“Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” Arnold Toynbee

“A great civilization is not destroyed from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Will Durant

“Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.”
—James Burnham, Suicide of the West, p. 25

Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations?” which appeared in Foreign Affairs in Summer 1993, is considered to be one of the most important works on the Post-Cold War world situation. Contrary to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992), Huntington did not prognosticate that the world would accept liberal democracy and thus bring conflict, and hence history, to an end. Obviously, even if the world should end tomorrow, 9/11 and the events that followed would give the lie to Fukuyama’s thesis: the world has not reached a “consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government.” In the above mentioned essay, Huntington argued that the global conflicts of the future will not be between ideologies, but rather between cultures, or civilizations. He delineated the following cultures in his analysis: “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African civilization.” Several of his candidates represent religions (Confucian, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox), while the rest represent ethnic or geographical entities, with the exception of the West, which includes not only Europe, but those areas of the world that were formerly colonized by Europe and continue to identify as descendents of European civilization. It is to Huntington’s credit that he recognized the future importance of Western-Islamic conflicts despite that fact that the nations of Islam do not include a major, central world power, and lack both dominant economic and military power, the major exception being their control of petroleum reserves. Huntington stated: “Muslims increasingly see America as their enemy. If that is a fate Americans cannot avoid, their only alternative is to accept it and to take measures necessary to cope with it.” (Remember, Huntington wrote his essay in 1993.)

James Kurth’s 1994 article in the National Interest, “The Real Clash”, however, takes exception to Huntington’s thesis, basically arguing that the West no longer represents a coherent culture and has been superseded by the post-West: “The real clash of civilizations, the one most pregnant with significance, will not be between the West and the rest, but one that is already underway within the West itself, particularly within its central power, the United States. This is a clash between Western civilization and a different grand alliance, one composed of the multicultural and the feminist movements. [I believe Kurth is here referring to radical feminism, with a Marxist basis, and not the feminism of equal opportunity.] It is, in short, a clash between Western and post-Western civilizations.” Huntington was essentially in agreement that multiculturalism was “basically an anti-western ideology.”

John Fonte’s 1997 National Review article, “Post-West Syndrome,” takes up Kurth’s theme about the post-West, arguing that the American intellectual class looks askance at patriotism and nationalism, in favor of more humanitarian and universal values: “This critique of patriotism, nationalism, and the nation-state is advanced in the name of universal ideals such as humanitarianism, egalitarianism, and democracy.” But according to Fonte, “just below the surface of the claims of universality we find the specific political agenda of an influential group of progressive activists. Instead of philosophy we find ideology; instead of cosmopolitanism we find the parochialism of the Western progressive elite.” He concludes:

Liberal democracy and liberal democratic nationalism are phenomena of the modern age, whereas the alternative progressive vision smacks of the pre-modern and post-modern. Instead of individual rights and national citizenship there is an emphasis on group rights and multiculturalism; instead of majority rule there is proportional representation for ascribed groups; instead of patriotic affection for one’s own nation, multiple loyalties to subnational and supranational groups are emphasized.

Similar themes and criticisms about the changes in modern liberalism were voiced by James Burnham in Suicide of the West as far back as 1964. Burnham stated: “Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide” (p. 297). Burnham’s statement can be brought up to date by replacing the term Liberalism with Multiculturalism. In the above work, Burhnam described how classical liberalism, with its belief in individual liberty, had been transformed (or morphed) into modern liberalism, with its primary principle of egalitarian social justice (and hence influenced by Marxism and other socialist doctrines), as follows:

This difference in human character type corresponds to a theoretical conflict within the ideology of modern liberalism: the conflict between the principles of free speech and the other individual freedoms on the one hand, and the principle of egalitarian social justice on the other. Essentially, it is a conflict between individualism and regimentation: the individualism that the liberal ideology derives from its past and the regimentation it has absorbed in the present. This conflict is real, and can be hidden but not solved by discussion, negotiation and compromise. It is a fact that liberalism’s inherited principles correspond to individualism, and a highly atomistic individualism at that. It is equally a fact that the Welfare State and plebiscitary democracy mean a good deal and an increasing deal of regimentation. One or the other must give way; and, on the evidence of the past generation, there is little doubt which is the tottering horn of that particular dilemma. (p. 171)

Multiculturalism as a political ideology can only be understood in its relation to that which gave it birth, Political Correctness, which has its roots in the cultural Marxism of the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, with his theory that to be successful and dominant in the West, Marxism needed to “march through [take over] the [cultural] institutions” of the West. Georg Lukacs of Hungary was the other great progenitor of this doctrine. In 1923, Lukacs and other fellow Communist Party intellectuals founded the Frankfurt School in Germany. After the Nazis took power in 1933, most members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States.  Included in this group were Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Writing on the “Historical Roots of ‘Political Correctness,’” Raymond V. Raehn contended:

America is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as ‘Political Correctness.’ Political Correctness seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which seeks a radical inversion of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution.

Although Multiculturalism claims to promote diversity (of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender), what it does not promote is diversity in thought. Instead, it promotes a New Left, Marxian version of race, class, and gender warfare against America and the West; a new left wing monoculture that excludes, prohibits (when able to), and condemns all opposing view points. As this ideology, through Political Correctness or the idea that one must conform to its tenants or be ostracized, has become dominant in American universities, schools, media, government, and even businesses, one could argue with some confidence that while America won the Cold War with the Soviet Union, she lost the war at home with Marxism.

Influenced by Burnham, Pat Buchanan wrote The Death of the West in 2002. According to Buchanan, who had been an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration for many years, the most significant dangers faced by America and the West are the following: 1) Depopulation – declining birthrate below the 2.1 children per couple replacement rate: Europe is dying (see below); 2) massive immigration from the third world; 3) dominance of an anti-Western culture in the West (Post-West); and 4) the break up of nations and the defection of the West’s ruling elites to a world government. (p. 228).

I will address each of the dangers cited by Buchanan below with the exception of 3): In reviewing Kurth’s and Fonte’s articles, I have already written about the “dominance of an anti-Western culture in the West (Post-West).”

Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, who wrote America Alone and the article, It’s the demography, stupid, which originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of The New Criterion, has written extensively about the demographic issue of the depopulation of Western democracies and the threat of Islamic Fascism. While the media in America and the West has the public in a lather about global warming, in the above article, Steyn wrote: “Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries.” While the United States is “hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman,” most Western industrialized nations, and including Japan, have birth rates well below 2.1 children per woman. For example, “Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation.” So much for Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. Meanwhile, many Islamic nations have fertility rates over 6 children per woman. As Steyn notes, “A society that has no children has no future.” Pope Benedict has stated: “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen as a liability rather than as a source of hope.”

“But unlike us,” Steyn continued, “the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they’re flying planes into buildings for they’re likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ‘em over?” With current trends, it is easy to forecast what the future holds for the European Union: Europe will have no choice but to continue allowing massive Muslim immigration to maintain an adequate workforce to sustain their welfare states for a declining and aging population. As Steyn wrote: “The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it’s suicidally so. To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted.”

I won’t belabor the issue of massive immigration from the third world, except to say that such immigration of peoples who often have no tradition of liberal democracy and often don’t speak English (in the case of the U.S. or Britain) poses a real threat to our liberal and democratic institutions. (Lest one think that only conservatives have such concerns, former Senator Eugene McCarthy wrote a book entitled A Colony of the World in 1992, on this very issue, and former Democratic Governor of Colorado, Richard Lamm, vociferously expressed his concerns about both Multiculturalism and massive illegal immigration at a conference on immigration in January 2005.)

Finally, regarding the last danger, “the break up of nations and the defection of the West’s ruling elites to a world government,” Fonte quoted from “a little-noticed article five years ago,” by Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, written when he was a senior editor at Time (1992?). Talbott wrote: “All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.” Fonte continued, “Talbott predicted that by the end of the twenty-first century ‘nationhood as we know it will be obsolete: all states will recognize a single global authority.’ Moreover, he described the weakening of sovereignty as a ‘basically positive phenomenon.’”

Use your imagination for a simple thought experiment: Currently, if you live in the U.S.A., in our federalist system, you experience at least three levels of government: The local level of county government (and maybe city government also if you live in an incorporated area); state government; and the Federal Government in Washington, DC. By any stretch of the imagination, do you think that adding another tier of government, say the United Nations in New York, will increase your freedom and ability to participate in self-government? Considering the current make up of the United Nations, a more appropriate name would perhaps be the League of Dictatorships. And how long do you think our Constitution and Bill of Rights will last if we relinquish U.S. sovereignty to the U.N.?

The conclusion is warranted from the above analysis that if current trends continue, Europe will continue in its precipitous decline in native European population and Muslims will eventually constitute a sizable minority, if not a majority. Even with minority populations in most European countries, the Muslim Cartoon incident of February 2006 should give ample cause for concern for the fate of free speech and press in a Europe with large Muslim populations. Instead of championing the rights of a free press and speech, most authorities buckled under pressure from Islamist extremist groups. Robert Sibley in “The Dark Side of Multiculturalism” (The Ottawa Citizen, September 10, 2006) has quoted Australian philosopher David Stove, who explained the problem of Muslim intolerance as follows: The contemporary liberal West has attempted “to achieve a society which would be maximally tolerant. But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally intolerant society. It also, and more importantly, paralyses our powers of resistance to them.”’ Europe appears to have given up resistance without a fight. For example, with only 8.5 percent of the population of London Muslim, the Archbishop of Canterbury has stated that accommodation to Sharia law in Britain is “unavoidable,” as the following article appearing in Christian Today (February 7, 2008) indicates:

LONDON – Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, said on Thursday the introduction in Britain of some aspects of sharia, Islamic law, was unavoidable.

His unexpected comments were welcomed by some Muslim groups, but the government was quick to distance itself from them, saying it was out of the question that the principles of sharia could be used in British civil courts.

Williams, speaking to the BBC, said other religions enjoyed tolerance of their laws in Britain and he called for a “constructive accommodation” with Muslim practice in areas such as marital disputes.

Asked if the adoption of sharia was necessary for community cohesion, Williams said: “It seems unavoidable.

“Certain conditions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system.”

One can only wonder what the response will be when Muslims constitute 15 %, or 30% of London’s population. I’m certainly not contending that all Muslims are intolerant, but there is a large vocal group of Islamist extremists in most European countries that is practicing a sort of reverse cultural imperialism on their host nations, which they are able to do because their host’s multicultural ideology leaves them impotent to respond.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who emigrated to the Netherlands to escape the fate of an arranged Muslim marriage, eventually was elected to the Dutch Parliament. After making a short film about the plight of Muslim women, Submission, with Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim fanatic. Hirsi Ali eventually left politics and fled the Netherlands, after the Dutch government decided that it could no longer afford to grant her the around-the-clock protection she needed, due to all the death threats that had been made against her by Muslim extremists. Hirsi Ali recounted her story in the 2007 New York Times bestseller, Infidel. Her main issue as a Dutch parliamentarian was the fact that the government was turning a blind eye to the plight of Muslim women in the Netherlands, who, according to Sharia law, were beaten and even murdered (honor killings) by family members for adultery, rape (yes, a Muslim woman can be killed by her family if she’s dishonored by being a victim of rape), and other offenses against Islamic law. Apparently, these crimes went unreported because the Dutch government feared giving offense to Holland’s Muslim minority.

While the left constantly criticizes the right for practicing a so-called “politics of fear” about the Islamist threat, the left, with assistance from an immense campaign of media hype, practices the same thing in an even grander scale about man-made global warming. For ourselves and our children’s generation, the suicide of the West is more of a threat than global warming, the collapsing economy, and any number of other future disasters, because it may well portend the end of a free and democratic civilization. While many experts estimate that the irreversible effects of climate change may take well over one hundred years, the effects of the depopulation of the West (and Western industrial production is considered to be the main cause of increased carbon dioxide emissions) will, if current trends continue, occur well before that, within the next fifty years. As Mark Steyn has argued: “By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria’s by 36%, Estonia’s by 52%.” Although a depopulated Europe will present a decreased threat to global warming – reduced populations is not in and of itself a bad thing, as long as birthrates are high enough to sustain a high quality civilization – the Islamification of Europe does present a clear and present danger to Western Civilization, including the United States. If you do find any value in your current lifestyle for yourself and your children, and its continuation in some semblance of its current state, then you might consider this important. Certainly an Islamified Europe will be intolerant of feminism, secularism, women’s rights, abortion, and gay marriage, to say the least.

So why is there not more concern about this? I think the answer lays in the fact that the politically correct multiculturalists have the Western political elite fearful of being labeled racist if they don’t embrace Islam and all it stands for as a religion.  If they don’t accept Islam’s right to live by its own Sharia laws, Muslim leaders will claim that they are being victimized and discriminated against by the dominant Western culture. The leaders of Islamist Jihad well understand the West’s credo of multicultural tolerance and use it against the West. Shelby Steele has made similar claims about “white guilt” towards blacks in America (Content of Our Character, pp. 77 – 92). Of course, as Kurth, Fonte, Sibley, and Steyn have argued, the politically correct multiculturalists are now largely the Western political elite. Once the Islamist position is dominant, however, the Islamists will not tolerate dissension, or even the existence of those whom they consider to be infidels. As the nineteenth-century French writer, Louis Veuillot, wrote: “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle” (Quoted in Burnham, Suicide of the West, p. 237). Lee Harris has written:

[A] tolerant society needs more than citizens who are themselves personally committed to tolerance: It needs to produce citizens who, in addition to being tolerant themselves, feel that they have an unconditional duty to insist that everyone else in their society be tolerant as well. Somewhat paradoxically, in order to secure a tolerant society, you must teach the young that there are times when they have a civic duty to be intolerant, namely, when dealing with those who refuse to play by the rules that are necessary for the creation of a tolerant society. If you teach the young that they should never be intolerant themselves, because intolerance is always wrong, then you will be making your society immensely vulnerable to those who themselves practice intolerance. (The Suicide of Reason, pp. 198 – 99)

Where to draw the line with intolerance? Certainly not where advocates of Political Correctness have drawn the line, limiting the free speech of American citizens on campus and in the media, which is a form of Orwellian thought control. Rather, I think the point of Harris’s comment is to resist and limit the ability of those who advocate, promote, and conspire to kill those American citizens who disagree with them, in addition to those who fund such enterprises. I would argue that it is the very effects of the thought control of political correctness that leaves us (the U.S. and the West) defenseless against the totalitarian ideologies of Islamic fascism, and that in fact, we already live in a semi-totalitarian society ourselves, at least in respect to free thought and speech, when any argument in our defense is slandered as racist. For example, in Maureen Corrigan’s review of Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible for NPR, she stated: ‘Gerstle explores how our country has contended with two contradictory ideas of itself: a racial nationalism that conceived of America as “a people held together by common blood and skin color and by an inherited fitness for self-government,” versus a far more inclusive “civic nationalism” in which the melting-pot promise of full citizenship is open to all.’ This is an old tactic: smear the opposition with an extreme example of guilt by association (because some people who are opposed to unlimited immigration are racists, all who oppose unlimited immigration, must be racists). I suppose one could use the same tactic with socialism, and argue that because some socialists are communists, therefore all socialists must be communists. (By the way Corrigan, what “melting pot”?) Buchanan offered the following example of how the Stalinist Soviet Union dealt with critics and dissenters:

From the Moscow Central Committee in 1943:

Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascists, or Nazi or anti-Semitic. . . The association will, after enough repetition, become “fact” in the public mind. (Quoted Buchanan, The Death of the West, p. 82)

The point of this essay is not to extol the current War on Terror, because in fact, I think that the Iraq War has served to take our eye off the ball of the real threat, which is the proliferation of terrorist cells in Europe and America, and the impotence of the politically correct European and American establishments to resist. As Melanie Phillips has indicated in Londonistan (2006), the real center of Islamist terrorism is in the mosques and madrassahs of London and the rest of Europe. So while I agree with Bush’s critics that invading Iraq was a mistake – in my opinion, a strategic mistake for an overextended U.S. military, but certainly not the moral equivalent of Nazism as claimed in the frenzied rhetoric of the far left – the threat from Islamic fascism is very real, especially in Europe. Although nothing is inevitable, if current trends continue and Europe is lost to Islam, as in the title of Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone, America will be truly alone, with the possible exceptions of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. To assume that once third world nations are supreme and that Europeans and Americans are in the minority at home as well as abroad, that our children will be treated fairly by their new masters, makes about as much sense as the belief that if there are other intelligent beings in the universe they will necessarily be beneficent and not predatory.  

Our children, with the politically correct dogmas of multiculturalism, have been taught, or rather indoctrinated, to believe that all cultural traditions are equal and to be preserved with respect, except their own. They have been indoctrinated to believe that America, and Western Civilization, are the main sources of political oppression in the world today, instead of a beacon of liberty and democracy for the world to respect, and sometimes emulate. Thus, they are deprived of the very will to survive as a civilization, which is essential for the survival of any civilization, and for the individuals and progeny of those individuals who make up that civilization. Jean-Francois Revel has written, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.” Yet, while enjoying all the abundant benefits of our civilization, the multiculturalists continue to denigrate it and to advocate its destruction so that it can be replaced by a new, untried and untested, multicultural utopia.

As Nietzsche wrote about the death of God (The Gay Science,1882) in the hearts of his contemporaries, that Christian morality as a set of shared cultural beliefs was destroyed by rationalism and science, so we might now ask: Is Western Civilization dead? Has it been destroyed by multiculturalism? Or do we still have a set of shared cultural beliefs that could even be described as a civilization?

David Davis

I have called this one _MY_ quote, because I know that a majority of libertarians, especially in Britain, think we ought not to be militarily involved in Afghanistan – or anywhere else for that matter. Therefore I will not annoy and insult these people by calling it the “Libertarian Alliance Quote of the Day” (although it ought to be.) I take responsibility for it instead of the august think-tank for which I have the privilege to be allowed to blog.

These libertarians, and others, know that I have never failed to support war in Iraq, or Afghanistan, and that I say [regularly] that the West _must_ take war, if need be everywhere that is required, to all those who cheerfully, frankly and materially oppose individual liberty anywhere. The people the West is trying to resist are not “insurgents”. They are not even “terrorists”, which is why the notion of “The War On Terror” is so glib, shallow and meaningless – these people are willing soldiers for a cause, they really believe what they are saying and they mean to destroy us: they are the willing agents of purposeful and committed deconstructors of everything they think we stand for and love.

Here’s Charles Moore:-

If we truly want to win the war in Afghanistan, we need to challenge its opponents much more fiercely. Politicians such as Nick Clegg, who congratulate themselves on asking the necessary, awkward questions, need to be interrogated about what they actually want. Do they want the first defeat of the most powerful military alliance in history at the hands of a small band of fanatics armed with little more than rifles and IEDs?

Do they have any conception of what such a defeat would mean for the world order, for the stability of countries in the region, or for civil peace in every European city? Do they not understand that this fight will be seen all over the world not as a battle for control of some jagged mountains, but between values, and that, if our values do not win, they will lose?

Please read old Charlie Moore on the whole thing: he puts some sharp perspectives on war, its roles – good or bad they may be – in intercivilisational conflict, and where we ought to go from here. I already said a couple of days ago that the alternatives are only (and ever) victory or defeat, and what it will mean. He’s probably read Sir John Keegan. I doubt most of our present politicians have even heard of the bugger.

The first (annual?) Chavagnes Great Books summer course is just about to start. We are expecting Professor Anthony O’Hear on Sunday, together with a group of enthusiastic participants from the UK, France, Ireland and the United States.

We are going to spend a week in the company of Homer, Euripides, Dantes, Shakespeare and other great minds of western culture.

We are also going to have some fun and experience culture ‘in the raw’ (not just in seminars. We are looking forward to live drama, live music and visits to local cultural and historic sites, as well as ten days of good old fellowship.

But let’s look beyond this summer, and think about some of the ideas we have for 2010 and 2011.

We are planning already to repeat this year’s summer course for adults, and make it even more fun. So watch this space.

We are also hoping to develop a Great Books Camp for boys, and possibly for girls too. We would be aiming at the 13-18 age bracket, and plan to come up with a package similar to that we are hosting this year for adults.

In addition, we are floating the idea of a House of Studies, based at the campus of Chavagnes International College, that would incorporate the unique Chavagnes approach to education in an adult education context, providing opportunities for young people to study various subjects in an atmosphere of faith and culture, at the heart of Europe. For more details, visit: http://www.chavagnes.org/news/Chavagnes_Studium.shtml

(For details of our summer course, click here.)

Our summer course is based on Professor O’Hear’s latest book:

The Great Books:  A Journey through 2,500 Years of the West’s Classic Literature, published by Icon in the UK and ISI in the USA.

The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales: great literature can be read by anyone, with a little help. The eminent British philosopher Anthony O’Hear leads the way with this captivating journey through two-and-a-half millennia of books as powerful, thrilling, erotic, politically astute, and awe-inspiring as any modern bestseller.

O’Hear begins with Homer, whose poems of epic struggle have made him the father of Western literature. After Greek tragedy, Plato, and Virgil’s Aeneid comes Ovid, whose encyclopedic Metamorphoses is an inexhaustible source for European art and literature. Via Saint Augustine, O’Hear reaches Dante and his terrifying and sublime Divine Comedy. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Pascal, Racine, and finally Goethe complete the cast list. In each case, O’Hear patiently draws out themes, focuses on key passages, and explains why they are important.

Not simply a grand work of reference, The Great Books is also a narrative history shot through with a love of literature and the author’s deeply held belief in its power to enrich and enliven everyone’s world.

(For details of our summer course on The Great Books, from 26th July to 4th August, click here.)

(For details of our summer course, click here.)

For two and a half millennia, from Homer’s Iliad to Goethe’s Faust, the foundation of Western literature was the epic, and built upon it, the tragic and the poetic. The whole edifice was enveloped in a world of myth, by turns classical and Christian, in which the divine and the human met, in which the gods became as men and men as gods. These forms and these myths permitted the portrayal of greatness in a way which is hardly possible today. 

A sense of the sacred … 

The backdrop of sacred order allows our writers a simplicity, a strength and a grandeur which is inevitably lost in the detail of descriptive naturalism and psychological realism, and also in the fascination with the mediocre and the mundane which begins to take over in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Compare, for example, Emma Bovary with Racine’s Phedre, Joyce’s Bloom with Homer’s Odysseus, Proust’s Marcel with Sophocles’ Oedipus or with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The themes, the dilemmas, the characters are of a different order. 

The clue to the transition from literary greatness to modernity emerges in Faust himself. As he dies, the Earth Spirit notwithstanding, he cries out that he stands before nature as a man, alone. If we are men, alone, then there is nothing to imbue our lives with meaning, other than what emerges from our own psychology – the very domain explored so brilliantly and exhaustively in the nineteenth and twentieth century novel. As the Spirits sang to Faust earlier ‘you have destroyed our beautiful world’, the world, that is of Homer, of Virgil, of Dante, of our great books generally. 

Maybe that world has been destroyed, and our condition is one of inevitable disillusion. This is one reason why the great books of the past are on many levels foreign to us and inaccessible. But that is also the reason why we should access them, on their own terms. Only then will we come to experience what we have lost. In doing this we will certainly discover something about ourselves, for bits of that lost world still resonate today. And, as in all renaissances, we might also discover that some of the lost greatness can, with patience and humility, be recovered.

The organisers of this summer course, motivated variously by Christian faith, love of culture or concern for modern society invite you to join them in working for the spiritual and cultural renaissance that our continent and our world so badly need.

If it says “embedding disabled by request”, then just go to this place:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3B49N46I39Y

These last two are from Swieta Lipka in Poland. We go there sometimes:-

According to this article the torture meted out to Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison wasn’t the work of a few ‘bad apples’, it was actually a policy accepted by the very top levels of the US government… I guess this is what happens if you have a society which is highly nationalistic, practices cognitive dissonance everyday, and believe we hold superior values to other cultures, religions and nations. As representatives of the people, when our governments are involved in systematic torture, we need to look ourselves in the mirror and ask some pretty hard questions about our acceptance of a system which would allow such abuse of human rights and dignity.

What is also interesting is the lack of reportage of these findings and the fact its all been released on a Friday, close to Christmas. I guess the major media outlets wont pick it up as people don’t want to be feeling any worse than they already do considering the funk the recession has already caused. The fact is, the mainstream media is pretty much complicit in this kind of thing. If this happened anywhere else, there would be cries of war crimes. The fact is, the media does very well out of its position as part of the establishment (often owned by very powerful and influential people) and therefore really has no reason to question the legitimacy of governments that are involved in this kind of action.

Over the coming months we’ll hear more about those ’savage’ Africans in Somalia, Zimbabwe and peoples of the Middle East (Afghanistan comes to mind) who just don’t seem to be able to ‘get’ our enlightenment ideals of freedom and democracy. In fact these are the people who see beyond the rhetoric and are on the wrong end of the reality of western values (whether being tortured by American troops or experiencing centuries of European imperialism), and I imagine they do indeed ‘hate our freedoms’. As Gandhi once so astutely put it, western civilisation would be a nice thing.

David Davis

Good night all. Carry on, praecantor.

‘But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.’  ~ I Timothy 5:8

If you appreciate the fruits of Western Civilisation–and you should if you do not–you can thank the 300 Spartans who stood in the breach at Thermopylae and battered the Persian hoard which outnumbered them 400:1.  Though the Greeks were destroyed (due in no small part to a betrayal) after two days of brutal and fierce close-quarters combat, these brave men ultimately saved the West.

Why did they do it?  They were defending kin and soil–two things that don’t seem to matter as much to-day as they once did.  We are a semi-nomadic people spread hither and yon, miles away from our immediate (not mention extended) families.  And, for that matter, the age-old adage, ‘Blood is thicker than water’ means very little anymore.

I have not seen the movie ‘300′ which chronicles this heroic frame in Time but I may have to break down and do so.  This video overdubs ‘Game On’ by Christian rock band Disciple; if it doesn’t inspire you, I suggest you drive to the nearest hospital and have them check you for a heart.  (Warning: The violent movie footage in the video is quite graphic–it’s not for the young or weak of stomach.)

David Davis

Gerald Warner asks if it’s just him who’s perplexed by this. And how exactly does electing an anti-Western fascist lefty like Barack Obama, and during a war to boot, which is to say: shooting oneself in both feet instead of one, help either the USA or assuage some kind of mediarati Beltway collective guilt, and about what?

The dude has done nothing except be a lawyer, a political activist (on the wrong side) and collect degrees. This is not what wannabe-Presidents of the most importan nation on earth do, if its people are to be served well – assuming that is what they still want out of a President.

The epistemologically-measured distance between Obama and Pol Pot is less than the similarly-measured distance between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Remember what this dude Obama said earlier, and ask yourselves, especially you Americans who read us, what you’d do about a guy who thinks you are great, and is going to change you…..into what?

David Davis

No comment needed.

From Chuck Colson

The faculty of Harvard University admired Alexandr Solzhenitsyn for his literary achievements, so they were thrilled that he agreed to deliver the university’s 1978 commencement address. But almost as soon as he began to speak, the professors changed their minds: too late. As I wrote this month in Christianity Today, they realized that Solzhenitsyn was charging them with complicity in the West’s surrender to liberal secularism, the abandonment of its Christian heritage, and of all the moral horrors that followed.

For example, describing the Western worldview as “rationalistic humanism,” Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of “our concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.” Man has become “the master of this world . . . who bears no evil within himself,” he announced. “So all the defects of life” are attributed to “wrong social systems.”

Solzhenitsyn argued that this moral impoverishment had led to a debased definition of freedom, which makes no distinction between “freedoms for good” or “freedoms for evil.” Our founders, he reminded us, would scarcely have countenanced “all this freedom with no purpose” but for the “satisfaction of one’s whims;” they demanded freedom be granted conditionally upon the individual’s constant exercise of his religious responsibilities.

Solzhenitsyn could hardly have imagined that, just 14 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court would enshrine this radical definition of freedom: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Solzhenitsyn also foresaw the rise of political correctness. “Fashionable trends of thoughts and ideas,” he said, “are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable.” He predicted this would lead to “strong mass prejudices” with people being “hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.”

Could even Solzhenitsyn have imagined that sexual rights would in 30 years triumph over free expression, that academia would impose rigid speech codes, or that churches would be threatened with the loss of their tax-exempt status for opposing the homosexual agenda?

On that June day, 30 years ago, Solzhenistsyn predicted that, in time, we would become more concerned with the civil rights of terrorists than with our own national security. Could he have imagined that 30 years later to the week, the Supreme Court, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, would uphold the civil rights of enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay?

Solzhenitsyn also charged the West with losing its “civic courage . . . particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites.” After all, he said, with “unlimited freedom on the choice of pleasures,” why should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good?

Three decades after Solzhenitsyn’s speech, Americans find themselves in the grip of violent and pornographic “entertainment,” growing censorship of unfashionable ideas, a new wave of isolationism, and a spiritually exhausted citizenry.

The solution Solzhenitsyn offered at the Harvard commencement was for a “spiritual blaze.” The question is, have we listened? Do we see signs of awakening? And is there still time to renew ourselves out of our “spiritual exhaustion”?

David Davis (as if you had not guessed.)

Read John Bolton here.

Better to be dead that red “socialised”.

…Guido has an interesting take.

David Davis

The question tonight is: “Have the voters of Crewe/Nantwich actually voted against _socialism_ (which, for new readers, is a barbarian/pre-capitalist lethal killing-blight on the face of Western Civilisation, under which mankind will be doomed to Universal Extinction in Time, and therefore the Universe will end its Life dead, as an Extinguished Object) or have they merely voted against Gordon Brown and “new” “Labour”? Not of course the same thing at all!

I think the latter.

There is still no hope, really, for a “Sea Change” – whatever one of those things is. The problem with the British is that, being as we are a good people, we feel that we ought to get our noses rubbed in Stalinisto-Nazi shite every 10 or 20 years or so, as a sort of penance for having worked hard to achieve a better life in the meantime, for ourselves and – more importantly - as a beacon to others.

So here you go…

1906…we have just (1901) expensively saved Africa and all its then-existing and subsequent peoples from the Devil, and we go and elect an administration at home, which proposes that the State ought to do more stuff. Madness.

1922…we have just (even more expensively, and we are actually bust) saved the whole world form the Devil, and we go and eletc a Labour Government. Madness. Thankfully it falls down.

1945…we have just, all over again (because nobody listened to Haig about the Armistice and Versailles) re-saved the whole world from the same Devil, and we go and fire the man who got victory, and elect a … Labour Government. Madness. (My father, a returning soldier in 1945, from Burma, confessed to me that “well, son, we were told, and thought, that we were voting for a Brave New World”. His words, not mine.)

1964…Sex has just been invented the year before by Kenneth Tynan, just a few days too late to save John Profumo (if I was an adult in 1963, I’d have PAID to shag Christine Keeler, but the lucky bastard got her for free it seems – this phrase is to be used to check if people read this blog or not) and we elect a Labour Government. Madness.

1964-1979…Labour continues in power for 15 years under various socialist PMs including Ted Heath. Madness.

1990…The British find even slight success to be a bit tiring and hard-going, and want a rest, so liberalism gets shafted and Labour gets in again under John Major. Madness.

1997…the British elect another socialist: a real leftie, who is cleverly pretending to be a-Conservative-pretending-to-be-a leftie. Under him, this clever man Blair, Britain is turned into a Police State, so all you are allowed to vote for now is lefties. Madness.

2007…Britain is provided with a real-leftie-pretending-to-be-a-leftie-who-is-at-heart-a-Conservative, but pretends to see through the disguise, so he flops. Still madness, though.

Until we get this bug out of our system, the trait that makes us want to think we want to help the “underdog” and that this can only be done – importantly in this belief - by a Big State doing Big Things, we will never break out of the eternal cycle of “socialism followed by a little breathing space before the next round of socialism”.

No, I don’t think the war is over, it’s only one election, the Nazis played the “toff” card and lost, and they won’t do it again as it was a bummer. The bastards want us dead, or at least they want our civilisation and culture dead, and they are part-way-there. They won’t stop now.

The Conservatives are not going to make any real change in the strategic battle-lines of this conflict, so perhaps we should have hopes for a Libertarian Party.

For me, I would like to see socialism, all its historiography, all its literature, all its works, and all its Utopian ideas, actually expunged, erazed, deleted and “washed with bleach”, as far as Mankind is concerned. We can’t bring back the killed humans of course, nor can we free all the slaves, either retrospectively or even today for the millions still enslaved in oil-producing-countries (and others, less endowed) which I cannot name for libel reasons. That is the tragedy. The lost time, and the lost wealth? We will just have to stand it, and try, try to make it all up, somehow, in the fullness of deep future time, if there is enough.

But a grand collective apology, from the non-English-Speaking-World, to the Anglosphere, and in particular England, for unilaterally declaring slavery illegal in 1807, and prosecuting slavers unilaterally thereafter, would be in order. I shall not demand 235 trillion dollars, just an apology. (This was not about slavery at first, but then I shafted the plot by talking about socialism. Ha Ha.) 

Since this is my first post, I thought I should take this opportunity to welcome all you readers out there. Since the blog is very new, some of you will no doubt be reading this a few weeks or months further down the track – to those people, welcome all the same.

Consider this post my manifesto, the prelude and first chapter of an extended treatise on the aim and purpose of this blog.

In addition to providing a platform for my own political, philosophical, cultural take on the scheme of things in this world, where we’ve been and where we’re going, I also aim to appeal to those with more low-brow interests. Maybe by appealing to such a broad reader base I can reconcile the two and make the loftier musings of mankind accessible to the great unwashed. This is a critical in a world of mass bubble popculture and consumerist-enabled dumbing down of Western Civilisation. In my future work, I hope to point to the common thread to this, and the political and social agenda behind Western Culture’s descent into a new Dark Age.

Once again, a very warm welcome to you all, and I look forward to your comments and thoughts on this and future posts!

David Davis

Libertarian Alliance quote of the day….from our good and right friends at Delaware Libertarian…

The Stupidity of Ethanol in a single sentence

David Davis

Hat tips from Free Market Fairy Tales, and Kathy Shaidle.

David Bullard was fired from the Times for saying the following:

http://www.fmft.net/archives/003013.html

Uncolonised Africa wouldn’t know what it was missing

So David Bullard the ‘controversial’ Sunday Times columnist has been given the boot. Turns out the bad boy of South African writing ruffled a few feathers with his column “Out To Lunch” on Sunday. In his last offering of Out to Lunch, Bullard graphically detailed how Africa had “benefited” from colonialism, an argument that drew criticism from readers and social commentators. “He wrote a racist column on Sunday. I had a conversation with him on Tuesday, I told him that what he wrote was unacceptable,” Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya said last night. “It went against the values of this newspaper. “He told me he believed what he had written. I took a decision as editor to discontinue his contract.”

Business Day Friday 11/04/2008

& here is the piece in question

Imagine for a moment what life would be like in South Africa if the evil white man hadn’t come to disturb the rustic idyll of the early black settlers. Ignored by the Portuguese and Dutch, except as a convenient resting point en route to India. Shunned by the British, who had decided that their empire was already large enough and didn’t need to include bits of Africa.

There are no roads because no roads are needed because there are no cars. It’s 2008 and no one has taken the slightest interest in South Africa, apart from a handful of botanists and zoologists who reckon that the country’s flora and fauna rank as one of the largest unspoilt areas in a polluted world. Because they have never been exposed to the sinful ways of the West, the various tribes of South Africa live healthy and peaceful lives, only occasionally indulging in a bit of ethnic cleansing.

Their children don’t watch television because there is no television to watch. Instead they listen to their grandparents telling stories around a fire. They live in single-storey huts arranged to catch most of the day’s sunshine and their animals are kept nearby.

Nobody has any more animals than his family needs and nobody grows more crops than he requires to feed his family and swap for other crops. Ostentation is unknown because what is the point of trying to impress your fellow citizens when they are not impressible?

The dreaded Internet doesn’t exist in South Africa and cellphone companies have laughed off any hope of interesting the inhabitants in talking expensively into a piece of black plastic. There are no unsightly shopping malls selling expensive goods made by Asian slave workers and consequently there are no newspapers or magazines carrying articles comparing the relative merits of ladies’ handbags.

Whisky, the curse of the white man, isn’t known in this undeveloped land and neither are cigars. The locals brew a sort of beer out of vegetables and drink it out of shallow wooden bowls. Five-litre paint cans have yet to arrive in South Africa.

Every so often a child goes missing from the village, eaten either by a hungry lion or a crocodile. The family mourn for a week or so and then have another child. Life is, on the whole, pretty good but there is something vital missing. Being unaware of the temptations of the outside world, nobody knows what it is. Fire has been discovered and the development of the wheel is coming on nicely but the tribal elders are still aware of some essential happiness ingredient they still need to discover. Praying to the ancestors is no help because they are just as clueless.

Then something happens that will change this undisturbed South Africa forever. Huge metal ships land on the coast and big metal flying birds are sent to explore the sparsely populated hinterland. They are full of men from a place called China and they are looking for coal, metal, oil, platinum, farmland, fresh water and cheap labour and lots of it. Suddenly the indigenous population realise what they have been missing all along: someone to blame. At last their prayers have been answered

.

Published: Sunday Times Apr 07, 2008

Blog Post Dated: April 18, 2008 1:00 AM | Permalink

AND… on Kathy Shaidle…

From Hallsofmacadamia.blogspot.com

08/04/18

For having the nerve to actually say it…

“Columnist David Bullard made a good point, and one

we have made here in the past: compared to the

stone age – or to anything else, Western civilization

is a gift.”

*

David Davis

The poor confused old Marxist-leaning Archbishop has apparently delivered a sermon, preaching about how “….. modern “comforts and luxuries” were unsustainable and would one day bring about the collapse of civilisation. He added that Christians must prepare by striving constantly to let go of “selfish, controlling, greedy habits”……”

The report and the comment-thread in particular are worth a read: majority opinion seems to be against the fellow, but this the Telegraph is not the Guardian.

So here’s a more constructive Christian Message for Easter, which the sad old wierdie-beardie would do well to read out in his (agreeably wonderful) Cathedral sometime.

 ”Western Greed” is a theoretical construction, reflecting the mindset of those anti-Western philosphers who live in a fictitious neopastoral idyll, which is unobtainable and not desirable for humans to be in.

The “resources” often referred to in such discussions would neither be discovered nor invented if not for the liberal post-Renaissance “Western” attitude to life and the purpose of existence. the purpose of existence is not simply to exist and just die, but to better the lot of humans everywhere. This cannot be done by forcing those whose societies have the power for betterment, to live as if they were locally-chained-subsistence-farmers.

Capitalism is NOT a zero-sum game; the doing of it benefits all, especially those “outside” initially, and makes poverty and deprivation hideous (where it was never hideous before!) because it shows the world what shall be achieved instead. It has been the West, and in especial particular the British Empire and Commonwealth, which has done most to spread worldwide the ability to deploy great amounts of energy and resource, and the benefits of this to humankind – and not any other “civilisation”. We glibly allow ourselves to marvel at the seeming longevity of “ancient” civilisations, but we forget that dozens of generations of humans lived in these, in substantially unchanged primitive conditions, without any improvement whatsoever, from one millenium to the next. Instead of flagellating ourslevs, we should aggressively ask all the other societies what it was that stopped them from developing and improving the lot of their people in any way at all?

A precapitalist society’s “rulers” are to blame for their people being stuck – not ours for showing the whole world how to unstick. 

Marxist lefties stuck with a wrong analysis of human relationships, and “liberal” Anglican “Archbishops”, simply have never got this connection.

Die Befragung ergab mindestens 1.033.000 irakische Gewalttote, bei einer Fehlerquote von 1,7 Prozent. Für die Studie wurden 2.414 Erwachsene in 15 der 18 Provinzen befragt. In den Provinzen Kerbala und Anbar konnte die Befragung aufgrund der unsicheren Lage nicht durchgeführt werden. Auch Erbil musste von der Befragung  ausklammert werden. Etwa ein Fünftel der irakischen Haushalte beklagen dabei den Verlust eines Angehörigen. Für die Errechnung verwendeten die beiden Institutionen die letzte Volkszählung, die im Irak 1997 durchgeführt wurde.

Diese Zahlen stehen in in krassem Gegensatz zu den offiziellen Zahlen der US-Regierung, die von 100.000 Todesopfern sprechen. (sa)
www.igmg.de

teil 1

Operation Hollywood

Amerikaner lieben Kriegsfilme weil darin Helden und Schurken vorkommen. Es gibt Konflikte, Dramen, Gewalt und Action und am Ende gewinnen immer die Guten. Doch in wie weit stehen Film- und Militärmaschinerie in Verbindung? Wer entscheidet wer Held und wer Schurke ist? Und beeinflusst das US-Militär mit Geld und Material bewusst den Inhalt historischer Ereignisse auf eine fast propagandistische Art und Weise?
Genre Dokumentation Länge 90 Min. Grösse 713 MB Format divx Sprache Deutsch
http://video.stage6.com/2018213/.divx

alternative

Genre Dokumentation Länge 10 Min. Grösse 65 MB Format wmv Sprache Deutsch
insgesamt 9 stück gesamt grösse 577MB

Die Kriegs-Propaganda-Maschinerie der USA.wmv
Die Kriegs-Propaganda-Maschinerie der USA_1.wmv
Die Kriegs-Propaganda-Maschinerie der USA_2.wmv
Die Kriegs-Propaganda-Maschinerie der USA_3.wmv
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Die Kriegs-Propaganda-Maschinerie der USA_8.wmv

teil 2

teil 3

teil 4

teil 5

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unterfalscheflage_1.wmv 10 minute 37MB
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“Die Welt hat sich nach dem 11. September verändert. Sie hat sich verändert, weil wir von nun an nicht mehr sicher sind.

Die Worte benutzte der im Jahr 2000 gewählte Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten George W. Bush, um die politische Richtung für das 21. Jahrhundert zu diktieren.

Während die Amerikaner verhältnismäßig schnell mit gefälschten Beweisen zuerst Afghanistan und später den Irak angreifen, wächst der Zweifel an der offiziellen Version des 11. Septembers. Was unmittelbar nach den Anschlägen an Spekulationen im Internet kursierte, galt bisher als wilde Verschwörungstheorie. Doch die Indizien und sogar Beweise zeichnen ein deutliches Bild. Nicht islamische Terroristen, sondern einige ranghohe Militärs und Politiker der US-Regierung selbst, scheinen für die schrecklichen Anschläge verantwortlich zu sein.

Diese Dokumentation beschäftigt sich mit den Ungereimtheiten der offiziellen Version, sowie den unterdrückten Beweisen des 11. Septembers. Ausserdem gibt er eine Antwort auf die Frage, warum wir bis heute nichts davon wissen und wieso man uns belügt – auch in Deutschland. —–

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tags: zeitgeist, loose change, 911, bush, cia, dokumentation, german, deutsch, bundestag, politik, violetten, opartei, terror, osama bin laden, krieg gegen den terror, irak, iran, atomwaffen, medein kritik,information, bildung ,meinung, verschwörung ,verschwörungstheorie, 911 ,mysteries ,nuoviso ,press for truth revisited ,11. september, new york ,pentagon ,flugzeuge,crash in plane ,site ,insidejob ,brüssel demo, united for truth

Die DVD gibt es unter: http://www.nuoviso.de

Going into 2008, it’s apparent that the gap in the quality and quantity of blogging output between conservative bloggers in the English-speaking Commonwealth and their counterparts in the US, is showing little sign of narrowing.

Although the population of the US dwarfs that of Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, the English-speaking Commonwealth still has a population of over 110 million from which to draw upon. However, we are still failing to produce many bloggers in the class of US traditional and scientific conservatives like Daniel Larison, Steve Sailer, Randall Parker, Jim Kalb, Lawrence Auster, John Savage, and John Press.

As well as being a regular blogger, Mr Press has also produced a substantial book Culturism, which tackles the weighty issue of western cultural survival. Steve Sailer’s blog appears to attract the lions share of reader comments, although Auster and Larison also appear to be attracting significant web traffic. (Hat tip to Daniel Larison for being my best referrer, with Oz Conservative second, and mainstream NZ blogger David Farrar third).

Among many others worthy of mention include the lucid and entertaining Dennis Dale, and punchy empiricist Audacious Epigone.

The most consistent and accomplished conservative blogger in the British Commonwealth remains Mark Richardson of Oz Conservative, who is now into his 5th year of lucidly and persistently de-constructing liberalism. However, he is conspicuous for the being the only conservative blogger in Australasia to consistently produce quality commentary on a regular basis.

On this side of the Tasman I regret to report that the Internet scene continues to be dominated by libertarians who seems to think defending western civilisation goes no further than ranting about tax rates.

Canadian output is similarly limited. Immigration blogger Hogtown Front stood out for the quality and accuracy of his postings on Immigration in Ontario, but ceased blogging on a consistent basic earlier this year. Similarly, Vancouver blogger Kevin Michael Grace has been pretty quiet this year, although he is no doubt making a valuable contribution through his work with the American Conservative.

Britain is producing some good bloggers with a law and order focus, with Laban Tall of UK Commentators one of the best in this regard. Unfortunately though, there are few UK bloggers who are willing to offer serious, original analysis of the type that US writers like Kalb and Sailer deliver on a regular basis (a possible star in the making, though is teenager Sam Tarran, who is already producing some good posts at a ridiculously young age).

Although Continental conservatives appear to be preoccupied with current events concerning Islamic immigration (and who can blame them) there are a few European pundits like Fjiordman and Conservative Swede who are going the extra mile and producing some serious critiques of modern liberal thinking.

Perhaps 2007’s most important site from a Conservative perspective though, was not a political blogger, but a non-partisan Internet lobbying site, Numbers USA, which played a vital contribution to the downfall of George Bush’s unpopular illegal immigration amnesty.