HT and Link: Straight Talk
Principles of Tyranny…or we are so screwed
1. Control of public information and opinion:
It begins with withholding information, and leads to putting out false or misleading information. A government can develop ministries of propaganda under many guises. They typically call it “public information” or “marketing”.
2. Vote fraud used to prevent the election of reformers:
It doesn’t matter which of the two major party candidates are elected if no real reformer can get nominated, and when news services start knowing the outcomes of elections before it is possible for them to know, then the votes are not being honestly counted.
3. Undue official influence on trials and juries:
Nonrandom selection of jury panels, exclusion of those opposed to the law, exclusion of the jury from hearing argument on the law, exclusion of private prosecutors from access to the grand jury, and prevention of parties and their counsels from making effective arguments or challenging the government.
4. Usurpation of undelegated powers:
This is usually done with popular support for solving some problem, or to redistribute wealth to the advantage of the supporters of the dominant faction, but it soon leads to the deprivation of rights of minorities and individuals.
5. Seeking a government monopoly on the capability and use of armed force:
The first signs are efforts to register or restrict the possession and use of firearms, initially under the guise of “protecting” the public, which, when it actually results in increased crime, provides a basis for further disarmament efforts affecting more people and more weapons.
6. Militarization of law enforcement:
Declaring a “war on crime” that becomes a war on civil liberties. Preparation of military forces for internal policing duties.
7. Infiltration and subversion of citizen groups that could be forces for reform:
Internal spying and surveillance is the beginning. A sign is false prosecutions of their leaders.
8. Suppression of investigators and whistleblowers:
When people who try to uncover high level wrongdoing are threatened, that is a sign the system is not only riddled with corruption, but that the corruption has passed the threshold into active tyranny.
9. Use of the law for competition suppression:
It begins with the dominant faction winning support by paying off their supporters and suppressing their supporters’ competitors, but leads to public officials themselves engaging in illegal activities and using the law to suppress independent competitors. A good example of this is narcotics trafficking.
10. Subversion of internal checks and balances:
This involves the appointment to key positions of persons who can be controlled by their sponsors, and who are then induced to do illegal things. The worst way in which this occurs is in the appointment of judges that will go along with unconstitutional acts by the other branches.
11. Creation of a class of officials who are above the law:
This is indicated by dismissal of charges for wrongdoing against persons who are “following orders”.
12. Increasing dependency of the people on government:
The classic approach to domination of the people is to first take everything they have away from them, then make them compliant with the demands of the rulers to get anything back again.
13. Increasing public ignorance of their civic duties and reluctance to perform them:
When the people avoid doing things like voting and serving in militias and juries, tyranny is not far behind.
14. Use of staged events to produce popular support:
Acts of terrorism, blamed on political opponents, followed immediately with well-prepared proposals for increased powers and budgets for suppressive agencies. Sometimes called a Reichstag plot.
15. Conversion of rights into privileges:
Requiring licenses and permits for doing things that the government does not have the delegated power to restrict, except by due process in which the burden of proof is on the petitioner.
16. Political correctness:
Many if not most people are susceptible to being recruited to engage in repressive actions against disfavored views or behaviors, and led to pave the way for the dominance of tyrannical government.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Karl Marx's 10 Point Program of Communism
Liberalism = Communism = Statism
Below are the 10 points laid out by Marx.
Consider them and consider where the nation is today in reference to each. Then, consider for each of the points which of our political parties advocate for policies and programs to achieve the stated goals.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.
How far along now is the U.S.A.?
Below are the 10 points laid out by Marx.
Consider them and consider where the nation is today in reference to each. Then, consider for each of the points which of our political parties advocate for policies and programs to achieve the stated goals.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.
How far along now is the U.S.A.?
Monday, May 9, 2011
H.L. Mencken And The Gettysburg Address
H.L. Mencken (HT - The Bonnie Blue Blog:
"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."
"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Elusive Wapiti Classic #1,Part 1, - Destuction of the Family - Feminism and Communism
The next two posts are in conjunction with the April 25, 2011 post:
Communism Through The Institutions
Great video of former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov
Part 2 is below this post for a more traditional/readable continuation.
Original here: LINK
"Most Americans do not realize that they, through their institutions, are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the continuing destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new one"
[4]
In previous installments, I've discussed how feminism devalues women, causes them to be sexually precocious, and leads to cultural hara kiri. Today, I'll discuss how feminism, purposefully and with full awareness, aims to destroy the religious- and family-based principles upon which our country and civilization is based, and replace it with its totalitarian matriarchal utopia. As this post is very long, I'll post it in two sections.
Some time ago, reader pjanus gently rebuffed me for my naivete in thinking that feminists are simply misguided but well-meaning liberals who know not what they do. Well, I've done some more thinking and research on the subject, and I concur with him in that, while some feminists, in their zeal for so-called "women's rights", fail to appreciate the long-term effects of what they do, the remainder doggedly and intentionally pursue an agenda that is aimed at nothing less than the subsumption of Western and Christian culture.
I will attempt to explain what I found in as brief a manner as possible. Because it is instructive to know where something came from to know where its going, this post will contain a short history lesson that explains the ideological roots of feminism. In this task, I ask for your grace...this is ground well-tilled by those far more talented than I, I am not a "women's studies" major, and I lack the space to delve into these subjects with any considerable depth. But I will proceed nonetheless, and see where it leads. Let's go, shall we?
The Age of Reason
I start my very brief history with the Enlightenment, when man began to reject priestcraft and the theocratic State and used science and his powers of reason to define the world. One primary feature of this event is the decoupling of culture and morality from external sources such as religion. Man began the process of turning inward and located his compass there, rather than on an Almighty Being, a process probably best exemplified by the rise of the Transcedentalists and the Unitarians in the 1700s and 1800s and the incorporation of their theories into the philosophies of Hegel, Kant, and Marx[4]. As Dreher recently observed, this turn was doomed to fail as we only now are beginning to fully understand.
This use of humanist reasoning, uninformed by theology, came to a crescendo in Germany in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We all know what nightmares came of that, both there and elsewhere (such as the USA and USSR).
The Godfather: Karl Marx
Karl Marx thought it all up. His unified, single-factor economic theory of history divides peoples into two classes, sorted by ownership of the means of production. Put short, he dreamt up modern class warfare, in which certain classes of people--in his case, the workers--are a priori good, and others such as the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. His theory of economic organization dictates expropriation from the haves to the have-nots, according to their politically determined need. Marx critiqued society through an economic lens, and he had an intense hatred for Western civilization itself, querying in 1919, "who will save us from Western Civilization?".[1] He also viewed the family as an instrument of oppression, particularly for the wife who is under the thumb of an oppressive patriarchal male, and advocated for its abolishment in favor of the family of the State.[2] As one can see, HRC wasn't the first person to think that raising children "took a village".
Critical Theory and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (ISR)
After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, it became clear that economic Marxism was not yielding the worker's utopia that Marx envisioned. Thus a group of Marxists got together and created the ISR--the first modern-day 'think tank'--in 1923, in Frankfurt, Germany.
The ISR's purpose was and is to translate Marxism from economic into social terms, and enable Marxism to be fully realized. The key tool with which to do this was called "critical theory", at term which sounds vaguely academic at first blush. In fact, the theory behind "critical theory" is just to criticize. Relentlessly criticize, relentlessly "deconstruct", and relentlessly discredit social institutions and mores at every opportunity. With one's criticism, the aim is to undermine the prevailing order with the most descructive criticism possible without offering an alternative, and the ISR was hard at work doing just that when the NASDP came to power in 1933. In this staunchly anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic environment, the Frankfurt School fled to Columbia University, various positions in the US government, and in Hollywood, where they promptly begain to apply critical theory to American culture. The Frankfurt school would not return to Germany until after the War.
End of Section 1.
Tomorrow: Gramsci takes the stick from Marx and runs with it...
PART 2 BELOW
Communism Through The Institutions
Great video of former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov
Part 2 is below this post for a more traditional/readable continuation.
Original here: LINK
Feminism Destroys Family and Society--Intentionally
"Most Americans do not realize that they, through their institutions, are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the continuing destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new one"
[4]
In previous installments, I've discussed how feminism devalues women, causes them to be sexually precocious, and leads to cultural hara kiri. Today, I'll discuss how feminism, purposefully and with full awareness, aims to destroy the religious- and family-based principles upon which our country and civilization is based, and replace it with its totalitarian matriarchal utopia. As this post is very long, I'll post it in two sections.
Some time ago, reader pjanus gently rebuffed me for my naivete in thinking that feminists are simply misguided but well-meaning liberals who know not what they do. Well, I've done some more thinking and research on the subject, and I concur with him in that, while some feminists, in their zeal for so-called "women's rights", fail to appreciate the long-term effects of what they do, the remainder doggedly and intentionally pursue an agenda that is aimed at nothing less than the subsumption of Western and Christian culture.
I will attempt to explain what I found in as brief a manner as possible. Because it is instructive to know where something came from to know where its going, this post will contain a short history lesson that explains the ideological roots of feminism. In this task, I ask for your grace...this is ground well-tilled by those far more talented than I, I am not a "women's studies" major, and I lack the space to delve into these subjects with any considerable depth. But I will proceed nonetheless, and see where it leads. Let's go, shall we?
The Age of Reason
I start my very brief history with the Enlightenment, when man began to reject priestcraft and the theocratic State and used science and his powers of reason to define the world. One primary feature of this event is the decoupling of culture and morality from external sources such as religion. Man began the process of turning inward and located his compass there, rather than on an Almighty Being, a process probably best exemplified by the rise of the Transcedentalists and the Unitarians in the 1700s and 1800s and the incorporation of their theories into the philosophies of Hegel, Kant, and Marx[4]. As Dreher recently observed, this turn was doomed to fail as we only now are beginning to fully understand.
This use of humanist reasoning, uninformed by theology, came to a crescendo in Germany in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We all know what nightmares came of that, both there and elsewhere (such as the USA and USSR).
The Godfather: Karl Marx
Karl Marx thought it all up. His unified, single-factor economic theory of history divides peoples into two classes, sorted by ownership of the means of production. Put short, he dreamt up modern class warfare, in which certain classes of people--in his case, the workers--are a priori good, and others such as the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. His theory of economic organization dictates expropriation from the haves to the have-nots, according to their politically determined need. Marx critiqued society through an economic lens, and he had an intense hatred for Western civilization itself, querying in 1919, "who will save us from Western Civilization?".[1] He also viewed the family as an instrument of oppression, particularly for the wife who is under the thumb of an oppressive patriarchal male, and advocated for its abolishment in favor of the family of the State.[2] As one can see, HRC wasn't the first person to think that raising children "took a village".
Critical Theory and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (ISR)
After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, it became clear that economic Marxism was not yielding the worker's utopia that Marx envisioned. Thus a group of Marxists got together and created the ISR--the first modern-day 'think tank'--in 1923, in Frankfurt, Germany.
The ISR's purpose was and is to translate Marxism from economic into social terms, and enable Marxism to be fully realized. The key tool with which to do this was called "critical theory", at term which sounds vaguely academic at first blush. In fact, the theory behind "critical theory" is just to criticize. Relentlessly criticize, relentlessly "deconstruct", and relentlessly discredit social institutions and mores at every opportunity. With one's criticism, the aim is to undermine the prevailing order with the most descructive criticism possible without offering an alternative, and the ISR was hard at work doing just that when the NASDP came to power in 1933. In this staunchly anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic environment, the Frankfurt School fled to Columbia University, various positions in the US government, and in Hollywood, where they promptly begain to apply critical theory to American culture. The Frankfurt school would not return to Germany until after the War.
End of Section 1.
Tomorrow: Gramsci takes the stick from Marx and runs with it...
Elusive Wapiti Classic #1, Part 2, - Destuction of the Family - Feminism and Communism
Original here: LINK
In other words, hegemony is the culture. It is the whole system, both tangible and not. From Marx, we know that Gramsci's hegemony is just code for all of Western Civilization, particularly Chritianity, and especially the Patriarchy.™ By attacking the hegemony with the weapon of critical theory, Gramsci hoped eventually so discredit the guiding influences of Christianity and traditions of Western law and English common law, so as to be able to supplant them with with his own "anti-hegemony" or "counter hegemony" of "scientific", atheistic, cultural Marxism. This would best be accomplished via a "slow march" through the cutural institutions (such as the public schools and the universities), where, like a frog in boiling water, the opposition would not know that they were in danger until it was too late.
To accomplish this clandestine overthrow of the culture, however, Gramscian theory needed a vehicle upon which to perch upon. Heeding the maxim that "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world", the cultural Marxists deliberately targeted the industrialized Western civ family's center of gravity: women. Recruit women as the change agents; they would become the perfect vector by which Gramscian Marxism would infect the whole of the culture.
So we know that the cultural Marxists targeted women, both here and elsewhere (as I document in my piece on female suffrage), in an effort to abolish the traditional family and usher in their new world order. They found willing accomplices in feminists, who happily exploited the power that cultural Marxism provided, and later crowed about this merging of feminism with cultural Marxism. To wit: "Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism", "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism", "Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism".[5]
The New Feminist Family: An Import from Bolshevist Russia?
Speaking of socialism and communism, some readers would be surprised to learn that the American family law system, of which no-fault divorce is a prime feature, wasn't an American invention. It was imported from Bolshevist Russia early in the last century. That's right, the same system that the West defeated in the 1980s lives on in our own culture, rotting us from within in the same way that Communism collapsed under the force its own weight. Bolsheviks, when they came to power, attacked the Russian family with zeal, pushing for loosened divorce laws, granting 'consorts' identical property and status rights as wives, and encouraging free love unfettered by any obligation of one party to the other. Chaos soon ensued: men and women both lightly entered into temporary unions only to abandon them with zest. Illegitimate births skyrocketed, and the abortionist was busy. Both men and women could charge each other alimony, and some women found child support quite profitable as they flitted from wealthy man to wealthy man, being impregnated and enriched by each. Orphans clogged orphanages, and the Soviet state could not bear the additional fiscal burden of it all.
Indeed some Russians fretted about the corrosive effects of these reforms:
Their dire predictions look eerily prescient given how they've been realized in the current state of the modern American family. Marriage is tapering off into oblivion, the traditional family now is outnumbered by non-traditional ones, American culture is one marked by serial polyandry and polygyny and soon may feature legalized polygamy, and the middle- to lower strata of American society are disintegrating into ruin.
But these predictions fell on deaf ears. MacKinnon, and feminist scholars like her, were pushing for Russian-style easy divorce as early as 1947[6]. They found their huckleberry 20 years later in then-governor Ronald Reagan, who signed the nation's first no-fault divorce law in 1969. Marxist feminists rammed through the Wisconsin model of child support across the country--itself modelled on Article 81 of the Russian Family Code--soon after. These cultural revolutionaries continued to push the Russian model even after it became clear that the 30-year Bolshevik attack on the family threatened total social collapse within the USSR and had produced 7 million fatherless children by 1947[5]. To date, there has been no repudiation of the failed Russian model in the family law system despte the evidence right in front of us. Instead, it continues to wreak havoc to this day, producing legions of "liberated women" who are "married" to the State and, by 1998, nearly 25 million children lacked a father in the home.
As a result, we no longer have a family law system that honors the Constitution; it has been wholly assimilated by a Bolshevist-cum-Gramscian Marxist "anti-hegemonic" philosophy specifically designed to destroy the family and create as many people dependent on the State as possible. Western "hegemonic" legal traditions upon which our society was founded have been turned on their heads. As I've blogged before, the justice system is fairly shot through with Marxist ideology in the service of Feminism; now we have the dubiously moral practice of rewarding wrongdoing and penalizing, even enslaving, those who have done no wrong, sometimes based on no evidence at all save one person's self-interested accuation, all for the goal of eradicating the independent, nuclear family and increasing the influence of the State on its subjects.
The effect of this Russian import has been catastrophic to our social fabric, posing a dire threat to our society's ability to survive. Divorce, while down slightly from its all time high, consumes nearly 50% of all marriages. Marriage is way down. Cohabiting is way up. Abortion slaughters over 1M fetuses annually. Single motherhood, either by "choice" or by divorce, is skyrocketing. The fertility rate is sub-replacement; even more so when you subtract illegal aliens from the mix. Crime is rampant. Educational achievement is spiralling downward. And just this week, we established an all-time record in incarceration. This is where our society puts disenfranchised men--and the few women who run afoul of Big Sister--who don't fit into the Marxist-feminist picture of the State acting as the ultimate husband for the family. The government discourages competition, after all.
Feminists and other Gramscian fellow-travellers know exactly what they're doing. Their aim is to enlarge the State through weakening the family and other hegemonic institutions. How do we know this? Because their acolytes tell us so:
The feminist agenda of female "liberation" goes way beyond gender equality. If that was the case, the feminist movement would have ended decades ago when women achieved legal parity with men. Rather, their aim is to create a omnipresent, omnipotent, socialized matriarchal government. To do this, they need to destroy the traditional nuclear family--which has sustained civilizations for millennia--and replace it with a solo, female head-of-household wedded to the State. In other words, a matriarchy, with Big Sister as benefactor. Problem is, in destroying the traditional family, they have threatened the very fabric of society. If 1940s Russia is any indicator, the new social order will not be self-sustaining.
In this way, feminism intentionally, purposefully acts to destroy the family, which in turn threatens to destroy society. Their agenda is clear to those who bother to look.
Feminism delenda est
References:
[1]: Lind, Bill. "The Origins of Political Correctness"
[2]: Lawson, Dominic. "You Can Blame It All On Karl Marx". The Independent (UK), 20 Feb 07
[3]: Borst, William. "A Nation of Frogs"
[4]: Atkinson, Gerald. "Radical Feminism and Political Correctness"
[5]: Wood, Bill. Statement before the US House Ways and Means Committee.
[6]: Mohler, Albert. "No Fault Divorce--The End of Marriage?"
[7]: "The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage". The Atlantic Monthly, July 1926.
Note: This is the second half of a post that argues that feminism aims to destroy the family and the cultural fabric in favor of a new social order.
Read the first section here.
The Protege: Antonio Gramsci
An Italian, Antonio Gramsci, took Marx's theories and expanded upon them, creating what we now know as 'Cultural Marxism'. He took Marxism's monolithic bloc of aggreived "workers" and broke them up into several smaller constiuencies, each claiming its own variant of oppression, be it sex, race, economic, blue collar workders, or homosexuals. Each had its own particular axe to grind, each had its own reason to be "critical" of the enveloping culture, and each demanded that the wider culture accede to its demands through accomodation or even publicly funded remuneration. Women, usually the largest group in any human population, became the largest "oppressed" constituency in cultural Marxism, and thus swung the heaviest political weight[4]. Gramsci also coined the term "hegemony", and set it in the context of a full-scale culture war in which each oppressed group was to buck the hegemony which was seen as keeping each down in a state of servile oppression. Gramsci defines hegemony thus:
"... Hegemony operates culturally and ideologically through the institutions of civil society which characterises mature liberal-democratic, capitalist societies. These institutions include education, the family, the church, the mass media, popular culture, etc."
In other words, hegemony is the culture. It is the whole system, both tangible and not. From Marx, we know that Gramsci's hegemony is just code for all of Western Civilization, particularly Chritianity, and especially the Patriarchy.™ By attacking the hegemony with the weapon of critical theory, Gramsci hoped eventually so discredit the guiding influences of Christianity and traditions of Western law and English common law, so as to be able to supplant them with with his own "anti-hegemony" or "counter hegemony" of "scientific", atheistic, cultural Marxism. This would best be accomplished via a "slow march" through the cutural institutions (such as the public schools and the universities), where, like a frog in boiling water, the opposition would not know that they were in danger until it was too late.
To accomplish this clandestine overthrow of the culture, however, Gramscian theory needed a vehicle upon which to perch upon. Heeding the maxim that "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world", the cultural Marxists deliberately targeted the industrialized Western civ family's center of gravity: women. Recruit women as the change agents; they would become the perfect vector by which Gramscian Marxism would infect the whole of the culture.
Gramsci hated marriage and the family, the very founding blocks of a civilized society. To him, marriage was a plot, a conspiracy... to perpetuate an evil system that oppressed women and children. It was a dangerous institution, characterized by violence and exploitation, the forerunner of fascism and tyranny. Patriarchy served as the main target of the cultural Marxists. They strove to feminize the family with legions of single and homosexual mothers and ‘fathers’ who would serve to weaken the structure of civilized society [3]
So we know that the cultural Marxists targeted women, both here and elsewhere (as I document in my piece on female suffrage), in an effort to abolish the traditional family and usher in their new world order. They found willing accomplices in feminists, who happily exploited the power that cultural Marxism provided, and later crowed about this merging of feminism with cultural Marxism. To wit: "Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism", "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism", "Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism".[5]
The New Feminist Family: An Import from Bolshevist Russia?
Speaking of socialism and communism, some readers would be surprised to learn that the American family law system, of which no-fault divorce is a prime feature, wasn't an American invention. It was imported from Bolshevist Russia early in the last century. That's right, the same system that the West defeated in the 1980s lives on in our own culture, rotting us from within in the same way that Communism collapsed under the force its own weight. Bolsheviks, when they came to power, attacked the Russian family with zeal, pushing for loosened divorce laws, granting 'consorts' identical property and status rights as wives, and encouraging free love unfettered by any obligation of one party to the other. Chaos soon ensued: men and women both lightly entered into temporary unions only to abandon them with zest. Illegitimate births skyrocketed, and the abortionist was busy. Both men and women could charge each other alimony, and some women found child support quite profitable as they flitted from wealthy man to wealthy man, being impregnated and enriched by each. Orphans clogged orphanages, and the Soviet state could not bear the additional fiscal burden of it all.
Indeed some Russians fretted about the corrosive effects of these reforms:
The opposition to the proposed law seemed to centre around four points: (1) that it would abolish marriage; (2) that it would destroy the family; (3) that it would legalize polygamy and polyandry; (4) that it would ruin the peasants[7].
Their dire predictions look eerily prescient given how they've been realized in the current state of the modern American family. Marriage is tapering off into oblivion, the traditional family now is outnumbered by non-traditional ones, American culture is one marked by serial polyandry and polygyny and soon may feature legalized polygamy, and the middle- to lower strata of American society are disintegrating into ruin.
But these predictions fell on deaf ears. MacKinnon, and feminist scholars like her, were pushing for Russian-style easy divorce as early as 1947[6]. They found their huckleberry 20 years later in then-governor Ronald Reagan, who signed the nation's first no-fault divorce law in 1969. Marxist feminists rammed through the Wisconsin model of child support across the country--itself modelled on Article 81 of the Russian Family Code--soon after. These cultural revolutionaries continued to push the Russian model even after it became clear that the 30-year Bolshevik attack on the family threatened total social collapse within the USSR and had produced 7 million fatherless children by 1947[5]. To date, there has been no repudiation of the failed Russian model in the family law system despte the evidence right in front of us. Instead, it continues to wreak havoc to this day, producing legions of "liberated women" who are "married" to the State and, by 1998, nearly 25 million children lacked a father in the home.
As a result, we no longer have a family law system that honors the Constitution; it has been wholly assimilated by a Bolshevist-cum-Gramscian Marxist "anti-hegemonic" philosophy specifically designed to destroy the family and create as many people dependent on the State as possible. Western "hegemonic" legal traditions upon which our society was founded have been turned on their heads. As I've blogged before, the justice system is fairly shot through with Marxist ideology in the service of Feminism; now we have the dubiously moral practice of rewarding wrongdoing and penalizing, even enslaving, those who have done no wrong, sometimes based on no evidence at all save one person's self-interested accuation, all for the goal of eradicating the independent, nuclear family and increasing the influence of the State on its subjects.
The effect of this Russian import has been catastrophic to our social fabric, posing a dire threat to our society's ability to survive. Divorce, while down slightly from its all time high, consumes nearly 50% of all marriages. Marriage is way down. Cohabiting is way up. Abortion slaughters over 1M fetuses annually. Single motherhood, either by "choice" or by divorce, is skyrocketing. The fertility rate is sub-replacement; even more so when you subtract illegal aliens from the mix. Crime is rampant. Educational achievement is spiralling downward. And just this week, we established an all-time record in incarceration. This is where our society puts disenfranchised men--and the few women who run afoul of Big Sister--who don't fit into the Marxist-feminist picture of the State acting as the ultimate husband for the family. The government discourages competition, after all.
Feminists and other Gramscian fellow-travellers know exactly what they're doing. Their aim is to enlarge the State through weakening the family and other hegemonic institutions. How do we know this? Because their acolytes tell us so:
“[T]he stronger the ‘counter-hegemonic’ strength of unions and left parties, the stronger the welfare state… When we argue for ‘decommodifying’ (i.e., taking out of private market provision) such basic human needs as healthcare, childcare, education, and housing, we have in mind a decentralized and more fully accountable welfare state then [sic] exists in Western democracies.”[5]
The feminist agenda of female "liberation" goes way beyond gender equality. If that was the case, the feminist movement would have ended decades ago when women achieved legal parity with men. Rather, their aim is to create a omnipresent, omnipotent, socialized matriarchal government. To do this, they need to destroy the traditional nuclear family--which has sustained civilizations for millennia--and replace it with a solo, female head-of-household wedded to the State. In other words, a matriarchy, with Big Sister as benefactor. Problem is, in destroying the traditional family, they have threatened the very fabric of society. If 1940s Russia is any indicator, the new social order will not be self-sustaining.
In this way, feminism intentionally, purposefully acts to destroy the family, which in turn threatens to destroy society. Their agenda is clear to those who bother to look.
Feminism delenda est
References:
[1]: Lind, Bill. "The Origins of Political Correctness"
[2]: Lawson, Dominic. "You Can Blame It All On Karl Marx". The Independent (UK), 20 Feb 07
[3]: Borst, William. "A Nation of Frogs"
[4]: Atkinson, Gerald. "Radical Feminism and Political Correctness"
[5]: Wood, Bill. Statement before the US House Ways and Means Committee.
[6]: Mohler, Albert. "No Fault Divorce--The End of Marriage?"
[7]: "The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage". The Atlantic Monthly, July 1926.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
The Suicide Cult
The Suicide Cult
On November 17, 1978 members of an American religious cult known as the “People’s Temple” who a year previously had followed their leader, Jim Jones, to a commune in Guyana committed suicide en masse after members of their group murdered an American congressman. In the decades since the incident it has come to take on cultural significance as a symbol of the dangers of uncritical groupthink. Variations of the now familiar phrase “don’t drink the Kool-Aid”, used to urge people not to blindly follow the crowd or some charismatic leader, are a reference to the poisoned communion which brought the sect and the lives of its members to an end.
Communities and societies, like individual persons, are alive, and like all living things in creation, can die. To remain alive, an organism must be constantly regenerating itself, growing new cells to replace the old ones that are dying. This is true of a society as well. The cells that make up a society, its people, are constantly aging and dying. For the organism that is a society to survive it must replenish those cells. It must be constantly reproducing itself.
Note that I said “reproducing” not “replacing”. Today, through modern science, we can extend the lives of people by replacing entire organs with transplants or prosthetics. Our ability to do so is not unlimited, however. Suppose we were to develop prosthetic equivalents of every organ in the human body. We would still not be able to keep a man alive indefinitely by replacing all of his organs. If we were to attempt to do so, then at some point, we would actually kill the man rather than extending his life. Where the line is to be drawn is difficult to say, exactly, but if we keep replacing organs, until no natural organs are left, and it is just 100% prosthetics, even if they are working perfectly, you will have a robot and not the man you started with. That man will be dead.
This is true of a society as well. For a society to be a real, living society, it must reproduce itself. The present generation must be descended from all previous generations and all future generations must be descended from the present generation. This is true generally speaking. A society can survive having some of its members leave and join other societies. Likewise, a society can bring in new members from other societies and incorporate them into itself without losing its identity and dying.
At some point, however, a line exists. On one side of the line, a society is alive and healthy, and reproducing itself. Some people leave, some people move in, but the general sense that the society today consists of the descendents of past generations of the society and the ancestors of future generations of the society is not compromised. On the other side of the line, the society has ceased to reproduce itself and is relying entirely upon immigrants to replace its aging and dying members. This is a society that is dying. It is dying because it is replacing itself rather than reproducing itself.
It is difficult to say exactly where this line is, but it is also not necessary that we identify its exact location. A healthy, thriving, living society, is not interested in getting as close to the line as possible without crossing it.
Western societies today are not healthy societies. Western countries experienced a huge drop in fertility and birth rates over the course of the twentieth century. This was briefly interrupted, by a baby boom which began immediately after World War II and which extended into the mid-60’s in most Western countries, and in some as far as the mid’70’s. Following this boom, however, fertility and birth rates dropped below the levels needed to sustain a population and have remained dangerously low ever since.
In this same period the governments of Western countries have implemented liberal immigration policies. A country with a liberal immigration policy accepts considerably larger numbers of immigrants than a country without a liberal immigration policy would. A country with a liberal immigration policy will also accept far more immigrants from cultures and populations radically different from its core culture and population than a country without a liberal immigration policy. Indeed, a government with a liberal immigration policy, although it will nominally be a non-discriminatory policy, may actually encourage immigration from cultures and populations that are further removed from its core culture and population over immigration from cultures and populations that are closer to its core culture and population.
When a government implements a liberal immigration policy in a period of dangerously low fertility this indicates that a society has moved away from reproducing itself and towards replacing itself. It has started to commit suicide.
During this period of low fertility and high immigration, several movements and ideologies have sprung up encouraging Western societies to embrace aspects of this culture of death. The sexual revolutionaries sought to separate sexual intercourse from any and all sense of social responsibility and place it entirely within the self-enclosed sphere of personal physical pleasure. They were encouraged by the development of new and more efficient contraceptive technology. Then the feminists attacked society’s promotion of the wife/mother role for women as “patriarchal oppression” and demanded that society eliminate gender roles. This went hand-in-glove with the promotion of abortion on demand, for if women were not able to terminate pregnancy at will, all talk of eliminating gender differences and producing either an purely individualistic or an egalitarian society was meaningless. Then the gay rights movement came along and demanded that society affirm rather than discourage same-sex eroticism.
What all of these ideologies and movements have in common is that they place the physical pleasure or the emotional “fulfillment” (or some such nebulous concept), of the individual or a group within society, over the good and even the survival of society itself. They are all also manifestations of the general ideology known as liberalism.
Liberalism’s orientation towards death can be illustrated by comparing its positions on capital punishment and abortion. Liberalism tends to produce minds that are opposed to capital punishment but which favour abortion being readily available and even paid for by the state. Now, liberals come to each of these positions from separate chains of arguments which to them appear to have no connection with each other. A connection is there nonetheless which is plain to see.
Capital punishment upholds the sanctity of human life. It is reserved, or should be reserved, for crimes on the level of first degree murder – the deliberate taking of human life in defiance of social and moral law. By imposing the death penalty upon someone who has cold-bloodedly, in a calculating fashion, taken the life of another human being in defiance of law, society is saying that human life is so precious, that only the life of the murderer is acceptable as just payment for the crime of taking it. (1)
Abortion is the deliberate termination of a pregnancy. It results in the death of the fetus. The fetus is unquestionably a human life. The moment it’s father’s sperm and mother’s egg united to form a single cell, it possessed a complete set of human chromosomes making it fully human. Immediately, the process of growth through cell-division was started. It was fully human and fully alive. The fetus has not committed a crime that demands societal retribution in the form of death. Nor is the fetus an aggressor the killing of whom can be justified by self-defense. In the majority of cases abortions are committed because pregnancy imposes either a hardship or an inconvenience upon the parents of the fetus.
Allowing human life to be terminated for those reasons cheapens human life. So does the abolition of capital punishment. Liberalism is consistent in its low regard for human life which goes hand-in-glove with its embracing of societal and civilizational death.
The connection between liberalism and the death of the societies that make up Western civilization has been discussed in the past. The best treatment of the subject was probably James Burnham’s Suicide of the West which was originally published in 1964. (2) In this book Burnham described liberalism as the “ideology of Western suicide”. He did not mean by that that liberalism was an ideology created with the goal of bringing about the death of Western civilization. Rather he meant that liberalism served to rationalize after the fact the self-inflicted mortal wounds of Western societies.
Our focus for the rest of this essay will be narrower than liberalism in general. We will be looking at a specific ideology and movement within liberalism which has provided the other liberal ideologies and movements mentioned above with the rhetorical weapons and conceptual framework with which to make their arguments and which has also long served as a shield to protect the replacement-over-reproduction trend within our societies from criticism. This ideology/movement is the suicide cult of Western society.
The ideology/movement in question is anti-racism.
Before proceeding to examine anti-racism’s relationship to Western societal suicide we will first have to carefully define what is meant by anti-racism. To avoid confusion the first step in defining anti-racism will be to make clear what we do not mean by the term anti-racism.
The first distinction to be made is between anti-racism and non-racism. Anti-racism is not the same thing as non-racism. Anti-racism and non-racism are both terms which are defined negatively in reference to “racism”. Non-racism, however, is neither an ideology nor a movement. A person who is a “non-racist” is just someone who is not a racist. To be an anti-racist requires more than that, it requires active opposition to racism.
There is a sense in which everyone who is opposed to racism is an anti-racist. For the purposes of this essay however, we will be using a narrower definition of anti-racism. Another distinction needs to be made and that is between the person legitimately opposed to or even outraged at actual racial injustice and racial violence and the person we are calling an anti-racist.
There are two main differences between the two. The first, is that the “racism” an anti-racist actively opposes is a much broader category than actual racial injustice and racial violence. The second is that someone legitimately opposed to racial injustice and racial violence is opposed to these things no matter who the perpetrators are and who the victims are. Anti-racists, on the other hand, consistently oppose any expression of group solidarity on the part of one racial group no matter how benign while overlooking significant racially-motivated violence directed against members of that same group. The racial group in question consists of people groups descended from those who in classical antiquity were the Greeks, Romans, Germans and Celts, that are European in origin and who are most often just called “white” people.
So anti-racism is not just non-racism nor is it to be equated with opposition to actual racial injustice/violence. What is it then?
Anti-racism is the idea that injustice and violence towards people of other races is the inevitable result of believing mankind to be divided into races and treating race as being more than just a trivial difference between people. To see oneself as being a member of a race and other people as not being members of that race is the racism which anti-racists oppose. They insist that we see ourselves as individuals who are members of the human race and to attach no importance to groups intermediary between the individual and the species. To attach importance to such groups, the anti-racist declares, creates divisions which lead to injustice and threaten the future of humanity. Therefore, racism, is an evil which must be eliminated through extensive measures including the use of government power aimed at eradicating all sense of racial identity.
At least if you are white. Anti-racists have no objection to racial consciousness, identity, and solidarity on the part of other racial groups. When was the last time you heard of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People being denounced as a racist organization?
Anti-racism is one of many errors that arise out of liberalism’s root error. The core of liberalism is the idea that human beings are basically and essentially good therefore the evils which are manifest everywhere in the real world must be caused by something outside of human nature. If we can only identify the causes of evil and eliminate them, the liberal believes, we will achieve a just society, a paradise on earth.
In World War II racial violence was escalated to an extreme level. The horrors that Allied soldiers discovered in the concentration camps of the Third Reich as they liberated occupied Europe were photographed and filmed for the world to see and as the story came out of what had occurred there people were shocked, appalled and disgusted.
The liberal mind, presented with such glaring evidence of the falsehood of its most foundational belief, the goodness of mankind, desperately searched for an origin outside human nature. It latched on to the concept of “racism” as its explanation. Hitler had been famous for his theories of Aryan racial superiority. They were foundational to the ideology of the Third Reich. Therefore, the liberal mind concluded, racism is the cause of atrocities like those committed by Hitler and will always lead the racist to commit atrocities like Hitler’s. Racism must therefore be eliminated for society at all costs.
There are several problems with this idea.
First of all, its basic presuppositions are false. Evil does have its origins in human nature. Attempts to eliminate evil by political and social solutions aimed at the elimination of “causes” of evil that are external to human nature will always fail. The only way to eliminate human evil through such means is to eliminate human beings.
Secondly, the theory does not fit the facts it seeks to explain. Hitler believed in white supremacy – but so did Sir Winston Churchill, and indeed most, if not all, of the leaders of the Allies. Before, during, and after the time period in which Hitler was committing his atrocities, Joseph Stalin was committing even greater atrocities.
Finally, the anti-racist theory itself becomes a justification for injustice against two different groups of people.
First, it is a justification for injustice against those who are labeled “racists” by the anti-racists. People generally do not apply the label “racist” to themselves. It must therefore be attached to them by others, by the anti-racists. The label itself creates a stigma resulting in a presumption of guilt against the person labeled a “racist”. If the person denies being a racist, the anti-racist replies “all racists deny being racist, therefore you must be a racist”. People who have been accused of racism in Canada alone have been charged with violating “hate speech” laws, subjected to long inquisitorial trials before the Human Rights Tribunal, issued life-time gag orders, fined thousands of dollars, had their homes and property vandalized, had their persons’ violated, had their children taken away from them, been subjected to harassment, stripped of their jobs and careers, and turned into social pariahs. The treatment a “racist” receives at the hands of the anti-racists shows some remarkable resemblances to the treatment Jews, gypsies, and others received at the hands of Nazi Germany.
Secondly, it is a justification for injustice against the various ethnic groups that are collectively referred to as “white people” and particularly against specific groups within that broader category that are particularly associated with “racism” in the mind of the anti-racist – groups such as Southern whites in the United States, Germans, and Afrikaners (South African whites). Countless examples of such injustices could be discussed but there is one major injustice that overshadows all others. Namely that anti-racism requires that people groups within the category “white” commit collective suicide and disappear from the earth by replacing themselves with immigrants rather than reproducing themselves.
To restate our definition of anti-racism it is the idea that racism is the recognition of the existence of races within humanity and the attributing of significance to the category of race, that racism leads inevitably to horrible racial injustice, and that therefore racism is an evil to be eliminated through repressive government measures if necessary. Anti-racism also refers to the movements and organizations which act upon that idea.
To say that anti-racism, as described above, is the suicide cult of Western civilization is not to say that anti-racism is the cause of the factors contributing to Western suicide. It would be absurd, for example, to argue that anti-racism is the cause of low birth rates and low fertility among Western societies. It is, however, foundational to several of the ideas which serve to justify, if they are not themselves the cause of, anti-natal behavior. Feminism, which encouraged women to place careers ahead of motherhood, is an anti-natal movement which borrowed many of its concepts from anti-racism.
While anti-racism is not the cause of low birth-rates and may not be the primary cause of Western governments having adopted policies of multiculturalism and liberal immigration, it is certainly a justification invoked for the latter policies. More importantly, it prevents those policies from being abandoned.
How does anti-racism do so?
One way is by providing officials who don’t want to change those policies for whatever reasons with an easy means of justifying their actions and smearing their critics. “You don’t like what we are doing? You must be a racist!”
Another way, related to the last one is by stifling political discussion and marginalizing people and organizations that seek immigration reform and an end to multiculturalism. Even if the spokesmen for an organization seeking a more restrictive immigration policy and an end to multiculturalism express themselves in irenic tones and try to make a positive case for their people that does not reflect negatively on other people groups, the anti-racists will seek to marginalize the organization. The organization that is trying to argue its case positively will be condemned as a “hate group” by anti-racists who certainly do not disguise the loathing they feel for the organization, its leaders, and members, and anyone who happens to agree with it.
The anti-racists will justify this by explaining to us that “racists” speak in code language. For this reason, they must be marginalized, and their words banned from public forums where everybody has easy access to them, such as the internet. Otherwise uninformed people might be misled by them. People should only have access to the thought of “racists” as carefully filtered through anti-racist “experts” who understand the code language. Otherwise we might hear a “racist” say something like “white people have rights too” and think that that is a reasonable position without realizing that it is an “old canard” that really means that all other people should be enslaved or slaughtered.
There is one more way which we will consider in which anti-racism prevents the suicidal policies of western societies from being reversed. That is through instilling in us, from our earliest childhood, the idea that “race is only skin deep” and that is a great evil, if not the greatest of all evils, to treat people differently because of something like race. This is what makes anti-racism’s marginalization technique so effective and it is carried out with the full cooperation of the government, media and educational system.
If all the public schools, and public service announcements, and diversity and sensitivity seminars, were doing was telling us that we need to treat everybody fairly and justly, regardless of their race, there would be no problem with it. Instead, however, they are telling us that treating people justly means treating them the same and they are telling us that race is only a matter of skin color. Both of these things are falsehoods.
Note carefully that there is a difference between the idea that we should treat all people fairly and justly and the idea that we should treat all people the same. A person should be fair and just to both his father and to a complete stranger. That does not mean that he should treat his father and a complete stranger in the same way. Indeed, because of a man’s relationship with his father, justice demands that he treat his father differently than he would treat a complete stranger. Thus the idea that treating people justly means treating them the same is a falsehood.
So is the idea that race is only a matter of skin color. In fact, not only is race more than skin color, skin color is not even essential to the meaning of the word race.
The English term “race”, when applied to human beings and not used to mean the sport of competitive running or an election campaign, comes through a French derivative, from the Old Italian word “razza”, which refers to lineage, ancestry, or stock. Race, when applied to people, refers to a line of biological descent. We use it this way in a number of sense. Sometimes we speak of the entire human species as “the human race”. What this expression means is that if we go back far enough, all human beings are descended from the same original stock.
Another use, one which is now rather archaic, is to refer to a particular family’s ancestors as it’s race. “The race of the Smiths” or “The race of the Joneses” would be examples.
The use however, that is most relevant to discussions of racism and anti-racism, is to refer to large human populations whose descent from a common ancestral stock is indicated by a set of shared physical characteristics which is common to the members of the population and which distinguishes them from other people. Two things should be noted about this use of the word race.
First, it is a set of characteristics, and not one particular trait like skin color that distinguishes one race from another. A dark-skinned Australian aborigine might share the same skin color with a man from a sub-Saharan African tribe. They are not of the same race, however, nor would the albino son of either of them be of the same race as an Englishman or a German.
Secondly, even here, it is common ancestry that is the essential meaning of the word race. The physical traits associated with race are only racial insomuch as they indicate common ancestry.
It is important that we grasp this. The groups of people that we call races, are races because they are descended from a common ancestral group, not because they have distinct physical characteristics. The reason members of a race have distinct physical characteristics in common is because they are of a common stock. It is ancestry that is the most important part of the meaning of the word race.
Ancestry, however, is not something trivial like skin color. Anti-racists wish to trivialize. Hence their reducing race to its most trivial accident and speaking of it only in terms of skin color. They wish to eliminate any sense of loyalty to a group that is grounded in that group’s shared ancestry. Such loyalties stand in the way of their vision of a world where the individual’s only loyalty is to mankind. Therefore, they tell us from an early age that race is inconsequential that it is not important because it is only about skin color. We believe them because we recognize that group loyalty based upon something as shallow as skin color would be incredibly silly.
Our acceptance of their doctrine, however, hinders our forming a proper, natural attachment to our own people, even though such an attachment would not be based upon skin color but upon something far deeper. The anti-racist switch-and-bait has proven to be a remarkably effective brainwashing tool. We have drunk deep from the poisoned chalice containing their Kool-Aid.
Ordinarily, when he does not have something like liberal, anti-racist ideology being shoved down his throat since he was in diapers to hinder him, a man will form an attachment to his people. This attachment, this sense of loyalty, develops out of his first natural affections which arise out of relationships. He grows to love his parents and his siblings, to form bonds with his friends, to develop various relationships with his neighbors, and all of thee relationships form the basis of his loyalty to his community as a group. From this loyalty to his community his patriotic affection gradually spreads to encompass his country and his people. It is only out of such love for his own that any real love for mankind as a whole can arise, as Edmund Burke pointed out years ago.
The people, for whom a man develops this patriotic attachment, is not his “race” in the sense in which I have defined the term above. That meaning of the word “race” is only really useful for scientists and political ideologues. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to call the people which is the object of a man’s patriotic affections his “nation”. A “nation”, like a race, is a people group with a common ancestral identity. A nation, however, is smaller than a race, which is a continental population, and a nation is distinguished from other nations by cultural distinctives – a common language, usually a common religion, common customs, habits, manners, dress etc.
This kind of patriotic affection for one’s people, for one’s nation, rooted in one’s first affections for ones family, friends, neighbors and community, built upon a foundation of blood, relationship, and shared experiences is the lifeblood of an organic society.
The racialist and nationalist ideologies and political movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries committed the fatal error and the deadly sin of ignoring the source of patriotic affection and demanding that race and/or nation replace family, home, friends, kin, neighbors, community and even God in people’s hearts and affections. Human loyalty and affection have to start with the small and grow towards the big. When you put the nation or race ahead of the family and community in the chain of affection you develop unnatural affections which breed fanaticism.
Liberalism in its anti-racist manifestation commits the same error and sin on a much larger scale. It demands that our first loyalty be to all of Humanity. All other loyalties are regarded as threats and hindrances to the goal of eliminating hatred and injustice and finding salvation for mankind through the establishment of a unified, just, peaceful, new world order. This sort of fanaticism demands a sacrifice – the sacrifice, through suicide, of the white peoples and Western societies in this world.
Perhaps it is time we put the Kool-Aid down.
(1) Having said that, I shudder to think of the power of life and death being in the hands of modern liberal governments composed of democratically elected politicians and administered by self-righteous bureaucrats. On principle, capital punishment is necessary for justice. Modern governments are the wrong kind of governments to administer justice. This is a subject for another essay however.
(2) James Burnham. Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. The John Day Company: New York, 1964. Although this book stands on its own it can also be read as part of a series that began with the author’s The Managerial Revolution and continued in his The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom. A good profile of the author and overview of his thought can be found in James Burnham by Samuel T. Francis, published as part of the “Thinkers of Our Time” series in 1999 by The Claridge Press in London.
On November 17, 1978 members of an American religious cult known as the “People’s Temple” who a year previously had followed their leader, Jim Jones, to a commune in Guyana committed suicide en masse after members of their group murdered an American congressman. In the decades since the incident it has come to take on cultural significance as a symbol of the dangers of uncritical groupthink. Variations of the now familiar phrase “don’t drink the Kool-Aid”, used to urge people not to blindly follow the crowd or some charismatic leader, are a reference to the poisoned communion which brought the sect and the lives of its members to an end.
Communities and societies, like individual persons, are alive, and like all living things in creation, can die. To remain alive, an organism must be constantly regenerating itself, growing new cells to replace the old ones that are dying. This is true of a society as well. The cells that make up a society, its people, are constantly aging and dying. For the organism that is a society to survive it must replenish those cells. It must be constantly reproducing itself.
Note that I said “reproducing” not “replacing”. Today, through modern science, we can extend the lives of people by replacing entire organs with transplants or prosthetics. Our ability to do so is not unlimited, however. Suppose we were to develop prosthetic equivalents of every organ in the human body. We would still not be able to keep a man alive indefinitely by replacing all of his organs. If we were to attempt to do so, then at some point, we would actually kill the man rather than extending his life. Where the line is to be drawn is difficult to say, exactly, but if we keep replacing organs, until no natural organs are left, and it is just 100% prosthetics, even if they are working perfectly, you will have a robot and not the man you started with. That man will be dead.
This is true of a society as well. For a society to be a real, living society, it must reproduce itself. The present generation must be descended from all previous generations and all future generations must be descended from the present generation. This is true generally speaking. A society can survive having some of its members leave and join other societies. Likewise, a society can bring in new members from other societies and incorporate them into itself without losing its identity and dying.
At some point, however, a line exists. On one side of the line, a society is alive and healthy, and reproducing itself. Some people leave, some people move in, but the general sense that the society today consists of the descendents of past generations of the society and the ancestors of future generations of the society is not compromised. On the other side of the line, the society has ceased to reproduce itself and is relying entirely upon immigrants to replace its aging and dying members. This is a society that is dying. It is dying because it is replacing itself rather than reproducing itself.
It is difficult to say exactly where this line is, but it is also not necessary that we identify its exact location. A healthy, thriving, living society, is not interested in getting as close to the line as possible without crossing it.
Western societies today are not healthy societies. Western countries experienced a huge drop in fertility and birth rates over the course of the twentieth century. This was briefly interrupted, by a baby boom which began immediately after World War II and which extended into the mid-60’s in most Western countries, and in some as far as the mid’70’s. Following this boom, however, fertility and birth rates dropped below the levels needed to sustain a population and have remained dangerously low ever since.
In this same period the governments of Western countries have implemented liberal immigration policies. A country with a liberal immigration policy accepts considerably larger numbers of immigrants than a country without a liberal immigration policy would. A country with a liberal immigration policy will also accept far more immigrants from cultures and populations radically different from its core culture and population than a country without a liberal immigration policy. Indeed, a government with a liberal immigration policy, although it will nominally be a non-discriminatory policy, may actually encourage immigration from cultures and populations that are further removed from its core culture and population over immigration from cultures and populations that are closer to its core culture and population.
When a government implements a liberal immigration policy in a period of dangerously low fertility this indicates that a society has moved away from reproducing itself and towards replacing itself. It has started to commit suicide.
During this period of low fertility and high immigration, several movements and ideologies have sprung up encouraging Western societies to embrace aspects of this culture of death. The sexual revolutionaries sought to separate sexual intercourse from any and all sense of social responsibility and place it entirely within the self-enclosed sphere of personal physical pleasure. They were encouraged by the development of new and more efficient contraceptive technology. Then the feminists attacked society’s promotion of the wife/mother role for women as “patriarchal oppression” and demanded that society eliminate gender roles. This went hand-in-glove with the promotion of abortion on demand, for if women were not able to terminate pregnancy at will, all talk of eliminating gender differences and producing either an purely individualistic or an egalitarian society was meaningless. Then the gay rights movement came along and demanded that society affirm rather than discourage same-sex eroticism.
What all of these ideologies and movements have in common is that they place the physical pleasure or the emotional “fulfillment” (or some such nebulous concept), of the individual or a group within society, over the good and even the survival of society itself. They are all also manifestations of the general ideology known as liberalism.
Liberalism’s orientation towards death can be illustrated by comparing its positions on capital punishment and abortion. Liberalism tends to produce minds that are opposed to capital punishment but which favour abortion being readily available and even paid for by the state. Now, liberals come to each of these positions from separate chains of arguments which to them appear to have no connection with each other. A connection is there nonetheless which is plain to see.
Capital punishment upholds the sanctity of human life. It is reserved, or should be reserved, for crimes on the level of first degree murder – the deliberate taking of human life in defiance of social and moral law. By imposing the death penalty upon someone who has cold-bloodedly, in a calculating fashion, taken the life of another human being in defiance of law, society is saying that human life is so precious, that only the life of the murderer is acceptable as just payment for the crime of taking it. (1)
Abortion is the deliberate termination of a pregnancy. It results in the death of the fetus. The fetus is unquestionably a human life. The moment it’s father’s sperm and mother’s egg united to form a single cell, it possessed a complete set of human chromosomes making it fully human. Immediately, the process of growth through cell-division was started. It was fully human and fully alive. The fetus has not committed a crime that demands societal retribution in the form of death. Nor is the fetus an aggressor the killing of whom can be justified by self-defense. In the majority of cases abortions are committed because pregnancy imposes either a hardship or an inconvenience upon the parents of the fetus.
Allowing human life to be terminated for those reasons cheapens human life. So does the abolition of capital punishment. Liberalism is consistent in its low regard for human life which goes hand-in-glove with its embracing of societal and civilizational death.
The connection between liberalism and the death of the societies that make up Western civilization has been discussed in the past. The best treatment of the subject was probably James Burnham’s Suicide of the West which was originally published in 1964. (2) In this book Burnham described liberalism as the “ideology of Western suicide”. He did not mean by that that liberalism was an ideology created with the goal of bringing about the death of Western civilization. Rather he meant that liberalism served to rationalize after the fact the self-inflicted mortal wounds of Western societies.
Our focus for the rest of this essay will be narrower than liberalism in general. We will be looking at a specific ideology and movement within liberalism which has provided the other liberal ideologies and movements mentioned above with the rhetorical weapons and conceptual framework with which to make their arguments and which has also long served as a shield to protect the replacement-over-reproduction trend within our societies from criticism. This ideology/movement is the suicide cult of Western society.
The ideology/movement in question is anti-racism.
Before proceeding to examine anti-racism’s relationship to Western societal suicide we will first have to carefully define what is meant by anti-racism. To avoid confusion the first step in defining anti-racism will be to make clear what we do not mean by the term anti-racism.
The first distinction to be made is between anti-racism and non-racism. Anti-racism is not the same thing as non-racism. Anti-racism and non-racism are both terms which are defined negatively in reference to “racism”. Non-racism, however, is neither an ideology nor a movement. A person who is a “non-racist” is just someone who is not a racist. To be an anti-racist requires more than that, it requires active opposition to racism.
There is a sense in which everyone who is opposed to racism is an anti-racist. For the purposes of this essay however, we will be using a narrower definition of anti-racism. Another distinction needs to be made and that is between the person legitimately opposed to or even outraged at actual racial injustice and racial violence and the person we are calling an anti-racist.
There are two main differences between the two. The first, is that the “racism” an anti-racist actively opposes is a much broader category than actual racial injustice and racial violence. The second is that someone legitimately opposed to racial injustice and racial violence is opposed to these things no matter who the perpetrators are and who the victims are. Anti-racists, on the other hand, consistently oppose any expression of group solidarity on the part of one racial group no matter how benign while overlooking significant racially-motivated violence directed against members of that same group. The racial group in question consists of people groups descended from those who in classical antiquity were the Greeks, Romans, Germans and Celts, that are European in origin and who are most often just called “white” people.
So anti-racism is not just non-racism nor is it to be equated with opposition to actual racial injustice/violence. What is it then?
Anti-racism is the idea that injustice and violence towards people of other races is the inevitable result of believing mankind to be divided into races and treating race as being more than just a trivial difference between people. To see oneself as being a member of a race and other people as not being members of that race is the racism which anti-racists oppose. They insist that we see ourselves as individuals who are members of the human race and to attach no importance to groups intermediary between the individual and the species. To attach importance to such groups, the anti-racist declares, creates divisions which lead to injustice and threaten the future of humanity. Therefore, racism, is an evil which must be eliminated through extensive measures including the use of government power aimed at eradicating all sense of racial identity.
At least if you are white. Anti-racists have no objection to racial consciousness, identity, and solidarity on the part of other racial groups. When was the last time you heard of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People being denounced as a racist organization?
Anti-racism is one of many errors that arise out of liberalism’s root error. The core of liberalism is the idea that human beings are basically and essentially good therefore the evils which are manifest everywhere in the real world must be caused by something outside of human nature. If we can only identify the causes of evil and eliminate them, the liberal believes, we will achieve a just society, a paradise on earth.
In World War II racial violence was escalated to an extreme level. The horrors that Allied soldiers discovered in the concentration camps of the Third Reich as they liberated occupied Europe were photographed and filmed for the world to see and as the story came out of what had occurred there people were shocked, appalled and disgusted.
The liberal mind, presented with such glaring evidence of the falsehood of its most foundational belief, the goodness of mankind, desperately searched for an origin outside human nature. It latched on to the concept of “racism” as its explanation. Hitler had been famous for his theories of Aryan racial superiority. They were foundational to the ideology of the Third Reich. Therefore, the liberal mind concluded, racism is the cause of atrocities like those committed by Hitler and will always lead the racist to commit atrocities like Hitler’s. Racism must therefore be eliminated for society at all costs.
There are several problems with this idea.
First of all, its basic presuppositions are false. Evil does have its origins in human nature. Attempts to eliminate evil by political and social solutions aimed at the elimination of “causes” of evil that are external to human nature will always fail. The only way to eliminate human evil through such means is to eliminate human beings.
Secondly, the theory does not fit the facts it seeks to explain. Hitler believed in white supremacy – but so did Sir Winston Churchill, and indeed most, if not all, of the leaders of the Allies. Before, during, and after the time period in which Hitler was committing his atrocities, Joseph Stalin was committing even greater atrocities.
Finally, the anti-racist theory itself becomes a justification for injustice against two different groups of people.
First, it is a justification for injustice against those who are labeled “racists” by the anti-racists. People generally do not apply the label “racist” to themselves. It must therefore be attached to them by others, by the anti-racists. The label itself creates a stigma resulting in a presumption of guilt against the person labeled a “racist”. If the person denies being a racist, the anti-racist replies “all racists deny being racist, therefore you must be a racist”. People who have been accused of racism in Canada alone have been charged with violating “hate speech” laws, subjected to long inquisitorial trials before the Human Rights Tribunal, issued life-time gag orders, fined thousands of dollars, had their homes and property vandalized, had their persons’ violated, had their children taken away from them, been subjected to harassment, stripped of their jobs and careers, and turned into social pariahs. The treatment a “racist” receives at the hands of the anti-racists shows some remarkable resemblances to the treatment Jews, gypsies, and others received at the hands of Nazi Germany.
Secondly, it is a justification for injustice against the various ethnic groups that are collectively referred to as “white people” and particularly against specific groups within that broader category that are particularly associated with “racism” in the mind of the anti-racist – groups such as Southern whites in the United States, Germans, and Afrikaners (South African whites). Countless examples of such injustices could be discussed but there is one major injustice that overshadows all others. Namely that anti-racism requires that people groups within the category “white” commit collective suicide and disappear from the earth by replacing themselves with immigrants rather than reproducing themselves.
To restate our definition of anti-racism it is the idea that racism is the recognition of the existence of races within humanity and the attributing of significance to the category of race, that racism leads inevitably to horrible racial injustice, and that therefore racism is an evil to be eliminated through repressive government measures if necessary. Anti-racism also refers to the movements and organizations which act upon that idea.
To say that anti-racism, as described above, is the suicide cult of Western civilization is not to say that anti-racism is the cause of the factors contributing to Western suicide. It would be absurd, for example, to argue that anti-racism is the cause of low birth rates and low fertility among Western societies. It is, however, foundational to several of the ideas which serve to justify, if they are not themselves the cause of, anti-natal behavior. Feminism, which encouraged women to place careers ahead of motherhood, is an anti-natal movement which borrowed many of its concepts from anti-racism.
While anti-racism is not the cause of low birth-rates and may not be the primary cause of Western governments having adopted policies of multiculturalism and liberal immigration, it is certainly a justification invoked for the latter policies. More importantly, it prevents those policies from being abandoned.
How does anti-racism do so?
One way is by providing officials who don’t want to change those policies for whatever reasons with an easy means of justifying their actions and smearing their critics. “You don’t like what we are doing? You must be a racist!”
Another way, related to the last one is by stifling political discussion and marginalizing people and organizations that seek immigration reform and an end to multiculturalism. Even if the spokesmen for an organization seeking a more restrictive immigration policy and an end to multiculturalism express themselves in irenic tones and try to make a positive case for their people that does not reflect negatively on other people groups, the anti-racists will seek to marginalize the organization. The organization that is trying to argue its case positively will be condemned as a “hate group” by anti-racists who certainly do not disguise the loathing they feel for the organization, its leaders, and members, and anyone who happens to agree with it.
The anti-racists will justify this by explaining to us that “racists” speak in code language. For this reason, they must be marginalized, and their words banned from public forums where everybody has easy access to them, such as the internet. Otherwise uninformed people might be misled by them. People should only have access to the thought of “racists” as carefully filtered through anti-racist “experts” who understand the code language. Otherwise we might hear a “racist” say something like “white people have rights too” and think that that is a reasonable position without realizing that it is an “old canard” that really means that all other people should be enslaved or slaughtered.
There is one more way which we will consider in which anti-racism prevents the suicidal policies of western societies from being reversed. That is through instilling in us, from our earliest childhood, the idea that “race is only skin deep” and that is a great evil, if not the greatest of all evils, to treat people differently because of something like race. This is what makes anti-racism’s marginalization technique so effective and it is carried out with the full cooperation of the government, media and educational system.
If all the public schools, and public service announcements, and diversity and sensitivity seminars, were doing was telling us that we need to treat everybody fairly and justly, regardless of their race, there would be no problem with it. Instead, however, they are telling us that treating people justly means treating them the same and they are telling us that race is only a matter of skin color. Both of these things are falsehoods.
Note carefully that there is a difference between the idea that we should treat all people fairly and justly and the idea that we should treat all people the same. A person should be fair and just to both his father and to a complete stranger. That does not mean that he should treat his father and a complete stranger in the same way. Indeed, because of a man’s relationship with his father, justice demands that he treat his father differently than he would treat a complete stranger. Thus the idea that treating people justly means treating them the same is a falsehood.
So is the idea that race is only a matter of skin color. In fact, not only is race more than skin color, skin color is not even essential to the meaning of the word race.
The English term “race”, when applied to human beings and not used to mean the sport of competitive running or an election campaign, comes through a French derivative, from the Old Italian word “razza”, which refers to lineage, ancestry, or stock. Race, when applied to people, refers to a line of biological descent. We use it this way in a number of sense. Sometimes we speak of the entire human species as “the human race”. What this expression means is that if we go back far enough, all human beings are descended from the same original stock.
Another use, one which is now rather archaic, is to refer to a particular family’s ancestors as it’s race. “The race of the Smiths” or “The race of the Joneses” would be examples.
The use however, that is most relevant to discussions of racism and anti-racism, is to refer to large human populations whose descent from a common ancestral stock is indicated by a set of shared physical characteristics which is common to the members of the population and which distinguishes them from other people. Two things should be noted about this use of the word race.
First, it is a set of characteristics, and not one particular trait like skin color that distinguishes one race from another. A dark-skinned Australian aborigine might share the same skin color with a man from a sub-Saharan African tribe. They are not of the same race, however, nor would the albino son of either of them be of the same race as an Englishman or a German.
Secondly, even here, it is common ancestry that is the essential meaning of the word race. The physical traits associated with race are only racial insomuch as they indicate common ancestry.
It is important that we grasp this. The groups of people that we call races, are races because they are descended from a common ancestral group, not because they have distinct physical characteristics. The reason members of a race have distinct physical characteristics in common is because they are of a common stock. It is ancestry that is the most important part of the meaning of the word race.
Ancestry, however, is not something trivial like skin color. Anti-racists wish to trivialize. Hence their reducing race to its most trivial accident and speaking of it only in terms of skin color. They wish to eliminate any sense of loyalty to a group that is grounded in that group’s shared ancestry. Such loyalties stand in the way of their vision of a world where the individual’s only loyalty is to mankind. Therefore, they tell us from an early age that race is inconsequential that it is not important because it is only about skin color. We believe them because we recognize that group loyalty based upon something as shallow as skin color would be incredibly silly.
Our acceptance of their doctrine, however, hinders our forming a proper, natural attachment to our own people, even though such an attachment would not be based upon skin color but upon something far deeper. The anti-racist switch-and-bait has proven to be a remarkably effective brainwashing tool. We have drunk deep from the poisoned chalice containing their Kool-Aid.
Ordinarily, when he does not have something like liberal, anti-racist ideology being shoved down his throat since he was in diapers to hinder him, a man will form an attachment to his people. This attachment, this sense of loyalty, develops out of his first natural affections which arise out of relationships. He grows to love his parents and his siblings, to form bonds with his friends, to develop various relationships with his neighbors, and all of thee relationships form the basis of his loyalty to his community as a group. From this loyalty to his community his patriotic affection gradually spreads to encompass his country and his people. It is only out of such love for his own that any real love for mankind as a whole can arise, as Edmund Burke pointed out years ago.
The people, for whom a man develops this patriotic attachment, is not his “race” in the sense in which I have defined the term above. That meaning of the word “race” is only really useful for scientists and political ideologues. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to call the people which is the object of a man’s patriotic affections his “nation”. A “nation”, like a race, is a people group with a common ancestral identity. A nation, however, is smaller than a race, which is a continental population, and a nation is distinguished from other nations by cultural distinctives – a common language, usually a common religion, common customs, habits, manners, dress etc.
This kind of patriotic affection for one’s people, for one’s nation, rooted in one’s first affections for ones family, friends, neighbors and community, built upon a foundation of blood, relationship, and shared experiences is the lifeblood of an organic society.
The racialist and nationalist ideologies and political movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries committed the fatal error and the deadly sin of ignoring the source of patriotic affection and demanding that race and/or nation replace family, home, friends, kin, neighbors, community and even God in people’s hearts and affections. Human loyalty and affection have to start with the small and grow towards the big. When you put the nation or race ahead of the family and community in the chain of affection you develop unnatural affections which breed fanaticism.
Liberalism in its anti-racist manifestation commits the same error and sin on a much larger scale. It demands that our first loyalty be to all of Humanity. All other loyalties are regarded as threats and hindrances to the goal of eliminating hatred and injustice and finding salvation for mankind through the establishment of a unified, just, peaceful, new world order. This sort of fanaticism demands a sacrifice – the sacrifice, through suicide, of the white peoples and Western societies in this world.
Perhaps it is time we put the Kool-Aid down.
(1) Having said that, I shudder to think of the power of life and death being in the hands of modern liberal governments composed of democratically elected politicians and administered by self-righteous bureaucrats. On principle, capital punishment is necessary for justice. Modern governments are the wrong kind of governments to administer justice. This is a subject for another essay however.
(2) James Burnham. Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. The John Day Company: New York, 1964. Although this book stands on its own it can also be read as part of a series that began with the author’s The Managerial Revolution and continued in his The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom. A good profile of the author and overview of his thought can be found in James Burnham by Samuel T. Francis, published as part of the “Thinkers of Our Time” series in 1999 by The Claridge Press in London.
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