The true history of the West

There's a post at American Renaissance worth reading which briefly summarises the challenges faced by the West over the past 1500 years. In the year 1900, it is true, the West dominated the world - a fact which has helped to feed a view of the West as being historically privileged.

However, if you go back further in history you find that the West has had to fight for its survival against powerful aggressors. If you're not already aware of this history, I encourage you to read the American Renaissance piece, as well as my own posts on the Harvest of the Steppe and White Gold.

I have only one criticism of the American Renaissance piece. It ends by explaining the problems facing the West today in terms of the rise of cultural Marxism. As I've explained previously, I'm open to learning more about the influence of the academics associated with cultural Marxism, but my reading to this point doesn't support the idea that they were a key influence. Explaining Western decline in terms of cultural Marxism also has the danger of leaving the politics of right-liberals unexamined.

Let me give some examples. Traditional Australia began to be dismantled from the early 1940s and was certainly in full swing by the late 1960s. The men who did the job in the early 1940s were part of the Labour left. The radicals of the time to their left were not cultural Marxists but your everyday Marxist-Leninist Marxists. The men who finished the job in the late 1960s were Liberal Party businessmen types.

Or look at Australia's contribution to 1960s radicalism. The most famous figures contributed by Australia, such as Richard Neville and Germaine Greer, were part of the Sydney "Push" - a loosely organised libertarian group whose politics were most influenced by a Scottish philosopher called John Anderson.

And if we look at feminism we find that it was alive and kicking by the mid-1800s, a long time before cultural Marxism was supposed to have gained its influence over the left in the 1960s and 70s.

Brandis 3

I've been looking at an essay on liberal values by the Australian right-liberal George Brandis. Here's the next section:

Secondly, conservatism and socialism share a theory of social change which owes much to the dogma of historical determinism. Both believe that the forces which shape a society's development - whether those forces are understood according to the conservative's metaphor of society as an organism with its own spontaneous causes of growth and change, or the socialist's more formal theory of dialectical materialism - are impersonal and irresistible. Neither gives any place to human reason as a reconstructive social force. For both, the past determines the present and therefore limits the future. The socialist feels that he is the prisoner of the past; the conservative would like to think that he still lives there.

Liberalism, by contrast, simply rejects historical determinism. It asserts that individuals, acting rationally and with co-operative goodwill can consciously shape the future of their societies so as to avoid the errors of the past and correct the injustices of the present. The reconstructive spirit of liberalism was captured well by Robert Kennedy when he proclaimed that it was 'the shaping impulse' of a liberal society that 'neither fate, nor nature, nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, will determine our destiny'.

What does this tell us about Brandis? It suggests to me that Brandis does not feel a positive connection to the past. What matters for him is the idea of individuals rationally following a principle in order to create a just future. In this sense, the individual can only be acting against the past. The past is a kind of foil against which the rational individual sets himself.

I do think that Brandis has accurately described a liberal mindset in all this. Liberals have set themselves to create a new order based on the rational unfolding of a principle that aims at justice.

But there are major problems in taking this approach. First, a society is not built on the basis of a single, clearly enunciated principle. Any society faces the difficult task of coming to a sense of an "order of being" - an order which brings together the natural, the social and the spiritual aspects of life. There is no single principle which can express all of these things. What (ideally) happens instead is that a society gives rise over time to a culture which represents the best efforts of that society to reach a harmonious order of being.

Things are likely to go wrong if you seek to reorder society along the lines of a single principle aiming at justice. First, there is no such single "rational" principle. Second, the negative effect of adopting a false principle, as liberals have done, is radically heightened. Third, once you adopt such a principle there is no way to provide limits to its effects, as it becomes the sole organising principle of a society. The principle is likely to run to much more radical extremes over time than its originators ever intended.

Does this mean that Brandis is right when he claims that traditionalist conservatives do not give "any place to human reason as a reconstructive social force"? It's true that we reject the idea of radically breaking with the past in order to reconstitute society on the basis of an ideological principle. But it's not true that a culture, as an expression of an attempt to create an order of being, is frozen in time. Each generation tries to add to it, to improve and refine it, and this is partly an act of human reason (and conscience and creativity). Traditionalists do have a sense of justice and the good, and we do expect society to aim to measure up to this, but not as a singular, rationalistic principle that serves as its own starting point. We aim to carry forward a culture and a tradition and we look instinctively to the best of what our forefathers achieved to inspire us in reaching toward the good.

One final point. Brandis approvingly quotes Robert Kennedy speaking about "the shaping impulse" of liberalism, an impulse which overrides not only history but also nature. A traditionalist would never set reason against nature in a simplistic way. It's not that nature is sacrosanct. Anyone who has had children knows that they don't come ready civilised. Ruder aspects of their nature do have to be overcome. Even so, principle has to have regard for our created nature. You can't formulate principles about the way that human life is to proceed abstractly and without consideration for what humans are, for both better and worse, in their given natures.

Kuwaiti woman wants captured Westerners to be sold as concubines

Salwa al Mutairi

A Kuwaiti woman has called for sex slavery to be reintroduced into her country. Not only that, she believes the slaves should be non-Muslim women captured in war, such as Russian women captured in the conflict in Chechnya:

A Kuwaiti woman who once ran for parliament has called for sex slavery to be legalised - and suggested that non-Muslim prisoners from war-torn countries would make suitable concubines.

Salwa al Mutairi argued buying a sex-slave would protect decent, devout and 'virile' Kuwaiti men from adultery because buying an imported sex partner would be tantamount to marriage.

And she even had an idea of where to 'purchase' these sex-salves - browsing through female prisoners of war in other countries.

Mutairi claimed: 'There was no shame in it and it is not haram' (forbidden) under Islamic Sharia law.'

She suggested shopping for prisoners of war so as to protect Kuwaiti men from being tempted to commit adultery or being seduced by other women's beauty.

'For example, in the Chechnyan war, surely there are female Russian captives,' she said.

'So go and buy those and sell them here in Kuwait. Better than to have our men engage in forbidden sexual relations.'

In an attempt to consider the woman's feelings in the arrangement, Mutari conceded that the enslaved women, however, should be at least 15.

Mutairi said free women must be married with a contract but with concubines 'the man just buys her and that’s it. That’s enough to serve as marriage.'

Mutairi said that during a recent visit to Mecca, she asked Saudi muftis – Muslim religious scholars – what the Islamic ruling was on owning sex slaves. They are said to have told her that it is not haram [forbidden].

The ruling was confirmed by 'specialized people of the faith' in Kuwait, she claimed.

'They said, that’s right, the only solution for a decent man who has the means, who is overpowered by desire and who does not want to commit fornication, is to acquire jawari.' Jawari is the plural of the Arabic term jariya, meaning 'concubine' or 'sex slave'.

One Saudi mufti supposedly told Mutairi: 'The context must be that of a Muslim nation conquering a non-Muslim nation, so these jawari have to be prisoners of war.'

Concubines, she argued, would suit Muslim men who fear being 'seduced or tempted into immoral behaviour by the beauty of their female servants'.

Where would such an idea come from? From the history of the Muslim Middle-East. Russian and Ukrainian women were captured in raids and sold as concubines for a lengthy historic period of nearly 1000 years. It was called the harvest of the steppe. One of the roles of the Cossacks in Russian history was to defend the southern borders from such raids:

Until the beginning of the 18th century, Crimean Tatars were known for frequent devastating raids into Ukraine and Russia. For a long time, until the early 18th century, Crimean Khanate maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East which was one of the fundaments of its economy. One of the most known and important trading ports and slave markets was Kefe. Some researchers estimate that altogether more than 3 million people, predominantly Ukrainians but also Russians, Belarusians and Poles, were captured and enslaved during the time of the Crimean Khanate in what was called "the harvest of the steppe". A constant threat from Crimean Tatars supported the appearance of cossackdom. The Cossacks often answered with similar raids into Crimea during which many Christian slaves were liberated.

Eventually the Russians became too powerful and won some decisive military victories and the raids ceased. But you can see where Salwa al Mutairi gets her idea of enslaving Russian women as concubines from - it was part of the history of the region for a very long time.

It's true that she is a minority voice within modern Kuwait, but I think it's worthwhile publicising her views. Left-liberals have picked out white Christian males as a dominant oppressor group in history and have therefore blamed us for the existence of inequality and injustice in the world. We are the ones, therefore, who are treated as illegitimate and who are targeted for deconstruction.

But look at the real history here. When the Russians were not dominant what happened? Was there peace and equality in Russia and in neighbouring lands? No, their lack of strength simply meant that they were exploited by others - they were raided by the Muslim nations to their south and their young women were carried off as booty. There was no virtue in being weak. When the Russians did finally dominate their southern neighbours they were able to put an end to an injustice inflicted on their own population.

So here are two important conclusions. First, it is wrong for left-liberals to assume that the white, Christian lands were always dominant. There have been long periods of history in which Europe was vulnerable to conquest by other peoples. Second, when European nations were weak it did not create equality and justice in the world; it meant that the Western populations were vulnerable to exploitation by others.

One final point. Salwa al Mutairi is not alone in calling for Muslims to profit from the invasion of non-Islamic countries. Some years ago an Egyptian Islamic cleric, Abu Ishaq al-Huwaini, said:

If only we can conduct a jihadist invasion at least once a year or if possible twice or three times, then many people on earth would become Muslims. And if anyone prevents our dawa or stands in our way, then we must kill them or take as hostage and confiscate their wealth, women and children. Such battles will fill the pockets of the Mujahid who can return home with 3 or 4 slaves, 3 or 4 women and 3 or 4 children. This can be a profitable business if you multiply each head by 300 or 400 dirham. This can be like financial shelter whereby a jihadist, in time of financial need, can always sell one of these heads [meaning slavery].

Huwaini recently clarified his earlier position:

According to Huwaini, after Muslims invade and conquer a non-Muslim nation—in the course of waging an offensive jihad—the properties and persons of those infidels who refuse to convert or pay jizya and live as subjugated dhimmis, are to be seized as ghanima or "spoils of war."

Huwaini cited the Koran as his authority—boasting that it has an entire chapter named "spoils"—and the sunna of Muhammad, specifically as recorded in the famous Sahih Muslim hadith wherein the prophet ordered the Muslim armies to offer non-Muslims three choices: conversion, subjugation, or death/enslavement.

Huwaini said that infidel captives, the "spoils of war," are to be distributed among the Muslim combatants (i.e., jihadists) and taken to "the slave market, where slave-girls and concubines are sold." He referred to these latter by their dehumanizing name in the Koran, ma malakat aymanukum—"what your right hands possess"—in this context, sex-slaves: "You go to the market and buy her, and she becomes like your legal mate—though without a contract, a guardian, or any of that stuff—and this is agreed upon by the ulema." [The ulema or ulama refers to "the educated class of Muslim legal scholars."]

"In other words," Huwaini concluded, "when I want a sex-slave, I go to the market and pick whichever female I desire and buy her."...

Left-liberals might like to bear in mind the existence of views like these when judging the historical record of the West.

The Tol plantation massacre

I've read a lot of history over the years, but I'd never heard of the Tol plantation massacre until Wednesday night. It's something that I should have known about as an Australian, particularly as there is a connection to my own family.

The story was told in a new and well produced documentary on the Foxtel history channel. In January 1942 the Japanese attacked Rabaul in Papua New Guinea. The 1400 Australian defenders were hopelessly outnumbered and withdrew inland. Suffering from disease and hunger, they were invited to surrender by the Japanese with the promise of good treatment as prisoners of war.

A contingent of Australian soldiers who did surrender were taken to the Tol plantation. They were given a meal and then had their hands tied behind their back. They were then taken out in groups and either shot or bayoneted.

At least 130 were massacred, but six survived to reveal what had happened. (There is a list of names of those who were killed here.)

The massacre was not conducted in the heat of battle; nor had the Japanese suffered heavy casualties in the campaign. The Japanese were mostly able to walk ashore unopposed into Rabaul and the Australians surrendered some time after the battle had ended. The massacre was a deliberate, cold-blooded killing of Australian troops who had been promised fair treatment as prisoners of war.

Worse was to follow. Many of those captured in and around Rabaul were put in the hold of a ship, the Montevideo Maru. The Japanese did not identify this ship as a prisoner of war transport. It was sunk by a US submarine with the loss of over 1000 Australian POWs and civilians. One of those who perished was my great uncle.

There have been times in history when Australians have suffered at the hands of other races and other nations. We haven't always been in a position of strength, as much as those who follow the "white oppressor" template would have us believe so. The Tol plantation massacre is one of the more shocking examples of this fact, but it's not unique - some Australian readers would be aware, for instance, of the infamous Bangka Island massacre of Australian nurses.

History in the remaking

Royal Auto has the largest circulation of any monthly magazine in Australia. It's read by half the adult population here in Victoria. So it's significant that the feature article in this month's edition (August 2009) is on the topic of history, ancestry and identity.

The article looks at a historical re-enactment society in the Victorian city of Ballarat. The young members of this society are quite articulate when it comes to explaining why they devote so much time to their hobby. For instance, David Waldron believes that it connects him to his heritage:

His participation ... is a way of "bridging the disjuncture from my heritage - my own history. I am recreating that sense of connection."

Another member of the society, Fred Cheney, an English and history teacher, has a theory about the loss of Western identity:

Fred ... has tried to connect with Asian spirituality but found immersing himself in the essentials of northern European culture is the better fit pyschologically. He says the transported gene pool of white Australia set his social lineage adrift.

"And in the absence of knowledge about our own ancestral roots, we tend to project our internal indigenous sense onto the exotic other - the Aborigines or the Asian races," he says. "Through these processes we are reclaiming our own roots. For me, enacting the Viking period is a way of engaging with my racial heritage. We get the sense it is still there. The costumes are profoundly respectful of our ancestors, but by wearing them you get that instant consciousness of The Great Then."

There are women involved too. Anna says of history that,

"reading about it just isn't enough." And best of all is the payoff in a real sense of connection. "This sense of tribal community is vital to sustain us now because it has a real integrity. We do operate as a tribe or an extended family."

If this sounds a little politically incorrect, it's because it runs against the grain of orthodox liberalism. According to liberal orthodoxy there is no collective good, only an immense set of self-chosen individual life paths. The overall aim is to achieve an autonomy in which we self-determine every aspect of who we are. We don't choose our ethnicity or our ancestry, so these are thought of negatively as impediments to the self-creating, blank slate individual. Furthermore, because liberals associate the West with power and dominance, they see Western forms of ethnic identity as being constructed for the oppression of others. So Western identity gets tagged as supremacist or discriminatory, whereas non-Western identity is tied much more positively to resistance to Western cultural and political dominance.

So there is a profound rejection of modern liberal orthodoxy when the Ballarat history players declare that their own Western ancestry is authentic and indispensable to who they are.

I personally have no desire to dress up like a Viking. Nor do I think that re-enactment is the most effective way of challenging the liberal status quo. But I do agree with the Ballarat history players that a sense of our ancestry and roots is important in forming our self-identity. It deepens and enriches our sense of who we are. It places us within a distinct tradition, so that we identify with a set of cultural ideals and achievements, rather than always being outsiders who are not actively involved in reproducing a culture of our own.

If liberal theory treats such an identity, at least for Westerners, as wholly negative, then this only shows that liberal theory is inadequate - that it limits too severely what can be expressed within our self-identity.

We can be better than neutral

Here's a more upbeat story to report on. Over at Abandon Skip, there's a post on the popularity of the song De La Rey amongst Afrikaners in South Africa. The song has become something of an anthem for Afrikaners, expressing a pride in their own identity.

There are a couple of things about the situation which impress me. First, it seems to be predominantly young Afrikaners, both male and female, who are generating enthusiasm for the song. Second, some of the Arikaners have clearly rejected the idea that it is a mark of distinction to be neutral about ethnicity.

For instance, Bok van Blerk asks the audience before singing the song, "I'm proud of my language and culture. Are you?". He has also made the comment that, "Tswana, Zulu, Sotho, English or Afrikaner, take pride in who you are, it gives you backbone and direction in life."

This is exactly the shift Westerners need to make. For a long time, the neutrality strand of liberalism has set a different tone. The gist of this strand of liberalism is that it's best to be neutral about important public goods, and to orient ourselves instead to the pursuit of our private, individual interests. At best, ethnicity is then recognised as a purely personal sentiment, not to be defended as a good in a formal, public setting.

We are therefore supposed to win admiration by proving how neutral we are about our own ethnicity. The most advanced practitioners of this art achieve status by identifying the most "othered" ethnic group and displaying sympathy toward them. In general, though, the effect is to produce a Westerner who has little sense of his own culture and who thinks of culture instead as something he consumes according to taste from a range of other ethnicities.

It's not a sustainable way of ordering things. If everyone were to do it, and we were all neutralists, then there would be no range of "other" ethnicities to consume. In other words, even to maintain things as they are now, there have to be groups of people who reject the ideal of neutrality and who continue to produce distinctive cultures.

There is another problem with the neutrality strand: it trivialises our life aims. Much of what is significant in life requires a communal setting. If we limit ourselves to the pursuit of private interests, we undermine the opportunity to fulfil important aspects of life.

We can be better than neutral. We can identify positively with our own culture; we can defend its value as a real entity and not just as a personal sentiment; and we can admire those who show themselves to be most connected to their own ethnic culture and who represent it at its best.

(If you follow the link to Abandon Skip's post there are several short You Tube videos showing the response of young Afrikaners to the De La Rey song.)

The weirdness of the American idea?

How do American Jews form their identity? David Samuels believes there is a tension in the process. He thinks that most American Jews still have a traditional view of identity: that it is tied to an historic, ongoing ethnic tradition. The mainstream American identity, though, he takes to be modernist: it is based on relinquishing the past in order to be a self-made, future oriented individualist.

Samuels writes that there is a creative tension in trying to reconcile the two aspects of American Jewish identity; in maintaining the traditional and ethnic, whilst identifying with a mainstream identity in which heritage has been dissolved.

Samuels' argument has its strengths and weaknesses. The strong point is that Samuels has captured the point of transition between a traditional understanding of identity and the liberal modernist one.

In the past, communal identity was based largely on ethnicity: on membership of a shared ethnic tradition, which might involve a common ancestry, religion, language, culture, history and so on.

This kind of identity, though, was undermined by liberal modernism. In part, this is because liberalism has taken individual autonomy to be the highest good. Ethnicity is not something that is self-determined: it is inherited and not chosen by us as individuals. It therefore stands in conflict with autonomy theory.

As a result, liberal moderns have either treated ethnicity as a trap or prison from which the individual must be liberated, or else they have thought of ethnic identity as something that individuals might construct for themselves as part of a personal narrative (which ignores or denies the real, historic, objective basis of ethnicity).

Samuels doesn't connect the modern view of identity to liberalism. He sees it as a peculiarly Christian thing. This has one positive outcome: it means that he, as a Jew, feels sufficiently distant from the "Christian" mainstream identity to express his doubts about it. But there's a negative consequence too of seeing modernism as a peculiarly Christian affair: Samuels doesn't seem to be aware of just how deeply he himself as a Jew is influenced by liberal modernist assumptions about autonomy and identity.

Here is Samuels on the difficulty of combining a traditional and modern understanding of identity:

If Americans are self-made people who embrace an imagined future in order to escape the burdens of the past, American Jews seek to have their cake and eat it too by embracing the future-oriented American idea without relinquishing their historically bound identity as Jews. While I don't think that the American and the Jewish identity principles are always necessarily opposed, I do think that keeping both ideas in one's head at one time can be the source of a tremendous amount of creative tension.

It is also inherently deceptive, in the sense that one is quite often signaling to others that one has agreed to dissolve one's particular heritage and historically bound point of view into a common Christian-inflected, highly individualistic and alienating, yet incredibly productive future-oriented social whole that most American Jews view with a high degree of distance and skepticism. The only real parallel for the ungracious refusal of large numbers of American Jews to buy into the full weirdness and wonder and scariness of the American idea is the experience and behavior of blacks ...

Note the terms in which Samuels describes the mainstream identity: the aim is to be "self-made" (i.e. self-created or self-determined), which then makes the past not a positive source of identity but a "burden" (an impediment, a restriction). This is identity seen in terms of liberal autonomy theory.

And how does Samuels, raised within a more traditional ethnic identity, portray the mainstream, liberal identity? He is not altogether complimentary: although he describes the mainstream identity as being incredibly productive, he also thinks that it is weird, scary, alienating and individualistic. He believes that most American Jews view it with "a high degree of distance and scepticism".

Samuels has written a story based on the life of James Hogue, a con man who lied his way into Princeton. Samuels draws on liberal autonomy theory when linking Hogue to the mainstream American identity:

... I see James Hogue as a representative American who embodied the abstract logic of self-invention and being born-again, and took those ideas to an uncomfortable extreme. One purpose of my text is to create sympathy for Hogue's victims without denying Hogue his actual achievements or reducing his personal autonomy and the strangeness of his choices to a bunch of symptoms for which Prozac or some newfangled anti-psychotic pill might be usefully described.

Similarly Barack Obama is described this way:

I see him as a representative American - a self-made man, part con artist, part performer, living in an imaginary future that will make him and his audience whole.

Samuels is enough of a liberal modernist to reject the ethnic nationalism on which Israel is based. In correspondence with an Israeli Jew he writes:

The other reason this conversation scares you is that you are an Israeli, meaning that you are a product of a nineteenth century ideology that believes that blood, soil and language must be unified in order to form a healthy, unified self ... Israelis can't help but believe ... that the mark of being a healthy Jew is to be a member of a free nation living in its own land.

Here is Samuels arguing that American Jews don't follow the modernist line consistently - again because they don't follow the principle of autonomy:

Why do they (Jews) insist on converting their goyish wives or children's children to their religion instead of simply letting them choose to be whoever they want to be?

And some more on the difference between the liberal American mainstream identity and the more conservative Jewish one:

Americans believe, very deeply, in the value and necessity of abolishing the past and living in the future. Americans believe that each individual has the capacity for finding God's grace within him or herself, and can only find it by being born again --- independent of family history and ties. While you don't have to be a Christian to accept historically peculiar American ideas about the individual, the past and the future, it is hard to ignore the fact that these ideas are Christian in their history and, I would argue, in their essence.

The stories Jews tell ourselves are different. We tell ourselves stories about our unbroken connection to a common set of tribal ancestors to whom all Jews are connected by blood. We tell ourselves about the unbroken chain of interpretation that connects today's Torah sages to the medieval commentators to the sages of the Gemarra and Mishna to the revelation given to Moses on Har Sinai. We tell ourselves stories about our survival as a people through thousands of years of exile and persecution in which we still claim to be able to see the hand of God.

Similarly:

The ways that Jews see the individual and his or her place in the world contradicts core American beliefs about abolishing the past, living in the future, and making yourself up from scratch. Sometimes we acknowledge this contradiction to ourselves, and sometimes we pretend that we think and see the world the same way as everyone else.

But how does Samuels reconcile all this? He is clearly deeply influenced by liberal autonomy theory. Does he then reject his own Jewish ethnic identity as a "burden" to be cast aside?

He doesn't. He finds a way to preserve it within the terms of autonomy theory:

I am Jewish, not because I think things are rosy, but because I chose to be Jewish, because I feel lucky to carry the historical weight of 3500 years of contradiction and argument and exile, and because there is something irreducibly slippery and human and contemporary about having to be two or more things at the same time.

So his Jewish identity is legitimate because he chose it, and because it is complex, multiple and fluid - and therefore something difficult and challenging for the individual to negotiate (which preserves the idea that it's something the individual is constructing for himself, or at least participating in the construction of).

This might seem like a useful "out" - a way to stay Jewish whilst still holding to liberal orthodoxy. The problem is, though, that it doesn't provide a strong basis in the long run for a Jewish identity. Is it just a matter of an arbitrary individual choice? And why not find a complex identity to negotiate somewhere else? I just can't see generations of Jewish kids opting in for the reasons outlined by Samuels.

Liberal autonomy theory played a major role in undermining the mainstream heritage; it is likely to do the same if adopted elsewhere, no matter how cleverly Samuels attempts to fit his own ethnic identity within it.

It's not enough to be right

Andrew Bolt is easily the most influential right wing journalist here in Victoria. It's very important to understand, though, that he is not a conservative.

This isn't very hard to prove. Take a column he wrote recently for the Herald Sun, titled "Racism kills our heritage" (4/8/04). The column concerns two Aboriginal bark etchings, which were collected by a white landowner in the 1850s and which were then acquired by British museums.

The British museums returned the etchings to Australia on loan, but an Aboriginal tribe has laid claim to them and has won a legal order preventing their return to Britain.

Personally, I think it's wrong to accept the items on loan and then seize them. So I don't disagree with Andrew Bolt's basic position, that the etchings should go back to Britain. It is more the particular reasoning employed by Andrew Bolt to support his position which reveals his very straightforward liberalism.

The Aborigines claimed that they wanted to keep the etchings because, "We believe strongly that (the artefacts) connect us to our country, our culture and ancestry".

Now, the Aborigines are merely expressing here a normal conservative sentiment. Most ethnic groups feel a special connection to certain artefacts. Certainly, Anglo-Australians dislike it when prized artefacts are sold overseas. In fact, just recently there was even a huge outcry over the possible sale of a Don Bradman cricket cap to overseas buyers!

Imagine how important the bark etchings must be to the Bendigo Aborigines. These etchings must be amongst the precious few items connecting these Aborigines to their own history and ancestry. No wonder they would prefer to keep these etchings closer to home than Great Britain.

But Andrew Bolt doesn't see this. Instead, he claims that the Aborigines should have been "laughed to scorn" for trying to keep the etchings and he condemns them for being "racist".

Significantly, Bolt considers the Aborigines guilty of a "New Racism" which "insists that we are always members of a tribe". Now, this is pretty harsh: Bolt is telling a tribe of Aborigines that they are racist for considering themselves to be a tribe of Aborigines!

And here we come to the really telling point. Bolt goes on to state that the mistake made by the Aborigines is to forget,

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race. In this New Racism, we're driven back into tribes.

This is as intense, condensed and pure a statement of liberalism as you're ever likely to come across.

Remember, the liberal first principle is the idea that to be fully human we must create who we are out of our own reason and will. The point of liberal politics is therefore to remove any impediments to an individual freedom to create ourselves in any direction.

One such impediment to a self-created identity is our ethnicity. We don't get to choose our ethnic identity as it's something we're simply born into. This makes it illegitimate under the logic of liberalism.

Andrew Bolt has simply applied the basic liberal principle in a consistent way. He has declared an ethnic identity to be "racist" and therefore illegitimate, because for him as a liberal our equal humanity depends on our freedom to "make our own identities".

True conservatism is actually a resistance to such ideas. It is a defence of important forms of human identity and connectedness which are placed under assault by liberal first principles.

A true conservative, therefore, would admire the stubborn connection felt by the Bendigo Aborigines to their own distinctive traditions. He would not condemn these Aborigines for failing to discard an inherited group identity in favour of individual, self-created ones.

Andrew Bolt is therefore clearly on the liberal side of politics, rather than the conservative one. This doesn't mean that he isn't right wing, but that he is a right-wing liberal rather than a right-wing conservative.

The dominance of liberal principles, even on the right-wing of politics, explains why liberalism has been able to march forward, largely unchallenged, in Western societies. There was hardly anyone in the political class who stood outside of liberal first principles, and who could therefore take a principled stance against liberal policies.

That's why it's so important that the younger generation of conservatives is able to distinguish between right-wing forms of liberalism and a genuine conservatism. It's no use rejecting left liberalism by joining the camp of right-liberalism: both camps are dominated by principles which make traditional national, ethnic, family and moral identities and beliefs illegitimate.

To make real progress the first step is to free ourselves from the dominance of liberal first principles.

(First published at Conservative Central, 07/08/2004)

Does the mind have a sex?

In 1673 a Frenchman, Francois Poullain de la Barre, declared that "the mind has no sex".

He wrote on this theme that,

It is easy to realise that the difference between the sexes concerns only the body - being, correctly, only this part that serves for the production of men. Since the mind participates only by giving its assent (and giving it in all people in the same manner), we can conclude that it is sexless.

In simple terms, de la Barre believed that men and women differed only in their reproductive organs. He thought that men and women were, by nature, the same in all other respects, including everything to do with the mind.

De la Barre drew some very modern, feminist conclusions from this idea. He asserted that traditional gender roles had no basis in "natural law" but were maintained by prejudice and custom alone.

(For instance, he complained that "legal scholars, who also have their prejudices, have attributed to nature a distinction that derives from custom alone.")

De la Barre claimed that,

the mind, not functioning differently in one sex than in the other, is equally capable of the same things

and therefore concluded that women were as equally suited as men (or more so) to be priests, generals and monarchs.

The argument framed by de la Barre eventually came to have much influence. But it can now be seen to be mistaken in its first assumption. Science is now demonstrating that the mind does have a sex. After a period of more than 300 years we can now conclusively reject the theory pioneered by de la Barre.

It has now finally become accepted in the scientific mainstream that there are significant differences between the male and female brain. A new book, The Female Brain, written by an American neuro-psychiatrist Louann Brizendine is the latest, and undoubtedly not the last, work to be published in this area (see the review by Janet Albrechtsen aptly titled "Feminism begs to differ, but unisex brain is a fantasy").

The scientific research should give heart to conservatives who have long held that there are naturally occurring differences between men and women which are hardwired into human biology.

(In fact, I think many conservatives would tend to the view that there is an essential masculinity to men and femininity to women, which forms a core part of our identity and which is reflected in traditional gender roles within the family and society.)

More Hollywood lies

Glory Road has just been released in Australia. It’s a film which claims to be the true story of the Texan Western Miners basketball team, an all-black team, which unexpectedly won the 1966 championship.

The film vilifies white America. It contends that black players weren’t accepted on university basketball teams and that the all-black team was met with racial violence and intimidation. As the American film critic William Arnold describes it,

In the middle of the film, there’s a devastating sequence of events that begins when one of the traveling Texas Western Miners is brutally assaulted in the restroom of a Southern restaurant by “crackers,” beaten bloody and then shoved head-first into a toilet in which we have just seen a man urinating.

Frightened by the incident, their confidence shaken, the Miners thereafter find, in an even more shocking scene, their motel rooms trashed, their personal belongings violated and the slogans “Niggers Die” and “Coons go home” scrawled all over the walls in what looks like either red paint or blood.

From here, the battered team takes a long, solemn bus ride to Seattle for its next game. When they arrive, the mood is so grim that Haskins’ assistant wants to give up. But Haskins can’t, because it’s become a moral crusade for him. “Just THINK of how these boys have been degraded and humiliated just because they’re black.”

Cut to the Seattle University game, where the fans are booing just like all the rest of the rednecks we have seen. And as a consequence of this abuse – the restaurant, the motel, the Seattle U fans – the Miners lose the game: the only loss of their magical season.

The Melbourne Herald Sun reviewer, Leigh Paatsch, fell for this portrayal of events. He came away from the film with the following belief about the Miners’ season,

Incredibly, until that time the very presence of non-white players was barely tolerated by schools, coaches or spectators.

Indeed, for much of the season chronicled by Glory Road, the Miners’ star players … are subjected to treatment seemingly lifted wholesale from a Ku Klux Klan guide to social etiquette.

Paatsch ought to have been more sceptical. The maltreatment of the black basketball players depicted in the film did not, in fact, occur. If we return to William Arnold’s review we finally get to the truth,

First, neither the restaurant nor the motel scenes actually happened to the Western Miners. This was divulged to me by the film’s producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, when I interviewed him a month before the film was released, Those incidents were made up, he said, “for dramatic purposes.”

Second, the racist reaction of the Seattle U fans is a fantasy. When I questioned the scene in my review of the film, a number of readers wrote to confirm my suspicion. “I was at the game,” one writes, “I was 12 years old at the time … It was a great game but there was no racial booing toward Texas that I remember.”

Another writes: “I am black. I was 16 when I listened to that game on the radio, and I don’t remember hearing any racially motivated booing, or any comment on such a response. I’m certain it never happened …”

Moreover, the ’66 Seattle University Chieftains were hardly the lily-white foe the movie depicts. As former player Mike Acres testifies in a recent issue of the Seattle University newspaper … they were “a predominantly black team. Four of our six top players were black.”

So the key scenes are made up. Why? Jerry Bruckheimer claims that it is for “dramatic purposes”. The problem is, though, that the film is being advertised as a true story, rather than dramatic fiction.

Jerry Bruckheimer must know that most people will respond like Leigh Paatsch, and accept the “dramatic” scenes in the film as historic fact, and draw negative conclusions about white Americans, their history and culture. In other words, Bruckheimer must know that the fabrications will have wider consequences than just adding cinematic drama.

It is another case of Hollywood manipulating public feeling. There’s not much we can do about it right now, except, of course, to distrust any Hollywood film dealing with such issues.

I can’t finish without one final quote from William Arnold. He too doesn’t accept that the fabrications in Glory Road are justified on dramatic grounds. He ends his review with this forthright comment:

When the movie untruth slaps you in the face, it’s not artistic licence: It’s a lie.

A sentimental victory

I found a book showcasing my home town, Melbourne, in a second-hand bookshop on the weekend.

Published in 1968 it is full of glorious photos of the Victorian era architecture of the inner suburbs, with Carlton featuring strongly.

So I was taken aback when I read the text accompanying the photos. The authors described the inner suburbs as follows,

In districts eventually destined for rebuilding the great majority of present-day residents still live in time-expired houses made habitable and, indeed, often presentable by renovation.

The argument that inner suburban areas must be rebuilt to provide residential accommodation for a much greater proportion of the population is patently true. The metropolitan sprawl cannot go on much longer ...

Central Melbourne - the city of the first hundred years is vanishing. It had much that was quaint and charming, but it was uneconomic and therefore an anachronism. Sentiment may yet preserve some of its buildings as curiosities, but they will never again much influence its atmosphere.

Such a dry economic rationalism! The love of place and heritage and gracious architecture is recognised only as sentimentality. The future belongs, it is claimed, to the more impersonal, objective requirements of scientific planning.

And initially history seemed to prove the authors right. A small part of Carlton was, indeed, demolished and replaced with modern, high-rise Housing Commission towers.

But "sentiment" was not so easily vanquished. Today, the Housing Commission area is considered a blot on the landscape, and the old Victorian terraces of the inner suburbs have soared in value. There are still many sections of the inner suburbs where the historic atmosphere has been largely preserved.

Ironically, it is the extraordinarily dry and technocratic views of the authors which now seem quaintly anachronistic rather than the Victorian terraces.

It's good to reflect that something relating more to the soul has proved stronger than an empty rationalism. I have often walked such inner suburban streets and felt connected to the historic character, and felt pride in what my own ancestors created, and enjoyed the pre-modern architectural design, with its emphasis on elegance and charm.

It seems I was not alone in valuing such things.

The no future clause

There are people who like the idea of liberalism. They are attracted by the thought that we might define who we are by our own individual choices.

Last year, authoress Lionel Shriver wrote an article for The Guardian in which she paid tribute to the liberal idea. But her article had an unexpected twist: she recognised in the very philosophy she was praising the seeds of Western decline.

So she wavers in her article between an appreciation of liberalism and an awareness that it has a no future clause for any society which adopts it.

Why no future? Because if we are concerned only to be autonomous in our choices, then we will shift our emphasis,

from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction

and this makes it less likely that we will commit ourselves to family life and children and the creation of new generations.

Lionel Shriver believes that this underlies the falling birthrate in Western countries. She describes what has happened to the culture of the West as follows:

Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lower-case gods of our private devising. We are less concerned with leading a good life than the good life ... We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty ... We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted.

We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don’t especially care what happens once we’re dead ... we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not ‘Did I serve family, God and country?’ but ‘Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon?

As I have mentioned, Lionel Shriver is not entirely unsympathetic to such a culture. She thinks it has an “upside” in people trying to live for the moment and pack as much as they can into their lives. Her liberalism, in fact, is utterly orthodox when she suggests that material progress may lead inevitably to a modern Western style culture:

Furthermore, prosperity may naturally lead any well-off citizenry to the final frontier: the self, whose borders are as narrow or infinite as we make them.

This is a pure and intense liberalism. The claim is that we ourselves can decide the limits of what we might become, which means that there are no limits. The self, in this view, is borderless and open.

(In contrast, conservatives would claim that we do have an inborn nature which gives a natural direction to our lives. An example would be our nature as men and women, which does influence our behaviour, our identity, our social roles and our ideals.)

Wavering women

Lionel Shriver, therefore, is a woman who believes in the liberal idea, but who regrets its major consequence: that the West won’t reproduce itself.

She develops this view further by interviewing some of her female friends, who similarly waver between their support for a liberal culture and their regret about a failure to reproduce.

First, there is 44-year-old Gabriella, who thought having children would compromise her autonomy – her freedom to choose – and only changed her mind when it was too late. She tells us that,

Having children in my 20s would have spelled the end of everything I had spent my life working towards and was about to really enjoy: the ability to spend my money the way I wanted, travel where I wanted, choose my partners, live as I wished.

Gabriella has accepted the fact of being childless, but she does feel some sense of loss that she has not passed on her genes to future generations. She states that,

If people like me don’t reproduce, civilisation may be the worse for it ... I am a typical product of my family; I can see the thread stretching back through the generations. Do I think it’s a shame that this genetic inheritance won’t continue? Yes I do ...

Then there is Nora. She is a childless woman who aims to continue “to have fun, to enjoy my job, to meet interesting people, to go on great holidays, to read interesting books” and so on.

But she too has regrets. “I think my parents came from an excellent gene pool," she says, "and it’s a shame that, to date, that hasn’t been passed on.” Then there’s this:

at the end of our exchange Nora declares fervently, “You and I should have had children!” – hastily appending that she meant not for our own sakes, but in social terms. “We’re blessed with brains, education and good health.” She admits that the longer our discourse has continued, “the more I think I am a squanderer of my gifts and my heritage. But I live in a decadent age where that doesn’t seem such a problem. Anyway, devoting my whole life to promulgating my ethnicity is a big ask.

And from here the balance in the article swings decisively to a disappointment with liberalism as a dead end. Lionel Shriver is moved to write:

Contentment. Happiness. Satisfaction. Fun. There’s nothing, strictly speaking, wrong with these concerns, but they are all of a piece. They fail to take into account that our individual lives are tiny beads in a string.

Our beloved present is merely the precarious link between the past and the future – of family, ethnicity, nation and species. We owe our very contentment ... to the ingenuity of our ancestors, yet it rarely seems to enter the modern childfree head that proper payback of that debt might entail handing the baton of our happy-happy heritage on to someone else.

Even more trenchantly she adds,

My friends and I are decent people – or at least we treat each other well. We’re interesting. We’re fun. But writ large, we’re an economic, cultural and moral disaster.

There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn’t make Gabriella and me the “mavericks” that we’d both have fancied ourselves in our younger days, but standard issue for our age. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy – a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise ...

Large sectors of western population have broken faith with the future.

In Lionel Shriver we have a liberalism grown wistful and self-critical, but too deeply ingrained to be jettisoned.

Let’s hope that others will take the further, necessary step of repudiating liberalism more decisively, as a mark of faith in our own future.

Taking the other side

In the news lately has been the story of Douglas Wood, the Australian kidnapped in Iraq and then rescued by US soldiers.

Today Douglas Wood told of the ruthlessness of his captors who executed two Iraqi hostages next to him and who beat him up for understating the amount of money he kept in his office safe.

At a press conference, Mr Wood called his kidnappers “a---holes”. Most of us would understand his use of such an uncomplimentary term. But Andrew Jaspan, the editor of The Age, Melbourne’s second newspaper, did not.

Andrew Jaspan called Douglas Wood “boorish” for using the term. As Jaspan himself explains it,

I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood’s use of the a---hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through ... The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive.

Labor Party speech writer Bob Ellis went even further in expressing his respect for the kidnappers by praising them as “honourable men (with) a well-treated captive.”

My point here is not to make a judgement about the morality of the war in Iraq. It’s to point out the capacity of some members of our cultural elite to identify with “the other," even to the point of defending cut-throat terrorists.

This is not a new phenomenon. More than a century ago an English poet, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, chose to defend the Mahdi uprising in the Sudan. When Sir Herbert Stewart defeated the Mahdi’s forces at Abu Klea, Blunt was moved to condemn the victorious British forces as “A mongrel scum of thieves ... without beliefs, without traditions” whereas “on the other side” were,

men with the memory of a thousand years of freedom, with chivalry inherited from the Saracens, the noblest of ancestors, with a creed the purest the world ever knew, worshipping God and serving him with arms like the heroes of the ancient world they are ...

Blunt’s admiration for the Mahdi’s forces was misplaced. The Mahdi revolt was partly a response to General Gordon’s efforts to outlaw the slave trade. Nor was the Mahdi’s programme the kind of idealised defence of an ancient tradition suggested by Blunt. Instead,

The Mahdi maintained that his movement was not a religious order that could be accepted or rejected at will, but that it was a universal regime, which challenged man to join or to be destroyed. The Mahdi modified Islam’s five pillars to support the dogma that loyalty to him was essential to true belief.

Personally, I am not sympathetic to any kind of imperialism. But Blunt was not just a critic of British imperialism. He was fundamentally disloyal to his own people. His mindset was to identify with “the other” almost to the point of reverence.

And these men we have with us still.

All brutes and barbarians?

Late last year I chose for the inaugural Biased History Award a school textbook which described the crusaders as follows:

They were all fanatics. Crusaders were fundamental extremists - mad warriors who were intent on causing havoc for whatever they believed. They were virtually religious terrorists.

This year's leading contender for the award has chosen the same theme. Film director Ridley Scott has made a $150 million feature about the crusades called Kingdom of Heaven. The New York Times pithily described the plot of the film this way:

Muslims are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists ruin everything.

According to an excellent review by Robert Spencer, the film invents a group called the "Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians" whose multicultural solidarity is only ruined by the activities of the Knights Templar.

This is too much even for academic historians. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith called the movie "rubbish", "not historically accurate at all", "nothing to do with reality" and "utter nonsense". He complained about the bias of a plot which depicts "the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised" in contrast to the Crusaders who "are all brutes and barbarians".

But to really get a grasp of how false the film is I suggest you read a short article called "The Real History of the Crusades" by Professor Thomas Madden of St Louis University. Professor Madden reminds us in this article of the reality of the situation which gave rise to the crusades:

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered.

When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

War hero too blokey?

The Australian Government has set up a body to examine which values should be taught in Australian schools. My first thought was that the "values" promoted would be the familiar liberal ones of tolerance, diversity and respect: values which are really more about "non-interference" rather than a positive ideal of behaviour and character.

I was pleasantly surprised therefore when the list of values finally appeared. Although tolerance, respect and inclusion are three of the values, so are integrity, honesty, trustworthiness and responsibility. The list, in other words, goes a little bit beyond mere "non-interference" and includes some values that are genuinely important to character.

But all is not well. A row has erupted over the design selected to accompany the "values" publications. It is an image of the Australian war hero John Simpson Kirkpatrick. Simpson was a stretcher bearer at Gallipoli and he risked his life many times rescuing wounded soldiers under heavy fire before finally being killed.

Andrew Blair, who represents school principals on the values advisory body, has complained that the image is "very blokey" and he has asked "why would you go in with an image that is grounded in ... heroism in conflict, and not about tolerance, trust - all of the issues that are embedded in the program?"

The liberal orthodoxy bites back! For Andrew Blair it is the old liberal faithfuls of "tolerance" and "trust" which are the "issues" embedded in the programme. Poor old Simpson is just too heroic and too masculine a figure to represent these modern liberal "values".

Conclusions? First, notice how restrictive liberalism really is, despite all its talk about individual choice and personal freedom. It struggles to permit anything beyond the passive value of non-interference, which is re-badged in various ways as tolerance, trust, respect etc. It struggles even to accept the masculinity and heroism of a man who was a humble member of the Field Ambulance and who gave his life to help save his mates. How limiting is this to our ideals of human conduct and human nature! It ends up making us very small.

Second, if Andrew Blair really is representative of secondary school principals, it's highly unlikely that Australian schools will ever attempt to develop a positive masculine character in boys. This is a role, it seems, that fathers are going to have to undertake themselves.

Rethinking the left: Paul Kingsnorth

Generally speaking there are two kinds of liberals. Both kinds believe that people need to be "liberated" from whatever impedes their individual will and reason.

Right liberals, though, have a special focus on economic activity. They see the individual more as an economic unit and stress the removal of restrictions on labour and capital.

Left liberals prefer to focus on social activity. They typically emphasise the "liberation" of the individual from unchosen forms of national identity, family life, sexuality, gender etc. They are more supportive of the idea of state planning over the economy and society than right liberals.

Usually, most of the political debate in the West is between right and left liberals. Even though they share a common philosophical starting point they still often see each other passionately as the enemy.

Paul Kingsnorth is a young British writer. He is a left-liberal, though more opposed to the role of the state than most on the left. He has written a column for the Melbourne Age (The Citizens of Nowhere 20/9/03) which is interesting in the way it goes beyond the usual distinction between left and right liberalism.

In part the column follows the usual pattern. Kingsnorth, as you would expect of a left liberal, hammers the enemy (right liberals) for their focus on the individual as an economic unit.

Kingsnorth chooses, for instance, to criticise Bill Emmott, editor of The Economist, by claiming that Emmott's version of progress is "posited on turning everyone on earth into a wap-wielding, choice-chasing consumer, drifting through a global pleasure garden in which each place is much like every other and everything is for sale".

It's usually difficult for a conservative to remain patient with these kind of left liberal attacks on right liberalism. It's not because conservatives can't see some truth in the claims. Conservatives don't want a society based on a shallow consumerism any more than left liberals.

The problem is that left liberals usually remain blind to the way that they themselves have prepared the way for a consumeristic, materialistic, globalised culture. After all, it is the left who have led the charge to break down alternative standards of culture based on national traditions, a stable family life, accepted standards of morality and so on.

Having "deconstructed" such traditions, it seems a bit naive for the left to then complain when the gap is filled by a shallow commercial culture.

Kingsnorth, though, is different. He is willing to admit that the left has contributed to the rise of a globalised, commercial culture. He says of the supporters of globlisation that:

it is not just The Economist reading right who swell their ranks ... While the neo-liberal [ie right liberal] citizens of nowhere celebrate the birth of a global market ... another group, the liberal [ie left liberal] citizens of nowhere help them along...

Nor does Kingsnorth see this as being only a recent phenomenon. He notes that:

For longer than a century, sections of the idealistic left have dreamt of a world made up ... of "global citizens" casting off the chains of geography and nationality

Kingsnorth gives the particular example of the left-wing novelist H.G. Wells who in 1933 encouraged "modern-minded people" to reject traditional governments and to "make over the world into a great world civilisation."

Kingsnorth is to be congratulated, therefore, on his clear-sighted recognition that left-liberals, in wanting to be "unrestrained" by national traditions, have helped pave the way for right-liberal economic globalisers.

Which leaves one final question. How does Kingsnorth choose to oppose the globalism of both left and right liberals? Remarkably, Kingsnorth takes a conservative approach. He views the attempt to break down traditional forms of connectedness in order to create an unrestrained, unimpeded individual as creating not true liberty, but an unhappy rootlessness and alienation.

This is implied, firstly, in his description of the new global class:

Rootless, technocratic, unburdened by the baggage of locality or the complications of history, they exist in every nation but feel attached to none.

It is more explicit in the following comments:

It has long been a touchstone of "progress" that place, and attachment to it, is an anachronism ... Barriers are broken down by the mass media, technology and trade laws. Rootless, we gain freedom, placeless, we belong everywhere. Yet placelessness and rootlessness create not contentment but despair...

The rising tide of this global progress, we are told, will lift all boats. The trouble is that some of our boats are anchored; anchored by place, tradition, identity, a sense of belonging...

...the citizens of nowhere ultimately inhabit an empty world ... Disconnected from reality, they can make decisions that destroy real places, to which people are connected, at the stroke of a pen.

The rest of us can join the citizens of nowhere in their empire of the placeless, or we can build new relationships with our own landscapes and our own communities. We can build on our pasts or dismiss them ...

As you might guess, Kingsnorth, coming as he does from the left, is not very reliable in his conservatism. I took the trouble to read a book he has recently published called One No, Many Yeses. It was disappointingly orthodox in its left-liberalism (or more exactly left-libertarianism).

Still, I think he's to be congratulated for the approach taken in the newspaper article. He has thought his way through to a more consistent opposition to globalisation than most left-wing writers.

(First published at Conservative Central 26/01/2004)

Biased History Award 2004

There's a lot of history with a left-wing bias out there, but I think I have found a clear-cut winner for the Biased History Award of 2004.

In a Year 8 textbook used widely in secondary schools here in Victoria, students are taught the following about the Christian knights who went on the crusades:

They were all fanatics. Crusaders were fundamental extremists - mad warriors who were intent on causing havoc for whatever they believed. They were virtually religious terrorists.

For an alternative, more grounded view of the crusaders click here.