Alone
Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz surveys the British political scene and muses on whether the recent rise of the British National Party tells us anything about how a European society can be infatuated with the Left one year and switch over to fascism in a relatively short period.
Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.
How did Britain come to this state?
Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces. As I wrote three years ago, liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.
If fascism and Left wing socialism share most of their political DNA then this process is easy to understand. When the vital 5% — or whatever crucially differentiates them — flips then one becomes the other. The BNP is not a ‘conservative party’ in the American mold. It is essentially a racist but economically Left wing organization which accepts a large state role in managing the economy. Where it differs with the Left is for whose benefit the economy should be managed. For the Left the answer is: for the benefit of what it defines to be the historical victim — Muslims, immigrants from former colonies and people with special sexual needs. For the BNP the answer to the question is: for the benefit of the poor white; the indigene; the people who have lived in the British isles. The Left correctly accuses the BNP of dividing the nation. What it fails to recognize is that the BNP is simply paying them back in their own coin. This exchange of toxic currency has set up a zero sum game. It has cast the Left as the champions of one side and the BNP is happily casting itself as the champions of the other.
Britain faces major problems with a permanent economic underclass, low economic mobility, illegal immigration and a large, vocal and often violent unassimilated Islamic subculture. The native working class in particular feels squeezed by economic competition from low-cost immigrants. More importantly, they have seen themselves relegated in social status to the bottom of the heap. Much as in America, where the once-venerated rural poor are now despised and ignored “rednecks,” lower-income white Britons now see themselves pushed aside and spit on in favor of the left fawning over illegal immigrants and Muslims.
The BNP could scoop up a lot of support if it could slow down illegal immigration. Doing so would give an immediate economic boost to Britain’s native low-skilled workers. Even easier, they could no doubt pick up a lot of support merely by treating low-income white Britons with respect and by putting them at the center of their policy recommendations.
By smearing as racist everyone concerned with illegal immigration and the overboard tolerance for radical Islam, the British left is desensitizing everyone to the legitimate charge when it is directed at the BNP. People think, “Well, I’m concerned about illegal immigration, Islamists, the white poor, etc., and I’m not a racist so maybe the BNP isn’t either.” The overuse of the left’s catch-all denunciation deprives it of meaning and force. People may simply stop listening to the left’s warnings because they’ve so many times labeled people with legitimate concerns as racist. By their own narcissism, self-righteousness and contempt, the left is actively driving people to fascist solutions just as their more radical ideological ancestors did back in the 1920s.
Worse, entire generations of Britons have been conditioned to believe that the state has a moral obligation to care for them cradle-to-grave. It is a short step from there to the belief that the government has a moral obligation to care for native Britons first and foremost before all others. Such a longstanding belief in Germany certainly made National Socialism an easy sell to the German working class and poor.
If the mainstream parties cannot address the real concerns of many Britons, and if they cannot at least pretend to respect and value lower-income white Britons, then Britain may be only one ugly incident away from a political seismic shift. A major native Islamic terrorist attack or an immigrant riot might be all it takes to push Britain over the edge. Other European nations are at risk as well, for the same reasons.
Leaks which showed how Labour intentionally flooded Britain with immigrants in order to gain a permanent political majority and rub multiculturalism in the faces of poor whites has provoked a storm of outrage in the UK. It plays directly into the BNP narrative of invasion abetted by leftist treason. The Telegraph reported that “Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.” But it was manner in which the plan was sugar-coated which rankled the most. It was, if the leaks are to be believed, an ideological conspiracy sold as a plan to bolster the economy. It’s almost as if the Left set out to paint itself in the very same colors the BNP wanted it to don.
Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the “major shift” in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.
He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.
He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.
He wrote: “Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”
The “deliberate policy”, from late 2000 until “at least February last year”, when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.
What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil. It is a prize to be seized by main force; the castle to be stormed. In the long run there is little reason to think that Nick Griffin will allow any more freedom than Gordon Brown. What is likely to happen is the substitution of one set of sacred cows for another. When the Left and fascists contend for power, the surveillance cameras are in every case fully employed.
One of the commenters at Chicago Boyz writes, “A friend of mine is a professor of Surgery and Anatomy in London. He has told me he is very concerned about the number of young women converts to Islam who are medical students. These women, like the louts in the Dalrymple books, are not from immigrant families. Why an educated young woman would convert to Islam is a real puzzle. Maybe they are seeking structure but I expect it will come at a high price. The other side of that coin may be the BNP voters.” Maybe this infatuation with Islam should not be surprising: if the central role of the state is accepted, then the only question is what the character of that authority will be: Islamic, Communist or Fascist. When you come to it, who cares? It is the same dog with a different collar. And perhaps the young ladies are simply choosing Islam on the basis of fashion. It’s as good a reason as any.
How does one get away from the dog?
Perhaps the greatest service that religion once rendered to Western civilization was providing the individual with a real or imagined hotline to God. Whether this was simply a conceit or not let us set aside for the moment. For as long as man imagined himself to be sacred and accountable to the Creator he stood at the center of polity. The state was there to serve him and not the reverse. Today he has lost that central place and is no more or less than a collection of curiously animated chemical substances with a market value of less then fifty dollars which the state has deigned to keep alive until some bureaucratic panel decides it is too expensive to do so. Just as Global Warming can be understood at one level as an attempt to bring nature into the purview of politics, it is impossible to understand the Left’s fixation with abortion except as a sacramental affirmation of the state’s power over man. The strident insistence on abortion on demand goes way beyond any conceivable need to prevent backroom abortions, or even an affirmation of a woman’s right to choose. It is really an absolute display of the power of politics over life. Abortion’s principal utility is as a stake driven through the heart of the notion of human sacredness, which once performed, ought to prevent its revival entirely.
Today we are at the point where it may be almost impossible to substitute anything — traditional culture, race, God, even man himself — in place of the central role of the state. What the BNP and the Left are fighting over is who gets to control the state. Perhaps the greatest challenge of the 21st century, if one is to accept the notion of the “Death of God” as permanent in the West, is to find a basis to once again put the individual at the center of politics. Can a person, deprived of his sacredness, living under a sky swept of a Creator, assert himself as superior to the monstrously gigantic state?
Voltaire famously wrote that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” The line actually comes from Voltaire’s poem the Three Impostors and anticipates many of the thoughts in this post. He might have been writing about Europe in 2009. The question he raises is this: if philosophers themselves argue that man is no more valuable than an animal, then how much longer before the state starts calculating the cost of bullets?
Insipid writer, you pretend to draw for your readers
The portraits of your 3 impostors;
How is it that, witlessly, you have become the fourth?
Why, poor enemy of the supreme essence,
Do you confuse Mohammed and the Creator,
And the deeds of man with God, his author?…
Criticize the servant, but respect the master.
God should not suffer for the stupidity of the priest:
Let us recognize this God, although he is poorly served.My lodging is filled with lizards and rats;
But the architect exists, and anyone who denies it
Is touched with madness under the guise of wisdom.
Consult Zoroaster, and Minos, and Solon,
And the martyr Socrates, and the great Cicero:
They all adored a master, a judge, a father.
This sublime system is necessary to man.
It is the sacred tie that binds society,
The first foundation of holy equity,
The bridle to the wicked, the hope of the just.If the heavens, stripped of his noble imprint,
Could ever cease to attest to his being,
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
Let the wise man announce him and kings fear him.
Kings, if you oppress me, if your eminencies disdain
The tears of the innocent that you cause to flow,
My avenger is in the heavens: learn to tremble.
Such, at least, is the fruit of a useful creed.But you, faulty logician, whose sad foolishness
Dares to reassure them in the path of crime,
What fruit do you expect to reap from your fine arguments?
Will your children be more obedient to your voice?
Your friends, at time of need, more useful and reliable?
Your wife more honest? and your new renter,
For not believing in God, will he pay you better?
Alas! let’s leave intact human belief in fear and hope.
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Racism begins with our families, parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, people we admire, respect and love.
However, as we grow and mature we come to the realization that what we were told by our family when we were children were slanted lies base on their prejudices. We realize that most people are like ourselves and not so different and want the same things, like a home, steady work, a Medicare plan and schools for our children (if you travel you will see this). We realize that most people are of good hearts and goodwill.
This reminds me of a parable from the good book where a Levite and Priest come upon a man who fell among thieves and they both individually passed by and didn’t stop to help him.
Finally a man of another race came by, he got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy and got down with the injured man, administered first aid, and helped the man in need.
Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his fellow man.
You see, the Levite and the Priest were afraid, they asked themselves, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”
But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
That’s the question before us. The question is not, “If I stop to help our fellow man (immigrant) in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help our fellow man, what will happen to him or her?” That’s the question.
This current climate of blaming others for our woes is not new. We have had this before and we have conquered it.
Remember “Evil flourishes when good men (and women) do nothing”. Raise your voices with those of us who believe we are equal and we can win this battle again.
Paul,
Great comment.
Evil also flourishes when believers contend instead of competing in good works.
Salaam eleikum!
“By smearing as racist everyone concerned with illegal immigration and the overboard tolerance for radical Islam, the British left is desensitizing everyone to the legitimate charge”
What a novel concept!
Paul: Not sure I follow the drift of the sermon. Seems to me like you’re saying we’re responsible for the illegal immigrants who sneak through our borders because they come from places with failed economies. Hmmm. It isn’t working for UK, as Wretchard points out, so why will it work in the US? Or am I missing something here? F
Paul: Finally a man of another race came by, he got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy and got down with the injured man, administered first aid, and helped the man in need.
You are reading something into the Bible that isn’t there. There’s no races in the Bible, only peoples and kindreds and tongues. Miriam, in fact, was punished for her racism of objecting to her brother Moses’ marriage to an Ethiopian woman…God temporarily made her literally white with leprosy. In the 150,000 years our species has been around, our DNA only differs by 0.1 percent, and that will actually come back into near-perfect alignment again with the invention of air travel. There’s no race, only people with slightly different shades of brown skin.
for exhelodrvr: The left sees the “racist” canard as it’s most powerful weapon and has no idea of how much damage they are doing by throwing it around so loosely – because if *Everyone* is racist, then *No One* is.
Why should unsophisticated people care if the BNP is called racist? Anyone who criticizes the government these days is a racist, and most have them have probably already been called racists at some point just for opposing some of the things going on. The left has pushed a host of people into the BNP’s camp without even realizing what they were doing.
And now comes the backlash. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it turn quite bloody before this is over.
Wretchard wrote: “Today he has lost that central place and is no more or less than a collection of curiously animated chemical substances with a market value of less then fifty dollars which the state has deigned to keep alive until some bureaucratic panel decides it is too expensive to do so.”
Under Imperial Rome two millenia ago, a man’s life had no more value than the value he could provide to the State. If that value was only to be found by sacrificing him for the entertainment of the crowds of the Arena, then it was a man’s obligation to submit. The all-powerful State had rendered it’s judgment, and there was no power higher than the State, for there were no morals higher than the State’s.
There is an editorial which has been republished yearly which applies to these thoughts perfectly.
In Hoc Anno Domini
When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.
Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.
But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression — for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?
There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?
Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.
And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.
So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.
But it came to pass for a while in divers places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.
Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.
Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets. Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter’s star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.
And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
(This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Royster and has been published annually since.)
That would explain their hostility to the historical religions (particularly Christianity in the West, but sincere Judaism too) – the State cannot bear a competing source of moral authority. Thus rendering the 1st Amendment largely useless, since we’ve returned to an official (State sanctioned) font of Truth.
Before I hadn’t really understood how Communism could be a “religion”, except to the extent they believed in mystical things (like Love scaling beyond Dunbarr’s Number). Now I get it. Religion is the moral authority, and government is the police power. A never should they be joined, or else we will be forced to repeat the Age of religious wars, and be forced to study the lessons of history again.
Heh. I guess that makes me a Christian after all, for lack of closer fitting alternatives. Which readers of an earlier thread will no doubt be amused by.
I think we had best dispense with the notion that we can do anything about God except take him into account in what we do. We can’t invent him, sweep him from the skies, or anything of the sort. That is precisely the opposite of what can and seemingly will be done. It is we who are in danger of being eradicated if we don’t shape up.
There is no such thing as a useful delusion, and that includes religion. If something is imaginary or delusional, it is discrepant with reality and cannot therefore be useful in any sustained way. Christianity has proven itself wildly useful. It remains the great solution to the problem of the Fall.
There is no way to construct a world that does not account for natural law and still works. That’s what the snake promised, and we see again how stupid it was and is to take that advice.
What we have here is a failure to communicate, and the farther we get from the source of who we are the greater a mess we’re in.
“Racism begins with our families, parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, people we admire, respect and love”
It most assuredly does NOT! Anyone dispensing with the fourth commandment with the lame excuse that “my parents were racist” is a lout. Our parents tells us things from accumulated experience and wisdom with the best intentions toward us! To turn the parable of the good samaritan into a politically correct weasel lesson is blasphemy!
Cain’s question is more relevant here: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Pace Rousseau, but the idea that most men are good and decent is laughable for those of us recognizing the truth of Original Sin.
There is a hierarchy of duties and responsibilities, and we are required to take care of our own first, before we attempt to help those far away! Cheating your next door neighbor is not compensated for by sending a check to help the starving children of Sudan!
Benedicamus Domino!
“Racism begins with our families, parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, people we admire, respect and love”. Paul@1
Paul, your family I do not know, and cannot speak for. My family I do know, and your accusation is false.
Hey Paul,
Mind getting off of your high horse and paying for my medical bills? I am an obese, drug addled pedophile and would like to help myself to your 7 year child. Roll over and think of me please.
sarc/
Jeesh. Really. So you are a religious communist who worships the state and believes in forcing your will upon the taxpayer by threat of death by men with guns? A tithe taken is not a tithe given.
A society with a multiracial population and no racial politics is meta-stable. Sooner or later one of the races with develop a political identity, use it to that race’s advantage and to the disadvantages of the other racial groups. Every other racial grouping will need to respond in defense.
That’s why we see such an effort to suppress any racial identity in whites in the US and the UK. Otherwise, whites would fight back with the same poison as the other groups use.
The longer the disparity is maintained the more unattractive with be the result. Either a Klan-like reaction or the subjugation of whites.
That’s not a pretty picture of the future I’m afraid. The BNP looks like a forerunner. Let’s not let it get that far in the US.
Wr. : “It’s almost as if the Left set out to paint itself in the very same colors the BNP wanted it to don.”
or perhaps- “It’s as if the Left set out to don the colors that the BNP would paint them in.”
That’s parsing it a bit, but that gets to the point: namely that when Laboor engaged in a fraud when it imported a constituency for its welfare state, but then sold it to the public on the rubric of “a plan to bolster the economy”; it was effectively saying that the means (the bolstering of a permanent class constituency) justified the means (namely: Lying to do it).
Which translates to: even if one concedes the stupid, inane arguments of the left for the moment, (for the sake of argument, and in the abstract), then therefore- Two Wrongs Make a Right.
Or perhaps- If Might Makes Right (again, according to the Left’s formerly undisclosed argument), we (the Left) just need the (political) Might (a new and bigger, ‘permanent’, multi-culti constituency).
So the Left effectively discarded Willie Stark’s venerable hick constituency as its darling, and then expected that same (original) constituency to, not only foot the bill, but deliver the votes as well.
And for those apostates who defected, well, the new influx of voters could more than compensate for the loss, and besides, punishment awaited them anyway in its myriad forms, from a heepin’ helpin’ of guilt pie, to the tax burden riding so high on those who escaped the poor meager circumstances of their ancestors and joined the ‘the middle class’ where nothing is guaranteed, and nothing is for certain.
Except that we may all succeed based on our merits, as long as someone who doesn’t exchange his/her labors for a days pay, or something doesn’t come along and tamper with our livelihood(s) and make it all more complicated than it needs to be.
And this infernal tampering, as we’ve learned to our horror, has been going on incrementally in the U.S. at the national level, for going on ninety six years now. Under the guise of mixing, infusing, and intruding general quasi-religious principle’s from the nations capital, as national policy, in the form of ‘progressivism’.
Including Voltaire’s poem, in its entirety, adds a vey nice coup de grace, and gives the proper context to his use of the oft quoted line. (IMHO). Thanks.
Whitehall, what is going on there has nothing to do with skin color or race. It has to do with culture, and the Brits have been infected by leftist materialist paradigms for decades now and have made the mistake of forgetting how great they have been and might still be were they to get their heads out of their collective asses.
How stupid to think you could dilute something as precious as what England was without threatening it’s identity and integrity. How stupid not to know that letting hordes of people infected with the most serious of cultural pathogens would irrevocably alter the host culture. How stupid not to know that who you are and what you have is good and needs to be protected as though it were gold or water in a desert.
That’s what multiculturalism does to its faithful.
The muslim agreed with you Paul. That’s not a favorable return on the old litmus test.
Encouraging a culture of heaping mocking and derision on those who would too broadly apply epithets such as “racist” would be a good start. A state not powerful enough to confer benefits on a current “in group” would be a good finish.
Religion is the moral authority, and government is the police power.–Brock
Government does not lack for moral authority. Romans 13:4a–”For it (civil authority) is a minister of God to you for good.”
While it is true that the state often exceeds it God-given authority, using it to afflict the just, the civil magistrate’s office is not an inherently evil one.
The problem originates when civil government seeks to exercise powers that are best reserved to other institutions such as the church: charity (vs welfare) nurturing the nuclear family through marriage (vs day care and civil unions) and teaching/preaching God’s word (vs public schools).
Failing to recognize the proper God-given authority of the church and family (to say nothing of the individual), the state seeks to impose its own police power on and control over these institutions, thus damaging the ties of voluntary association. As these competing authorities grow weaker, the state must fill the resultant void by expanding its role to that of secular priest and paternal guardian.
Since the state is not well-suited to either function, it must ultimately fail.
Fittingly, God’s death (or ultimate irrelevance) must bring about the death of the state as well. Because the state has irretrievably weakened the authority of all competing agencies, no one remains to fill the looming void and chaos erupts.
Thus panicked, men will rush to reinvigorate the failed state with ever greater powers and willingly yield up their few remaining freedoms to an iron-willed autocrat. If he is a white, heterosexual male, the people will feel a greater kinship for him than if he looks like a metrosexual foreigner.
Race-socialism is to be our future unless the loss of respect and affection for church and family can be successfully recovered.
imho the non native europeans will be kicked out eventually. When “eventually” is — I don’t know. I also think the cost of desalination and tranport will collapse far that it will be ecomically feasible to turn the world’s deserts green. I have a little more insight into the timing here. Desalination costs have fallen by a third over the last 10 years. They’ll do at least that much in the next five. Killing the cost of transporting water up hill over long distances will be the more difficult challenge. That will happen in 10 years.
if the european expulsions and the greening of the deserts happen at the same time and pace– an accommodation can be made.
imho deserts all over the world will be turned green by cheap plentiful water & power.
devising the technologies to do that will be the key stepping stones to developing the technologies for space colonization.
Socialism is not Fascism.
Hitler’s brand of “Socialism” was for Arians only (National Socialism).
In it minorities would slave for the White man.
We modern progressives want just the opposite.
;>)
I could not disagree with Wretchard more. First, the idea of a notional nation or centrality of religion over nationalism and identity is as dead as the Holy Roman Empire. You cannot call back the bullet.
Said bullet already being fired by the UN.
The BNP specifically cites the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples wrt Labor’s policy of flooding the UK with immigrants here.
Indigenous Peoples are Indigenous Peoples. In Britain, they are the Angles, Scots, Welsh, Celts, Saxons, Danes, etc. Under the UN Declaration they have primary rights. Just as Mexico has the right to prevent say, hordes of Germans descending on them and colonizing them and making them minorities in their own nations (and theoretically, Tibet to exclude Chinese or Egypt the Palestinians), so too do native Britons. Who are in this case White.
This is the bullet THAT CANNOT BE CALLED BACK. Group rights and identity ARE THE LOGIC OF THE AGE. Arguing that it would be nice if people were oriented towards God or notional ideas of a nation state are akin to arguing it would be nice if the Byzantine Empire had never fallen. It is completely irrelevant at the task at hand.
Which is a naked spoils fight over government goodies according to ethnic/racial identity.
This was the inevitable outcome of the bullet being fired (which is why many warned against it) but nevertheless, the bullet has been fired. It cannot EVER be called back. SOME form of the BNP is the future of EVERY nation on Earth. Period.
The US has uneasily been an Anglo-Celtic-African nation. With the African part being in one way or another, the deciding factor between the “Anglo” i.e. coastal, wealthy merchant/banking/leadership elite, and the Celtic, western, populist, frontier-entrepreneurial masses. The US cannot and will not ever cease being party Black. Blacks are going nowhere but here. The US always has been and always will be partly Black.
HOWEVER, the status-quo ante of Affirmative Action is no longer sustainable. It depended on good times rolling, a White population that found it a small cost (for Blacks basically not rioting much), with government a distant and not intrusive aspect of daily life. NOW, with “We Are All Socialists Now” being Newsweek’s mantra, government proposes to control EVERY aspect of life, health care, who gets what, the carbon rationing green police, government hiring being the only game in town for jobs, and all predicated on Blacks first on the Bus and Whites standing in the back (getting beat up like that White kid in St. Louis by a cheering Black crowd) metaphorically speaking if Whites protest too much.
Given that the US Census Bureau has the 2005-2007 Community Survey as 76% White and 12.5% Black, and the 2008 Estimates being 80% and 12.8% respectively, this is not even with Elite backing from wealthy Whites a sustainable political arrangement.
Changes ALREADY MADE by Obama cannot be unwound, and more changes to come will only make Government a PERMANENT aspect of life in all areas. This makes racial identity voting CRITICAL for the majority — facing discrimination by an alliance of minorities.
The key aspect of the alliance (women and women’s activist groups, note that the report cited was created by a female pol) has been White women who have allied themselves against White men, their chief political, economic, and cultural enemies. However, the naked spoils fights over slices of the pie have led more to conclude that the BNP is “a better deal” which is why you get the British National Ballet ballerina, a very respectable woman in her thirties, who had a child by a Chinese-Cuban man who is her common law husband, joining the BNP.
Duh the female converts to Islam. They want a dominating husband, who expresses “hard” masculinity and are perfectly willing to share him with other women (indeed that other women would want him and have him is proof he is desirable.) Only those putting women (falsely and in a way that denies their humanity of flaws and bad attributes) on a pedestal would fail to see the motivating desire to convert to Islam by women: they wish dominant/dominating husbands and don’t see any downside feeling “protected” by modern society. In other words the classic expression of female hypergamy.
Sandra Tsing Loh in her column on divorce noted how Scandinavian men were abjuring their effeminate countrymen for marriages to Muslim men. Note btw that polygamy plus Muslim men “hoarding’ the limited number of available women (Muslim women do not date unbelievers) is an unspoken pressure cooker for young men who now have every reason to hate.
Way to go, Paul @ 1, trying to hijack this post with the (irrelevant) first comment
We’ll never see a smoking gun, but would anyone bet that the same thinking didn’t animate Edward Kennedy and the Great Society Democrats when they totally changed US immigration law in 1965—and both parties ever since, whenever someone has tried to move toward a rational and enforced immigration policy (and been called racist for their trouble)?
All social animals engage in warfare and kll or drive out non-group members of the same species. Some behaviour most certainly is genetically inherited. The purpose of socialization is to protect habitat and territory from competing groups.
In nature the kinship group is usually based on a lineage and so it is with human tribes and clans. Given time the clans evolved into nations and the nations to states and the states to unstable empires.
Humans having brains can form territory/habitat/resource protecting groups on a number of basises. It could be kinship, trade, religion, ideology, language, culture etc etc. But the point is diversity in the thing that holds the group together is no virtue. In the USA we developed a nation state based on a shared set of values at an early point in oue history when we were well divided by language, religion, custom, mode of livlihood, and origin. A Dutchman from the Hudson Valley, a Pennsylvannia Quaker, a Virginia Anglican, and a Massachusetts dissenter didn’t have a lot in common except the need for a common defense from an English King, rapacious Indians, the French and the Spanish crowns. So they formed a lose confederation based on limited government and local sovereignty that wound up holding together resonably well for the first four score years.
But you, faulty logician, whose sad foolishness
Dares to reassure them in the path of crime,
What fruit do you expect to reap from your fine arguments?
I just saw a clip of John Kerry on TV, surrendering in “sad foolishness” in speaking about Afghanistan.
We have a C-in-C who came to fame by famously demanding surrender in Iraq at the nadir of that war we have since all but won, relying upon a Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who came to fame by damning all his fellow Vietnam Warriors as war criminals.
God bless our troops. With unworthy leadership like this, they need our prayers. If we are not in it to win it, war is immoral.
#15 Maineman,
I will agree that any clear, public,, non-erasable difference can serve as the basis for devisive politics – race is just the clearest, most common example and the bigger risk in the US. Compound the issue with other differentiators – culture, religon, etc, and the problem gets bigger and meaner.
Consider a high class, educated, Francophone from Africa coming to the US. Would he join Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson’s camp or would he be more supportive of the politics of the white middle class? Lacking white racism, he would be welcomed into the white middle class’ camp.
If whites had to re-adopt racism in defense, then our example would face a tougher test and the US could lose his contribution to our society.
#20 Whiskey
Always appreciate your look at the issue from the sexual politics angle. Biology and the primacy of sexual competition is at the root of most human behavior. Now, how do we keep the exo-estrogens out of our food and water supplies?
In one sense, we have gone along with few challenges over the last few decades and have gone soft as luxuries flowered. Tough times will make for a tougher people.
Comment I left earlier at Chicagoboyz:
There seems to be a bit of confusion here, so I’ll remind people that Fascism and Nazism are of the LEFT, not the RIGHT.
“National SOCIALIST Worker’s Party.”
There hardly is a right, anymore–that was royalists and clerical, esp. Catholic. As political forces, come on… the success of modernism pretty much did in the old right, it’s last gasp was arguably L’affaire Dreyfuss, with some echoes in the Phalange in the 1930s.
The difference between Facsism/Naziism and Communism/Socialism is mostly about what are the great drivers of history–the Communist points to the class struggle over the means of production, the Fascist looks at national identity, the Nazi is a racist and anti-Semite.
But they wind up at about the same place on a broad range of philosophical and practical matters, as long as you’re not a Jew or kulak, so to speak.
To the extent you can say anything meaningful along a single dimension, the distinction is more statists vs. liberals (in the European or original sense of the term) vs. libertarians.
What the BNP and the Left are fighting over is who gets to control the state.
Why did you leave out the Conservative Party? They are no different. It is all about power.
Why did you leave out the Conservative Party? They are no different. It is all about power.
Yes of course. Them too. The attraction of state power explains why the conservatives, and to some extent the RINOs are curiously “unconservative”. The state imposes its mold on those who seek it. A powerful state will ensure, by its own existence, the absence of any political party that truly rejects it, unless it were a revolutionary movement. Any mainstream party within the system will implictly be prepared to inherit the great mechanism. It will be prepared to “play”. When government is huge, there can be no party of small government which seriously seeks office. That would be like looking for teetotalers at a bar.
Ultimately the greatest threat to democracy is the state itself. If allowed to grow beyond a certain size it stops becoming the agent of the principal and acts on its own behalf. Every democratic mechanism is designed precisely to prevent this; whether check and balance, the ballot or term limits. The first ten articles of the Bill of Rights are Thou Shalt Nots which limit government, what Cass Sunstein called stupid “negative rights”. But they not so stupid, nor nearly so dangerous as his ill-conceived positive rights. Those positive “rights” are properly considered, a charter for potential fascism as I think we will all discover before long.
Wretchard — in the Corner at National Review there is a post by IIRC Jonah Goldberg today (too lazy to look it up) by a reader on the RINO phenomena and the appalling leftist nominee in NY State. Basically, politics at the local GOP level are dominated by women … who are left-leaners on nearly all social issues: global warming, guns, abortion, affirmative action etc. because these are “respectable positions” held by “opinion makers.”
Men and people who are conservative do not show up, or if they do are loathe to argue/fight with the women who show up and are quite left-wing (women are, even older women). This is how Scofallaza (spelling?) was nominated. Politics at the local level like pretty much ALL volunteerism is dominated by nice “respectable” ladies age 55-65, semi-retired, who are pretty hard left.
The key to changing Republicans or Conservatives in the UK is through mass volunteering action by more conservative men and simply out-manuevering and shutting up the left-female contingent. Who “know” things because Whoopi Goldberg on the View or Al Gore said they were true.
On a practical matter, the state powers now are irreversible. We will not see them wound down in our lifetimes. What is left to us, is how to limit them from growing to ALL aspects, and critically, controlling the State so that “we” (our alliance groupings) benefit and our enemies are destroyed. None of us wanted this — but is left to us to deal with.
Great stuff Wretchard:consider ,if you will,this wee premise re: lefist machinations and pathetic,retrograde power grabs…in the USA , post-LBJ/voting acts/GreatSociety presumptions, etc…the Left in dismantling extant culture&religious habits ,seek to create other liturgies and psalms; to wit: enviro-lemminglike-lunancy is no different than the Salem witchtrials as is the astonishing absurdity and overt manipulations of “global whatever”-1st it was Newsweek mag. braying about a new Iceage-1978!!- now , 20k polar bears are suffering- inspite of a 4x growth curve in popul. since 1960s!But, the Left’s new religion to replace the older one is now threadbare and under serious and rational assault- see Rich. Lindzen’s work from M.I.T…the man is a veritable Martin Luther within the “academic”(read: hoplessly lost in romantic marxism)orb and he is causing the roof to come in on these poseurs-see the perfidy and knowing mis-information leaking from under the “work” of N.A.S.A’s James Hansen.Hockey stick , my aspidistra…the message is that human beings crave order and rigour- they’re just given to lazy formulations like “I’m votin’ for Obama: he’s gonna pay my mortgage and put gas in my tank.” word, bro- I saw the young clueless woman say that pre-election , on nat’l TV. Disorder/sloppythinking/bread&circus…that’s what Obama has brought. Are we focused enough and properly informed enough to tell him to take this baksheese back to wahhabbi land?Or, leftyland, wherever that might be…maybe in Mexico City next to Trotsky’s grave?
There is this sense, is there not, that what the power grabbers are fighting over is so complex as to be uncontrollable over the long term. Seems like a tower of destruction moment is on the horizon. My money is on the black swan.
Then we shall see what needs doing.
>>Where it differs with the Left is for whose benefit the economy should be managed. For the Left the answer is: for the benefit of what it defines to be the historical victim — Muslims, immigrants from former colonies and people with special sexual needs. For the BNP the answer to the question is: for the benefit of the poor white; the indigene; the people who have lived in the British isles.<<
HA! Wretchard agrees with me again! Further proof I'm not crazy!
I have coined the term "white socialism" to cover the far "right", fascism, and associated ideologies. The left calls fascism a right wing, conservative philosophy; the right calls it a left wing, socialist philosophy. Neither is strictly correct, it's just the same program for different groups. Actually the groups cooperate quite easily when they want to.
“By their own narcissism, self-righteousness and contempt, the left is actively driving people to fascist solutions just as their more radical ideological ancestors did back in the 1920s.”
This is the clear lesson I learned when – amid all the bleating about BushHitler – I recognized that I really didn’t know that much about Nazis and Fascists and should take a class. I had the opportunity during a law school summer and had the great good fortune of having a perspicacious Serb as a professor.
The clear lesson of the simply chronology is that Communist excesses in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Italy, and elsewhere precipitated the tendency to accept aspects of “fascism” – for example, for its perceived sympathy with the traditional symbols of the state, including its acknowledgement of the prevailing church – to the exclusion of others. It was quite clear to contemporaries of the German Revolution, Bela Kun’s regime in Hungary, and the Republicans of Spain that the alternative to crown and church – i.e. normalcy – was something total, athesit, and murderous, even though the word “totalitarian” didn’t come into the common discourse until much later. The term “reaction-ary” is absolutely spot on.
Even now, the excesses of the conservative reaction to liberal triumphalism and Obama, its apotheosis (complete with “shut up because I won”), are fueled largely by the previous 8 years’ basically Leninist temper tantrum. Who would expect anything else to occur when the “Bush is Hitler!” crowd gets into office – even among the people who mostly liked Bush because the alternative was worse?
Our greatest hope for being awoken from this stupid irreconcilability is for Obama to f up so badly the Reagan Democrats spirit re-awakens and rescues us from, in the words of Bezmenov, “these schmucks who want to bring this country to crisis” – of course, unless Obama brings that on himself, intentionally or unintentionally.
The Left versus the BNP. What a laugh. This time we must remember things according to their proper names and not exalt one kind of tyranny simply because it set itself against another. The struggle for centralized power can create a rivalry which destroys the very thing the rivals seek to possess. Only when the whole thing burns down do they stop grasping after it. Then they build it up and try again.
In other words, if you don’t like the electorate you have, trade it for another one. The small minority of the population represented by elected officials thinks that the land actually belongs to them, to be staffed with peasants as needed. Well, I’ve called it neo-fuedalism before. Those pesky peasants sometimes find lots of torches and pitchforks though.
Interesting to read this as I’m listening to Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which I find compelling and informative even though the basic argument – that fascism and communism were both Leftist movements – is something I long ago realized. The rise of the BNP is Great Britain is a very high-fidelity echo of the rise of German fascism in the 20′s and 30′s. The real difference between Communism and Fascism is that Communism is international socialism (workers of the world unite!), while Fascism is national socialism. Class-based vs racial-based. As Wretchard pointed out, it’s quite natural for international socialism to collapse into national socialism. In times of hardship, people tend to retreat to more local communities and local allegiances. Socialism, by being such a lousy long-term solution to anything, guarantees eventual hardships. The international experiment of modern pan-gaia socialism will collapse. I just hope the US can extract itself from the mess with enough of a tradition of individual liberty alive to avoid falling permanently into our own nightmare.
For as long as man imagined himself to be sacred and accountable to the Creator he stood at the center of polity. The state was there to serve him and not the reverse. Today he has lost that central place and is no more or less than a collection of curiously animated chemical substances with a market value of less then fifty dollars which the state has deigned to keep alive until some bureaucratic panel decides it is too expensive to do so.
Back when I was in college, I read Auden’s poem, “The Unknown Citizen,” several times and always enjoyed it. I seem to recall that, at the time, I interpreted the poem to be a poke at the conformed, living-a-life-of-quiet-desperation, born-and-bred-to-consumerism, modern Western citizen, and to a lesser degree at the bureaucrats of the State to whom the citizen was just a faceless number.
But these past few months, when BC discussions have turned to exploring the way the socialist/collectivist State views the citizen, I have found myself returning to that poem and re-thinking it. Maybe it’s not a satire harshing so much on the citizen after all. Maybe it’s a satire harshing most harshly on the State (and pitying the citizen for what the State has reduced him to). After all, the poem is told from the State’s (collective) 1st person POV, yes?
I don’t know enough about Auden’s personal politics to guess, for now, which interpretation is more accurate with respect to his intention. But I think the poem cuts a lot deeper when it is read as an anti-Borg statement. Otherwise, why capitalize “Greater Community” unless the intent is to ridicule? Or the sly dig at
state indoctrinationpublic education with the line about “our teachers report that he never interfered with their education”?The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07/M/378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for he time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Then the question becomes, what percentage of the parliament are they likely to be on the brink of winning? If they do not secure a majority in the next election, how will they proffer their positions according to what we know about them? Will their pulpit, as a minority party, mean they can disseminate their hyperbole and/or demagoguery with a louder megaphone? Are they potential instigators of street violence as an expression of their will? (The Left is the one who usually stokes such dramaticas; its in the handbook)
Who knows how it will play out exactly? I think they’ve got a chicken/egg problem on their hands to begin with; to promote socialist welfare for the poorer oppressed (ostensibly by current Labour policies) white folks is one thing, to expell the immigrant population on the other id quite a different thing. Which one will the pursue first? Which one will they have the power to mandate first?
What is the rate of female hypergamical conversion to islam, does anyone know? Am I at risk of this disaster overwhelming my life? Could She be a closet hypergam?
signed, happily married 30th
In other words, if you don’t like the electorate you have, trade it for another one.
Yah, I’ve heard this attitude described in a couple of similar ways:
That the progs think of the US as a government with a people, not a people with a government.
And in any disagreement between the government and the people, the progs’ view is that it’s time to get a new people, not a new government.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of the 21st century, if one is to accept the notion of the “Death of God” as permanent in the West, is to find a basis to once again put the individual at the center of politics. Can a person, deprived of his sacredness, living under a sky swept of a Creator, assert himself as superior to the monstrously gigantic state?
Wretchard, a former pastor of mine (brilliant guy, best preacher I have ever had as a pastor) once said in a sermon that the most radical & rebellious thing a person could say in today’s world is, “Jesus is Lord.” This pastor was in the Philippines during the 1980s and told a lot of stories about what he witnessed during the People Power Revolution. He and his wife adopted a daughter while there …. I’m sure you and he would have some interesting conversations.
Jared Taylor in his “Paved with Good Intentions” discusses, among other things, the negative consequences of tamping down the language of the debate over issues such as race and immigration.
It is said that Norwegian authorities, faced with a horrid epidemic of rape by Muslims against ethnic Norwegian women, have stopped breaking out the data by ethnicity. To prevent people getting the wrong idea.
Problem is, people will get a worse wrong idea and, into the bargain, see the government and the chattering classes as the enemy.
Bad, bad arrangement.
But done with the best of intentions.
I don’t think the BNP has a realistic hope of winning any more than a relative handful of seats. Not yet anyway. But the fact that they have become the “hope of the working man” is an indication of how badly both mainstream parties have fallen short. The real problem is that there’s no real reason to believe the trends will change. Labour will continue to set its hair on fire and the conservatives will continue to floss with razor blades. The craziness continues. Sooner or later the Titanic will sink even if the leak is but small for as long as nobody plugs it up.
Paul seems to have stirred up some fuss with his post. I think I should speak up in his defense.
This is spirituality 101. I and thou. Give and recieve. Heaven and Earth. This is not a stance on illegal immigration. It is his response to what he sees as deeper issues. They are too basic to try and explain further.
If we lose sight of those higher goals then we have fallen into the trap as our host reminds us:
“But the architect exists, and anyone who denies it
Is touched with madness under the guise of wisdom.”
But this is a thread about the State and I wanted to speak of loftier issues.
The locals running for Mayor and Council are driving me nuts. They show up Sunday afternoons just when I am into beer #3, after I spent the whole morning raking leaves, and my local football team is crapping out again. Last thing I want to do is talk about the storm drains right now. This week we need to vote on a variance for the new house going up in the spring. I think it is a good plan and the folks showed up at the clambake and seemed very nice.
Politics is local.
Spindok
“It is really an absolute display of the power of politics over life.”
Enabling abortion is primarily an attempt to enable otherwise nonviable lifestyles to exist. See Myron Magnet, “The Dream and the Nightmare.” That has become a primary purpose for the State, making sure that people do not have to suffer the consequences of their actions. Gun control is another aspect of this ultimate priority. Some people, even some cultures, can’t handle guns, – and others refuse to have anything to do with them – so no one can have them.
The power of politics over life has become not simply the ability to end life – that has always been around – but the ability to enable almost all lifestyles to be viable.
Whether this priority is a real, ideological commitment to a judgement-free, non-moral, non-religious society or merely a necessary tactic to make sure they have a big enough tent and enough political power – well, I don’t think anybody really knows.
Great post:
“The strident insistence on abortion on demand goes way beyond any conceivable need to prevent backroom abortions, or even an affirmation of a woman’s right to choose. It is really an absolute display of the power of politics over life. Abortion’s principal utility is as a stake driven through the heart of the notion of human sacredness, which once performed, ought to prevent its revival entirely.”
“Perhaps the greatest challenge of the 21st century, if one is to accept the notion of the “Death of God” as permanent in the West, is to find a basis to once again put the individual at the center of politics. Can a person, deprived of his sacredness, living under a sky swept of a Creator, assert himself as superior to the monstrously gigantic state?” In some art, at least, an individual’s awakening against the overbearing totalitarian state begins with an act of love, which in the state’s eyes is an act of political subversion. At the centers of 1984, Brave New World, We, THX 1138, and even Braveheart (the movie) are love stories. The all-powerful state (at least in art) cannot abide the individual act of love, especially, sexual love, a particularly individual act. Those poor saps really had no chance.
If that sky were not swept of a Creator, but instead held a capricious God, would the outcome be any different?
#33 dan,
I posted this comment elsewhere in response to this paragraph:
”
“Soon we will get everything on the official transcripts and websites scrubbed down to read: Guantanamo really will close on March 1, 2010; Iran must comply this time by June 1, 2010; all combat brigades will be out by March 2008, 2009, 2010; health care must pass by
August,September,October,November“.”
I can remember the sound bytes from this summer: they included, in fact they started with this one, from all three principals: Peloski, Reis and Übhamas- “We are going get this thing passed (health care “reform”), by the end of the week”!
Then it became …“By the end of the month”…”Before the Summer Recess”….”Before Labor Day” …”Before Halloween”…, “Before Arbor Day”…“Before Thanksgiving”…
What next? How about- “We are going to bring this thing home …Before Christmas” …”Before New Years?… “Before the Spring Thaw”?…
How about …”By the Midterm Elections Nov. 5, 2010″ ? How about that? These people are the most pathetic losers; they can’t do anything right, not even their own cloaked power grabs. They wouldn’t even be able to tie their own shoes if all the eunuchs called in sick that day.
they got the “majur-tee”, but they don’t got the votes.
I say it again: they got the majority, but they don’t got the votes.
Some force majeure. Looks as though we got it on our side, which should end up being one hell of a blow to their pathetic, insecure, already weakened, strumpet egozze.
“Hey, Leggo my EAGGO!!”
BWA! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!
”
[End]
So, never attribute to malice what can be explained by sheer incompetence.
But as to your point dan, in der Weimar Reichstag, since the precedent was Mussolini, and his explicit “Everything in the State, nothing outside the state” quotation, every proposal was met with the ad hominem cries of “Fascism!!!” ad infinitum, so that by the time the National Socialists and Hitler were able to start shrewdly exploiting the economic depression, and ridicule (those) democratic parliamentary procedures that weren’t improving anything, calling Hitler and National Socialists “Fascist” was redundant and a tired old rubric used previously [already] to challenge the majority party in power.
Just as the disloyal “opposition” did during Eight years of the Bush Administration. It happened accidentally the first time, but now its an old trick, used by the Left whenever their status is minority and they want to convince the public that everyone’s collective back is against the wall, and stage a new, I say, a *new* [ahem] stunt, persistently “fueled largely by the previous 8 years’ basically Leninist temper tantrum.”
Even if it takes 8 years to do it.
I never fully appreciated the parable of the Good Samaritan until I found out that historically, the Samaritans where not foreigners as 1-Paul above asserts, but were ethnic Jews whose religious practices were a throw back to a more archaic, i.e. Mosaic, time. If Jesus had meant the parable to be about foreigners then the character would have been a Roman, a Greek or a Syrian for example. But most Jews of Jesus’ time, and especially the Pharisees, would have had a snobbish attitude toward the Samaritans, who were their cousins in faith. I would guess in much the same way many educated Christians look down their noses at their more fundamentalist brothers and sisters today.
“If fascism and Left wing socialism share most of their political DNA then this process is easy to understand. When the vital 5% — or whatever crucially differentiates them — flips then one becomes the other…What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society…When the Left and fascists contend for power, the surveillance cameras are in every case fully employed.”
Beautifully stated. I would only add that the in-your-face Fascist often stays in power without the need for burdensome elections, whereas the Marxist stays in power through (un-Constitutional) class struggle; i.e.: robbing Peter to pay non-disabled Paul in return for votes. In order to pull off this “Marxist Shuffle” the Marxist must seize legal (un-Declarational) ownership of individual property, i.e.: the labor of the individual; and ownership of its means of production, i.e.: the creativity of the entrepreneur. The Fascist merely requires legal control of the same; but in reality control is de-facto ownership.
Both Fascism and its cousin Marxism are European in origin, and they both remain distinctly un-American. Our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, if enforced, would destroy all traces of these disgusting European ideologies from our land; because that is the will of “We the People.” The Fascist and Marxist aspects of American Society today have evolved without the informed consent of the American majority.
Our Tenth Amendment forbids Marxist economic social engineering (unjust property redistribution in return for votes) at the Federal level, and our Declaration of Independence forbids it at any level because an individual’s earned property (or means of production) is his/her creative pursuit of happiness – a sacred and natural right which surpasses the legitimate authority of any government.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODJfwa9XKZQ
if the central role of the state is accepted, then the only question is what the character of that authority will be: Islamic, Communist or Fascist.
But these are all sterile. What got the Germans going was as much nationalism, and a bunch of pagan hoohah, as debates about authority structures. Islam is more visceral by being a religion. But some kind of Druid revival might give the BNP a little more life, if they want some marketing advice.
But do you really think an incident could turn the entire UK? I think, unfortunately, that the sterile and secular is too much entrenched, and too comatose, to do more than lie there while it is dismembered.
At the centers of 1984, Brave New World, We, THX 1138, and even Braveheart (the movie) are love stories. The all-powerful state (at least in art) cannot abide the individual act of love, especially, sexual love, a particularly individual act.
Don’t forget “Gattica.” Being conceived the, erm, old-fashioned way rather than the gene-scrubbed and pre-selected approach by the state was a one-way ticket to permanent untouchableness. And what a state it is in that story … coming around at night to vaccuum up the sloughed-off skin cells of its worker bees to ensure that every little bee is genetically pure. The gross violations of privacy that the state allows itself are matched only by the gross prohibitions that the state places upon privacy between individuals.
And once again we return to the realm of “The Lives of Others” wherein the state finds it so intolerable that someone, somewhere, might be discussing forbidden ideas, that it dispatches the ultimate Socialist Drone to monitor and report every word and every act taken by a man inside his own residence.
Ah, the real past mirroring the (perhaps not-so) fictional sci-fi future ….
If that sky were not swept of a Creator, but instead held a capricious God, would the outcome be any different?
Like Voltaire and perhaps Pascal, I think it is always in a man’s personal interest to claim he is something more than an animal or the equivalent of a barrel of chemicals. There are enough forces out there trying to enslave and kill you without volunteering the proposition that we’re all just jumped up monkeys. You must at least allow for the remote possibility that we truly are sacred; and that not a sparrow falls to earth without a heavenly Father taking note. If a man won’t argue his cause, if a man can’t at least hope that his “individual act of love” will last or try to last forever, then nobody else will. Because sure as heck the bearded prophets of Marxism would like nothing better than to assign, or better yet tattoo a serial number on you with an expiration date and a recycling destination. I would almost say that to believe in God, or at least to allow for the possibility of His existence is the most fundamental act of rebellion possible. You defy the universe and certainly the State to extinguish you.
I think it’s not totally a stretch. We believe certain things because evolution ensured that certain thought patterns and attitudes were rewarded with survival advantages compared to others. And the man who thinks his life is worth preserving is certainly going to be better motivated than the man who thinks he is a hindrance to Gaia or a burden on the State. If you really want to make sure you’re for the boneyard, then curl up into a little ball, and heed Lord Stern of Brentford’s advice to keep the cows from farting; get ready to eat your pets and volunteer if necessary for the voluntary human extinction project. Think of yourself like bacteria and you’ll soon be treated like one. The Marxist word for the plural of humanity and the plural of algae are the same: it is the masses. Not the people.
The most subversive sentences of the Declaration are all to do with the legitimacy of the pursuit of happiness; and the celebration of our dangerously impertinent desire to look up at the skies and call each star by its name.
Socialism is not Fascism.
It was in Italy. And Italy to some extent protected their Jews. The French went out of their way to send them to Germany.
Also I find it interesting that it took until #15 for some one to get the crux of the matter.
“Think of yourself like bacteria and you’ll soon be treated like one. The Marxist word for the plural of humanity and the plural of algae are the same: it is the masses. Not the people.”
“As for Marxism, one thinks of an analogy with another physical theory. This is the kinetic theory of gases, according to which a gas is the aggregate of molecules that come into collision, with the result of each collision determined by the laws of mechanics. A very great number of molecules transform the statistical laws of their collision into the general laws of the physics of gases. (Marx:)“The only form of social contact of the producers of goods in capitalist society is exchange” (just as for gas molecules the only form of interaction is collision). The interaction of a great number of producers engenders that “social production” which, in its turn, determines their political, legal and religious notions, and the “social, political and spiritual processes of life in general.” It is evident that such a conception makes sense only on the assumption that separate “molecules” (producers) are identical.” Igor Shafarevich
“We have arrived at this view of socialism in attempting to account for the contradictions evident in the phenomenon at first glance. And now, looking back, we feel confident that our approach indeed accounts for many of socialism’s peculiarities. Understanding socialism as one of the manifestations of the allure of death explains its hostility toward individuality, its desire to destroy those forces which support and strengthen human personality: religion, culture, family, individual property. It is consistent with the tendency to reduce man to the level of a cog in the state mechanism, as well as with the attempt to prove that man exists only as a manifestation of non-individual features, such as production or class interest.” Igor Shafarevich
http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
Why would identical little molecules and cogs have any unalienable “God-given” human rights? Karl Marx answered this question: There will be no unalienable rights for pond scum because pond scum is of measurably little value. Karl Marx hated his fellow man – disgusting pond scum and insignificant identical molecules:
“You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
“And still, you (ordinary middle class individual – creative owner of property) personified mankind, I may take you by the power of my mighty hands and crush with fierce force. In the meantime, as the abyss gapes before me and you in the darkness, You will fall in it and I’ll follow you, Laughing and whispering into your ear: “Come down with me, friend!” Karl Marx
http://www.forerunner.com/predvestnik/X0013_Karl_Marx.html
Comparisons between the American and the English polities are unreliable. We truly are as Shaw said, “Two peoples separated by a common language.” In America the concept of a Yeoman Democracy was taken seriously. Military officers are discouraged from entering the Civil Service, they get fewer points than enlisted members, and with few exceptions, such as South Carolina, state legislatures were rapidly selected by the widest possible enfranchisement of the free citizenry.
American movies were about the average doughboy of WW-I or the GI Joe of WW-II and he was a pretty shrewd mature and even noble figure as portrayed. British films were generally about the officers and even when the “other ranks” were portrayed it was generally as shining examples of feudal sacrifice. An American warship can get underway, navigate across the ocean, and fire its weapons, with no officers on board. A Russian ship could not get underway. The crew of a Royal Navy vessel might have the technical know how but would they have the initiative given that they lack the cultural models to act on?
In England the Tories and the Whigs/Liberals/Labour competed to expand the franchise, with the Conservatives pushing hardest to broaden the lower orders, but the culture remained far more rigid and upward mobility was much rarer then in the States. Most Americans looking at the rise of the BNP may be shocked but are unaware at the deep contempt that all educated English, whether old Tory snobs or modernizing Labour technocrats have had for generations for the masses and their Yob culture of Beer, Footer and violence.
The contempt that the Left in America directs at Fly Over Country and Nascar America is a recent affectation done in imitation of their European models. Nothing would please the Axelrod Pelosi left as much as a BNP type nativist movement that justifies their ghettoizing and debasing the people who successfully built and defended America. Nothing terrifies them as much as the prospect of an alliance between Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin that could offer an alternative to the European model.
#36 bogie wheel
Do you know Robert Frost’s poem “Departmental,” written in 1936?
An ant on the tablecloth
Ran into a dormant moth
Of many times his size.
He showed not the least surprise.
His business wasn’t with such.
He gave it scarcely a touch,
And was off on his duty run.
Yet if he encountered one
Of the hive’s enquiry squad
Whose work is to find out God
And the nature of time and space,
He would put him onto the case.
Ants are a curious race;
One crossing with hurried tread
The body of one of their dead
Isn’t given a moment’s arrest-
Seems not even impressed.
But he no doubt reports to any
With whom he crosses antennae,
And they no doubt report
To the higher-up at court.
Then word goes forth in Formic:
“Death’s come to Jerry McCormic,
Our selfless forager Jerry.
Will the special Janizary
Whose office it is to bury
The dead of the commissary
Go bring him home to his people.
Lay him in state on a sepal.
Wrap him for shroud in a petal.
Embalm him with ichor of nettle.
This is the word of your Queen.”
And presently on the scene
Appears a solemn mortician;
And taking formal position,
With feelers calmly atwiddle,
Seizes the dead by the middle,
And heaving him high in air,
Carries him out of there.
No one stands round to stare.
It is nobody else’s affair
It couldn’t be called ungentle
But how thoroughly departmental.
The
64 Thousand Dollar300 million person question is whether “was” or “is” is the correct tense for that sentence.I really, really, really, really, really hope it’s “is.”
“Yob culture of Beer, Footer and violence.”
Footer? …
Oh! Football + Soccer = Footer!
LOL!
wretchard writes:
And this defines the BNP as fascists how? It seems to me that they are what we would call patriots. They care about the people who have historically been citizens and have been cruelly displaced by immigrants that refuse assimilation into the dominant society. It sounds strangely like what occurs in the southern border states.
From “The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics” – Fascism
I really cannot see where the BNP fits this definition which is pretty concise. They do have some racialist tendencies but that is understandable given the current state of the British nation.
It seems to me that the current pResident – TOTUS – is more kin to the statists we call fascists that the BNP.
Whitehall @ 13 said (in part):
Now that state of affairs looks familiar. But, you know what, most whites in this country are NOT acting thus, just asking to be treated fairly. What gets me is that I spent my time working to make the society fair and have people treated per the MLK ideal and what is the apparent result? It hardly seems right and makes me wonder if perhaps I was misguided.
What I continually see is that the speed of the heating of the water is debated, no one is thinking of putting out the fires. And if they should, then they get vilified as ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ or some other epithet.
This is the same as the debate about healthcare reform, now healthcare insurance reform. There is the tacit assumption that something needs fixing and no one, no one, ever stopped and defined the base problem = “What is broken?” “What needs to be fixed and why?” Not one person in any place. AFAIAC we deserve what we are going to get here. ‘The Shaft’. The only debate is whose shaft and how.
If someone wishes to fight this abomination coming down the road then there needs to be a lawsuit questioning the Constitutionality of making me pay for something I do not choose to purchase.
UNDER THE LENIN TREE
Ah there, my friend, come rest with me
Under the flowering Lenin tree
We’ve room for many more on yonder hill
They’re waiting for us, all my friends
Those cheery men whose very ends
Bespoke the very nature of the will
That’s it, my friend, just fall in line
Please follow me and you’ll be fine
A few more steps and you shall see the tree
And under it a few good men
Just waiting for the right time when
They’ll walk the earth again to set men free
Yes free from bourgeois thoughts and dreams
And free from priests and all their schemes
The freedom to be you and yours alone
The freedom to lead fruitful lives
With great rewards for he who strives
And in the end the State a bare dry bone
Ah here we are, Adolph you know
And Josef here will kindly show
How people of your sort can gain control
Of states that worship not their God
Dismissing Him with just a nod
While claiming there’s no such thing as a soul
I’m Vladimir sir, by the way
And I am pleased to hear you say
That state control can only set men free
That’s something we have said for years
It seems enough to calm most fears
Come sit beside me ‘neath the Lenin tree
“…it is impossible to understand the Left’s fixation with abortion except as a sacramental affirmation of the state’s power over man.”
I always maintained that this fixation is not just a sacramental affirmation of the state’s power over man. It also a reflection of the left’s hatred of judeo-christian philosophy–and how more you can negate especially the christian part of the tradition than by human sacrifice? That is really what it is.
It was the Mosaic tradition that stood in the contrast and opposition to many other creeds of the time, by its removal of the human sacrifice as a form of communion with gods. The christian tradition took that even further. The crucifixion of Yeshua ben Yusuf was the final interpunction mark, a period of that philosophical motif.
58 Walt
Lenin tree very pretty, and the Lenin flower is sweet,
But the fruit of the poor Lenin is impossible to eat.
(Apologies to Peter, Paul, and Mary.)
There once was a country most fair
In Arabia, or Russia, no it was the UK of Blair
Where was imposed an ingenious Third Way
of programme, privilege and profit fay
Now the Peoplecrat Gordon can’t even make mayor.
wretchard:
if the central role of the state is accepted, then the only question is what the character of that authority will be: Islamic, Communist or Fascist. When you come to it, who cares? It is the same dog with a different collar.
I like your remark.
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. There is a considerable segment of the American population which, if forced to choose between the race baiting of Barack Obama and a new version of the race baiting of George Wallace, would stay on the sidelines.
One aspect of the Wilsonian monster called the United Nations that poisons the atmosphere is the question of indigenousness. What counts as indigenous? There are quite a few people whose ancestors came from England and Holland but who regard themselves as African. And they are. They have lived in Africa all of their lives and wouldn’t feel comfortable in Europe.
The problem with calling America a “nation of immigrants” is that it effectively exalts the status of the most recent immigrants; it replicates the antagonism of Creole versus Peninsulare that existed in colonial Mexico. Such iconography whets the appetite of those who would seek to invade the United States in order to colonize it. If the United States grants amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants who are now here, the net effect becomes “fifty-two card pickup” – the United States becomes a fruit ripe for the picking.
Yet, to equate being American with the worldview of the Paxton Boys would do a disservice not only to the American people but also to historical memory. Just who are these “elites” that the Paxton Boys and their ideological descendants vilify? Back in 1763, it was “elitist” to think that Christianized Indians ought to be allowed to live at all. Back then, it was “elitist” to think that laws ought to apply to people equally regardless of race. Back then, it was “elitist” to oppose lynch mobs who would substitute their own tyranny for the rule of law.
If the opposition against the Obama administration becomes monopolized by the ideological descendants of the Paxton Boys, the effect will be to alienate a large proportion of the population that would otherwise be opposed to his administration. Remember, if the choice were between Nazism and Communism, the reaction of a silent plurality of the population would be to hunker down and refuse to comment.
Granted, affirmative action is wrong. Yet, if the role of Indians, Hispanized Indians, Hawaiians, and even Louisiana and Missouri French is to be conquered peoples who have nothing to contribute to American civilization, the net result will be to embolden outside forces who seek to conquer the United States for their own purposes. If such people are not regarded as part of the core of what it is to be American, then that definition may likewise be stripped away from those of British ancestry as well.
I am concerned that emphasizing the role of conquest, and particularly “white conquest”, in America’s history will only serve to embolden outside forces that seek to take the United States for themselves. On September 11, 2001, terrorists destroyed two traditional Mohawk artifacts, artifacts designed by a Japanese American. If one were to define America in the narrow manner of the Paxton Boys, those terrorist attacks would have been as far away as some other planet rather than an attack upon our country.
One key aspect of American politics is that certain definitions become divisive. Most Americans claim to be Christian. Yet, their definitions of what it is to be Christian differ so strongly that any attempts to imposing Christianity generally lead to bitter partisan struggle. Likewise, the word “white” is equally divisive. Not only are there different definitions of the word, but there are bitterly contentious differences on what that word ought to mean. Back in 1763, were Quakers and Moravians in Pennsylvania “white” or were they “race traitors”?
The Pontiac Rebellion of 1763 and the Paxton Rebellion of 1763-1764 shattered British royal authority in North America. Although America’s Constitution has maintained a façade of unity since 1789, the rift that existed in 1763 has never healed. Those who call for “white power” typically terrify a large proportion of people who are called “white” to such an extent that Barack Obama may actually be seen as an improvement of modern day Paxton Boys.
When Barack Obama referred to “typical white people” and rural Pennsylvanians who “cling to their guns and their religion”, this wasn’t an aberration. These comments were central to Barack Obama’s political appeal. They were sheer demagoguery. And they worked. The difference is that the people who got vilified were not accustomed to being on the receiving end of such hate in a political campaign; they got picked on in the same manner that religious and racial minorities in America got picked on in earlier eras.
The British National Party exists essentially because the existing political parties willed it into existence. When one cries “Wolf” on race, the real wolf becomes more dangerous than ever. Likewise, when Obama supporters equate criticism of the Obama administration with racism, they only succeed in emboldening the real racists.
“Intention is a dangerous precondition: if we are not focused on the wrong doer. If we are looking at the speech itself then intention is not as important.”
This is from a committee hearing on the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Reading Wretchard above describe how the state views individuals, this seemed a stunning example. The hearing was today.
The canadian constitution guarantees freedom of expression within limits. To deny that right would normally require criminal proceedings with the high bar of evidence, etc. The Human Rights Commissions have tried to circumvent these protections, as decribed here.
When we say something, the state isn’t concerned about us, but what we say. They cannot stop us from saying what they don’t like, but they can stop the words.
Very odd, and very troubling.
Derek
As an example of Alexis’ points, consider the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).
No longer is membership treated as a social entre but is now almost an embarrassing stigma. Tell just about anyone that you are descendant from a Revolutionary War veteran and what are you considered?
64 Whitehall
Ditto the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which is still headquartered in Richmond.
Very interesting, and I expect we’ll see more of this type of thing coming out of Europe in the next decade. It’s likely they have at least one more massive conflagration in them, and we’ll get to deal with the end results.
Many feel estranged from their politics, both here and in Europe. Many others are disinterested, and are willing to muddle along as long as the basic state is functional. What attitude will those people have when the State loses it’s ability to hold things together and deliver the goods? How will we here in the US react, and how will the European reaction differ?
I’m 57, and I can say that so far in my life I’ve seen no major upheavals. Neither have most others, and most in this Country consider our way of life one of those things that just is. It doesn’t have to be defended, it just exists. We will soon discover the truth, and everything will depend on the peoples reaction when that becomes apparent.
When I look at the Obama adminstration, I have hope. This incredibly inept crew is the best that they can do. There is not much “there” there, and more are seeing that every day. I expect that as times get tough, we will have one more of our periodic Religious revivals, and much of what passes for “wisdom” in this day will be emphatically discarded. The US will be very different in ten years, and I’m optimistic that many of the changes will be positive.
we need to reject multiculturalism, while not rejecting those who want to come here from a different culture. A hard balancing act, but one that is vital for the future of the US. The longer our “elites” oppose efforts to gain control of our immigration policies, the less likely it will be that we will be able to do this.
One of our main future advantages will be the ability to admit ambitious persons and accept them as part of our culture, whatever their color or origin may be. But they need to become part of our culture, and we must be able to determine who comes here. It’s bass-ackwards right now, but that won’t stand forever. I just hope when it changes we’ll have the wisdom to do what is right, instead of taking the reactionary road of demonizing the “other”.
Europe, OTOH, has a much more statist view of things than we do here, and they also have a much different immigration problem. I’m not optimistic on the eventual results there, but I can hope that I’m wrong. Time will tell.
Whiskey says “…mass volunteering action by more conservative men…” -Google- EDF- or English Defense League. They are a group of young men, sound like some former military?, who are banding together to protest the taking over of their country. They say they are non-violent and welcome all comers who agree with their goals. They wear face masks. Their shirts have a St. Andrew insignia. Their next march/protest is in Leeds.
Melanie Phillips related this her op-ed …
October 26, 2009
The conspiracy to transform Britain
So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened…..
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=690
Life of the Mind: Nothing terrifies them as much as the prospect of an alliance between Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin that could offer an alternative to the European model.
America needs a Ronald Reagan to repair the damage of this one-termer named Barack Hussein Maobama. Jindal ain’t it, he boofed his debut, and Palin ain’t it, America hates quitters and frankly she’s a moron. Newt is a RINO who supports RINO Dede Scozzafava in NY-23 and drug testing for all Americans (more fascist than anything Obama could ram through). That leaves Romney, Huckabee, and Ron Paul. My guess is that Huckabee breaks out of the pack for 2012.
Pace Rousseau, but the idea that most men are good and decent is laughable for those of us recognizing the truth of Original Sin.
hmmm, I saw “Robinson Crusoe” movie in Spain TV, “Friday”, was the kind of good and decent man, but he could have become a pervert and an evil man, depended on how Robinson had delt his relation with him.
Wildiris @46:
The Samaritans were foreigners who were brought in and resettled to Samaria when that portion of Israel was invaded by the Assyrians. They had, however, adopted some of the Jewish religious customs while retaining some of their own. They were viewed by most Jews, I believe, as “half-breeds.” See 2 Kings Chapter 17 for some background on the origins of the Samaritans.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2 Kings+17&version=NIV
Alexis @ #62– I’m no fan of the BNP (when I was in Birmingham this summer the Muslim/BNP tension was palpable) but your example of the Paxton Boys leaves out an essential part of the story: the absence of sovereignty makes tribalism inevitable. The colonial government of Pennsylvania might speak of the “rule of law” within the confines of Philadelphia, but its sovereignty–defined in the most basic, Hobbsian sense as a monopoly on force–didn’t extend much past the Schuylkill. There is undeniable pathos in the story of the Conastogas (as there would be later with Logan and Gnadenhutten) but the 1500 civilian dead on the Alleghany frontier from the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s Rebellion should be factored in as well. The lesson of 1763 is that a government that is unable/unwilling to protect its citizens is inherently illegitimate.
Marsh Arab:
Samaritans were foreigners who were brought in and resettled to Samaria when that portion of Israel was invaded by the Assyrians.
Master Je Tzu said blood meant nothing to God. Luke 3:8 …begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.
Putting God aside for the moment, one thing I like about traditional conservatism is that it proposes a higher authority than the urges of the individual or the fist of the state, namely, tradition-the time honored manners and customs, deference to those who came before, loyalty to “your” people. It’s the silent 10th amendment, even in those countries which have never had a constitution. This is highly constraining to ambitious reformers with big plans to reform humanity. So they must destroy it. The question is whether they have truly succeeded. I gather they haven’t, not entirely.
Russia is a different country with a very different history, but its fate in the 20th century is unfortunately relevant. They fell into the pit the West is so busily digging for itself. I think we should watch with interest and sympathy their attempt to climb again. True, it’s a government of crooks, thugs and goons bloated on oil revenues, but it’s a proudly patriotic one. We in the West haven’t had one of those in decades. And it’s got its head its shoulders about what you might call the “reforesting” of Russia, not only demographically (which is slowly improving) but spiritually. Look at the reestablishment of the Church as a part of national life; there’s even religious instruction in the schools and the regiments in the “red” army now have their patron saints. Putin gets it: You don’t have a future when you’ve lost your past.
Whereas we have….oh screw it….
Theo Spark links to a handy dandy chart from Holy Taco that sorts out the religious mess.
http://www.theospark.net/2009/10/click-to-enlarge-found-at-holy-taco.html
Regarding Samaritans, there is evidence that they are descended from Mesopotamians settled after the conquest by Babylon/Assyria and also from native Jews who did not go into captivity. There are now fewer than a thousand of them, less than 1% of their past strength.
73.Marsh Arab, We’re both right. The Samaritans were a polyglot people from many different origins. Part Canaanite, part Lost-Tribes-of-Israel, and part outsiders that had adopted Jewish ways. But your point about them being considered by the “better” Jews as being “half-breeds” I find is the historical core of the parable. The point of my comment was that the parable was not about ethnic foreigners, as 1.Paul was asserting, but about how the highbrow “academic” elite among the Jewish world treated their “hillbilly” cousins in faith, the Samaritans.
Richard,
Consider that Ralph Peters wrote a column on this several years ago, about Europe and not merely Britain. He concluded that the lucky Muslims in Europe will be the ones who escape with their lives.
A curiosity:
“If fascism and Left wing socialism share most of their political DNA…”
That is a remarkable distinction, requiring the qualifier, “Left wing”.
What, exactly, is the point of this logical hair-split?
Why can’t you just call a thing (and: all things which include its essential element) simply by its name without pussy-footing around it?
#74 Sertorious
“The lesson of 1763 is that a government that is unable/unwilling to protect its citizens is inherently illegitimate.”
Well said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603394.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2009102603447
U.S. official resigns over Afghan war
Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is fighting
his letter
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/ResignationLetter.pdf?sid=ST2009102603447
A very interesting article and letter. wretchard, comments?
The BNP is not a ‘conservative party’ in the American mold. It is essentially a racist but economically Left wing organization which accepts a large state role in managing the economy.
What is “racist” about saying that England should be a country for English people? That sounds like a pretty common-sense position to me.
The Left correctly accuses the BNP of dividing the nation.
I’m sorry, but that’s idiotic. The left correctly accuses the BNP of dividng the nation? Who is it again trying to flood the country with non-English people?
It is a short step from there to the belief that the government has a moral obligation to care for native Britons first and foremost before all others.
Is this supposed to be a shocking concept? It’s the foundation of the notion of the nation state going back to its inception in the 17th century!
And to think that PJM is considered a “conservative” media outlet.
Leaks which showed how Labour intentionally flooded Britain with immigrants in order to gain a permanent political majority and rub multiculturalism in the faces of poor whites has provoked a storm of outrage in the UK.
Both political parties are playing this game here in the US, and we don’t even have the realistic option of third parties.
Ragnar:
You left out the part about the government running the economy for the benefit of one or another group. Wishing to have the government stop tilting the scales in favor of immigrants is not fascist, that’s patriotic. Wanting the government to tilt things in favor of the local folks is fascist. It’s the heavy involvment of government in things that transforms it from patriotism to fascism.
And beware of dictionary definitions of fascism. For as often as the word get’s bandied about, it’s actually poorly defined. Hitler and Moussolini didn’t run identical governments (Nationalism in Italy for instance was patriotic without being xenophobic) but they were both fascist. Planning boards and cartels have nothing to do with it – those are perhaps symptoms but not defining characteristics. The real defining characteristic of fascism is that the government takes not just a large role, but a domineering role, in nearly every aspect of life for the “good of the nation.” Sometimes that means designating a scapegoat group and sending them off to the camps, sometimes it just means forcing obedience from everyone.
Fascists don’t try to dismantle a leviathan government. They try to harness it to their own desires. Then grow it even larger. Does the BNP want to dismantle socialist programs in Britain, or just redirect them to a different set of receipients?
Yeah, can you believe all these fascists Britons wanting to stay British, or those fascist Mexicans wanting Mexico to stay Mexican or the fascist native Americans not wanting to turn their continent over to white immigration?
Fascists, all!
Wanting the government to tilt things in favor of the local folks is fascist.
You must get your defintion of the word “facist” by reading the offical Chairman Mao Dictionary. Expecting the British government to favor the British is not “fascist” by any sane definition. It’s liberalism, as it used to be understood until very recently.
Wretched said:
“If fascism and Left wing socialism share most of their political DNA then this process is easy to understand.”
Yes.
“Fascism – Socialism, its all just a matter of taste.”
Bon Mote attributed to Molotov during the time of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact.
The real defining characteristic of fascism is that the government takes not just a large role, but a domineering role, in nearly every aspect of life for the “good of the nation.” Sometimes that means designating a scapegoat group and sending them off to the camps, sometimes it just means forcing obedience from everyone.
Then Britain is already fascist, isn’t it? And the US is not far behind.
Steve @ 92
Yes.
The US adopted the then fashionable Corporatism of Mussolini during the FDR administration.
Thus an economic contraction was turned into the “Great Depression.”
This did NOT happen after the 1920 crash (the first Black president – Warren Harding – did NOTHING and the economy was back on track in a year).
The understanding of the role of government in the US starts with something well known, but few dare speak of it today:
“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. WHEREFORE, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows, that whatever FORM thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.
In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A thousand motives will excite them thereto, the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness, but one man might labour out of the common period of life without accomplishing any thing; when he had felled his timber he could not remove it, nor erect it after it was removed; hunger in the mean time would urge him from his work, and every different want call him a different way. Disease, nay even misfortune would be death, for though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die.
Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which, would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen, that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other; and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.” – Thomas Paine, 1776, Common Sense
The need for government is one that reflects our beings as mortals and we create governments as we are not angels, and even they had a falling out if memory serves. Society is our great boon, the thing we create with our positive liberty which we garner from Natural Law as we do all of our Liberty. Our Negative Liberties, however, are those of the animal and we dare not keep ahold of those for that would put all in danger from our very selves. There would be no society if we did not do this, if we did not create society, and the very basis of what comes after is formed by this thing we call society.
It is that basis, that first thing we create, that is now supplanted by government and we are now in the position of saying that we have society because we have government, while the plain and self-evident truth is just the opposite. This first creation of us in the mortal realm, the one in which all peoples of this world do, is one well described far before our times:
“What the jus gentium is.
[017] 33The jus gentium is the law which men of all nations use, which falls short of
[018] natural law since that is common to all animate things born on the earth in the
[019] sea or in the air. From it comes the union of man and woman, entered into by the
[020] mutual consent of both, which is called marriage. Mere physical union is [in the
[021] realm] of fact and cannot properly be called jus since it is corporeal and may be
[022] seen;34 all jura are incorporeal and cannot be seen. From that same law there
[023] also35 comes the procreation and rearing of children. The jus gentium is common
[024] to men alone, as religion observed toward God, the duty of submission to parents
[025] and country, or the right to repel violence and injuria. For it is by virtue of this
[026] law that whatever a man does in defence of his own person he is held to do lawfully;
[027] since nature makes us all in a sense akin to one another it follows that for one to
[028] attack another is forbidden.36
What manumission is.
[030] 37Manumissions also come from the jus gentium. Manumission is the giving of
[031] liberty, that is, the revelation of liberty, according to some, for liberty, which
[032] proceeds from the law of
[001] nature, cannot be taken away by the jus gentium but only obscured by it,38 for
[002] natural rights are immutable. But say that he who manumits does properly give
[003] liberty, though he does not give his own but another’s, for one may give what he
[004] does not have, as is apparent in the case of a creditor, who [may alienate a pledge
[005] though the thing is not his,39 and in that of one who] constitutes a usufruct in his
[006] property.40 For natural rights are said to be immutable because they cannot be
[007] abrogated or taken away completely, though they may be restricted or diminished
[008] in kind41 or in part. 42It was by virtue of this jus gentium that wars were introduced
[009] (that is, when declared43 by the prince for the defence of his country44 or to repel
[010] an attack) and nations separated, kingdoms established and rights of ownership
[011] distinguished. Individual ownership was not effected de novo by the jus gentium but
[012] existed of old, for in the Old Testament things were already mine and thine, theft
[013] was prohibited45 and it was decreed that one not retain his servant’s wages.46 By
[014] the jus gentium boundaries were set to holdings, buildings erected next to one
[015] another, from which cities, boroughs and vills were formed.47 And generally, the
[016] jus gentium is the source of all contracts48 and of many other things. What long
[017] custom is will be explained below.49″ -Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England (1220-30, rev. 1250)
When we create that very first bond with each other in marriage the die is cast for all other laws that follow and the guiding law of that creation is the Law of Nations. We no longer learn this so we cannot think upon it – deprived of knowledge we grope towards immediate succor from the material world and the object that is mere organ of society and a lesser expression of the Law of Nations, which is government. When we endow government with the power to determine all of our liberty, and not just the small portion we hand to it for our safe keeping, we become enslaved to it. Yet it is self-evident that our entire Liberty, of all things that we may do for good and ill, is within us and not given to government in whole as we cannot make that grant no matter what we do or say in life.
To elevate government above society is to elevate one single organ of the body above all others and say it is the body entire. When done, society withers and decays, and liberty reverts from the organ that says it is singular back to the parts which are all individuals. When we no longer grant government its role, it may only use the negative liberties we entrusted to it against us, which are those of force, binding and holding.
For over 500 years this was the acknowledged way of things in Western culture, recognizing that no matter where you are born or of what culture, you create societies and Nations from the lowest possible level. Only by further pieces is that obscured from our vision by those seeking to inflict ill upon us and ‘remake society’. In all cases that has ended up with a long and fearsome trail of blood pooling at the feet of the dripping hands of those re-makers. When so deluded they are no longer of society nor even of government, even if that is their acclaimed standing, but of the animals red in tooth and claw seeking to inflict their whims upon all. They recognize no authority save their own, proclaim themselves far elevated above all others, and even declare godhood… until nature claims them, of course, as we are all in nature, products of nature and within a universe that is wholly natural.
In just a few short decades we have gone from understanding this to not teaching it… by those who seek to remake society.
No good will come of that.
“Why an educated young woman would convert to Islam is a real puzzle.”
Tocqueville–
I can see two ideas which are as incompatible as they are disastrous. Some people can see in equality only the anarchical tendencies which it engenders. They are frightened by their freedom of choice and are frightened of themselves.
Others, fewer in number but more enlightened, maintain a different viewpoint. Alongside the road which starts with equality and leads to anarchy, they have at last discovered the path which seems to lead men to inevitable enslavement. They incline their souls in advance to this unavoidable slavery and, prepared to worship in their hearts the master who is bound to make an imminent appearance.
The BNP is not a ‘conservative party’ in the American mold. It is essentially a racist but economically Left wing organization which accepts a large state role in managing the economy.
There is a real difference between race and culture. The Middle East is a multicultural and racially homogenous place. In Lebanon they’re all the same race and are frequently at each other’s throats. Ditto Northern Ireland. What made the US less unstable than Europe wasn’t racial homogeneity. It was shared culture. It is probably better to have a racially diverse but culturally homogenous society than it is to have a racially homogenous and culturally diverse society.
All men are created equal but all cultures are not. Multiculturalism is chalk that has been brought in under the auspices of the cheese that is anti-racialism. They’re different, but one has been sold under the label of the other. If you don’t like multiculturalism you are told you are racist. It doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to. If the BNP is white and socialist it is the socialist part that will eventually matter.
Thanks for the Tom Paine quote.
Here is one from John Stuart Mill.
“But, when a people are ripe for free institutions, there is a still more vital consideration. Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than jealousy of the government. That any one of them feels aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity in a joint resistance; the strength of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding for the favour of the government against the rest. Above all, the grand and only effectual security in the last resort against the despotism of the government is in that case wanting: the sympathy of the army with the people. The military are the part of every community in whom, from the nature of the case, the distinction between their fellow-countrymen and foreigners is the deepest and strongest. To the rest of the people foreigners are merely strangers; to the soldier, they are men against whom he may be called, at a week’s notice, to fight for life or death. The difference to him is that between friends and foes — we may almost say between fellow-men and another kind of animals: for as respects the enemy, the only law is that of force, and the only mitigation the same as in the case of other animals — that of simple humanity. Soldiers to whose feelings half or three-fourths of the subjects of the same government are foreigners will have no more scruple in mowing them down, and no more desire to ask the reason why, than they would have in doing the same thing against declared enemies. An army composed of various nationalities has no other patriotism than devotion to the flag. Such armies have been the executioners of liberty through the whole duration of modern history. The sole bond which holds them together is their officers and the government which they serve; and their only idea, if they have any, of public duty is obedience to orders.”
REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT, 1861.
If the BNP is white and socialist it is the socialist part that will eventually matter.
The ruling Labor Party is a socialist party. So are the Lib-Dems. And the Conservatives are quasi-socialists. If you want to save Britain from socialism your task is far bigger than whacking the BNP.
In general, I find the whole “I oppose the BNP because they are socialist” line of argument to be disengenious. They are socialist of course, but in this they simply reflect the prevailng ethos. It’s not their socialism which has people commenting on them.
The value of many cultures is self-evident; red and yellow, black and white – they are precious in His sight. Who in their right mind would object to the various arts, music, cuisine and architecture of the world’s cultures? Variety is the spice of life.
On the other hand the Sacred Values of the United States, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, are to be preserved and defended at all costs. These values are superior to the disgusting “values” of totalitarian cultures, whether Marxist, Fascist or Islamist. The modern usage of the term “Multiculturalism” is a Marxist expression of Orwellian “newspeak” – what is really meant by this word is all values are equal – but all values are self-evidently not equal. Multi-Culture is OK – Multi-Value is not OK.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2125/print
Annoy Nouse: “I am an obese, drug addled pedophile and would like to help myself to your 7 year child”
So sorry you were brought up that way, but it explains your viewpoints.
They are socialist of course, but in this they simply reflect the prevailng ethos. It’s not their socialism which has people commenting on them.
The prevailing ethos is the problem. That’s why the Lib-dems and the Conservatives, for so long as they continue the program of government expansion of Labor are not going to change anything significantly. The Conservative Party has more or less acquiesced to staying in Europe. Nick Griffin himself a European member of parliament. You are perfectly right in saying “If you want to save Britain from socialism your task is far bigger than whacking the BNP.” Without socialism nobody would even give the BNP the time of day.
Al_Batross: Are you saying you grew up and are now racist without any assistant from you family?
Marty:
All hail to Marty he is hear to set us straight, snore, snore.
What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state.
I hope that everybody accepts the existence of the states transformative power, and that the debate is only over how judiciously it should be employed and the proper ends it should pursue.
I’ve always felt that discussions on racism were warped by completely wrong assumptions. The wrong assumption was perfectly portrayed in that classic of Liberal moral uplift, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” the worst song from South Pacific and maybe the worst Rogers and Hammerstein song ever written.
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
So what’s wrong? What’s wrong is this has it precisely backwards. You don’t need to be taught to hate or distrust those unlike you. Humans are tribal by nature and — historically — by culture. It is perfectly normal and even quite useful to distrust “the other,” because more often than not the other wants to take your wallet, your land, your women and your life. What you need to be taught is NOT to distrust the other. Yet we pretend that we’re all born as multi-culti loving socialist college professors, only to be ruined by the corporate media, the Church, name your bogey-man.
This also distorts our thinking on WHY people “hate” other groups. For example, urban crime is largely committed by blacks and Hispanics, mostly males. So if you’re walking down a dark street at night and you see a bunch of young black or Hispanic men up ahead, are you a racist for crossing the street, or are you just taking a perfectly logical step based on everything you know about crime but are no longer allowed to express in public? When whites are upset that blacks or Hispanics are moving into the neighborhood, are they “racist” or are they reacting in a perfectly logical way to what almost inevitably leads to a decline in neighborhood standards at every level? If the neighborhood gets dirtier, louder, and less safe, why are you a racist to point that out?
As many above have stated, the problem isn’t skin color, it’s culture. Middle class whites don’t care if middle class blacks move into the neighborhood. They care a LOT when some government program dumps a bunch of multi-generational welfare-supported ghetto misfits into their neighborhood, because everyone knows where that leads. The same applies if loads of Mexicans show up. They don’t have American values. I would be bold enough to say their cultures are clearly inferior — the proof is in the pudding — but it’s enough to admit that the cultures are different and in no way compatible.
When we gave up the idea of assimilation and the melting pot and replaced it with the chimerical “rainbow” idea, we gave up any chance of immigration being a successful project. There are only two paths it can take. One is assimilation — with no option — into the regnant culture and assumption of all its key values (this doesn’t mean you can’t keep your ethnic food or your ethnic music, but you damn well need to learn English). The other path — transfer your culture with you to America and keep it that way — can lead to nothing but suspicion, distrust and sooner or later the way of the knife.
Yes, you have to be carefully taught. Taught how to be an American.
And for a much more, ummmm, interesting musical take on immigration, I recommend the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hWg6lTzR2I
“Hot-button issues including affirmative action, black-on-white crime and immigration policies are being exploited by the new white nationalists to woo mainstream whites into extremist movements. They exploit real racial and ethnic policy concerns which should be given a forum for intelligent discourse, says Swain. In fact, Swain goes so far as to say that if liberals and African American leaders don=t start to address the legitimate concerns raised by the white nationalists on race matters, they risk being partly to blame for racial unrest in America.
Courting controversy on all sides, Swain=s book both challenges liberals to re-examine their strategies on race issues which may be contributing to racial tensions, and warns conservatives, who may be drawn to some seemingly legitimate aspects of white nationalism, of its underlying racist and white supremacist nature.”
http://bookbuzz.com/swain.htm
Most folks’ idea of diversity extends no further than ethnic restaurants and (ethnic group) day at school.
Ask if they intend to put their money in a Nigerian bank, go to a clinic staffed by graduates of the Addis Ababa School of Veterinary and Medical Science, insist that their city recruit its cops only from the Mexico City Police Academy, and the women cover themselves from head to foot to avoid “arousing” Muslim men hanging out at the mall.
Some years ago, when the Pistons won the NBA championship, they were entirely diverse except for Bill Laimbeer.
Culture is the only thing a person can really change about himself, barring expensive cosmetic surgery. Culture is the ground of freedom; it is the sum total of what you choose to value and believe in. Multiculturalism trivializes freedom. Because if it’s not important what a person believes in then in a very fundamental sense he has no ability to transform himself. His values, beliefs, traditions are no more important than a fashion choice. And since they’re all equally good as a practical matter you are better off fixed in your ways. Go back to your roots and stay there.
If you look at the old communist posters from between the 1920s to the 1960s you’ll see that the figures in them were all stereotypes. People wore ethnic costume, trade clothes, badges of office in the same way that medieval guilds and stations of life were distinguished by outward signs. Doctors in posters had forehead reflectors long after doctors stopped using them. Workmen wore workmen’s caps long after people stopped wearing hats. Scholars had thick glasses. They never heard of contact lenses. But the ethnic types were stereotyped most of all. And when they appeared on Revolutionary Stage they all came on in ethno-garb. Multiculturalism doesn’t exist to promote brotherhood but rather its opposite: mutual suspicion.
What made the US less unstable than Europe wasn’t racial homogeneity. It was shared culture.
Culture in the US used to far less homogeneous than it is today. The difference was space and federalism. The Louisiana, Alabama, New Jersey, and Oregon of 1920 were all sharply different in terms of culture, but they did not impinge on one another.
But it was also a much more racially homogeneous country than today.
Sertorius:
I don’t disagree with you that a lack of state authority leads to tribalism.
I would argue that a “Quaker State” is intrinsically a contradiction in terms. A pacifist state is simply unable to be a State for long. Please note that Benjamin Franklin organized the Philadelphia militia and it was Benjamin Franklin who conducted the negotiations at Germantown to defuse the situation. In essence, Benjamin Franklin had become the warlord of eastern Pennsylvania. By that time, the question was no longer whether the government of Pennsylvania had any authority but whether Philadelphia would be besieged or sacked.
Pacifist multiculturalism has been tried before. It was called Pennsylvania. It failed.
One of most illustrative examples of what happens when state authority dissolves is the New Mexico Penitentiary Riot of 1980. New Mexico did not protect prisoners in protective custody in Cell Block 4; they were subjected to an orgy of torture and murder. I think the New Mexico Penitentiary Riot ought to be a cold reminder of what can happen when there is neither state authority nor any sense of general solidarity.
A State without moral authority is counterfeit.
Culture is everything, but its a multi-faceted jewel. Different cultures may have some facets that are nearly identical to another, but as a whole they are very, very different. And then there are the sub-cultures.
In terms of the modern world the trend that most disturbs me is in the convergence of sub-cultures in the political classes of the world in general. It is no wonder that “progressive” politicians have nothing but admiration for the likes of Hugo Chavez. They would like nothing more than to be able to wield such power in their own countries. But alas, in many countries such as the US the political facet of the predominant culture would never stand for such a thing.
The solution? Destroy the predominant culture, and one way to do this is by dilution. Encourage immigration of people who culturally are used to doing what their betters tell them to do. And set them up with privileges that puts the predominant culture in its place, which of course is at the bottom.
But when you live by the sword then you die by the sword. In their arrogance, the political classes of the world simply cannot imagine a noose coming to their necks, but with the implosion of the world economy, who can say what the future shall bring? You can tamper with our lives but we can’t tamper with yours, oh Wise and Great Leaders? Think again, or maybe its not again, but for the first time.
And in the meantime, come on over to the hot tub filled with boiling oil. Enjoy yourself, dear Leader. We won’t take no for an answer.
A truly multicultural society will be a nightmare of behavioral codes, implicit taboos, no-go areas and irrational sensitivities — even when it is racially homogeneous. In the end people will actually wear badges of culture to warn you off and alert you to adopt the right mode. Like honking the horn. The example of the Middle East has already been mentioned. Even in a mostly white audience, but one devoted to “diversity”, a Larry Summers can cause feminists to faint if says the wrong phrases. School officials search little boys bags for pocket knives. Ironically, past a certain class or educational threshold, the “whiter” a community the more of this nonsense there is.
A lot of people have made the point that the establishment of the US was assisted by the circumstance that it was a “Christian” country. Some have observed that it was because it was a “white” country. In many ways these two properties were proxies for a much more important underlying variable: a shared set of basic values. The proxy is a convenient outward sign of the underlying value, but it is not the thing in itself.
“In many ways these two properties were proxies for a much more important underlying variable: a shared set of basic values. The proxy is a convenient outward sign of the underlying value, but it is not the thing in itself.”
Yes, and our shared set of basic American Values are summed up as follows; in, as Thomas Jefferson said, “an expression of the American mind.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm
Here are a couple of excellent essays on the subject of equality. When Thomas Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal” it was understood by all of our Founding Fathers as natural equality before law, not un-natural government-enforced equality of economic outcome – the latter is the core ideology of Marxism.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guides/Z-Social%20Justice-Code%20for%20Communism.htm
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/what_is_equality.html
Nonsense. Classical liberalism does not advocate the government favoring anyone. Classical liberalism is about government respecting the natural rights of people as individuals, not as groups to be played off one against the other.
Seeing people as groups is what modern liberalism – better called socialism – does. If there’s one thing to take away from this entire threat, I’d hope it is that avocating a government that sees people as groups is a bad road to travel regardless of which groups end up getting favored. Because eventually, robbing Peter to pay Paul eventually becomes jailing Peter to keep Paul in line.
Ignore the groups, ignore the identity politics, focus on the power politics. But that’s Wretchard’s point, isn’t it? That socialists have conditioned people to think in terms of identity politics, so “Britain for the Britons” makes perfect sense and fewer and fewer people see any problem with that. Better than the most common alternative of “Britain for Everyone Else” but that’s, as a famous speechgiver once said, is a false choice.
“And still, you (ordinary middle class individual – creative owner of property) personified mankind, I may take you by the power of my mighty hands and crush with fierce force. In the meantime, as the abyss gapes before me and you in the darkness, You will fall in it and I’ll follow you, Laughing and whispering into your ear: “Come down with me, friend!” Karl Marx
That would have been a good line for the Joker.
A truly multicultural society will be a nightmare of behavioral codes, implicit taboos, no-go areas and irrational sensitivities — even when it is racially homogeneous.
Exactly. So you need a vast array of laws to deal with the conflicts–and the more laws there are–the more conflicts there will be, and the more bureaucrats there must be in order to resolve these conflicts. For the political class of whatever country this is not a bug its a wonderful, wonderful feature.
The need for government is inversely proportional to the cultural homogeneity of the people who inhabit the jurisdiction. And for the political class “governance” is their only product. Encouraging “diversity” and “multiculturalism” is the best way to expand their market share.
My apologies–in # 118 above the last words “their market share” should read “the demand for their product.”
“the recent rise of the British National Party tells us anything about how a European society can be infatuated with the Left one year and switch over to fascism in a relatively short period.”
going from socialist to facist is NOT a switch or a flip.
a calm leftist is a socialist,
an angry leftist is a facist.
facism is only a little further down the same road as socialism and progressivism.
a calm rightist is a republican
an angry rightist is a patriot.
Reading the sprawl here, I am reminded of a student in the Midwest who, at the height of Thatcher’s reign in Britain, asked me, a Brit, what it was like to live in a socialist country. Being 18 and never having been out of the state, I could forgive her naivete about Britain and fast and loose use of language.
It’s much harder to forgive such a laissez faire attitude to terminology amongst adults.
The Left, what most Europeans mean by the Left, has been dead in Britain for years. The Labour Party has not been Socialist since before Kinnock, and the BNP”s Britain for the British? A centuries old notion–pre-dating dearest Karl.
Great thread, following a great post, W.
May I throw another religion-justifying thought into the pot (as it were).
Religion, in the classical sense, was a societal glue: it provided fellowship, ritual, and absolution. Plus morals, codes, and penalties for transgressions which ranged from the trivial (Hail Mary’s) to the terminal, usually in crowd-pleasing ways (the Ritual bit, again).
There’s even the suggestion that religion, being faith-based (duh!) was able to enforce socially useful environmental taboos (e.g. no pigs in a desertifying ME landscape, please – hence the Judaic and later Islamic prohibitions as ‘unclean’), without needing to justify the taboo in any ‘reasonable’ way. The omniscient, omnipresent Being was the internalised Minder for all these things.
So, in rationalising away the ‘faith’ basis for the whole show, we have thrown out an entire way of enforcing Useful Stuff, and there’s no way back except blind faith.
Which, funnily enough, is what the strong religions (Islam and Catholicism) offer. Submit, and be free. Fellowship, ritual aplenty, and absolution….
And in a faint echo, drained of the Establishment mores and pitched to appeal to the native Brit woiker, this is what the BNP offers. Fellowship, ritual aplenty, and absolution – the latter because ‘it’s for Our country’.
The electorial process ensures that when a political need is unmet, and is proven to attract votes, one of the main stream parties will adopt it as their own. Those parties and candidates that fail to either respond to the voters with real policies or buy-off/hoodwink the voters with false advertising eventually are voted out.
Look at the Senate majority leaders. First Tom Daschle fell because he represented too much the Washington insider/liberal viewpoint for the folks back in Dakota. Now look at the trouble that Harry Reid faces in the next election.
Our republic can work but it allows only a slow response to the will of the people, by design.
I will disagree with Mr Fernandez on the mutability of culture within an individual. I think that is a very slow and difficult process to change for an individual so very few make the transition within their lifetimes. In fact, it is American experience that it takes two or even three generations to make an American out of an immigrant.
51. M. Simon:
“It was in Italy. And Italy to some extent protected their Jews.”
until 1943, when Germans occupied Italy many trains headed to concentration camps too. Besides, and Italian Jews lost leir jobs from 1938.
“The French went out of their way to send them to Germany”
Rather the French sent their foreign Jews to Germany first, until Germany occupied the whole France at the end of 1942.
Since the 1930 depresssion, France was the economical and political refugees country, (spanish civil war, fashism, nazism) while Hitler at the beginning of his conquests had not taken the decision to eliminate the Jews, they were expelled to France, who can’t welcome them, because of the numerous refugees she already had.
The french administration was zeelous to sort them out from the french Jews that were first “protected”, then by falsh identities and hidden in countrysides as possible, also because the population knew what would be their fate after 1942, when german authorities had decided the final resolution for all of them. The Church first complained to Vichy, some civil servant became less interested in collaborating.
#20: What do you think the collective is except slavery? Only the justification changes.
Well multiculturalism wasn’t in our culture until the last decades, all our immigrants had to learn that their ancestors were Gallics with blond hair and blue eyes, in a kinda authoritarism. But none of these new patriots regretted it, and some old born Italians are complaining that the new immigrants are claiming for their cultural “identity”.
We too, as provincials with our dialects, were forbidden to talk in our languages at schools, we had to learn the language of the central power, that forged our nation characteristic.
Multiculturalism is making barbarics, that, instead of, have no respect for the laws, and try to impose theirs
One of the things I missed in the BNP vs Conservative vs Labour debate, probably obvious to domestic viewers tuned into the Nick Griffin Question Time at the BBC, was the class subtext. The sneer has been developed into an art form in that society and its successful use depends on subtlety. When skilfully used you should feel insulted five minutes after it is too late to punch the offender in the face. How to recognize it? Obscure references, hints of unattainably high culture and indirect insult are its hallmarks. Foreigners normally can’t understand this subtextual dialogue. I certainly don’t, but I am aware that it exists.
To some extent this is an advantage. A friend returned from Britain told me how his Australian accent “put him outside” the system where speech habits peg you for class, trade and place of abode. Sneers have unpredictable effects on foreigners. On the arrival card to Australia, there’s a question asking whether the passenger has ever been convicted of a felony. Occasionally some wise guy will crack in the best Received Pronunciation “I didn’t know this was still a requirement for admission”, a reference of course to the Stain — the convict past. The sneerer enjoys his little private joke. In this case the sneer may have been funny once. But now it’s just stupid.
You still hear them especially in put downs to Americans in letters to the editor. They are normally composed in a superior tone, with commonplace references to stupid American Presidents, the ignorance of people who have never been out of their country or their state, know nothing of Europe, even less of wine and may contain a citation to some obscure literary magazine writer from the Punch edition of 1899 thrown in as proof of erudition. I think they’re sad. But they often have the desired effect on aspiring American snobs, which is even sadder. I don’t think there’s any secret knowledge anywhere. Behind the superior sounding Guardian letter writer is often an ordinary man with the same fears and limitations as anyone else.
But in the Nick Griffith question time episode at the BBC, I am sure the subtextual arguments were flying thick and fast. It was as those things are, a conversation about class as much as it was about ideology. It’s that kind of inside baseball that makes following foreign politics so hard. An Australian friend once told me that it was easy to think you understood America because you watched it on TV. It was only after living there that he realized how dangerous an assumption that was. There’s always more to it than meets the eye.
Culture is a complex thing. It is powerful and dangerous. Whoever thought that all cultures could be essentially treated as equivalent was either deluded or conniving. It is every man’s heritage, the true gift from his fathers — warts and all.
To 121. Auguste
Being euro I can understand how you have zero understanding of the left/right debate and often confuse the too.
All countries in europe and socialist… period(you could maybe argue some of the most eastern countries/Baltic are not full blown socialists).
The only real question about europe being socialists is what type of socialists they are… commies, nazi, stlainist, marxist, etc, etc, etc. Just because the current socialists don’t agree with your brand of socialism doesn’t change the fact that they are indeed leftwing and socialist.
Animal Farm is a great metaphor for understanding European “Right” and “Left” – Fascism and Marxism. When the oppressive humans (Rightist Monarchy or Fascism) are overthrown in (Marxist) revolution, the animals become free at last. The clever pigs (Intellectuals) end up creating an oligarchy (without the informed consent of the animals) which eventually begins enacting arbitrary pig law – no longer law from “We the Animals.” Later one very clever and strong pig (Napoleon) becomes a (Marxist) Dictator in the name of Pig equality (Social Justice) and becomes indistinguishable from the original (Rightist/Fascist) human oppressor when it turns out that some animals (pigs) are more equal than the others.
European Right = European Left
European Fascism = European Marxism
Americanism (Declaration, Constitution, Bill of Rights) stands alone. Long live, and God Bless, America. Fascism and Marxism must die.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODJfwa9XKZQ
“Al_Batross: Are you saying you grew up and are now racist without any assistant from you family?” Montana@102
A good question, Monty.
I can fault myself for not living up to my parents’ example, but I cannot fault the example they set, and that was my objection to Paul’s comment. I don’t claim to be a racist, it is just that I have had enough, and I am not going to take it any more.
Like many of the generation who were young during WW2, my parents tried to bring up their children to be tolerant of difference, and understanding of the ways of others (my mother’s family had Jewish relatives by marriage). They did not argue in front of us, did not use profane language, and rarely smoked or drank. They knew hard times, worked and saved, paid their taxes, and lived within the law.
When, in the mid-1980s, I began to wake up to the Islamic threat, my parents felt that I was a little cracked and extreme in my views. Unfortunately, I was not extreme enough because, as many had suspected, and has now been confirmed, the current Labour government deliberately ramped up immigration for years, and lied, denied and taxed to conceal their treasonable scheming, all of which hugely reinforced the Islamists.
It enrages me that as the WW2 generation now fades away it sees the final reward for it’s sacrifices, from a government which cares nothing for it and is hand-in-glove with terrorists whose plans for Britain are actually worse than those of Hitler. That people who gave the best years of their lives to the defence of their country have been reduced to hoping that their grandchildren will survive by emigrating is something that should cause Blair, Brown and their cabal to hang their heads in shame. But to know shame, you need to know honour, and Labour lost that knowledge a long time ago.
Wretchard.
Haven’t been to England. Talked with some Brit ex-pats about the sneer.
One of its effects, deliberate or not, is to teach a subordinate who knows something a superior does not to keep his mouth shut.
Which has the expected organizational effects, along with keeping said subordinates subordinate, along with their expertise.
With the expected organizational effects.
Oh, yes. When my father’s divison (104th Timberwolves) first were in the ETO, they were attached to the Canadian Corps in the Monty’s army. So he dealt with a mixed bag of Imperials. A Brit lifer noncom told him the social distance between the Brit officers and Other Ranks was greater than that between the British and the natives in India.
The Canadian enlisted men hated the British officers.
Must have been the sneer.
BTW. Reading the excellent Telegraph (U.K.) obits, you get four or five WW II vets each week. Running thin, now. About once a year, the honoree is not an officer.
An Australian friend once told me that it was easy to think you understood America because you watched it on TV.
Oh, but it is!
“What I Learned About America From Watching It on TV”
1. American women want to have sex all the time.
2. American men are morons.
3. American men with Southern accents are dangerous, bigoted morons.
4. Black American men are really cool and funny. Except the ones who carjack you in the parking lot at night.
5. Asians? What Asians? There are no Asians in America. Oh yah. Except the Japanese time-traveling guy. But he’s just here to save the cheerleader.
6. Doctors, lawyers, and political consultants are the only intelligent people in America. And they live in either New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C.
7. About 40% of the population in America is composed of serial killers.
8. Based on the drug commercials, the two most rampant medical problems in America are not enough sex (see #1) and not enough sleep.
9. Most dangerous occupation in America: fruit-stand vendor. You will *always* lose your livelihood in a police chase.
10. Virtually nobody in America goes to church or synagogue or temple. Those who do can’t intelligently express what they believe or why they believe it. All the smart people are atheists or agnostics.
11. American parents are morons. The 12-year-olds know everything.
12. Dead young blondes. For some reason, Americans are fascinated by them. For some reason, the blondes keep obliging by dying.
13. Americans will compete for big $$ by, among other things, eating bugs and living like impoverished Kenyan goatherds or Mindanao fishermen.
14. For all the car commercials, strangely enough, one almost never sees someone on a TV show with an occupation of mechanic. This must mean that in America, the cars fix themselves. Incidentally, psychics, medical examiners, and boutique owners who work about 3 hours a day, if that, are very commonplace in America.
15. Americans either really, really love themselves, or really, really hate themselves. Can’t decide which.
It is over 20 years since Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister and the evidence is that things have only changed around the margins, and that was for the worse. Ninety six years ago an arrogant Englishman knew that his hauteur was backed by all the pink bits on the map, with the expectation, at unguessed cost, of more to come. Forty two years ago that Englishman’s grandson could safely claim to dominate a conversation based on his presumably superior education, invaluable role as the trusted go between among East and West and North and South, cultural dynamism in “Swinging London,” and clever timing in shedding a money losing Empire.
The problem with those who pretend to be the grandsons of Sir Humphrey Appleby is that it is clear to all but the most self deluded audience that the show lacks substance. The Mandarins no longer impress the former natives of either Britain or from the former pink bits who are flooding in. The later were invited in with as much foresight as the Romans showed in inviting in barbarian tribes to cross the limes and serve as allies.
The English have over time proven poor at assimilating foreigners in large numbers into the Imperium’s culture. Despite all those missionaries playing the organ for little African Methodist souls and Princes sent to Cambridge and Sandhurst the natives did not Anglicize. The French proved more effective by ignoring the masses and uncompromisingly assimilating the elites. They at least gave the first impression that French culture could be seen as color blind and universal. America has proven more effective at spreading into popular culture than at co-opting elites.
What America did have was a great engine for assimilating large numbers of immigrants, the urban public schools. When I taught at what was at the time the most dangerous High School in New York City I found a book from the 1920s in a corner of a storage room with a title like “A Guide for New Americans.” The Chairman gave it to me to keep. It was a collection of practical lessons on topics like opening a savings account and selected inspiring passages from Great Men like Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie on Americanism. The entire approach was straightforward. Welcome to America, now don’t spit on the floor. It worked for millions. Different ethnic groups can share a common space that includes sufficient tolerance to sustain democracy. We have done it.
Robotech,
Well, that was a very convincing reposte, thank you.
“Behind the superior sounding Guardian letter writer is often an
ordinaryparanoid man withthe sameextremely irrational fears and (largely more social) limitations as anyone else.There Wretch. Fixed it for ya.
Auguste, nicely worked sneer…ol’ chap.
JFSanders031,
Is that supposed to be ol’ chap, ol’ bean, or ol’ cock? I’m sure that the distinction is as important to some as whether you are an Old Etonian or a Wykehamist. After all “Manners makyth man“.
Bogie,
you forgot the big “boobs” and plastic surgery !
(#30) On a practical matter, the state powers now are irreversible.–whiskey
Leonid Brezhnev articulated a similar doctrine: Communist expansion is irreversible.
We see how well that played.
As the state increasingly extends its control over areas where it has neither proper jurisdiction nor demonstrated competence, it will generate resentment among those who have to bear the cost of its misadventures. Taxpayers will revolt.
Funding for the welfare state will come to rely on the printing press, because Japan and China will end their purchases of US bonds, which have no prospect of ever being repaid except with greatly depreciated dollars.
Washington, D.C. is, by design, unable to coerce a well-armed populace, which is why they rely on blandishments to further their ambitions. When the money runs out, the state will be perceived as more of a nuisance than an asset.
As economic actors, men seek to rid themselves of nuisance goods. You may be certain the same fate awaits state interference. As free men, we need to begin work now on the wind-down while it can still be achieved in an orderly manner. Fatalistic declarations of irreversibility are unhelpful toward that end.
Robot
The only real question about europe being socialists is what type of socialists they are… commies, nazi, stlainist, marxist, etc, etc, etc. Just because the current socialists don’t agree with your brand of socialism doesn’t change the fact that they are indeed leftwing and socialist
Robot, you’re a good character for carricaturing, uh, I’m going to draw you some day (when I’ll get back home, actually I’m enjoying Spain sunshine)
please, tell me more about your look
Classical liberalism does not advocate the government favoring anyone. Classical liberalism is about government respecting the natural rights of people as individuals, not as groups to be played off one against the other.
Really? Perhaps you can cite some “classical liberals” to that effect. I already cited John Stuart Mill on this thread.
For over two hundred years the Big Idea of classical liberalism was the self-determination of peoples, the idea that “a people”, usually defined in terms of language, race, and religion, should have their own polity. It was never about “individuals”, a category which classical liberalism never even acknowledged. The breakng up of multi-ethnic authoritarian states, aka the great empires of the 18th and 19th centuries, was the biggest goal of the classical liberals. They would see the modern US and Europe as regressing,
Socialism is not Fascism.
It was in Italy. And Italy to some extent protected their Jews. The French went out of their way to send them to Germany.
What do the Jews have to do with any of this?
That socialists have conditioned people to think in terms of identity politics, so “Britain for the Britons” makes perfect sense and fewer and fewer people see any problem with that. Better than the most common alternative of “Britain for Everyone Else” but that’s, as a famous speechgiver once said, is a false choice.
“Briton for the Britons” is the essence of the concept of the sovereign liberal nation state. It is a concept which precedes the development of socalist thought. It was socialist thought which first considered the ethnic state to be illegitimate and all of you prattling on about the evils of “group identity” are echoing the Marxist critique of the classical liberal order, little though you know it.
“Classical liberalism does not advocate the government favoring anyone. Classical liberalism is about government respecting the natural rights of people as individuals, not as groups to be played off one against the other.”
No European nation has ever actually established classically liberal society where the sacred rights of the individual (life, liberty, private property honestly earned – pursuit of happiness) were secured by just government power. While John Locke’s political thinking pointed in this direction, it was Thomas Jefferson and our other Founding Fathers who actually pulled it off – and now it is being unraveled by the so-called “Liberals” – they are really Marxists &/or Fascists.
““To understand “social justice,” we must contrast it with the earlier view of justice against which it was conceived — one that arose as a revolt against political absolutism. With a government (e.g., a monarchy) that is granted absolute power, it is impossible to speak of any injustice on its part. If it can do anything, it can’t do anything “wrong.” Justice as a political/legal term can begin only when limitations are placed upon the sovereign, i.e., when men define what is unjust for government to do. The historical realization traces from the Roman senate to Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution to the 19th century. It was now a matter of “justice” that government not arrest citizens arbitrarily, sanction their bondage by others, persecute them for their religion or speech, seize their property, or prevent their travel. This culmination of centuries of ideas and struggles became known as liberalism. And it was precisely in opposition to this liberalism — not feudalism or theocracy or the ancien régime, much less 20th century fascism — that Karl Marx formed and detailed the popular concept of “social justice,”
“”The history of all existing society,” he and Engels declared, “is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf … oppressor and oppressed, stood in sharp opposition to each other.” They were quite right to note the political castes and resulting clashes of the pre-liberal era. The expositors of liberalism (Spencer, Maine) saw their ethic, by establishing the political equality of all (e.g., the abolition of slavery, serfdom, and inequality of rights), as moving mankind from a “society of status” to a “society of contract.” Alas, Marx the Prophet could not accept that the classless millenium had arrived before he did. Thus, he revealed to a benighted humanity that liberalism was in fact merely another stage of History’s class struggle — “capitalism” — with its own combatants: the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie.” The former were manual laborers, the latter professionals and business owners. Marx’s “classes” were not political castes but occupations.”
“The imperative of economic equality also generates a striking opposition between “social justice” and its liberal rival. The equality of the latter, we’ve noted, is the equality of all individuals in the eyes of the law — the protection of the political rights of each man, irrespective of “class” (or any assigned collective identity, hence the blindfold of Justice personified). However, this political equality, also noted, spawns the difference in “class” between Smith and Jones. All this echoes Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek’s observation that if “we treat them equally [politically], the result must be inequality in their actual [i.e., economic] position.” The irresistable conclusion is that “the only way to place them in an equal [economic] position would be to treat them differently [politically]” — precisely the conclusion that the advocates of “social justice” themselves have always reached…. Hayek had continued, “Equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different, but in conflict with each other…”
“The People’s State of Marx … will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, and finally the application of capital to production by the only banker — the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many heads “overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guides/Z-Social%20Justice-Code%20for%20Communism.htm
(#31) [T]he man is a veritable Martin Luther within the “academic”(read: hoplessly ((sic)) lost in romantic marxism)…–Hugh
This is factually incorrect.
Thomas Muentzer, who the GDR communist party rehabilitated as a protocommunist, was unequivocally denounced by Luther. Moreover, to refer to a 17th century theologian an being amenable to the economic theories of a 19th century radical is an historical anachronism.
Richard,
I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time, and this is, hands down, one of the finest, most thought-provoking pieces I’ve ever read. Well done, sir.
To 136. Auguste
I did my best to keep it down on your level so you’d understand.
To 141. Marie Claude
First would you stop calling me robot… robo, robotech, robotech master…. but not robot… I know english isn’t your first lang so I’m telling you your doing it wrong. As for drawing… I’m sure you can easily find my name sake with a simple search.
“What I Learned About America From Watching It on TV”
8. Based on the drug commercials, the two most rampant medical problems in America are not enough sex (see #1) and not enough sleep.
And don’t forget the hemorrhoids. All Americans have hemorrhoids…
148 Robooooooooooooooooootech
of course there are manylinks abour your nic
but they do not deal with what perspires from your writings !