The essay below is the sixth in a series by Takuan Seiyo. See the list at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments.
Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Right: George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916/17
The Bee and the Lamb
Part 6
By Takuan Seiyo
Embracing doubt once embraced
It is hard to see in history the thumbprints of the particular God of the Jews or the Redeemer of the Christian faithful. Some patterns that may be discerned over very long cycles are easier to explain as a play of the cosmic forces first intuited from Nature by the Chinese than as signs of a sentient deity refereeing the affairs of men.
But there are two exceptions. The chosenness of the Jews for every calamity that history may have in store for a people, and their survival for nearly 4000 years in order to enmesh themselves in new calamities — Socialism, “Civil Rights” [i.e. reverse racism] and Multiculti Suicide-by-Immigration portending the latest — cannot be easily explained by any random or impersonal forces. And there is only one more such extravagantly outlying phenomenon in all of history: America’s Founding Fathers.
The chance that a Washington and a Jefferson, a Franklin and a Madison, a Hancock, Henry, Wilson, Morris (Robert) and Morris (Gouverneur), Adams (Samuel) and Adams (John) and dozens of others be all in the same generation, in the same patch of land, hugely defies the odds, as any student of the distribution of human stupidity and baseness across time and space may confirm. A group of flawed men yet with such virtue, courage and intelligence as led America to independence, produced the singular Declaration and won a war with a ragtag yeoman army against the premier military power of the age, never existed before or since[1]. When one adds that the foreigners who made a major contribution to the effort — names like Lafayette, Rochambeau, Kosciuszko and Pulaski -- were of the highest, noblest, most valorous kind that their native lands have ever produced, the uniqueness of this anomaly becomes even more apparent.
To talk of their commonly shared virtue would inevitably lead to a gushing stream ever so depressing in comparison to the cesspool of pulverizing madness, mediocrity, stupidity and corruption engulfing us now. But one ought to at least brush by greatness, via Washington’s eulogy by General Henry Lee III before the two Houses of Congress on December 26, 1799. Here is some of what Lee said about his commander in the Revolutionary War and, later, President:
“Possessing a clear and penetrating mind, a strong and sound judgment, calmness and temper for deliberation… with invincible firmness and perseverance in resolutions maturely formed… drawing information from all… acting from himself, with incorruptible integrity and unvarying patriotism… his own superiority and the public confidence alike marked him as the man designed by Heaven to lead in the great political as well as military events which have distinguished the era of his life…
First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, he was second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life. Pious, just, humane, temperate, and sincere; uniform, dignified, and commanding, his example was as edifying to all around him as were the effects of that example lasting. To his equals he was condescending, to his inferiors kind, and to the dear object of his affections exemplarily tender. Correct throughout, vice shuddered in his presence, and virtue always felt his fostering hand. The purity of his private character gave effulgence to his public virtues…
When our monuments shall be done away, when nations now existing shall be no more; when even our young and far-spreading empire shall have perished; still will our Washington’s glory unfaded shine, and die not, until love of virtue cease on earth, or earth itself sinks into chaos!”
The far-spreading empire will not last much longer, love of virtue has already ceased on Earth, and chaos is coming. Washington is but a devalued face on the $1 bill that will soon buy what the dime does now. But perhaps in some indeterminable future he will regain the popular admiration now accorded The One We Have Been Waiting For. Perhaps the key to regeneration will be found by adopting the beliefs and values that animated Washington and his peers, excepting such then-intractable peculiarities as slavery and the state of science and technology of an earlier age.
The Christian faith and reasoned personal philosophy of the Founders comprised religion reconciled with reason, revealed dogma tempered by empirical validation, traditional social elitism coexisting with republican liberty, American exceptionalism side by side with Europhile ecumenism, Anglo-Saxon civic culture fused to Roman personal virtue and Greek love of beauty and wisdom. They all kept Bibles on their night stands but mostly were not too keen on clergy or theology, spoke and wrote of Nature’s God, believed in moral consequences that flow from that belief, and called their honor “sacred.” Moreover they were a true elite: mostly landed gentry in all but name except for a few high burghers like Franklin and Adams, and in cognitive aptitude not in the top 10% like the current elite, but in the top 0.5%. Yet, they led lives of service to their lessers, in republican kinship and spirit of noblesse oblige[2].
Washington and Franklin were both prominent Freemasons and Deists. Hancock, Revere and Henry were active Masons, with some evidence that Jefferson, Madison and Robert Morris were too. Jefferson, Madison, Ethan Allen and others were Deists, but all that did not imply hostility to Christianity. Almost all these men were churchgoing Anglican/ Episcopalian or Presbyterian/Congregationalist, yet they were also stalwarts of the Age of Reason who had unpacked from Christianity, at least for their own consumption, the tinfoil, goldfoil, alchemy (transfiguration), purchase incentives and penalties for withdrawal, as had their philosopher-teachers of the English and Scottish Enlightenment and, in Jefferson’s case, the French too.
Deism, a religious philosophy that has early Greek antecedents and that flourished in late 17th century England and mid-18th century America, was a reason-based creedal system that inferred the truth about God and man from Nature. It is generally posited that Deists rejected the God of the Bible and all organized religion as such, but that is not quite so. Theirs was an American amalgam “distinctly Christian both in tone and deed,” as Herbert M. Morais stated in one of the few authoritative works on this subject[3]. Such Christian Deism manifested also in Europe, for instance in the German poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, an alumnus of a Lutheran seminary and, like the Estonian poet with whom we began this exploration, a romantic whose tragic love ended with a long journey on foot and then years of quiet madness in seclusion, followed by oblivion that decades after his death turned to fame and popular reverence.
Perhaps Gregg Frazer’s notion of “theistic rationalism” comes closest to capturing the unique and currently extinct flavor of the Founding Fathers’ faith. Frazer, professor of history at Master’s College, lists Gouverneur Morris, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and James Wilson among the rational theists: neither Deist nor by-the-book Christian, but each with a personal blend of natural religion, Protestant Christianity, and rationalism.
“For theistic rationalists,” writes Frazer in “Gouverneur Morris, Theistic Rationalist”, “reason determined what should be accepted as revelation from God. Unlike deists, theistic rationalists accepted the notion of revelation from God; unlike Christians, they felt free to pick apart the Bible and to consider only the parts which they determined to be rational to be legitimate divine revelation. They similarly felt free to define God according to the dictates of their own reason and to reject Christian doctrines which did not seem to them to be rational.”
Gouverneur Morris (1752 —1816), the main subject of Frazer’s paper, was one of the most brilliant members of this brilliant group of America’s founders, and perhaps principal among the authors of its Constitution. An aristocratic elitist and regular Episcopalian for social more than religious reasons, Morris disdained the superstitions of Catholicism and the harshness of Calvinism — a disdain probably reciprocated, given Morris’s reputation as a prolific, intercontinental fornicator. He nevertheless worked tirelessly for tolerance among the various Christian creeds, particularly in opposing various anti-Catholic measures in his state of New York. He disdained pacifism but defended the Quakers’ right to follow their conscience and opposed religious tests for public office.
Frazer has found 40 references to God in Morris’s writings, but only two to Jesus. This parallels other Theistic Rationalists and Deists. They lived too close in time to the rivers of blood spilled in Europe’s Thirty Year’s War in the name of the Prince of Peace. Although that war had ended in 1648, the strife between Catholics and Protestants continued. Besides, the tale of that war’s horrors was an immigrant grandfather’s yarn that many a mid-18th century American heard while growing up. Revulsion had set in.
George Washington, famously, though attending Sunday service at Christ Church when in Philadelphia, did not take communion and was never known to kneel except in the field, in solitary prayer before battle. But Franklin’s spiritual makeup may be more indicative, because he was more the quintessential, self-made American than the patrician Washington. From failed printer’s apprentice Franklin rose to wealthy tradesman, wise godfather of Philadelphia, founding father of the United States, the toast of France’s high society, prolific author, and a creative genius so astonishing that just to list his discoveries, inventions, new civic and social institutions sprung from his eyebrow, books and essays and the major events he greatly influenced takes up a catalog.
Franklin chafed under the Puritan atmosphere of his native city and parental home, became a Deist early on and later one of colonial America’s most prominent Masons. He described his lukewarm sentiment toward Christianity in his Autobiography, among others as "I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies." Yet, in several places in his writings he affirmed his fate in God, Creator of the Universe, and his “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion” includes a long prayer that wouldn’t be out of place in a church hymnal.
Even those who remained traditional and unwavering Christians preserved deep fraternal bonds with those who were not. Robert Morris, then the second most powerful man in America, was brother-in-law of the Rector of Christ Church, Bishop William White. Yet Morris was a close ally of the Mason-Deist Founding Fathers, labored to overturn Pennsylvania’s religious test laws, and was friend and patron of the Jewish co-financier (with Morris himself) of the Revolutionary War, Haym Solomon.
John Witherspoon, a Scottish Presbyterian minister and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, stressed that his own opposition to “sacerdotal tyranny” had led him to support religious freedom. Samuel Adams, called “Last of the Puritans,” was a strict-by-the-book fundamentalist Christian, much given to prayer and Bible devotion, yet he was a close associate of Freemasons like Hancock and Revere. His polemical exchange of letters with Thomas Paine
about the nature of God and proper Christianity shows the opposite poles of religious attitudes of these men united by a limited but specifically Christian common denominator for a common cause.
It was Samuel Adams who defined that common denominator in 1772, in words later reverberating in the Declaration of Independence. In “The Rights of the Colonists; The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting”, he opened the first section with the words:
“Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.”
… and ended with:
“If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.”
The basic problem of Western man is that he has renounced freedom, and the other natural rights — the unalienable gift from God — because he has renounced God: the God of Nature that was a living presence for the Founders, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. And with that surrender, he has vacated the necessary conditions for individual and societal survival.
Nature is about survival. A natural right to property cannot be inferred directly from the Gospels[4]. It can only be inferred by deducing principles from Nature’s ways and ends, and seeing Biblical God’s intent in them. In contrast, a right to life cannot be inferred from Nature, but only from the precepts articulated by Jesus Christ. Somehow, American Christianity until the end of the 19th century managed to combine the two inputs. But since then, increasingly, Christianity has lost its interest in the God of Nature, and the wisdom that inheres in Nature.
The Church — all churches but the kookiest white supremacist ones — has only three interests now. The first is postmodern socialism: the constant banging about social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, economic justice, peace, loving our brothers and sisters of the back culture or back entry, cringing, yielding and folding before the agents of entropy and barbarism. The second is temporal power. The third is the maintenance and cultivation of the fundamentalist reading of the Biblical canon, the orthodoxies of the Nicene Creed and, especially for Catholics, various ritualistic superstitions —all of which were rejected already 250 years ago by the one generation in history in which the hand of God may most clearly be discerned.
Something has gone wrong with a Christianity that confers no immunity on its adherents against transcendence-denying lunacy flowing from the secular, hostile Western elite through its tools of utopian globalist treason, pincer looting by White banksters on one side and favored racial minorities on the other, demographic sabotage via immigration, subversion of traditional morality, mockery of God’s Nature via unnatural but enshrined gender, sex and procreation practices, and metastasized state outlays and power to ram all that down the throat of the deselected white race in its quasi-Christian homelands.
The Ultimate Blasphemy
Systemic lying about Reality is the ultimate Blasphemy. It is a mortal offense against the Order of the Universe or, for the believer, God. Reality is how God manifests. It's what God does for a living.
When a society lies about the basic nature of man, and the rules by which a community of people may be wholesomely constructed, and about the true nature of its government and its laws, and about basic economic truths, and it lies further about its own history and the history of other peoples, and it lies by elevating the purported goodness of the savage and poor versus its own self-imputed badness, and it lies about the miserable outcome of its practice of all those lies, and it brings up its young to believe in those lies, and consistently persecutes those who challenge the lies — that is an aggravated blasphemy.
It makes no difference if God may be more correctly described using Norbert Wiener’s concepts of a self-correcting homeostatic feedback loop than by using the concepts of the Bible. It makes no difference if the consequence of massive, systemic blasphemy is Yahweh lashing out in outrage, or the cosmic recursive loop twisting violently to crush the toxic barnacles and so restore its own balance. What matters is that a mortal offense against Reality has its consequence, mort (i.e. death), hitched inseparably to the transgression.
The apocalypse toward which the West is hurtling is not in some future twitch of the divine scepter. It has begun everywhere, now, in human reality. Though it may take from one to ten decades before the big cave-in, the walls are quaking — all of them, now, as they have been since the 1980s[5]. There are several biogenic crises coasting toward their exponential phase. With Earth’s population projected at 10 billion in 2100, the computational wizard Stephen Emmott plugs that into models that show a resulting pollution of the atmosphere and the sea, raising temperatures, loss of biodiversity and, ultimately a destruction of what Emmott calls “Earth’s life support systems.” Kaput, y’all.
It’s no laughing matter, either. All the anthropogenic global warming hoax on one scale and, on the other, a visit to the soot-spewing industrial Chinese or Indian hinterland, or to an African forest stripped bare for food and tinder, and one has to tip the scale for the pessimists. The question is what to do about it.
The unhinged Green Left and bleeding heart Christians see the answer in an economic and industrial self-evisceration of the West. That includes Emmott and the various Oxbridge/Ivy League crypto-Marxists thick on the ground in Brussels and surrounding B. Hussein Obama in Washington. They care little about the fate of the Pacific smelt. What they do care about is that America be cut at the knees, in every possible way, along with other colonialist, imperialist, racist whitey, and that the resulting “savings” be transferred to the “historically exploited.”
With practically all the population and ecology problems situated in Third World countries, and the solutions being sought in First World countries, it’s the social and ideological malignancies in the West that have to be resolved, before the biogenic ones can be, elsewhere. There are now at least eighteen synchronized wave-patterns of such socio-cultural malignancies:
1. | Hollowing out of the economy and of national (and personal) sovereignty via the globalist caper and the American-style consumer-on-credit economy; |
2. | Raising from the near-dead a hostile Frankenstein, China, as a linchpin of the globalist scheme; |
3. | Fiscal pulverization via exploding government outlay commitments and debt piled onto confiscatory taxation; |
4. | Monetary implosion via institutionalized bankster fraud and governmental collusion to save the malefactors at the expense of the little people; |
5. | The torching of social trust, physical security and public outlay budgets via globally open immigration; |
6. | Forced pumping of Islam and its carriers into the Western edifice, though it’s the most toxic substance the West has known, and for the longest, in its history; |
7. | Conversion of formerly cultured, civilized countries into no-go zones where bands of previously excluded or hunted savages prey on normal people; |
8. | Putrefaction of a culture that, still the glory of mankind just 60 years ago, is now far more imbecilic and nearly as decadent as Rome’s was at its worst; |
9. | Purposeful conversion of education into an egalitarian assembly line spewing out dumb, ignorant, hedonistic serfs, imprinted with the rulers’ operating code and brimming with self-esteem but loathing for their historical polity and for genuine achievement; |
10. | Capitulation before the base, moronic, vulgar, uncivil social strata in each country, giving them the street, the fashion, the vote, the TV and film screens and all other mass media; |
11. | Empowering, indeed enthroning the young and stupid as the rulers of the marketplaces of goods, ideas, cultural trends and votes, while ignoring and disrespecting the older and wiser; |
12. | Universal lowering of competence, responsibility and civic virtue in all branches of the government and all public services due to Affirmative Action, racial norming, “disparate impact” and, in the case of White electorate’s voting for manifestly corrupt and incompetent politicians “of color,” widespread sentimental stupidity; |
13. | Destruction of the family and an advanced effort to destroy Nature’s distinct genders, starting with the absurd campaign of denial of sexual dimorphism and its respective limitations. |
14. | Atrophy of all moral restraints and all loyalty but to self: turning bankers into buccaneers, lawyers into hyenas, legislators into whores, corporate executives into con-men, journalists into phone hackers, rappers and hoopsters as the aristocracy, mafia wives on teevee, celebrity replacing fame, cleverness replacing wisdom, priests, school teachers and sports coaches raping their young charges, little children as sex objects, bestiality on video, porn as a major industry, and, as of late, cannibalism too; |
15. | Death of democracy by voiding, replacing, diluting, manipulating and fraudulently inducing citizens' votes, or taking the most important decisions out of the citizens’ purview — or even knowledge — altogether. Governance in the West is really a giant Progressive experiment undertaken unilaterally by self-selected elites, no serf opinions required, thank you. |
16. | Creeping fascism under the guise of nondiscriminative public safety, with hi-tech snooping, mass-humiliation and harassment of the traveling public, drones in the sky, miniature cameras everywhere, planned re-education camps, planned seizure of communication channels, and a general voiding of constitutional rights of due process, assembly, dissent and free speech, with perpetual tunneling under the right to bear arms; |
17. | Going down fighting — fighting a string of failed wars fought wrongly (Vietnam, Afghanistan), or against the wrong enemy (Serbia, Kosovo), or on a fool’s errand (Iraq, Somalia), with futile building of hostile nations on the back of the American taxpayer, accoutered with lunatic diplomacy actively pulling down friends and helping enemies (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Palestine); |
18. | Voiding the possibility of a corrective feedback process by persecuting critics of the demographic-ethnic aspects of the Descent, with thought crimes and “racism” witch hunts, while deliberately ignoring expert critics of the economic-fiscal and cultural road of descent. |
But it’s not the earthquake that matters. What matters is that when the successive seismic waves hit, the foundation of the edifice was revealed — and it was made of jelly, of lies pumped into the substrata by the ruling elites for 50 years, gradually replacing the concrete rebar that used to be there.
No massage of words, concepts and even numbers known to the Stalin-era editors of Pravda (e.g. Nikolai Bukharin) has been lost on the leadership caste of the officially democratic West. Islam is the Religion of Peace. The global war is “against Terror.” Putting the Muslim Brotherhood in power across North Africa is “Arab Spring.” Diversity is Strength. Voting for lower taxes is “Racism.” Stealing the savings and fixed income of America’s middle class is “Quantitative Easing.” Shipping their jobs to China is “The Service Economy.” Morgan Freeman is POTUS-for-life except when he is God, or when Will Smith saves Planet Earth or Demi Moore leads Navy SEALs in combat. No Child Left Behind. Obama will bring us together.
Moreover, the blatant contempt for Reality, for Nature — and therefore for God — has continued despite recurring catastrophic results, for decades. When revealed, the swaths of self-wrought destruction are merely papered over with more lies, and the game continues. It’s as though the Eveready bunny at the top is waddling with its tin drum, and it won’t stop until the battery runs out.
The battery will run out, with large consequences for the future of mankind. Indeed, observing Western society in its throes is like looking at a poor little ant, its head torn off, the body staggering in circles, trying to make sense of Reality without the organ it needs for perceiving it. This can be perhaps more readily understood in the context of a simple life and death situation: war.
NATO soldiers are running around Kandahar looking for terrorists and vying for the “courageous restraint” award that can be won by not firing their weapons when their lives are at risk. And that’s after their commanders have doubled that risk by forcing them to patrol enemy territory with unloaded weapons. Meanwhile, NATO governments import the cousins of the terrorists whom NATO soldiers may not shoot, so that they can rape and blow up the soldiers’ kin back home.
Behold, furthermore, the latest soft-cone projectiles in America’s combat arsenal. Already in June 1991, Marine General Robert H. Barrow implored the U.S. Senate not to push women into combat roles. He laid out the plain truth that there is no military need for women in combat, and combat is not about achieving equality but killing effectively. He outlined the disastrous hobbling of that effectiveness that the admission of women would entail. All for naught, as America’s ruling elite has no interest in such mundane trifles as what makes soldiers prevail in the carnage of combat. If Obama is re-elected, relays a new book by Aaron Klein, Fool Me Twice, the U.S. military is to be transformed into a social work organization deployed to combat “global warming,” global poverty and “injustice,” and to serve as an arm of the United Nations.
Consider the self-evident rubbish of the “strength in diversity” bromide. It would take 35 years of this miserable mental masturbation until Angela Merkel announced in 2010 that multiculturalism had failed in Germany, followed by such statements from Nicolas Sarkozy in France and David Cameron in Great Britain. And still, “diversity” and its enforcement continues to be a paramount goal of the European Commission and “United in Diversity” is still the motto of the European Union. All that when historical evidence shows dozens of nations that crumbled because of diversity: from Assyria to Austro-Hungary, from Cyprus to Czechoslovakia, from Rome to Rwanda.
In the United States, every cog and wheel of the government and of corporate and public institutions turns to further “diversity,” every day. “President Obama Signs Executive Order to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce, Initiative designed to draw on the talents of all parts of our society” reads one agitprop from a stream of nouveau Marxist hooey that emanates daily from every government office in the land. But parts of society don’t have talents. Individuals have talents, and talented individuals are assiduously cultivated, scouted, helped and promoted in America already -- especially if they come from parts of society that were subject to past discrimination.
Something else is happening here. The rulers are not rewarding talent but membership in favored identity groups, primarily black, brown and female. To tweak just slightly Karl Marx’s central idea, the Diversity/Inclusion gambit changes society’s pattern from “Each employed according to his ability” to “Each favored minority person employed according to his need.” However, packing the state apparatus with favored minority groups is not an innocent exercise in “diversity” but a suicidal hobble in an international reality where the race goes to the ablest, in everything. It is, ultimately, a mortal offense, a recipe for failure and erasure from the pages of history.
Illustration from a 1942 comic book, Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism, projecting how easy it would be for the Soviets to take over the United States [more panels here. The Bolsheviks are kaput, but the Far Left took over anyway.
Consider geopolitics. Already in 1993, Harvard historian Samuel Huntington published and article in Foreign Affairs that he later expanded into a widely read book issued in 1996, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Among others, Huntington argued that profound cultural differences doom to failure any attempts of the West to export its values and political structures to the East.
Now, even if that half of Washington D.C. that matters had not read the book, everybody who is anybody in U.S. foreign relations reads Foreign Affairs. Yet America’s foreign policy establishment continues in its prolonged effort to impose democracy in Muslim lands in North Africa and elsewhere, with the consequence of boosting totalitarian and hostile Islam. Obstinately clueless, America is likewise committed to making laughingstock of itself by sending a succession of female emissaries to Muslim lands: Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Hillary Clinton. The latter has been greeted recently in Egypt with crowds chanting “Monica, Monica” and pelting Madam Secretary with shoes and tomatoes[6].
A tide of lies has drowned everything. Government unemployment figures exclude the permanently unemployed. Government core inflation figures exclude the cost of food and energy. GNP “growth” figures treat government output the same as private sector output, and the porn industry the same as the steel industry. M3, the broadest indicator of money supply, is no longer reported by the U.S. Fed, because it indicates the explosion in money supply too well. Obamacare is touted before the law’s passage as a great saving for America’s middle class, but admitted as picking their pockets after the law’s passage[7]. Photos and video footage of violent criminals in Scandinavia are photoshopped to disguise the brown skin tones and facial features of the perps. The Los Angeles Times’ crime section now reports the victims’ personal details instead of the criminals’ — the old way of reporting yielding results that were, shall we say, too racist. The most prestigious names on Wall Street and in the City (London) have engaged for decades in the biggest fraud of all time by consistently mispricing and misrepresenting risk and its bearing on the value of their transactions. The entire Western educational establishment has bamboozled generations of it students with lies that race is a social construct, we are all born an equal tabula rasa, Whites are uniquely wicked, and it’s only their racism and selfishness that has prevented some from reaching their “full” (and equal) potential.
Things get really interesting when you start crossing the threads of dysfunction. Writing in her blog on July 9th about the second mega-fraud in the commodities and foreign currency brokerage business — the theft of at least $220 million of customers’ funds on deposit at PFGBest nine months after disclosure of $1.5 billion missing from John Corzine’s MF Global — Ann Barnhardt, a pro in this business, described the U.S. regulatory system overseeing the futures industry as “an evil, despicable mafia, administered by politicking psychopaths on the take, and staffed by affirmative action hires to provide plausible deniability.”
“The NFA, CFTC, SEC and the CME,” wrote Barnhardt, “are lying, thieving psychopathic criminals [snip]… “clients are viewed as nothing but zeroes and ones on servers that can be "harvested" whenever JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs sees fit to do it, and then Tyqueesha in the back office and LaNeequa the junior auditor and Jamahl the assistant compliance manager/robosigner will be blamed,” she wrote.
Now if you add to this that the mega-thieves of capital will receive a light swat instead of the capital punishment they deserve, and then Chinese interests will buy the farmland of some of the farmers broken by these bold robberies, and the children of the broken ones will console themselves with meth and rap or “witnessing” in megachurches with rock bands before charlatans in alligator boots, and the U.S. government will use newprint money to buy the remaining food commodities as a gift to Taliban and Hamas, which will increase food prices for American consumers, then you begin to appreciate the power of intersections.
An even bigger intersection of many threads of collective madness transpired on September 11, 2001, resulting in America’s defeat by its own hand due to a single coordinated terrorist attack. A web of domino lines has plunged the country in two bottomless Muslim bogs abroad, while increasing its frantic efforts at more Islamization and more Muslims in America and its top power structure. With guns and butter at the same time and credit spigots open, the collapse of the U.S. economy and a future collapse of its currency were baked in. But entirely discretionary was the destruction of America’s most cherished liberties that had flourished for 225 years, the conversion of the state from a relatively benign one to a fascism-prone colossus, the people shuffling shoeless, beltless and bottle-less in long, docile lines through processing chutes where machines strip them naked, or elsewhere watch them from flying drones and CCTV cameras while in remote government basements computers and anonymous spooks watch their bank accounts and credit charges, and read or listen to all of their communications while re-education camps are under construction…
The hideous, all-enveloping sludge is the work of all of them: the Marxist and crypto-Marxist saboteurs; lunatic White “Progressives” with their self-flagellating S&M “diversity”; well-meaning practitioners of Socialist-Statist brain onanism (e.g. Keynesians, big welfare advocates, 95% of credentialed economists and sociologists); cynical power grabbers in labor unions and government bureaucracies; mammon-mad banksters and their captured governments; growth-mad exponents of the paper-and-bailout socialized capitalism model; the cynical, nihilist managerial class; the American Neocons drunk on Empire wine; the Theocons-Neocons drunk on sweet Jesus juice. But above all, it’s the fault of the common people.
People, at last dumb and decadent enough to be herded around at will by clever Svengalis like Obama’s packager, David Axelrod, or by practically anyone who knows something of Edward Bernays or Saul Alinsky. Seduced by goodies doled out by governments or bought on unduly cheap credit. Yielding uncritically to the media barrage of advertising, manufactured images of success and desirability, tainted news and analyses of news. Failing to smash with revulsion imposed, transparent frauds like “diversity” and multiculturalism. Consuming with gusto the latest news of Tom and Katie’s marriage and feel-good fibs from the White House or EU. Worshipping mindless celebrity drones. Neither reading nor thinking.
Over three quarters of these people in America, Canada, Denmark and Norway declare themselves Christian, as do almost 70% of Britons and Swedes, and about three fifths of Germans and Australians. Why were they not taught in their churches what Reality is, and how God’s laws may be deduced from it? The question is particularly salient for Americans, whose Christianity led them not so long ago to challenge the established order in the name of Nature’s God, and to risk their lives, fortunes and sacred honor in that challenge.
How can there be a faith that purports to connect mortals to God via a dogma it calls TRUTH, but is oblivious to a thousand truths in the reality of everyday life, visible to all who have eyes to see? Yet all major Christian denominations are in favor of the same globalist-redistributionist agenda as pushed by the Club of Crooks, Loons and Looters that alone feasts at the trough of every Western nation, with differences only in the ratio of Crooks to Loons, and the ethnicity of the Looters.
Victor Davis Hanson describes in many of his articles the unbearable barbarian frontier that his California home country has become due to an influx of feral “Hispanics,” yet the prevalent goal of all American Christian denominations is to maintain an endless stream of more barbarians, legal, illegal or “refugee”, Christian, Muslim or Communist. In the language of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, “We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, wherever they may be. Loving our neighbor has global dimensions in a shrinking world.”
By means of this religious lunacy boosting the sabotage of the Left that wants more captured voters, and the greed of business seeking cheap labor, one quarter of all Mexicans in the world now live in the United States, and largely off the United States. So does 1.5% of the population of Somalia, thanks to the Christian import efforts alone. It’s no coincidence that Mexifornia — Hanson’s term — is technically bankrupt. Its officially-bankrupt cities have been inundated by “Hispanic” immigration, so that Whites are now 25% in bankrupt Vallejo (78% in 1970), 23% in bankrupt Stockton (58% in 1980), 19% in bankrupt San Bernardino (65% in 1970) and 0.8% in imminently-bankrupt Compton.
The Catholic archdiocese of Chicago paid in the 1980’s for Obama’s training in Alinsky socialist subversion methods, so that he could come 25 years later and force them to subsidize abortions. Christians For Obama is on Facebook, complete with this photo evidence (right) of his cleverness and their terminal idiocy.
An influential Methodist pastor, seminary professor and media pundit by the old WASP name of Ben Witherington III believes that “Jesus would be smiling” if Americans turned in their guns to their gummint. This in a country where Virginia statutes once required[8] that all who have arms bring them to the church for Sunday services. And despite solid historical evidence showing that disarmament of civilians always leads to mass murder of the people by their own government: actively as in Ottoman Turkey, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, China or Uganda, or passively as in Great Britain now, with a government-disarmed native Eloi majority being preyed upon by government-imported Morlock minority.
We will dwell into the ancient origin of those literally denatured Biblofallacies next time, noting for now that as 18th century America avoided them so should 21st century America. For the last hope of this last best hope of mankind is its strong Christian identification — if the compass needle be unstuck so that it no longer points to a false North.
About the paintings
The two paintings adorning this page were produced in Europe just 40 years and one border apart from each other, yet they portray entirely different levels of the basic order of life.
Auguste Renoir (1841—1919) was the painter of happiness. Many of his paintings show families and friends sharing cheerful moments rendered in soft light and gay[9] colors. “Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette” depicts a Sunday afternoon at a popular amusement spot for regular Parisians in 1876. I chose this painting to symbolize simple, organic happiness. Not the bliss of utopia, for France had just lost the Franco-Prussian war in which the very owner of this windmill-bakery-dance garden was killed by Prussian soldiers and nailed to the spars of the windmill. But it was still a world in which the natural order stood, people shared countries with kin people, and a Christian-elitist culture still permeated, though both strict religion and aristocracy had waned.
Georg Grosz (1893 — 1959) was a German painter famous for his savage caricatures of life in Germany in the 1910s-20s. Grosz was a communist idealist and saw humanity mainly as depraved and the German people as a medley of greedy profiteers, war-crippled curs, war-demented Prussian officers, whores and perverts.
Metropolis is Grosz’s vision of Berlin at the apex of World War I, with enormous numbers of German casualties returning from the front, African empire lost, withdrawal to Siegfried Line, deprivation of the civilian population and, with America’s entry into the war from the west and the Russian Revolution exploding in the east, the beginning of the end for life as it had been known. Painted almost entirely in red, it’s an apocalyptic panorama of alienated men thrashing in a frenzied city destroyed by material shortages, desperation, brutal struggle for survival, loss of civic virtues and loss of hope.
I have chosen this painting to symbolize the Lamb part of the equation, because it portrays the end destination not only of an obsessively rigid and nationalist culture but also of a civilization governed by rigidly eschatological dogmatics fanatically devoted to blocking out Reality and making sacrificial lambs of men.
Notes:
1. | We will not get stuck here with the multiculti Left’s favorite trick of bringing up not only the slavery issue but the personal imperfections of each of the Founders. Usually, the people who bring up Franklin’s neglect of his wife, or Jefferson’s perpetual indebtedness, or Morris’s jumping butt-naked from the window of a married woman, insulted their mother that day before breakfast, sodomized a transvestite minor a few hours before, and helped a Muslim or MS-13 monster evade deportation a day earlier. |
2. | This is by necessity a superficial account of the American Revolutionary Period, or just the Founding Fathers, or even just the religion of the Founding Fathers. Each one of these may be subdivided into further categories, and in each category thousands of books and scholarly papers and PhD dissertations have been written. |
3. | Herbert M. Morais, “Deism in Revolutionary America (1763-89)”, International Journal of Ethics 42:4, University of Chicago, July 1932, pp. 436-442, 452. |
4. | Jefferson substituted “pursuit of happiness” in the Lockean triad of “life, liberty, property.” However, the phrase “among which” that precedes the three enumerated rights indicates that there are additional such rights. In Jefferson’s generation the understanding of property as an unalienable right was pervasive, as was John Locke's entire theory of government. “Property” is included in the quote from Samuel Adams cited in the text above, and Jefferson himself invoked the “life, liberty, property” triad several times in his writings. |
5. | This is arbitrary, and the choice of an American chronology only is just a space/time necessity. Every Western country differs in the relevant details and dates, but the trend and its components are the same, if in different proportions. The 80s are a viable peg for tracing the beginning of the collapse because, culturally and morally it started from the launch of MTV Networks in 1981, geopolitically from the tragic end of the International Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon in October 1983, demographically a major self-inflicted wound occurred with the 1986 Amnesty, and derivatives were first shown to be weapons of financial mass destruction on Black Monday in October 1987. While different pegs are possible, the unquestionable beginning of America’s descent was on November 22, 1963 -- the day Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as United States President. |
6. | True to type, in the matter of the risible boomerang called “Arab Spring,” the U.S. State Department has for the first time deleted the sections covering religious freedom from its May 2012 Country Reports on Human Rights. These reports cover the period of the Arab Spring and its aftermath. |
7. | An important weapon in the arsenal of the Obama cabinet and Obamacare proponents in 2009, before the law was passed, was the work of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. Gruber vouchsafed that the scheme would result in large savings in healthcare premiums, ranging from 13% to 31%. After the law passed, his consultant fee pocketed, Gruber began advising that there would be large increases in premiums as a result of this law, ranging from 19% to 30%. |
8. | Clayton Cramer, Gun Control in the Middle & Southern Colonies |
9. | It’s time to spring the much-missed adjective, “gay” from its captivity in the Dark Side’s dungeon. |
Takuan Seiyo is a European-born American writer living in exile in Japan.
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45 comments:
Wonderful article.
Art is a doorway into the psyche and the multitude of contemporary artistic expressions found in architecture, movies, music sculpture to painting is quite obscene and brutalist even by the social standards of 30 years ago, let alone 70+.
SAW I, II and III anyone? These movies couldn't have been made in 1980 without a X rating yet they are television. This is a canary in the coal mine.
It is also a corrosive used by the elite to attack traditional held values of the Western people. When our values turn to excrement we become no better than the Morlocks we've imported.
Think about the spewing intellectual stupidity from post-modernism that is pushed in our colleges that put Goethe on par with some crazed feminist. They have relativized truth and debased critical thinking.
Go read Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House" for understanding of what has happened and who is behind it.
Ask why the West cannot seem to produce the quality of art that was found in Venice in the Renaissance. Why instead we get "piss christ" and a "dung maddona" created by talentless, filthy hacks backed by some of the most wealthy men on the planet. And a torrent of post-modern garbage from the Guggenhiem to the Getty.
Nauseatingly pedantic. You almost get the impression of someone on the Titanic using the occasion to make a self-aggrandizing soliloquy. Not to mention that most of this is material Seiyo has gone over before. That said, barring the racism and snobby elitism, I tend to agree with most of his views.
The US is heading towards even more
loss of control, confusion and self-arming leading to partial Balkanization or even another North/South split.It is evolution
basically,caused mainly by diversity.I can see the South-Western states which are already flooded with Chicanos, reverting to Mexico, Texas maybe going its own way, Alaska as part of Canada etc.It may actually be a good thing.We live in interesting times.
September 11: The hijakers didn't just bring cause the collapse of a couple of tall buildings, rather it caused the collapse of an already hollowed out society. Bin Laden succeeded beyond anything he could have imagined. Hitler before Barbarossa told his doubting generals that Soviet society had done the same to Russia and all the Wermacht had to do was kick in the front door to bring it down. However something of Russia was still alive under Communism, enough to prevail. Let's hope the same applies in the West.
Did I get what I bargained for? If I am not quite misstaken here in the outskirts of old age daementia, Takuan Seiyo has on his for us foreigners hard to read but admirably (over)precise and thought-provoking English in a sence described and defined this for me since several years disgusting something that I under anothe but highly motivated signature 9 months ago in a comment on GoV with some trepidation ventured to call not only 'glabal stupidity' but GLOBAL IDIOCY.
I even dared to make the following suggestion:
"PS Would not GLOBAL IDIOCY be a wishful theme for Fjordman and/or the Baron to immerse themselves in?"
@LN
Readers sometimes chide me for flinging "pejoratives" at Progressives and Socialists of various stripes, particularly when I use the word "insane." But I use "insane" as a professional diagnostic term in its precise clinical definition as the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Our ruling elites' conduct fits even the popular intutitive definition as "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting it to come out different." Ditto my use of "idiot," which is also a defined term in psychiatry.
Takuan Seiyo
When I was born 61 years ago, England was 99.9% white - if not more - the Windrush had docked and that was all. It was 100% Christian, still had some of its empire and the Dominions, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were peopled with our own kith and kin. England was homogenous, happy and peaceful and stable. Sanity ruled supreme and the wisdom of the old men was acknowledged. At some stage the 30 somethings were given power - from the 1970s on - and I assume was because those who wanted to destroy the white race and Christianity knew they would act in an immature and irresponsible fashion and warm to the new liberal multicultural agenda. Now Canada and Britain are multicultural hells and our own kith and kin are being squeezed out into a diaspora. Australia is going more slowly and New Zealand is resisting, too. The way I feel and many of us now, is as if we have been taken from a sane and ordered world where we lived peacefully with our own and our cousins across the Continent who lived in their own peaceful and stable homogeneous white Christian nations and have been locked up in Bedlam and they have thrown away the key. We are ruled now by absolute maniacs, immature psychopaths who lust for power alone even if Europe and North America and Australasia head the same way as South Africa is destined to go. Perhaps I am more hypersensitive than my English brothers and sisters, perhaps more deep thinking or perhaps they have somehow managed to blinker themselves to what they must no is going to be a total disaster for our country. A recent poll showed that 22% of English people are in a state of deep anxiety, I wonder why? Most of us now feel desperately insecure for we know the storm clouds are gathering and we don't know who is going to turn on whom. There is a black farmer here, the only one and he is held up as an example of multiculturalism at work. What I don't understand is why he doesn't head for Africa to help his fellow Africans do the same; but it always seems to be Europeans who help there. Anyhow, I read that he had said that he looks forward to the days when his brethren spread out as he has from the inner cities and take the country. But we are too busy enjoying the Olympics to worry about that.
Organized Christianity today is indeed a farce. On the left, the once-mighty mainstream Protestant denominations have been reduced to a dwindling collection of Marxists, homophiles, abortion mongers and diversity cultists. What was immoral has become moral, and vice versa.
On the right, the heresy of Christian Zionism has converted legions of white Americans to a slavish worldview where their first loyalty should be to a non-Christian religion, a non-European ethnic group, and a non-Western nation. Why don't they just convert and make aliyah already?
And virtually all Christian denominations, particulary the Catholics, are now raging open borders fanatics. These modern-day "Christians" would no doubt pithily sum up the teachings of Jesus as "We're all immigrants", or maybe "No one is illegal".
From the time of the Emperor Constantine to some point in the late 20th Century, Christianity served the West pretty well. Theologically, I have no explanation for what went wrong and no solution for how we can right it. All I know is that any proposed cure (atheism, secular humanism, neo-paganism) seems worse than the disease (debauched modern Christianity).
I'm coming to believe that the rise of China may be the West's last hope of redemption. When (not if) China passes the US to become the world's most powerful country, we will have a shining example of a nation that succeeded by plotting a course that's the exact opposite of that taken by the modern West.
China's not a liberal society, in fact it's illiberal. It's definitely not a nation of immigrants. They celebrate unity, not diversity. They have no desire to spread their ideology around the world. They're nationalists, not globalists. They value order over unfettered freedom. The rights of the majority come before those of minorities. They're not ashamed of their history and traditions. They are ethnocentric and proud of it.
In other words, they're the anti-West. Maybe America and Europe will reassess the post-1960s suicidal path they've taken after China leaves them both in the dust. Maybe America can return to being a normal nation again instead of the self-righteous, messianic liberal hyperpower it's become. Maybe we can learn from the Chinese and change course before it's too late.
That's why I'm cheering for China in these Olympic(tm) Games. The sooner the West is humbled before our new Asiatic overlords, even in something as trivial as a sporting event, the sooner we might collectively realize that we've screwed up big time, and we need to humble ourselves and start copying the successful way the Chinese order their society. Which is not that different from how we used to order our own societies.
Oh, come on...
Nature is about survival. A natural right to property cannot be inferred directly from the Gospels[4]. It can only be inferred by deducing principles from Nature’s ways and ends, and seeing Biblical God’s intent in them.
Try this:
Exo 20:15 Thou shalt not steale.
Exo 20:17 Thou shalt not couet thy neighbours house, thou shalt not couet thy neighbours wife, nor his man seruant, nor his maid seruant, nor his oxe, nor his asse, nor any thing that is thy neighbours.
Verse 17 fully condemns the socialist state which is founded on covetousness....
I simply had to stop reading at this point.
@njartist
Knowledge of the Bible does not make up for lack of knowledge of history. Try to adduce the Bible as a source prohibiting the State -- i.e the King, the Temple or later the duke and the bishop from claiming a part of your property for themeselves. It's in the spirit of rejecting economic serfdom to the State that the Founders understood this issue, and it's in this spirit that I wrote it. The Biblical injunctions about stealing and coveting have to do with moral temperance in reltionhip to others, and not with the sanctity of property per se. Great though they are, those injunctions never sufficed to give the individual sovereignty over the fruits of his labor. Bible notwithstanding, there came a time when the Christian State in the person of the local seigneur even claimed your bride for itself, before you could, and the Catholic Church took 10% of what you made with your own labor on the plot you tilled, plus demanded that you work for free on its lands. In that it was quite like the Judean economy that Jesus would have reformed, had they not killed him. It took the British thinkers of the Age of Reason, and then the Founding Fathers, to build more robusts defenses of property and personal sovereignty.
Takuan Seiyo
@jeppo
In the next chapter I will be trying to answer where we screwed up, religion-wise, whereas China didn't -- again, religion-wise. I have dedicated a better portion of the last five years of my life to the proposition that we have failed to learn important lessons from the East -- lessons that have to be chosen judiciously, just as they have chosen from us just what they need to beat us with, rather than what will corrode them like it has us. On the other hand, God help us if we were ever to be ruled by China or be like China. Much nastiness there too -- just follow the ongoing fall of the Commie boss of Chonking, Bo Xilai and his wife.
Takuan Seiyo
Mr. Seiyo
You are confusing the Babylonian religious system of Rome with the biblical Christian: Babylonian Rome founded its laws upon the so-called Natural Law which is Greek in origin - going back to Aristotle; Rome infamously altered the received biblical text; it has also changed the Law, declared itself to be in the place of God on earth, and declared the edicts of the priest superior to the word of God; the triple crown declares that Rome considers itself to rule in heaven, on the earth, and in Hell: Protestant founders rightly identified Rome and the papacy as the anti-Christ.
God does not hold the king or state to be higher than the moral law.
The synchroncity of our Founding Fathers having all been in one place at one time is surely one of the most amazing moments in human history.
I'm sorry they changed the wording -was it Morris?- of Life, liberty, and property to the more Hallmark greetingish "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
I'm also sorry they didn't address the issue of slavery early on, though I realize they were desperate to form a union that could survive against the british.
Still...
@jeppo--
You're conflating the church leaders with those who attend individual churches, missions, etc. It's like saying I'm the same as my Senator or Congressional rep.
The average person in the pew lets the leaders spew while they get on with being a small faith community. The disconnect between the Catholic bishops and the average Catholic, for instance, is almost infinite. Same goes for our wonderful Presiding Bishop in ECUSA - who is a Mommar Ghaddafi look-alike but in a bespoke suit. She's a charmer.
Please, don't conflate us. The ones who care desperately about finding racists under the bed or stuffing as many Somali immigrants in small towns while they can have nothing to do with us.
It's kind of like living in America. Where ya gonna go?
This is for Jeppo and TS...
Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia
By Spengler
EscapeVelocity
@Dymphna
'I'm sorry they changed the wording -was it Morris?- of Life, liberty, and property to the more Hallmark greetingish "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".'
Back then "happiness" was a synonym for "blessedness"; this means the committee removed Jefferson's materialist direction.
@Anonynmous
Re: Spengler on Asian Christianity
I don't need to read Spengler to know how Christianity stands in Asia. Besides, I have taken issue with Spengler on music and on Asia -- and he knows far more about the former than the latter.
Christianity is on the ascendant on the Far East -- so what? The first thing to consider is that it's not the Christianity of Euro-origin peoples. Go to Korea and hang out in some churches there for a taste of the Confucian. In China it's a form of political dissent and I suspect Confucian in its manifestation too. In Japan, it's a fashion; a crucifix goes really nice with a designer cleavage or, in chunky alloy, with a fake grunge-gothic look. I personally know hapless American schlubs who missed the haydays of employability as English teachers so they now officiate in Christian wedding ceremonies in downsized replicas of the Notre Dame Cathedral (including one plated in fake gold). Our churches should focus on saving the West, not on gallivanting all over the world in search of new, strange converts.
Takuan Seiyo
nj artist--
Communities and cultures without private property laws do not prosper.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
My seven year-old son was delighted to read that: it meant he was going to have some land of his own. We all need a space/place of our own; it is a mystic bond
Interested to read the comments about China. You could have added that whilst the Marxists, as they had aimed, have managed to empty all the churches in Europe, in China Christianity is forging ahead. I thought that re-conversion was going to come from Russia as per the Zagorsk Prophecy but we will see. What is clear is that China is racialist and supremacist. China believes what we used to believe before the Marxists clubbed us for being so "racist" namely that the races thrive better if kept apart, that it is the natural way and that the opposite is unnatural social engineering. And China is supremacist, the Chinese, like the Japanese, believe they are superior to other races. This brings me to the gentleman who killed the Sikhs in the USA, probably believing them to be muslims - must have read Nostradamus!! He is described as a white supremacist, that term that the Marxist BBC just love to throw at anybody who is opposed to multiculturalism. It no longer means somebody who believes that the white race is superior to other races in their book, it now means a racialist, a white person who believes that it is natural for the races to live apart in their own countries as they developed to do. Why are there no brown supremacists, black supremacists and yellow supremacists as every other race thinks it has a right to live in a state of apartheid? The reason is that the charge white supremacist is no more than anti-white racism and only whites can be racist. It is designed to bring us to our knees. We have another case of racial abuse here, somebody shouted rude things at a Chinese family, well that makes a change. Does the term racial abuse exist in China? By the way my father who died nearly 40 years ago so has missed the worst of British multiculturalism said that China would be the salvation of the world. Still find that hard to believe in view of their cruelty and what they are doing in Tibet but perhaps he meant their 4,000 years of acquired wisdom which leads them to realise that only by being strong, unified and homogenous and strict do you survive. Well, they must look at the west, remember that we were once like that and know that they are right.
@Dymphna
As a European-American I've always looked for the great things in the new country while trying to spread around the great things of the old country. Among the former I count authentic blues and bluegrass music. There is one song of the Alison Krauss/Dan Tyminsky band that touches on all the themes I've written about in this essay, and I was going to weave it in somehow, but perhaps I can't because I have too much material. But I'll put it in here because your comment about land kind of broke the dam. So here it is:
Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CjbO9pL-2UY
Lyrics:
Bright Sunny South
"From the bright sunny south to the war, I was sent,
E'er the days of my boyhood, I scarcely had spent.
From it's cool shady forests and deep flowing streams,
Ever fond in my mem'ry and sweet in my dreams.
Oh, my dear little sister, I still see her tears.
When I had to leave home in our tender years.
And my sweet gentle mother, so dear to my heart,
It grieved me sincerely when we had to part.
Said my kind-hearted father as he took my hand:
"As you go in defense of our dear native land,
"Son, be brave but show mercy whenever you can.
"Our hearts will be with you, 'til you 'turn again."
In my bag there's a Bible to show me the way,
Through my trials here on earth and to Heaven some day.
I will shoulder my musket and brandish my sword,
In defense of this land and the word of the Lord."
Takuan Seiyo
Takuan Seiyo
I happened to find your below explanation on the net. And I am very happy to learn this, as I had already been thinking that you should be read also on paper.
"As to my style, it is florid and even my friends call it purple. Indeed I am more of a novelist than a feuilletonist, and when I can, I prefer to publish in print rather than on the Internet."
I am sure other readers here at GOV also would be interested to know.
Verse 17 fully condemns the socialist state which is founded on covetousness....
"Exo 20:15 Thou shalt not steale.
Exo 20:17 Thou shalt not couet thy neighbours house, thou shalt not couet thy neighbours wife, nor his man seruant, nor his maid seruant, nor his oxe, nor his asse, nor any thing that is thy neighbours.
Verse 17 fully condemns the socialist state which is founded on covetousness....
I simply had to stop reading at this point.
8/07/2012 7:14 PM"
LOL:) Love the humour in the expression
....what to do with the socialist state?
The following can never be pointed out too often
Takuan Seiyo:
" Ultimately, you see, there is no point in arguing about which pattern looks nicest on the upholstery of the deck chairs on this here Titanic. What’s necessary is to put shoulder to the rope pulley to get the ship off the jagged rocks. Such an endeavor is considered to have larger odds of success, as per the Japanese weltanschauung, if one spends less time criticizing others and more time criticizing oneself, quietly, and then applying that self-reflection as a lever for self-improvement.
My regards,
TakS"
Source
In admiration of the language of the message
@Anon
On quoting TS:
Thanks for liking the quoted passage. I can't tell you how many times I have been pilloried as "unpatriotic," "yellow dog," "slanted-eye dog," "Jew," "go back to where you came from" (presumably Japan) etc.
And that's because I prefer to focus on the disease, rather than on the symptoms of the disease. In my book, Bush stands worse than Obama, because he is one of us and the other one isn't.
The disease is in us; the Islamic invasion and population replacement in general, the tide of ibecility and depravity, the institutionalized thieving etc. -- the remedies are not in raining obloquy on the agents of these diseases, but in finding where we have weakened our own immune system and administering--to ourselevs-- the necessary and sometimes painful antidotes.
Takuan Seiyo
I do not think racially homogenous states are the only viable political alternative to where we are today. The romans had a knack for making romans out of their subjects. By the time of the Punic Wars, the various tribes of Italy already saw themselves as Roman. Caesar Augustus made roman citizenship available to those who signed up for the army as auxiliaries after their service was completed. Granted, Rome never completely homogenized its empire, nor did it come close. But it nevertheless DID homogenize it to an extent. Most importantly, it gave its subjects incentives to participate in the empire as citizens. (Brutal punishments for misbehavior no doubt also helped keep things in check.)
My point is this: If the right civic model is found for a multiethnic state, it CAN work. The operative word is obviously "right". Secular progressivism has infected our body politic along with practically everything else. But if one does not see other races as necessarily intellectually inferior (a barrier to integration if it is commonly accepted), and if one is not so suicidally stupid enough to allow immigration from nations with cultures diametrically opposed to one's own, there is no reason to categorically preclude a multiethnic state. Besides, states based on race and homogeneity can very easily fall victim to fascist tendencies.
Christianity must play a crucial role in any viable modern multiethnic state. It has already played a huge role in keeping various groups from butchering each other here in the americas. The Christian example of Nelson Mandela (and perhaps Martin Luther King) has kept South Africa from dissolving quicker than it has (or will).
Too bad that contemporary Christianity reeks of secular progressivism, as Seiyo rightly notes. Its Disneyesque morality renders it morally superficial and weak. But the only way the West can be saved, is if Christianity is revitalized and secular progressivism is banished from all quarters of our culture.
-el gato loco
It's the Evangelical Christian Conservative Right that is gaining traction all around the world.
That is what is growing in Korea and China.
And most certainly those people bring Confuscian ideas with them to the table. Peoples infuse their culture into the practice of Christianity, everywhere it has ever gone. The pagans of Europe brought us the Christmas tree and the celebration of Christ's birth at Winter Solstice Rebirth Festival Time, for example.
@el gato
Almost all Western states have been multi-racial and multiethnic for centuries. But it makes a great deal of difference whether racial minorities (incl. Muslims) are 3% or 30%. And we are now at 30%+ in some formerly nearly-White nations, and will be in a few years at 30%+ in the European lands that are not presently so. Combined with the low birth rate of Whites, we will soon be the minority in our own countries. I think you are much too optimistic in believing that a successful formula can be found for a peaceful, productive life in such a situation within the state system we know today. There is hope only in radically different departures from what we know now, e.g. in what Hans Hoppe, whom I'll cover in the next chapter, calls "a thousand Singapores."
Takuan Seiyo
Niall Ferguson talks about Christianity and its relation to the success of the West in this documentary that compliments his book...
Civilization: The West and the Rest
Listen to the Chinese themselves...
Christianity the reason for West's success, say the Chinese
In the West we are doing our best to destroy our Christian heritage but in China, Chinese intellectuals are coming around to the view that it is precisely this heritage that has made the West so successful.
Former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Dominic Lawson, in a review in the Sunday Times of Niall Ferguson's new book, ‘Civilisation: The West and the Rest’, carries a quote from a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in which he tries to account for the success of the West, to date.
He said: “One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world.
“We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had.
“Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system.
“But in the past twenty years, we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful.
“The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”
Note the source. It isn't from a religious leader, or some religious think-tank. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is an instrument of the Chinese Communist government which spends a not inconsiderable amount of time and money persecuting Christians and is officially atheistic.
If this is the conclusion it has come to, maybe Europe needs to reconsider whether it mightn't be an idea to encourage rather than eradicate Christianity.
Incidentally, just to drive home the point, Lawson also refers to this data point in Ferguson's book: Wenzhou, the Chinese city which is rated as the most entrepreneurial in the country, is also home to 1,400 churches.
Lawson refers to a quote in the book from a prominent Wenzhou business leader, a Mr Hanping Zhang, who argues that “an absence of trust had been one of the main factors holding China back; but he feels he can trust his fellow Christians because he knows that they will be honest in their dealings with him”.
It has long been accepted that Christianity is one of the core elements of Western civilisation; it is too little understood that it is also one of the secrets of the stunning success of that civilisation.
EV
I heartily agree that systemic lying about reality is the ultimate blasphemy.
But what can our author have been thinking, when he sneered at global warming by putting it in quotes?
Part of reality, indisputably, is physics. We know enough about physics to know that putting a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere will make it warmer than it would otherwise be. We know enough to know roughly how much warmer.
We know enough about crop yields to know that the consequences will be more costly than the price of moving to an economy powered mostly by wind, solar, and nuclear inputs.
And this summer and the last few ought to have been enough to convince anyone that these costs are not purely theoretical. As our forests burn and our crops wither, what excuse remains for systemic lying about the reality of human-caused global warming?
Covetousness
"Verse 17 fully condemns the socialist state which is founded on covetousness...."
Carpenter built his own house in Norway during leisure time. Must now pay tax on his competence being used after hours.
@Tekuan.
You are right that proportions at specific times make huge differences. Right now the US is being swamped with hispanic immigrants legal and illegal. As a hispanic myself, I can recognize the danger of too many, too fast. Latin America, after all, has been plagued by incoherent nationalities. Hatreds are held in check by Christianity, but not yet smoothed over enough to constitute viable "nations" in the romantic 19th C sense of the term. Not to mention that the christian ideology of the ancien regime in Latin America, the only ideology capable of holding the groups together, has been systematically attacked and denigraded by the very elites which supposedly once held it sacred. This isn't to say it wasn't horrifically abused. It was. But much like the modern day advanced West, instead of reforming the old views, they simply attempted to destroy them, ala Enlightenment.
Personally, I think the humble friar telling indian souls on the other side of the world the Word of God, is the very DNA of Latin America. As imperfect as it was, it was the very essence of the place. Think Ennio Morricone's music to the movie "The Mission". If there is any music that reflects all that is noble in Spanish/Portuguese America, it is Gabriel's Oboe, and all it poetically conveys. There was/is something greater than "empire" at work there.
But like I said, something similar has happened here in the States. The ugly side of the Enlightenment has hijacked what is good here. The French Revolution has coopted our own. A damned shame, because this side of the America's developed marveolous if imperfect virtues all its own. Enough to hold the entire world in awe in certain incredibly specific virtuous ways.
You are right that huge disproportions are a serious problem for our modern-day situation. But rather than embrace racially homogenous states which are neither viable for us nor desirable (after the horrors of the nazis), I say let us strive to embrace all the best that is spiritual, and all the best that is viably civic for our own pluralist (forgive the term) situation.
And if one day we are forced to choose between civic survival and spiritual meaning, I say we should die with our souls intact, and cry "TRUTH!" with every fiber of our being.
Man does not live on bread alone.
@Tekuan.
You are right that proportions at specific times make huge differences. Right now the US is being swamped with hispanic immigrants legal and illegal. As a hispanic myself, I can recognize the danger of too many, too fast. Latin America, after all, has been plagued by incoherent nationalities. Hatreds are held in check by Christianity, but not yet smoothed over enough to constitute viable "nations" in the romantic 19th C sense of the term. Not to mention that the christian ideology of the ancien regime in Latin America, the only ideology capable of holding the groups together, has been systematically attacked and denigraded by the very elites which supposedly once held it sacred. This isn't to say it wasn't horrifically abused. It was. But much like the modern day advanced West, instead of reforming the old views, they simply attempted to destroy them, ala Enlightenment.
Personally, I think the humble friar telling indian souls on the other side of the world the Word of God, is the very DNA of Latin America. As imperfect as it was, it was the very essence of the place. Think Ennio Morricone's music to the movie "The Mission". If there is any music that reflects all that is noble in Spanish/Portuguese America, it is Gabriel's Oboe, and all it poetically conveys. There was/is something greater than "empire" at work there.
But like I said, something similar has happened here in the States. The ugly side of the Enlightenment has hijacked what is good here. The French Revolution has coopted our own. A damned shame, because this side of the America's developed marveolous if imperfect virtues all its own. Enough to hold the entire world in awe in certain incredibly specific virtuous ways.
You are right that huge disproportions are a serious problem for our modern-day situation. But rather than embrace racially homogenous states which are neither viable for us nor desirable (after the horrors of the nazis), I say let us strive to embrace all the best that is spiritual, and all the best that is viably civic for our own pluralist (forgive the term) situation.
And if one day we are forced to choose between civic survival and spiritual meaning, I say we should die with our souls intact, and cry "TRUTH!" with every fiber of our being.
Man does not live on bread alone.
@Global warming anonymous,
I don't sneer at global warming. I sneer at lying scientists who fudged data in a fraudulent attempt to prove that this is an anthropogenic global warming, and that it is some unique apocalyptic development whereas data shows that there have been similar such warmings in the relatively recent, i.e. human civilization, past.
On the other hand, my opinion, which will be developed further in the next chapter, is that true conservatives and true Christians ought to get a lot closer to the idea that Earth is a living organism that must be respected, even revered, rather than thoughtlessly befouled. This is just one issue that ought to be totally wrested from one-worldnick Marxists and dealt with as a spiritual matter, first of all.
Takuan Seiyo
@EV
I agree with the Chinese quote you adduce, and the premise behind it. Note, however, that there are two related phenomena that somehow change the equation. First, what you mean by "Christianity" and what a Chinese mandarin does is not the same thing. He sees the Church as a useful institution if it can be subsumed under the total control of the Chinese State. Second, you touch on a sore point with me that I have been writing about for years. Christianity is by no means the only Western institution that the Chinese have studied and adopted for their own purposes, while we have foolishly discarded same. Capitalism, famously, is one. The study and performance of Western Classical music is another. Education in the sciences, and not in Chicano lesbian poetry of protest, is the third one--and there are more. The point is, they have done their homework on us and benefited from it. Have we done our homework on them, and learned from it?
Christianity, however, is not for teaching the Chinese or other Northeast Asians about entrepreneurship. Commerce has been in their blood for much longer than it has been in the Europeans'. It's not in vain that the Chinese are counted, along with Jews, Armenians, Lebanese, ancient Phoenicians etc. as a "Mercurian" people.
Takuan Seiyo
Christianity isnt to blame for the move to study Chicano Lesbian Protest Poetry. Rather the abandonment of Christianity, is to blame.
Whether Chinese Communists are excited about the idea of controlling a centralized Church or not is neither here nor there. Firstly the benefits of Christianity are multifaceted...not just in morality which shores up social trust and thus underpins democracy and capitalism, but its metaphysics do likewise, and its theology prepare(d) the ground for the ground of the pursuit of science, exploration, and furthermore persuading people to your point of view via evangelism.
Christianity doesnt teach the Chinese about entrepaneurship....it lays fertile ground for it to flower (and cooperative production) in all its glory. Youve seemed to missunderstood.
However I certainly can agree with you on many of your points.
EV
Ill also note that the Catholic Church is under the auspices of the Chicom Party and is going nowhere.
What is loose in China is uncontrollable, House Churches and Evangelical sects like Pentacostals (Sarah Palin is a Pentacostal), which are very decentralized affairs...and Christian Right organizations. Not the stodgy ole CINO churches....Christian in Name Only (dont really believe this crap or follow the Bible) like the Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican. Well the Anglican church still has quarters around the world where this isnt so.
I think that Christianity spreading like wildfire amongst the Chinese is a very good thing.
EV
I am a bit bewildered by the assertion that racially homogeneous white countries become fascist countries. The German attempt to impose Nazism on Norway, until recently almost one hundred percent homogeneous, was a complete flop. The Danes smuggled their Jews over to Sweden. Nazism in England would have been a complete flop as well. Only since England and other white homogeneous countries have had multiracialism/multiculturalism imposed on them by the political and financial elites have they begun to learn what fascism is i.e. the anti-fascist fascism which makes us afraid to open our mouths in our own country, which we always believed was our own for all time. However, if the writer believed that homogeneous countries are fascist countries then presumably we may now talk of fascist India - and refuse to trade with her - fascist China - and refuse to trade with her, fascist black Africa and refuse to trade with her. Why these double standards which prevent white people living with their own as they did for thousands of years as others are allowed to continue to do? Nazism, as we know, was just another form of totalitarian socialism and anti-semitism there and in Austria more the product of a rather simplistic and paranoic streak in the German psyche, leading to an over-controlling nature. Islam is just another egalitarian totalitarian form of the same thing. Presumably, the writer disagreed with Ingrid Carlquist when she spoke of the peaceful and happy homogeneous Sweden of Mr Erlander's day? Here in Europe we are apprehensive of the changing demographics in our own countries and that needs must not only include muslims but we also watch with increasing concern the changing demographics in the United States and Canada. Here's the exam question for you. "Will Europe continue to be European when Europeans are in a minority there?", discuss. Even Lady Warsi, a British Pakistani chairman of the Conservative Party, admitted that if she went to China she could not be Chinese. Neither could I be a Pakistani if I went to Pakistan. Identity, I am afraid, is everything as the Marxists will soon discover to their cost.
Inheriting the Earth
"My seven year-old son was delighted to read that: it meant he was going to have some land of his own. We all need a space/place of our own; it is a mystic bond"
Fundamental.
OT
Please, Dymphna & Baron, wouldn't it be a good idea to discreetly encourage the commenters to use some more space within blocks of text for better readability?
Personally, I tend to automatically skip heavy blocks of text. Sometimes I go back and take the effort to read them. Of course, this has nothing to do with the contents of the blocks, only the accessibility.
Wadda ya think?
Takuan Seiyo
"I have dedicated a better portion of the last five years of my life to the proposition that we have failed to learn important lessons from the East - "
A reminder that the world looks a whole lot different from the East.
The more I learn from you, the more impressed I get.
In particular, I like the fact that, with your background, you have so many angles to view things from to better see.
I already expressed before on this post, how much admiration I have for your language, and I take this opportunity to point out in general how important it is to value language as a tool in as precise a communication as possible. You are the best example of it.
It is obvious that knowledge from different language families, like you have, contribute largely to developing a varied language as a tool to sharpen your thoughts to better think, and thus better express ideas.
Your example could stand as inspiration to how we all should strive to develop and hone this tool.
@Anon complementer
Thank you. Languages are important, but in my case there are other factors, none of which I can take credit for. It's multiculturalism-- the real, painfully earned kind rather than the fake ignorant progressive idiocy. It just what went into the hand of cards I was dealt at birth, and a rather harsh subsequent life story that made it impossible for me to have the kind of secure, conventional life rooted in one place that is the happy lot of most people. With that came the varied experience and understanding that pampered grandees like NY Times' Tom Friedman or France's BH Levy cannot possibly have though they jet set all over the world and write clueless, best-selling books about it.
Takuan Seiyo
"same globalist-redistributionist agenda as pushed by the Club of Crooks, Loons and Looters that alone feasts at the trough of every Western nation, with differences only in the ratio of Crooks to Loons, and the ethnicity of the Looters."
Excellent.
To be honest, what struck me from this essay is that we are facing the same issues in Europe. As you said, the difference might be the names of the groups and so forth.
But it is like a disease that gains strength the more it is accepted (and fed into our brains). Minorities are here also put on pedestials, hailed and given extra support and authority. Whilst we do not have our own ´Obama´, I am sure it is just a matter of time.
My question to you would be of the future, political alternatives. You seem to criticise a whole series of political aspects of US politics and foreign policy - But which one is the road forward?
Where do you head to stop the Marxism of US universities or the Neo-Con foreign policies? How long will it take until you no longer cannot criticise Islam within America, for example, due to political correctness or bad guilt of Neocon Policy? Is White Nationalism a viable alternative or does it echo of KKK racism etc?
I hope that Americans can stand up for themselves to protect the Freedom the US is supposed to stand for - Hopefully, it will be more successful than some nations in Europe (which you already have noted have 30% Muslims in some areas).
I was fascinated to read the comment from the person whose seven-year-old son longed for a country for him and his people. I am not sure if he was English or not. England is being rapidly deconstructed and England and the English deemed to be not worth saving.
I was greatly saddened, too, to read the comment as when I was seven in the late 1950s, just a couple of generations ago, the English did have a country of their own, a country that was over a thousand years old. It was wonderful, we were English and proud and knew our English history as it was taught in primary school, we sang English folk songs. We never dreamed that within 50 years or so England would be fighting for survival. We were all of one blood and wished one another well. We shared the same sense of humour and we were strong and united having just had the biggest empire the world had ever seen. About that time an American lady wrote a book about Oxford called "If these stones could speak" and she marvelled at how the English had remained unchanged for so long.
But now we have to share our country with people from all over the world who do not feel tied to this country through a love of soil and common blood. We are slowly fading away and our identity and the country's identity with us. It is like being raped and pillaged, like having your house burgled and occupied whilst you are hiding cowering in the attic. For my sake and that boy's sake I hope that we both have our country back again.
I hope that the multicultural olympics, at the end of which Mo Farah gets more adulation than all the hundreds of indigenous olympians - Lord Coe has described him as our greatest ever olympian following the politically correct party line but insulting the many other native olympians - will be as far as the tsunami of immigration gets.
It will have left a trail of destruction in its wake but we hope that it will now recede and peace can return.
@PMP
The first step to salvation is to recognize that the whole system is based on egregious lies and to determine firmly to reject all of them in all their manifestations. This is the principle described eloquently by famous Eastern European dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn and Havel.
The second step -- but this my controversial opinion that many will reject -- is to open spiritually,reclamining a Christian identity (not Christian Identity, that's for morons)that's less sectarian and dogma-obsessed and more pan-European ecumenical and closer to Nature, which is what European spirituality was once based upon.
The third step is to regain a healthy racial consciousness as sons of Europe(again, staying clear of Nazizoids) whether living in Belgium or in Australia. This means, for instance, the end of France-bashing or Germany-loathing by Americans but rather a new feeling of solidarity and mututal affection between freedom-loving Americans and freedom-loving French and Germans (there are such). Not unlike it was in the 1770s.
Where all this will lead is, for multiple reasons, unsafe to predict. But I think that the above is a precondition to anything enduring that might arise from the ashes.
The subsequent chapters in this essay will elaborate on these points.
Takuan Seiyo
As regards suggestion number three Taukian, I was suddenly struck by a blinding realisation the other day, namely that the Marxist EU was meant to bring all Europeans together under the ring of stars.
Fantastically, what it has done is to bring all the Europeans who believe in the genius of their race, their love of freedom and democracy and their common Christian and Enlightenment culture together against the Marxist totalitarian multicultural superstate that the political elites have created.
My one sadness is that all the parties of the right in Holland, France, Scandinavia, Belgium and Britain, cannot join forces to form a European Freedom Party which would be the same across the whole continent.
I have put this suggestion to parties of the right here but they do not seem to want to know. Unfortunately, in England, we have about five parties of the right who do not want anything to do with one another whereas most other countreis only have one. Not much hope there then.
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