Obama: “no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts”

Um… except Islam. So more evidence of duplicity, or – much more likely – plain laziness. You’d have to read only 20 pages of the Koran, just that 1 book, before you realized the place of …

And so since we have not read and cannot hear we have no other way of interpreting the motivation of others except in terms of concepts we can know and feel – which is to say our own, dominantly liberal, or (specifically enough) anti-anti-Communism.

Which brings me to the following point, riffing on your Nietzsche quote:

Wretchard wrote: “And if the country lacks for conviction in something — whatever that something may be — that is because the times since the Second World War have been largely good.”

Consider. Nietzsche believed that Nihilism was the logical consequence of the destruction of Christianity/God because Christianity happens to be – for lack of a better word – ideology which purports to Explain Everything. This in contradistinction to, say, The Age of Constantine (by Jakob Burkhardt, N’s favorite historian), which was an absolute orgy of different beliefs, few or none of them totalizing, all more or less compatible with the existence of other gods. The only exception was Judaism, with its single jealous god, who demanded exclusive obedience, yet which begat Christ amid the Augustinian world-breaking welter. And Christ went forth and conquered.

But by the 19th century, having maintained its dominions really up until the advent of Socialism in the latter half of the 19th century, more or less, for hundreds of years, and having stamped out serious contention for rivalry – when that idol falls what else is there to replace it? Nihil. Nothing.

Now – what if it is the case that, similarly, the post-war consensus was short-lived precisely because the Uniquely Good War, the Second World War, had absolutely monopolized the public spirit, so that once its bright sunlight waned – what Nietzsche might call “The Great Noon” – what could compete, at least emotionally or spiritually, with that mighty self-evidently Good Campaign? The clarity of other things and policies paled and paled and enabled the habit of equivocation exploited to great effect by…

Oh wait. You mean there was a giant concentration camp ideology called Communism? Communism, piloted by Joseph Stalin, who funded and directed and generally unleashed a colossal Narrative of Anti-Fascism! on the rest of the ambivalent world? Stalin, whose propaganda monopolized public discourse (after almost inventing it) over a huge swath of the Earth, whose intelligence services worked for the subversion of every nation on Earth, who may have effectively improvised the Second World War itself to bring about the World Revolution denied in the wake of the First?

That is, wasn’t World War 2 to a very large extent Communism’s Great Noon?

I wonder if it is a case of, humanity being incurably superficial, “Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Is Empty?”

I’m sick of all these other theories and sociologies and philosophies and theologies. The world is shaped by actions – thought is an action. All these theories simply betray a lack of good intel. The Era’s Answer lies in this odd relationship to Soviet Communism. I know it, even if eloquence fails me yet.