In a private discussion, Sage McLaughlin – long an important commenter at VFR, and now a contributor at WWWW – pointed out that there are only two ethnic groups in America today:
A Pact between Factions of Christendom?
Protestants, Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox might regard each other as different religions (then again, they might not), but our enemies certainly don’t. For liberals, Moslems, homosexualists, feminists, radical environmentalists, et al, the three versions of Christianity are just slightly different flavors of the same poison. Or, to switch metaphors, our common enemies see Christians of all sorts as essentially the same pack of rats who deserve to be exterminated. Continue reading
Mortified by the New Necromancy
If you wish to make a man do something that he does not wish to do, you must proceed in one of three ways. You may threaten to do him harm, you may promise to do him good, or you may persuade him that he is under some sort of “moral obligation” to do what you wish him to do. These might be called the three roads to power, power being “the possibility of imposing one’s will on the behavior of other people” (1). For simplicity’s sake, I will call these the Minatory Road, the Remuneration Road, and the Mortification Road. Continue reading
Atheism is Not Strictly Conceivable
“God does not exist” turns out to make as much sense as “2 + 2 = 5.” You can string the symbols together, but you can’t get a concept out of that string.
Pushing the Eschaton
It is in the discourse of the Right a commonplace that liberal policies implement Ponzi schemes; that their wild prodigality can be justified only on the basis of magical thinking which supposes that economic and cultural goods pour forth inexhaustibly from some mysterious cornucopia, rather than as products of unstinting, intelligent, diligent, difficult, costly labor rightly and prudently directed. In this liberalism has always reminded me of the cargo cults that sprang up among natives all over Oceania in the 20th Century after their contact with Europeans, especially during and after WWII. But of these cargo cults I had had only the most cursory knowledge. I knew only that some cargo cultists thought that if they mocked up a semblance of an airstrip, planes full of goods would land to disgorge them (“If we build it, they will come;” we see the same sort of thinking at work in those who suppose that if they just show up in a nice suit or arrive in Sweden, life will be for them thenceforth all wine and roses (and blondes)).
I’m reading Mircea Eliade’s The Two and the One, wherein he discusses the cargo cults. Now that thanks to him I now know a bit more about them, my hunch about liberalism has borne out to a truly spooky degree. Consider the following extended passages (page 125 ff.), and feel the prickle of the hairs on your neck as you begin to comprehend the true immensity of the intellectual gulf that separates us from latter day liberals:
The Crevasse at the Center of Things
I recently conducted a “classroom observation” of a colleague. This involves taking a seat in the back row, with the students who are streaming Netflix and, perhaps, passing a flask, and then “observing” the fellow at the lectern for an hour or so. It’s not entirely clear what one is supposed to be on the lookout for, but my policy is to make sure that he doesn’t expose himself, tell off-color jokes, or forget to show up. Within those limits, I figure it’s his class. Continue reading
“Classical Liberalism” is a Myth
American conservatives are wont to say that the word “liberal” at one time denoted a person who believed in free markets and limited government, and that the word has only recently been twisted to mean a person who believes in free love and big government. This is false, so far as the United States is concerned, and results from conflation of the history of Europe and the United States. Continue reading
The Quality of Our Elite
The world’s elite recently wrapped up its annual conference in Davos. To commemorate the event, they released 36 quotable quotes in meme form. You can find them here. Incredibly, this is what the masters of the universe want us to think of them. As hard as it is to choose a favorite, I think this is mine:
Hat Tip: Zero Hedge.
Dread, Love and Disgust
Sentiments are at the root of all politics, and consequently at the root of all political divisions. Vast labor is expended to bury this fact under mountains of rebarbative reasoning, but a very little honest reflection will excavate the truth that politics begins in the heart. In the heart of the Right, dread, love and disgust are the essential and defining sentiments. This is not to say that these sentiments are absent on the Left, only that they are neither essential nor defining.
The Right is a decidedly motley assembly of people who, in one fashion or another, oppose, deplore or dislike the Revolution. The Revolution comprises all those changes in which modernization has turned the old order on its head. The Right does not oppose, deplore or dislike every change that has taken place since the seventeenth century, only the radical innovations and satanic transvaluations that cause modernists to boast of a novus ordo seclorum. Continue reading
Article of Possible Interest: Will California Follow Atlantis?
My follow-up article to “Will Europe Follow Atlantis?” appears at The People of Shambhala website under the title “Will California Follow Atlantis? How Likely? How Soon?”
It is accessible here: http://peopleofshambhala.com/will-california-follow-atlantis-how-likely-how-soon/
I offer an excerpt:
Poet, story-writer, painter, sculptor, farmer, handyman, correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, and lifelong resident of Auburn, California, Clark Ashton Smith (1893 – 1961) was perhaps destined to participate in the tradition of Atlantean and Lemurian lore by the fact that his father’s given name was Timeus, no less. Where [Lewis] Spence treats the topics of Atlantis and Lemuria as tragic myth and [W. S.] Cervé as Utopian narrative, Smith treats it as a combination of Swiftian satire… and Baudelairean poetic apocalypse. Smith indeed began his authorial career as the writer of exquisite lyric poetry consciously and studiously modeled after the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, a Catholic reactionary who refused to participate in the euphoria of Progress. Smith gained a wider audience, however, when, to eke out his living during the Great Depression, he began to submit stories to Weird Tales, a “pulp” monthly specializing in lurid exploitations of horrific and supernatural themes. A great many of Smith’s stories have their setting in one or another disintegrating continent, all of which are home to a variety of baroquely corrupt civilizations. Hyperborea and Poseidonis belong in the remote past, but Smith places Zothique in the far future. All three are tropes, not only of Atlantis and Lemuria, but also of modernity, reflecting many of its aspects, and are intended by their author to show the direction in which the vaunted Progress tends.
In Smith’s versions of Atlantis and Lemuria, which reflect the autodidact small-town-dweller’s experience of Metropolitan California in San Francisco and Los Angeles, those New Babylons built atop a major earthquake fault, everyone is a lore-versed hyper-aesthete – and everyone implacably resents and hates everyone else. Smith attuned himself to see modernity as the triumph of resentment over generosity through his immersion in Baudelaire, who preceded Friedrich Nietzsche in that type of acuity. Inspecting the future, Smith, like Baudelaire, saw no “sweet loveliness,” but rather pervasive Cainite invidiousness expressing itself in magical-technical expertise, inveterate status-seeking, and cults of refined (that is to say, debased) sadomasochism. When Smith invoked the past, he did so to hold up a mirror to the present, as Spence had done in Will Europe Follow Atlantis. Just about any of Smith’s stories is therefore implicitly an answer to the question whether California will follow Atlantis, and for Smith the question is unavoidably prejudicial and self-answering. “The Empire of the Necromancers” (Weird Tales September 1932) offers itself as a case in point. In it, the “Golden State” appears allegorically in its true guise, not as the gateway to a radiant future, but as the Abendland in the moment of its Untergang.
