From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 6: When The Music Stops

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The sum of our fears

Question:  What are these people doing in Europe? Who invited them? Who let them in? Who let them stay? What has allowed them to even dream about moving to Europe, let alone realizing a colonization plan?

In Great Britain alone, intelligence agencies are tracking 200 terrorists plots among Pakistani Brits, of whom some 2,000 are under observation. More than 400,000 Pakistani citizens of Great Britain travel every year to Pakistan – a country of 12,000 madrassas and, as of mid-2005, 55 terrorist training camps.

Why are there a million (1) Pakistanis in Great Britain?  Just what has been going on in the brains of the British ruling elites these past 40 years? What has been going on in the brains of the ruled British people?

What are these people doing in the United States? We know how they came and who and what let them in, but why? The stock answer is: the left, to gain new voters; the right, to get cheap labor. But it’s not the real answer, except if this be a society of madmen.

You have to be a moron, an ignoramus with no knowledge of history, religion, philosophy, social psychology, economics, geopolitics, strategy, statecraft, higher [and ipso facto Western (2)] culture not to be aware that you have seeded a future civil war, an economic calamity, a cultural wasteland, a major devaluation of social capital, a destruction of your own mother, your nation. Yet the people who have inflicted all this on us have very high IQs (3) and have all been educated at the very best universities.

Why is Christmas in Sweden greeted these days with flaming mayhem  by imported Muslim barbarians, rather than with flaming glögg by Swedes?  Why are there 2 millions irredeemably alien “refugees” (4) in Sweden, including 600,000 Muslims, when there are only 7 million Swedes proper?

There are answers to this too: the politicians and the mass media are foisting this madness on the people, and the people have no power and no voice. But it’s a copout: the Swedish people do have the power and the voice – they just prefer not to use them.

All the answers are no answers. If we looked solely at the demographic folly of the West, the resultant fraying of the social fabric, the certainty of rapidly accelerating socio-political entropy, the inevitability of future internecine violence due to the infusion of 70 million Muslims (5) and growing, with many more to issue from those – that alone would qualify as the greatest catastrophe the West has inflicted upon itself since the Assembly of Athens, swayed by Alcibiades -- a glamorous fast-mouth of a type that entrances the demos of democracy to this day -- decided to send an enormous armada on its ill-fated mission to conquer distant Sicily in 415 BC.

For ours is not a disaster imposed from the outside, such as Hitler’s Germany inflicted on the rest of Europe, or Muslim jihad on Christendom. What we are witnessing is a voluntary self-destruction carried out by democratically elected political leaders on acquiescing populations that, largely, refuse to see The Emperor’s New Clothes even as his naked arse is at arm’s length from their faces.

To the contrary, gross, transparent lies such as “Our Strength is in Diversity, “All Whites are racists,” “Islam is a religion of peace” seem to have much traction with the general population, even though in the depth of their falsehood they equal the worst that the subjects of the Bolshevik Empire had to live under. The West has become an Orwellian tyranny of preferred lies, forcing the natural social preference for one’s own people into the same inhuman mold as the Bolsheviks applied to the natural preference for one’s family’s material wellbeing.

But that is just one of many symptoms. Why is the culture of Aristotle and Kant, Cervantes and Molière, Thomas Mann and Raymond Chandler, Mozart and Rachmaninoff, Velazquez and Bruegel, Charles Chaplin and Francis Coppola, Levi’s and Valentino now almost the exclusive province of Amy Winehouse and Rage Against the Machine, Booty Pop Panties and designer-torn jeans with rhinestone skull patches, Reality TV celebrating real repulsive imbeciles, and illiterate hoodlums with diamond-encrusted gold chains prancing on MTV ? Why are pierced eyebrows, green hair and Che Guevara the hottest fashion statement of Western man and woman?

Why is the idea of multiculturalism to not know any culture, least of all one’s own, rather than to know one’s culture plus at least one other? 

Nor is the destruction demographic and cultural only. The madness of financial capitalism, of multiplying debt through reckless leverage and breeding funny money through out-of-control credit expansion, of making of consumption and borrowing rather than production and saving the holy grail of nouveau capitalism, have pushed America and capitalism itself under water. The shockwaves have swept through the West, bringing destruction in places ranging from Iceland to Bulgaria.

As reported by Reuters, in November 2008, the ten largest American financial companies had about $12.2 trillion of assets and only $406 billion of tangible common capital, or just 3.4%. The US financial system had $37 trillion of debt outstanding. According to some reckonings, the ten largest banks in America and Europe have a combined equity of 2.8 % of total assets.

That is rash mismanagement bordering on insanity. And where was America’s government in all those years when the hollowing out was taking place? It was too busy with gutting the merit system in order to “improve” the racial and gender “ratios” in the workplace, invading other countries for their own good, or importing itself a new, more primitive and malleable Third World electorate with a voracious appetite for consumption. Not the least the consumption of social services and tax money, hence multiplying the power of the government...

The United States, mankind’s best hope, has become a sad farce, a giant Titanic steaming ahead on waves of deluded triumphalism, inertial hubris, and consumption as the hopeful glue holding together its rent hull, even as it has already slammed into the biggest –and foreseeable decades in advance -- imprudential rock in history.

Weighed down by enormous debt levels and zero savings, a nation begat by thrifty Pilgrims has turned into a giant Ponzi scheme of successive bubbles inflated by phantom money, all burst in turn by unfoolable Reality. It’s also a Ponzi scheme – Rubato Land as I called it – in the sense of the government stealing from future generations in order to create illusory wealth for the present ones.

America is now veering from the capitalism of illicit gains to the socialization of the resulting enormous losses. $3.6 trillion in losses, actually, or 25% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. It’s the greatest financial debacle – scandal, really – ever. The U.S. Government is frantically printing and packing trillions of dollars into holes and fissures in the collapsing hull.

This is a futile attempt to patch up an irreversibly shattered model based on runaway greed, foolishness, and moral corruption at all levels of society. It’s also a gross and demoralizing miscarriage of justice, for the government’s trillions in new money devalue the savings of its responsible citizens in order to save the reckless financial highflyers and irresponsible borrowers.

The specter of hyperinflation, of the fate of Rome and Weimar, is now hovering over the United States as well. The blame must ultimately rest with America’s government, and the people who always get the government they deserve. It no longer matters whether “the Left” or “the Right” run things in Washington. Under the terminally clueless “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush, federal spending grew 60%, much of it wasted in a misbegotten war, bureaucratic boondoggles, and unnecessary government initiatives in areas ranging from fake education, to fake mortgage loans to fake “minorities.”

After leading America’s largest bank and “financial supermarket,” Citigroup, to the edge of the abyss, Chuck Prince, CEO, retired in November 2007 with a “modest” golden parachute of $40 million. In July 2007, in a famous interview with the Financial Times, Mr. Prince had described his company’s financial game as follows:

When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing. "

To realize what sort of dance it was for this citadel of voracity and foolishness, one has to know that at the end of 2006 – the height of the real estate bubble – Citigroup had a stock market value of $274 billion and a $2.2 trillion balance sheet loaded with phantom derivatives and toxic mortgages. As of 20 January 2009, Citigroup’s shares had lost 95% of their market value and were selling for the price of a cup of bad coffee, $2.85.

In the past four months alone Citi has received $45 Billion of the unwilling US taxpayer’s money, plus U.S. government guarantees of impossible-to-keep-track-of-anymore hundreds of billions more to shore up its crumbling balance sheet. It helps to know that Citi is a primary dealer in U.S. Treasury securities. The U.S. Government, currently in debt for $13 trillion, needs Citi’s services to palm off additional U.S. sovereign debt on the increasingly reluctant treasuries of Asia.

The American justice system is broken too. 50,000 civil actions are filed daily. The more social capital and its array of norms and customs are broken through imported “diversity” and multiculti coddling, the more lawsuits multiply. Courts are now not interested in justice but, as a former-prosecutor friend puts it, "disposing of the backlog."

America’s inspired Constitution has been made into a handy gourd that the Imperial Judiciary and its Jacobin theorists in the top law schools fill with any brackish water of “progressive” causes that happen to inflame their passions. So many new and unnecessary laws are enacted, and so many new “victim” classes created and new government privileges arrogated, that falling afoul of the law can be a random process that can harm anyone irrespective of innocence. Raising one’s voice to a boorish flight attendant may result in a felony air terrorism conviction under the cannily named Patriot Act.

In Europe, alas, the picture is even uglier. While the American example shows the self-extinguishing nature of a populist democracy with a besotted and decadent demos, the European example is one of a bien-pensant oligarchy, driving the whole continent off the cliff while singing the praise of its own greatness, complete with a 2.4 billion euros PR – brainwashing budget.

Europe has been busy copying many of the worst features of the United States – from militant feminism, to Affirmative Action, to obsession with human rights rather than human obligations, to a toxic pop culture, to outsize greed and overleveraging of the main European banks. What is has not copied is what’s still healthy and commendable in America – Freedom of Expression, Freedom to Bear Arms, Constitutional protections from the state’s arbitrary power, strong Christian consciousness, ease in setting up and conducting a business, only moderately powerful labor unions, resistance to high taxes.

But America’s still-healthy features may not remain so for long. With state socialism implemented by the last Republican government the U.S. will know for quite a while, and the biggest blanket ever of reality-averse liberalism about to be tied around a somnolent, dumb electorate, America is going to wake up after four or eight years of Obama administration and Nancy Pelosi Congress to find, in the words of James Delingpole, “its pockets empty, its savings gone, its property trashed to virtual worthlessness, its streets rife with crime and its traditional liberties circumscribed by nannying bureaucrats and pettifogging regulation.” And— the most important topic that every “conservative” pundit tiptoes around carefully – a 33% Latino and African segment of the population that votes reflexively socialist and anti-white. That block will have been vastly augmented through a deliberate weakening of border security and endless ‘amnesty.’

Already, the Democrat machine is gearing up to squash freedom of expression through the “Fairness Doctrine,” to enshrine the imposition of chaos by “minorities” through various pro-Muslim, pro-Mexican,  pro-homosexual and anti-“discrimination” initiatives, and to gut the freedom of armed self-defense. The government’s constant race-and-gender meddling in the workplace will escalate far beyond what even the most witless and liberal Republican administration in history has just wrought, and its labor union-coddling will reach levels not seen since before World War 2.

Hence the process we posited at the beginning of this series: the convergence and gelling of Europe and the United States as an oppressive, socialist, anti-white racist, redistributive and economically crumbling police state – Meccania. The recent disinvitation of Vlaams Belang by the American Embassy in Brussels, hours before Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, shows where Obamerica’s European sympathies will lie: with the unhinged Greens, the rioting Muslims, the Lefto-Jewhaters, and the S&M Social Dhimmicrats.

But America still has perhaps eight years to get there, while Europe’s slide down the chute of unintended consequences is already a singular spectacle. In September 2008, Geert Wilders stated in a speech that Europe is in the final stages of Islamization, with America that will remain as the “Last Man Standing.” Wilders cited  multiple European cities that are already one-quarter Muslim, with the majority of the under-18 population that’s Muslim. School curriculums have been distorted to accommodate Muslim sensibilities, and Western culture has receded before the Islamic one – from shop signs in Arabic script to sharia courts.

As per Wilders, 54 million Muslims now live in Europe and 25% of the population will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Muslims will have reached a European voting majority by the end of this century. In every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. “Clearly,” said Wilders, “the rather obvious, and ominous, signal is: «here WE rule»; right 'in your face'.”

What’s thrust in Europe’s face can be seen in these photos.

The Euro ruling elites don’t even try to disguise anymore that they deploy the immigration and naturalization of alien Muslim primitives, as a means to dilute and replace the vote of the autochthon population. “Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties,” said Wilders. “Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as 'right-wing extremists' or 'racists'. The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals, Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam.”

 

Mr. Wilders is now under an indictment of a Body Snatcher Inquisition Tribunal in Amsterdam, for his “hate speech.” And one should not forget in this context the tax-funded plan to invite more than 50 million African workers into the European Union (hat tip, Tiberge), with a job recruiting center already opened in the African state of Mali. Those who speak out against it will share Geert Wilders' cell in prison or in the poorhouse.

The average European’s reaction to such goings-on ranges from evasion to incredulity. But the ruling oligarchy is no longer a part of the people. It’s a class of Body Snatchers (6) with an altered consciousness programmed on Destroy, except Destroy is mislabeled as Renewal. No Stop or Reverse buttons are incorporated into their synthetic carapaces.  And so, a Nicolas Sarkozy, who happens to be the President of France, would retort to the question “What on Earth are you doing?” with a proclamation – pulled at random from his most recent “gems” -- that Arabic is “the language of the future, of science and of modernity that expresses great civilizational and spiritual values."  (Hat tip, Tiberge)

And in Europe too, the destruction has economic dimensions. Pundits in Great Britain, Ireland and Iceland are talking about a “national bankruptcy.” As to the continent, “A great ring of EU states stretching from Eastern Europe down across Mare Nostrum to the Celtic fringe,” writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, ”are either in a 1930s depression already or soon will be. Each is a victim of ill-judged economic policies foisted upon them by elites in thrall to Europe's monetary project - either in EMU or preparing to join - and each is trapped.”

In just the 2nd week of January, in Latvia, protesters enraged by austerity cuts smashed up Latvia's finance ministry and attempted to smash its Parliament. In Lithuania, riot police fired rubber-bullets on a trade union march. In Bulgaria, a demonstration outside the parliament in Sofia turned violent.

In Greece, wrote Prof. Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, “The spectacle of young people (and assorted criminals, leftwing extremists, and self-proclaimed anarchists) on a smash-and-burn spree wrapping themselves in the mantle of justice, martyrdom, and victimhood is only rivaled by that of a government incapable of making a clear and effective distinction between political grievance and thuggery, lawlessness and the rule of law.” (7)

We shall return to the incapability of making clear distinctions as the true disease not only of the Greek government but of the entirety of contemporary Western Civilization. But to revert to Evans-Pritchard, Ireland's economy will contract 4% this year and the deficit may reach 12% of GDP by 2010. Spain lost a million jobs in 2008 and has 16% unemployment that may grow to 25%. Italy's treasury awaits each bond auction with dread, trying to offload €200 billion of debt just in 2009. Greece no longer even tries to sell long bonds to fund its debt.

Evans-Pritchard relays how investors are dumping their “Club Med” and Irish debt on the European Central Bank, forcing it to provide a stealth bail-out for Europe's governments. “Liabilities are being shifted quietly on to German taxpayers. What happens when Germany's hard-working citizens find out?”

He answers too. “Don't expect tremors before an earthquake - and there is no fault line of greater historic violence than the crunching plates where Latin Europe meets Teutonia.”

To translate into plain language: the contours of a European war show  in Evans-Pritchard’s crystal ball. And he has not even mentioned the 54 million Muslims and 50 millions-to-be Africans in Europe. That kind of “racist” concern might have cost him his job.

 

Western Snapshot, early 21st century

The West has finally settled where the hearts and hormones of its ruling elites have lain for generations. France, led by a gangly ghost whose name is Mon General, is following his bony steed toward the mythical land of La Gloire de la Patrie, with patrie defined as a Franco-Arab Empire and the French interested only in what selection of gourmandises the hopeful empire provided in today’s picnic basket.

Great Britain wakes up daily to a routine of sexual perversion that may  be the answered prayer of generations of under-loved and over-privileged public schoolboys in cold dormitories. For breakfast, it’s sodomized by a gang of its formerly-inferior colonials. For lunch, it enjoys a session of self-flagellation for the sins of Empire and fox-hunting. For dinner, it watches through peepholes in the MSM bordello.

In one bug-eyed vista, the Royal Family – Becks, Posh and their perfect children – eat tofu burgers and sip Evian while dressed in Armani underwear. Through the more risqué peephole, the nation thrills to an orgy of Roman proportions in London, with nine-figure Albanian investment bankers ravishing hourglass-figure Lithuanian beauties to the beat of Jamaican rap and the snap of Italian paparazzi flashes.

The poor Germans too are at long last where their hearts have been for 100 years. They now have a dialectically progressing Marxist  Republic, with wild-eyed political, cultural and environmental comrades barking Prussian orders to enforce equality on all except supermodels, football players, and other exemplars of Aryan beauty and robustness.

The rest of Western Europe falls somewhere between France and Germany, from the socialist caliphate of Spain, finally able to repeal  the reconquista and kick out the Jews again (this time, from Israel), to the feminist utopia in Norway, staging the ultimate Henrik Ibsen play.

And in the United States, the robber barons have at last realized their maximum dream that even ole’ J.P. dared not hope for. They have achieved the global fungibility of labor, access to unlimited, magic capital, privatization of their earnings and socialization of their true labor costs and business losses. And, by means ranging from television to open borders, they have created a citizenry too dumb to notice the ruse. What could possibly go wrong?

  

What then is to be done

There comes a time when cataloguing malfeasance and complaining is no longer enough. The sharpest shots of satire ring hollow. Casting ‘nay’ ballots becomes a symbolic gesture, with the empty signifier dangling in the wind of ill will and derision of a mentally altered majority, as a memorial to the signified.

We live at such a time. And so, this series will now leave the safe harbor of critique, satire and status quo analysis, and venture into the speculative field of what to do about it all.

It’s not that that there is a dearth of writers with a penetrating Right-based insight into Western society’s problems. Some even offer salutary advice. But they usually highlight a few ugly facets, and the facets they have omitted preclude the solutions that they offer. Or, the merit of their insight is tainted by their ego-driven attacks on people who have different insights.

Those who write about the evil of our Islamization rarely write about the evil of our deracination. For Islam works reasonably well in countries ranging from Qatar to Kazakhstan. Its repulsive features notwithstanding, Islam in those societies is devoid of self-denigration, self-extinguishing reverse racial discrimination, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, infantilism as the guiding principle in culture, females as the driving force in politics, out-of-control taxes, state welfare, therapeutical society, militant feminism, militant  homosexuality, state suppression of the majority religion, street violence, gangbangers.

Body Snatcher Society has seeded and sprouted all these calamities that Islam doesn’t have, while also importing Islam’s afflictions by importing Muslims. If only judicious discrimination, ethnic self-confidence and reasonable morality had been maintained, the West  would have not needed to pay attention to Islam. Islam would have remained in the diminished and solipstistic haze where Jan Sobieski’s winged hussars left it on land in 1683, and the U.S., British and Dutch Navies left it on the sea by 1815.

Those who write about the demographic decline – i.e. massive Third-World immigration – don’t write about the cultural decline, entirely self-engendered by the West. But those who write about the cultural decline, don’t write about the demographic decline.

Those who write about racial differences rarely write about the political differences. And those who write about politics and society would rather touch a yellow scorpion than the issue of racial differences – even though the social and cultural rot is a direct consequence of the lunatic pretending that such differences don’t exist, and the current recession is a “diversity recession”.

Those who justly decry the epidemic of abortion, rarely consider the back-alley wire coat hanger jobs before abortion was legalized. Those who bemoan the lack of Western procreation, fail to consider the toxic culture that foils parental efforts to raise decent progeny. Those who want to go back imagine that in their past lives they were country squires and cardinals.

Those who preach a return to orthodox Christianity, fail to see that the one group upon which God’s Providence most shone in modern history – America’s Founding Fathers – were unorthodox deists and thorough children of the Enlightenment. Those that lambast “godless atheists”—as though atheists could not be moral, spiritual and conservative -- are ignorant of the great moral leaders and their uncountable followers for over 3000 years in East Asia, the cradle of “godless atheism.”  Who could be more ethical than Confucius, or more conservative than Sun Tzu?

Many of those who feel the sum total of the West’s decline most acutely, blame the Jews while worshipping a Jewish Messiah, drawing their faith from Jewish apostles, using hospitals built by Jewish charity and pharmaceuticals invented by Jewish scientists, sending hate e-mail by computers programmed by Jewish code-writers, and disregarding the 10% -20% of Jewish genes that their own ancestors’ DNA soaked up in Europe over the ages.

Those who preach conservatism fail to notice that conservatism as a political force has died by its own hand. Those who preach capitalism, fail to notice that capitalism has just hanged itself, ignominiously.    Those who preach libertarianism seem to have no clue either about the depth of baseness that resides in the human soul or the geopolitical forces built of such baseness.

Hardly any of the above connects the dots into economics, even though “follow the money” has much to do with tracing the West’s social ills. And if they write about economics from a Right perspective, e.g. The Wall Street Journal, they are liberal and hypocritical in matters of immigration, racial and gender differences, the implosion of the white ethny. They are blind too to the built-in flaws of the supply-side model they usually advocate.

Thinkers on the Right are conspicuous as well in having taken conservation out of conservatism. The best observer of the fault line where moral decay breeds the maleconomy that breeds an unsustainable depredation of the Earth and of its resources is a social liberal Obamaniac by the name of James Howard Kunstler. Mr. Kunstler’s naïveté in so many socio-political areas of great consequence does not take away from the depth of his insights into some issues where true conservatives ought to develop depth as well.

Perhaps the name of James Kunstler’s website, Clusterfuck Nation, is what the Right ought to reflect upon most deeply. For our civilization is in a cluster situation far direr, and in many more ways, than our analysts have dared string together.

Among the many damages that the tenure of George W. Bush in the White House inflicted on conservatism was the concept of “faith-based community.”  In reaction, “progressive” liberals started calling themselves “reality-based community.” That was even more ludicrous, for no group of people on Earth is as intent on denying reality as precisely those liberals. But reality does count, and is the supreme sovereign.

The West is now a brakeless bus rolling toward the abyss. It has already crashed the economic guardrail, and it will crash the other guardrails too before the g-force of reality launches it onto a parabolic course. There is a giant legume pod, a pre-programmed robotic alien, at the steering wheel. For the passengers to survive, the first step is to recognize and observe this situation with no blinders -- to become a reality-based community again.

The second step is to orient the conduct as per that observation, after which come the stages of decision and action (8).  But most of us have already progressed to decision and action, without having done enough of the prerequisite observation and orienting. Therefore, conservatives are trying to convince the driver to turn the steering wheel, without recognizing that all they will get in response is more pedal to the metal. Or, they try to persuade the other passengers to vote the bus driver out of his seat. But most of the passengers are already Pods, snatched a long time ago and of one programmed will with the driver.

Yet a different group of conservatives tries standing athwart the road, yelling stop. But what worked for William Buckley in the 50s does not work anymore. For one, all of us are on the bus now, so how can anyone imagine he is standing on the road? In the 50s, Body Snatchers were only in the universities and among the intelligentsia. Now, hundreds of millions have been turned into Pods too, currently all in rapture, for Messiah hath returned. The Pods are now within our closest families.

We have to figure out how to get off this bus, hoping that other passengers will follow. And to that, the rest of this series will be devoted.

 

See also: From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 1: The March of the Body Snatchers, 28 October 2008, Part 2: From the Clenched Fist to the Raised Middle Finger, 1 November 2008, Part 3: From Encirclement to Breakout, 27 November 2008, Part 4: Tribe, 12 December 2008, Part 4½: Darkness in the Cranium, 14 December 2008, Part 5: From Screeching Cats to SDG, 19 December 2008, Part 51⁄2: Music We Can Believe In, 26 December 2008. 

 

_________________

Notes

(1) In 2001, the last year for which data is accessible on the Internet, there were $750,000 Pakistanis in Great Britain, with a high likelihood that there many more, illegally.

(2) China and Japan also have a higher culture, in some ways higher than the West’s. But China’s higher culture was largely smashed by Comrade Mao, and Japan’s higher culture is the province of very few, albeit its popular culture has commendably soaked up and diffused a few of the higher elements, primarily in social etiquette and commercialized aesthetics.

(3) I referred previously to the prominent members of our ruling class as “+2 sigmas,” i.e. an IQ quotient of 130, which is better than 97.7% of the population.

(4) There are refugees who are redeemably alien, if the West could only retain the capacity of making useful distinctions. This author has a cousin who arrived in Stockholm decades ago as an indigent refugee from communist Poland. A highly qualified engineer, he both mastered Swedish and obtained a professional position after two years in his new land. His engineering works dot the Swedish landscape, and he has been lecturing to aspiring Swedish engineers in a university rather than to the Swedish police across a flaming barricade.

(5) Estimated aggregate of Muslim immigrant and 1st generation population in countries previously classifiable as ethnically and culturally Euro-Christian.

(6) The basic analogy reverts to Part 1, where we cited the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film, alien “Body Snatchers” produce giant legume Pods that replace living people while appearing to be identical to them. From the Pods develop the new Body Snatchers who cultivate further Pods etc. I use these terms interchangeably, usually preferring Pods as a catchall term, and Antipod as the antithesis of Pod.

(7) Cornelia Tsakiridou, Associate Professor and Director of the Diplomat-in-Residence Program at La Salle University, in a 19 December 2008 e-mail bulletin from Foreign Policy Research Institute www.fpri.org

(8) The concept applied here is the OODA Loop – Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.  This is the immortal contribution to the strategic arts by a fabled American combat pilot and thinker, USAF Colonel John Boyd. We will have more to say about that.

"Dark Ages" revisited: mindless.. hateful?

Let's see that bold TS-statement again:

"..our own civilization was not exactly going somewhere, until the
Renaissance and then the Enlightenment loosened the straitjacket of
mindless religiosity and hateful sectarianism.."

To back up this sweeping indictment, a running-off-the-page scholarly procession was promised, but only two titles made it to the recommended reading shortlist. As it happens, I have read the work by Kors & Peters (revised edition) some time ago, and it was time well spent.

What truly boggles the mind though, is how such a well-researched and balanced work could possibly serve as justification for the above quote by Tayuan Seiko. A quote besides, that might not encounter too much opposition from the
ruling elites at "Pod"-factory.

Kind regs from Amsterdam,

Sag.

 

P.s.:

@Capo,
those Hadewych lines you referred to, were about longing and "love",
but could indeed just as well apply to the quest for "truth", 'cause before approaching that: "..there’s bitter sorrow to get through".
I guess the apt qualification for such an ordeal or test would be "Fitna" ;-)

Herbert's other writing

In addition to his prose and poetry, the open letter he wrote to Lech Welsea in defense of Ryszard Kuklinski is worth acknowledging.

When I read The Envoy of Mr. Cogito I couldn't help but think of Kuklinski, whose biography by Benjamin Weiser "A Secret Life" I'm currently reading.

William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold!
Bring me my Arrows of desire!
Bring me my Spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant Land.

 

 

@Steiner

Blake is an excellent addition to Herbert and Hadewych.

So now we have Faith, Reason and Love.

Let's wish TS the best in his next installment.

p.s.

"The Prayer of Mr. Cogito: The Traveller" ;-)

Pebbles Rock!

( A poem by Zbigniew Herbert).

 

The pebble

is a perfect creature

 

equal to itself

mindful of its limits

 

filled exactly

with a pebbly meaning

 

with a scent that does not remind one of anything

does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

 

its ardour and coldness

are just and full of dignity

 

I feel a heavy remorse

when I hold it in my hand

and its noble body

is permeated by false warmth

 

- Pebbles cannot be tamed

 to the end they will look at us

 with a calm and very clear eye.

 

 

 

 

 

Zbigniew Herbert -- in memoriam

I know his nonfiction more than his poetry, but those who sail with us in the same boat ought to know this one:

The Envoy of Mr Cogito

by Zbigniew Herbert

Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let you sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards - they will win
they will go to your funeral with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown's face in the mirror
repeat: I was called - weren't there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don't need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant - when the light on the mountains gives the sign- arise and
go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold
skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

translated by John Carpenter & Bogdana Carpenter

Judeo-Christian morality #2

Whatever the truth may be about the real degree of darkness of the Middle Ages in Europe, I thought that TS dealt masterfully with Monarchist's smallminded brain.  No doubt, there are 'Christian' Euro-conservatives who think that the Ten Commandments were invented by the RCC and preserved in Poland by Christian monarchs!   If the nazis did not bring all this to an end in the gas chambers, the Euro-naive-lefties from Brussels surely will with 'directives'.  

@ Takuan Seiyo

The complexity of your writings and ideas are a challenge for any reader.
I must admit that I underestimated that complexity in your first writings, but now that I feel where you are aiming at I prefer to wait for the final chapters before making any serious comments.

As for the "atheists" Confucius and Sun Tze(or Tzu), I think they both agreed on a Great Unknown. Their writings were too disciplined to be compared to atheist writings in a modern sense.

Jezus was a Jew and never denied his origins, nor the Jewish teachings, He just repeated: "love thy neighbor like you love yourself" which is exactly the same as what your Jewish friend told you.

Personally I am too much in awe before the Greatness of Creation and the magic of the Great Mathematician to be able to even guess Who or What He is.

This deïst interludium does not in any way reflect negatively on your writings for which I have only the greatest respect, you condense a lifetime of study and observation in these chapters and I admire you for it.

As far as the Middle Ages is concerned, I don't know if some poems and writings of some Flemish Middle Age authors are well translated in English, but here "marcfrans" can probably help out, I would like for you to read the poems of Hadewych if they are available in acceptable English. They tell you more about the Middle Ages than any scholar could.
Do you know if they exist in English Marc?

What Our Traveller Seeks

Hadewijch: The Complete Works

translated and introduced by Mother Columba Hart

Paulist Press

Hadewijch, a Flemish Beguine of the 13th century, is undoubtedly the most important exponent of love mysticism and one of the loftiest figures in the western mystical tradition.

Format: Paperback

Series: The Classics of Western Spirituality (TM) series

Category: Spirituality

ISBN: 0-8091-2297-9

@traveller @capodistrias

Thanks. I have always considered Flanders a true flower of European civilization, and one strangely replete with many of the petals and few of the thorns.

If I can reciprocate, it's a book by a Polish writer that opened my eyes to Dutch and Flemish painting:

Still Life with a Bridle, by Zbigniew Herbert.

Familiarity with Herbert's work would enrich any and all, from Europeans to Eskimos.

@Takuan Seiyo

Arigato.

@Traveller

Thank you, Hadewych is mentioned often in one the better treatments of Mysticism which I keep at hand, i.e. Bruno Borchert's Mysticism: Its History and Challenge (the english ed., not the original Dutch...Sagunto. I'm not that civilized :).

I wonder if Pope Benedict is an admirer of Hadewych? His first encyclical was "Deus Caritas Est"

@Impatient Readers of TS

A few lines from Hadewych:

Vooraleer alles met alles wordt verenigd,
proeft men bitter leed. ...

Ach, hoe men alles met alles omvat,
dat weten vreemde buren niet.

Before a harmony is found
there’s bitter sorrow to get through....

Ah, how it all comes together,
the stranger cannot know.

http://belgium.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.p...

@ Capo

Thanks again, I didn't know that site.
See how the "Belgians" hijacked that poetry again, it's Flemish poetry, morons, Belgian poetry doesn't exist.

On establishing a common denominator

@ Friends and Interlocutors

I have a definite destination with this series, but not a definite agenda. Or rather, the agenda is one I learned in the East: seeking to perceive Reality without a veil, regardless of how I or mine stack up in that reality. It’s unwise to read a hidden agenda – i.e. “maligning the Middle Ages” or “deprecating Christianity,” or “seeking to put the Jews on top” into my writing, as there is no such agenda. I call them as I see them.
However, I am neither infallible nor omniscient. And as I seek to take the widest possible view of Western Civilization, I shall inevitably slip up.
I don’t mind if readers who know more about the Netherlands than I do correct me, or people who know more about medieval history, or about credit default swaps. But please do so in a friendly and collegial spirit, taking under consideration the magnitude of my task and one’s inevitable shortcomings when discharging such a task.
After all, the whole raison d’être of this labor is my conviction that the remaining whites who haven’t been brainwashed yet must form a “community,” in the sense in which B. Obama was a “community organizer.” As I have already stated, I don’t believe that basing this community on “faith,” even just the Christian faith as opposed to GWB’s harebrained any faith, is a viable road to go. It’s because of this that I am not receptive to faith-based arguments, even while remaining receptive to Christianity.
Concerning the Middle Ages, we cannot possibly start a discussion because it’s a subject that could occupy a whole website ad infinitum. First of all, we are talking about 13 centuries, three distinctive periods, and 20 distinctive main peoples. For Poland, the Middle Ages were the period of her glory. For Germany, I don’t think so.
But leaving that aside, let me assert that my negative references to the Middle Ages are limited only to the way Christianity mutated in that period, and how that has hobbled the West’s development until the thaw from these particular manacles started with the Renaissance. For those interested in exploring this point of view, from among the four dozen books I know of but haven’t read, I’d like to suggest two that I have read, written by conservative historians whom I respect:
Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History, by Alan Charles Kors
History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson
I shall continue referring to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as the periods of the West’s cultural glory. It will do no good to come back with reflexive barbs about how the Dark Ages were not the Dark Ages, and how the Enlightenment was really dark. Here too, we have important nuances: which Enlightenment? The French, the British or the Scottish? Or their American reflection?
Nothing having to do with humans can be immaculate. On the whole, I stand by my judgment, and will not be able to argue with people having the opposing view, simply because it stops and diverts the momentum of this series. A later chapter will elaborate my view of how Christianity and the West ought to fit together in a most salutary way.
For people who have a problem with how the West, Christianity, the Jews, the Greeks and the Romans fit together, I’d like to recommend a wonderful book I discovered at an airport bookstore recently: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, by Anthony Esolen. For $21 it’s the best inoculation you can give your children against the crap they learn in the Pods’ mind factory.

An indictment of The West and Takuan Seiyo ...ever learning...

Go on and tell this people: Keep on listening, but do not perceive;
keep on looking, but do not understand....Isaiah.

dear Takuan,

I enjoy reading much of what you write, but sadly, like the very western society that you are trying to save, your response shows the very predicament western society is in.

 

The verse may just as well have been directed at you personally, for you have ears, but will not listen, have eyes, but will not see...And like the very west, that you speak of, you have gone searching high and wide for knowledge, and though you speak highly of Christian morals, you,you.. like the very west, have rejected Christ, the power to sustain those who choose such a morality.

MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN...are the very words directed at a generation that is willing to eat and drink from the blessings of the Almighty, but rejects Him as sovereign.

And here again, I am reminded  of the west. Which having gained the whole world, yet has lost its very soul...

 

 

No discussion TS? At least bring on the list

Modern historians have - for decades now - completely discredited the old schoolbook myths about those infamous "Dark Middle Ages".
Today's archaeologists have also had their say on top of that. In 1998, Archaeology, in it's 50th anniversary issue, ran a lengthy article entitled "The Not-So-Dark Ages", summarizing an immense number of excavations that confirmed the historical reassessment crediting the Middle Ages with having laid the "foundations of modern European culture". This change of perspective already reflected even in the popular encyclopedias from the 70's on.

So what was all that about "truth-seeking" on this forum? Is that how it's done? First launching wild claims about "mindless religiosity and hateful sectarianism" and then avoiding discussion at the very first sign of a counterargument?

Instead of being slightly less than courteous to members with opposing views, the author could at the very least provide part of that lengthy list of scholars in support of his claims against a large and important part of our history and culture, a period of vigorous technological innovation that also saw the birth of the European University, to mention but a small feat.

 

So why not bring on that list to proclaim those ages "dark" once again? I wouldn't mind standing corrected.

Kind regs from Amsterdam,

Sag.

P.s.:
There's also something not quite so conservative about issuing blanket statements about "The Enlightenment", hailing it as a liberating force against "mindless religiosity". Again, among most historians, certainly those who have studied the phenomenon of political religions, such one-sided claims would be considered untenable and outdated by now. Minor detail: many of these "liberators" promoted Mohammed and his Islam as a more "rational" approach to religion.

Oh boy, here we go again..

Since Seiyo raised the subject himself, taking upon him the role of forum-overseeer, speaking zealously of "truth", while lauching this little howler :

"..That calls, software-wise, for knowing that our own civilization was not exactly going somewhere, until the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment loosened the straitjacket of mindless religiosity and hateful sectarianism.."

 

Perhaps here's a moment to point out that this forum might also not be the right platform for regurgitating those worn-out, propagandistic myths about the so-called "Dark Middle Ages".

Suggested reading for not discarding one invaluable millennium of European history and civilization:

Works by Régine Pernoud; Frances & Joseph Gies; Eamon Duffy, to name a few.

 

Kind regs from Amsterdam,

Sag.

Judeo-Christian morality, What is that?

Apparently TS is not familiar neither with concept of morality that flourished under influence of the Catholic Church or with concept of Talmudic morality. These are two completely different approaches.

@Monarchist

I have no patience for people who seem to consider the Ten Commandments an invention of the Catholic Church.

Another good example of the relative (but not total) validity of the term "Judeo-Christian Morality" is in the traditional story of the great Talmudic scholar, Hillel who, when asked by a Gentile for the essence of Judaism said: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Law." Now, what other religion rests on this principle? I can't think of one.

As to the rest of "Talmudic Morality," I am certain you know zero about it, other than what you may have read courtesy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion Publishing Company. I at least acknowledge my ignorance in the matter. What I do believe I know is that the Talmud contains some anti-Christian invective, as does the New Testament in the opposite direction. I also know for sure that Jews, who until the 19th century grew up soaking the Talmud and the thousands of pages of the interpretations of its interpretations, came in both the virtuous and the immoral models, as they do now. Not much difference if you look at the Gentile side of the equation. Also, I know of three American rabbis -- surely Talmudic scholars -- who write and speak widely of their warm feelings and support for Christianity, though they remain observant Jews.

There are some legitimate problems that a Christian Euro-conservative might have with the Jews as a group. I have some such problems myself, and have mentioned them. There will be more on this too. But regurgitating Okhrana offal should not busy us at this website.

For the time being…

@ Steiner, @ Capodistrias

 

I will not deal in this forum with issues raised by people who believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and that they – and they alone – have an inside scoop on the meaning of that Holy Book. And I mean Christians here, for Islam, characterized by this attitude more than any other creed, is utterly beyond the pale.

 

People who want to battle Satan and save our civilization that way have many avenues open to such action. To cite a few, they can join an American megachurch with 15,000 in a hangar every Sunday, sharing spasms of rapture to the exhortations of a practiced salesman. Or, they can make a trek on their knees to Lourdes. Or, they can turn their churches into shelters for illegal Muslim immigrants and their other cheek until it’s no more, along with other members of a mainstream Protestant denomination.

 

But this is not the forum for you. In this forum, we will respect everyone worth respecting. First of all, our own, European–origin whites who practice Judeo-Christian morality, love their cultural heritage, and want to restore their civilization to its former glory. Irrespectively of what church they attend, or whether they attend a church at all.

 

Second, this is a forum for people who respect truth, and who have the mental instrument to discern and deal with the complexities of truth. That calls, software-wise, for knowing that our own civilization was not exactly going somewhere, until the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment loosened the straitjacket of mindless religiosity and hateful sectarianism.

 

Third, we shall not put down things and ideas foreign because they are foreign, nor automatically elevate our own because they are our own. Nor shall we hasten to divine hidden motives in a person who praises some foreign thing or person, or who fails to condemn Darwin or atheism. A civilization that becomes entirely self-referential and that encloses itself behind a wall ends up exactly where the Chinese civilization was for 3000 years.

 

But no more. The Orient has skirted the self-caused catastrophes that the West has brought onto itself. And that despite handicaps far greater than Europe, let alone the U.S., have faced.   People who are serious about the West's predicament are unwise to reject examining why that is so.

 

 

Being and Nothingness

@TS

If you are suggesting your comments are applicable to my comments, you are apparently a better writer than you are a reader.

If your comments faithfully convey your understanding of European History then you really have nothing, yet, to offer those who have seriously studied their European cultural heritage.

Not that I won't listen to nothing, Master Takuan Seiyo.

(Suggested readings for a European Enlightenment see Sagunto's post)

@Capodistrias

You misread my intent. You were referenced in my comment with a cc: intention, because you had originally responded to Steiner's comment. As to our respective visions of European Medieval history, we have nothing useful to say to each other. The list of books I can bring forth that dispute the claims of your books would run off this page. So let's just agree respectfully that there are two sides to every coin. You inferred correctly, at the beginning, that I had no stake in pushing a vision of just one side of the coin.

What would not be uttered...but now is

Go on and tell this people: Keep on listening, but do not perceive;

keep on looking, but do not understand....then I said, Lord, how long?

 

And He answered.

 

Until cities are devastated and without inhabitants. Houses are without people, and the land is utterly desolate...The prophet Isaiah

 

Let me also add that neither Confucius, nor Sun Tzu are worth even a mention..precisely because for 3000 years...nothing really happened worth mentioning....

You mention Pods...but I propose the unmentionable...

 

Satan, the spirit of this age, has gone out to deceive those that have rejected Christ, and although these seem to come from different creeds, they are quickly coalescing  under his one banner.

These have come from us, but they are not of us.

 

 

Give him Time

@Steiner

Well Abraham, Moses and others like Isaiah are I would guess worth mentioning but I get your point.

I think TS can make the argument concerning Confucius and Sun Tzu, as part of his 'solution.' He hasn't yet, but remember the Word is eternal , omnipresent. Aren't you presuming to place temporal limitations on the Almighty? I'll be disappointed if a Polish writer places Confucius and Sun Tzu on a higher plane of consciousness than a, JPII or a Jan Sobieski, it would be very unPolish.

Pat Condell Speaks

Pat Condell speaks out about Geert Wilders and Islam:

"You're not allowed to insult anyone's beliefs in the Netherlands, even if those beliefs insult you and everything you stand for."

 

Whenever we heard the words 'human rights' in connection with Islam, we're about to be confronted with another piece of ugly opportunism that spits in the face of genuine human rights and insults everyone's intelligence."

 

"Nobody should be compelled to respect an ideology that doesn't respect them. And Islam respects nobody. It claims dominion. Respect doesn't come into it. You submit. That's the deal."

 

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/024577.php#respond

 

In Defense of Geert Wilders. 

 

Sign the petition that people from all around the world are signing.

 

http://www.petitiononline.com/wilders/petition.html

The causes are not obscure--it's Gramsci

The left achieves its revolution by focusing on culture and language by achieving control over the media and the academy. This is what has happened. The academy is then used to ridicule the opposition and indoctrinate the young, and the media is used to demonize the opposition. This makes it very expensive in reputational costs to oppose the left, considering there are now generations that have been taught your alternative views are crackpot and the media will attack you personally, and destroy your reputation. And since most of those who would oppose the left tend to also be capitalists, this has an added negative impact on your business prospects.

The West in the late stages of the left's Gramscian revolution. They have completed the process of leveraging their control of the media and the academy into political control. It will all end in tears.

Tradition

@Rob the Ugly American

It will end not in tears but in blood. It has always been so, and will be again.

The public is waking up

As this mother of all global recessions winds its way across the west, trust me, more heads will be out of the sand and priorites are going to be reset if only because of economic expediency.

When times were good the tolerance for what the leftist elites were imposing on the native public could be ignored. As per the WSJ today Spain with an unemployment rate of nearly 15% is hard pressed to keep supporting its 5 milliom immigrants:

Government efforts to free up more jobs for Spaniards are having a limited effect. Billboard-size ads in subway stations and on city buses pitch payments for legal immigrants who go home: If they agree to leave Spain for at least three years, the government will pay the unemployment benefit they're entitled to in a lump sum -- 40% on leaving and 60% on arrival back home.

-----

Spain is entering "uncharted territory," says Fernando Eguidazu, an economist and vice president of the Círculo de Empresarios, a business association. "There's a group of five million immigrants in a situation of economic crisis and a shrinking economy. We don't know how that is going to work."

And in Britain there is outrage over Labour's continued refusal to stop their influx of migrants:

Ministers were criticised last night for issuing a record 151,635 work permits to foreigners as Britain slid into recession.

The document lets non-EU workers take or keep jobs here, even though hundreds of thousands of Britons are losing theirs jobs.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1127112/150-000-foreigners-swell...

People are waking up finally. The comments following the article are more numerous than I've ever seen before and very angry. Of course the western MSM minimizes the problem and as cluelessly the public backlash that's forming. When a recession hits you in your wallet lefty multi-culti nonsense doesn't look so benign anymore. It's pretty safe to say that Labour will be gone from Britain and Spain might get some new faces come next election.

Gutting the blatant lefty MSM would be the my first choice in taking back western culture. Boycotting their product and using the internet as an opposition vehicle to refute their moronic pc and multi-culti agendas seem like a no brainer to me.