If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
It seems clear that the right has won the bitterly fought war for the culture, at least in the US, which probably means everywhere in time. There are and still will be struggles, assaults, riots, government overreaches, and assassinations, but the outcome is no longer in doubt.
But now the right in turn seem to be increasingly delusional. I think of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, as examples.
This may be an overreaction to the atmosphere of thought policing, of cancel culture and deplatforming, being lifted. We saw something like this in the Sixties, when the McCarthy era ended, and the various media morality codes were lifted. In fitful exuberance, almost any idea was vented, and considered. Anything seemed acceptable. Why don’t we do it in the road? Why not put a hole in your head, to open your third eye? Why not drop out and live on a commune in Goa?
Ben Shapiro is currently being pilloried for saying something perfectly reasonable: that, if young Americans are lacking opportunities where they live, they should move. Others on the right are outraged. As Americans, we have the right to whatever we want, wherever we are. What sinister force seeks to steal this from us?
Shapiro is obviously right. Moving for better opportunity is the essence of the American story. It is a nation built by immigrants, and by settlers forever moving west. America is, as Margaret Atwood pointed out, with reference to its literature, the frontier.
But like the Hippie Sixties, the resurgent right will suddenly not accept the bounds of reason or common sense: “we want the world, and we want it now.”
And part of why there is such blowback to Shapiro is that he is Jewish. For the question hangs suspended: if, the left defeated, we still do not have everything we want, what sinister force seeks to withhold this from us?
This, sadly, naturally segues into antisemitism. If I deserve whatever I want, and some Jew seems to have more than I do, then they must be the guys. They must be keeping it from me.
The more so since the Jews always represent the Law: the idea of living with restrictions on one’s behaviour.
To resurrect a famous phrase from the Sixties, we have met the enemy, and they is us.
The murders of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska still physically sicken me. But this morning I have a new sense of calm. This was the last lunge of a dying beast. Charlie was killed because he won the debate. There may be further violence, we cannot let down our guard, but we are now in the mopping-up phase..
The trans movement is dead.
Materialism is dead.
Scientism is dead.
Islamism is dead.
Multiculturalism is dead.
Climate change is dead.
The powers and principalities of this world are in panic.
The materialist demons who inspired Iryna's murderer are in panic.
Christianity has won; or Judeo-Christianity.
The culture war is won.
The evil is exposed, and the majority is repulsed by it. And we know who the ultimate baddies are now. There is moral clarity.
A Jehovah’s Witness recently justified their non-observance of Christmas to me by quoting 2 Corinthians 6:
“14 Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? …
17 Therefore, “Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.”
This only works as a reason to shun Christmas if you think Christians are unbelievers. And then you contradict St. Paul in this passage, for he cites Christ as the object of belief.
But this advice to stay clear of unbelievers is standard for monotheists in general. It should not be ignored.
The same advice is in the Talmud: "Separate yourself from the nations, and do not eat with them." Jubilees 22: 16.
The Quran is more violent: “Kill them [the unbelievers, kafirs] wherever you come upon them and drive them out of the places from which they have driven you out. For persecution is far worse than killing.” Surah Al-Baqarah 191.
Even John Locke and the philosophers of liberal democracy say so: religious liberty is a necessary human right, freedom of conscience, but atheism is not to be tolerated in a liberal democracy.
This is vital advice. We cannot ignore or reject it; it comes with the warrant of God himself. Believers cannot mix with those who do not believe in God. One or the other will be persecuted. Belief and unbelief are fire and water.
This is indeed historically shown to be true. The pagan Roman empire could get along with the worshippers of any given pagan/polytheistic deity. But they could not tolerate the Jews, and levelled Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. And they persecuted the early Christians. So did the polytheistic Babylonians before them—then the Jews were allowed to return to their lands by Cyrus, the Zoroastrian, a fellow monotheist.
Other historical examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely.
But why are the two positions incompatible? Why can’t we all just get along?
Belief in God means belief in the absolute. God is the absolute, by definition. God is the good, the real, and the beautiful. Rejecting God is relativism. Relativism cannot permit the existence of the absolute, and therefore cannot accept absolutism as tolerable. And absolutism must view some things as positively wrong; therefore it cannot accept relativism.
Locke’s objection is that an unbeliever cannot feel himself bound by an oath. Not recognizing the authority of God implies not recognizing the demands of morality, or truth, or beauty. Relativism cannot accept that there is such a thing as reality, or truth.
Similarly, it cannot accept that anything is either good or bad. So a relativist will not accept the demands of morality.
That is usually why people become relativists: to escape their conscience. The existence of God is accessible to human reason. It has been proven by the philosophers a dozen or more ways. Given that this is so, anyone rejects God ultimately because they reject the authority of God, reject being subject to Him, or to anyone but themselves.
“Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.” – Milton, Stan’s speech, Paradise Lost.
Accordingly, as Locke argued, one cannot trust an unbeliever.
Now let’s get to the third great transcendental. Rejecting God means rejecting reality, for God is the ultimate real. It means rejecting good and evil, rejecting morality. It also means rejecting the concept of beauty. As, for fear of their conscience, unbelievers will shun any hint of the absolute, they will actually shun beauty.
This illuminates Jesus’s repeated test of the false prophet: “By their fruits you shall know them.”
A relativistic age like our own will lose its capacity to produce beauty in the arts. Artists who are unbelievers will not produce anything of value.
But here’s the bigger, more ominous problem: we are now living cheek by jowl, throughout the West, with a large mass of genuine unbelievers, kafirs. This is unsustainable, and must lead to trench warfare, figuratively or even literally. There is a reason why we all it a "culture war."
We are seeing the battle lines draw up more clearly all the time: the religious cluster around Trump in the US, Catholics like RFK or JD Vance, evangelicals like Huckabee or Cruz, Hindus like Ramaswamy or Gabbard, orthodox Jews like Ben Shapiro; while the Liberal Party in Canada bans from their ranks anyone who opposes abortion.
And one side or he other must triumph. They cannot just coexist.
I think the ancien regime is collapsing before our eyes.
I teach Asian students studying in the US and Canada, at high school through grad school level. I can report that they are fed up with the wokery they are forced to deal with in their classes. They complain endlessly about it.
Polls suggest it is not just Asian students.
The left has gotten far by being the loudest voice, the squeaking wheel. And everyone else goes along to get along. Peace at any price.
A bad and cowardly policy—the mistake once known as appeasement, and before that, Danegeld. This encourages the aggressor to continually make more and greater demands, trained to believe the same rewards will keep coming.
There necessarily comes a point at which their demands are unsustainable, and all hell must break loose.
The BBC series “Call the Midwife” was the perfect premise for a life-affirming, faith-affirming show: about a convent running a midwife service in impoverished East London. And for the first few seasons, based on one midwife’s autobiography, it was.
Then it, improbably, swerved into fictional story lines about how homosexuality was innate and involuntary. Into tales of wifebeating; into the evils of slum landlords; into editorializing in favour of abortion, and against the moralistic sort of religion.
Odd that it should go about to trash its core appeal to its natural core audience.
The obvious reason is that, after the first half-dozen seasons, they began to run out of interesting complications in childbirth. The newer ailments were getting obscure, and sometimes trivial. “It is a very rare condition, and no, it will not harm the baby.”
A long-running show tends to run out of plot ideas. That’s where “jumping the shark” comes in, and that lack of new ideas has infected Hollywood with their sequel mania.
CTMW has a bit of an advantage, because they can bring in new characters. But they decided to bring in “ethnically diverse” characters. And ethnically diverse characters must not have any flaws or dark pasts or even interesting eccentricities. So they cannot inspire any good new plots.
So what can you do? The temptation is to get political to keep interest up: find a news hook.
This is tiresome, and obvious; but wouldn’t be as bad if doing so these days always means a whiplash-inducing veer to the left. Particularly ill-suited to this show premise.
But then, they really haven’t had a choice. There’s the immigration issue. That’s in the news. Imagine if they were to feature an immigrant family that was not settling in, but resented the new country. The son was up for raping some girl, or staging a random knife attack.
There’s the abortion issue; pretty natural for such a show. Of course, a religious order of midwives should be firmly opposed. Yet imagine if they had a sympathetic character point out with emotion that abortion kills babies?
Or that homosexuals can choose to stop having homosexual sex?
Imagine if they showed a wife abusing her husband, or blackmailing him with false charges?
The leftist cancel culture machine would wheel into action. Advertising would be pulled, they would be picketed, probably cancelled. The writers would be blacklisted, possibly thrown in prison, at a minimum lose their careers.
So the minute they raise a political controversy, they must show only the approved leftist narrative. And it’s a race to the farthest left possible, because what you said ten years ago, when the Overton window was different, can now be held against you. There are currently cries on the left and in the media to ban a local candidate from the next provincial election, because she objected to gay marriage in a book she wrote in 2008. A time when almost all of the developed world were also opposed to gay marriage, including, say, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.
We have all been bullied in this way for years; creative types more than anyone. Which is why all we get from the arts and entertainment sector any more is predictable and perverse.
The good news is that the right has recently woken up to the strategy. They have started to do the same, and things are swinging back to sanity. Mass farmer protests in Germany. Bud Light, Disney, Harvard, Target; the boycott head count is growing.
We are accustomed to say we are in a culture war. But what are the two sides? It is not two warring cultures. One side seems in favour of culture, the other opposed.
Why would anyone be opposed to culture?
The answer is simple: those who seek power oppose culture; cultural norms are a restraint on power. See the Cultural Revolution in China, the French Reign of Terror, or the Cambodian Killing Fields.
So the real battle in the “culture war” is the bullies against the decent common folk. In political terms, say authoritarian government against liberty; but, culturally, it is broader than that. As broad as good against evil; the scribes and Pharisees against those Jesus identified as his own in the Beatitudes.
The bullies see the new technologies as the ideal opportunity for Big Brother—level control. They are pushing for constant oversight, censorship, and control as hard as they can. I have long believed, on the other hand, that the natural consequences of improved communications technology, and technology as a whole, favour over the longer term liberty against the bullies. It is harder for a small group of bullies to control and compel people who can communicate and organize among themselves. Indeed, I suspect that much of the current woke drive to authoritarianism is more a fear reaction to cats escaping bags.
What we currently call “woke” culture is the vanguard of the authoritarian bullying impulse. Consider the things it demands. One is now compelled to say that a man is a woman: the overlords demand the right to dictate reality itself. This is eerily parallel to O’Brien, in 1984, demanding Winston Smith admit that he sees three fingers when O’Brien holds up only two. What could be more complete control than a godlike control over reality itself? This is why bullies gaslight.
Language has long been under their control: “politically correct” is what Orwell called “newspeak.” It has gotten so far as the compulsory use of new pronouns. Or, in Canada, face a prison term.
The right to life has been negated by abortion, and now at warp speed in Canada by euthanasia.
Freedom of conscience, is increasingly denied. Expressing any of the major world religions’ teachings on homosexuality is now illegal. This is not because anyone cares much about homosexual sex or the supposed rights of homosexuals. It is an excuse to suppress religion. Religion, with its ethical restrictions, is the main constraint on bullies everywhere, and they always hate it. They will, at the same time, thoroughly infiltrate it, as did the Biblical Pharisees, for the same reason Saudi Arabia, China, and Afghanistan insist on always having seats on the UN Commission on Human Rights: to co-opt and subvert them. Let God actually appear, and they will try to kill him.
But mere subversion is not enough. They will also attack frontally. The Catholic Church will be condemned and suppressed, and churches will be burned down with no one held accountable, on the grounds that Catholicism is homophobic; at the same time that a huge proportion of the Catholic clergy are revealed to be active homosexuals, a “velvet mafia.”
The issue is not homosexuality. It is getting rid of morality.
Although the night seems dark, and no place left to turn, there are signs of impending dawn. I anticipated dawn for this spring, and I believe the morning star is here.
Styxenhammer notices an interesting recent shift: previously, when an aggressively woke movie got a low audience score on a site like Rotten Tomatoes, it got a high critics’ score. See the all-female remake of Ghostbusters. The scribes were closing ranks against the common people, who were condemned as misogynists, homophobes, racists, “white supremacists,” “Christian nationalists,” deplorables. However, the recent Queen Cleopatra series, which tries to gaslight the public to accept against all historical evidence that Cleopatra was black, is scoring almost as badly with both the critics and the viewers. Latest tally: 15% among critics, 3% with the audience.
This suggests the scribes and Pharisees, not all of whom are themselves bullies, some of whom are honest working stiffs who have been bullied into line, or suckered into line or have been going along to get along, like Joseph of Arimathea, are beginning to break ranks. The same thing happened with the nobility in the French Revolution, and it was a crucial moment.
In the meantime, the general public is also increasingly fed up with this stuff; there is much less of the cap-doffing syndrome and deference to authority than there was a couple of years ago. The woke movies and series are now consistently bombing at the box office: The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan and Wendy, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the latest Star Wars bumpf. Literally, the public isn’t buying it any more.
Polls show that the main issue in the minds of Republicans in the US is now the battle against “wokeness.” Above the economy, above inflation, above government corruption (which is number two), above immigration, above national security.
Somebody has indeed woke; but not as advertised. As with most calculated lies, the term “woke” was always the opposite of the truth.
The bullies always have one great advantage: while they are single-mindedly bent on the acquisition and exercise of power, the average person just wants to either help their neighbour, or be left alone, and assumes the same good will of everyone else. So for some time, the bully can run wild and jackbooted without resistance—in fact, with the help and cooperation of those seeking peace at any price.
As a result, we have seen the rise of “woke” corporations. Their actions seem superficially mad; they are supposed to be making money for their shareholders, not pushing a political agenda. And, generally, the political agenda they push is against the interests and sentiments of their customers. In the case of media platforms, Facebook, YouTube and the like, their profitability depends on being the platform everyone needs to be on to engage in the public discourse. Yet they are banning users, increasingly driving the to other platforms or networks to suppress the public discourse. How can this make business sense?
It actually does. They have learned that if they fall afoul of the demands of the bullies, their business will suffer. There will be demands for boycotts, for divestment, for bans on advertising with them, for freezing their assets, silencing them on social media, and so forth. Disney learned this when they made the villain in The Lion King, Scar, appear to be gay.
If they appease the bullies, they avoid this.
As the demands of the bullies grow and grow.
On the other hand, they face little or no downside for this appeasement—because their other customers generally just want to buy a needed product, and do not care much whether a man dresses in women’s clothes, say, or has sex with another man, or whether it was a man or a woman who invented beer.
But the bullies have now overplayed their hand. This was inevitable; when you crave power above all, sooner or later you get drunk on it. They went too far with the pandemic lockdowns, vaccine mandates, suppression of news, defamations, false prosecutions, fake hate crimes, drag shows for children, pornographic children’s books in school libraries, and endless cries of “wolf.” The bullying has gotten too directly threatening for the passive and amoral general public. Now they rise up.
The Bud Light boycott looks like a watershed. The customers showed they now care enough about the woke bullying to do something about it. And they have discovered their power. At last, corporations must calculate on paying a price for appeasing bullies. The woke corporate complex may collapse quickly.
As for the woke political complex, Trump is currently running away with the Republican nomination: up 42 points over his nearest competitor, the highly credible Ron DeSantis. If that trend continues, he will enter the general election with a strong party united behind him.
Why the Trump surge? Because he has the right enemies. He is being legally persecuted, indicted and prosecuted. This establishes his bone fides as the hero of the common man against the corrupt elite. If the bad guys hate him so, he can be trusted.
The Democratic nomination is being contested by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also has anti-establishment credibility as an anti-vaccination activist. And he is surging in the polls against a sitting president. The usual Democratic backroom chicanery will probably keep him from the nomination; but he will probably weaken Biden in the primaries, encourage others to come out against the establishment “narrative,” and possibly tempt the dark powers to overreach in order to stop him.
In Canada, we now have the rhetorically magnificent Pierre Poilievre. He has apparently decided to make the war on woke a central issue. No doubt he is reading polls, and sees the same surge in concern over wokeness as in the US. I recently saw a clip of Erin O’Toole, and remembered how luck we are to have Poilievre.
Things will never be as they ought to be, until the clouds part and Jesus comes trailing glory. But I have hopes that in two years, with Trump in power, a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, an originality majority on the Supreme Court, Poilievre presiding over a Conservative government in Canada, and the woke advertising blockade and the regime of censorship on social media broken, the cultural atmosphere will feel quite different.
Several substantial Hollywood names have just come out against aspects of the woke agenda: Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Richard Dreyfus. They might have only publicly objected to this or that point; but that does not matter. With wokeism, you are either all in, and question nothing, or you are out, and the enemy. Ask Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, or Tulsi Gabbard.
This begins to look as though the dam might be bursting. A huge proportion of people, in Hollywood and in the wider society, have been going along not out of any conviction, but either just to get along or to avoid having their career destroyed. Artists—and these people are, in the end, artists—are rarely really ideological. They don’t care about politics, and will generally just accept and roll with what those around them say. They are highly empathetic. But they are also free spirits; they will entertain any idea, however mad, but will soon hate being restricted to it. The chameleon poet. So they could embrace the woke assertions at first, and superficially, but over time, will feel desperately constrained by them. The strengthening of the woke dam, I suggest, is why the arts have been so moribund over the past few years and decades. Hollywood more than anywhere.
Pressure has been building up behind that dam. Now, if enough artists too big to be destroyed start speaking out, it will be like the tension being released in a deluge. The woke will suddenly go from being seemingly all-powerful to being common objects of ridicule. I think this is happening now to Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light.
More evidence that the arts may be about to flip: at a recent meeting of the League of Canadian Poets, I was encouraged to hear that they were having continuing trouble finding members for their inevitable Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee—the woke police. The chair of the Feminist Caucus declared her suspicion that one current member of that DEI committee was a mole. The Feminist Caucus is feeling vulnerable. A recent online reading provoked a high level of negative comments—it got ratioed, it seems, in YouTube jargon. So the next time they disabled comments; and found that attendance dropped by half. In other words, half their audience seems to have been coming to jeer.
And, while the Feminist Caucus motors on, the committee for Queer Poets is moribund--not enough members any longer to hold a meeting. This despite the fact that there are a lot of homosexual and lesbian poets. The Aboriginal Poets continue, but the chair looks less aboriginal than I do—blonde, very pale of skin, with an Anglo name. By contrast, new committees for Parenting Poets and Poets of Faith have recently formed, and are apparently growing fast.
I am hopeful that things are happening, or are about to happen, in the culture.
I had a little epiphany recently while rummaging through old files.
I found there a weathered note from an old friend from grad school, dating to back in the 1980s. She was expressing her delight that I had tried to get back in touch; but at the same time warning me that she was “fragile,” and urging that we not discuss either politics or religion.
I think I may have uncovered here a very early example of the attitude of censorship that has now overtaken the left. This young woman was a canary in the mine—in the academy from which this has all sprung.
At the time, I recall, I found it odd, that she wanted to avoid all talk of religion. Since our graduate field had been religion. And we were of the same religion.
I took it then as expressing some very personal problem; and my friend did indeed seem “fragile,” as she said, always complaining of a bad back, and of a history of depression.
Because it is being expressed through political action, people tend to see the growing intolerance on the left as political. Jordan Peterson calls it “cultural Marxism.”
But perhaps my friend’s case indicates that the first cause is not political, but psychological and spiritual. Marx just offers a convenient political analogue.
And it may be a bit callous to scoff at such fragile people as “snowflakes.” They may be responding to some real spiritual anguish with their talk of “triggers.”
Better perhaps to blame not Marx, but Freud. What we are seeing now may be less cultural Marxism than political Freudianism.
Freud’s thesis, in an A-cup, was that mental illness was caused by repressing natural urges. “Civilization and its discontents” were the problem. Accordingly, if someone like my friend went to a psychiatrist or psychologist with emotional problems, perhaps originally caused by the torment of an aching back, the advice they would be given would be to throw off their “hangups” about conventional morality and start thinking seriously about having sex.
My friend was into that.
And rather than helping, this may well have led sufferers, especially those who like my friend had religious sentiments, into a downward spiral. Increasingly tormented by the voice of conscience, it came to the point that they, like she, could no longer bear any mention of religion.
It all makes you wonder.
But then, why politics too? She could not tolerate politics. And why has this mental illness now spread from individuals like my friend to the political left in general, seemingly a majority or almost a majority of the population?
Carl Rogers.
That may be thanks to Carl Rogers. Rogers was the dominant voice in American psychiatry during the 1960s. He followed Freud, Jung, and the rest of the field in holding that the solution to mental illness was to throw off the shackles of conventional morality and the demands of being civilized and satisfy your natural passions. But he expanded the possible clientele, arguing that we are all suffering from these oppressive influences: we would all be healthier and happier if we adopted psychiatry as our religion and reached our full “human potential,” by which he meant, getting whatever we wanted. This was the meaning of life: “Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced.”
Surely this, perhaps best immortalized by Disney’s Baloo the Bear, was the essential doctrine of the Sixties. “Let it all hang out.” One was supposed to be ashamed only of having “hangups,” meaning moral scruples. The term itself comes from Kerouac; but Kerouac meant something very different. He meant simply things that hold our attention, as a hobby might. Nothing negative about it.
And note the Sixties slogan, “if it feels good, do it.” “Follow your bliss.” “Do your own thing.” “Don’t be judgmental.”
The premise, then, was that the natural man, man in the state of nature, our natural urges, were good; the restraints placed on them by morality, culture, and civilization, were bad. Morality was bad. Civilization was bad. We had to get “back to nature,” “back to the garden,” “back to the land.” Witness too the whole ecology thing.
This is awful advice, if conventional morality and civilization happen to be anything other than ignorant prejudice. And that is not a possible hypothesis. If ignorant prejudice, given original blessedness, where did they come from? If all our natural instincts are right and good how did sin and error, these hurtful demands of civilization, ever come into the world? It could not have come from humans. It must have been some outside agency, then: alien mind control?
Then too, if all preceding generations got it wrong, and we in the Sixties were the first to realize this, we must believe that all our ancestors were idiots.
Logically not credible, then; but fatally appealing. Natural urges are naturally seductive.
But because it was logical nonsense, this fact was bound to become obvious over time. The wheels were going to come off this handcart. What then?
Folks in the Sixties and in the human potential movement were not generally reckless enough to believe that you could always ignore morality in favour of satisfying your natural urges. Manson family aside, most hippies stopped short of murder. Or theft, despite feints like Abby Hoffman’s “Steal This Book,” and talk of “liberating” whatever you wanted. Theft might be good, but unlike most sex, there was the practical risk of being arrested.
This is where Marxism comes in. One could through it at least be working towards a solution: Marx’s communist cloud cuckoo land, in which everyone could just have whatever they wanted.
In the meantime, more immediately, the human potential revolution concentrated on the sexual urges. Sexual sins, we were assured, were “crimes with no victims.” So that any such laws or prohibitions were simply oppressive, and easily abolished.
It was actually obvious form the start that this was not so: abortion. It was never that there were no victims; it was that the victims were defenseless.
And over time, it has become apparent that there are lots more victims too; our ancestors were indeed not just prejudiced self-hating fools. The sexual revolution has been devastating for family life, which means devastating for children. But again, children are voiceless and vulnerable members of society.
Less obviously, it has been devastating for everyone else.
Gradually, the toll has mounted. But that is only the half of it. At the same time, the voice of conscience has become louder and louder, making those who bought in to the doctrine increasingly emotionally “fragile,” terrified of their own shadows, terrified of certain matters being raised.
As we now see all around us.
In Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, chronicling the beginnings of the hippie movement in Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their van trip across America to meet Timothy Leary, he already reports the case of a female passenger who goes suddenly psychotic over thoughts of a child she had abandoned or aborted as a requirement of their free-love lifestyle. She is herself abandoned at the next stop. The van rolls on.
Kesey's van.
Along with the need for censorship has grown the need to find scapegoats. The original and classic move in this regard was feminism: blame everything bad on men. Women’s urges were still all good: but men were all depraved and their urges immoral. Then whites have become scapegoats, for the obvious reason that they really did play a disproportionate role in forming our “oppressive” culture and civilization. So they are a fifth column that must be suppressed or eliminated. And, of course, the Catholic Church, the right, any memorials to shared history, anyone who will not openly endorse this or that given sexual perversion, anyone who retains the conventional faith in right and wrong.
Some on the right have taken recently to calling this all “clown world.” That is to give it too much credit. It is pathological and objectively evil. Perhaps the beginning of a return to civilizational health is to say so.
I think it is indisputable that we, in Europe, America, and Oceania, “the West,” or “Western civilization,” are now in a state of cold civil war. Normal discourse is being shut down, and this must lead to violence. To an extent, violence has already started, with gangs like Antifa in the streets.
I also think there is no question who is the aggressor in this war: the “left.” It is the left that has been trying to shut down civil discourse; this is demonstrable. They are shouting down, censoring, passing “hate speech” laws, banning, boycotting, and unfriending.
Not all wars are contests of good against evil. But in the normal course of things, contrary to popular belief, most are. If both parties are of good heart, things can almost certainly be worked out without violence. A war that is simply a “misunderstanding” is improbable.
When this is the case, when it is good against evil, it is generally the party of evil who begins the war. It is not that starting a war is evil in itself, as is often claimed, but that it is the side with a losing argument who will want to shut down debate and resort to force. As a desperation measure, because otherwise they will lose the debate.
And it is usually the party of evil, or the party that begins the war, who loses it. That is, given that the parties are reasonably equally matched--this rule cannot apply if, for example, the British Empire invades Easter Island with a dozen ships of the line.
It sounds crazy, but it makes sense. First, there is the logic of the ordeal or duel: the assumption behind these practices was that the human conscience would strengthen the arm and aim of one who knew they were in the right. Second, the side that lacks justification is going to war as a desperation measure; because they know they will lose the argument. As they go to war in desperation, they may well go to war against the odds.
The obvious historical example is the Second World War. Granted that Stalin was as bad, overall, as Hitler, I think there is no room to dispute that right was on the side of the Western Allies against the Nazis. And I think the argument is compelling that Hitler, and Japan, went to war with little chance of winning from the outset. It is as though in a fit of suicidal rage they just wanted to take down as many people with them as possible.
I think, contrary to much opinion, that the same was true of the First World War. Germany was morally in the wrong, advancing an ideology of social Darwinism, Germany and Austria were the aggressors, first declaring war, and Germany and Austria lost.
American Civil War: begun by the South by firing on Fort Sumter. They were obviously morally in the wrong, to the extent that they were fighting to preserve slavery, they started a war that, in terms of relative economic and military strength, they had little chance to win, and they lost the war they had begun.
Franco-Prussian War: France declared war on Prussia for no good reason but grandeur and to check German power. France lost.
Punic Wars: who started them is unclear; but the Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice, and so were clearly in the moral wrong as a civilization. And they lost.
The left, I think on this basis, is doomed to lose this current civil war. And I believe, as I have said before, that the real underlying issue is abortion, and the supposed right to unrestricted sex. It is only a matter of how much blood they can spill in the effort.
Once they lose, I think we can expect the world to return to a healthy course and reconstruct.
Just in time for American Thanksgiving, a host of leftist websites in the US are priming their audience to disrupt the family meal with political talking points.
This is an obvious violation of good manners, and destructive to families. How could anyone justify it?
Lifehacker does by arguing we have a moral duty to respond if someone else says something “racist.” I agree. If some other family member brings up politics, you have a right and quite possibly a duty to respond. They have committed the aggression, on the family and on all present. You must defend.
But, to begin with, the comments Lifehacker calls “racist” clearly are not. They cite complaints about voter fraud, “welfare queens,” and “faux outrage about blue lives mattering.” Splinter adds the need to deal with those objectionable “Trump isn't racist” comments. None of these things have anything to do with race, let alone racism. If the listener on the left insists they do, he is the racist, not the person he is speaking to: he is insisting that only blacks abuse welfare, only non-whites vote illegally, and all policemen are white. And that saying someone is not racist is racist.
Moreover, given these examples, who is more likely to be initiating the political conversation? The phrase “blue lives matter” is a response to the phrase “black lives matter.” Who is going to say it except in response to the first? Who is going to suddenly burst out with “Trump isn't racist” in the absence of the prior assertion that he is?
Splinter advises that the organization SURJ ("Showing Up For Racial Justice") "also created an anti-racist placemat you can print and set under your plate if you want to avoid grabbing your cell phone. The placemat focuses on indigenous solidarity and challenging familiar narratives about Thanksgiving.”
So—isn't putting such placemats under everyone's meal initiating the argument? Isn't pulling out the placemat you have been given, and replacing it with this, also ostentatiously starting the argument? And, without it, are racist comments against American Indians likely to come up? After all, the “familiar narrative” of the “First Thanksgiving,” smarmy as it may be, is all about how the local Indians helped the first settlers, and they shared their Thanksgiving meal in peace and harmony. This is racist? This is hostile to American Indians?
It is getting hard to believe the modern left have any agenda other than destroying any traces of civilization they can reach: destroying the Thanksgiving celebration, destroying the extended family. I do not mean American culture, or American civilization. I mean civilization. I think they hate all civilization equally, and it would not matter if it were Chinese.
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