From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 7: The True Horror in Hitchcock Films
From the desk of Takuan Seiyo on Sat, 2009-01-31 18:23
I used to live in San Francisco. The San Francisco that despite having been roiled by hippies, beatniks, anti-this-and-that, still had the feel of the charming, civilized town that it had been when Alfred Hitchcock was shooting his masterpieces there.
Observe the setting of Davidson’s Pet Shop in The Birds. It’s a staged scene, but this is San Francisco’s Union Square in 1962-3 and that is the way middle class people looked and dressed in San Francisco. Tippi Hedren is an upper class society girl in this movie, so perhaps her suit has a finer cut and her clutch purse a higher price tag – but watch the other people milling about (and don’t miss Hitch himself).
Union Square was where middle class San Franciscans, dressed in suits, white shirts and ties for men, and high heels, ankle-length dresses, gloves and often hats for women, shopped. I don’t know what exactly was in the building that in this film is set up (1) as a pet store, but now it’s Louis Vuitton. Only Japanese and Chinese tourists shop there, plus the significant others, female and homosexual male, of the ultra-liberal LeftoDemocrat chieftains of the city.
The latest hot Vuitton item, quite different from Hitchcock characters’ footwear, is the Kanye West Vuitton Kicks. Who is Kanye West that he should be honored with an overpriced red sneaker? Forget it; it’s not worth our time.
Union Square now reeks of urine and reverberates with the shrieks of lunatics who use its sidewalks and benches as their bedroom, kitchen and toilet. It’s no longer politically acceptable to call them crazy or to put them in institutions. Besides, California doesn’t have the money. It has given the bounty robbed from its taxpayers to Mexican and other “Hispanic” legal and illegal immigrants (now 37% of California’s residents), and to public employees’ unions who thrive from dispensing the ransom to the colonizing aliens.
Put Tippi Hedren, dressed so that only her calves are exposed, next to a 2009 spoiled rich girl, say Paris Hilton, whose body hundreds of millions of people know virtually in its entirety, save for a crevice or two. Which figure is charged with more female sexuality, not to use such no-longer-comprehensible terms as class and elegance?
Let’s look at Vertigo. It’s 1957, and Vertigo is a virtual paean to the beauty and niceness of San Francisco, serving as an effective backdrop to the twisted plot and the tortured characters playing out the drama in the foreground.
A friend, who was an 11-year old in San Francisco a decade after Vertigo was released, contributed this observation:
“Vertigo makes me wistful for the time when San Francisco was a decent town. I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of San Francisco's glory days, when it was a community. We had real neighborhoods where kids played ball on the street. We had the annual Cork County picnic that drew hundreds of people who were either family or friends. Cops walked the beat with a baton and called the paddy wagon to haul the drunks off to "the tank". Now one can drive for blocks in my old neighborhood without seeing a child. The "homeless" get free clean needles, and defecate between parked cars and no one thinks twice about it. I used to ride my bike all over the city, by myself. Now when I visit there I want to cover my children's eyes when they are riding in the car with me.”
San Francisco had its upper crust, mainly of the demographic known as WASP, but it was also a town of immigrants and ethnics: primarily Irish and Italian, some White Russians, some Jews, some Chinese, some Californios harking back to the 19th century, and some blacks whom the currents of the U.S. military effort in World War 2 had deposited in Northern California. Its people had manners, and its working class had a touch of the contentment that comes from being able to support a large family decently on one blue-collar salary.
It was a town of peaceful ethnic neighborhoods and eateries, and exotic, for America, churches like the Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral. It was charming, beautiful and diverse. But not “diverse.”
San Francisco is “diverse” now. And this is what it means:
In Vertigo, the character Scottie Ferguson, played by James Stewart, is a police detective who once dreamed of becoming Chief of Police. A traumatic experience when dangling from a rooftop has ended that dream, and leads him into a hallucinatory adventure with a twice-dead blonde beauty, Madeleine/Judy, played by Kim Novak.
Flash forward 50 years. A lanky blue-eyed Scot from Pennsylvania, whose ancestors fought in the American Revolutionary War, as James Stewart’s did, has a lesser chance of becoming San Francisco’s Police Chief than he has becoming the chief ballerina of the SF Ballet. This is no hyperbole, what with the T in the ubiquitous GLBT.
Scottie in a 2009 Vertigo would not dare harbor such an audacity of hope as becoming Chief of Police. Just to be hired as policeman is difficult now if you are a white heterosexual male.
San Francisco’s actual Chief of Police now is an affirmative-action diminutive Chinese-American female from the accounting department who is the laughingstock of the police force. The rate of unresolved murder cases in San Francisco is so high that the city has tried, unsuccessfully, to solicit help by offering $100,000 rewards to people who would come forward with information.
At a loss, the city’s leaders elected what else but a transgender person, Theresa Sparks, as President of the San Francisco Police Commission. Mr./Ms. Sparks’ qualifications for the job consist in his/her managing a vibrator company which was recently running a special under the slogan, “August is Anal Sex Month; 15% off select Anal Toys.”
To bolster this team with some serious dose of law-enforcing testosterone, San Francisco got itself a female District Attorney who bestows additional glory on the city by being half Tamil-Indian and half-black. Kamala Davis Harris refuses to seek the death penalty for murder, which is the law of the land, plea-bargains murder cases, and fails to prosecute criminals arrested with firearms. San Francisco police officers take a dim view of this, what with their own being murdered by criminals that the District Attorney has failed to prosecute. But the need to keep their jobs muzzles their mouths.
Of late, Ms. Davis Harris has made the news due to her office’s failure to prosecute Edwin Ramos, a vicious Mara Salvatrucha gangbanger and illegal Honduran alien, who had been arrested on illegal gun possession charges, and then released instead of being at the least deported. One month later Mr. Ramos would be arrested for the murder of Tony Bologna, 48, and his sons, Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16. The murder weapon has since been linked to two other murders.
San Francisco’s metrosexual mayor is given to utterances like, “You know we're the only city -- I think we're the only big city in America ... there may be an exception or two ... that women are running the Police Department, Fire Department and our emergency services. That's why I feel so safe.”
In a town where reserved, well dressed men once wooed elegant, alluring women, in a society whose genders 45 years ago were still unmixed and whose cultural reference was still coherent, now weird hermaphrodites prance, proud penises parade, and penetrations of pumped-up poofters peek in public venues at perturbed families with children who just came for the baseball game or the Disney movie.
It’s because homosexuals and other gender-benders have colonized San Francisco. After the hippies’ Summer of Love in 1967, people with deviant (2) sexual preferences started streaming into the City by the Bay from all over North America and turned it into an orgiastic Anustown.
Now, 15.4% of San Francisco’s population of 800,000 calls itself by the confusingly adopted synonym of ‘joyful.’ And their impact on the city and those who live in it is as though they were 54% of the population. You can find out more about that in the Passionate Struggle exhibit of the “GLBT community,” including the aspiration for “hot living in the face of disease and sex negativity.”
Now I never busy myself with another person’s sex life, and as long as it’s between consenting adults and not thrust in my face, I don’t care where it’s thrust. But when it becomes exhibitionist politics by people who live for hot living and sex positivity, when strange men in elevators start inquiring about my “equipment,” when art is transformed into the public packing of feces into the orifices of bound subjects, when married couples of men demand the equal right of conceiving babies with each other, I feel harassed and disturbed. I want to fight to preserve my and my family’s space and peace of mind.
But that’s not the way the majority population of middle class white heterosexual San Franciscans reacted. They simply folded. They pretended not to see and not to hear, and they did not speak up about what they didn’t see and hear. And the politicians, they just rode whatever trend would carry them, and eventually were replaced by “gay rights” and “minority rights” Body Snatchers. The majority that fails to protect its rights ultimately fades into ghosts that walk through frames of old movies. .
San Francisco is now the gay capital of the world, and the capital of Body Snatcher America. Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Congresswoman who represents San Francisco and knows no bounds in her pandering to this centrifuge of the aberrant, is the second most powerful person in the United States. As to me, I just left, full of sorrow. This place could no longer be my home, and I knew only three other people who felt like me, so resistance was futile.
But the transformation of my city from the town Hitchcock loved to the town of hot GLBT living was but one in a cluster of symptoms. Let me take you to the cathedral where I attended service on many a Sunday for 25 years. Or rather, let Alfred Hitchcock take you there.
Here are James Stuart and Kim Novak in Vertigo, taking a walk in the fabled Muir Woods, a few miles north of San Francisco (3). This footage has been dubbed into Italian, but it doesn’t matter. The main actors here are the magnificent redwoods.
On their walk, Scottie and Madeleine/Judy, stop by a cross section of a giant redwood. There are markers next to the tree’s growth rings, to show how old it was when cut down. The tree was over-1,000 years old. To visualize that, there is an arrow close to the center, marked 1066 – Battle of Hastings. Other arrows, in an outward progression, mark 1215 – Magna Carta; 1492 – Discovery of America; 1776 – Declaration of Independence.
A pivotal exchange between the two characters takes place, prompted by the 1000-year calendar that the tree expresses. But what’s important for our purpose here is that this is a real redwood section, and those arrows and dates are real, and they were there on my hundreds of walks in that forest.
One day, Body Snatcher State (4) that administers the park – for it is a U.S. National Monument – rearranged the arrows. The redwood calendar now looks like this:
The Battle of Hastings is gone. Instead, marking the pivotal event of the 11th century, of the greatest significance to Americans, is the building of cliff dwellings by murderous, self-extinguishing cannibals in a rock in Mesa Verde, Colorado.
The Signing of the Magna Carta as the late Middle Ages event of most significance to Americans is gone too. Instead, there is a new arrow that wasn’t there when Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak visited. It’s marked 1325 – Aztecs Begin Construction of Tenochtitlan, Mexico. Thus doth Body Snatcher State announce to its subjects, children of the people who walked through the frames of Hitch’s movies, that their country has been snatched away from them.
Now, the Battle of Hastings is of no emotional significance to me. I don’t have a drop of Norman or Anglo-Saxon blood in me, and until I was 20 I didn’t even speak English. But I emigrated to the United States because it had been founded by descendants of those Normans and Anglo-Saxons, and its founding institutions embodied the virtues of those people and of their singular document, the Magna Carta.
So that we don’t get our arrows confused, the way the U.S. Federal Government has, let us recall why the Aztecs began their construction of Tenochtitlan in 1325. Two years earlier, in 1323, these refugees, who had been welcomed and allowed to settle among the people of Culhuacan, and to intermarry and mingle with their hosts, had done something to celebrate their strength in diversity.
The Aztecs, or Mexica as they called themselves, asked the king of Culhuacan, Achicometl, for permission to make his daughter into their goddess. Their wish was granted. What the Culhuacan king didn’t know was the details of this “canonization.”
He would learn soon enough. At a feast celebrating the new goddess of the Aztecs, their priest appeared, wearing the flayed skin of Achicometl’s daughter. That is why the Aztecs had to flee the wrath of their hosts to an island on Lake Texcoco, where they began to build their city Tenochtitlan in 1325.
Now if this is what the United States Government wishes to celebrate, instead of one of the founding documents of Western Civilization and of its own Constitution, things have gone seriously awry. But that’s because the demographics have gone seriously awry. The people milling about in Hitchcock’s train stations and train cars, streets and restaurants, office and hotel lobbies, were replaced, when not by the “GLBTA community,” by Aztecs imported by bleeding-heart Body Snatchers and by fathomlessly greedy “capitalists.”
Hitchcock gives us a glimpse into an earlier, better world that would transform within just 20 years into a grotesque Pod farm of twisted legumes. In America of 1960 that lives in Hitchcock’s wide shots, little girls in blue dresses and white socks pass in train stations, hand in hand with their grandmas, on the way home for dinner. Now, the same girls, 12-years-old, talk the language of black pimps and give blowjobs to boys who record it on their cell phones for later flaunting on the Facebook pages of both blowed and blower.
But mine is a minority view. A small minority that’s not recognized as “minority,” does not enjoy a favored status and, in the coming Meccania, will soon be subject to state persecution as it already is in Western Europe. Recognized “minorities,” on the other hand, have colonized by the dozen millions and pull the strings to much that goes on in the United States and the entire West.
Another historical record of how things were just 50 years ago is in the “crop duster scene“ from Hitch’s North by Northwest. It’s one of the most famous sequences in film history, and it was shot in East Bakersfield, California.
What was in 1959 a sun baked, empty steppe is now a paved-over part of Bakersfield with a majority population of Mexicans, illegal “Hispanics,” blacks and other “minorities.” Bakersfield’s population has grown from 55,000 in 1970 to 330,000 in 2009. It’s one of the fastest sprawling cities in the United States, and one of the anchors of what Victor Davis Hanson, who lives not far from Bakersfield, called Mexifornia.
But underneath all that asphalt is still the parched flatland where Cary Grant once dodged the crop duster. California does not have the water or the electricity to accommodate a population growth of half a million people a year, most of them rapidly multiplying Third Worlders. It does not have the schools, the hospitals or the prisons – for its crime statistics have grown exponentially with its colonization.
Some parts of Hitchcocks’ desolate flatland now have a crime rate 10 times that of California, and California has a crime rate that’s almost 20% higher than the national median. That, of course, corresponds to the number of armed and often-illegal alien gangbangers, of whom there are about 6,000 in the greater Bakersfield area, several standing armies’ worth in California, and one million – one million – in the United States. And that’s the country that worries primarily about peacekeeping in Bosnia and the integrity of Iraq’s borders.
A de rigueur map to have in Bakersfield shows the turfs of the various gangs. Frankly, I’d rather dodge a crop duster than a posse of the Colonia Bakers, on the same land, though populated differently 50 years later. But then, in addition to the bullets, one must elude the lethal cars, driven by license-less and drunk illegal immigrants. Fatal driving accidents in Bakersfield are up to 87% higher than the already-very high California average (5).
As the blogger Frosty Wooldridge has put it, “Does anyone understand that this nation immigrates itself into irreversible consequences with unsolvable problems?”
But no, they don’t understand. To glimpse the majority’s zeitgeist, you can read this comment on the Youtube page of Vertigo’s rerelease trailer by, naturally, ObamaRules4Ever:
“James Stewart was a HUGE racist. Just ask Hal Williams or Hal Kanter. Even Leonard Gershe, one of his closest friends, admitted that Stewart was one of the most racsit [sic] men ever. He was also very anti-semitic as well. James Stewart was SCUM, and he was far too OLD for this crappy, dated movie.”
It’s a New World Order now, with Kanye West Vuitton Kicks as the highest cultural aspiration and “racism” as the greatest crime. And to oppose immigration or to mention crime rates statistics broken down by race is to be racist. End of discussion, you are allowed one phone call to your lawyer.
Hitchcock’s films provide a rear window into a world recently lost, but still within memory. Because so many of the rotund master’s films were shot in Northern California, and he was a pros’ pro, the visual details of his settings provide a record that allows for gauging how Northern California has changed over the last 50 years.
But the change process itself, the ideologies, cultural influences, political power shifts, betrayals, false hopes and sad capitulations were the same in Bodega Bay (6) and Brussels, Bakersfield or Bremen. And what emerges most from the before/ after look one can take with Hitchcock’s aid, is the power of colonization.
Occupation is 90% of possession. You allow a stream of colonizers onto empty land, or into a sophisticated city, you have set up the new demographics as the destiny of that land or city. But only if that be a Western country and the colonizers deviate greatly from the majority due to race, sexual orientation, and all those other qualities the discernment of which is not allowed under the rules of Body Snatcher playbook.
Because that playbook allows the colonizers to demand aggressively, to arrogate privileges and reject responsibilities, to “act up,” shout, accuse and wrest control. The same playbook either criminalizes the proper response of the indigenous majority, or it changes the culture to stigmatize such a response.
But rewriting history books in England to please Muslims is no different from replacing tree ring markers on a Sequoia sempervirens in California to please Mexicans. It’s base and cowardly treason.
Filling the suburbs of Paris with ugly concrete high-rises to house imported Algerians equals the paving-over of East Bakersfield as a playfield for imported Mexican low-riders. It’s an economic and social miscalculation without parallel since the fall of Rome.
There are only five ways to exit this runaway bus: Emigration, Revolution, Loyal Opposition, Separation and Exodus. But if you consider how San Francisco has become Anustown steered by space aliens, how the majority of its normal, decent people just faded into the frames of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, the range of actually viable choices becomes quite a lot smaller.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) Set up is the proper expression, for Hitchcock implies the location through Tippi Hedren’s walk, but when he actually cuts to the pet store we are no longer in Union Square but on a sound stage.
(2) As always, I use the adjective “deviant” not to connote moral condemnation but to indicate a removal by a lot more than one standard deviation from the average, or the “norm.”
(3) Sooner or later there will be a film buff posting indignant entries how not all of this sequence was filmed in Muir Woods. That’s true, but the parts relevant to us here, were.
(4) 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.
(5) Sources: http://www.city-data.com/city/Bakersfield-California.html and http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53103
(6) The town in Northern California where most of the plot of The Birds takes place.
Conclusions
Submitted by SteveP55419 on Sat, 2010-04-17 20:01.
I'm re-editing this comment because I have focused my thoughts now.
Your wonderful writing pefectly describes how those who will be at home in Hell have created a replica of it in society. Sane individuals can use your insights to resist these evildoers and I hope you publish it in book form.
But you describe an evil that exists in a bubble, as it were. There is something outside of the bubble. In His good time God will pop the bubble and judge us all. As the Bible says: 'He will wipe away every tear'. Simple people understand this.
Much is said about speaking truth to power. Here is how truth is spoken to power at the highest level: 'Mr. Obama, God will judge you and if you do not change your ways, you will then wish that you had never been born.' Simple but true.
@traveller
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Fri, 2009-02-06 21:43.
Thank you for your kind words and your point of view. The problems I have are only with two of the commenters here. The one uses a building I built in order to stand in its window and relieve himself on my head. The other continues challenging me to what’s known in the American slang as a “p*****g contest” about the relative merits of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance/Enlightenment. I have explained that my views hew closely to those of an eminent conservative/Catholic historian Paul Johnson, and that I cannot get farther into the subject without skewing the direction of this series and of my time that ought to be spent writing what’s still unwritten. Yet, the dogged pursuit continues.
The BJ editors informed me that there is no way to shut out individual commenters, but that the entire comments section may be closed down if I wish. I too believe in the benefits of debate, and for that reason will try to suffer the two commenters whom I find objectionable. Alas, I shall be unable to retort with “any virulent comment I wish,” as writing this series is much work, and there is still much left to be written. That’s where my energy will go. However, should the insulting or sabotaging quotient of contributions from the aforementioned or other commenters exceed the level I can tolerate, in the interest of being able to continue this work in peace I will have to ask for shutting down the comments section entirely.
BTW, while agreeing with your assessment of the importance of Freedom of Speech, I also believe that this has been a Trojan Horse ridden mainly by, so called, “capitalists,” to wreak havoc on our culture and on the brains of its members. This, like everything else I look at, has the dual ying/yang nature. And the balance of these elements has been thrown off so much that in a future chapter I’ll advocate limits on what passes for Freedom of Speech nowadays.
Censure # 3
Submitted by marcfrans on Fri, 2009-02-06 04:51.
@ TS
Thank you for so clearly stating your true position, which was certainly revealing to me (and presumably to some others as well). I do not see much relevance in the related post from Gates of Vienna Blog for the issue at hand here.
I largely agree with the content of the post by Dymphna. Again, three points:
1) I certainly share her (?) dismay regarding the mentality of "Alles kan, Alles mag" of recent decades in the Netherlands. However, "alles" is much broader than 'speech'. It includes everything, and surely it is only common sense that actions or deeds must be regulated, preferably by democratic means in a democratic society or environment. As long as 'free speech' remains preserved, so that these regulations can be debated and democratically 'decided' (which means inter alia they remain subject to change). I would even accept a certain degree of 'honest' regulation of 'speech' as such, in terms of circumstances (like place, and frequency, and timing etc...) and even in terms of relevance, but NOT in terms of specific content (e.g. because they might be considered insulting by someone, or might be interpreted to be leading to "extraneous subjects"). In the latter cases, the proper remedy is ignoring the offense or stating one's refusal to go along on extraneous paths, not 'arbitrary fiat from above'.
2) I certainly have no "disdain for traditional values". Quite the contrary! And neither do the people you want to censure here. So what is the relevance of Dymphna's post here?
3) I also agree with her that freedom of speech was NOT necessary to free people from Christianity (as much of the multicul left mistakenly thinks), but rather that freedom of speech was an outgrowth or result of Christianity. Because it was first substantively realised in the Christian West (and only there in the whole world) and where it is now gradually being lost again as Christianity is being (temporarily, no doubt) replaced by a secular religion/ideology (as belief-system) of naive-leftism. In Western civilisation, over the past century, the substantive attacks on freedom of speech (opinion) have not come from Christianity (in its major denominations), but rather from States/statists and secularists.
@ Takuan Seiyo
Submitted by traveller on Fri, 2009-02-06 20:15.
For some unknown reason my comment on this ongoing discussion was posted on "epicureanism and empire"
I am sorry for this.
Can the blogmaster perhaps switch it over to this thread?
Thank you.
Censure
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Fri, 2009-02-06 01:18.
@marcfrans
Understand your point. I am different. That I am personally different, is less relevant. But it ought to be obvious that someone writing under a pen name that's only one letter removed from the most famous Japanese practitioner of Zen in history, will have somewhat different ideas of acceptable norms of conduct. What's more interesting is that I differ from you philosophically.
I do not consider Freedom of Speech as the ne plus ultra of Western values. I believe, for instance, that most of advertising, television, films, computer games, Internet porn etc. -- as they exist now -- ought to be banned. If we get that far in this series, we can debate it. For now, I want to refer you to an interesting and related post by Dymphna in the GoV blog, here: http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/02/hollands-muddy-waters.html#readfurther
Censure
Submitted by marcfrans on Fri, 2009-02-06 01:01.
@ Takuan Seiyo
Rest assured that I have thought my comment through, and be informed that you are not the first author to impose such an unreasonable demand on the editors of the BJ. No doubt, you will not be the last one either. The 'rot' of intolerance has sunk too deep in Western societies, and the essential difference with other civilisations is fading fast.
Three points.
First, every serious reader here will recognise that you have spent many hours on your 'work' (and I suggest that you do not care what the unserious ones think), but your desire to 'control' the commentary on it is not healthy.
Second, while I disapprove of some of the language that has been used, I would never attempt to censure it. Let adult readers make their own judgements. The best way to deal with inappropriate sarcasm and with "lunatic or insulting comments" is to ignore them. Lunacy and insults are very much in the eye of the beholder.
Thirdly, I recognise that the political left's contemporary attempts to censure free speech through legislation is not exactly comparable (in terms of a threat to our future as free beings) to censureship on 'private' websites. But, the emotional impulse underlying both phenomena is 'cut from the same cloth'. I have little doubt that people who censure in private, will do so in public if they had the political power to do so. Intolerance of free speech is not an exclusive affliction of the left, for history is replete with illustrations of it on the right. As always, the real distinction that matters is not between left nor right, but between genuine 'democrats' and nondemocrats.
If this website would no longer provide a platform for your 'work', I would certainly regret it (among with others, no doubt). But, I would regret the knowledge of the loss of free speech, even more.
Exile ?
Submitted by marcfrans on Thu, 2009-02-05 22:38.
@ Capodistrias
Why would you exile yourself? Because TS told you so? That is not a good reason.
While I do think that your choice of words (language) sometimes needlessly goes way 'over the top', the only truly objectionable thing I have read here was Takuan Seiyo's threat to "remove" posts that he considers "ill-mannered" and/or that might "steer" him in a direction that he considers "false and spurious". As if he is not in control of his own 'direction'.
The most dangerous development in current 'Body Snatcher' society is the willingness of much of the triumfant cultural and political Left to censure disagreeable opinions. If aspiring 'conservative' reformers on the political Right start doing the same, then we are truly lost as a civilisation.
@marcfrans
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Thu, 2009-02-05 23:26.
I find that you have not thought your comment through. There is a salient difference between the Left's censure of dissent, and the situation here. I am not trying to censure some posters' negative comments. Let them say and write what they want. But not here. This page is a platform built with my work of hundreds of hours. There is no reason why I should agree that this platform bear the load of lunatic or insulting comments, or comments that hijack the discussion in directions that are extraneous to the subject matter.
Therefore, I have communicated to the BJ's editors that unless filters be applied to eliminate further participation by two posters, on this page only, this series will discontinue. It's not meant to eliminate dialogue and critique per se. For instance, you and I have disagreed in the past, and will in the future. No problem with that.
Christianity and civility
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Wed, 2009-02-04 20:08.
@KO
There is no dust-up. I simply don’t want religious Kapos (Capos?) on this page. Please go meet elsewhere.
Future ill-mannered posts from Foaming Defenders of the Purity of the One True Faith will be removed, not only because they exploit my hard work to ride on its top to insult me personally but also because they steer the momentum of this page in a direction that I consider false and spurious and where I have no desire to go.
Now, for you, and others who are both well brought-up and concerned about the preservation and regeneration of Christianity, as opposed to just regaining the supremacy of the RCC, I would like to share an excerpt from an email I got today from a friend:
“I don't think Christianity can be revived. The problem is that most well-educated, prosperous, long-lived people don't really need religion - although there will always a minority of people who relish mysticism for its own sake. I've got friends like this - who move from one religion to another looking for some kind of answer to a question I have never bothered to ask myself. This disbelief is a real problem, and means that our resistance to Islam is perforce based on secular rather than transcendent concerns.”
It will help you in re-evaluating those words properly if you know that this person is the grand-grandson of the Archbishop of a prominent city in Western Europe. I assure you that Catholic Capos are not what’s going to resurrect Christianity.
Practical Politics 2
Submitted by KO on Wed, 2009-02-04 22:15.
Mr. Seiyo: I think the religious debate can be set aside for the reasons stated below. The West as a whole is religiously too diverse for religion to be useful in mobilizing it. Other banners must be raised, most likely chosen on a local basis. Locally, religion may provide the banners.
@KO
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Wed, 2009-02-04 23:12.
I too believe that religious debate ought to be set aside, but not necessarily religion. It’s useful to extract the common denominators of all the Christian denominations, and relink them undogmatically to Western Civilization. It’s useful as well to re-emphasize the inextricable connection between Christianity and Western Civilization, and to re-learn all the positives in that connection while not insecurely denying the far fewer negatives.
Now on these comment pages there are postings by evidently well-educated Catholics that not only cancel out this common denominator possibility but make me ashamed of my Catholic roots and still-extant fondness for this faith. Besides the Kapo there is the gentleman from Amsterdam who takes dogged pot-shots because I have committed the heresy of considering the Dark part of the Middle Ages dark. But the Dark Ages live on the fringes of the RCC even now, to wit:
http://www.bild.de/BILD/news/bild-english/world-news/2009/02/04/bishop-w... .
Salient quote: “The Jews created the Holocaust so we would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve of their new State of Israel... Jews made up the Holocaust, Protestants get their orders from the devil, and the Vatican has sold its soul to liberalism.”
For the record, I disagree with the vehemence of the attacks on the Pope. But if there be many among us who think that Protestants get their orders from the devil, or who would define Isaac Newton out of Western Civilization because he denied the Trinity and was a mystical small u unitarian, then there is truly no hope.
@TS
Submitted by Ronduck on Thu, 2009-02-05 02:50.
I compiled a series of polls from before the election showing how each religious group would vote. The religious information is the only post on my blog at:
ronduck.blogspot.com
Practical Politics 3
Submitted by KO on Thu, 2009-02-05 15:22.
An example of local, pro-Western activism would be anti-Islamization activism. The theme is common to many countries, but the targets are local and national governments and Islamic organizations, which must be confronted individually. The theme is not relevant to all Western countries, and where it is relevant it varies from place to place. In the U.S., it is the grotesque demand for footbaths in public institutions and for the call to prayer to be broadcast audibly. Excuse me, no Western country should tolerate a publicly audible Moslem call to prayer, and no Westerner should have to hear that in his own homeland. That is just about the ultimate sign of Moslem victory and Western surrender, in my opinion.
Immigration issues vary from place to place. So do the issues of slavery instituted by excessive taxation and overregulation, and theft of property by overregulation and inflation of the money supply. The institution of slavery by deprivation of the right of self-defense is another offense to Western liberty that varies from place to place.
Readers of the Brussels Journal should engage in and share information regarding pro-Western activism. For example, check out Roy Beck's NumbersUSA website. Such a prject could be emulated anywhere, and with respect to issues other than immigration. Thank you.
@Traveller.. (d@ Capo)
Submitted by Sagunto on Wed, 2009-02-04 19:42.
# (Mon, 2009-02-02 13:50)
You're welcome @Traveller.
And indeed, it's striking that even though the Spanish were seen as foreign invaders, the general population of Utrecht held on to their traditional faith against all odds. That would be the right expression, I think, for Catholicism in those days at that particular spot in wooden-shoe-land didn't always mean Roman Catholicism as we would today understand it. And besides, the traditional Roman Catholic faith in those times was intricately bound up with folk tradition (the other victim of state sponsored reformation: de strijd tegen zg. "heidensche" en "Paapsche superstitiën" en natuurlijk de vele vrije [feest]dagen). The great effort put into academic research of the past 50 or so years, done "at grassroots level", collecting facts about the actual lives of ordinary people and their families situated in their "nabuurschap", shows a picture that is markedly different from the old views (e.g. Huizinga et al.) that were dominated to a large extent by the outcome of the protestant reformation.
There's also another perspective that is missing from the old doctrinally dominated interpretations, and that is the fact that there already had been a great number of "reformations" in the Low Countries - actual ones, i.e. within the traditional Church, spread by the clergy - that catered to a growing need for a personal spirituality, while not discarding the greater context of handed-down tradition. In the dissertation I mentioned, close attention is paid to the movement of the so-called "Modern Devotion" (Devotio Moderna, say from AD 1375 onwards). One only has to read a few pages from the bestseller "de Imitatione Christi", by Thomas van Kempen, to feel the impact of it. The spirit of that Catholic reformist movement - that also profoundly influenced Erasmus and Jeroen Bosch - pervades the (folk)religiosity of the late Middle Ages in Utrecht (and the Netherlands in general). There are so many "protestant" themes there, that it might also have contributed to the fact that traditional Roman Catholics, at the community level, never had much use for the calvinistic doctrine, even though it was "promoted" by the new powers to be, and Catholicism (together with e.g., Anabaptism, Lutheranism and the Remonstrant, more lenient form of calvinism) persecuted and banned from public life until after more than two centuries it was formally re-admitted in Dutch society.
In short: I can't recommend the book by Llewellyn Bogaers, "Aards, betrokken en zelfbewust: de verwevenheid van cultuur en religie in katholiek Utrecht, 1300-1600" highly enough, because, as I said, it manages to get down to the level that really matters from the perspective of tradition, i.e. the level of family and neighborhood. Even parallels with the medieval city of Gent are drawn. Of course, I wouldn't dare to enhance the impression of this site being somehow(?) a kind of "hang-out" for Catholic Lowlanders (I'm not and have never even been a Catholic myself), but anyhew, it seemed nice to hint at the opportunities for further "cross"-cultural research ;-)
As always, kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
P.s. @Capo "de garagis clamavi ad te.. meoow-mine!" ;-)
The Exile
Submitted by Capodistrias on Wed, 2009-02-04 09:51.
Dear TS,
You are a fine writer, but you are woefully ill-equipped to accomplish the task you have set out upon. You have neither the knowledge of theology, history nor the sense of humor to lead your readers to the promise land.
I have a Polish mother-in-law, a Polish pastor, and until a moment ago, a Polish Oracle instructing me on what I must do as a faithful Catholic from a lapsed Catholic point of view. The three of them have one striking quality in common - they don't listen.
I was given a great gift as a child I couldn't speak, as a practical matter. So I learned to listen, well, and I learned to read early, and a lot. What I learned soon enough, and to my surprise, was that many people don't take the time to listen or read very well. The consequences can range from tragic to comical. In this instance, with the cause and issuance of your blog banishment of punk Capo we have a little bit of both, a tragi-comedy.
Tragic? Bearing false witness against another and the doctrines of a faith one claims to have once professed is, in my ill-mannered, puckish opinion tragic. Not only does the bearer engage in spreading calumnies against others, but his own integrity is upon discovery often left in tatters.
Comical? When one is completely oblivious to one's own rude, knaivish and ill-mannered pontifications that triggered the food fight is in my puckish opinion comical.
Regrettable
Submitted by KO on Wed, 2009-02-04 14:52.
A most regrettable dust-up. Hopefully the honor of both participants will be satisfied to let it sink quickly into oblivion without impeding the business of this discussion.
TS
Submitted by rpwins on Wed, 2009-02-04 07:44.
Light on the dark path of this troubled times.Brilliant essay.Thank you.
@Ronduck
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Wed, 2009-02-04 07:13.
Interesting maps but difficult to correlate. I find that this helps: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1022/exit-poll-analysis-religion. Note these breakdowns in 2008 exit polls:
Obama McCain
Jewish 78% 21%
Catholic 54% 45%
White Catholic 47% 52%
Protestant 45% 54%
White Protestant 34% 65%
Evangelical 26% 73%
White Evangelical n.a. n.a.
Treating your deracination
Submitted by Capodistrias on Wed, 2009-02-04 01:55.
@TS
Meow, Meow, Sit there in memory of Me Ow Me Ow.
Or try reading "The Body and Society, Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity" Peter Brown. At least, Brown will put the deracination which is bothering you in a little better context than you seem to present it. His last chapter is on Augustine.
TS you may also want to consider that by dismissing transubstantiation you are contributing to your own 'deracination' troubles. Just a thought. Get back to your cat and let me know if he has any thoughts on the matter.
Capodistrias
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Wed, 2009-02-04 03:12.
You behave on these pages like an ill-mannered punk. Please remove your footprints from here. I do not labor to provide a platform for your likes; go elsewhere. The blogosphere is wide. Go.
@KO
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Wed, 2009-02-04 00:42.
Thanks, your comment is helpful and edifying, at least to me, a relative layman in theology. Where I see Augustine's influence as hurtful is in the deracination from nature and the natural, and in the resulting launch of the Church onto a zealous trajectory of the penitent, ethereal and eschatological. I may be more Japanese than palatable to some in this forum, but to me there is more God in my cat sitting on the window parapet than in the entire theory of transubstantiation.
The deracination from nature, BTW, reflects the Hebrew origins of Christianity, and the Hebrews' origin as shepherds rather than farmers. It was a magnificent deracination in its own time and place; without it we'd probably still have child sacrifice and sacramental orgies. But eventually it became too much of a good thing, not the least to the Jews in their diaspora.
The early church fathers obviously recognized this deracination and tried to ameliorate it by incorporating various "cleaned-up" pagan customs in Christianity, but in my opinion they haven't gone far enough -- partly due to Augustine and his disdain for the flesh. I believe that much exists in the pre-Christian traditions of the European peoples that could help in reinvigorating Christianity. Soon enough somebody will say that Hitler thought so too, but we don't need to reduce things to their absurdist condensation.
The Incarnation
Submitted by KO on Wed, 2009-02-04 03:28.
Mr. Seiyo: As Capo would likely agree, Catholic orthodoxy as largely shaped by Augustine is far friendlier to the world of the flesh, the family, the fields, and the fauna than the various gnosticisms with which the Church contended for centuries (including Islam). Early medieval Catholic culture even made a place for Virgil, whose Georgics are the antithesis of deracination. But that was in combination with the developing understanding of a transcendent deity.
What you call deracination among the Hebrews, Eric Voegelin calls the "leap of being" from a cosmological civilization, in which deities are embroiled in the physical world, to a civilization based on transcendance, in which the deities are beyond time and space. The transcendance of the Deity is so fundamental to Western being that it is close to being de rigueur for any friend of the West, though it is qualified by important exceptions--such as the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the reconciliation of the difference between the transcendent deity and the physical world of the flesh. If Augustine neglects the Incarnation, and the wonderful opening chapters of Luke which place it in the context of Jewish prophecy, he is missing a great joy and opportunity. We don't have to follow him in that. But in general, the sheer reach of his rhetoric (no matter what subject he is discussing) enables him to wrap up more reality, including the reality of the natural world, into his writing than most writers less constantly aware of original sin. In any case, we don't need to debate Augustine, since it can scarcely be denied that he is a defining figure of the West we are setting out to save.
Also, don't forget the example of Sienkiewicz's Polish knights that you have commended to your readers--orthodox Catholic to the marrow, yet fully competent to do what must be done, enjoy what may be enjoyed, and suffer what must be suffered, always in the presence of and in reference to Almighty God, His merciful Son, and His Blessed Mother.
KO
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Wed, 2009-02-04 04:19.
I can't find fault with your thinking. As a child, I grew up as a happy Catholic; I don't suffer from the Frank McCourt syndrome. But in America I came to appreciate Protestants too, and I studied the Bible in a Protestant school. I can even appreciate the Mormons, while considering their religion outside of the brackets of what I'd call Christianity. If you visit the Mormon states, you will find the most moral and least-Pod area of the U.S., with the most "conservative" indicators and the happiest family life. That counts for something too, not just the doctrine.
My main thesis here is that we are in a leaking boat buffeted by large waves. All white people are in that boat, from Opus Dei to atheists socialists. For those who realize this, who want to get out and build a larger, stronger boat, old transgressions have to be forgotten. Theological and doctrinal differences have to be forgotten. Who did what to whom has to be forgotten. You have to find a common denominator other than Orthodox Catholicism. You don't have to abandon your Catholicim, but you have to abandon your certitude that only Catholics can be saved and only Catholics can be your brothers.
You have to recognize that Protestants have as large a case against you as you have against them. You have to recognize that when somebody is posting evidence how the RCC is actively pulling a stream of Mestizos into the USA, he is not Catholic- bashing but merely reporting the truth. On the other hand, if someone is posting about how the Roundheads killed and oppressed Catholics,that is truth also, but it's the distant past that does not serve as a counterpunch to the other side's current beef.
These pages seem to be a meeting point for a group of Flemish/ Dutch Catholics. That's fine, but this is not a specifically Catholic website; it has a larger purpose. Attacking people (which you don't do) who deviate from Catholic orthodoxy is just not helpful on this website, or within the context of this particular multipart essay.
Our solution cannot be based on the faith and fealty of one Christian denomination, for it will never work.
Practical Politics
Submitted by KO on Wed, 2009-02-04 07:58.
Mr. Seiyo: Excellent points all. Let's set aside the religious question. For that matter, let's set aside the question of the best political system. Your target audience is spread over many countries and consists of infinitely various individuals. There is no element of culture, race, religion, heritage, or political philosophy of universal appeal among them. What therefore seems indicated is social and political activism adapted to local conditions, with information and experience shared across national boundaries. You (and your allies--on this site, for example) thus would want to direct your efforts toward developing effective activism in existing groups of all kinds, parties, schools, businesses, unions, and so on. People who see what is going on around them will have to take the lead in picking the issues and planning their campaigns. What can your role be? Thinking about how to inspire local activism, identify strategies, reach wider audiences--you know your talents.
I have referred before to Neopopulism.org. It is about local activism, eschewing partisan and ideological reductionism. The focus on issues avoids conflicts over ideology and other group markers. But it potentially lacks a banner to tie an effective group together.
I don't want to skip any steps in the development of your essay, but these thoughts respond to your practical sense that the people you want to help are prone to bitter factional discord and need to be guided to some kind of effective cooperation.
Just an addendum to my
Submitted by Ronduck on Wed, 2009-02-04 06:27.
Just an addendum to my earlier comment about the mainline (especially Lutheran) return to Rome:
If you look at this map you will see what denomination has a plurality in each US county. In this map you can see how each county voted in the 2008 election here in the States. If you look at Minnesota and North Dakota you will see that most, but not all, of the Lutheran counties vote the same as the majority Catholic counties. The map of religions by county makes one region above all stand out in vivid relief.
Thanks for looking.
The drug that gives its user superhuman powers
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Tue, 2009-02-03 21:12.
There are some learned comments here that enriched my own knowledge of the subject. But I have to return to my main thread.
Blaming the Reformation for the ills of the Christian civilization is like blaming Jesus for the ills of Judaism. This phrase by KO ought to nail the lid on this particular box: “The Reformation was initially an attempt to recover the true Pauline-Augustinian doctrine of justification from an establishment that had become infested with semi-Pelagians. It was the unwillingness of the establishment to reform itself that led to schism and religious war, from which liberal tolerance emerged as an alternative to civil war.”
Pace the pricklier posters in this comments section, Catholics ought to look at where they own religion went astray then, and where it’s gone astray now – and concentrate on conning that ship, rather than hurling missiles at the Protestant vessel, however justified that may be. As to Protestants, the empty pews speak for themselves. It’s not the fault of the parishioners; it’s the fault of the pews.
I might as well admit my bias and take exception to a position linking Augustine with much that’s good in Christianity. There is a better-learned proponent of this view, Paul Johnson, in his book “History of Christianity.”
Lastly, looking at Judaism, I perceive the same phenomenon there. There was a historical Jesus: a spiritual Jew who saw the spiritual bankruptcy of his religion and arose to reform it. And mainstream Christianity is not the religion of Jesus but rather the religion about Jesus. The religion of Jesus was Judaism, and the first Church, the Nazarene Church led by James, could be called “Reformed Judaism.” It seems to me that Jews have allowed themselves to focus on the hurt that has come to them because of Jesus, rather than on the derailment of their religion that Jesus arose to address.
Of course, Islam is hopeless in more ways than one precisely because that self-reflection and re-conning of the ship are not allowed. Instead, the certitude that this precise course has been charted immutably by Allah leads to a voyage to oblivion by a vessel that cannot be re-conned.
Augustine the Man
Submitted by KO on Tue, 2009-02-03 22:54.
I know Paul Johnson's discussion of Augustine but recommend Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo as another learned source, an excellent book. Whatever objections one may have to Augustine in detail, in total his works are an ark that carried the very best of Late Antiquity's culture of philosophical inquiry and learned eloquence into succeeding centuries and outlying places, through the ruin of a dying civilization to the monastic encampments of a new one. It is largely because of Augustine's pen, and his theory of Christian education, that the Dark Ages were not dark. See, e.g., Bede's On the Reckoning of Time. Who more than Augustine has a title to be the father of the Christian West, except maybe Gregory the Great?
We don't have to bring only 1 book or 100 on this journey we are starting on, so the question is rather an idle one. How to develop an effective Western ecumenism to counter the pseudo-ecumenism of the universalist pods is the weighty question. The minimalism of Gans's Generative Anthropology and of Kaardal and Dahlberg's Neopopulism may hold clues regarding the pragmatic deferral of differences among allies. Personally I am looking forward to reading Natural Religion by the great science-fiction epic poet and thinker, Frederick Turner. [See The New World (1985) about the U.S. in the 24th century, including the social and legal history that leads to the dissolution of the country into militarized counties; see also Genesis (1987), about the terraforming of Mars and the war declared on the Martian colonists by the Eco-Theists who dominate the U.N. ] In my view, belief that the Bible is the Word of God and that Christ is the One Way is compatible with a cautious ecumenism that recognizes many ways of saying the same thing and many ways of achieving the same purpose with one's words.
KO OK
Submitted by Capodistrias on Tue, 2009-02-03 15:22.
"Capo is right and wrong to blame the Reformation for the dissolution of Western communities."
What the Protestant Giveth the Protestant Taketh Away ;-)
The Protestant
Submitted by KO on Tue, 2009-02-03 16:27.
Capo: Exactly, like a drug that gives its user apparently superhuman powers but leaves him broken and exhausted. Though from our point of view, the Reformation was initially an attempt to recover the true Pauline-Augustinian doctrine of justification from an establishment that had become infested with semi-Pelagians. It was the unwillingness of the establishment to reform itself that led to schism and religious war, from which liberal tolerance emerged as an alternative to civil war.
Let's hope our European friends are not sufficiently adept in American slang to enjoy the full resonance of your title!
@ KO
Submitted by traveller on Tue, 2009-02-03 18:09.
Unluckily they are:)
Anyway, good analysis.
@Rev. Takuan Seiyo
Submitted by Capodistrias on Mon, 2009-02-02 17:53.
Knee-jerk? Little preachy there aren't ya TS? Duckface is a serial RCC basher. I was not simply responding to his first post.
As to: "perceive and admit your own wrongs and transgressions," what part of the apple metaphor don't you get?
I also appreciated KO's post, from a RC perspective the irony leaves one with hands raised at one's sides wondering - "Well...?"
In the spirit of ecumenism, let me quote someone who I believe truly captures the thoughts and spirit of those of us who have kept the Faith:
"The future belongs to the civilization (and the religion) that first perceives its weaknesses and corrects them, without falling into the trap of self-flagellation, self-disgust, and suicide."
Thank you Reverend Takuan Seiyo!
Emerson the Prophet (1)
Submitted by KO on Tue, 2009-02-03 14:05.
Ronduck points to Emerson as a figure of the faithlessness and dissolution of old New England. That may be correct, but our European friends should know that the conventional view of Emerson is as the prophet of a new, uniquely American ecumenical and individualistic religion that accompanied a great period of economic and geographical expansion. It is possible that Emerson's so-called Transcendentalism could serve as a unifying faith among a relatively homogeneous people who are already bound by ties of common ancestry and aspiration, yet also destroy their ability to maintain those ties over time. Thus it would be a parasitical faith that destroys, rather than sustains, its host, like a consuming fever. It is a crystallization of liberalism that illustrates both its power and its weakness.
Capo is right and wrong to blame the Reformation for the dissolution of Western communities. Certainly Catholic intellectual tradition is a great bearer of a sustainable, natural law-based view of peoples and races, in which the Gospel does not bring about the abolition of culture by the elimination of all difference but the preparation of man for salvation in his cultural, racial, national, gendered specificity. Yes, Catholic tradition is where the Gospel meets Greco-Roman thought and gives birth to the civilization of the West. However, just as the misuderstanding of Calvin can be blamed for the descent of Protestant societies into materialistic, individualist nihilism, so can misunderstanding of Christ within and without the Catholic church be blamed for every kind of political error that the Church has sponsored and espoused. An American Protestant who sees the utter debasement of his mainstream denomination may look longingly at a Church that at least honors Augustine and Aquinas, but is quickly deterred by the innumerable phalanx of communists that operate with impunity in the Church's name.
@KO
Submitted by Ronduck on Tue, 2009-02-03 17:49.
KO wrote:
An American Protestant who sees the utter debasement of his mainstream denomination may look longingly at a Church that at least honors Augustine and Aquinas, but is quickly deterred by the innumerable phalanx of communists that operate with impunity in the Church's name.
There comes a time whne you realize that most denominations have been infiltrated by the pods. Once you realize that you have to look at each church individually. Better yet, you need to attend an independent local church, or a church that is part of a small local denomination. Any denomination that has large seminaries to train its' clergy is open to infiltration and this definitely includes the large Prtestant denominations too.
Finding a church is not like buying a new car anymore, you can't rely on the "brand" to indicate quality. Instead, finding a church is like buying a used car, you have to go over each candidate individually.
Emerson the Prophet (2)
Submitted by KO on Tue, 2009-02-03 14:43.
As Takuan Seiyo recommends, the friends of the West must set aside sectarian hatreds to unite and defend the West from its enemies. The worst enemies are the Western pods. However, there are positive principles of liberty, justice, and truth around which the friends of the West can unite without identifying themselves primarily as anti-pods. In Eric Gans's phraseology, both love and resentment must be enlisted in the struggle to renew the West. We are not anti- fundamentally, but pro-. The movement Mr. Seiyo seeks to incite is necessarily ecumenical, because the friends of the West are a remnant scattered among all Western faiths and even non-faiths. They must be invited to join a struggle based on unifying principles, accompanied by the famous "tolerance for diversity" that is the banner of our hypocritical foes. The friends of the West generally recognize that the various Western sects tend to the same truth, hence the ability of Europeans of many stamps to form the American nation around the WASP core. But it is a tricky business to unite the heterogeneous faithful against the heretical pods who claim that they are the ones who represent the West with their universalist egalitarian liberal-socialism that is primarily a mask of elitist tyranny. We are in the position of needing to adopt an ecumenism to wage our war for the West when we think it is an excessive, misunderstood ecumenism that is destroying the West.
I have just finished The Teutonic Knights, recommended by Mr. Seiyo. An excellent novel that illustrates the power of non-liberal Christianity to inspire a rising people to achieve great virtue in peace and war. The true Christianity is not socialist, pacifist, anarchist, antinational, or antiracial. Recovering Christianity (and Judaism) from the pod-heretics, on an ecumenical basis, is part of the struggle for the West, and it is under way.
Then and now: little belief in reformation
Submitted by Sagunto on Mon, 2009-02-02 09:54.
..they have also lost any reason for continuing to believe in the Reformation.
Such was also the case during the protestant reformation itself, when even in one of its heartlands, popular support was between low to almost non-existent. Before 1555 there were very few Dutch who joined the reformed circles and in a large city like Utrecht, even in 1589 - when the Reformed doctrine had already become the enforced quasi State-religion - only 8% of its general population had joined the ranks of the reformation. That low popular support becomes even more amazing, when it is set against the background of the Dutch uprising against their "Spanish" king.
In a 700 page Phd. dissertation by Dr. Llewellyn Bogaers I have here, the process is described of how those in power enforced the protestant reformation upon the general public, that still held on to age-old custom and traditional faith. On a community-level the protestant reformation played out as an attack on traditon and it spelled the breaking of fellowship. This process bears an eery resemblance to Cobbett's description of what happened in England. Popular "support", largely enforced by the use of State power.
In Holland, the reformers even tried to ban the traditional feast of St. Nicholas (Sinterklaas). It lead to a spontaneous popular revolt (children's uprising), not in the name of, but directed against the protestant reformation. Today, that same traditional feast is once again threatened by zealous social engineers - let's call them "sharia-socialists", who want to use the lever of religion (cooptation of Islam) as a force to make society fit their elitist blueprints.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
@ Sagunto
Submitted by traveller on Mon, 2009-02-02 12:50.
Thanks, this was new for me, I thought that in Utrecht at least there would be much more support for calvinism in those days.
Of course the political background was very bad for the RCC with the Spanish idiocy.
Ecumenical Spirit
Submitted by Capodistrias on Sun, 2009-02-01 17:22.
As Traveller alludes to I'm the last one who would defend the US Catholic Bishops' role in this issue but the blame can be spread around to all the faiths and unfaithful. Collective guilt is a wonderful concept in the Judeo-Christian tradition, so I'll just grab my RCC slice of the apple and watch the finger pointing and denunciations for awhile. Knock yourself out Duckface , you usually do.
@Capodistrias
Submitted by Ronduck on Mon, 2009-02-02 04:25.
I would like to point out that both in Europe and here in the States the old Protestant denominations have begun to return to Rome. To put it another way, as the old denominations have lost their faith they have also lost any reason for continuing to believe in the Reformation. Most of the churches in the US which have become part of the problem have united into a single ecumenical body called Churches Coming Together, which can be seen here on wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Churches_Together
If you look at this list of churches you will see what I mean when I say the Reformation is dead among the Mainline Protestants. Essentially the Mainline Protestants should really be called almost-catholics, with a small "c". If you add up the number of Roman Catholics and the almost-catholics together you have a majority or a near majority here in the States. Combined with the Mestizo invasion you have the makings of a new Catholic country, a new part of the RCC's empire of failure in Latin America.
Ecumenical Spirit
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Sun, 2009-02-01 22:09.
@Capodistrias
cc: @ KO
I agree with KO's analysis below. My idea of "ecumenical spirit" is not just the finger pointing but the acceptance of that finger pointing when true. It's no different for peoples, ideologies, religions than it is for the individual, say the alcoholic who joins AA. First of all, you have to drop knee-jerk defensiveness, perceive and admit your own wrongs and transgressions. And you should not resent others for pointing them out. Nor is your pointing out of theirs a substitute for your own self-reflection and correction.
Nor is the other way of evasion feasible: to make this into a reductio ad absurdum, and reject what I am suggesting here because of "look at the liberals and their cult of white guilt." Of course, the white guilt cult is insane -- but it's only because they have taken this thing way too far. And, because they fail to notice all the empty AA chairs around them, where the black and the brown peoples, and Judaism and Hinduism and Budddhism (not to even mention the far outlier of Islam) have ample reason to sit in contrition and guilt too, many of them for reasons weightier than those of Christian whites.
The future belongs to the civilization (and the religion) that first perceives its weaknesses and corrects them, without falling into the trap of self-flagellation, self-disgust, and suicide. Our civilization has perceived its weaknesses, and then has fallen into all those traps. It doesn't have to be so.
BTW, I have sparred on these pages a couple of times with anti-Semites. But that's only because what they were writing was lies. However, discussing the ills that the left-liberal direction of the great majority of Jews has brought to our societies should be no less legitimate than discussing the ills of the Roman Catholic Church. To the contrary, it's needed even more, for it's a taboo subject where only crazed neo-Nazis and one-track-mind evolutionary psychologists roam, and discussion that rings truthfully is scarce. But it's an important subject and I, for one, intend to explore it.
@ TS
Submitted by traveller on Sun, 2009-02-01 10:55.
We have on this blog 2 US Roman Catholic members, Capo and Cephran. They are both outraged by the antics of the RCC.
Myself I am from an RCC family and I gave up when I was 18 years old when I saw the negative attitude of the RCC on Flemish independence.
The RCC has the tremendous burden of being the continuation of an ancient empire with all the worldly trappings and powerplays. They have to correct this but don't know how for the modern times. The new pope is a splendid scholar but moving the church in a more apostolic spirit will not be his job.
I knew San Francisco in the '60's, God I feel old writing this, and afterwards I saw the "flower" people starting to demolish that town. Once you are in a cultural vacuum, that's what you get. I loved the town I knew but when I saw what was happening in the '70's I never went back.
Northern California
Submitted by KO on Sun, 2009-02-01 13:14.
The Bay Area used to be heaven on earth. Now it is just LA with bridges. The WASPs gave it away because we did not believe in ourselves. We looked at ethnic invasion, first, as enriching and picturesque, second, as historically inevitable. The liberal mindset in Democratic, Republican, and Independent whites was a hormone-suppressant that made white males unable to seize and hold territory. Instead we focused on being well-functioning cogs in the machine that is our true god.
The inability to seize and hold goes way back, so that one wonders if the Great Migration of the 1620's and 1630's created a nation that would always flee rather than fight. Those who fought under Oliver had stayed put. I am only thinking of two data points, the ceding of New England to immigrants beginning in the 19th century and "white flight" in the 20th century. In both cases WASPs preferred to flee rather than hold their ground. Acquiescence towards unlimited Third World immigration is a third data point. As things stand, we don't deserve to survive.
The liberalism that goes back to the 17th century is not today's liberalism but sectarianism that eroded people's identification with the (English) nation in favor of a religious vocation. The same religious vocation dissolved the identification of individuals with their sects. Now we are a collection of nationless, faithless, family-less atoms that try to fill the void with money and a simulacrum of virtue and patriotism.
The fragments of a reborn nation exist: decent white families and decent families of other races who want to live in a civilized, white-dominated West. At this point I think that political evolution on Neopopulist lines (see Neopopulism.org) is the only available strategy. It involves taking back self-government, and by eschewing ideological and partisan reductionism, does not provide the liberal fascists with an easy target, unlike white nationalism. Any help that can be given to developing the Neopopulist strategy will be welcome.
@KO
Submitted by Ronduck on Mon, 2009-02-02 04:13.
The reason the WASP's gave away New England was because they had decayed spiritually. The Transcendentalist movement was one of the most visible signs of the turn away from God in New England. The Scarlet Letter was written during this period of decay and glorifies an adulteress who defies the moral order set up by the Puritans. Much like the RCC today the state church of Massachusetts was infested with clergy, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did not believe.
As a side note, US states were not required to comply with the Bill of Rights until the 14th amendment was passed after the civil war. Until the 14th amendment was passed states could have established churches the way Massachusetts used to.
Population replacement by the RCC
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Sun, 2009-02-01 02:03.
@Ronduck
I asserted several times that I want to maintain an ecumenical spirit here, but that does not mean that we are going to evade the truthful. You are correct in pointing out the RCC- Mex Migra connection. The best close-up look at this syndrome that I've found is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/magazine/24catholics.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Cardinal Mahony, who is the engine of this propulsion in Los Angeles, is also up to his ears in the homosexual priests scandal, e.g. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/la-me-mahony29-2009jan29,0,1462644.story.
On the other hand, both Protestant and Jewish organizations go out of their way to import to the U.S. every Somali, Sudani, Yemeni etc. they can find as long as he/she is both Muslim and has never seen a toilet. It's not in vain that I use words like "the West" and "Western Civilization" to indicate the entity that's rotting. It's on a grand scale, and that's why devising some course of viable counteraction is important.
Why it happened
Submitted by Ronduck on Sun, 2013-08-11 21:26.
If you go see the new Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino you get to see Dirty Harry admit that he misraised his Boomer children, which is where the monsters of '68 came from.