Be the change
by Takuan Seiyo
As Glenn Beck is talking about NEA’s Yosi Sargent (aka the brain behind the BHO Hope poster) and his “Mobilize for BHO” conference call to 75 artists and the president is honing his address to the nation’s schoolchildren, it transpired that the propaganda wheels of the Change and Hope machine have already been spinning at full tilt.
The case in point is “I Pledge”, a video that Mr. & Mrs. Moore-Kutchner produced for the BHO inauguration with the participation of some famous and demi-famous airhead celebrities. This piece of agitprop mind coitus is now being foisted on American schoolchildren. The principal of Eagle Bay Elementary School in Farmington, Utah, plunged his impressionable charges in I Pledge on Aug. 28, and it raised parents’ objections, made the news and started much Web chat.
I missed I Pledge when it first came out, but its continuing use in light of the past 7½ months of the BHO regime makes it relevant enough to take a look now. Let’s look at it the way a pro would.
We open with a grandiose fanfare, bearing the DNA of both Aaron Copland and John Williams — the kind of music you hear opening major liberal PBS series or closing major liberal message films. Like what you hear at the end of “Independence Day” after an Afro-American top gun and a Jew earth-firster saved Earth, and noble POTUS, flying the lead jet fighter himself, spearheads the final attack on the alien spaceship.
As the brass climbs to its climax, you see exploding on the screen a bracing message: We’d like you to know; You Are Not Alone.
Warming your heart just as you are shivering in the gale of inflating scrip snowing from helicopters on the grave of your future.
Of course, this is wrapped in rainbow tinfoil, to imply that it’s you and the nincompoops in the video who are blowing hope and change to your lonely POTUS. But these things work in sneaky ways if it’s a pro at the helm — and here it was. So no matter what you think, what you feel is that your POTUS is blowing hope and change your way. You know, like this:
- - - - - - - - -
You then hear your POTUS on the soundtrack and read his words about Patriotism and Responsibility and Caring for Each Other. The strong and confident voice — and remember, that crescendoing brass is still in your ears — makes you forget that the owner of the voice has kicked the CIA in the nuts, put the Apollo Alliance in the White House, and changed the focus of the Afghanistan war from winning (or leaving that unredeemable hellhole) to “winning hearts and minds.” He has bowed and apologized for America throughout the world. He has offended practically every major European Head of State while cozying up to Chavez, Morales, Castro and Muhammad peace be upon him.
As to Responsibility, instead of holding ACORN responsible for its blackmail of America into the subprime and alt-A disaster, instead of making ACORN accountable for election fraud in at least 17 States and for other malfeasance and embezzlement, the BHO regime has rewarded ACORN with $4 billion of the US taxpayer’s money. Instead of holding the banksters responsible for their leveraged greed palace and General Motors for its management’s incompetence and union’s greed, the BHO regime has been bailing them out with trillions of dollars extracted from the present and future taxpayers’ pockets.
And the looking-for-each-other stuff — I want to hear that from my pastor, not from an elected Chicago pol and Alinsky acolyte. And I certainly don’t want my government to “take care” of me either, except to the extent of not willfully destroying the value of my money, and not playing Ponzi games with my Social Security. Alas, my government has taken care of me in both ways already, and at warp speed in the BHO alien spaceship.
Now we segue to the beguiling female drones, fresh, innocent and enthusiastic. The tattoos, upthrust silicon mammalia, Armani bespoke over Jimmy Choo one-offs are not in the picture — just your everyday girls next door: Demi Moore, Cameron Diaz, Marisa Tomei, some Cindy Crawford lookalike and a dozen more I should know more about but won’t, pledging to be good and do good, not to use plastic, and “to make this world a better place.”
Problem is, it’s my world too and I want twitting twits’ hands off my world. You want to make it a better place, be better to your family, friends, employees, servants and casual acquaintances, and I don’t want to know about it either. And keep your president out of doing good to me too. I’ll be grateful enough if he does not actively destroy me.
Ashton Kutcher then throws some bones to Joe Patriot Sixpack, pledging to “always represent my country with pride, honor and dignity.” There are some stale rusks thrown to the old geezers, with 20-something hunks and hunkettes pledging that senior citizens will have access to healthcare and we’ll beat Alzheimer’s. But sentient people know that it’s the seniors who must be sacrificed in the Obamacare scheme in favor of the young, the illegal, the soon-to-be-illegal, the politically organized nonwhite. The savers too will be thrown under the bus, given that this is a trillion dollar boondoggle added onto a 2 trillion current deficit and a 13 trillion cumulative deficit, not counting the 99 trillion retirement and Medicare black hole.
There are so many second-grade “celebrities” here; I dunno. Of the few I recognize, there is the Will I Am person — “I am” is just the forbidden name of God, you know, the Yahveh dude — who wrote a moron song celebrating BHO. I think I recognize a mogul in the schmata biz, a P. Diddy, in his own label’s BHO t-shirt and pledging to turn his lights off.
But wait! Could it be the same P.Diddy who authored the immortal lines:
“Niggas put a hundred grand up
Stand up, before I stick your bitch-ass you better put your hands up
Hate if you want and front like you ain’t wit it, nigga
I bust your m*********ing head with a skillet, nigga
More rugged nigga, heat for the track
I’m like a Pick-up Truck with broken concrete in the back
Now let me add a couple G’s to the stack.”
I woulda slept on the sidewalk to rise early enough for an autograph of this person. But we are still pledging here. Someone is pledging service to US Service.Org, which is a legal services business so what he had in mind is probably SERVE.GOV, (serve gov???), the website of another Obama initiative, The Corporation for National and Community Service. SERVE.GOV will attempt to do to 9/11 what BHO did to Chicago’s South Side per the Alinsky screenplay.
Or maybe you would like to visit mybarackobama.com with the BHO Sun of Hope rising over the striped and heretofore barren of Barack’s baracka plains of America to illuminate the Rainbow Land a Change and Hope? Like, “Organizing for America — Let’s Get It Done: Health Insurance Reform Now.”
You mean, you didn’t know? But as we are being propelled toward the end of I Pledge, the messages are unspooling into creepier grooves. Some celebrette is pledging to make good the 200-year-old promise to end slavery, with Mr. & Mrs. Moore-Kutcher amplifying the message. Say what? Then the tattooed funkadelic dude pledges to be of service to Barack, pause, kiss tattooed biceps, Obama.
Then Mr. & Mrs. Moore-Kutcher pledge to be “of service to our president and to the world.” Please, please, you want to serve BHO, that’s your right. But hands off my world. Leave it alone. And, for goodness’ sake, shut up.
Just as I utter this heartfelt cry, the Moore-Kutchers multiply into little squares with little celebrities all taking the BHO pledge because together we can, together we are, and together we something something change. And as the minicelebrity squares are minimizing, multiplying and receding into distance, they morph into Big BHO who hovers between the White House and the Capitol, over the caption “Be the Change.”
I don’t know, for some reason all this set me thinking about my old pals, Sergei Eisenstein and General Lev Zakharovic Mekhlis. Especially the latter. In Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him there is a trenchant description of this architect of Stalin’s glorification machine:
“Stalin’s’ least-known but most vicious scorpion was Lev Mekhlis […]
By 1931, Mekhlis was literate enough to become editor of Pravda, which he turned into Stalin’s mouthpiece, receiving material from Stalin on former party leaders to be denounced in the paper and then arrested by Ezhov. For seven years Mekhlis took not a single day off and dragged into the paper, against their better judgment, fine writers such as Mikhail Kokltsov, to make Pravda more readable. Mekhlis was the sole new member of the party’s Central Committee of summer 1937 who survived the terror.” (pp. 396 -397)
Galeazzo Ciano comes to mind too. Hamish Macdonald writes in Mussolini and Italian Fascism:
From the outset, the Press Office carefully controlled the public image of Mussolini. Newspapers projected him as a dynamic, energetic and ageless leader. Photographs emphasized his virility and sporting prowess, as well as his cultural side. […] In 1933 his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, took over the Press Office and turned it, in 1935, into the Ministry for Press and Propaganda. In 1937, it became the Ministry of Popular Culture, or Minculpop. Achille Starace, party secretary from 1930, promoted the hero worship of Mussolini […]. Mussolini’s picture was everywhere — in public buildings, shops, offices and on the streets. Catchphrases such as “Believe, obey, fight!” and “Mussolini is always right!” were stenciled on walls across Italy. [p.31]
We shouldn’t go too far with historical parallels, so I’ll leave the Third Reich out of it, for now. But wait, haven’t we seen this on the stage of history before?
36 comments:
I find it humorous how much that Mussolini poster looks like Darkseid from DC comics.
There really is an Obama Youth? Pledging personal obedience complete with lame dance moves? That is freaking frightening.
Those squares with celebs making up the face of Obama, reminds me of the Leviathan.
Has any other presidency in American history relied upon such blatant emotional manipulation and concerted propagandizing?
What is it with these newly elected do-gooders that they can't just set about governing instead of cobbling up this nonsensical dog and pony show? These people are blowing more smoke than Woodstock.
There is so much window dressing out front that it makes you wonder if there's any inventory in back.
This "Goody Two-Shoes" propaganda is effective and potent for those who deploy it on a society. The result is that any interlocker of an issue wrapped in goody two-shoes sentimentality is labaled an evildoer before he has had the chance to be critical of the issue which is concealed behind the curtain of false sentiment.
That Obama youth video is so old.
I Pledge... to increase awareness of the dangers we face between my people, to help fight them and to make the life of the lefties and corporates that are destroying our race, culture and languages harder and harder!
Down with Obama!
I am appalled by Mr. Seiyo's frankly sacrilegious diatribe. One does not take the name of the Lord in vein. Obama will get you for this.
We should aknowladge that this video is great, harmless and suits its proposals.
Now, let's work and do a like minded video that suits our proposals, whatever those are.
Propaganda in democracy is war, and Obama reigned supreme over his enemies.
What may be objectionable is the destruction of one's enemies after one has gain the power in a democracy.
In our Civilisation the left attacks, attacks, attacks...
The right is considered offensive only to defend its vallues.
The right has to be as much offensive as the left, otherwise the left will always win. When two mildly equal forces confront each other, the most radical will be victorious.
The question to the right is:
Are you in the mood of getting offensive yet, or will you continue to defend your ridiculous moderation and conservative carachter?
We need a progressive right wing movement. Assimilate that, dear friends.
The Speechless Right
Mr. Henriques put his finger on it. We don’t have the public faces and we don’t have the public voices inside of the mass culture. There was one, William Buckley, but he derailed for the last 20 years of his life. Reagan was great, but he is gone; ditto Chuck Heston.
And these were old men. Old white men, while the Left – in full charge of official indoctrination in K-12 schools, in universities, and in all MSM (including entertainment) – has been brainwashing three generations now, unopposed, and targeting specifically old white men. Particularly the dead ones of 1776 who owned slaves and wrote some hypocritical gibberish called Declaration of Independence and codified the oppressive White Power structure in the Constitution.
Mark Steyn is great both on the page and in person – but he tiptoes around the really difficult – and crucial – issues. In Hollywood, I had high hopes for David Zucker after that Madeleine Albright video, but that was 10 years ago and he hasn’t followed through. Jon Voight has started speaking out, but not enough and at too old an age.
A gulf has opened up between everything we believe in and 85%+ of all people under 30 (95%+ in Europe). A greater voice in the MSM and in popular entertainment will help turn the tide – but it’ll take 40 years of patient work, just as it has taken the Left.
We are so far gone that history itself will rub the current generations’ faces in their tragic idiocy long before those 40 years of patient cultural work will have turned Western society’s rudder,
Takuan Seiyo: I like to think of it this way: If you have one brainwashed generation then you have a problem. If you have two brainwashed generations then you have a very serious problem. If you have three brainwashed generations then you have a problem that is so big that it almost cannot be solved, because nobody in living memory can remember how it was to have a sane worldview. We are now fast approaching a point where young Westerners, indoctrinated with anti-Western hatred, not only do not receive a correction from their parents, but in many cases not even from their grandparents. By then we have witnessed a complete cultural discontinuity.
As much as I loathe to admit it, Marxists and other anti-European forces have been far more successful in staging a slow, "permanent" revolution in the West than they ever were in staging an armed revolution. They have largely succeeded in their goal of eradicating Western civilization, and are now working hard to physically eradicate the European peoples who created this civilization to ensure that it cannot be rebuilt in the future, either. They achieved this feat not by gaining control over the means of production but over the means of indoctrination, the mass media and the education system.
The only thing left to do is to let the current ruling paradigm crash under the weight of its own uselessness and work to survive so that we can build something new out of the ashes. We need a new paradigm as the current post-WWII "suicide paradigm" isn't sustainable. The question is whether the coming discontinuity will be so severe, just like it was in the Middle Ages, that we will end up with an entirely new civilization, the third generation of European civilization.
Great short story. You should expand this to be a full novella. Nice Work!
For me, a refugee from Eastern Europe, it is deja vu!!!
This is really revealing to everyone who wants to know.
Well, after three generations of communism, the majority of the population will be so sick of it that it will throw the bums out in a a nanosecond, IF given the opportunity, as the Eastern Europeans did in 1989.
If not, DPRK 2009....
But, i have a feeling that we are reaching the tipping point and we will vomit this administration very soon, one way or another.
Fjordman,
I think we have to go to the giants of science fiction, maybe Philip Dick, to get an idea where this is leading. I'd be happy with the West being peppered by polises, independent city republics each organized according to principles and a culture shared by all and with a citizenry, like in Greece, willing and able to lay its lives on the line to defend that.
Alas, although I’d be perfectly happy with radical left polises co-existing side be side with the kind I want, I doubt that the progressive left would be equally broad-minded. Also, that kind of decentralized arrangement would be easy pickings for the ummah, particularly with its giant fifth column already established in the West. And maybe that’s why the leftist elite created that fifth column in the first place.
But restoring a common Western culture is no longer possible. Even intelligible conversation with the other side is no longer possible. We don’t share the same language anymore, even if we were born in the same country. Words like justice, nation, freedom, culture, racism, constitution, wealth, work, love, marriage, gender, right versus privilege etc. no longer have a common referent, and words like honor, merit, fidelity, prudence, civilization, civility, manners, graciousness, manliness, femininity, modesty, class, elegance, valor don’t even exist in the other side’s vocabulary anymore.
Then there is the whole rich fabric of our culture that the other side has bleached out and discarded. I made light recently of far out lefties who go by names like Onan and “I am.” But one has to have absorbed the Bible as a founding cultural document to understand what this is about. How many young nowadays do?
Or look at American films between 1935 and 1955. These are recent pop culture artifacts that seem 150years old. See how much French or German dialogue is included in these films meant for the broad and relatively unsophisticated American audience, how good English, good manners and virtues prevail even in plots that are cynical or risqué [Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” is a good example].
I need to modify what I wrote in the previous comment. While it’s only our last three generations that have been transformed into changelings, the left has been working on all that really for 100 years, not 40. Much of what one can find in the works or speeches of Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci reads like a blueprint for a soft coup d’etat, exactly of the kind as has been unfolding in the last 40 years.
Takuan Seiyo: When I'm finished with the science history part, I will continue my reading list with a number of books that I haven't read. One of them will be Suicide of the West by James Burnham, another The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. I haven't read Spengler yet. The original one, not the Asia Times one. Some people like him, others don't.
One title you could look into is How the West Was Lost by Alexander Boot, an ex-pat Russian who fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s, only to discover that the West he admired no longer existed. He traces the development of Western civilization through art and ideas, but especially music. You can arguably find early seeds of some ideological perversions already in Beethoven in the early nineteenth century, post-French Revolution, which did not exist in the compositions of Mozart or Haydn, let alone Bach.
You can successfully track the rise and decline of Western civilization through music. There are other ways, of course, but music is as good as any, and better than most. Through the likes of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven we created greater music than any civilization on this planet has ever done before us. During that same time period Europeans also made advances in science and technology which went far beyond what any other civilization had ever done before.
Europeans could still make good music in the nineteenth century, although we did not quite match the names of the eighteenth, and a few names were produced in the early twentieth century, but hardly anybody in the second half of the twentieth century. By the early twenty-first century, not only do we not produce anybody remotely close to the greatness of Mozart, we don't even listen to the ones we once produced. The only people who take European Classical music seriously today are, ironically, East Asians, and maybe, just maybe, some people in the eastern half of Europe, the only half of the continent that still actually looks like Europe. If you want to see a simple illustration of cultural decline you can listen to basically anything by Mozart and then turn on the TV and see some young men doing drugs, talking about their "gangster" lifestyle and their prostitutes.
Alexander Boot has a very Christian view, which I do not always share, but he brings fresh and unusual perspectives, which is good. His basic conclusion is that the West is dead, but as a Christian man he also believes in life after death. Maybe that's not a bad conclusion.
The West is dead. Long live the West!
Even considering the gloomy commentary and forecasts I maintain some optimism. I believe the election of the current president and his imprudent unleashing of hard-left power has frightened a lot of Americans between the coasts. His liberal overreach is a gift; in a short blog last month I celebrated it, saying, thank God for Barack Obama. And so I find some reasons for hope in what I believe to be true:
1. Traditional American distrust of government – despite the work of the left – has not been entirely bred out of the last three generations.
2. The linkage between practical behavior and practical consequences remains strong among those who work in the private economy.
3. A majority of Americans are neither elitists nor narcissists, and they tend to judge those who are without favor or trust.
4. The tea parties, the 10th Amendment initiative and the surprising number of hits (3M) on "new secession” are not insignificant.
5. The decline of MSM (measured by earnings) and the corresponding ascendancy of alternative conservative media reflect traditional American sentiments.
6. Polling clearly shows dissatisfaction with the current president, his party and liberalism (now, once again, progressivism). The Republican Party and its distant cousin, conservatism are beneficiaries.
7. Liberal zealotry is not accountable to reason, but it can be contained and defeated by political or main force. I think that force is beginning to stir and organize. We shall see.
Fjordman,
I am still catching up on your Music series, but like the son of a good Polish mother that I am, I was raised to be the next Frederic Chopin. Didn’t end up that way, but the love of classical music has remained in me. BTW, I know three Japanese who have made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Chopin near Warsaw, two who have paid a similar homage to Bach, and at least 15 who have so paid respects to Mozart. In 40 years of living in the U.S., I have met only two people who have done that.
As to 20th century music I can add the following:
1. I am reading now Stefan Zweig’s eulogy to European civilization, including music, that he wrote before his suicide in Brazil in 1942. Most excellent work, for it’s a sort of autobiography and a chronicle of pre-WW1 Vienna. “The World of Yesterday,” highly recommended, though my conclusion from it to persevere and win rather than follow Zweig.
2. Try Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony Nr. 3, written in 1976.
3. By far, the best classical music of the last 70 years has been written by so called film composers. It started with Jewish refugees from Hitler such as Erich Korngold, Ernest Gold, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann et al. Currently, Enio Morricone and Zbigniew Preisner are tops in my book.
@Phaedo
Optimism, pessimism, it does not matter to people rooted in European civilization. The 300 in Thermopylae did not conduct an actuarial study of their life expectancy before choosing their course of action.
We have to start from realism. And then gear up to deal with it, rather than give up because it's difficult.
This kind of asymmetric war as Olavo de Carvalho calls it is what is destroying the west. When the left attacks we will ever yield some ground in this aspect it's like a real war, but our lack of counter offensives when the opportunity arrises (Miss World, The Gayzism in California after proposition 8) that do make us really loose it, as we lose some ground and do not tries to take it back we lose just another bit when the left attacks again, do that again and again and the far right dissapears and the right becomes the far right moving all the political spectrum? Did you notice that the "far right" in europe is pro gay? The center moved to the far right slot now. That's why it is it. And soon if we don't do anything in due time the left will be the far right. And yes we take at least 20 years to make one generation. 20 years to create a generation so it can fight and if everything goes well win. Do we have this time? We really can afford it? That's why despite being an republican in heart i only believe in imperial solution... It's sad but it's time for a new Caesar. The problem is i'm not seeing him. A Flavius Aëtius is enought lets hope we also do not cut our right hand with our left...
@TS
Thank you for your response. BTW I've missed our exchanges -- always civil -- over at BJ (under my true name, Wynne).
I suspect there's an enthymeme lurking in your somewhat arch remarks. What you seem to assume is that I operate on the basis of optimism (read wishful thinking) . That is not the case.
Had I expected to be rebuked for an admittedly loose usage, I might have chosen my words more carefully. On the other hand, I will defend my use of "hope" in the opening sentence. One can easily imagine that the 300 experienced that emotion in connection with aquitting themselves honorably and to best effect on the field, but I readily concede that optimism was likely not part of their kit.
The point of my comment was to enumerate trends and events that I regard as supporting the survival of the Western Tradition in America. These (with the gifts and resources at my disposal) I encourage, support and build upon.
Best regards
I take issue with both Seiyo and Fjordman. This is not "Gramscian" stuff out of the Frankfort School. It is the natural result of Christianity. That most Christian of poets, William Blake, in "Daughters of Albion" compared marriage and family to slavery and prison. Mary Wollstonecroft, mother to Mary Shelley, preached free love in the 1780's. The Oneida Commune predated Marx and the Revolutions of 1848. Much of the current morass stems to the Romantic poets and the thoughts of Thoreau and Whitman.
Which boil down to this: if you have some amount of money, better to behave like a depraved French Aristocrat than an upright member of the "square" bourgeoisie.
Or more concretely, elites wish to maximize sexual, personal, and monetary freedom of action for themselves while cloaking themselves in Caesarian "for the people" morality.
You can't sell things people don't already want. The tremendous amounts of money flowing to elites, making them richer than the richest French aristo under Louis XIV, create the tremendous appetite to cast off any restriction in a decadent, depraved elite. The impact of the condom, improved female earnings, and anonymous urban living make women the natural home of the Hard Left, combining as it does "the New Aristocracy" of the Kennedys, Obama, etc. with a massive female-friendly social safety net. Anyone watching little girls play princess or adult women wanting understandably to jigger the system for them can understand this. The impact of the collapse of marriage (which ties female well-being to that of men's opportunities) is to my mind, far more explanatory than the idea of the pod-people and bodysnatchers.
The films of Hitchcock in San Francisco reflected a married, bourgeoisie world. The current city reflects a decadent, aristocratic single world dominated by single women seeking aristocratic princesses and a safety net.
@Phaedo
I've never thought much about Phaedo or about the after life, but that would support my argument that the odds of the outcome should not sway one from pursuing right conduct.
Anyway, I did not attempt to attribute intent into your statement. Rather I was addressing the issue within the context of my exchange with Fjordman about the dire straits, my citing the suicide of Stefan Zweig etc. The idea is that even if I am among those who read the situation with less hope than you do, it would not sway me toward defeatism or inertia, and I believe that it should not so sway anyone.
I must have ADD. I look at the length of the comments and my eyes glaze over. I have to say I agree (for the first time in my life) with Afonso and the right has to go on the offensive - but on a rational offensive. Pictures of aborted fetuses and pushing a religious agenda always ruins the Right's message. If you're trying to convince secularists about the virtues of the right, don't shove moral judgment down their throats (most here don't do that, I'm just saying). Potential celebs for right wing causes:
Dennis Miller
Jon Voight
Maria Conchita Alonso
Bruce Willis
South Park dudes
Gary Sinise
I'm sure there are others and I'm going to start tracking them so I can augment this list in the near future.
Ironically my word verification is repub.
seiko lets us comment here. you should ask for your school money back seiko.
The elite are only enabled by the masses once the mass dissent the elite fall. Observing this exercise in self-destruction it is of elitism and inherently one of the weakest pseudo-ideologies ever imposed on a society - that is what makes its success so surprising. It is the elitist structure that has attracted so many conservatives and why they have embraced it, Its success has been built on ignorance (dumbwashing) and fooling the appetites and aversions of the masses. When you challenge the average person and remove their fear of individuality or isolation they can be turned, after all the ignorant carry no guilt and in the sense of REAL politics they are a clean slate.
It is a nihilism born of Western academic and intellectual ma*ter*ation. The European congregation has been scattered by false prophets and intellectual whims - the congregation will prevail.
I find it fascinating Fjordman’s comment that hardly anybody in the second half of the 20th century has made good music. What about this music by César Tort? (the first ten seconds are oratory; and YouTube only allowed me to upload the first ten minutes of this symphonic & choral piece). For those who don’t understand Spanish let me say that the spirit of the letter and the music is… a call to civil war!
Fjordman and Takuan Seiyo: concerning music and cultural revolution I recommend "Dionysos Rising" by E. Michael Jones. Also his "Degenerate Moderns". “United in Hate” by Jamie Glazov also helps to identify pieces of the puzzle.
My work is along the thread that there is a fatal flaw in the Western psyche caused by a terrible mistake in Christian theology on the problem of evil. It was obvious to the early Christians that there is evil in the world, but how is evil created if God is good? They could not accept the idea the God would create evil. After St. Augustine of Hippo evil was defined by Christian theology as the absence of good, the privatio boni. In the modern secular mind the religious form has been stripped away but the essence of the privatio boni survives in the unconscious. Go up to anyone in the West and ask if man is essentially good or evil. Everyone will say that man is essentially good. Modern man suffers under the unconscious inflation that he is a god (another very big topic that I will not expand on here) and has inherited the privatio boni solution that evil is not real and is only the absence of good.
Modern secular Western man thinks he is essentially good and pushes his evil potential into the unconscious. His consciousness is inflated by the illusion that it is essentially good which drives a righteous thinking morality that ‘my thinking cannot be wrong’. This thinking morality has driven his intellect into all kinds of excesses such as the many isms of the 20th century that massacred over one hundred million people (and modern man looks down his nose at the Inquisition?). His unconscious holds the evil potential that his consciousness will not acknowledge which can grab him by the back of his neck to be projected onto his neighbor (such as anti-Semitism, or most recently the Obama types calling opponents of government single payer health care “domestic terrorists”).
This is moderated in most of us by social conventions and religious belief but strongly manifests in those that have above average power over the rest of us such as in the Western elites. Modern secular Western man thinks he is a god. What is the first thing a god does when we awakes? He creates. The elites, in self identification with the good, with a righteous thought morality, and suffering from inflation that he is a god awakes to his god like power over others as he acquires his position of authority. Something must be destroyed in order to create so we should not be surprised that he tries to remake man. Even conservative politicians like George Bush fell into this trap (although to a lesser extent then Obama or Clinton).
If this analysis is even partially correct then the problems with our civilization that we are discussing is also in each of us. Fjordman is probably correct that Western civilization will suffer a massive discontinuity to set the stage for a possible renewal, but if the foundation of the renewal stands on the mistakes of the past then it will fail. A Christian based civilizational renewal must pick up the thread from the early Christians and face head on the problem and reality of evil. In modern parlance, we need to acknowledge the reality of both good and evil in the human psyche.
Americans are anti-elitist.
But simultaneously, there's no more materialisic/elitist Nation than the United States of America.
Interesting...
Arius-
In regard to the Rousseau-ian illusion that people are basically good, I counter with:
"Most men are bad." - Bias of Priene.
(One of the Seven Sages men of Ancient Greece. This was his signature saying. How times have changed...!)
I pledge to continue stockpiling ammo!!!
Quite the thread here!
I just wanted to address a few of the comments by Alphonse and Debbie.
First, Alphonse, the USA is a republic not a democracy. I have been blogging and posting and reminding folks of this for some time and I plan to continue until the rest of the country gets it or I am dead. To restore our republic, we must know the difference.
Debbie,
The reason religion and morals are essential to taking back our nation are that they contain our principles. There is no other foundation upon which to build our arguments.
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." ~John Adams
Please particularly note the mention of gallantry. Isn't this exactly what the collectivists are doing? Utilizing a form of false gallantry to push their agenda?
If we have become so so ignorant of our own founding principles, how can we defend against this sort of attack? The Biblical principles upon which this country was founded are our road to salvation. Attempting to reason against the collectivist mindset without them is a doomed exercise. One can espouse principles without pushing religion. (Since I happen to be a Christian, I cannot do so, because that would make me a hypocite.)
Fjordman,
The modern Spengler is definitely NOT our friend. He is a sycophant for the useful idiot Benedict XVI, who is for the continued Turd World invasion of Europe and whose underlings aid and abet illegal immigration stateside.
Spengler also seems to deny the genetic origin of intelligence and has no problem with the race replacement of the founding peoples of Europe and the West.
I think you will enjoy The Camp of the Saints. Will you read it in the original French or the English translation? I thought the English version was quite good, even though a bit was lost in translation.
Taking issue with Takuan Seiyo and Fjordman
I agree with Whiskey: today’s crisis can best be understood if we go beyond Gramscian or commie brainwash into a meta-perspective that involves Christian ethics.
My full post, longer than the 500-word limit for this blogsite, can be read here. It conflates ideas from Whiskey and Conservative Swede with my psycho-historical views of the whys of the current self-loathing among westerners.
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