—And I saw a great sadness descend on mankind. The best grew weary of their works. A doctrine appeared, accompanied by faith: ‘All is empty, all is one, all is past!’ And from all the hills it echoed: ‘All is empty, all is one, all is past!’ Indeed we have harvested: but why did all our fruit turn rotten and brown? What fell down from the evil moon last night? In vain was all our work; our wine has turned to poison; an evil eye has seared our fields and hearts. We have all become dry…. All our wells have dried up; even the sea has withdrawn. All the soil would crack, but the depth refuses to devour. ‘Alas, where is there still a sea in which one might drown?’ Thus are we wailing across shallow swamps.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
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Our great shame — the shame of the present generation — is how we have been fooled: first, by the supposed collapse of communism; second, by our tolerance for the promises of socialist politicians who deny they are socialists; and third, into tolerating a bogus set of claims that should have been struck down as madness— like today’s gender and race obsession, like the politics of climate change, like our culture’s romance with the homosexual and the transsexual. It is, as Nietzsche intuited, a shallow swamp in which we hear the refrain, “Everything is empty, everything is one, everything is past.” It is the crisis of European nihilism.
When the Soviet Union somehow vanished, we were told that communist subversion was a thing of the past. Then we elected communists domestically, though these people denied their Marxism and hid their subversive connections — some of us weren’t fooled. But the public would not hear our warning. Socialism is advancing steadily, with an accelerating pace, insistently, militantly, with fang and claw at the ready. We are now locked into socialized medicine, which corrupts good medicine. The tax burden of “free” healthcare will effectively crowd out defense spending. No one dares to oppose tax money for grandma’s surgeries (though socialized medicine is more likely to kill grandma than save her). For our compassion: say goodbye to carrier battlegroups, tank divisions and air wings. We don’t need them anyway, right? The threat of totalitarian socialism ended in 1991.
But it didn’t end, and they have us by the throat. And now we are boxed into one untenable position after another. Yes, they tricked us into socialized medicine, and they are tricking us into the global warming hysteria. Soon our society will be financially ruined, and our enemies will hold the balance of power in their hands. Our “mainstream” intellectuals, who dominate the government and the media, have already made sure that our nuclear arsenal has rotted away. There is no surviving these educated morons — people with huge brains, little minds, and no instincts whatsoever.
William F. Buckley famously said that he would “sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” But Harvard has won, and Stanford and Yale, and….
I recently finished reading Stanford professor Michael McFaul’s memoir of policymaking in the Obama administration. It was a tough read because McFaul is a politically correct enthusiast of the dullest, most repetitive, and exasperating type. He believes in feminism, climate change, world peace and democracy. He is a political fantasist ready to invest in a moonbeam farm if given half a chance. Here is a well-meaning bungler, an architect of Obama’s Russia reset policy, who vaguely (kind of) admitted mistranslating the word “reset” on the button Hillary Clinton presented to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in 2009. McFaul has such blinding multicultural earnestness that he should never have been taught to read, or permitted to write. The inner disease that afflicts people of this kind was once described by H.L. Mencken as “the will to believe.” As a policy-maker McFaul is dangerous at any speed; an intelligent simpleton whose advice must never be followed and whose prescriptions are fatal.
McFaul, of course, loathes President Trump; probably for the same reasons that Claire Berlinski loathes him; namely, on account of The president’s decided non-intellectual bent, which rates in Claire’s analysis as “illiteracy.” We are told the president does not like to read. Trump’s unfitness for high office begins here, precisely where the ruling class’s autism begins. Oh yes, I know they read. But in my experience, they do not read with discernment, and they gravitate to the wrong books. It is an intellectualism permeated with self pity, dishonesty, and malice. One might say, in this matter, that our intellectuals are loathsome because they read.
Nietzsche knew there was a problem with intellectuals over 130 years ago. In Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche wrote, “Another century of readers — and spirit itself will stink.” In the next paragraph he explained, “Everyone being allowed to learn to read, ruins in the long run not only writing but also thinking.”
Very few are capable of thinking, of keeping to the facts, of reserving judgment. Character is decisive here. The enthusiast immediately believes, enthuses, applauds. This is McFaul and the whole tribe of elite useful idiots. Covering his flank, and taking full advantage of his naïveté, is the tribe of the intellectual gangsters, the nihilists and revolutionary haters. I would take Trump’s “illiterate” instincts over these people’s “literate” nihilism any day.
It is not that Trump’s distaste for reading is something to celebrate. I understand the limitations of someone who doesn’t read good books. But still, Trump is better than the leftist literati who despise him. If he is evil, as Claire Berlinski suggests, then he is less evil than they are.
Manly virtue combined with strong instinct sometimes counts for more than reason in the life of man. As often happens, reason either prostitutes itself to justify the arrogance of the fragile ego, or it humbles itself before objective fact out of an abundance of inner strength. This latter case is relatively rare today. Therefore, it is fitting to be wary of intellectuals. And I say this as one who reveres intelligence, who believes in literacy, but who is disappointed in intellectuals as a class. I have seen too much unmanly wickedness in our literati to cherish any illusions about them. One must go further than Nietzsche in condemning these people. Granting literacy to the wicked is like giving a pedicure to a hyena.
Consider what our intellectual hyenas have done: False ideas are everywhere promoted. The new religion of the intellectuals is socialism, and it is taking hold on all sides. It devours the seed corn of the future. It deceives and corrupts the public. And once they get a sufficient hold on power, they will use violence against anyone who contradicts them. They are not interested in the rule of law. That is why the new religion of socialism has established so many totalitarian states across the globe — in Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Congo, Venezuela and more. People in those countries have no rights. They are chattel. And their socialist rulers always reveal themselves to be criminals, murderers, and destroyers. But all of them started out as intellectuals.
Do you see where we are headed?
Thomas Carlyle once observed that “man never yields himself wholly to brute Force, but always to moral Greatness.” Here is the basis for a swindle: the imposition of a counterfeit moral greatness (a.k.a., Political Correctness). Thus, we have lost touch with real moral greatness.
The new religion of the intellectuals — socialism — is a doctrine that promises to bankrupt us, financially and intellectually. Those who have doubts, who disagree with the new doctrine, are immoral. They must be ignored, else they are labeled sexists, racists, or Nazis. We hardly consider what racism or sexism would be, if it were something other than a label used to destroy persons who disagree with specific policies — whether in family law, immigration, or national security.
A real racist isn’t bothered by such labeling, and certainly isn’t destroyed by it. Rather, it is his badge of honor. More commonly, the label of “racist” was designed with a different set of victims in mind; for it is entirely possible to conclude in favor of restricted immigration and the elimination of “abortion rights” on account of superior moral sense and prudence; not on account of a malicious disregard for women or aliens.
It is possible to oppose divorce, abortion and feminism without feeling animosity toward women. It is possible, indeed, that some of us are rightly concerned with the survival of our own kind, and our way of life, under a regime that insists that women should have careers instead of children. Might we admit that our forefathers, whose rulebooks we have thrown out, were wise and careful in preserving folkways that were sustainable? And now that we have inherited what their prudence and foresight obtained, we call their prudence racism and their foresight sexism.
Are we stupid?
The war that is really ongoing, in our time, is a war against our ancestors and against the Creator; a war of ingratitude — of monstrous, self-destructive, ingratitude.
Veronica Kamenskaya, a Moscow blogger, once commented on the decline of Western and post-Soviet civilization. She said that Christian civilization did not generally allow divorce. And then, we opened a virtual Pandora’s Box. “As soon as divorce was legalized in France,” Veronica wrote, “men started to divorce their wives to marry younger women.” At first, 85-90 percent of divorces were initiated by men. France experienced a baby boom. Then, noted Veronica, “the pill came to France in 1969, and abortion was legalized in 1975. By the mid-80s a drastic change occurred.” Before 1970 most French women, if they worked, were employed as small time clerks or secretaries — prior to marriage. Starting in the late 1960s, according to Veronica, “French women began to acquire professional standing, and they started to earn good money; so that marriage ceased being the best and only solution for the financial and sexual problems faced by French women.”
Then and there, giving birth to children ceased to be inevitable. By 1987, 90 percent of French divorces were initiated by women. On this statistic Veronica reflected, “French men had brought it on themselves. They destroyed the family, which is the most precious of all institutions.” Why would a woman seek security in marriage when her husband could discard her to marry a younger wife? Better for a woman, then, if she had a career instead of children. Veronica is not a social scientist, but she nonetheless sees some of the forces at work behind European degeneracy. Europe’s birth rate has collapsed. The state has facilitated this collapse, with its no-fault divorce laws. Consequently, Europe has a shortage of people. And this brings us to the brink of an unprecedented crisis. To make up for this shortage of people, Europe has imported millions of Muslim workers; so many, in fact, that Europe is gradually turning into something called Eurabia.
Here we find a segue from “sexism” to “racism.” Everyone, of course, has heard of the Constitution of the United States. It is the supreme law of the land. The first ten amendments to the Constitution are known as “the Bill of Rights.” Americans today hear a great deal about “rights” and very little about the practical measures needed to ensure those rights. Many Americans have forgotten that you cannot have a constitution unless you have a country; and you cannot have a country unless you defend it against enemies, foreign and domestic. At bottom, every constitution must be construed so that the country’s natural right to self defense is not canceled by a growing tangle of individual and minority rights that choke off the necessaries of national defense. So here we are, wrestling with the question: Do Muslims have a right to erect a Mosque near “ground zero” in Manhattan? Does the right of religious freedom, supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution, protect Muslims in the United States from discrimination? Does it protect them against barriers to immigration, against the distrust and dislike of the native population? Does it allow them to build a Mosque near the very place where Islamic “warriors” made a great gash in the skyline of America’s greatest city?
Whatever we think of the Constitution, it cannot protect Muslims from the enmity which Islam generates wherever its standard has been raised. In fact, the Constitution was not written to protect the nation of Islam, or various colonies of that nation planted in our midst. The Constitution nowhere says that Muslims have the right to come to the United States, build mosques, or establish their own culture as part of a multicultural patchwork celebrated as a new kind of nation (which effectively negates what America once was). This is not why the Constitution was established. As stated in the Preamble, our Constitution was established “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity….”
It is worth repeating that last phrase – “to ourselves and our Posterity.” There is no reference to Muslims, explicit or implicit. They do not belong to our nation. They are not “ourselves and our Posterity.” Furthermore, we should pay careful attention to the objectives of the Constitution. How does the presence of millions of Muslims in the United States make a “more perfect Union” or “insure domestic Tranquility”? Clearly, the presence of an alien colony in our midst serves to promote disunion and unrest.
How would the Arabs react if we built a Christian church in Mecca? Their violent reaction would be immediate and lethal. Are Muslims the enemies of America? It is presently inconvenient to say so; but insofar as Muslims are like Unitarians, they are no enemy. Insofar as they take the Koran and its teachings seriously, their enmity is established by their own precepts. If a person truly believes the Koran, they cannot be an American without making a mockery of that which Americans are. It is important to say once more: If a Muslim is only a nominal follower of the Prophet, there is no harm in him. He might leave his faith, and become an American. On the other hand, if a Muslim is a Muslim in earnest, consistently and conscientiously following the teachings of the Prophet, then he cannot be a citizen of the United States in good faith. His allegiance is to Allah and to the Nation of Islam. He cannot serve two masters. Mohammed did not instruct his followers to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars….” The Muslim faith does not agree with this saying. For this and other reasons, Muslim culture cannot easily coexist with American culture.
The God worshipped by Muslims is different from the God worshipped by Americans. It is an error to think that Muslims and Americans can, in the end, live peacefully together in the same country. Such a project, if persisted in, will vouchsafe a religious war to our posterity. We might as well write a new Preamble for the Constitution “in Order to form a more perfect Disunion, establish Political Correctness, insure domestic Disorder, sabotage the common defense, promote general mayhem, and secure the Blessings of Military Dictatorship to ourselves and our Posterity.” Then, at least, our words would better align with our policy. Of course, we are foolish and naive in our thinking, and hardly deserve our ancestors as we fail to consider the true situation of our posterity.
Few have the courage to point out the disastrous course we are following. Americans ought to read the history of Islam. Here they will find a religion spread by the sword; a militant zealotry that swept away the Roman Empire, conquered Africa, Spain and the Balkans. Here is a war that raged for centuries in which millions of Christians were slaughtered and enslaved. When exactly did Islam declare that their war against Christendom was over? When did the Muslims return those lands taken from the Christians?
Yet the doctrine of political correctness would have the West apologize to Islam for the legacy of colonialism. Given the history of Islam, and the history of the United States, only a fool would imagine that Islam and America could be safely blended together. But today we have this formula, invented and carried forward by the political left, called “multiculturalism.” In fact, multiculturalism is merely a denial of American culture, and a rejection of the notion that immigrants must assimilate and become Americans.
In respect of this, a culture that is represented by all cultures, is not American. It is everthing but American. It would be like saying that everyone on earth is, in fact, an American; that every culture represents American culture. If this is accepted as true, then there can be no American culture and the whole of America’s real heritage is wiped away at a single stroke. If this is not the objective of those promoting multiculturalism, then they have opened themselves up to a serious misunderstanding. For it appears that their project is to destroy the United States of America using multiculturalism as a weapon to disarm and disorient the American people, taking away the concept of “nation,” replacing it with concepts that will allow them to play a game of “divide and conquer.”
A nation is a group of people united during the course of generations by cultural and social ties, by language and history, by common values and folkways. It cannot be an amalgamation of every people and every culture, with tenuous connections and contrary folkways. Such is not a country or a culture, but a Tower of Babel. Yet we have been told to become this Tower of Babel, and thereby lose our unique national identity while engendering a civil war. This doctrine would eradicate America entirely, leaving nothing but a cratered landscape. To allow millions of Muslims into the United States, and say they are Americans, is a kind of insanity – unless they are nominal Muslims.
If a Muslim wants to become an American, it is certain that he must give up his religion in a fundamental sense, or else we should give up our country; for he cannot believe in Islam while faithfully swearing an oath of allegiance to the Constitution; for the Prophet Mohammed would not have approved of the U.S. Constitution. He would have called for its negation, and for the creation of a Caliphate, and many of his followers today understand this.
On the American side, it is clear that the Founding Fathers did not establish this country as a place for Mohammed’s followers to colonize and subvert. This was not their intention, nor would they look favorably upon descendents who interpreted the Constitution as an instrument for the protection of an Islamic colony inside the United States. They would account any such interpretation as incredibly stupid, belonging to some new species of American idiot.
As may be readily apparent to the wise, it is backwards to imagine that a constitution comes first and a nation comes second, as if the nation was created for the constitution instead of the constitution for the nation. With this error comes the idea that individual rights trump national existence, so that we may push forward the concept of “rights” even if this concept leads to a general unraveling of national existence. There is no legitimate right which effectively disintegrates the nation that observes it; for it would be absurd to propose political principles which promise destruction to those who uphold them, as it would be absurd to propose laws that must lead to the negation of all law.
Not only does the individual have a right of self defense, but the nation also has a right of self defense. For if there were no nation, there could be no unit for organizing the effective defense of the individual. Furthermore, we should not pretend that national suicide is somehow an enlightened ideal. It is nothing of the kind. And those who despise the nation state are not progressive, but follow a path leading back to the Dark Ages. National patriotism is not a synonym for racism or collectivism. Love of America does not signify hatred against Muslims, or a campaign to denigrate them. Such love, properly considered, recognizes irreconcilable differences between the laws set down by the Prophet Mohammed, and the laws set down by our Founding Fathers. The two things cannot coexist in one nation, under God. For the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God are at variance, as well as our concept of law. A child can see this, and yet our politically correct authorities admit of no problem whatever.
If anyone should reproach the nation state with being the principle cause of war, they should reflect that wars have existed from the beginning of human history, and have occurred between city states, tribes, clans, and empires. It is a mistake to blame war on the nation state. War is part of the human condition. Men will fight each other whether or not they are organized under nation states or under feudal barons. It is an affliction of all states at all times, not peculiar to the nation state.
But haven’t we evolved? Shouldn’t we give up our petty nationalism? Aren’t we all simply “citizens of the world”? If we embrace the Muslims, surely peace will follow. We are all human beings, and tolerance will prevail if we set the tone. Therefore, say the progressives, we need to embrace the oneness of humanity. It is the only alternative to destructive war.
Ask yourself: Why is America denied the right to defend its borders, its culture, and the very ground of its mourning (i.e., “ground zero”)? Because the left dreams of a world without nations where war itself has been eradicated. This dream is the delusion fools and madmen. It is an excuse to wage an altogether more dreadful type of war — a war against civilization itself. In truth, there will never be a world without war, just as there will never be a world without poverty or death. To wage war against war is merely a pretext to pursue power for its own sake.
For those who want total power, the United States represents a barrier that must be knocked down; for it stands in the way of all those revolutionary lunatics dreaming of a brave new world. Oh yes, America stands in the way of the great socialist commonwealth of mankind — a butcher’s block and a slaughterhouse. Here we see what kind of weapon multiculturalism is, and what it aims to achieve.
In this context, Islam merely serves as the “icebreaker of the revolution.” Does a weapon, deployed against us by the revolutionary left, have rights? No. Does an enemy have rights? Only with regard to the agreed-upon rules of war. The American reader should ask himself, at the end of the day, what would happen if Islam or Communism had its way in America. What if Islam took over? What if a Communist regime came to power? In that case, wouldn’t it be fair to describe America as a country occupied by an internal enemy? How is it, then, that we tolerate the open subversion of our country? How is it, then, that we are unable to name our enemies (excepting the ones hiding in distant caves)?
Don’t we have the right to recognize those who are against us? Or are we already conquered? The reader may see, quite clearly, that all issues — from divorce and abortion to immigration and terrorism — are interconnected. What our ancestors accepted as wise and prudent we dismiss as sexism and racism. Therefore, we have embraced feminism to the detriment of our birth rate; and we have embraced multiculturalism to the detriment of our national security. Both feminism and multiculturalism belong under one and the same heading: Collective Suicide.
At bottom, the arguments in favor of Collective Suicide are hedonistic arguments. For it is hedonism which leads the man to divorce his wife, and the wife to choose a career. It is hedonism which embraces the pill and abortion. It is hedonistic to reject children in favor of a career, and to postulate oneself as the be-all and end-all of existence. It is hedonism that calls forth multiculturalism, because we are too busy shopping and having fun to notice that we have enemies.
It is, as Nietzsche foretold, a shallow swamp over which echoes the refrain, “Everything is empty, everything is one, everything is past.”