fighting back in the culture wars

Is there anything we can do in the way of fighting back in the culture wars? There are times when it seems hopeless but there are a few things we can do as individuals and on a group basis. 

One thing we can do is learn to be better at watching each other’s backs. Conservatives have been operating as lone wolves while leftists always hunt in packs. We need to hunt in packs as well. That does not imply that we should copy the vicious tactics of leftists but we should make it clear that we’re not going to let individual conservatives get picked off one at a time. 

We need to network more. It’s true that we are divided. The paleo-conservatives and the traditionalist conservatives and the alt-right disagree strongly about many things. However we need to remember that the Left is even more divided. The Left today is composed of countless lobby groups with virtually no interests in common. And yet they will always close ranks against us. There seems to be no good reason why we can’t do the same.

We should follow the example of Ron Unz. At Unz Review he has collected together a formidable array of writers. They cover a very broad range of the political spectrum. What they have in common is that all are dissidents. All are outlaws as far as the mainstream media is concerned. These are voices that would otherwise be unheard. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with another dissident - any dissident is worth supporting. 

Taki’s Magazine is also worthwhile. We need to support such sites. Without them a lot more voices would be silenced.

We need to offer moral support to other conservatives, even if it’s nothing more than leaving an occasional brief comment just to let a conservative blogger know that his blog does get read. 

Networking outside the online world is more difficult but it’s not impossible. In Australia we have groups like the Melbourne Traditionalists. The Upon Hope and Oz Conservative blogs have more information about this group.

The best antidote to despair is the knowledge that you are not alone, that other people do share your beliefs and concerns.

paralysed by history

History matters. It matters a good deal. This is something that leftists have always understood, and it’s something that conservatives have consistently failed to understand. As Orwell pointed out in 1984 if you control the past you control the present. A sense of corporate identity, of national identity, is the product of history. If history can be manipulated then that sense of identity can be destroyed. More importantly perhaps, if our faith in out own history can be undermined then our sense of a shared positive identity evaporates.

This is what has happened to European history, and conservatives have allowed it to happen. Leftists have pushed the line, remorselessly, that the history of western civilisation is nothing more than a record of oppression, crime, victimisation, brutality, ignorance, superstition, cynicism and hypocrisy. Conservatives should have resisted this process and they have failed to do so. As a result the West is now paralysed, morally and spiritually, by its own history. 

The irony of course is that the Left has a whole lot more to be ashamed of in its history, but leftists never ever apologise for their history. Stalin’s regime murdered tens of millions of people. Mao’s regime killed tens of millions of people. Pol Pot’s regime slaughtered millions of people. You would expect that it would be leftists suffering from a crippling paralysis as a result of their murderous history. But they don’t. It’s conservatives who are ashamed of their history.

Mention colonialism to a conservative and he will immediately start apologising. Mention anything connected with race to a conservative and he will immediately start apologising. Mention women to a conservative and he will begin apologising for the oppression of women. Mention Christianity to a conservative and he will apologise for all the supposed crimes of Christianity. Mention the Industrial Revolution to a conservative and he will apologise for sending children down the coal mines. Mention the possibility that things might have been better in the past and conservatives are reduced to abject terror that somehow they will be tainted by accusations of fascism - and of course they immediately start to apologise. Mention any historical event and the apologies will inevitably begin.

This mania has apologising has one obvious and certain result - it will be interpreted as an admission of guilt, an admission that every accusation leftists throw at western civilisation must be true. If the accusations were not true why would conservatives be apologising? 

It is not necessary, and never was necessary, for conservatives to claim that western civilisation was perfect. Every human civilisation that has ever existed has had its faults and has done things that were less than admirable. That’s simply human nature. It is not necessary, and never was necessary, for conservatives to attempt to denigrate other civilisations. It is unnecessary and it is a huge tactical mistake - it comes across as both arrogant and defensive.

All conservatives ever needed to do was to counter the criticism levelled at the West by pointing out the West’s very considerable achievements. Europeans were the first people in history to outlaw slavery. Western society has, by comparison with every other civilisation in history, treated women remarkably well. Colonialism was in many ways an unfortunate and misguided experiment but on balance it did more good than harm. And almost everything that has made life relatively comfortable and pleasant has been invented by European men - without European men we would not have electricity, antibiotics, anaesthesia, sewerage, cars, trains, aircraft, recorded music, telephones and countless other things that no sane person would wish to live without. Without western civilisation the world have been denied Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, the glories of Renaissance painting and countless other artistic treasures. 

Creating a civilisation is nothing to apologise for. Life before civilisation was not only remarkably unpleasant, it was remarkably violent. As Lawrence  H. Keeley points out in War Before Civilisation pre-civilised societies are infinitely more violent than modern western civilisation. Even the bloodbaths of the 20th century caused proportionately fewer deaths than occur in pre-civilised societies in the normal course of events. Which is of course another reason why it is mistaken to apologise for colonialism.

All conservatives have ever needed to do to win the history wars is to put the case for western civilisation. Instead of which they have chosen surrender and have given the victory to the Left by default.

Racism is alive and well - among the Greens

Leftists have been telling us for years that racism is alive and well in Australia. It turns out they were right. A journalist on the notoriously left-wing Melbourne newspaper The Age has discovered a particularly obnoxious nest of such racists in the heart of Melbourne.

But these racists are not quite what the leftist media might have led you to believe they’d be. They’re not rednecks. They’re not working-class. They’re not Christians. They’re not evil conservatives. They’re middle-class, very wealthy, LGBTQwhatever-friendly, environmentally conscious, atheist, feminist and they vote solidly for the Greens. They live in inner-city Fitzroy where the local town hall is festooned with banners proclaiming "refugees are welcome here." 

But they are racists. They don’t send their children to the local primary schools because the local primary schools are very diverse and multi-cultural. No, they send their children to primary schools much further afield - primary schools that are almost entirely white. It seems they don’t want their precious offspring to have to mix with non-whites.

The best part of the article from The Age is the comments section. It’s absolutely hilarious watching the mental contortions these hypocrites perform in their desperate efforts to argue that they’re not racist just because they want their kids to be safely segregated from contact with non-white kids.

The funniest comment of all is from the person who tries to argue that it’s not racism at all - he’s just terrified his kids might come into contact with some of those nasty scary people from the lower socioeconomic groups. Because poor people are so icky, aren’t they? Apparently they’re even ickier than non-white people!

There is truly no limit to leftist hypocrisy.

I was led to the subject matter for this post by a post at OzConservative.

conservative strategies

A recent post at Upon Hope asks why conservatives seem to be poor at strategy and further asks what can be done to correct this. These are extremely valid points. 

A couple of things suggest themselves. I think we need to abandon any faith in mainstream “conservative” parties. They have always betrayed us, and always will. Ignore them. Bypass them. Concentrate on grass-roots activism on specific issues. And choose issues on which it is possible to gain widespread popular support.

The transgender nonsense is an obvious one. The truth is that most people think it has gone way too far and has reached the point of being dangerous insanity. Most people are too afraid to express such sceptical views openly but that doesn’t change the fact that most people are very uncomfortable indeed about the idea of men sharing bathrooms with their daughters. What we need to do is to encourage people to overcome their fears - let the silent majority know that on this issue they really are the majority. And as commenter Mark Richardson points out, a boycott of the US Target chain is already having some effect.

We also need to look at where we might find allies. The big losers in society over the past few decades have been working class people. They have been betrayed by all the mainstream political parties and they have suffered at the hands of Big Business and the globalist elites. They are disillusioned but they do nothing about it because they see no alternatives. Offer them alternatives. Reach out to them. Working-class people tend towards social conservatism anyway. It’s not working-class people who have pushed the homosexual agenda, or feminism, or lunatic environmentalism. Or mass immigration. These insanities are often described as Stuff White People Like but in fact they’re Stuff Middle Class People Like.

Working-class people know that globalism is not good for them and they know that Big Business is not their friend. Big Business is also no friend to conservatives. Big Business is solidly liberal. Bankers love liberalism. They love identity politics. It keeps people’s attention directed away from their own activities. 

The working class is a natural recruiting ground for conservatives. All we need to do is to convince them that conservatism is not all about greed. Which is another reason to abandon the mainstream “conservative” parties - they really are all about greed.

And we need to put as much distance as we possibly can between ourselves and the neocons. We need to be relentless in hammering home the message that neconservativism has nothing to do with actual conservatism.

freedom, choice and conformism

Yet another kerfuffle over trans nonsense with Germaine Greer in the firing line once again. The most instructive thing about it is the nature of the Twitter outrage. Liberals do love to give the impression that they are in favour of choice, freedom, autonomy, etc. 

And of course human rights. This week it seems that our most precious human right is the right to choose our own gender. The silliness of this is so obvious as to require no further comment.

What is really amusing is to see liberals noisily jumping up and down about freedom and choice. Amusing, because no-one hates freedom and choice more than liberals. 

A liberal’s idea of freedom is that everyone should have the right to make the choices that liberals tell them to make. Any other choices are entirely unacceptable.

Liberals are in fact even more conformist than ordinary folks. Liberals are positively terrified of nonconformity. The very idea that they might one day find themselves thinking a nonconformist thought reduces them to gibbering wrecks. 

This was not always true. A hundred and fifty years ago, in the heyday of classical liberalism, liberals really did believe in choice and freedom. What we call liberalism today bears no resemblance whatsoever to classical liberalism.

This might be one of the reasons that this modern variant of liberalism has been so successful in dominating debate on social and cultural issues while conservatism has failed utterly on those same fronts. It might also be the reason that classical liberalism is stone dead. The reality is that most people do want freedom. The proportion of the population that actually wants to have freedom is so tiny as to be statistically insignificant. People want to belong. They want to belong to a group and they want to be accepted unquestioningly as members of that group. The safest way to achieve that is by rigid conformity. Wanting to conform is the norm. The urge to conform overwhelms just about every other urge.

Modern liberalism answers that need. Accept the liberal creed and you need never trouble yourself with thought ever again. You need never fear failing to conform because such failure is not tolerated. You have a ready-made set of beliefs and a ready-made set of rules to obey. Obey the rules and you prove your orthodoxy and you are safe from accusations of heresy. Even better, you need never worry that deep down inside you might be a secret heretic. As long as you follow the party line heresy is simply impossible. It’s extremely comforting. It especially appeals to young people in whom the urge to conform is particularly strong.

Of course the rules change from time to time. In fact they change often. That’s no problem. As long as you read The Guardian or The Sydney Morning Herald or watch the BBC or the ABC you will always be able to keep up with the latest changes and change your badthoughts to goodthoughts instantly. And these constant rule changes are a good thing -  the help the authorities to stamp out any embers of smouldering heresy. Heretics (like Germaine Greer) can be instantly identified and dealt with. Nothing comforts the orthodox more than knowing that heresy will never be permitted to raise its disturbing head.

So maybe liberals aren’t crazy. Maybe they just understand human nature better than conservatives do. Conservatives have done a very poor job of offering people a sense of identity and security. 

the coming white guilt crisis

The liberal agenda that has triumphed throughout the western world in the past fifty years is driven by one factor - white guilt. Everything about modern liberalism comes down to white guilt.

It’s not difficult to see why this happened. After the two world wars it was understandable that western civilisation would undergo a crisis of confidence. The correct response would have been to abandon the modernist ideas that almost destroyed us, but people driven by emotion rarely draw the correct conclusions. The faulty conclusion that was drawn was that western civilisation was inherently evil and deserved to be destroyed. Western civilisation was seen as racist, sexist, homophobic, patriarchal and a danger to the planet. Christianity was seen as part of the evil of our civilisation. Driven by emotion westerners adopted a sentimental woolly-minded approach to the world. Environmentalism, feminism, the LGBTxyz madness - all this craziness was fueled by white guilt. White people felt guilty about absolutely everything. Today white people even feel guilty about the weather.

All this is of course obvious. The question that arises is - what happens if there’s a shortage of white people? Compared to a century ago white people are now a very small proportion of the earth’s population. Within a few decades even in many western countries white people will be a minority. And that means there’s going to be a serious shortage of white guilt.

This kind of guilt really is exclusively a white phenomenon. Non-white people (quite reasonably) can see no reason why they should feel guilty about western civilisation’s attempts to destroy itself. 

It’s not even a white thing - eastern Europeans seem to be far less afflicted with this illness. Ironically it appears that communism protected the people of eastern Europe from the worst excesses of liberalism.

So can liberalism survive without white guilt to fuel it? And how will the world look when the white guilt shortage becomes critical?

Obviously environmentalism will be swept away. Only guilt-ridden white people buy into any of that nonsense. The LGBT silliness will be much more difficult to sustain. The transgender madness will lose traction entirely. You can convince a white person that a man wearing a frock is a woman and always has been a woman but to a non-white person he’s just a guy in a frock. Feminism will suffer a body blow. Non-whites (or at least some of them) will tolerate the less extreme manifestations of feminism, but they won’t swallow the extreme stuff. 

And what of race? Without white guilt politics will become avowedly racial, with each racial/ethnic group pursuing its own interests. White “anti-racists” will no longer be required and will find themselves despised and ignored.

Of course liberals don’t think any of this will happen. They believe that everyone will become an anti-racist anti-sexist anti-homophobic tree-hugging liberal. This seems very unlikely. Such sentiments can only exist when there is a plentiful supply of white guilt to fuel them. Take away the white guilt and the bottom drops out of the market for liberalism. Liberals will make the unpleasant discovery that liberalism is a white thing. The Liberal Brave New World that liberals have dreamt about for so long will turn out to be just that - a dream.

can democracy be made to work?

Regular readers will know that I’m sceptical of democracy. To me democracy is simply a marketplace for the buying and selling of political favours. Politicians sell their services. Sometimes they sell their services for cash. This kind of blatant corruption is actually the least terrible kind. Sometimes politicians sell their services in exchange for campaign funding. This is worse but it’s still not the most pernicious element of the system.

More often politicians sell their services in exchange for votes. In other words they sell their services in exchange for power. Voters sell their votes in return for political favours. This is the real problem. It’s like prostitution - it corrupts both the buyer and the seller.

The theory behind democracy is that voters will vote for the party or candidate who will do the best job for the country. This is pure fantasy. People vote for the party or candidate who will do the most for them personally, or for the particular interest group with which they identify.

There are conservatives who think that democracy works reasonably well in an ethnically and culturally homogenous society. There is some truth to this. If a society is divided along ethnic and cultural lines the problems with democracy will be exacerbated. However, even in an ethnically and culturally homogenous society democracy (as we know it) will still fail. No society is truly homogenous. There will always be interest groups. There will always be farming lobbies, mining lobbies, trade unions and countless other interest groups intent on getting the best deals for themselves. There will always be groups that coalesce around some ideology. There will always be groups that self-identify along cultural lines, or class lines. There will always be regional interests. The voters of Lancashire will put the interests of Lancashire ahead of the interests of Britain. The voters of Tasmania will put the interests of Tasmania ahead of the interests of Australia. There will always be special interest groups. Democracy still ends up being a corrupt system of patronage.

The question is - is there any way that democracy can be made workable? Do we need to throw out the baby with the bath water?

There are a few things that might help. Governments in Australia are always complaining about how difficult it is to pass new laws since they need to get them passed by both houses of parliament and it is almost impossible for a government to control a stable  majority in both houses. In actual fact that is a feature, not a bug, of the Australian political system. Changing the law and passing new laws should be difficult. It should be very difficult indeed. It should be difficult because mostly the laws do not need to be changed and most new laws are either entirely unnecessary or positively dangerous. If you can’t have sensible government it’s better to have weak government.

What we really need to do is to return to being a constitutional monarchy. At the moment we are not a constitutional monarchy in any meaningful sense of the term. A true constitutional monarchy should have a balance of power between Crown and Parliament. The function of the Crown should be to protect us from the follies and the corruption of politicians, and from the follies and short-sightedness of the electorate. A monarch with the ability to dissolve Parliament and force a new election at any time on his own initiative and with the ability to veto unwise laws would have saved us from many unwise legislative stupidities. The royal veto would not need to be absolute. You could allow a mechanism for overruling such a veto. A good mechanism would be to allow a prime minister in such a situation to ask for a dissolution of Parliament. If he can win the subsequent election, get the law through the new Parliament and then have it passed by a referendum the veto would be nullified. If the law was genuinely necessary, or at least harmless, that would not be a problem. If the law was unnecessary, or dangerous, there’s a very good chance it would fail at some stage of the process.

It would be cumbersome. That’s the beauty of it. A king who exercised his veto too often would become very unpopular so it’s likely that it would only be exercised sparingly. A prime minister who tried to force through potentially harmful legislation would almost certainly find himself out of office.

The essence of a workable political system is that it should be based on a genuine balance of powers and it should err on the side of caution. No current western democracy fulfills those two conditions. A truly workable system is just about possible but it will require some major changes.