Or, Culture, Cowardice, and Skin color
Surfing The Guardian (the English newspaper, not the movie) I found this article, published October fourth (so thirteen days ago at time of writing). Link
A philosopher had entered his third week in hiding (at time of publication) due to death threats he received in consequence of writing a comment piece for Le Figaro on September 19. This comment referred to Muhammad, and what the philosopher said was this: that Muhammad was "a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass-murderer of Jews and a polygamist". He called the Qur'an "a book of incredible violence" and contrasted what he said were Christianity's peaceful roots and Islam's violent ones, adding: "Jesus is a master of love, Muhammad a master of hate." He said this year's ban on g-string bikinis at Paris's artificial beach, Paris Plages, was an example of the "Islamicisation" of minds in France. (my emphasis).
I'm English and therefore, automatically, I hate the French. Every real Englishman feels this way, just as a real Frenchman hates the English. It's always been that way and it always will be that way. But just as the French have a secret sneaking respect for the English, so the English grudgingly admire certain aspects of French culture and history. Especially its philosophers, from Montaigne to Voltaire to Foucault. Personally, I admire what the French Revolution set out to capture and express, opposition to hereditary rule, opposition to being subject instead of citizen. Its attempt to make liberty manifest. The fact that it failed doesn't make it any less admirable. I'm also an admirer of the French attitude to sex and sexuality (like all Catholics they are far less uptight about, and frightened by, sex than their Protestant counterparts) and their healthy attitude toward the body - far healthier than the attitudes found in either the UK or the USA.
So to discover that in France, home of philosophical radicalism and ideal liberty, that a philosopher is in hiding in fear for his life after having offended another bunch of raghead would-be murderers, and that free and healthy (or healthier than here and the UK) attitudes to sex and the body are in the first stages of being made subject to the stone-age thuggery of Islam, is doubly revolting and shocking.
The article in The Guardian reveals what seems to me to be becoming the standard set of responses in situations of this type - tepid support for the perpetrator of the 'offence' in the name of freedom of speech; condemnation of both the perpetrator and those threatening him with death (as if both were equally culpable, so that thinking and speaking are as criminal as voicing threats of murder); outright condemnation of the perpetrator without support for those threatening him; and condemnation of the perpetrator with support (either implied or expressed) for the Jihadis. But it seems to me that support in the name of freedom of speech is becoming tepid almost to the point of cold indifference, while criticism of those making controversial statements is becoming more widespread, more vocal - and more acceptable.
I regard myself as a Westerner, and as a child of the intellectual and philosophical traditions of the West going back to the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, reaching from them to Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, and on to Machiavelli, Dante, Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel (to name but a few). I am also, as every European is, a child of the consequences of the French Revolution and as an Englishman a child, too, of the consequences of the American Revolution.
What I see, in consequence, is that that tradition of radical thought and radical action is exhausted and completely insecure in relation to its history, and in relation to any idea of positive value that can be attached to that history. The culture that grew out of the North and South of Europe, then transplanted itself in North America, is what we refer to as the West - which means that the bearers of that culture are Caucasians. It was once said of Turkey, in terms of international politics, military and economic strength, that it was the 'sick man' of Europe. Well, the Caucasian is now the 'sick man' of the different varieties of human beings, and the most certain sign of this sickness is his new-found unwillingness to value his culture and its achievements in any way except negatively. The corruption of the French spirit, as evidenced by the burgeoning Islamicisation of the social/sexual mores of the French people, is another such sign.
Why is 'Colombus Day' no longer valued or made much of any more in America? In the history of European involvement in North America (the landmass) there could have been no United States of America without the contribution of Colombus and other Europeans like him. Not only did Colombus 'find' the New World for Europe, but his success communicated a vision of limitless spaces, limitless possibilities, limitless wealth and limitless room for ambition - all perspectives which form definite parts of the American character to this day. Colombus is at least as important in the history of America as any other Founding Father.
But he receives virtually no recognition for his contribution. The history of the Caucasian in the New World is now portrayed purely as a history of conquest, rapine, and near-genocide - a history of violent evil in the face of a naturally moral goodness. To be White, now, is to be guilty. To be anything other than White is to be virtuous.
There are signs of surrender everywhere - from Affirmative Action to artistic events cancelled for fear of the consequences of offending the Muslim mob - everywhere you look there is talk of affirming the culture of indigenous peoples as a way to atone for the sins of the White man's past. What sins? The sin of creating the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen? The sin of creating wealth beyond the dreams of avarice - and finding a way to distrbute that wealth which, if not always absolutely equitable, is still far more so than the hereditary possession of land and materiel and its transmission solely from male to male that characterised the world before the advent of Capitalism.
Or are we to atone for the sin of creating systems of government which, as in India, give a voice to hundreds of millions who would otherwise be voiceless? Or for the sin of creating the individual, endowing him with rights and obligations, and setting him free to pursue his own vision of happiness in his own way?
Oh but there's the bloodshed, and the slaughter, and the horrible cruelty and injustice of it all. All of our achievements were bought and paid for with blood and death and self-sacrifice. But to suggest that it could have been done in any other way is nonsense. Contrary to the romantic ideas of Rousseau, human beings are not naturally good. They are, I believe, far more like those who take part in Hobbes's 'war of all against all'. We are naturally vain-glorious, more interested in our own well-being than in that of others, prone to tribalism and the demonisation of anyone or anything that is not part of the tribe and, left to our own devices and without the fear of a greater power than our own, more likely to kill and rob someone found helpless by the roadside than we are to act the part of the Good Samaritan. And this greater power is not God. It's sovereign, legitimate Authority and its Law.
The very idea of such sovereign Authority is a Western creation; authority not dependent on the charisma of individuals, or upon hereditary possession, or the sanction of a holy man, but existing in its own right, embodied in the whole of the people, and expressed through the occupancy of an Office, an Office which itself exists only as an expression of the will of the people, to be changed or abolished as they see fit.
On every hand there are signs of surrender. Not to superior military strength, not to a superior philosophy of life or a better way of living, but to the forces of guilt, self-contempt, and self-loathing.
As anyone who has read my postings on JU should be able to see, I am not a respecter of the niceties of political correctness, nor a believer in the shibboleths of current American and British politics. I don't care how many indigenous peoples the White Man killed along the way to being top dog, and never have. If blood, pillage, slaughter and rapine were the price to be paid in order to achieve the culture of the West then it was a small price, and one worth paying. Instead of sitting round bitching about how awful we are, and how nice the natives, and the ragheads, and the dotheads, and all the other mongrels are, we ought to be getting ready for another season of large-scale killing in order to remind everyone of who really has the biggest bite - and the willingness to use it.
The First and Second World Wars of the 20th century changed the world fundamentally. More change, and far more radical change, occurred in that century than in all the centuries preceding it. Empires and Emperors have been swept away - with the exceptions of China and the former USSR, and the addle-headed Potentates that rule the ragheads. Today, Putin looks and behaves far more like Peter the Great than he looks and behaves like the holder of the First Office in a democratic state. China remains what it has been since the days of Mao Tse Tung: an oligarchy of authoritarian gerontocrats; and the Potentates of the Muslims remain what they were in the time of Mohammad, tribal autocrats. But in all other respects Empire and Emperors have been swept away.
Communication, and with it knowledge of other places and people, has been changed beyond all recognition, so that now all of us struggle to keep afloat in a storm-wracked sea of Otherness where everything we thought we knew is nothing more than the flotsam and jetsam of our assumptions, tossed madly about by the waves.
At such a time it becomes necessary to make a fundamental restatement of belief in ourselves. Not in some particular set of beliefs (since all beliefs are generated relative to their time and largely have no value beyond that time) but in the value of beliefs we hold simply because we hold them. Dead raghead murderers, it's believed by their fellows, go directly to Paradise, to the open arms and wide-spread thighs of any number of perpetual virgins. Perpetual fornication as the reward of murder - a lofty vision of the essential nature of man, woman, and God, if ever there was one. But the Muslims tolerate no doubt of the worthiness of their religion, are convinced of its value, and are therefore completely immune to the prevarication and refusal to decide in favor of something as good in itself and worthy of defence, that characterizes the 'liberalism of the American 'left', just as much as it characterizes the confusion and inability to act of the American majority.
I believe that the majority of American Whites still know what to believe in - America, and the people who founded and built her, and the values of those people - work, integrity, faith. But they no longer believe they ought to. Americans want to be liked, to be respected, and they want to be liked and respected because they do the right thing - or at least try their damnedest to do the right thing. That untainted self-belief is, to White American Protestants, what the Garden of Eden is to a good Catholic - a state of original innocence. The last half of the twentieth century saw America's realization that she had feet of clay.
It saw the vandalism worked against American society by Kennedy and his clod-hopping accomplice Johnson, it saw Korea and Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate, Clinton and Monica - the most powerful man in the world and he couldn't find a bitch that would swallow? Clinton, The Pimp Who Did Not Know How - that's what scandalized me, not that he was fucking a slut in the White House. Who wants someone so sexually unsophisticated as leader and representative of his people?
It would have been easier just to say 'America's fall from grace'. But to do that would be to give the sentiment of confused disappointment - which is all that this surrender to guilt and self-castigation actually is - far too much importance. Although it's now very litte mentioned, it's the Caucasian peoples that built the West and I don't believe the ruthlessness it took to do it has departed from the Caucasian character. Nowadays, it's considered racist (oh my... the 'R' word. Aren't I just rotten to the core?) to suggest that different peoples have characters as a whole, because we're all the same. We are not all the same. The French are not the same as the English, the English are not the same as the French - and no one at all is the same as the Welsh. Racist or not, I believe it to be true that there are racial differences which involve superiority and inferiority. I consider the creation of the individual, an entity that bears both conscience and rights, and is able to fulfill the obligations that come with those rights, to be a superior cultural achievement than that of the concept of an all-encompassing slavery to a god that pays murderers by allowing them to fornicate perpetually with heavenly sexbots.
Equally, I believe the societies that sprang from this cultural achievement are worth defending, militantly. I support the defence of the physical spaces they occupy - which is why I support the Minutemen. And I support the defence of the worlds of values that they occupy - though I wish those values had a more thoughtful, articulate and properly philosophical defender than the current incumbent of the White House - or any of his immediate rivals for Office.
The position is not yet one in which widespread physical violence is called for - not yet. I've come to believe that will change though, and that something that might be called the 'Caucasian backlash' is brewing for the short term future - sometime in the next ten or twenty years. The only violence presently needed is that of rhetoric - and I'm not talking about the crude simplicity of the Aryan Brotherhood and its ilk. The only violence necessary now is that inherent in contesting the image of the Caucasian as a simple thug. And the accusation to be resisted is that of simplicity and not that of thuggery. We were thugs and no doubt will be thugs again - but there was little simplicity in our violence, ask Machiavelli, or any of the Borgias.
Slaughter, pillage and rapine on an epic scale has marked the Caucasian peoples' road to being top dog of the planet. And the sooner we realise that that's how we are, and that it's good to be what we are (if it wasn't how would we have gained the good things we enjoy?), the better things will be and the more likely we are to summon up the resources to do what needs to be done to put down these upstart Muslims, their deranged Mullahs, and the Jihadi murderers who do their dirty work.