Maverick Philosopher

Radical Islam's Threat to the Left

Substack latest.

Why don't leftists — who obviously do not share the characteristic values and beliefs of Islamists — grant what is spectacularly obvious to everyone else, namely, that radical Islam poses a grave threat to what we in the West cherish as civilization, which includes commitments to free speech, open inquiry, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom to reject religion, universal suffrage, the emancipation of women, opposition to cruel and unusual penal practices, and so on?   In particular, why don't leftists recognize the grave threat radical Islam poses to them?  Why do leftists either deny the threat or downplay its gravity? Given their atheism and pronounced libertine ‘wobble,’ they would be among the first to lose their heads under Islamic law (Sharia).

Here is a quickly-composed  list of twelve related reasons based on my own thinking and reading and on discussions with friends. 

And You Call for a Cease-Fire?

Take a look at the massacre map. Then read this:

The world is yet again staring at the near inevitability of another global conflagration.   The flashpoint is in the Middle East and the Hitler of our time: the Mullahs of Iran.   The West, led by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have chosen to follow in the footsteps of the self-absorbed European leaders of the 1930’s in dealing with Iran and their terrorist legions of Hamas, Hezb’allah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Ansar Allah (Houthis) among others.

The Obama/Biden policy in dealing with Iran has been to facilitate Iran in becoming a dominant player in the region in the naïve belief that if the West, and in particular the United States, treats the Mullahs of Iran as equals, they will evolve into non-belligerent leaders who can be trusted.  Even if that means the acquisition of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and sacrificing America’s only resolute ally in the region, Israel.

But is the disastrous Obama-Biden policy naïve, or is it something worse: a deliberate attempt to "fundamentally transform" (in Obama's words), and thus destroy the USA?  For example, why are no steps being taken by the Biden administration to control the southern (and northern) borders when it is a known fact that jihadis are entering the homeland?

Before 7 October it was clear enough that the purpose of the open border policy was to change the demographics of the USA in such a way as to make possible the permanent ascendancy of the Democrat Party. But now it can be seen that more nefarious motives were and are at work: to increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks within the homeland.  And what would they accomplish? They would give the current regime the excuse it needs for an even more draconian assault on the middle class and traditional American liberties.

UPDATE 1 (11/1)

Senator Hawley in a Congressional hearing hammers Alejandro Mayorkas who bears the Orwellian appellation "Director of Homeland Security." Is there anyone in the Biden administration more emblematic of the abysmal mendacity of said administration? 

These are very dangerous times. You'd best prepare for the immediate here and the possibly soon-to-arrive hereafter.

UPDATE 2 (11/1)

Pope Francis has called for a cease-fire:

"Ceasefire," he said, mentioning a recent television appeal by Father Ibrahim Faltas, one of the Vatican's representatives in the Holy Land.

He then added in his own words: "We say 'ceasefire, ceasefire'. Brothers and sisters, stop! War is always a defeat, always".

What he means, presumably, is that war is always a defeat for humanity. Is Bergoglio ignorant of recent European history and in particular the Second World War? If the Allies had not defeated the Axis powers, humanity (in the normative sense) and the high civilization of the Judeo-Christian type that the good pope supposedly represents, would have ceased to exist.

 

John Lennon famously if foolishly sang, "Give peace a chance." What he and Bergoglio the Benighted fail to understand is that sometimes we have to give war a chance.

 

Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. The price of peace is a credible deterrent. Weakness and appeasement invite attack. Joe Biden is weak on multiple fronts; no surprise then that the upshot is war on multiple fronts.  

 

Conciliation is obviously a very high value. But how conciliate those who are religiously committed to your extermination? How conciliate those who would rather die than permit you to live?

 

 

 

 

Is There No Limit to Biden's Vicious Mendacity?

Apparently not. And you voted for him? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? 

Diplomad 2.0 on the Biden 'Special' Counsel

We all know it's a joke, a joke worthy of that all-time jokester and comedian, Lavrenti Beria.

Beria would have appreciated AG Garland's "sudden" naming of a Special Counsel to look into Hunter Biden, this after years of saying no SC was needed. He also would have appreciated that the Special Counsel (SC) named is none other than US Attorney David Weiss (another miserable Trump appointment), who "investigated" Hunter for the past three three years: remember the laptop? On top of it, Beria would have appreciated how Garland has violated the law by picking Weiss; the law requires that the SC come from outside of the government, certainly not be a DOJ Attorney and the one, on top of it all, who has protected the Biden Crime Family (BCF) for these past three years. Let us not forget that Weiss masterminded that other joke: the "plea deal" for Hunter which would have allowed that crackhead to skate on serious tax fraud and gun charges that would have put any of us in the slammer for years.

Well, of course, it turned out some honest judge threw out the plea deal as it contained promises of, in essence, permanent immunity for Hunter from any other prosecutions. 

Read it all.  Garland & Co. see themselves and their 'president' as above the law while piously intoning, "No man is above the law, not even the president of the United States."  

'2A' a Terrorist Marker?

It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.'  The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

I have written sentences like this:

2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.

My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime.  What does it make the regime? A police state.

So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.'  Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin.  Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection.  There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.

Sarcasm aside, part of understanding  the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion.  You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.  Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.

 

Anarcho-Tyranny in the USA

Here by Auron MacIntyre at The Total State (Substack):

The city of Philadelphia has announced an agreement to pay a $9.25 million settlement in connection with the police response to protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020. While dozens were killed and billions of dollars of damage were done during the riots that raged across America for weeks in the summer of 2020, it is the participants themselves who will be paid restitution by the government.

Law and order in the United States have now descended to a level of anarcho-tyranny in which the government funds rioters with the tax money of their victims. The slow death of the rule of law in America would be ugly enough, but what we are witnessing instead is the twisted, grimacing corpse of a system that was once designed to protect the safety of Americans now being used to punish us for disagreeing with our political elites.

UPDATE 3/24

This fellow and I so far appear to be 'on the same page.' Two days ago, before I had heard of him, I spoke of our time as 

. . . a time when those in control of the state apparatus have forgotten, or rather willfully ignore, the purposes that justify government in the first place, namely, the tasks of securing the life, liberty, and property of those governed. But the Orwellian wokesters now in charge invert these values in the Orwellian manner and aid and abet those who aim at the opposite.

As MacIntyre points out, what we are witnessing is "more than the slow death of the rule of law," but the inversion of our founding values. And yet brazen liars such as Nancy Pelosi yammer on about the rule of law while her shills in the media intone in unison the scripted mantra, "No one is above the law," as they pervert the law Soviet-style to destroy Donald J. Trump.  Thankfully, Nancy dear is no longer with us (nor against us) politically speaking; others, however, far worse and more dangerous because less stupid, will take her place.

And as usual the Left Coast leads the way. (Because it is closer to China?) Here is Substacker David Zweig on lockdown and surveillance Santa Clara-style.

How Low Can We Sink?

Seen at SOTU 2023 as worn by Senator Ed Markey, Massachusetts Democrat:

For a long time now, the Democrats have been the abortion party. But under the 'leadership' of the 'devout Catholic,' Joe Biden, they've 'evolved' to use the Hillary word which means    devolved: they now celebrate abortion by expressing 'love' for it.  And they are not above using rank Orwellianisms to express their 'love.' "Abortion is health care" is the most outrageous of them.  

Story here.

A Secret Plan to Destroy America

Malcolm Pollack recommends the following. I've reproduced it verbatim. It is that good. 

...............................

Democrat and former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm gave the following speech in Washington, DC in 2003. Originally published on CAIRCO in 2014.

I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and they all fall, and that “an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” Here is my plan:

1. We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. One scholar, Seymour Martin Lipset, put it this way: “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with its Basques, Bretons and Corsicans.”

2. I would then invent “multiculturalism” and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal: that there are no cultural differences that are important. I would declare it an article of faith that the black and Hispanic dropout rate is only due to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out-of-bounds.

3. We can make the United States a “Hispanic Quebec” without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently, “The apparent success of our own multiethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved, not by tolerance, but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentrically, and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.” I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with a salad bowl metaphor. It is important to insure that we have various cultural sub-groups living in America reinforcing their differences, rather than Americans emphasizing their similarities.

4. Having done all this, I would make our fastest-growing demographic group the least educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50 percent dropout rate from school.

5. I would then get the big foundations and big business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of victimology. I would get all minorities to think their lack of success was all the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority population.

6. I would establish dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties. I would “celebrate diversity.” “Diversity” is a wonderfully seductive word. It stresses differences rather than commonalities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other – that is, when they are not killing each other. A “diverse,” peaceful or stable society is against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together, and we can take advantage of this myopia.

Look at the ancient Greeks. Dorf’s “World History” tells us: “The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshiped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic Games in honor of Zeus, and all Greeks venerated the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. A common enemy, Persia, threatened their liberty. Yet, all of these bonds together were not strong enough to overcome two factors … (local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions …)” If we can put the emphasis on the “pluribus,” instead of the “unum,” we can balkanize America as surely as Kosovo.

7. Then I would place all these subjects off-limits – make it taboo to talk about. I would find a word similar to “heretic” in the 16th century that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like “racist”, “xenophobe” halt argument and conversation. Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of “victimology,” I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws. I would develop a mantra – ”because immigration has been good for America, it must always be good.” I would make every individual immigrant sympatric and ignore the cumulative impact.

8. Lastly, I would censor Victor Davis Hanson’s book “Mexifornia” – this book is dangerous; it exposes my plan to destroy America. So please, please – if you feel that America deserves to be destroyed–please, please – don’t buy this book! This guy is on to my plan.

'Democrats' Aping National Socialists

Excellent commentary here:

In two years, the Nazis went from being a fringe party to having a stranglehold on the German government and people. It was then that they unleashed their previously subdued anti-Semitism, from boycotts to book burnings to de facto discrimination to de jure separation (Nuremberg laws) and, finally, to the Final Solution.

We can be almost sure that, if we asked any German in 1932 whether it would be okay to enslave and murder Jews, he would most certainly have said no. But within two years, Jews would officially be defined as an inferior race and have their political and economic freedoms curtailed. Within a decade, millions would be murdered.

As Martin Niemöller suggests in his 1946 poem “First they came,” the Nazis were able to accomplish their goals by taking baby steps of oppression with little discernible pushback from a willfully gullible public.

So it is that we find ourselves in America in 2022 with fascism ascendant. And unlike what the media would want you to believe, it’s not Donald Trump who’s leading the parade. For just over two years, we’ve seen the evil of fascism take hold as it’s never held sway before. Consider the following:

In the summer of 2020, Democrats rained hell down on America by allowing, encouraging, and funding urban terrorists who destroyed property, attacked citizens and the police, and killed dozens of people.

In 2020 and beyond, despite years of watching Democrats assail election integrity, anyone who questioned the highly unlikely outcome of the 2020 election was branded as an anti-democratic conspiracy nut and accused of supporting insurrection.

The riot that occurred on January 6, 2021, was labeled an “insurrection” and hundreds of citizens who had been welcomed into the US Capital or standing on its grounds were arrested, labeled as terrorists, and thrown in solitary confinement for months without charge or bail. At the same time, among the crowd were provocateurs in whom the FBI was suspiciously uninterested.

By politicizing the Department of Justice, the Biden administration and other Democrats have used the “insurrection” pretense to harass, intimidate, arrest, and jail Trump’s supporters, members of his administration, and his legal team. This harassment eventually led to the unprecedented step of the Justice Department and the FBI raiding the home of the former president and future presidential contender.

Beginning in 2020, in response to COVID, primarily Democrat-run states and municipalities across the country instituted draconian lockdown edicts that eviscerated individual rights, destroyed small businesses, and ostracized or arrested individuals who resisted. Simultaneously teachers’ unions nationwide forced school shutdowns, leading to extraordinary declines in student learning and dramatic increases in youth depression. Those seen questioning the efficacy of or damage from such lockdowns and shutdowns were unconstitutionally muzzled when the administration covertly worked with social media companies to silence and de-platform them.

The Biden administration issued mandates for rapidly developed vaccines of dubious efficacy and unknown danger; then coerced private enterprises to enforce them. Questioning that policy or non-acquiescence with it was seen as a proxy for opposition to the regime, so the government and allied businesses threatened and destroyed livelihoods.

When Americans stood up to school boards, complaining about their children being exposed to sexualization in schools or being accused of being racists because of the color of their skin, Biden’s Justice Department branded them as terrorists.

The Biden administration’s threatening, intimidating, and jailing of its opposition set the backdrop for Joe Biden’s extraordinary speech on September 1, when he stated, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” This was not a campaign speech; this was the President officially addressing American citizens…and calling 70 million of them terrorists.

Is the Left Out for Power Alone?

Tucker Carlson and many other conservatives say that the Left is out for power alone, but it is not true. I grant, of course, that leftists love power and will do anything to gain it and maintain it. But why do they want it? Not for the sake of power alone, but to implement their agenda which they believe will be good for them and their clients. It is for the sake of the agenda -- the things to be done -- that leftists want power.

 

With their hands on the levers of power, the Democrats can keep the borders open, empty the prisons, defund the police except for the state police, confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens, do away with the filibuster, give felons the right to vote while in prison, outlaw home schooling, alter curricula to promote the 'progressive' worldview (by among other things injecting 1619 Project fabrications into said curricula), infiltrate and ultimately destroy the institutions of civil society, pass 'hate speech' laws to squelch dissent, suppress religion, and so on into the abyss of leftist nihilism.

Is the January 6th 'Insurrection' the Left's Reichstag Fire?

I put the title question to an historian. Here is his response:

It is not too far of a stretch to consider January 6^th as the Left’s Reichstag fire, in that the Left is portraying the former event, chaotic but minor, as a serious insurrection against the Republic, the very Republic that the Left despises, as the Nazis despised the Weimar Republic. Obviously, the Reichstag Fire Decree (suspension of habeas corpus and all the basic freedoms) , coupled with the arrest of thousands of Communists, went much further in suppressing the civil liberties of those opposed to the Nazi Party, but one sees something of the same pattern in the Left’s reaction today, as in the imprisonment without bail of many innocent persons who were in the Capitol on January 6^th, and in the attempt to destroy the MAGA movement by discrediting President Trump and ostracizing, as much as possible, those who support him.  

But I would say that another similarity should be kept in mind: that of the massive street violence of ANTIFA and other leftist and nihilist groups in the months preceding the 2020 election, violence encouraged and condoned by the Democrat Party in its urban bastions and among its national leadership; for me, these riots are akin to the violent and murderous actions of the SA [Sturmabteilung] in the 1920s and early 1930s by which the Nazis sought to beat its opponents into submission and to create a climate of fear and disorder.

Related: Roger Kimball, Regime Propaganda, Ray Epps, and The New York Times

The Orwellian Abuse of Approbatives: 'Democracy'

An approbative word or phrase is one the conventional use of which indicates an approving or appreciative attitude on the part of the speaker or writer.  The opposite is a pejorative.  'Democracy' and 'racism' as currently used  in the USA and elsewhere in the Anglosphere are examples of the former and the latter respectively. If we distinguish connotation from denotation, we can say that approbatives have an axiologically positive, and pejoratives an axiologically negative, connotation. 

Approbatives are like honorifics, except that the latter term is standardly used in reference to persons.

You will have noticed by now that the hard Left, which has come to dominate the once-respectable Democrat Party, has become infinitely abusive of the English language as part of their overall strategy of undermining what it has taken centuries to build. They understand that the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

And so these termitic Orwellians take the word 'democracy,' and while retaining its approbative connotation, (mis)use it to denote the opposite of its conventional referent. They use it to mean the opposite of what it standardly or conventionally means.  What they mean by it is either oligarchy or in the vicinity thereof. Hillary Clinton, for example, regularly goes on about "our democracy." But of course, in violation of the Inclusion plank in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion  (DEI) platform, "our democracy" does not include what Hillary calls "deplorables" or what Barack Obama calls "clingers." Whom does it include? Well, her and her globalist pals.

A clever piece of linguistic chicanery. Take a word or phrase with a positive connotation and then apply the Orwellian inversion algorithm. Use 'democracy' in such a way that it excludes the people.

Crossposted at Substack.

Does the Demonic Play a Role in the Politics of the Day?

This just in from Vito Caiati:

Your thought provoking post An Oligarchic Pathocracy and in particular the twenty characteristics of this collective psychological derangement, each of which is an absolute inversion of the natural, the good, and the rational, leads me to consider whether potent demonic (Satanic) forces are at work here and now, either directly or through possessed human agents, forces whose presence is unnoticed, since it falls beyond the scope of the established explanatory frameworks of the social sciences. Although such an account may seem farfetched, I find that I must at least entertain the possibility of its validity, given evilness of the political and social destruction and the moral and cultural darkness propagated by the pathocratic Left:  Evil is instantiated in everything it touches.  Does this seem too farfetched to you?

Too farfetched? Not so farfetched as to be beneath consideration. Of course, proper method requires that we search first for naturalistic explanations.  This methodological principle is accepted not only by naturalists, who will omit the word 'first' in my formulation, but also by those who hold that certain phenomena are explainable only by supernatural agency.  (See for example the criteriology set forth by the great Spanish mystic Theresa of Avila in her Interior Castle for the assessment of the veridicality of certain mystical states, and also the procedures of the Church of Rome for the evaluation of putative miracles of different kinds, the Marian apparitions, stigmata, Therese Neumann, Padre Pio, et al. , and so on.) 

A committed naturalist will of course never accept any supernatural explanation of any occurrence however unusual and apparently inexplicable. He will either proffer a naturalistic explanation or, in the absence of a convincing one, state that there must be one whether or not we ever find it.  The italicized phrase signals the naturalist's a priori and presuppositional commitment to naturalism, to the metaphysical scheme according to which reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. The naturalist 'knows' a priori and thus in advance of any particular investigation into any putative apparition, etc., that nothing could possibly be evidence of supernatural agency.  Nothing will be allowed by the naturalist to count as evidence against his naturalism.  To misuse, as in common parlance, the word 'theological,' there s something 'theological' about the naturalist's naturalism and his scientism. (Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism.)

Consider the case of the Russian monk, Rasputin. He was a hard man to kill, so hard to kill that some will surmise that he was under demonic protection. But there are naturalistic explanations of his toughness that are implausible, perhaps, but not impossible.  Adolf Hitler was another man who proved hard to kill until he decided to do the job himself.  I myself am open to the possibility that he 'enjoyed' demonic protection, but the evidence of its actuality is far from compelling.

Can we definitively rule out demonic interference in human affairs and thus in our politics? No. There is no proof of naturalism.  

While I cannot prove that there is demonic involvement in our affairs, it is reasonable to believe that there is. Here I argue that there is no plausible naturalistic explanation of  the ubiquity, magnitude, and horrific depth of moral evil. Fidel Castro, for example, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent; he had them tortured in unspeakable ways.

Why the Left Won't Budge on Anything

This from a long-time reader with my comments in blue:

 

Really enjoy your site . . . .

 

From north of the border, I'm watching the abortion chaos and the Machiavellian machinations of court document leakers. 

 

Since having a child, I have come to the admittedly not the most logically airtight position on the matter: if a "fetus" exhibits "human" behaviours, it is in fact a baby and not a "clump of cells." After witnessing ultrasounds, and reading about thumb sucking, laughing, and other quintessentially human and very recognizable behaviours -- say, around 17-18 weeks -- that's the line I draw. It's a timeframe which, while not exact, is a demarcation point after which I'd find any termination so-called, ugly, ghoulish, and morally indefensible.  

 

I ran this by a few people I know on the left, thinking I could perhaps find common ground. And no, I didn't. They won't concede any territory. And my position is the European one for the most part. And that means your left has not only caught up to that continent, but in some ways has eclipsed it in its lunacy. 

 

As far as I can tell, they won't budge on anything. And therefore, by extension, there will be no principles the left and right can agree on (hell, that's basically the situation now). Plus, by controlling all facets of the education system, that won't change. 

 

Right you are: the Left won't budge on anything. This is because they see politics as a form of warfare.  Too many conservatives, however, still see politics as gentlemanly debate under an umbrella of shared assumptions, values, and principles.  This puts conservatives at a disadvantage as I explain in an eponymous Substack article. In my contribution to Dissident Philosophers, I put it like this:

 

For the culturally Marxist Left, politics is not a process of bargaining and accommodation based on mutually accepted norms between parties with common interests and a desire to coexist peacefully. Failing to appreciate that leftists embrace what could be called the converse Clausewitz principle—namely, that politics is war conducted by other means—puts classical liberals and conservatives at a disadvantage. They cannot bring themselves to believe that their political opponents are enemies who will do anything to win and are impervious to charges of “double standards” and “hypocrisy.” These conservatives allow their virtues to hobble them in their fight with enemies who reject conservative values but use them Alinsky-style against conservatives (as Saul Alinsky says, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."

 

Conservatives are at a second disadvantage in that they are political part-timers who understand that the political is a limited sphere, whereas leftists are full-time agitators beholden to the totalitarian conceit that the political exhausts the real. The left is totalitarian in that “to realize its agenda the left must invade and dominate the sphere of private life.” (Horowitz, David, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Dallas: Spence Publishing, 1999, 88.) And this they do increasingly. (William F. Vallicella, "From Democrat to Dissident," in  Dissident Philosophers : Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, edited by T. Allan Hillman, and Tully Borland, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021, pp. 261-277

 

Augusto del Noce speaks of a new totalitarianism:

 

Unlike Stalinism or Hitlerism, its main characteristic is not that of being a political movement that aims at world domination. It is marked, instead, by a quest to bring about the disintegration (dissoluzione) of one part of the world (in the case at hand, Europe). Nevertheless, the word totalitarianism is still appropriate because the essential features remain the same: the individual is extinguished and the idea of politics is subsumed within the idea of war, even in peace time. This means that all forms of criticism must be 'prevented' -- whenever they are addressed at 'real power' -- because, instead of advancing real arguments, supposedly they reflect or conceal the conservatism or reactionary spirit of a 'repressed psychology' . . . . ("Toward a New Totalitarianism" in The Crisis of Modernity, tr. Carlo Lancellotti, McGill-Queen's UP, 2014, p. 87

 

Del Noce goes on to speak of a "denial of the universality of reason." This is why the new totalitarians do not respond rationally to arguments, but resort to shadow banning, deplatforming, shout-downs, and other forms of cancellation.  To these people it is all power at bottom, and all reasoning is a sham rationalizing of  underlying racial and class interests.

The Left's Ingratitude

How ungrateful, and how wrong, to sneer at the very conditions of one's own existence, activity, and well-being! Nature and society, church and state, language and institutions, culture and mores, everything that one finds and was given, that one did not make, cannot make, and can improve only to a limited extent, and only with difficulty, and only with the tools that were handed down, but can easily destroy out of thoughtlessness, ingratitude, and perversity of will.

The Core Tenets of the 'Woke' Revolution

Wake up to 'woke' by reading this outstanding piece by Bari Weiss.  It is long, but very clear, covers the essential points, includes examples and some suggestions on how to fight back, and last but not least, it receives the MavPhil plenary endorsement and nihil obstat.

And now I would like to ask any of you who are U. S. citizens and Democrats whether supporting said party makes sense for you and your family and their future and the future of the country. Please consider this question very carefully with an open mind in light of all the facts. Please do not retreat into your private life else you wake up some day soon to no private life at all.  

Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools.  And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully. 

Read the rest below the fold:

The State under Leftism: Totalitarianism with Bread and Circuses

Although the state under contemporary leftism is totalitarian and demands conformity and submission in matters of moment, it tolerates and indeed encourages the cultivation of a politically inconsequential individualism of private self-absorption. A people given bread (food stamps and other forms of infantilizing dependency), circuses (mass sporting events), dope (legalization of marijuana), HollyWeird pornography and violence, politically correct propaganda, and such weapons of mass distraction as Twitter and Facebook is kept distracted, enervated, and submissive.

 

Nowadays it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses, but the dope of Big Government and its leftist enablers.

 

The totalitarianism of bread and circuses is more insidious, and more conducive to social control, than that of gulag and Vernichtungslager.

 

The Democrats have long been the party of Big Government; they are now the party of hard-Left omni-invasive government by 'woke' global elites. There is nothing democratic about them.

Roots of Antifa

Almost all of my political commentary and linkage these days is at my Facebook page, but some of you so despise that platform that you will not join me there. I fully understand. But this article is important enough to be worth citing here.

On 'Peaceful' Protests

Two points.

The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

Worse than condoning evil-doing is denying its very existence.

Sebastian Haffner: Totalitarians Intolerant of Private Life

Among the dozen or so books I am currently reading is Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (Picador, 2003).  Written in 1939, it was first published in German in 2000. The Third Reich is no more, but the following passage remains  highly relevant at a time when the main forms of totalitarianism are Chinese Communism, the hybrid political-religious ideology Islam, and the hard-Leftism of the Democrat Party in the USA:

No, retiring into private life was not an option. However far one retreated, everywhere one was confronted with the very thing one had been fleeing from. I discovered that the Nazi revolution had abolished the old distinction between politics and private life, and that it was quite impossible to treat it  merely as a "political event." It took place not only in the sphere of politics but also in each individual private life; it seeped through the walls like a poison gas. If you wanted to evade the gas there was only one option: to remove yourself physically -- emigration, Emigration:  that meant saying goodbye to the country of one's birth, language, and education and severing all patriotic ties.

In that summer of 1933 [the year Hitler seized power] I was prepared to take even this final step.  (219)

Haffner did emigrate, to England, then a free country. But where will we go when the whole world is under the yoke of the 'woke'?

A review of Haffner's book.

Addendum. The totalitarianism of the 20th century was hard: enforced by the threat of the gulag, etc.  That of the 21st century, soft. See Rod Dreher, The Coming Social Credit System. Excerpt:

You think it can’t happen here? As I show in the book, Google, Facebook, and other major corporations already collect tons of data from every one of us, based on how we use the Internet and our smartphones. If you have an Alexa, or any other “smart” device in your home, then whether you realize it or not, you have consented to allow all kinds of personal data to be hoovered up by the device and shared with a corporation. The technological capacity already exists in this country. The data are already being collected. 

And Covid has pushed the United States much farther down the road to becoming a cashless society.  There is an obvious safety-related reason for this. But banks have a vested financial interest in weaning Americans off of cash:

“Big Finance is the key driver moving us to a cashless society,” he said. “You’ll notice banks have been slowly closing branches and ATMs and they’re doing so in an effort to nudge us more toward their digital platforms. This saves them labor, it saves them a lot of real estate costs, and it improves their bottom line.”

What happens when you can’t buy things at stores with cash? It’s already happening now. I’ve been to stores here in Baton Rouge that will only transact business with credit or debit cards, citing Covid, or the inability to make change because of a coin shortage. It’s understandable, but you should be well aware that the move to a cashless society makes each of us completely vulnerable to being shut out of the economy by fiat.

Trotsky's Faith in Man

On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

Read the rest.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.  His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a title of Raymond Aron's. The latter species of opium I call utopium. 

Christianity and Politics

The Christian who sees politics with worldly eyes must support Donald J. Trump. The Christian who doesn't must withdraw from the fight and turn the other cheek even if it means getting slaughtered, just as Jesus allowed himself to be slaughtered. But the apolitical Christians won't be slaughtered right away. They will first have to endure the destruction of Christian culture, a process that is proceeding apace right before our eyes.  Statues are being toppled, and churches destroyed, some of them ancient and of great historical significance. Ever hear of Junipero Serra and the San Gabriel Mission?  After they have demolished monuments and memorials and desecrated  churches,  destructive leftists will begin changing place names. Ever hear of a town called 'Santa Barbara'? I am just scratching the surface.  Fill in the details for yourself.  Is anything safe from the raging nihilists of the Left? Cemeteries? It's happening, and more is coming. Or are you in denial?

To Christians such as David French who oppose Trump, I pose a simple question:

What do you propose that we do politically to put a stop to this destruction of Christian and indeed Western, heritage and civilization?

I don't doubt the sincerity and good intentions of French, and Mona Charen, and any number of other Never Trumpers, but they clearly don't have a practical plan. Starting up yet another 'conservative' publication such The Bulwark is just more yap-and-scribble. The Democrats are now a hard-Left party and their 'leader,' that 'good Catholic' Joe Biden, is but a puppet.  (He is all in on abortion on demand and, horribile dictu,  he reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment!) Do the Never Trumpers  have an electable candidate to rival Trump? Not by a long shot.

So what is the plan ladies and gentlemen? Do you propose that we wait for  for the 'true conservative' to come along?  If he ever shows up it will be too late.  A practical man deals with the situation at hand as best he can with what he's got. He does not let the best become the enemy of the good. He does not seek perfection in an imperfect world. Trump is all we've got.  Show me I'm wrong.

I would guess that David and Mona and the other boys and girls of the yap-and-scribble brigade are not keen on hot civil war. But that could be in the cards: guns and ammo are flying off the shelves.  The patience of the people has an expiration date. A lot of us don't approve of the erasure of history and heritage by leftist scum.  And we don't cotton to the abdication of those to whom we entrust the preservation of civil order.

I grew up just a few miles from the 249-year-old San Gabriel Mission:

The Democrat Agenda

Open the borders; empty the prisons; empower the criminal; violate the the rights of the law-abiding; erase history and heritage and hard-won wisdom.

Above all: Destroy language so that no one can coherently think or speak about the destructive Democrat agenda.