist' and xenophobic lives.
As for me, I am not prepared to condemn our forefathers in that way, while assuming that today's confused Christians are the standard by which to judge.
I suppose there is little chance of exonerating Christianity from the accusations made by some nationalists and realists; I have always had the feeling that they have rejected Christianity already, and are simply looking for further reasons to denigrate the faith and to vilify Christians. So I don't think that anything will change their condemnation of Christianity.
If they are intellectually honest, they would surely at least try to explain why, as I often ask, Europe and the West generally were at their zenith when Christianity still reigned, and when it was a strong and muscular faith. And why, conversely, did the West become effete and passive and self-doubting as the Christian faith waned, and Christianity became stripped of its original power?
These questions are often touched on in various essays of Cambria Will Not Yield, such as this one.
If the ''Christianity did it'' theory of the West's demise were true, should not the West have fallen centuries ago when Christianity was at its peak of power, when the majority of people in the West truly lived their lives according to Christianity's precepts? Why did the fall of the West come only as Christianity became enfeebled and had strayed from its original truths, and when only a small number of faithful believers remain? It makes no logical sense whatsoever, yet I have never heard any of the anti-Christian critics explain why this paradox exists, if their theory is true.
I don't hold any hope of dissuading the 'Christianity did it'' sect from their beliefs. I would, however, hope that some Christians who think it is sinful and evil to close our borders, or to want to preserve our nation and our people, will rethink that position based on what Trask has to say, or better yet, what their Bible has to say, minus the politicized interpretations of our day.

Labels: Babel, Bible, Christendom, Death Of The West, Ethnonationalism, Liberal Christianity, Nationality, Nations, Political Correctness, Western Decline

Tom Sunic, in an Occidental Observer piece called White Identity in Postmodernity, discusses the minefield of "White identity". He writes of how many Whites in the West, wary of expressing a White identity, choose instead a sort of neutral national identity, as with most Republicans whose identity is bound up exclusively with national patriotism and loyalty to 'the American idea'. For many on the left particularly, who have been schooled to regard White identity as not only illegitimate but as prima facie 'racism', their choice is often to identify with some subculture. He cites the examples of Whites who champion the cause of Tibet or, in his words, 'exotic Afro or Asian escapism.' These types are very common among those who are politically leftist. Everything they do and everything they enjoy is meant to express their desired solidarity with some Third World culture or cause. They may wear 'rasta' dreadlocks or tattoo themselves like tribesmen of some sort or wear some kind of Third World ethnic garb, and listen to Third World music and eat exotic foods and worship at the altar of Asian religions or some kind of syncretic faith which involves Third World traditions.
Many less exotically-identified American liberals instead choose to identify with black Americans or Afrocentric culture. Their counterparts back in the 1970s and 80s may have been more likely to pick ''Native Americans'' as their ersatz identity.
What seems to be the important thing in adopting such a false identity is to express solidarity with some 'underdog' or downtrodden group, apparently as a way of assuaging their hyper-developed consciences about history's wrongs. For the last 40 years or so, Whites have been taught at every turn that their identity is in itself a guilt-saturated thing, because their ancestors were the authors of most wrongs in the world.
Sunic mentions that many Europeans or European-descended Americans may not discover any ethnic or racial identity without being threatened by someone else's national identity, and he uses the example of the break-up of Yugoslavia to illustrate his point.
He also emphasizes how victimhood and victimology are at the heart of the many competing minority identities which are proliferating in the West. There is inevitably a hierarchy of victimhood, and in our country blacks and to some extent Jews enjoy primacy in this department, though the exponential increase in the number of Hispanics in our country threatens to topple the current victim-order.
When I was in college in the 70s, as all this victim-veneration was just reaching a new peak, I noticed, to my surprise, that blacks did not like to share the victimhood mantle with other minority groups; there was instead a competition among the minority groups as to whose suffering was most intense or most prolonged. Blacks at that time fell back on frequent references to '400 years of slavery', sometimes extended to '500 years of slavery' or '500 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow' or some such claim. American Indians were enjoying a vogue in the 1970s, and there were many Ward Churchill types running around campuses, their identity being based on having supposedly had a remote ''Native American" ancestor. Asians were also in the victimhood sweepstakes, and their claims centered on past expulsions of Asian immigrants or the internment of Japanese during World War II.
But I noticed that these groups did not work together; they were all intensely ethnocentric, and quite competitive or jealous when it came to sharing the victimhood spotlight. They might put aside their rivalries to participate in some anti-White demonstration on campus but generally they were wary of each other, or outright unfriendly to one another.
As Sunic points out in his piece, when victimhood is claimed, that implies a victimizer, or a 'monster' as he says. It does seem to be an ironclad rule: the common thread in all the victimhood narratives is "Whitey did it." It is Whites who are to blame in every case; there is always a Honky in the woodpile when a cry of victimhood is raised.
And as Sunic says, the victimology leads to conflict not only between the vicitims and the accused (and automatically convicted) White victimizer, but among minority groups scrambling for their place in the hierarchy and their share of the spoils. If 'reparations' for blacks are to be paid, there will be outcries from Hispanics, who will demand payment for the 'theft' of their fictional Aztlan. What happens when the spoils are no longer so plentiful?
And more importantly, what will happen when the goose that laid the golden egg is moribund?
Sunic says that an authoritarian society is necessary to manage all the divisiveness that is inherent in such an unstable system; his words are that 'high levels of social control' are needed. We are seeing that happening. And many of us wonder if that is not one of the reasons why our rulers have purposely introduced so much diversity into Western countries: to break up any natural cohesion and racial integrity, and to produce instability as a prelude to their further plans. Otherwise we can only conclude that our ''leaders'' are utterly incompetent and clueless. Either explanation is sobering to say the least.
Sunic describes the psychological state of Western White people as being overwhelmed by the constant barrage of guilt and the clamoring by the various voices of grievance and discord. I think this is taking a toll, as he implies, and I think it may reach a tipping point before very long, unless the cacophony of complaints and accusations stops. Is this too part of the plan, I wonder?
He says that Whites don't have the option of claiming victimhood themselves, but actually some do just that; for example in our country, those who see their immigrant ancestors as having been victimized by founding-stock Americans a hundred or so years ago are rather good at bringing up their grievances, and these same people all too often side with illegal immigrants and work towards open borders and the third-worldizing of America.
America is perhaps more disunited than other Western countries in that respect; those European countries which are monocultural and monoethnic have a decided advantage over those countries with more than one nationality within their borders. This is illustrated by the comments on this AmRen thread discussing Nick Griffin's remarks about Black and Asian residents of the UK not being Britons. Someone asks whether ethnic Irish in the UK are ethnic foreigners, and several answer 'yes'. A squabble then erupts between posters who appear to be Irish-descended Americans and Anglo-Americans or British posters. It's an interesting but complicated argument, with people citing British celebrities who are supposedly ''really'' Irish. There seems to be some confusion about Irish people of Anglo-Norman descent, or people of mixed English and Irish descent. So even in the United Kingdom there are elements of ethnic conflict, though among closely-related peoples. America is not the only English-speaking nation with internal divisions among close kin.
These are issues that have to be addressed, along with ideological and religious divisions in our country and other Western countries. If we lack the capacity to put aside our other differences in favor of uniting based on our kinship connection, we really don't stand much of a chance.

Labels: Balkanization, Diversity, Ethnocentrism, Identity Politics, Multiculturalism, National Identity, Political Correctness, Western Decline

Where are all the social conservatives?
Not here in this discussion.
The discussion is about this story, regarding the young girls in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who apparently made a pact to become pregnant.
It makes me ask: what is going on in Gloucester?
According to City-Data.com, Gloucester is 96.2% White Non-Hispanic, 1.5% Hispanic, 0.6% black.
Allowing for the usual case that these statistics are several years out of date, and also that they represent an undercount of illegal immigrants and others, it seems likely that most of the girls involved are White, of unknown ethnicity.
Here there is a City-Data forum discussion of the story.
So what is going on here? It's not really a surprising story given the trends, going back some years, among Whites in which the illegitimacy rate has been climbing, although not nearly as high as that of blacks or Hispanics.
The fact that the degraded pop culture makes slutty behavior acceptable if not outright glamorous and 'cool' certainly contributes to this kind of thing.
But in the discussion at ParaPundit about the pregnancy pact, it seems that there is little social conservatism on display, except from Randall Parker himself. Granted, many of the regular commenters there are not conservatives; some are liberal or libertarian. But why are there so few socially conservative comments in many such discussions? Are social conservatives a dying breed? It certainly seems that way if you read around the Internet at the 'conservative' or Republican watering holes.
The comments about how girls in past eras married at very young ages are reminiscent of some of the comments made in this discussion on Brave New World Watch a while back. The subject was the FLDS (another subject on which I seemed to be at odds with most conservatives), and the consensus seemed to be that very young marriages could not be opposed on any kind of principle, seeing as how our grandmothers or great-grandmothers married at young ages in many cases. My argument was that the vast majority of young girls (and young men) these days are not ready or willing to truly raise any children they conceive, unlike the older generations, who were mature in a social and emotional sense at much younger ages. However, my argument was dismissed out of hand, as you see.
My grandmothers, both of them, married at young ages. In the case of my paternal grandmother, she was all of 16 years old -- but she lived in very different times, in a different world, you might truly say. In her day, most girls of her age finished school at the end of 8th grade. A relative few academically able young people went to high school, on their way, perhaps, to college. The majority did not. Many rural young girls who left school at 13 or so remained at home until marriage, helping with farm and household chores. In urban areas, some young girls went to work. All these girls who did not go to high school and college were gaining real-life experience and had responsibilities, often involving caring for younger siblings or relatives. Very few young people in that era were granted unlimited freedom and large allowances to play, to take in 'entertainment' or to lollygag with their friends unsupervised. They tended to marry young, without having had a lot of 'experience' in terms of relationships. People often married their first sweethearts, or people they had known since childhood.
By contrast, too many of today's teens have a surfeit of free time, with no adult supervision or interaction, a shocking amount of money provided by their parents, and access to a lot of lurid popular entertainment (rap and hip-hop music, violent and explicit movies and TV shows). The combination is a very unhealthy mix.
Hence, a gaggle of teenage girls making a pact to become pregnant.
Those who argue that these girls are simply responding to their biological urge for motherhood -- which is, by definition, good -- don't address what will happen once the girls actually give birth. In an ideal society, we would probably have a lot more early parenthood -- but in the context of a sound marriage. How likely is that for these girls? Nobody seems to know, or be willing to say, who fathered the children the girls conceived. One of the fathers is said to be a 24-year-old 'homeless' man. Are these candidates for happy families? Are they equipped to raise the children to be decent people?
Girls are biologically capable of motherhood, in many cases, while they are in elementary school. So the argument that they should become mothers because they are physically prepared for it would logically mean that we should have 11-year-olds becoming mothers. Why not, if biological readiness is all that matters?
If we are going to argue for motherhood as early as girls can manage it, we have to acknowledge the studies showing that the younger the mother, the more the risks.
I just don't see where this argument, that early motherhood is desirable because it's biologically possible, comes from, especially where 'conservatives' are concerned.
Women are also biologically capable of bearing children up until menopause. Back in the pre-Pill days, women often had babies in their late 40s and occasionally, in a rare instance, over 50. Is that also desirable because it's physically possible? Most of us would say not.
I can't help asking whether there is not a movement to lower the age of consent that is masquerading as a simple wish to go back to the 'old days' when 13-year-olds could marry.
Our present-day society is much more complicated than the one our grandparents and great-grandparents lived in. We can't wish away all the complications and say that immature, narcissistic, dysfunctional teens should just start having kids because they are anatomically capable of breeding.
So what would the conservative ideal be for these girls? Statistically speaking, they are unlikely to give their children up for adoption by married couples, as would have been done in many cases before the Sexual Revolution. Statistically, it would seem most likely for them to give birth, though remaining unmarried, and to go on as before with their lives: attending school, putting their babies in the school nursery or daycare with all their friends' babies, and just participating in all the usual teen social activities: dating, partying, or whatever. Chances are, the babies' grandmothers may be the de facto mothers of the babies. In the old days, when a girl ''got in trouble'' and the father had absented himself or was otherwise unavailable or unsuitable, occasionally the mother of the girl raised the child as one of her own, and the real parentage was not discussed. But that will not happen here; the girls will ''keep'' the babies while not assuming full responsibility. A bad situation all the way around, ensuring that, at least in some cases, the babies will be dumped in day care while the mother works when she is an 'adult', and most likely there will be multiple 'daddies' or 'uncles' in and out of the household as the mother pursues her dating life despite motherhood.
A recipe for future problems, for the child and society.
Ideally, the mothers-to-be would marry the fathers, who would be responsible young men, and all would live happily ever after. But in a world in which young people are devoted all too often to hedonism and self-seeking lifestyles, and few are ready for adult responsibilities until well into their twenties, or even older, there is little likelihood of that. Odds are that a sizable percentage of the babies will be supported, to some extent, by public funds.
So how do we prevent these things? I am afraid that our society has become so decadent that it's all but impossible to shield your children from the corrupting influences that are out there. I've certainly known many young people from conservative Christian homes, in wholesome communities, who run away, engage in promiscuous behavior, have children without benefit of wedlock, or become drug-addicted.
Many well-meaning parents are too busy to keep tabs on what their children are doing, and have rather shallow relationships with their children. Sometimes this is not their fault, as the demands of earning a living, long commutes to work, and managing personal concerns conflict with parenting. Still, in many cases, some of these factors are under the control of the parents, and they are simply too self-absorbed to put their children and family life first. We do have more control over these thing than many admit.
Still even with the best intentions and the best efforts at good parenting, things go wrong. The pull of the tawdry popular culture is just too strong, and it's too ubiquitous. Unless we live like the Amish, there's no chance of completely avoiding the temptations. I hear that even the Amish sometimes lose children to the 'world.'
In the meantime, though, social conservatives (if there are any still left) should be doing all they can to resist the pull of the depraved culture around us. We are supposed to be preserving, or if that is no longer possible, trying to restore the best of our traditional culture, based on the Christian values of our culture.
Giving in to popular trends, going with the flow, or rationalizing bad behavior from a libertarian standpoint should not be the approach we take.

Labels: Family Unit, Social Conservatism, Societal Decay, Traditional Morality, Western Decline

Reading around the Internet today, I kept coming across discussions about Obama and the frequently-repeated belief that his election will lead to some kind of turnaround in our favor. I suppose it could be said, then, that people on the right as well as on the left believe Obama's 'change' mantra, and somehow, both ends of the political spectrum believe that he is capable of working some kind of positive change, whether by accident or intentionally.
I hate to keep flogging the deceased equine, but let me go at this one more time from a slightly different angle. Assuming that Obama is incapable of delivering on his promises of 'healing' and 'unifying' and bridging the racial gap, assuming that a New Golden Age is not within his powers of manifestation, and assuming that things actually grow demonstrably worse (as most on the right assert) -- this is where it all breaks down for me. Suppose an economic collapse occurs, followed by conditions worse than in the depths of the Great Depression, which some believe will happen. Why should the masses of people out there, given their general cluelessness and passivity, suddenly begin to blame Obama, or even to be disillusioned with him?
Will the media desert Obama, or will they, like the good cult followers they are, cover for him and blame the crisis on the right?
If Obama fails in the sense that his agenda is thwarted in Congress (which I actually can't imagine happening), will the people blame Obama, or his opponents (who will of course be 'racists'?)
I think that just as when Bill Clinton ran into opposition and trouble, the left and the unthinking masses who are led this way and that will circle the wagons and support their beleaguered President.
Any economic crisis will likely be blamed on the greedy capitalists, who, as 'everybody' knows, are all WASPs who live in lily-white enclaves.
And if, as some foresee, there is a galvanizing of the White majority, what then? Any action, even lawful and legitimate, will likely be shown in the media as 'extremism' and the response will be to vilify any attempt by majority White Americans to press for their own interests.
The incident over the weekend of the church shooting is already being portrayed as 'right-wing extremism', and it will be followed by a lot of earnest condemnations of 'right-wing gun nuts' and bigots, with renewed calls for gun control and monitoring of 'right-wing hate sites' and groups. The man was deranged, to go after children and unarmed churchgoers, but he will be described as typical of White male 'right-wingers.'
And if some on 'our side', which means anybody White and right-wing, act out, that will only provide a pretext for more repressive laws and policies, and more ramping-up of PC propaganda.
I just don't see that the worsening situation, which will come regardless of who is elected in November, will automatically act in our favor. That's where I just can't take the giant leap of faith required to be a believer in the Worse Is Better, Vote Obama movement.
Oddly, it appears that on the left or among the 'moderate'/populist faction, many people are convinced we are on the cusp of some kind of momentous change, but of course they diagnose our problems very differently, and prescribe very different kinds of therapy for us.
I found a link at Occidental Dissent to James Howard Kunstler's blog, (which I won't mention because of its vulgar name), to a Kunstler article about 'Rebecoming', which seems to be his idea of this change that is supposed to be upon us, where the ugliness of modern America will be swept away by something along the 'small-and-local-is-beautiful' lines. Now, I happen to believe that small and local are beautiful. I happen to agree that what America has become, with strip malls, Wal-Marts, trashy entertainment and directionless, dispirited people, is not what America should be, or used to be.
However, both Kunstler's take and that of most of his readers seem to focus on what they no doubt perceive as 'White trash' culture, although no one uses that term specifically. They discuss women with tattoos (I agree about that), video games, drugs, and NASCAR. The last item seems to be a slap at Southron people, since the South is the basic fan base of NASCAR, though many heartland Yankees like it, too. But I get the sense that the people at Kunstler's blog look down on lower-class Whites as being the problem. If only everybody were educated and refined as the upper middle classes.
They leave out the obvious fact that of course working-class middle America is dispirited and demoralized; what can we expect after decades of dumbed-down schools and 'entertainment', all promoted by educated upper-middle-class and wealthy liberals? They mention thuggish, underclass behavior on the part of Whites (though they scrupulously avoid racial labels), but they fail to see or acknowledge how the liberal racial agenda has acted as a way of spreading underclass behaviors to the general population.
They ignore how 'free trade' has all but destroyed our manufacturing base, and how much of our agriculture has also been destroyed, leaving many previously hard-working Whites without the hope of work other than low-wage, part-time McJobs, and leaving some to nothing more than unemployment benefits, if they are lucky.
Many of the people they apparently despise were once people who had well-paying blue-collar jobs, with security, and now these people find themselves adrift. These people are mostly ignored by the Republicans, and because most are White, are now written off by Democrats as well.
Kunstler and his fans seem to remind me of Bill Kauffman, the populist/agrarian writer. I admire a lot of what Kauffman has to say, and have linked to his pieces. He writes wonderfully, and expresses a nostalgia for lost America -- but like Kunstler, he seems unwilling or unable to see that the old America that was so much better, so much more liveable and safe and clean and well-ordered, was so because of the people who made it what it was. Change the people, by means of liberal propaganda and maleducation and depraved entertainment, and you change America. Replace Americans with people from retrograde Third World environments, and again, you change America for the worse.
It's all well and good to lament for what America once was, or might still be, given the right circumstances, but a recipe is only as good as the ingredients. The right ingredients in the right proportions are necessary. You can't change the people of America, or exchange the people for others, and wonder why it just isn't the same.
But the message I take away from Kunstler's piece and his commenters' reactions is that everybody, right and left -- and center -- see that America is in great distress. Everybody can read the 'mene, mene, tekel, upharsin' on the wall, but not everybody can decipher it. And unfortunately, though lots of people see the need for a cure, not many of us agree on what medicine is needed, or even which doctor should prescribe and administer it.
And seemingly everybody thinks that a change, any change, is bound to be a change for the better. But the problem is, how can so many different opinions lead to any kind of constructive change?
Everybody seems to be cheering on some kind of apocalypse, and thus we all seem to be following the first pied piper who comes along.

Labels: American Culture, Demographics, Liberalism, Populism, Societal Decay, Western Decline

I had intended to write a piece commenting on Takuan Seiyo's latest installment of his Meccania to Atlantis series, but after having re-read his essay, I find myself unable to offer a detailed response; it's rather overwhelming.
The comment thread is not much help, either, as it is sidetracked at one point into a discussion of Bob Dylan's politics and philosophy.
(What is it, by the way, with Dylan and conservatives? I notice that What's Wrong With the World also had a thread about Dylan recently.
Like most people of my age, I used to like Dylan and I once thought he was quite profound -- at least when I didn't think he was being cryptic merely for the sake of it. But I was still quite young and quite naively liberal then. Nowadays I don't see him as any kind of conservative prophet as some seem to do.)
As to Seiyo's piece, I have to take issue with one thing, specifically, that he says
The West�s� original population � what we call for brevity�s sake "Whites" -- has given away the keys to its own home, and delights in being plundered. The ruling Body Snatchers have initiated and executed the plunder, but it�s the demos of democracy that has chosen those Body Snatchers and keeps them at the trough.''
I hear this and read this a lot, in one form or another. Have Whites really given away the keys to our own home knowingly, willingly, and do most of us 'delight in being plundered'? If this is so, or if Seiyo believes this (and others), then maybe it's pointless to even lament the fate of the West and of Whites. If our current fate is truly what 'we' want, and what we 'delight in', as he says, then let's just all stop talking about it and fretting over it and have an end-of-the-world party while we wait for the lights to go out.
I don't think it's as simple as that: that we've chosen it, with open eyes, and that we 'delight' in it. Do we?
How do we counter this idea, which is often expressed?
I also object, as I've said on comment threads before, to the often-stated claim that 'they [the Others of whatever kind] are not the problem; it's Whites who are the problem. We can't blame Them [the Others] for doing what they do; we have to blame our own.''
No, I don't agree. If my local law enforcement officers are lax in policing neighborhoods and turn a blind eye to crime under their noses, do I say that the burglars or home invaders or muggers in my neighborhood are 'not to blame' or 'not the problem'? Of course they are to blame, and of course they are the problem -- or part of it. But I can't go so far as to absolve the opportunists of their crimes just because law enforcement is lax and derelict in their duty. Granted, they are to blame in part, and should be called to account, but let's not let the criminals off the hook. Let's not excuse illegals, or minorities who work the system to shake the rest of us down. They are to blame, too. This cry of 'they aren't the problem' seems just like one more example of political correctness, of trying to shield the 'downtrodden' from any blame or culpability, and it is not right.
And as I've said before, if we can't even muster any sense of righteous indignation about what is being done to us, especially towards the people who are directly doing harm to us, then we may as well throw in the towel.
Any thoughts on Seiyo's piece? Or the questions I posed a couple of paragraphs ago?

Labels: Mass Immigration, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Racial Dispossession, Western Decline

There's a very good post by Stephen Hopewell at the Heritage American.
It's about Louisa May Alcott's book Little Women, and its depictions of traditional womanhood. I'm sure all of you are familiar with the book; even some who have not read it have seen one of the several Hollywood treatments of the story. My favorite Hollywood version was the 1933 movie, starring Katharine Hepburn, but the 1949 version, with June Allyson, Janet Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, and Mary Astor, was also good.
A critic could, of course, call the book false, a romantic fantasy. Even if this is so, the type of fantasy a society creates says something real about its soul. And in Little Women one sees a deep love between sisters and between mother and daughters that is utterly free of feminist distortion and resentment towards males. So, too, it was innovative as an early form of the American "domestic novel." In the words of Madeline Stern:
Little Women is great because it is a book on the American home, and hence universal in its appeal. As long as human beings delight in "the blessings that alone can make life happy," as long as they believe, with Jo March, that "families are the most beautiful things in all the world," the book will be treasured. (1)
The values held by the March family amount to a uniquely American conglomeration of stern Calvinism and English bourgeois values: a strong work ethic and a dislike of the pursuit of money, ostentation, and habits like drinking and gambling; but a very worldly enjoyment of art, music, games, nature, and conversation.''
I really like the second sentence in the excerpt above.
Read the rest at The Heritage American.
The discussion of Little Women started me thinking about the various books I read as a child, many of which were books that were read by virtually all children of the time. It's true that Little Women, like certain other popular childhood books, was a ''girls' book''. Many children's books, just as with adults' fiction, were divided between those for female readers and those for male readers. Boys tended to read more adventure books, involving action, travel, conquest, and so on.
But there were certain books that most children, both boys and girls, read. For example, The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Mark Twain's books. Aesop's Fables.The Arabian Nights. The Joel Chandler Harris 'Uncle Remus' stories.
Grimm's Fairy Tales. Hans Christian Andersen's stories. (I loved Andersen's stories, all of them. The Snow Queen was a special favorite for some reason.) Classical Mythology was popular with both boys and girls.
Girls read the 'Nancy Drew' mysteries while boys read The Hardy Boys.
In the realm of fantasy and fairy tales, George MacDonald was a popular writer among many children even when I was a child. I think he has been very influential over several generations.
Another more mundane writer whose books I enjoyed as a child was Lois Lenski ,who wrote about children in different regions of the country. Another series of ''girls' books'' which I read avidly were those by Maud Hart Lovelace. She wrote, among other things, the ''Betsy-Tacy" books about friends named Betsy and Tacy. They followed the lives of these girls as they grew up.
An interesting side note: this web page is devoted to explaining the cultural references in the Betsy-Tacy books, which would likely be foreign to any young girl of today who might read the books. I don't recall being baffled by these references when I read the books as a child; I think this is due to the fact that children of my era did not live in a world which was that drastically different, at least in a cultural sense, from that of 50 years earlier, the time in which the books were set. We did not need a translator or a lexicon to explain these things to us. Nowadays, however, children live in a very different world from that of my childhood, and the differences are not all due to our more advanced technology. It is more a matter of our not being conversant with the classic Western cultural matrix that everybody of earlier (pre-1960s) America shared. For instance, most of us knew the phrase ''All of Gaul is divided into three parts", and most of us knew the poem "Lochinvar." These things are absolutely foreign to the average child of today.
Many of the books we read as children were by British authors: those by Tolkien, Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), Lewis Carroll, Enid Blyton, E. Nesbit, A.A. Milne, Edward Lear, Frances Hodgson Burnett (how I loved 'The Secret Garden!), Anna Sewell, Andrew Lang.
Mother Goose.
We read books by European authors like Johanna Spyri (Heidi), or the aforementioned Hans Christian Andersen, or books like The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf.
We read things like the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, or the Robin Hood stories, or Aesop's Fables, or Grimm's, or Greek and Roman mythology, and we sensed that these things belonged to us; they were a part of our history and our origins, even we here in America. We had a sense of continuity.
But what I get from looking back at the books which most of us read as children is the message that we were much more a unified people then, with a common culture, a set of common cultural references, many of which were introduced to us as children. We had a sense of being part of a much larger, much more ancient culture. . Do children of today, except for some homeschooled children with good instruction, get that same sense?
Sadly, most of the young children I know of today, even those from good homes with conscientious parents. do not read that many books at all, and when they do it is the fad books of the moment, like Harry Potter. Now, I know some of my readers are probably Potter fans, and to each his own, but they are just not on a par with the books of the past, especially the truly classical books. I hear so many parents saying ''anything that gets them to read is good. We want them to read, and so whatever interests them in reading is good for them." Really? I question that sentiment. Suppose your child is undernourished. Would you say that ''anything they eat is good, so I let them eat whatever they like best; at least they're eating." I don't think you would find many parents who would use that line of reasoning; otherwise we'd be giving kids a diet of fast food, chips, twinkies, and cokes. So why is any reading material good ''just as long as they're reading"? We should take as much care to provide wholesome and edifying reading material as we take in choosing healthy food for our children's bodies. In fact I might say that unwholesome reading material can do more harm than junk food; childhood is a time for building good habits and good character, and that is even more important than the physical body in some senses.
Some of my Christian friends don't seem to try to feed their children wholesome mental food by encouraging good reading habits. I don't know that there are many good books for children out there, other than the classics; many of the newer books for young children are steeped in political correctness and liberalism in some form. Books for the 'young adult' group often feature foul language and sexual themes. The excuse is always that ''this is today's reality. Kids use profanity and hear it all the time, and they are exploring their sexuality." So it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.
One of the reasons our culture and our people are in such dire straits is that we've lost touch with our roots and our longstanding cultural heritage. Without even basic familiarity with it, how can any of us, particularly the younger generations coming up now, be proud of or protective of something with which they lack even a passing acquaintance ?
Generations are divided against each other because our children, in many senses, have grown up in a different country and a different culture than that of our generation and earlier generations. This is by design; the leftists and liberals were very astute in seizing control of academia and the arts, so as to surround the younger generations with different ideas and influences than those of earlier eras.
Those of you who do home-school, I trust you are including classic reading material, and works that represent the best of our Western cultural traditions. Much of what is produced today is suspect, and is often tainted, even if unintentionally, with political correctness.
Older books, describing an earlier era and a different way of life, have the effect of broadening a child's outlook, and opening the mind to other and better possibilities than those visible in today's world.
I know that many parents will say that 'kids today won't read that old stuff; they have to have something they can relate to.' Many children today seem sadly rather cynical and steeped in 'streetwise' kinds of entertainment. The trash on some of the ''children's" TV networks is very much of the 'urban', multicult variety, and this alienates children from their own rightful culture. I don't know what the antidote to this trend may be; killing the TV is a good start. If I had young children now, there would be no TV, and no modern movies.
Another criticism often made of the older books or of any older traditional fare, like movies, is ''the world was never really like that; it was whitewashed and idealized. It was really uglier than that. No such world ever existed.'' All I can say to this is that it's true that the world is imperfect and has always been imperfect. But to insist on exploring ugliness and the dark side of everything is to shut out the light. We get more of what we choose to focus and concentrate on. Why not exalt the higher instincts and our better potential? Why not show the good of which we are capable, rather than the bad and the ugly, as we do today?
And it is not wrong to idealize and to show a world which is just that little bit better than the world we see outside our windows. It gives us something better toward which we can aspire and strive.
"We never reach our ideals, whether of mental or moral improvement, but the thought of them shows us our deficiencies, and spurs us on to higher and better things." - Tryon Edwards
What books did you read growing up? Which ones inspired you or shaped your character or outlook?

Labels: American Culture, Books, Literature, Western Culture, Western Decline

Men have always tried to isolate women, to keep them as creatures apart. Men have always put women in houses, shut them away behind walls, kept them for themselves, detained them apart from the community. Men used to put women in a harem; now they put them in a house. But the home, like the harem, has considered its own interests rather than the interests of the community, and in so doing it has jeopardized its well-being rather than fostering it. The home, like the individual, is insufficient when it stands alone.
If a man commits an indiscretion all other men protect him. If a woman is at fault, other women, instead of protecting her, are often the first to condemn.
Women in the past have been afraid to lose the respect or the admiration or the love of men by opposing their wishes. In the last few years the suffragists have demonstrated that women do not lose the admiration of the worthwhile men by expressing their own individualities. On the contrary, it has been my experience that the modern man finds the intelligent, socially conscious, individualistic woman a more companionable person than her frightened sister who fears to speak or move lest she offend him.
Women gain far more than they lose by an attitude of independence.''
The above is from a magazine article from 1922, called Women as Dictators, written by a Mrs. Oliver H.P. Belmont, president of the National Women's Party.
Notice how the writer asserts that men, all men, men in general, have 'shut women away behind walls' or 'in a harem.' She does not specify which men, where, but indicts all men as guilty of doing these things.
The earlier waves of feminists were little different than the later, post-1960s feminists in this respect. They refused to differentiate between men in the Western countries, the men who were their own forebears, and men in the Islamic world or the Eastern world where purdah was often practiced, and women were truly secluded and treated as children or worse. No; they convicted all men of doing these things, without exception. And in this respect they were also following the pattern of today's liberals and leftists, the first rule being 'never give your own people any credit for their good points, and never fail to criticize and condemn every imperfection of your own people.'
It's ironic that in the part of the world where women have traditionally enjoyed the highest status and the greatest degree of personal freedom, feminism of the most militant type arose.
The very women who already had the most privilege were the ones who complained the loudest about oppression and 'discrimination.'
Maybe this is not so ironic after all; it does follow a pattern. One of my black political science teachers in college said that the 'oppressed' groups only organize to demand their 'rights' when the Oppressor (guess who that would be?) takes his foot off the neck of the 'oppressed', thus giving them room to stand up for themselves. So the 'victim' groups who are organizing to make demands and to push back against their perceived oppressor are already in an improved position, or they would not have the chance to rebel or 'resist'. Organized 'activist' groups are by definition in a position to push 'back'. Were they truly denied any power or any 'rights', their protests and complaints would either be ignored or silenced. Their complaints and grievances would not even be heard, and in fact, they would be too harried or distracted to organize on their own behalf, if they were truly oppressed or persecuted.
And there seems to be a truth here. All the aggrieved 'victim' groups have the freedom to organize and accuse and complain and even to engage in open defiance of their supposed victimizers. This in itself discredits, to some extent, their claims to being helpless victims.
Most of the perpetually aggrieved minority groups already have considerable privilege and status. Few are really 'oppressed' or persecuted or even discriminated against. Why are the 'oppressors' so willing to put up with the constant accusations and demands? This is not what we would expect from a ruthless oppressor class of people.
If we look back in history, we can see that even in supposedly 'backward' ages in the Western world, women enjoyed much better treatment than their counterparts in the East, particularly in the Islamic world. The Western tradition of chivalry, which I've written about here in the past, was part and parcel of the Christian culture of Europe, although it can be argued that the Northern and Western European cultures, even before Christianity, were inclined to monogamy and an elevated status of their womenfolk.
Christianity, as often happens, is and has been blamed for 'holding women back' or 'keeping them subservient', with the blame being laid mostly on the apostle Paul and his politically incorrect remarks about women obeying and submitting to their husbands. But the rest of the quotes in question involved Paul's instructions to men to love their wives. It was not a one-way street; the Bible implies that men and women both have rights and both have duties in marriage and in the world in general.
The militant Mrs. Belmont quoted above rails against Christian male dominance:
The church has been very, very hard on women. It has done its best to keep us in subjection and to restrict us mentally. Women are beginning to feel very bitter toward the church or the men who control it. They haven't driven us away from the Christian religion. They can't do that. But by their dictatorial discrimination they are driving us out of the churches as they are organized -- out of the edifices.
Women have given their time, their energy and their money to support the church. We are allowed to sit in the pews, but not to stand in the pulpit. The men of the church accept our support, but are not willing to share their exalted position with us. We are required to acknowledge man as our spiritual superior. We do not acknowlege him as such, and we know that Christ did not so acknowledge him.
If man wants to make a little god of himself he will have to do it by himself and for himself. He may stand in the pulpit and sit in the pew, but we must also stand as well as sit.''
Mrs. Belmont may not have anticipated that her feminist successors would, a few decades later, be talking about women being 'goddesses', and even introducing goddess worship into 'Christian' churches.
I wonder, though, if Mrs. Belmont would even be troubled by that; I suspect she would find it reasonable, and in that light, she and other feminists would be doing what they accuse men of doing: making 'little gods' (or goddesses) of themselves. And that is a picture of our age: the 'self' is the true god of much of the world.
On another front, Christianity is now being blamed for the perverted altruism and pathological refusal to discriminate that is killing the West. But again, Christianity is not to blame, but a corruption thereof.
Chivalry arose as part of the Christian culture of Europe but the original pre-Christian cultures of Europe contained the seeds of chivalry in the great degree of equality between the sexes. The sexes were not considered the same, as among today's deluded feminists and egalitarians, but different and complementary. There can be a kind of parity without pretending that the sexes are 'equal' or 'the same.'
There's a very good piece here about chivalry and feminism. The writer quotes Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts on the subject of chivalry:
A man without chivalry is no man.''
I've heard some men curse chivalry as being another damaging practice from the past, like Christianity, and men are often understandably embittered by the excesses of feminism and leftism/liberalism generally. But it seems to me that chivalry, and the Christianity of which it was a development, actually strengthened men, and of course, society at large. It may seem paradoxical, but it certainly appears that the West was far stronger in the days in which we were Christendom, and in the days in which women and men had their separate spheres.
If we look to find the causes for the rise of feminism and of the left in general, I think it's easy to overlook the decline of Christianity and the loss of faith of much of the Western world. Into the vacuum steps the counterfeit Christianity which is the gospel of humanism and egalitarianism, with its bogus heaven-on-earth notions of a socialist multicultural utopia.
Instead of the 'easy yoke' of Christianity we now have the heavy hand of totalitarian political correctness, which has more 'thou shalt nots' than the Bible has, and which is enforced with a harshness that the strictest Christian sects cannot compare with.
I have no magic prescription of how to find our way out of the maze, except to say that I think men will have to assert their rightful leadership positions and simply stop bowing down to feminism and all the works and pomps of liberalism and leftism, which is after all the ideology of a coalition of the failed, frustrated and envious of the world: weak men and militant women.

Labels: Chivalry, Christendom, Egalitarianism, Feminism, Western Civilization, Western Decline

Art hath an enemy called ignorance. - Ben Jonson
James F. Cooper asks, in an essay in First Principles, why conservatives should be concerned with beauty.
The Problem With Modern Art: Or, Why Beautiful Art Matters
...Why should a dissertation on beauty be addressed specifically to conservatives? Does the topic of beauty hold more relevance for conservatives than, say, liberals? If the answer is yes, as I propose it does, why hasn�t there been more attention paid to the subject of beauty by Republican and conservative leaders? This blind spot about cultural issues has hurt conservative credibility with the public. But, more importantly, it hurts true conservatism at its moral, spiritual and philosophical core. At this critical post 9/11 time of world terrorism, this nation finds itself culturally disarmed, its moral strength sapped. The reason for this decline is no mystery. Conservatives abandoned the culture some time around the end of the First World War. By century�s end much of the old master legacy was being ignored, and major art museums were aggressively collecting postmodern minimalist and neo-Dada works. Beautiful architectural treasures such as Pennsylvania Station were torn down to make room for highways and high-rise glass boxes that destroyed the soul of inner cities in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. If one political party stands more responsible for the precipitous decline in cultural standards, the other blindly ignored it.
Conservatives clamor to lead in the twenty-first century, but they choose to ignore the legacy of 2,500 years of Western civilization, which could elevate their cause to a higher level. The cultural direction isn�t to the left or right, it�s hierarchical. Beauty provides the key to a door that conservatives have been trying in vain to unlock for almost a century. That door leads to a world that reflects the timeless values and permanent truths that conservatives hold dear: faith, transcendence, virtue, freedom, God, patriotism, natural law, conservation. In short, what I am suggesting is that beauty provides the epistemological structure of a good society�not only through the ideological infrastructure, its laws, religion, customs, and government, but in the physical structure of its architecture, homes, public works, monuments, roads and bridges.
[...]
For those of us who consider ourselves conservatives, the recovery of beauty is a pilgrimage. I use the word pilgrimage because, in some ways, the recovery of beauty involves the recovery of the sacred. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," wrote Keats. "That is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Beauty is not about pretty pictures, pleasing flower arrangements or some Hollywood star�s sumptuously decorated mansion featured on the cover of Architectural Digest. It is about offerings inspired by the noblest, most profound and sacred works men can create. It is about the inner sanctum, the oracle, the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant, the Golden Mosque.
[...]
Across civilizations, from antiquity to the present, we see basic formal aesthetic qualities reoccurring in music, art, architecture and literature. There was an acrimonious debate between the nineteenth-century Academy and the early modernists, but aesthetically pleasing works from both schools share important formal qualities. When modernism declined into postmodernist theory in the late twentieth century, artistic discourse lost sight of the universality of art, including beauty and formal excellence. The revival of Realism in our own time has as much to do with the recovery of the ideas that have been lost�aesthetics, myth, spiritual, virtue�as with the recovery of high standards of quality in the arts. When modernism began to embrace a political agenda and cut off the ties to 2,500 years of Western civilization, it lost the moral high ground in the culture wars. The argument about whether "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" matters. There can be legitimate differences in taste over what is beautiful or merely adequate, but the idea that beauty is relevant to civilization is once again gaining ground. In the last decades of the twentieth century the mainstream establishment lost sight of the basic principles of art and beauty.
[...]
Why is beauty important? Because beauty�the idea and physicality of beauty�suggests a universal truth. The idea of truth, any truth, is abhorrent to those who believe that everything is relative. The war against beauty has been going on in the culture for much of the twentieth century. Conservatives, indeed most Americans, pay it no mind until some scandal in government or corporate funding to the arts reminds everyone that much of contemporary high and low culture is ugly, pornographic or anti-religious. You don�t have to launch a frontal attack on religion or God if you have already deconstructed the idea of absolute values.''
The writer suggests that conservatives need not only to oppose the ugliness and the decadence that is modern 'art', but to support and sponsor real art, art that expresses the idea of beauty and truth and transcendence. So far, this is not being done in any significant sense.
One hopeful sign is found in the existence of The Art Renewal Center.
ARC is the Eye of the Storm, at the core, hub and center of a major cultural shift in the art world. With a growing body of experts, we are setting standards to become ARC Approved� for artists, art schools, systems of training, museum exhibitions and historical scholarship, to bring guidance, direction, goals and reality to an art establishment that has been sailing rudderless for nearly a hundred years.
Additionally, the Art Renewal Center is a non-profit educational organization committed to reviving standards of craftsmanship and excellence. Only by gaining a full command of the skills of the past masters can we create the masters of tomorrow. This is a step forward for our culture. Experimentation and creativity can only succeed and prosper when built on a solid foundation of past accomplishments, with the tools which empower artists to realize their visions.
Nothing has been more restricting and debilitating than the theories of modernism, which eliminated these tools, along with the skills to employ them. We are providing a forum for artists, scholars, collectors and the public to appreciate great art, and to recognize that they're not alone in their suspicions about the emptiness of modern and postmodern art. These suspicions are fully justified by the overwhelming body of evidence and historical facts.'' - Fred Ross, Chairman of ARC
I can't say I really understand Ross's explanation of how modernism gained control of the art world in the last century or so. He ties the 19th century masters, like William Bouguereau, John William Waterhouse, William Godward, and others to the Enlightenment ideals, to the revolutionary ideas of 'liberty, equality, fraternity', and thus to what has since become our present-day liberalism. But I don't see how these things fit together. Yes, Bouguereau painted common people, peasant girls, rural folk, rather than kings and queens, lords and ladies, as the court painters of an earlier age did. But to my eye and my perception, it seems to me that the painters Ross holds up as exemplars (and I agree with his high opinion of their work) also presented a rather idealized, idyllic, etherealized image of their subjects. The peasant girls Bouguereau painted looked like celestial beings and Madonnas, and would not have been out-of-place in one of the Renaissance paintings of Biblical scenes, of angels and saints. Bouguereau's barefoot peasant maidens were not dirty or disheveled as real-life girls of that class would be; they looked like goddesses.
Many of the other painters represented on ARC's website often painted scenes from mythology or medieval legend and lore, or literature: The Lady of Shalott, Ophelia, Morgan le Fay, Sleeping Beauty, Pandora. The world these artists portrayed so masterfully was an idealized world of the past. And I say this not disparagingly; this adds to its value. It shows us the misty world of our remote ancestors, the world we all read about when we read the legends of King Arthur or Sir Gawain. It has a mystical and transcendent quality for those of us who care about our past and our heritage. The scenes seem to resonate on a deep level for many of us who feel a bond with that past, idealized or not.
But Ross proclaims that the artists in question were part of the liberal tradition, deriving from the ideas of Rousseau et al. To me, it seems that Rousseau, with his 'noble savage' idolatry, was the father, indirectly at least, of the movement to pull down standards and distinctions. The liberal movement sought to exalt the low, the crude, and the base as being on a par with the great. Once it was decided by the 'enlightened' liberals that distinctions and standards were the enemy of equality and 'justice', then all standards of excellence and beauty and even truth had to be pulled down. The common and crude came to be exalted over the holy and the beautiful and the sublime.
By the 20th century, primitive art from backward cultures became more valued by the Western 'cultured classes' than the beautiful works of their own ancestors. Rough, childish carvings of voodoo gods and the like were put on a par with the great art works of Europe at its height. The arts became dominated by the ugly, and as the century ended, 'art' often consisted of the shocking and the scatological or the simply banal.
And I would say this was the logical end of this sanctimonious drive towards "equality" and the destruction of standards and rules in every area of life, in other words, this was simply the fruits of liberalism/leftism. It was the enlightenment taken to excess, or perhaps to its logical (and ugly) conclusion.
Art became commandeered by leftists and assorted nihilists who wanted to use it to promote their corrupt agenda, and to destroy whatever was left of the classical heritage of the Christian West. After all, that heritage was declared to be guilty of 'male supremacy, bigotry, sexism, elitism, homophobia, xenophobia, and imperialism.' Down with it. Just as the French Revolutionists wanted to pull down the monarchy, the aristocracy, and to start from scratch, even declaring a new calendar, so do our present-day leftists and post-modernists want to deface and dishonor everything which signifies the excellence and the achievement of our past.
Even now, a popular device of many of today's ''artists'' is defacing images of Christ or of other sacred Christian symbols. The war against our Christian Western heritage is still very much in progress.
As Cooper says in the essay from First Principles, we must do more than merely react by protesting these outrages and blasphemies; we must present an alternative. We must do all we can to revive and promote and support a renewed Western art which honors beauty and truth and the best of our traditions.
This creation of a renewed art need not mean just the fine arts, or high culture, which after all, is patronized by a relative few people. It should extend to all of the arts, including, broadly speaking, pop culture and the entertainment media. We need to foster and support the good and the beautiful and the true in all ares of culture: music of all kinds, movies, plays, literature. It's true it won't be easy to do so, considering that the arts and all cultural institutions are dominated by leftists and cynics who are no friends to our Western heritage or to traditional standards. But we have to create ways of doing this, if we are to change our society for the better. Politics, elections, and the realm of government have their place (although I increasingly think they are also merely a show of 'democracy') but they are not the be-all and the end-all. Societies change, or are changed, in other ways. The men who sit in seats of power, dominant though they may be, are not in control of everything. Many real changes begin with the people, with a change of heart and mind, or to use a favorite liberal term, a 'change of consciousness.' Those things are not yet completely under the control of the political classes. Though they may pass laws to try to control our thoughts and our words and our feelings, those things are still practically speaking beyond their reach. They are not, after all, omnipotent or ominscient.
We might make a modest, but necessary, start by re-familiarizing ourselves with our artistic and cultural heritage. We in the West are often like an unknowing heir to a great fortune who is living in poverty and squalor. Most of us, it seems, are oblivious to the treasures of our past, and too many of us, especially younger generations, are unfamiliar with our great cultural heritage. Those of you who are wise enough to homeschool your children, I hope you are introducing your children to the great artists of the past, and all the great works of literature and music. Re-discover, or discover for the first time, the classic movies of the last hundred years or so. Yes, even the old silent movies are often works of beauty. Not all art, as I said, need be 'high' art.
If we live only in our present era, neglecting the riches that we have forgotten we possess, we are truly impoverished.
Conservatism means not just conserving ideas and philosophies, but our cultural traditions, folkways, arts, and crafts. All of it is an outward manifestation of the soul of our people, and all of it is a kind of spiritual sustenance for us. This may be what is lacking in our dispirited and jaded age.

Labels: Arts, Leftism, Modernism, Popular Culture, Post-Modernism, Western Civilization, Western Culture, Western Decline