...I went searching for an old short story, one whose theme was powerfully expressed without ever having been articulated. I couldn’t find it in any of the many collections or anthologies I own, so I decided to search the Web, to see if someone as greatly affected by it as I might have posted it. And I found it.
Philip K. Dick was taken from us all too soon. May God clasp him to His bosom.
Gather round, my educator colleagues, and I shall tell you a tale of the Bad Old Days. Back then, before we all grasped the Truth and made it the center of the curriculum, the schools taught a subject called history. It purported to teach students about stuff that happened before the center of the universe shifted – that is, before they were born.
No, we don’t teach history today. In recent years it’s been replaced by a much more important regimen called global studies, which schools the young in what really matters: the inherent and inexpiable guilt of the white race and all its members; the refutation of Western religious traditions; parental “discipline” as the root cause of all crime; the superiority of African culture; the exemption of Muslims from the penal laws; the sanctity of polymorphous perversity; the inalienable rights to abortion, same-sex marriage, and government-subsidized sex changes; and why the other nations of the world hate the United States even though they hunger for our bucks and demand that we defend them from one another.
History was suppressed because it’s nothing but a collage of innumerable scraps of useless and misleading trivia that were called facts. These items, which were assembled in time sequence, gave students inadmissible notions about supposed causal relations that prevail among people and nations. Clearly, this is dangerous to the developing mind, which must not be contaminated by any notion that there exist actual laws of nature no legislature can repeal or modify. That would make the teacher’s job of inculcating the tenets of the progressive gospel in his students much too difficult. History simply had to go.
But hark! What’s this? The citation of a nasty, retrogressive fact? On a publicly accessible Website where anyone might stumble over it? Horrors!
Black slaveholding is a historical phenomenon which has not been fully explored by scholars.Graduate students of history are often sur¬prised to learn that some free blacks owned slaves. Even historians are fre¬quently skeptical until they discover the number of black masters and the number of slaves owned by them. To many readers, slavery was an institu¬tion exclusively utilized by white slaveowners. The fact that free blacks owned slaves has been lost in the annals of history.
Yet at one time or another, free black slaveowners resided in every Southern state which countenanced slavery and even in Northern states. In Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves, according to the federal census of 1830.
From this it becomes quite clear that young people’s innocence must be carefully guarded from this “history” business. Why, if exposed to such poison, they might actually ask questions! I had to deal with such questions when I was your age, and the experience was terrible indeed. Was “racism” really the cause of slavery? What was the condition of enslaved Americans before their importation to North America? Were they free in any sense, or were they effectively the rightless property of African tribal kings, who happily bartered their lives for liquor, firearms, and ammunition? Why was slavery prevalent in the agrarian South rather than the industrialized North? Could federal tariff policies, which affected the South disproportionately, have had anything to do with it?
No, this “history” rot had to be suppressed. We simply couldn’t have young people asking inconvenient questions – i.e., questions with inconvenient answers. They might start to wonder whether the legacy of slavery so frequently cited by the infallible spokesmen of African-Americans is an unadulterated crock of shit. The progressive project is much too important to allow it to be imperiled that way. Ponder that as you head to your government-approved, government-funded classrooms. Have a politically correct day.
Good morning, young progressives Americans! The schedule for the day has just arrived. Your first class today will be White Christian Patriarchal Capitalist Oppression, which begins in ten minutes. All rise for the Pledge. No, you don’t actually have to say it if you prefer to think of yourself as a “citizen of the world.” But none of that nasty, regressive praying, you hear me? It might interfere with your schooling!
[Applause to the indispensable Brock Townsend.]
They cry crocodile tears over stuff that has at best a tenuous relationship to Poland's creditworthiness. S&P is very concerned that "a law that moves the power to appoint the management and supervisory board of public broadcasters to the Treasury Ministry significantly weakens the independence of these institutions and has the potential to make them political instruments . . . ."[1]
Far from this being an action taken based on any legit concern for the quality of Polish debt, it's retaliation against "Poland's new Eurosceptic government [for comparing] the EU and Merkel to Nazis."[2]
An outrageous comparison!
S&P can next concern themselves with German debt in view of its
What bearing any of the three objections have on something to do with the creditworthiness of Poland is anybody's guess.
The real issue is stated aptly by Tyler Durden:
. . . S&P is now nothing more than a lackey for Brussels, threatening to send Polish yields higher if Poland does not fall in line.[3]Oppose the E.U. at your own risk.
Notes
[1] "S&P Enters The Latest European Scandal: Downgrades Poland From A- To BBB+." By Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge, 1/15/16.
[2] Id.
[3] Id.
We should not follow those who — with coldness and even hatred in their hearts — make judgments about what it means to be German, and seek to exclude others from this definition[.][1]
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Merkel has just removed Germans from a place of importance in Germany. They are non-people who, so as to avoid being cold or hateful, must contort themselves and their laws to provide for a massive influx of malevolent, parasitic, third-world foreigners.
All this stuff about caring for refugees is nonsense. Merkel intends for Germany as it has been historically to be destroyed. Sexual assault on German women – eminently predictable from the experience of Sweden as the rape capital of Europe – is a necessary part of the transformation and an inevitable part of life under a Muslim majority.
The experience of infidels in Muslim-majority countries is well known. Nothing in history suggests Germany's future experience with arrogant, hateful Muslims in their midst will be different.
Meanwhile, conflicts with Muslims and Africans are to be resolved in favor of them. They must feel no discomfort or hostility. Objection by true Germans to elite betrayal and the presence of millions of contemptible foreigners is to be silenced by vigorous criminal prosecution or informal sanction by AntiFa scum in league with the government and protected by the press. The experience of the woman on the right in the photo above will be ignored, covered up, and forgotten.
All that talk of Nazi this and neo-Nazi that is just psychological projection. Fascism has return to Germany but its target is no longer foreign countries but the autochthonous people of Germany.
Notes
[1] "Entering 2016 : The Wars To Come." By Morgoth Penguin, Morgoth's Review, 1/15/16.
When Mark Steyn throws his hands up:
I've spent the entirety of this no longer new century writing about this stuff. As I told Steve Paikin on a turbulent edition of his TV show all those years ago, the remorseless demographic transformation of the western world is the biggest story of our time, so why wouldn't a writer want to write about it? Apart from anything else, once you're aware of it, it haunts your dreams. But most of us still aren't aware of it. I've been fortunate enough to get a couple of bestselling books out of the subject, but that's no comfort if, by the time they're my age, my children are living in a post-western world. And, of course, you can have a "bestseller" and 99.999999999 per cent of the population need never know of it. Every day I get letters from people who come here via a link from someone or other beginning in effect: "What do you mean, 'the Islamization of Europe'? It's the first I've heard of it."Really? Why did the Charlie Hebdo guys get killed? Because they provoked Islam. Why is Europe's political class so willing to trade away free speech and women's rights? Because they're desperate to appease Islam. Why did the same young secular childless German women who supported Angela Merkel in her multiculti delusions spend the New Year getting groped and raped by the young men they so generously opened the doors of their country to? Because when you appease Islam you provoke Islam.
I'm pretty Islamed out, because I don't have a lot to say I didn't say ten years ago.
... you know the situation is grave. If you’re a minor-league commentator who’s been screaming at the top of his figurative lungs for just as long, you have to ask yourself whether there’s any point in going on.
However, the exploitation of Islam by Western governments still demands emphasis. Also, that which drives me is less under my conscious command than I’d like to believe. Accordingly, one more probably vain screed coming up.
Given the attitudes displayed by the members of our political class, it no longer seems rationally disputable that they regard Islam and the fearsome aspect it presents to us of the civilized world as a useful tool with which to ensure our continued submission. Every State is founded on the fears of its subjects. It follows that anything that accentuates those fears, that makes the individual look about for a protector, will be of value to the State.
Therefore, it is unwise to expect that our government will “do anything” about any of the various aspects of the Islamic threat:
Of course, there is a problem with the tactic: while fearful subjects are easily commanded and controlled, the generators of that fear – Muslims – aren’t fearful at all. Should they displace the native populations of Europe and America, our politicians might well wish they’d thought the matter through a wee bit further.
As with Steyn, I’ve been jabbering on about this for quite a few years. At the old Palace of Reason in 2004, I wrote:
All of Islam's theocosmogony to the side, its usefulness to the Left in wearing away our edifice of freedom is undeniable. For one thing, Islam's instantiations in other countries, both political and cultural, are fodder for the apostles of multiculturalism. For another, Islam propounds so complete a system of dominance that most men of good will are unwilling to compare it to any "lesser" agenda of regimentation; it makes our domestic Leftists look good. For a third, as matters stand, Western societies are unable to bar their doors to an influx of immigrants solely because of their "religion." For a fourth, our necessary response to Islam's violent attitude toward other creeds and social systems provides leftists with specious justifications for accusing the West's defenders of tyranny, even though it's the Left's own program of control that's the real thing. It's hardly necessary to go on from there.However, it remains the case that the Left cherishes some sorts of latitude, at least for itself, to which Islam is as rigidly opposed as it is to all others. Sexual freedom is one example; artistic license is another. Thus, while the jihadis are a temporarily useful tool in destroying freedom "in the large," the Left could not tolerate them once the libertarian-conservative ethos that protects personal liberty, private property, and individual initiative has been overthrown.
Each of these monstrosities alone would present a formidable foe, simply for its ruthlessness. Together, they appear tactically to be much the worse...yet the tensions between them offer the defender of freedom an opportunity not to be missed.
At that time, I believed that it was possible to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. Compelling the representatives of the Left to admit that their apparent sympathy for Islam is a tactical ploy would poison American left-liberalism / “progressivism.” It would simultaneously prompt increasing numbers of unengaged or marginally engaged private citizens to take a closer look at the Religion of War, Murder, Slavery, and Rape. The consequences could only be to the good.
Why this hasn’t happened, I cannot say. Certainly enough writers have noted the way the Left coddles Islam for sins infinitely more grievous than the peccadilloes for which it castigates the traditional religions, cultures, and customs of normal, decent Americans. Yet somehow, the necessary connections haven’t occurred in enough minds.
Perhaps we the politically engaged have been firing the wrong ammunition.
I’m terribly tired just now – it’s been a “medical morning” – so I’ll close here. But expect me to return to this subject. Not only haven’t we made any progress on it; apart from the possibility of a declaration of martial law after the election results come in, there’s nothing on the national radar that looms any larger. Indeed, I question whether any subject short of imminent nuclear war really could.
Contrast this police behavior with their remarkably placid and restrained behavior when it comes to AntiFa "counter demonstrators" at PEGIDA events in Germany. AntiFa are just civilian auxiliaries of the German security state, of course, and if, a big if, I suspect, there are laws against appearing masked in public, the police show no interest in enforcing them against their AntiFa pals. Perhaps throwing pavement stones at nationalists, excuse me, neo-Nazis is a complete legal defense against appearing masked in public.
Seems to me if I were a German so very, very, very concerned about the return of fascist private (and official) armies (which caused some inconvenience in the past, I hear), I might, just might show some concern for people who choose to regularly commit violent acts in the streets of my country while concealing their faces. Am I the only one who sees some kind of historical parallels here? Who, oh who, could these people be and should finding and punishing them be a state priority?
Clearly, there is official complicity with and – therefore – encouragement of such street fighters who serve a very useful official purpose indeed.
What the German government is about here is full-throated fascism. I mean the real-deal, left-wing, f$ck you, keep-your-mouth-shut-rightist-scum repression. The speed with which these cops react is almost laughable in contrast to their cowardly, useless response to mass sexual assault on their women. The banner's message is beyond poignant for here we see the state's protection is of repression, not the women of the nation:
Defend your women, not our democracy.Contrast the cop's reaction, too, with Merkel's evasions and prevarications. "We can handle this" was the crown jewel of her response to citizens' fears over the madness of allowing in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of invaders. Well, she couldn't. "It," the introduction of over a 600,000 Muslim light infantry in under a year, spun out of control in the form of garbage strewn in towns and streams, gardens befouled, security shattered and, lately, of Muslim and African vermin tearing women's panties off and fingering them. With impunity.
For expressing disdain for this German madness, weakness, and rank dishonesty, the Poles are now the target of Merkel's and the E.U.'s ire.
And where official betrayal and suppression of free speech and other fundamental rights are concerned, Merkel can act with lightning speed.
And what law did the Poles break, what is the name of the local police commander, and what are the secret national directives regarding speech challenging suicidal immigration policies?
The reality is that thanks to the political class Europe is entering a new dark age. Sexual assaults were just the latest in a series of catastrophes that EU leaders have inflicted on its peoples."Merkel's destructive folly." By Tiberge, GalliaWatch, 1/13/16.Through their determination to destroy the traditional concept of nationhood, promote open borders and impose cultural diversity their ideology has brought meltdown to Europe’s economies and terrorism to her streets.
No bunch of anarchists or enemy army could have caused such irreversible damage. The bitter irony is that their pro-immigration, anti-nationhood federalist dogma was borne out of revulsion at the Second World War.
Yet in practice their approach has led to the import of barbarism and anti-Semitism on an epic scale. In the same vein they presented the EU as a means of putting a straitjacket on Germany.
But actually the EU, through its fixation with free movement, has enabled a domineering, race-fixated Teutonic regime to play havoc with all our lives. Europe’s rulers will never admit the failure of their disastrous experiment.
They are desperate to maintain the illusion that multi-culturalism has worked. That is why there was such a ruthless cover-up by German authorities and broadcasters of the Cologne scandal until the news leaked out on social media.
Ridiculously the police at first claimed the New Year celebrations were “largely peaceful” and “relaxed”. The same impulse to mislead and minimise the abuses can be seen throughout the elite.
So the German public broadcaster ZDF justified its early refusal to report the news of the attacks because it did “not want to spread a bad mood. The migrants deserve better”.
The same impulse for deceit was shown by Left-wing commentators who tried to explain away the assaults by reference to poverty and language.
But why on earth is it our duty to accommodate people who contribute nothing but misery and who utterly despise our values?
The authorities can be ruthless when they want. On Saturday in Cologne, police deployed 1,700 officers and used water cannon at a rally organised by anti-immigration protestors.
But craven political correctness means there is no will to show anything like the same toughness towards predatory migrants. And that is why European civilisation is in crisis.
* * * *
. . . A cataclysm has occurred, a turning point, and its impact can be felt everywhere.
Conspiracy theories about secret alliances between European governments are flying, owing to recent developments in the “refugee crisis.” Substantial numbers of persons – ironically, more here in the U.S. than in Europe, where the problem is at its worst – have adopted the thesis that the political elites of the First World find the Islamic tide useful: a stick with which to beat us cranky types into submission to the Omnipotent State. Those recent developments, and the wildly irrational behavior of highly placed public officials in response, make the notion more credible than not, though we must concede that in such matters proof is always elusive.
If we can be induced to fear others, particularly those nearest to us, the more credulous among us will be more likely to look to the government for “protection.” The government is quite amenable to such developments. In fact, it strives to help them along:Crime stats published by the FBI and relied upon by the media distort the gun violence and leave the public with the impression "mass shooting" incidents are a much bigger threat than they really are, according to a criminologist and Second Amendment scholar.The bureau's annual reports tabulating and classifying a wide range of crime throughout the nation have been historically free of politics, but John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said the latest statistics contain numbers that are misleading at best and deliberately fudged at worst. Lott believes the numbers may have been presented to overstate for political purposes the true risk of being a victim of random gun crimes.
“The FBI put out a clearly incorrect set of numbers on public shootings shortly before the November election last year,” said Lott, a frequent opinion writer for FoxNews.com and author of "More Guns, Less Crime." “I have been reading FBI reports for 30 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is one thing for the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the National Institute of Justice to put out politically biased studies, but there has always been a Chinese wall separating the FBI raw data collection from political pressures.”
Also, I wrote several years ago at Eternity Road:
There's a lot of entertainment value in a good thumping conspiracy theory. Your Curmudgeon is particularly fond of the ones that involve aliens, subterranean civilizations, and the control of the president by radio signals tuned to the resonant frequency of his fillings. Mel Gibson's marvelous movie Conspiracy Theory puts the subject to excellent use. But the significance of the growing frequency of conspiracy theories with political coloring must not be overlooked. They're not just a way to cast one's ideological adversaries as devils intent upon despotism, death, and destruction. A conspiracy is invariably rooted in the perception or construction of a plausible common motive.
And also:
Political conspiracy-theorizing that garners a significant number of participants is possible only when the power structure becomes remote -- that is, when those who wield power are sufficiently detached from “ordinary folks” that we groundlings cannot see them as ethically or emotionally comparable to us.
By my assessment, all the prerequisite conditions are in place.
A conspiracy is a variety of widely shared but difficult-or-impossible-to-prove belief. Needless to say, there are many other such beliefs that don’t bear the conspiracy label:
...and many more. Of course, that a belief is widely shared doesn’t guarantee its veracity. Neither does the impossibility of proving it guarantee its falsity, as various supposedly smart persons such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris really ought to know.
The impact of a belief flows from the behavior it impels, among both assenters and dissenters. A belief that aliens control the president’s brain by sending radio commands through his fillings isn’t likely to stimulate a lot of action. A belief that our political class has decided to subjugate us thoroughly by importing predators while simultaneously stripping us of our weapons is the sort of conviction that breaks kingdoms.
At this time, there are many in Europe who have opened their minds to that latter idea. The majority may not yet be convinced, but they’ve started the necessary search for evidence and are trying to measure it against their political masters’ statements and behavior. It doesn’t take a lot of raped mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives to get a people accustomed to public safety wondering what the Hell the forces of order are doing instead of rounding up the savages and deporting them.
America is not and will not be exempt. The Obamunist plan to import the very same savages currently despoiling Europe, on the grounds of “compassion,” will reap the same fruit here as it has there. Already Muslims are disproportionately represented in rape statistics – as the perpetrators. And of course, while their mouthpiece groups scream “Racism! Bigotry! Islamophobia!” the miserable excuse for a human being the electorate was persuaded to install as president – twice! – is Dutch-uncling us about our fears, telling is that all will be well. Why will all be well? How can anyone be confident that all will be well here when all plainly isn’t well in Europe? No answer.
The sovereign attraction of high office is power over others. The avidity of those who lust for it exceeds all their other desires. More, once they have it, their every word and deed is bent toward keeping it, or gaining more of it. Fear and envy are their principal tools.
We might not be looking at a conspiracy of men in high places. It might be more of a Hive effect: that is, persons with comparable characters and highly similar motives, responding to a common set of incentives, are merely acting in a fashion that resembles a secret, malevolent plan among them. But as I said above, the impact of a belief is in the behavior it impels – and the millions, both here and in Europe, who are gradually coming to believe that their rulers have leagued against them have already begun to act on it.
Stay tuned.
[Attorney General Loretta] Lynch also found it necessary, in Politico’s term, to "recalibrate” her statement to a Muslim civil rights group after San Bernardino that the Justice Department would “take action” against “hateful speech” that might inspire anti-Muslim acts. “Of course,” she later explained, in a manner suggesting that the principle she had just called into question had always been completely obvious, “we prosecute deeds and not words.” Lynch did not recalibrate another statement to the group, where she said her “greatest fear as a prosecutor” was that anti-Muslim rhetoric would promote a “backlash.” The inescapable conclusion, days after the San Bernardino shootings, was that the frontlash of jihadi violence on American soil was, at most, her second-greatest fear.
Horrific, baseless, hateful, Islamophobic backlash.
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I don’t think anyone here is trying to do that, we’re determining what a 16yr old Jean-Marie Le Pen did during the Occupation; which seems more than a little fetishistic. It’s only from our Nazi obsessed time that we measure all things in relation to Hitler. Was a teenage J-M Le Pen sufficiently anti-Hitler? Is defunct political party A farther from Hitler than defunct party B? How many hitlers tall is the Eiffel Tower?Comment by Cagey Beast on "Republican Terror and Anger." By Paul Gottfried, The Unz Review, 12/29/15.
[George] Will’s version of “conservatism” involves violent hostility to Orthodox Russia and a militant American stance in defense of the borders of Ukraine, but quite evidently not America’s own borders."George Will Is Right—Donald Trump IS A Threat, to Cuckservatism Inc." By James Kirkpatrick, The Unz Review, 12/28/15.
A few center console boats taking down US swift boats loaded to the teeth makes perfect sense. Let me explain...Comment by Tarzan on "In Latest Embarrassment For Obama, Iran Releases Footage From Arrest Of 10 U.S. Sailors." Zero Hedge, 1/13/16.Q: If you have 4 pencils and I have 7 apples, how many pancakes will fit on the roof?
A: Purple, because aliens don't wear hats
For more baffling bullshit, explain how our unborn grandchildren owe trillions to a secretive cabal in New York City?
Apologies, Gentle Reader. I’ve been wrapped around the fiction axle this entire day, and haven’t had the first glimmer of a nonfiction thought. So please excuse my absence for the day, and as compensation enjoy my favorite love song, performed by one of the most under-appreciated bands of its time:
ADDENDUM: Fairly soon – probably in the next two or three weeks – I’ll be putting out a call for test readers for the first draft of Statesman. Please think about whether you might have the time and the inclination. This has been an extremely tough, draining book to write. I would appreciate the assistance.
"The Case of Oliver Letwin." Brits Apologize on the Beaches, and on the Landing Grounds, and in the Fields…WHY? By John Derbyshire, Vdare, 1/1/16.“Ignorance is strength” said the Party slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four. For sure, in the Western world of 2015, knowledge will get you into trouble. Whether or not ignorance is strength, in the Western world today, ignorance is definitely social acceptance. Do Americans of all people really not know—that nations with big racial minorities are arenas of discord, social friction, group rancor, and perpetual conflict? How did we get so stupid?It’s not just us, of course. All the old Anglo-Saxon and northwest European countries have enstupidated themselves in the same way. Look at Germany. Look at Britain.
H/t: The Unz Review.
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This is a phenomenon that is everywhere in W. Europe and the Anglosphere and it is inadequately addressed in the blogosphere. I will return later with a more expanded treatment of the phenomenon.
For today it's enough to single out the "issue" of "comprehensive immigration reform" so beloved of the Treason Class and their enablers, the cuckservatives. It's brought out very well indeed by Mr. Voegeli in the excerpt below – and it's clearly an example of high-order obstuseness:
More than any other issue, immigration propels the Trump insurrection. The animus plays out on two levels. As a matter of policy, there is no obvious, compelling reason why controlling the border and resolving the legal status of people already here in violation of our laws must be addressed in a package deal. Why can’t the government prove that it has the commitment and capacity to enforce immigration laws first? Once a functioning immigration system was in place, we could then consider the status of people here illegally without fear that any “path to citizenship” would encourage new waves of illegal immigration.The Reason I’m Anti-Anti-Trump. By William Voegeli, Claremont Review of Books, 12/28/15.As a matter of politics, Trump voters are angry that no matter how often or how emphatically the package-deal approach to immigration is rejected, it never seems to be defeated. What part of “No” do the politicians, journalists, and activists who set the national agenda not understand?
H/t: comment by tbraton on "Republican Terror and Anger." By Paul Gottfried, The Unz Review, 12/29/15.
Called Muti ("Mom") by Germans, Merkel in recent days has toughened her talk, calling for expulsion of criminal aliens and reduction in the number of migrants coming in over the longer term.[1]With her political position weakened by her "misjudgment" on inviting in over a million Muslims and African opportunists, parasites, predators, and light infantry, Angela Merkel now admits it's all gone "too far" according to our source for this quote.
This is similar to what we used to hear in the U.S. during the Reagan administration, I believe, and afterward how the Congress was going to reduce the rate of increase of spending. They couldn't bring themselves to say reduce spending.
Ditto on the infuriating obsession with "comprehensive immigration reform." Those dress-wearing mothertruckers in Congress can ONLY every stay focused on that like a broken tooth. They'd rather set their hair on fire than say job numero uno is to seal -- not "secure" -- the joke that passes for a border that we have.
Similarly, Merkel cannot bring herself to call a halt to the madness she has inflicted on her own people.
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That’s what this piece will be about. It’s virtually all I do here: tell you, in my trademarked sesquipedalian fashion, things you already know. It strikes me that it’s time to “leap to the meta-argument.”
A dear friend I never met in the flesh, the late, much lamented Jeff Medcalf, once complimented me richly for stating the following:
In the political realm, there are currently a number of engagements in progress in which one side is playing fair and the other is fighting dirty. Political combat is supposed to be an argument, in which facts and logic are piled up against one another, and the legislature or electorate decides which side has the better case. Dishonor on that field consists of:
- Deliberate deceit,
- Evasion of legitimate issues and matters of concern.
The reasoning here should be equally lucid:
- To deceive in argument is to seek victory at the expense of honesty, and therefore at the expense of the honest man. It deprives him of the choice he would have made, if fully and honestly informed, and tricks him into making a choice (and its consequences) that is not to his liking.
- To refuse to address legitimate concerns, sliding around them with ad hominem or tu quoque replies, is to seek victory at the expense of candor. The voter must proceed with inadequate data, when the data he needs to make the best choice (by his lights) could have been made available to him.
Gentle Readers who just read the above passage probably shrugged and said “Of course. It couldn’t be any plainer.” In other words, what I said there was something you already knew, even if you’d never previously articulated it for yourself. I would contend that any American intelligent enough not to stage a mumbly-peg tournament in the middle of the Long Island Expressway would react the same way.
Yet at this time, the greater part of all political discourse consists of “one side playing fair and the other fighting dirty.” Indeed, the ranks of those “playing fair” have shrunk in recent years. And we the rational and decent almost never object, much less punish the dirty fighters.
I once tried to blast out some obvious truths in the form of a personal credo:
- I am a Caucasian of Irish and Italian descent, whose parents were immigrants from those lands.
- My loyalties are to my family and the United States of America. I would defend either or both to the death. Apart from a mortgage and a car loan, I owe nothing else to anyone.
- What matters most to me about others is their character: their willingness to respect the rights of others and to discharge their proper responsibilities, without whining about any of it.
- I believe that there is an American culture, and that it is infinitely superior to all the other cultures of the world, past or present. More, I believe that Americans are the finest people in the world -- that no other land produces anything remotely comparable to our general standard of decency, justice, generosity, or good humor.
- I believe that the races, as conventionally defined, differ in various ways. The importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
- I believe that the sexes differ in various ways. As with racial differences, the importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
- I believe that homosexual sodomy is self-destructive, but that, at least in certain cases, sexual orientation can be changed.
- I believe that there is such a thing as general intelligence, that it is at least partly inherited, and that it varies widely.
- I believe that the handicapped should receive our sympathy and compassion as individuals to other individuals, but that they are not entitled to more as a matter of right.
- I believe that laws that mandate preferred treatment for the members of any group, however defined, are both unConstitutional and destructive.
- I hold these convictions not because anyone else holds them, but because the evidence of my senses and my own powers of reasoning have led me to them.
That essay was met by a chorus of “of courses” and cheers that could probably be heard on Pluto. I received hundreds of grateful and congratulatory emails about it, and very few notes of criticism or denunciation. Clearly, I’d said some things my readers already knew; no one awakens to enlightenment and immediately bursts into applause.
But if those are things we already know – things I’d merely put into words, but that others already grasped and would endorse without argument – why was it regarded as a daring act to state them? More to the point for this morning, why are so many Americans reluctant to state them and embarrassed when confronted about them?
Has our political devolution become a personal devolution? Have we edited our own perceptions, stunted our own reasoning processes, to placate those who “fight dirty?” Are we as far gone into moral cowardice as that?
One of Robert A. Heinlein’s last emissions was a story titled “The Happy Days Ahead,” which capped his collection Expanded Universe. Its central motif was the elevation, by election and accident, of a black woman to the presidency. Among the subsequent developments, she lambastes the “women’s rights” harridans by noting that women are a considerable numerical majority of American voters. Ergo, if women were to vote en bloc, they could have any electoral outcome they’d like – and therefore, any legal outcome as well. So the pretense of women being an “oppressed group” is utterly fraudulent and has been since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.
Scott Adams would call that “a blinding flash of the obvious.” At least, it should be. Yet this pampered, privileged majority, which enjoys legal and social preferences never before granted to women anywhere – preferences that effectively demote American men to second-class-citizen status – continues to promote the notion that it’s oppressed – and American men defer to the claim more often than not.
Folly, said the late Barbara Tuchman, is knowing better but doing worse. We know better. What’s our excuse?
And that’s not the only thing about which we know better:
Indeed, these facts are so obvious, so invulnerable to effacement, that even those who promote their contradictions, by whatever tactic, are aware of them. Isn’t it well past time we got off our several asses and did something about them?
I would classify the answer to that question as something else we already know...which goes a long way toward explaining the great embarrassment many of us feel at our current social and political torpor.
Stated differently, the trauma of the 1930s was not the result of the inherent flaws or purported cyclical instabilities of free market capitalism; it was, instead, the delayed legacy of the financial carnage of the Great War and the failed 1920s efforts to restore the liberal order of sound money, open trade and unimpeded money and capital flows."The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War." By David Stockman, Stockman's Corner, 1/21/15.But this trauma was thoroughly misunderstood, and therefore did give rise to the curse of Keynesian economics and did unleash the politicians to meddle in virtually every aspect of economic life, culminating in the statist and crony capitalist dystopia that has emerged in this century.
"Trump, Borders and Masculinity." By Simon Wolfe, The Iron Legion, 12/17/15.The leftists are sometimes right. Borders are artificial. You can’t see them from space. They had to be made, and were made for the purpose of protecting what is inside them and defining who is a part of civilisation and who is the barbarian. And they were made by men. The business of fences, walls, castles, borders and nations is the business of men.
The West, led by the opinions of its single mothers, makes little effort to resist its own colonisation, and is indicative of a deracinated and emasculated people offering themselves up to the violent barbarians as a peace offering, in the hope that they may be permitted to survive as court eunuchs while their lands and women are plundered.
Hear me roar. The European man has lost the connection with himself, with his nature, his place in the world, his ancestors, his destiny and ultimately his God. In a world where both masculinity and femininity are attacked and smeared together into irrelevance, people lose sight of who is the protector and who is protected. This is a much deeper lying problem that can’t be fixed by political grandstanding or building a wall.
