The Death of Conservatism

It abandoned culture, tradition and learning.

From Forbes
By Melik Kaylan

What a strange, appalling time to be an American conservative. Obama is the hope of the world; G.W. has duck shoes hurled at him. At home: the severest deflation, unemployment, bankruptcies, bailouts since ... well, the marker keeps changing, shifting all the way back to the 1930s. Abroad: yes, after eight years, there's a clear victory in Iraq.

That's no small matter. But it is a small matter if Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine remain unchanged, more intractable than ever, more intractable for being exacerbated by the retrogression in Russia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Pakistan. It's not axiomatic that all leaders on the right are universally vilified anyway because they make the tougher choices, therefore, when they're vilified we should take comfort. This is not how the conservative cause looked after Reagan, Thatcher or Bush the elder.

One keeps hearing that there's a broad, behind-closed-doors, reconsideration afoot of basic principles--heaven knows we need it--but look and listen as I might, I see no evidence of it. For some years now, I've been puzzled by what has increasingly passed for conservatism in the Republican party. Herewith, I offer a short list of such puzzlements, at first modest-seeming perhaps, but ultimately at the heart of the debate we must have.

Consumption Trumps Thrift. After 9/11, we were told to go shopping. And now again, consumer confidence, the restoration thereof, is first priority--for which we must borrow against the future. Borrowing is not a conservative cause, nor spending a conservative virtue. The Founding Fathers did not espouse "life, liberty and the pursuit of shopping." Suddenly, thrift, sacrifice, saving--the process by which real wealth gets incrementally generated over time--have disappeared from the pantheon. Apparently, if the economy whizzes around at a faster and faster rate, the very act of unrestrained mass selling and buying creates a Brave New World, new value, new wealth, even though the money is borrowed. Well, we now know it doesn't. It creates a new class of charlatan zillionaires and money that blurs around so fast that there's no accounting possible.

Down With The Elites. Here's a puzzle: Suddenly, the orators of the right have taken up the 1970s leftist obsession with overthrowing "elites." Certainly, it's true enough that 30 years on, those leftists have become the elites, in academe, in art, in Hollywood and many parts of the media. But advocating class war, even intellectual class war, is hardly a sound conservative policy. The sight of Bill O'Reilly hurling accusations of elitism at his guests appeals merely to the basest populist instincts. Elites are necessary, have always existed and will exist willy-nilly in nature and in society whatever rancor we may feel. The top athlete, top chef, the airline pilot, the engine driver, the semi-conductor expert, the solo-violinist are all members of elites. If we don't like the current elites, we ought to best them through argument and ideas, not Robespierrian envy.

Anti-Intellectualism. Bill Buckley, the ideological father of the modern conservative movement, was arguably the most intellectual figure in the land and prevailed because his erudition, sense of context and history went deeper than the trendy new leftist thinkers he confronted. Conservatism is about studying and preserving the highest, oldest intellectual traditions--not about making the ignorant feel good about being uneducated. What's all this pride in heartland provincialism and ignorance of world geography? This is what Putin appeals to in Russia. If the education system has excluded conservative values, we don't ditch education, we redouble efforts to instruct the heartland in Western Civilization at its highest expression.

Entertainment Trumps Culture. Conservatives have largely ceded the landscape of cultural life to the left. You do not hear aesthetic commentary from Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly on their favorite Shakespeare tragedy or the loveliest painting they've seen. You might hear polemical words on a movie flouting family values and offending decency--and good for them for saying so. But on the left, you will hear discussions of art and culture at all levels of discourse. On the right, serious thought, erudition in general, remains largely political.

Here again we see a direct reversal of roles since the '70s, when the left viewed all culture from political or polemical criteria. When did conservatism become a lowbrow pursuit? Traditional values created the greatest churches, paintings of the Renaissance, country houses, book collections and a love of learning. As it stands, these days, the conservative masses mostly consume entertainment, and culture is considered elitist. This is nonsense. We need an aesthetics of conservatism.

Much of this may sound Utopian, and yet it's not new, not invented from whole cloth. It's about rediscovering lost traditions deep in the roots of our collective memory. This is where values come from, not from the economy or from political ideas alone. It's time for a profound consideration of what conservatism meant before we lost our way. Let the debate broaden and deepen. At the very least, let it begin.

Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for Forbes.com. His story "Georgia In The Time of Misha" is featured in The Best American Travel Writing 2008.

Created Equal: How Chistianity Shaped The West

In its flagship publication, Imprimis, Hillsdale College has reprinted a speech that best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza delivered at their National Leadership Seminar in Colorado Springs. Mr. D'Souza has thought deeply and written eloquently about the Christian roots of our culture and their importance in securing our rights, freedoms and human dignity. As the battles between Christians and secularists heighten during the Christmas season, this speech is an important reminder that the struggle is about much more than nativity scenes at the courthouse and Christmas carols at the school assembly; at stake are the most fundamental values of Western civilization.

Created Equal: How Chistianity Shaped The West

By Dinesh D'Souza

IN RECENT YEARS there has arisen a new atheism that represents a direct attack on Western Christianity. Books such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, all contend that Western society would be better off if we could eradicate from it the last vestiges of Christianity. But Christianity is largely responsible for many of the principles and institutions that even secular people cherish—chief among them equality and liberty.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” he called the proposition “self-evident.” But he did not mean that it is immediately evident. It requires a certain kind of learning. And indeed most cultures throughout history, and even today, reject the proposition. At first glance, there is admittedly something absurd about the claim of human equality, when all around us we see dramatic evidence of inequality. People are unequal in height, in weight, in strength, in stamina, in intelligence, in perseverance, in truthfulness, and in about every other quality. But of course Jefferson knew this. He was asserting human equality of a special kind. Human beings, he was saying, are moral equals, each of whom possesses certain equal rights. They differ in many respects, but each of their lives has a moral worth no greater and no less than that of any other. According to this doctrine, the rights of a Philadelphia street sweeper are the same as those of Jefferson himself.

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The Humanities Move Off Campus

From City Journal
By Victor Davis Hanson


As the classical university unravels, students seek knowledge and know-how elsewhere.

Until recently, classical education served as the foundation of the wider liberal arts curriculum, which in turn defined the mission of the traditional university. Classical learning dedicated itself to turning out literate citizens who could read and write well, express themselves, and make sense of the confusion of the present by drawing on the wisdom of the past. Students grounded in the classics appreciated the history of their civilization and understood the rights and responsibilities of their unique citizenship. Universities, then, acted as cultural custodians, helping students understand our present values in the context of a 2,500-year tradition that began with the ancient Greeks.

But in recent decades, classical and traditional liberal arts education has begun to erode, and a variety of unexpected consequences have followed. The academic battle has now gone beyond the in-house “culture wars” of the 1980s. Though the argument over politically correct curricula, controversial faculty appointments, and the traditional mission of the university is ongoing, the university now finds itself being bypassed technologically, conceptually, and culturally, in ways both welcome and disturbing.

At its most basic, the classical education that used to underpin the university often meant some acquaintance with Greek and Latin, which offered students three rich dividends. First, classical-language instruction meant acquiring generic methods of inquiry. Knowledge was no longer hazy and amorphous, but categorized and finite. Classical languages, like their Western successors, were learned through the systematic study of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Such philological study then widened to reading poetry, philosophy, history, and oratory. Again, the student learned that there was a blueprint—a structure—to approaching education. Nothing could ever be truly new in itself but was instead a new wrinkle on the age-old face of wisdom. Novel theories of education and entirely new disciplines of learning—to the extent that they were legitimate disciplines—could take their place within existing classical divisions of finite learning, such as philosophy, political science, or literature.

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Conservatives Have Important Political Value

From Aberdeen News
By Jon D. Schaff

The election drubbing recently taken by Republicans has given rise to much soul searching on the part of conservatives. What is the future of conservatism?

The conservative serves an important role in any regime. This is perhaps best illustrated by the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the slave who would ride behind a victorious Roman general during the triumphant return to Rome whispering in his ear “All glory is fleeting.”

The conservative's task is similar. It is for him to whisper in our ears “there are limits.” Human reason is not sufficient to solve all problems. Sin cannot be eradicated from the human soul. Society is sufficiently complex that it makes central planning difficult, if not impossible.

In the 19th century, Alexis De Tocqueville noted democracy's dangerous tendency to trust in the “indefinite perfectibility of man.”

But the conservative teaches that perfection is impossible. I recently asked a group of students what “utopia” means. They responded “a perfect society.” True enough, as this is how we often use the word. But “utopia” literally is from the Greek for “nowhere.” In other words, the perfect society is impossible.

Our love of even good things, conservatives teach us, must be a moderate love. To turn any particular thing into the sin qua non of justice is actually to do injustice.

The conservative reminds us that progress always comes with a cost. Perhaps one error of contemporary conservatives is to believe that the market is the sole of justice, perhaps promoting an immoderate love of the “progress” of economic change.

Conservatism suggests there is something worth conserving. As Abraham Lincoln famously put it, if conservative means favoring “the old and tried against the new and untried,” then he was a conservative. Lincoln gets at a central conservative truth: there is wisdom stored up across the ages that one discards at great peril.

Human order is a fragile thing. C.S. Lewis reminds that even war is not outside the norm of the human condition; war only “aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it,” and “human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.”

It took roughly 4,000 years to build a civilization that was not brutal and vulgar. We are to be reminded that the now seemingly barbaric “eye for an eye” was actually a major advance in human decency. If you kill one of mine I will only kill one, as opposed to all, of yours. Yet civilization is fragile, on a precipice as Lewis puts it. Conservatives do their job best when they remind us of the value of the past and to innovate only with great trepidation.

This is why conservatives question the redefining of marriage, the diminution of the sacredness of human life in the name of “choice” and the rejection, indeed outright mockery, of traditional religion. If Western civilization was built on the solid foundation of the Christian church and the morality it promoted (if not always practiced), then only a certain kind of ideological arrogance suggests that we can casually dispense with that foundation and retain the fruits of that civilization.

Conservatives will prove the faithful opposition if they successfully remind that majority that even audacious hope needs its limits.


Jon D. Schaff is associate professor of political science at Northern State University in Aberdeen, North Dakota. The views presented here are the author's own and do not represent those of Northern State University.

Obama's Core: The West, For Him, Is Not The Best

From National Review
By Michael Knox Beran

LEON TROTSKY's The Russian Revolution does not occupy a high place in the literature of conservatism. But the old Bolshevik could on occasion be perceptive. Analyzing the improbable rise of Rasputin, he noted how frequently shamanism flourishes in the bowels of a decaying oligarchy, when the languishing elites crave the stimulus that only a certain kind of messianic figure can give. The commissar had a point. In the fourth Eclogue, Virgil beguiled the patricians of the collapsing Roman republic with a vision of a miraculous child who would inaugurate a golden age. Eighteen centuries later such charlatans as Mesmer and Cagliostro practiced their mystic arts in the salons of the ancien regime.

True to the morphology of exhausted elites, it is the privileged element in the American polity that has proved most susceptible to Barack Obama's appeal. Historians of the future, seeking to understand this enthusiasm, may well conclude that it was a kind of despair, the despair of those who, having lost their faith in the traditional remedial institutions of their culture, embraced a mirage.

T. S. Eliot put his finger on the problem when he compared the poetry of Dante to that of the modern age. Dante's poetry, Eliot said, stood for a "principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe." Eliot suggested that the old poetic culture of the West, with its emphasis on harmony, proportion, and order, brought coherence to the world and did much to reconcile men and women to the larger rhythms of life. The roots of this culture, Werner Jaeger showed in his classic study, Paideia, grew out of the Greek belief that poetry and music, together with rhythm and harmony, powerfully influence the mind and are therefore one of the bases of civilization. Fletcher of Saltoun expressed the Greek view when he said that "if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."

Already in the 19th century, Nietzsche detected in Europe a "brutalization and decay of rhythm." Generalizations are over-simple, but the culture that has to a great extent replaced the old poetic culture values cacophony rather than harmony, brokenness rather than wholeness, and ungraceful forms of order rather than those grounded in poetic rhythm. The new culture--a significant force in education, popular entertainment and the arts, and modern architecture and town planning--has much less unifying power than the old culture; its perfection lies not in the organic whole but in the isolated fragment. Eliot, indeed, formed The Waste Land out of poetic fragments in part because he was attempting to render, in verse, the effect on the mind of the desolate and fragmented waste land he found modern life to be.

Whatever its merits, the new culture has failed to give people the tools they need to amalgamate disparate experience and perceive what the Greeks called the "wholeness of life." Dissatisfied and profoundly isolated, confined, in Tocqueville's image, "within the solitude of his own heart," the modern man, and in particular the modern man who comes from the well-to-do and predominantly agnostic classes, seeks consolation in the various and always inadequate intellectual and spiritual opiums on sale in the philosophical markets--Marxism, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, Weatherman-style radicalism, the pharmaceutical eucharist of the anti-depressant tablet.

Obama is, if not quite the messiah of this new culture, certainly an artifact of it. He discovered early that what he calls his "story," that of a multi-racial prophet equally at home at Harvard and in the slums, struck the profoundest chords in desolate upper-caste hearts. Middle America, by contrast, has mixed feelings about the new culture. It has embraced television and adjusted to a new set of musical rhythms, but it remains suspicious of other elements of the modernist and progressive sensibility. Obama's healer-redeemer qualities, which find so warm a reception in the hearts of the elites, make Joe Six-Pack uneasy. Were it not for the coincidence of his candidacy with a stock-market panic, the Democratic nominee's campaign for the White House would almost certainly end in failure. But the stock market crashed, and as a result Obama is, at this writing, the front-runner.

The conservative case against Obama goes beyond both questions of policy and questions about his record and background. Obama is widely regarded, by his supporters, as a visionary statesman, yet nowhere in his rhetoric does he bring this visionary power to bear on the most pressing problem of the age, the vulnerability of the old culture of the West, which is the ultimate source of its freedoms.

The omission is disconcerting. Like Obama, I am a graduate of Columbia College. I arrived on the campus in the fall of 1984, a little more than a year after he took his degree. I understand that he almost never speaks of Columbia, and to do him justice, there was much that was grim in pre-Giuliani Morningside Heights. But Columbia nevertheless had (and still has) its Core Curriculum, a group of obligatory courses in literature, art, and music that force the student to come to terms with the miracle of Western civilization--with the Greeks, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare; with Montaigne, Locke, Hume, Smith, Marx, and Mill; with Bach and Beethoven and Mozart. Of course you don't take it all in at 18 or 19, but even so the Core is bound to be one of the memorable intellectual experiences of a thoughtful person's life.

Yet the Core seems to have made little impression on Barack Obama. Its themes find no echo in his reflection on politics, The Audacity of Hope. Thucydides, describing the plague at Athens, showed that the virtues which characterize Western civilization at its best--freedom, a sense of fair play, a consciousness of the dignity of human life--cannot be taken for granted. Obama is much less attentive to the fragility of the West's peculiar culture. In Berlin he spoke of tearing down the walls that separate Western nations from the rest of the world: "People of the world--this is our moment. This is our time.... There is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.... The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand." This wall-wrecking sentiment is in some ways admirable, but those with a heritage as unique as ours can consent to such a demolition only if we are certain that the culture that has made us what we are will afterwards be safe.

Barack Obama is not the right leader to preside over this moment of crisis in the West, when the old civilization is dying in Europe and has lost its hold on the greater part of this country's ruling classes. John McCain is the better choice: His experience has given him a keener sense of history and of the world. Some people are skilled in talking about the defense of freedom and civilization; McCain has actually defended them. He is not so stirring an orator as the senator from Illinois. But he has only to walk into the room, and his presence sounds the theme.

Mr. Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861-1871.

A Marriage of Convenience: Obama, the Left and Radical Islam

From Family Security Matters

By Alex Alexiev

As we enter the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election, new revelations about Barack Obama’s harshly critical views of the U.S. Constitution for not providing for wealth distribution have again raised concerns as to whether the American people may be about to elect the first radical Leftist if not outright socialist president in the republic’s history. This hugely troubling possibility, were it to happen, would mark yet another historical watershed that’s mentioned less often – the de facto alliance between the Left and radical Islam in American politics.

The discussion of Islam, to the extent that is mentioned at all in the campaign, has mostly been limited to a rather inconclusive debate in the blogosphere as to whether Obama is a Muslim or not, and a more substantive, if suppressed by the mainstream media, discussion of Senator Obama’s questionable ties to radical Islamists and anti-Semites. The latter has provided more than enough empirical evidence to at least give a pause to a dispassionate observer as to Obama’s pious assertions of his dedication to the struggle against Islamic extremism and friendship for Israel. Without going into too much detail, these connections include well-documented close ties with Black Panther mentor-turned-radical Muslim and Wahhabi stooge, Khalid al-Mansour (nee Don Warden); Nation of Islam hate-spewing, anti-white racist, Louis Farakhan; Columbia professor and apologist of Palestinian terrorism, Rashid Khalidi; and last, but not least, Salam Ibrahim, an alleged Taliban sympathizer and chairman of the defunct Chicago Shariah-finance company Sunrise Equities, who appears to have absconded with $80 million of his clients’ funds.

What all of these unsavory men have in common, apart from friendship with and admiration for Barack Obama, is their passionate dislike for the United States and their virulent anti-Semitism. This may not prove that Obama himself is an Islamist, an anti-Semite or an anti-American, it but it does show that, throughout his career, he has willingly associated with, and been mentored by, people who are.

As much as this should be an issue of serious concern, the growing nexus between radical Islam and the Left is ultimately of much greater systemic consequence and one that goes far beyond current election considerations to present a palpable threat to the future of this country and Western civilization itself.

To understand that, we must first look at what the two parties to this unholy alliance represent. Should Senator Obama be elected as the next president of the United States, he will come to office as the leader of a party that has changed so dramatically from its historical traditions that, today, it has little in common with the Democrat Party of old. It is a party in which the worldview of the 1960s hard, anti-American Left reigns triumphant and in which yesterday’s democratic icons such as Truman, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson would feel completely out of place.

It is thus not a huge surprise that a radical Leftist like Barack Obama would find an enthusiastic reception in a party that itself has become socialist in everything but name. And like its fellow-socialist confreres in Europe and elsewhere, it is a party that implicitly rejects individual rights, the free market system and the Judeo-Christian moral order on which they are based in favor of socialist collectivism, multiculturalism and robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul redistributionism. More than anything else, it rejects the imperative to defend those sacrosanct American principles against enemies foreign and domestic, as enshrined in our Constitution, in favor of political correctness, utopian pacifism and appeasement of evil.

It is these ideological propensities of the new American Left that radical Islam finds made to order for its purposes, and eager to cultivate and exploit. This is indeed a tactical alliance, a marriage-of-convenience for the Islamists, whose ultimate objective is the destruction of Western civilization, including its socialist infidels. It is, nonetheless, a critically important alliance in the meantime that serves Islamism by legitimating it within Western society, allowing it to infiltrate its political establishment and government and weakening resistance to Islamist efforts to subvert it from within. In the American context, this has led to numerous successful initiatives by the Muslim Brotherhood/Wahhabi fifth column that dominates the Islamic establishment to make a common cause with the Left on efforts to stop anti-terrorism measures such as “Secret Evidence” and the Patriot Act, and various anti-Iraq war and pro-illegal immigration campaigns, among others.

None of this is particularly surprising and the imperative for Islamists to ally with the Left has long been part of the official Muslim Brotherhood strategic doctrine of waging war on the West. Less well-known is the fact that even prominent ideologues of violent jihad against the West, such as the leading theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri in his seminal work “Global Islamic Resistance Call,” lists Leftist parties with “anti-American and anti-imperialist ideology” as key potential allies for the jihadists.

A more pertinent question is what in radical Islam appeals to the Left. A messianic, totalitarian doctrine in religious garb that preaches violence against all non-Muslims and espouses the establishment of the medieval barbarism of shar’iah law as its political program, Islamism is, at first sight, as incompatible as could be with the lofty humanitarian pretenses of the Left. The more so because key constituencies of the Left, such as gays and lesbians, feminists, animal rights fanatics, atheists and Jews are among the first marked for destruction, should Shariah ever triumph.

The answer is to be sought in the common denominator and obsession of the radical Left around the world – a bottomless hatred for capitalism and America as the country that epitomizes it. A hatred as pathological as that of the Communists for the class enemy and the Nazis for the Jews. That and the documented mass appeal and murderous vitality of radical Islam made the dispirited Leftists after the fall of Communism believe that here finally was a mighty ally that could help defeat the hated capitalist system and bring down America.

It is this transcendent obsession that made a flamboyant homosexual like French post-modernist philosopher Michel Foucalt, who knew full well what Khomeini does to his kind, lionize the reactionary ayatollah as the new hope of the proletariat; British politician George Galloway claim that “progressives” like him and the Muslims had the same enemies; American greens to dream of an alliance with the Islamists to “destroy capitalism”; and assorted radicals and Communist leftovers from the 1960s to march against “Islamophobia” with terrorism accomplices from the American Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) networks. It is, of course, a pernicious illusion but a very costly one for a free society.

It has already led to electoral alliances between socialist parties and the Islamists in Europe, facilitated the introduction of shar’iah law, sanctioned appeasement of violent Islamist norms and turned a blind eye to the spread of vituperative anti-Semitism not seen since the 1930s. Should the Democrats win the White House, it will not be long before the same trends appear on American soil.

In a recent speech, Senator Obama admirably promised to go to the gates of hell if necessary to get Osama bin-Laden. He would have been more persuasive if before traveling that far he had bothered to check some of his campaign’s dubious connections and come clean on them and his own with the American public. He would have found out, for instance, that a former Muslim outreach coordinator of his campaign, one Mazen Asbahi, was a key leader of the Muslim Student Association, a radical Islamist organization on campus, which had this to say about Osama bin-Laden in an official publication: “When we hear someone refer to the great Mujahid Osama bin Laden as ‘terrorist’, we should defend our brother and refer to him as a freedom fighter, someone who has forsaken wealth and power to fight in Allah’s cause and speak out against oppressors.” This same virulently anti-American organization now advertises a “get out the vote” campaign on its website.

Barack Obama’s deafening silence on his own and his campaign’s troubling connections with Islamists does little to discourage one from believing that the loudest cheers for his eventual victory next Tuesday will be those of the sworn Islamist enemies of our civilization.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Alex Alexiev is a contributing editor to familysecuritymatters.org and vice-president for research at the Center for Security Policy in Wash. D.C. He is the author of a forthcoming book on shariah finance titled Jihad on Wall Street: Shariah Finance in the War Against America.

Ignoble Lies, or Socrates Was Not Black

From The Dartmouth Review

A Book Review by A. S. Erikson

History Lesson: A Race Odyssey

Mary Lefkowitz

Yale University Press, 2008

I recently heard in passing that Aristotle stole all of his philosophical teachings from the library in Alexandria. Being not completely ignorant in matters of antiquity—and something of a contrarian by nature—I was intrigued partly by this claim, but even more by the fact that I had never heard this view of history before. I was so intrigued that I googled ‘Aristotle’, ‘stolen’, and ‘Alexandria’ in the hopes of finding out more. This led me to find Mary Lefkowitz’s newly published book History Lesson: A Race Odyssey.

Lefkowitz is an Emerita Professor of Classics at Wellesley College. The book recounts the 1990s face-off between herself and a member of the Africana movement: Tony Martin, a professor in the Africana Studies department at Wellesley. The Africana movement was in the business, beginning in the late eighties and continuing through the nineties, of advancing not only the Aristotle fallacy but of claiming that Western Civilization itself came from Africa. The argument advanced was one of cultural, not biological, history. The Greeks had stolen all of their ideas of note from Africa.

For proponents of the Africana movement, Aristotle is a fraud and Socrates was a black man. Lefkowitz, upon learning of “The Stolen Legacy” theory, was, in turns, dumbfounded and appalled. In 1992, she penned a review of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena for The New Republic entitled “Not out of Africa: The Origins of Greece and the Illusions of Afrocentrists.” The event marked the beginning of Lefkowitz’s Long Road. History Lesson is the story of her ugly confrontation with Martin and his movement; yet, it is also about—paradoxically—the future of history.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. What exactly was the Africana movement, and what was the agenda they were pushing? The movement was concerned with revising history. The confrontation described in the book is primarily concerned with the proper way to study history. On the one hand, Lefkowitz maintained that history must be backed up with relevant facts, but her opponents saw history as an area perfect for the sowing of the ‘noble lie.’ This is the sort of lie that would make whole races feel better about their own history. The movement was composed of pseudo-intellectuals and academics (e.g. Bernal was tenured at Cornell University).

This movement was not interested in scrutinizing past scholarship, like how past scholarship downplayed Greek sexism or xenophobia. No, unlike modern scholars who try to “set the record straight,” the Africana movement was creating its own past; they were attempting to causally project themselves back into the past. The project was not merely about propping up their own insecurities, though: “In the introduction to Volume 1 of Black Athena, Bernal admitted that his project had a political purpose, which was, ‘of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.’”

The writers of the Africana movement stand in stark contrast to Lefkowitz, who is consistently—and perhaps a bit frustratingly—non-confrontational in her writing. In the New Republic review that started it all she objected to Bernal’s view of history, putting forth her own: “All these civilizations . . . like everything else in the past, belong equally to all of us.” Instead of rebuffing the Africana movement’s claim outright, she welcomed them to the fold, claiming no one had a special claim to ancient Greek civilization.

Nonetheless, Lefkowitz was concerned with the claims being advanced by Bernal and others:

As I saw it, Bernal’s book presented a serious challenge, both to the basic narrative of ancient history and to the whole purpose of studying the past. If I read him correctly, he was saying that one shouldn’t study history to learn what had happened—because—it was impossible to discover all the facts, especially in the case of the remote past—rather, the best one could do was to offer a “plausible” account. The role of the historian
was to assess the various “competitive plausibilities” and pick the one that was most persuasive.

But how to decide which was the most plausible? Bernal seemed to be saying that the most persuasive narrative was the one with the most desirable result. In effect, he was preaching a kind of affirmative action program for the rewriting of history, a project to revamp the past in order to bring about social change in the present. To Bernal, the Egyptian pharaohs could “usefully” be called black, because, presumably, today a lot of people wanted them to be black.

With her characteristic understated way of putting her concerns, she continues:

I was uncomfortable about Bernal’s competitive plausibility method, because it
was fundamentally subjective. If Bernal or I could simply rewrite history to
bring about the social changes we desired (and I felt sure that I hated the
racism in American society just as much as he did), then what was to stop the Ku
Klux Klan from rewriting the history to suit their nefarious purposes?

At Wellesley the movement’s representative was Tony Martin, whose class “Africans in Greece and Rome” was the beachhead at the college for Bernal’s and others’ writings. When some classics majors were upset by the lies being spread by Martin, they took their complaints to the President Nan Keohane, who “advised them to consider Tony Martin’s feelings. “He was on his own,” Lefkowitz said, while Lefkowitz herself had the support of tradition and the classics profession. The events are completely surreal; the college President tells students to beware a faculty member’s feelings because he practiced poor scholarship. Lefkowitz wryly writes, “I couldn’t help wondering why we were talking about feelings instead of historical values.” Martin was repeatedly coddled by the college’s administration.

As Keohane demonstrated by her fear of confrontation, one of interest-group-intellectualism’s unintended consequences is the utter stifling of intellectual debate and the installment of a constant fear: fear of what one says, fear of what one writes, even fear of what one thinks. It is the fear that anyone—even a liberal professor—can be branded as a racist reactionary.

All of this sounds a bit odd maybe—hardly innocent—but, after all, it’s a debate about ancient history. Yet, there was an even darker side to the movement, a side steeped in and stained by anti-Semitism.

The attacks from the Africana studies establishment were appalling to read about. At a debate Lefkowitz participated in at the University of San Diego, her counterpart, Dr. Khallid Muhammad, called her “Dikeda Left-o-witch.” She was a “homosexual . . . imposter man . . . imposter Jew” and a “hook-nosed, lox-eating, bagel-eating . . . something . . . something . . . so called Jew.”

Another disturbing element to emerge in Lefkowitz’s narrative is the students’ (and others’ as well) inability to tell a work of scholarship from a thinly veiled polemic. At first I chuckled aloud when she recounted how a student pointed to the number of footnotes as proof that The Secret Relationship Between the Blacks and Jews was not anti-Semitic. This is a book claiming that Jews dominated the slave trade and were the predominant slaveholders in the American South, all of this and more at a time when they were mostly confined to ghettoes in Europe. The laughter subsided as this tactic was used again and again to defend the above work—anonymously authored and published by the Nation of Islam—and others.

The Africana movement was perhaps the logical endpoint after several decades of multiculturalism occupying the apex of university chic. The establishment can tell everyone how special their culture is for only so long before people start reflecting on the fact for themselves. All cultures were not created equal, and to claim so downplays the incredible achievements of ancient Greece or Arabia during the Middle Ages.

Lefkowitz recounts all of these events from her past deftly and clearly. The tone throughout is neither one of sentimentality nor one of outrage, but one of bafflement. Her narrative easily keeps the reader’s attention, but the book is about more than Lefkowitz’s encounter with the Africana movement. This book is about two issues: first, the balance between political correctness and intellectual inquiry, i.e. how to keep campus debates both intellectual and civil; second, the extent to which the long-time virtues of history (clear argument, evidence, and attempting to recount reality rather than fantasy) are under attack in the academy.

Geert Wilders: "The Lights May Go Out In Europe"

In 1946 Winston Churchill delivered the historic "Iron Curtain Speech" at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. It was a defining event and the historic moment when Western democracies were summoned to a new, epic struggle for the freedom of man.

On September 25, at a forum in New York sponsored by the Hudson Institute, the Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders, gave a speech which was no less important, and may in time be seen as the great clarion call in the growing worldwide struggle with Islam.

At great personal risk, Wilders has been the foremost opponent of a totalitarian ideology conceived in the pit of hell. All who care about freedom, Christian civilization and national survival need to read this great speech.

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for inviting me. Great to be at the Four Seasons. I come from a country that has one season only: a rainy season that starts January 1st and ends December 31st. When we have three sunny days in a row, the government declares a national emergency. So Four Seasons, that’s new to me.

It’s great to be in New York. When I see the skyscrapers and office buildings, I think of what Ayn Rand said: “The sky over New York and the will of man made visible.” Of course. Without the Dutch you would have been nowhere, still figuring out how to buy this island from the Indians. But we are glad we did it for you. And, frankly, you did a far better job than we possibly could have done.

I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The danger I see looming is the scenario of America as the last man standing. The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe. In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: who lost Europe? Patriots from around Europe risk their lives every day to prevent precisely this scenario form becoming a reality.

My short lecture consists of 4 parts.

First I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I will say a few things about Islam. Thirdly, if you are still here, I will talk a little bit about the movie you just saw. To close I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem.

The Europe you know is changing. You have probably seen the landmarks. The Eiffel Tower and Trafalgar Square and Rome’s ancient buildings and maybe the canals of Amsterdam. They are still there. And they still look very much the same as they did a hundred years ago.

But in all of these cities, sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world, a world very few visitors see – and one that does not appear in your tourist guidebook. It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration. All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighbourhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. With mosques on many street corner. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighbourhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, city by city.

There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.

Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam, Marseille and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighbourhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities. In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims. Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear “whore, whore”. Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin. In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can in many cases no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity. In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighbourhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves. Last week a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels, because he was drinking during the Ramadan. Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.

A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe. San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.

Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim-immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favour of a worldwide caliphate. A Dutch study reported that half of Dutch Muslims admit they “understand” the 9/11 attacks.

Muslims demand what they call ‘respect’. And this is how we give them respect. Our elites are willing to give in. To give up. In my own country we have gone from calls by one cabinet member to turn Muslim holidays into official state holidays, to statements by another cabinet member, that Islam is part of Dutch culture, to an affirmation by the Christian-Democratic attorney general that he is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey.

Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behaviour, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus. Some prefer to see these as isolated incidents, but I call it a Muslim intifada. I call the perpetrators “settlers”. Because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies, they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.

Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighbourhoods, their cities, their countries.

Politicians shy away from taking a stand against this creeping sharia. They believe in the equality of all cultures. Moreover, on a mundane level, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored.

Our many problems with Islam cannot be explained by poverty, repression or the European colonial past, as the Left claims. Nor does it have anything to do with Palestinians or American troops in Iraq. The problem is Islam itself.

Allow me to give you a brief Islam 101. The first thing you need to know about Islam is the importance of the book of the Quran. The Quran is Allah’s personal word, revealed by an angel to Mohammed, the prophet. This is where the trouble starts. Every word in the Quran is Allah’s word and therefore not open to discussion or interpretation. It is valid for every Muslim and for all times. Therefore, there is no such a thing as moderate Islam. Sure, there are a lot of moderate Muslims. But a moderate Islam is non-existent.

The Quran calls for hatred, violence, submission, murder, and terrorism. The Quran calls for Muslims to kill non-Muslims, to terrorize non-Muslims and to fulfil their duty to wage war: violent jihad. Jihad is a duty for every Muslim, Islam is to rule the world – by the sword. The Quran is clearly anti-Semitic, describing Jews as monkeys and pigs.

The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet. His behaviour is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza. He advised on matters of slavery, but never advised to liberate slaves. Islam has no other morality than the advancement of Islam. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it is bad. There is no gray area or other side.

Quran as Allah’s own word and Mohammed as the perfect man are the two most important facets of Islam. Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means ‘submission’. Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for is sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.

This is what you need to know about Islam, in order to understand what is going on in Europe. For millions of Muslims the Quran and the live of Mohammed are not 14 centuries old, but are an everyday reality, an ideal, that guide every aspect of their lives. Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam “the most retrograde force in the world”, and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran.

Which brings me to my movie, Fitna.

I am a lawmaker, and not a movie maker. But I felt I had the moral duty to educate about Islam. The duty to make clear that the Quran stands at the heart of what some people call terrorism but is in reality jihad. I wanted to show that the problems of Islam are at the core of Islam, and do not belong to its fringes.

Now, from the day the plan for my movie was made public, it caused quite a stir, in the Netherlands and throughout Europe. First, there was a political storm, with government leaders, across the continent in sheer panic. The Netherlands was put under a heightened terror alert, because of possible attacks or a revolt by our Muslim population. The Dutch branch of the Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir declared that the Netherlands was due for an attack. Internationally, there was a series of incidents. The Taliban threatened to organize additional attacks against Dutch troops in Afghanistan, and a website linked to Al Qaeda published the message that I ought to be killed, while various muftis in the Middle East stated that I would be responsible for all the bloodshed after the screening of the movie. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the Dutch flag was burned on several occasions. Dolls representing me were also burned. The Indonesian President announced that I will never be admitted into Indonesia again, while the UN Secretary General and the European Union issued cowardly statements in the same vein as those made by the Dutch Government. I could go on and on. It was an absolute disgrace, a sell-out.

A plethora of legal troubles also followed, and have not ended yet. Currently the state of Jordan is litigating against me. Only last week there were renewed security agency reports about a heightened terror alert for the Netherlands because of Fitna.

Now, I would like to say a few things about Israel. Because, very soon, we will get together in its capitol. The best way for a politician in Europe to loose votes is to say something positive about Israel. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I, however, will continue to speak up for Israel. I see defending Israel as a matter of principle. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel. First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.

Samuel Huntington writes it so aptly: “Islam has bloody borders”. Israel is located precisely on that border. This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam’s territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia. Israel is simply in the way. The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.

The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything. Therefore, it is not that the West has a stake in Israel. It is Israel.

It is very difficult to be an optimist in the face of the growing Islamization of Europe. All the tides are against us. On all fronts we are losing. Demographically the momentum is with Islam. Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties. Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’. The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals and Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam.

This is the most painful thing to see: the betrayal by our elites. At this moment in Europe’s history, our elites are supposed to lead us. To stand up for centuries of civilization. To defend our heritage. To honour our eternal Judeo-Christian values that made Europe what it is today. But there are very few signs of hope to be seen at the governmental level. Sarkozy, Merkel, Brown, Berlusconi; in private, they probably know how grave the situation is. But when the little red light goes on, they stare into the camera and tell us that Islam is a religion of peace, and we should all try to get along nicely and sing Kumbaya. They willingly participate in, what President Reagan so aptly called: “the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.”

If there is hope in Europe, it comes from the people, not from the elites. Change can only come from a grass-roots level. It has to come from the citizens themselves. Yet these patriots will have to take on the entire political, legal and media establishment.

Over the past years there have been some small, but encouraging, signs of a rebirth of the original European spirit. Maybe the elites turn their backs on freedom, the public does not. In my country, the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat to our national identity. I don’t think the public opinion in Holland is very different from other European countries.

Patriotic parties that oppose jihad are growing, against all odds. My own party debuted two years ago, with five percent of the vote. Now it stands at ten percent in the polls. The same is true of all smililary-minded parties in Europe. They are fighting the liberal establishment, and are gaining footholds on the political arena, one voter at the time.

Now, for the first time, these patriotic parties will come together and exchange experiences. It may be the start of something big. Something that might change the map of Europe for decades to come. It might also be Europe’s last chance.

This December a conference will take place in Jerusalem. Thanks to Professor Aryeh Eldad, a member of Knesset, we will be able to watch Fitna in the Knesset building and discuss the jihad. We are organizing this event in Israel to emphasize the fact that we are all in the same boat together, and that Israel is part of our common heritage. Those attending will be a select audience. No racist organizations will be allowed. And we will only admit parties that are solidly democratic.

This conference will be the start of an Alliance of European patriots. This Alliance will serve as the backbone for all organizations and political parties that oppose jihad and Islamization. For this Alliance I seek your support.

This endeavor may be crucial to America and to the West. America may hold fast to the dream that, thanks tot its location, it is safe from jihad and shaira. But seven years ago to the day, there was still smoke rising from ground zero, following the attacks that forever shattered that dream. Yet there is a danger even greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America - as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem.

Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe’s children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.

This is not the first time our civilization is under threat. We have seen dangers before. We have been betrayed by our elites before. They have sided with our enemies before. And yet, then, freedom prevailed.

These are not times in which to take lessons from appeasement, capitulation, giving away, giving up or giving in. These are not times in which to draw lessons from Mr. Chamberlain. These are times calling us to draw lessons from Mr. Churchill and the words he spoke in 1942:

“Never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy”.

Empire of Yin - Part 1: The Great Unbalancing

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (central panel) – circa 1504

From The Brussels Journal
By Takuan Seiyo

Western Civilization is now like the Three Gorges valley downriver from the biggest dam in the world, breached. Pouring in is an alluvial torrent of toxic bilge waters of unbridled license, commercialized lust, puerile 24/7 media content of unlimited choices -- all of them bad, institutionalized overconsumption of useless junk with phantom money, mindless self-mutilation and nihilism. Foaming on top of this flow are cowardice and confusion masquerading as righteousness and tolerance, and a supine acquiescence to an invasion of a hundred million – 40 million in the US alone – Third World immigrants legal and illegal who are, in the balance, a gross burden on society.

But society itself is now an Ophraised mobocracy pretending as if it were a rational republic. In the geopolitical arena this translates into the castrated plumpness of Europe and Canada and the messianic, “compassionate” braggadocio of flailing America, versus the vigorous, aggressive, virile, militaristic and self-confident thrusts of China, Russia and Iran.

In the waning days of August 2008, three events occupied a disparate share of attention of the global village’s brain conditioning supra-channel. One might call that particular nook of the gushing vulgarians’ history: Dita, D-beck and da Messiah dumbfounding da dull, dolt and Democrat.

Dita is Madonna Ciccone, the aging tart with tight thighs and penchant for S&M whom many millions believe to be a singer -- a belief they back in much hard currency. Ms. Ciccone has been reported to use the pseudonym Dita Parlo, after the German actress of the 1930s.

In this inundated world, the mechanics of sex, from shafts and pistons through sockets and gaskets take the choicest location in media content and humanity’s consciousness. So do, of course, the lubricants related to the friction coefficient. And so Ms. Ciccone named her new international tour “Sticky and Sweet,” and is wooing stadiumfuls of swooning audiences with an eponymous song plus such classics of her repertoire as “Give it 2 Me," gangsta pimp and bondage paraphernalia.

Ms. Ciccone’s global appeal is such that in a city like Cardiff, Wales, where “Sticky and Sweet” kicked off, some 40,000 fans turned up, some having flown in from as far as Australia. The future of the West is in the hands of people like these. They probably know most of Ms. Ciccone’s repertoire by heart, but don’t know how a pencil is made, let alone what’s a republic or who was Aristotle. And they vote and influence the course of their nations.

No wonder that during the song "Get Stupid," Ms. Ciccone’s show included a video sequence linking images of destruction, global warming, Adolf Hitler, Robert Mugabe and U.S. presidential contender, John McCain, juxtaposed against a sequence comprising pictures of John Lennon, Al Gore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mr. McCain’s Democratic rival, Barack Obama. Thus are leaders of the Free World manufactured nowadays. A seat on Oprah’s couch for ten minutes is worth more in one’s resume than command of a brigade at war.

As to David Beckham, the prettiest footballer in the world emerged like Venus from the rooftop conch of a red bus in the Beijing Olympic stadium, kicking a ball into an ecstatic crowd and thus serving London’s notice to the world that it was next in line to stage that festival of the foulest corruption and feelgood consumer triggers in Nike or adidas kit. Mr. Beckham -- D-beck on the advice of his Los Angeles pal, Snoop Doggy Dog -- appeared in a long-sleeved track-suit, which was fortuitous, given that, in China, people with a collection of tattoos as vast as his are prone to be arrested on sight, whereupon they end up as involuntary heart and liver donors after a lifetime of breaking rocks in penal colonies.

But Mr. Beckham was the most sympathetic part of a cringe-inducing Olympic “handover” performance which was opened by a British girl with the Old-Saxon name of Tayyiba Dudhwala, followed by an impeccably “diverse” and aptly named ZooNation hip hop dance troupe from South London, mixed with a group of disabled -- can’t discriminate, can we? – dancers called CandoCo rushing the door of a red bus like back home, followed by a big person called Leona Lewis singing “I'm gonna give you every bit of my love” while Led Zeppelin’s old pro, Jimmy Page, worked the guitar and probably hummed to himself the original lyrics about inches rather than bits of love. Then appeared a burly man wearing an unbuttoned jacket over a badly pressed shirt with a mistied tie, who, being the Mayor of London, offended the Chinese hosts with his casual demeanor.

It was the perfect parody of a multiethnic, Third World-swamped Britain run by multiculti buffoons who no longer know which way is North, what’s up, and who they were before they forgot. It’s not coincidental that just a few days after this travesty, Mr. Sérgio Cabral, Governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro, pledged “to engage the youth of the world in a celebration and Games of social transformation,” as a sweetener in Rio’s proposal to be appointed host city for the 2016 Olympic Games.

It hardly needs stating that the last thing the world needs is for its youth to be engaged in the “celebration of Games of Social Transformation.” What the world needs is for its youth to commit to memory the multiplication tables and the 10 Commandments tablets, and to sit in one performance of a Bach choral in a white shirt and tie or a dress covering all the tattooed patches of skin, without fidgeting.

The Olympics are the clearest portal to our glorious New World Order, otherwise known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or regression to entropy.

CocaColaMacDonaldNikeHuyndaiCanonAllianzLenovoTataBudMTV will be running the world for the greater good of the perfect union of perfected Humanity with an advisory council consisting of Oprah, Sir Bono, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Avril Lavigne, and Al Gore, all administered by legions of UNiks and EUniks on the take from Beijing.

As though for a dry run, most of this scintillating advisory council assembled recently in Denver to pour the ceremonial oil on the pate of the Messiah. “Blinding array of stars gather for DNC climax,” gushes the media on a day when Son of Black Man accepted the US presidential nomination of the Yin Party in Denver. The blinding celestial bodies iterated are directors George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee and Davis Guggenheim; actors Forest Whitaker, Josh Brolin, Annette Bening, Fran Drescher, Ashley Judd, Jamie Foxx, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Garner, Ben Affleck -- who read excerpts from a book by who else but Howard Zinn; total-blanks-to-me Kal Penn, Daniel Dae Kim, Cash Warren, Rosario Dawson, Wilmer Valderrama, Wonder and Michael McDonald, Kerry Washington, Taye Diggs, Hill Harper, Joy Bryan; singers Sheryl Crow and Kanye West; people known for being famous Fergie and Star Jones; and something called will.i.am “of the Black Eyed Peas.”

There were a few heavyweights there: Muhammad Ali – a great boxer once but now appearing where planted, like a potted ficus; Forest Whitaker, a good actor marching in lockstep with his race phalanx; Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – important director-producers and walking bundles of yin -- the one as a liberal alpha mentsch in America’s most liberal industry and in its most liberal ethnic group, the other as a rotund product of the People’s Republic of San Francisco. But the rest?

This is “blinding” to the creatures of Oprah nation: the half-wit celebrity hound, the morbidly obese tabloid swallower, the council estate mom with nipple rings and serial pregnancies by different men, the sequined gay make-up man with a collection of Elton John memorabilia. A whining twit like Spike Lee or a luscious tweet like Jessica Alba is not blinding. Blinding is the greatness of the brain power of Benoît Mandelbrot, or the martial command skills of David Petraeus. A woman who has traversed the life road of Margaret Thatcher or Janice Rogers Brown is blinding. A director is blinding who can play words and actors like Krzysztof Kieslowski to compose symphonies about the greatest truths.

Thus is greatness divided from stardom, let alone celebrity. But since the great are few and the expansive yin culture needs fodder for its media noise, “blinding” celebrities are minted on an assembly line -- one-eyed kings in the country of the blind. One might even be so bold as to point out that the prototype I Am, known by his original Hebrew name, YHVH, may have been more blinding, memorably so on Mount Sinai, than will.i.am “of the Black Eyed Peas” was in Denver. And so was perhaps the first coming of the Anointed One, as distinct from the second coming in which 85,000 yin-crazed people climaxed at Mile-High Stadium in Denver at Barack Obama’s sight, with the most equals of the equals, mainly Hollywood machers, reprising the multiple orgasm a couple of weeks later at a $28,500-a-plate dinner + Babs later (separate charges apply).

Only in an upside down moonspace “proposition” country, could a pair of race-mongering, black-by-commitment Harvard lawyers – he, Elmer Gantry reincarnated as a latte metrosexual socialist, she a muscled Nadezhda Krupskaya with a $317,000 paycheck -- get to within a close probability of the presidency of a putatively “capitalist” republic, still 65% white.

Only a cancerous Western civilization could make a Messiah of a 45-year-old “community organizer” of no significant accomplishment who has drunk deeply from the wells of communist agitator Saul Alinsky, communist poet Frank Marshall Davis, terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and white-hating black racists Jeremiah Wright and Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour.

Only in a feminized (i.e. yin) society could a willowy Pied Piper given to narcissistic blather like 'We are the ones we have been waiting for' be greeted by great swooning crowds of whites from Portland in the west to Berlin in the east, and sell two autobiographies about nothing to millions of adoring fans the Western world over. For this is the age of the postmodern narrative, and people with diversity chips implanted in their skulls by government and media propaganda find Mr. Obama’s narrative irresistibly compelling.

Only in a nation full of confused, pathetic, ignorant weaklings could a charming charlatan raise campaign funds that may well amount to half a trillion dollars (1) by telling his millions of donors that their nation is no good, that he will absolve it from its sinful past and “bring it together.” To believe this, one has to deliberately welcome clear signs that the “bringing together” is a euphemism for a racial jizzya tax extracted from a cowed ex-Eurocentric nation by a unified phalanx of black and brown race grievance-mongers in concert with tens of millions of self-flagellating white useful idiots. Five hundred years ago Mr. Obama’s extraordinary talent for selling papal indulgences would have earned him the scarlet and ermine, a marble bust by Michelangelo, and a rebuke from Martin Luther.

Only in a farce conceived in opium haze, with addled eunuchs as opinion makers and pundits, could an avowed lotus-eater like Harold Meyerson be given prime real estate acreage in The Washington Post to opine:

"In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks' party, the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future, the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year's GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem."

We have to take a detour here, for somewhere in the basement of the ADL, in a cubicle at the Southern Poverty Law Center, or in a laptop file of a “conservative” littlegreenfootballista, someone has just written down that, in addition to a pronounced lack of respect for several iconic Afro-American figures, for the second time in this piece I have held up a Jew to scorn and ridicule, even if others are mentioned here approvingly. And I haven’t even mentioned yet the brain behind the Obamas’ phenomenal success, not to speak of the big-ticket campaign donors.

One earns another point of demerit, and lifelong career repercussions, for having read on a white ethnocentric website:

“’Long term,’ says Myerson [sic], ‘this whiteness is a huge problem’. For Jews, he means. The only way of dealing with it is more of the same ... more Rothstein, more NBA, more porn, more Brangelina, more Bratz, more Myerson [sic], indeed ... more everything. More white deconstruction, too. White Americans as people, their European selves have to be ‘solved’. Finally.”

We will delve later into the connection between Jews and liberalism – or “yin” – a connection shared in different ways by other population segments, including putatively “conservative” ones, from mainstream Christianity to the Republican Party. For now, it suffices to state that in the comments section after the above quote, a Jewish reader writes:

“I have read the Myerson [sic] article and being a Jew and Zionist, you may be
surprised that I agree with you and think Myerson [sic] is an idiot who doesnt
[sic] know what is good for the Jews.”

Back to useful idiots of all ethnicities:

“Obama’s charisma,” writes Michael Knox Beran, “is closer to what critic Camille Paglia has identified with today’s television talk-show culture.(snip) The man who would succeed in such a culture must appear to sympathize with these obscure hurts; he must take pains (snip) to appear an ‘androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother. Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to bottle old wine (snip). Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. With the triumph of Obama’s post-masculine charisma, the patriarchal collectivism of the New Deal has finally given way to a new vision of liberal community, the empathetic mommy-state.”

All Western “progressive” parties in an arch extending west from Austria to Australia, including Mr. Obama’s, cater to the psychographics for which media events such as pop star tours, Olympics closing extravaganzas, and grand and unspecific pronouncements of hope, change and equalization of all in front of papier maché Greek temples are tailor made. It’s no coincidence that Mr. Obama’s temple set was built by the same company that works for Britney Spears. Nor should it surprise that another “blinding” specimen of shrieking Western moronism should generate the headline, “Rage Against the Machine Ask Fans to Fight ‘Fascist Republican Agenda’ at Fierce Minneapolis Gig”.

The shade-grown lachrymose fungus

It is difficult to deal with the dystopia of the West partly because we don’t have an accurate concept of its genesis. Conservatives believe that leftism, in its current mutation as liberalism, is at fault. Liberalism is, indeed, the lachrymose fungus sapping the West’s vital energy. It does so mainly through its excretion of multiculturalism and execration of the non-equal woof and warp of homo sapiens as per the grand lottery of parental DNA, natal gender, race and culture, and fate, God’s will and karma. But a Daoist would say that not only liberalism but all shade-grown, i.e. yin, creedal fungi are harmful to the West in its present condition.

Consider the main leaders of the presumably “counter-liberal” forces in the world, George W. Bush, John McCain, and David Cameron. Here are fervent believers in the Mexicanization and Balkanization of the United States, the dissolution of the ethnic base of Great Britain, faked equality of the unequals through dumbed-down education and affirmative action, fighting a war on an unnamed enemy while shilling for the “Religion of Peace,” and hollowing out the coin of the realm by riding, Don Quijote-like, to the rescue of any damsel in democratic distress, anywhere. When Conservatism thrives with the Clintons in power but is destroyed with the Bushes at the helm, there is something wrong with our political typology. As it is in England that has turned, in Mark Steyn’s words, into a Somalia with chip shops, while the Conservative Party’s priority is taxing the chip shops.

In Europe, the situation is worse. The Eurabian political elite, aided by Europe’s own millions of useful idiots, seems to have poisoned most of the 183,000,000 brains of Western Europeans as surely as if it were a Hymenoepimecis wasp, stinging a Plesiometa argyra spider to spin the cocoon of its own doom. Europeans now accept as objective truth the media’s referral to Jacques Chirac or Angela Merkel as “conservatives,” and have grown to believe that a peaceful gathering by indigenous people who desire not to be dispossessed by immigrants from alien and hostile cultures is a conclave of “racists” staged by “German fascists” as a “so-called” Anti-Islamisation Congress”. When the goal posts have been moved so far to the lunatic left, terms such as “right,” “conservative,” and “fascist” no longer carry any useful meaning.

And then, conservatives believe that secularism is the cause of the fraying, and that returning to Mother Church is the answer. But the Christian churches are destroying their hosts as surely as if they were deep-cover enemy agents. For its vigorous action in the cause of dissolving the demographic base of its host countries, the Catholic church in the US might as well be on the payroll of the Mexican government, while in countries ranging from Belgium to Australia it might qualify for financial support from Al-Qaeda.

The Episcopalians, Presbyterian, Methodist and other mainstream Protestant churches are a parody of pious “social-justice equity,” worshipful Third-Worldism, militant homosexuality, and progressive Islamification. American Evangelicals are tireless in resettling Third World refugees and “refugees,” the more primitive the better: from Meskhetian Turks planted in Virginia to Somali Bantus in Kansas to Sudanese in Illinois.

We will examine in later installments in more depth what’s on the scales in the balance that has gone awry. For now it suffices to say that according to Oriental cosmology, the forces in the eternal cosmic play are the hot, male, condensing element, or yang, and the cold and wet, female and expansive element, or yin. Arnold Toynbee, who posited that all democracies die from suicide, applied the ideas of yin and yang to discern patterns in history. For Toynbee, history is like a current alternating between the yin pole, which he equated with a quiescent civilization, and the yang pole, which he equated with turmoil, barbarian conquest and drastic change.

In his 1939 magnum opus, Study of History, Toynbee explained the rise and fall of empires according to this yin – yang paradigm, but a deeper scrutiny of applied Oriental cosmology might find that it was oversimplified. For what is most salient about the force of yin is not its quietism but its expansive femaleness, and what characterizes yang is not necessarily its dynamism but its contractive maleness.

Applied mycology, or some thoughts about wet, expansive yin

The West has careened dangerously out of balance, and its political and philosophical concepts have not been able to identify correctly what it is that’s out of balance. The forces of the West’s postmodern decay are vested disproportionately in such disparate groups as city dwellers, lawyers, teachers, actors, artists, public sector employees, people with graduate degrees and academics; Jews, Swedes, Norwegians, diaspora Irish; blacks; Muslims and Mexican and Central American mestizos (but not in their original countries); women; adolescents; homosexuals.

The entropic motors that seem to be preponderant in these groups may be, singly or in combination, a drive for power or money; identity politics stemming from racial, ethnic, or gender pride wounded in the past but pretending as the present ; utopian proclivities combined with naiveté; compassionate feelings overriding empirical analysis; displacement of personal feelings of inferiority – what Nietzsche called ressentiment; or ideological hatred such as what Islam preaches about the kuffar and Black Theology teaches about whitey. But the destruction wrought by such centrifugal forces comes not from them, but from a wilting of the respective majorities that ought to have been able to resist and countervail against these forces.

These majorities’ apathy and nihilism has also allowed their elected governments to magnify the centrifugal destruction as though by a giant lever. Everywhere in the West, governments are working on behalf of the entropic forces and against the best interest of the vast majority of their citizens. The government itself has become the chief propagator and enforcer of social decay, often under the smokescreen of elastic portmanteau concepts like “civil rights,” “tolerance,” “hate speech,” “Islamophobia” etc.

The European Union apparatus is the Trojan horse wheeling Islam into the gates of Europe. Socialistically kleptocratic and grossly incompetent federal, state and local governments in America are actively selling their country piece by piece, to China, to Mexico, to special interest lobbies, to organized racial minority pressure groups, to public employees unions. And in areas where their active involvement is desperately required, such as regulating the securities and derivatives markets, or putting up a dam against the deluge of hedonism and faked sentimentalism pouring into peoples’ brains from the mass entertainment juggernaut, Western government are strictly laissez faire.

Maybe all this is by design. For, as Bertold Brecht has written, would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people – maybe starting with their brains -- and elect another?

Even though Western governments now do what they can to suppress it, reasonable people may have to start talking publicly about the slow-mo destruction by the black minority of every community and country where it is anywhere near majority; or the flow of Mexico’s demographic burden into the USA and Islam’s Middle Ages handicap into Europe. They have to start talking about a permanent closing of immigration doors to people from cultures incompatible with the historical West and therefore harmful ipso facto.

People of good faith ought to diagnose and combat in their personal lives the decline that feminism has wrought on them and on the West. Men are at fault here for having caved in completely, instead of employing a reverse Lysistrata tactic, or anything else that might have worked in this dire predicament. At least a varied group of courageous women has begun beating back this particular fungus. The cultural left’s reaction to Sarah Palin shows how effective that can be.

The vast heterosexual majority may want to consider that it’s time to protest the outsize din raised by the homosexual and the comically self-labeled GLBTA minorities. We will not ask if you will not tell; frankly, we don’t want to hear or see too much either. Don’t rub our faces in your orifices.

Maybe it’s time to say to the churches, if this be your retail markup, I am buying directly from the wholesaler. Because, as Chesterton has noted, some humanitarians care only for pity, but their pity is often untruthful.

However mortified by the Holocaust and appreciative of the inestimable contribution that the Jewish minority has made to the West, people of good faith and sound mind may have to start putting public Jewish figures on the spot, as Jews, for the destructive currents they propagate. Because if the establishment club of “racism” “fascism,” “antisemitism” “homophobia” and “sexism” keeps the West’s hundreds of millions of reasonable indigenous people cowering in their diminishing corners, soon the West will have decayed so much that tens of millions of newly-unreasonable people will be rising, and their numbers will be growing at an astonishing rate.

“It is those wreckers that most concern me,” wrote the English-American writer, John Derbyshire, “the arrogant judges, the academic deconstructors, the teacher-union multiculturalists, the media guilt-mongers, the love-the-world pacifists, the criminal-lovers and family-breakers, the inventors of bogus rights and destroyers of cherished traditions, the haters of normality and scoffers at restraint, the enterprise-destroying litigators and pain-feelers. I do fear that this country might be made unfit to live in, as the country of my birth has been, by a misguided and corrupt humanitarianism, sentimental wallowing in past wrongs both real and imagined, and class and race resentment petted and nurtured by opportunistic tax-eaters.”

To return to balance, the West must find ways to pull back the centrifugal forces that are hurling its frayed pieces ever outward in an expansive big-bang of emotionalism, solipsism, egalitarianism, yobbism, socialism, multiculturalism, relativism, masochism, and moralism strangely coexisting with hedonism and nihilism. This outward spiral has now lasted for a better part of three generations. Of late, we have had generations X, and Y. Soon generation Z will be abroad. And after that, what?