I worry myself into fits over the state in which we will land after the conflict between our own and the Left and their Muslim proxies. The war that is certain to come will be likely as bad or worse than any other war in history, not some clinical attack on the enemy, not some surgical strike on the bad guys; but it will not be a bad thing per se, not bad because it is war in itself; the problem with the coming war we will be parts of is that we might well find our victory to by Pyrrhic at best, we being monsters for winning it, we being the ones who annihilate the Islamic world, who turn the Middle East into a sand diorama, who wipe out the threat of the primitives without concern for who is guilty and who is not. We might well win the coming conflict in a matter of hours, and we might then be so sickened by our victory that we will not care to live with ourselves thereafter. And worse: we might win our struggle against Reaction only by turning to the worst of Human possibilities, by turning into hate-filled, evil people who like killing and who demand more, more, more, till Stalin would puke at the tally. We might win the war against Reaction by hiring a thug to clean up Dodge, only to find we can't get rid of him; and maybe we won't want to because he brings such perfect order to the confusion of life that it might be better to let him kill more and more till we reach the state of perfection he promises.
We in the Modern West find ourselves in a state of shock and sometimes anger when it's pointed out that we are revolutionaries. We do not see ourselves, and we cannot think of ourselves, as wild-eyed bomb-throwers and cold-eyed assassins. Nor should we. But nevertheless, we are revolutionaries: we are the revolutionary children of the great triune revolution of America, France, and Industry. We are the revolutionists of Modernity. The so-called "progressive Left" is the only significant force of Reaction in our world today. Our own are the enemy. We are revolutionaries, and the vast population of the world is not and has never been so and does not wish to be so. We are, and we will push the boundaries of our revolutions to encompass the whole of mankind or we will whither and die in dhimmitude and neo-fuedalism. More likely, we will turn on our own, killing our own family members in a desperate attempt to survive the coming madness brought on by our revolt against the Left's fascism and by our own apathy and current cowardice. We are few, we are new, and we are so much more powerful that we might exterminate the majority of people with the touch of a dial, the press of a keyboard. And we might well lose our revolutionary gains by doing so. Thus, as revolutionaries we should look to our predecessor to examine their flaws and their successes so we know in advance how to conduct ourselves in times of violent conflict. We are revolutionaries, and few outside the West like us. In fact, half of our own think they hate us too. it's up to us to carry on our revolutions and succeed at the greatest benefit to all with the least suffering possible. To do so we must know in advance our missions and our paths to success. One of my favorite revolutionaries, Jean-Paul Marat, said that if the French had killed 10,00 in the beginning it would have spared the lives of a hundred thousand later. We must think in those terms if we are to prevent worse tragedies than those we think today are intolerable. We have to prepare now to seize power when the states of Europe collapse into civil war; and we must prepare ourselves for further revolution rather than a lapse into fascism from our own ranks. Too many revolutionaries are not serious, and they are defeated by those who are: see the Girondists, see Kerensky, see Sun Yat Sen. We cannot allow our failure. As bad as failure is victory by evil. Sane revolutionaries must plan now for victory in the future to prevent our victory from being our worse possible defeat. We are revolutionaries, and we must address that clearly and know why we are so. When we know why we must fight we will understand that we should for the betterment of all. We are the revolutionaries of clean drinking water. We are the revolutionaries of flush toilets. We are the revolutionaries of mediocrity. If we become more than that we might well be the worst thing to have happened to Humanity in 5,000 years.
What revolutionary activities do we propose the average middle class person in the Modern West pursue? We argue at least weekly that we can and must meet in public, in libraries, to speak out loud about the Left's fascist dhimmitude and the use of Muslim proxies to install a regime of neo-fuedalism upon us. Yes, speaking out against the p.c. orthodoxy is revolutionary, even dangerous at this time. Reichman does it in France, and he too suffers for it. We here in Vancouver do so, and we do not suffer for it, though our friend "Downtown Eastside Enquirer" is on the firing line, subject to threats and possible violence. We suffer from attempts at intimidation by union fascists. Any number of things are possible. But what is probable is that if we do nothing now, we will be able to do nothing later when we will be the voices of Reason in a time of chaos and violent hatreds and civil war. We must take some chances and run some risks now for our favored positions later when we are going to be sorely needed. We have to be real revolutionaries. It means mostly nothing more than meeting those among us who will in the times to come join us to organise sanity among the hysterical. Plan for it. You, sane and decent people, must plan now to prevent seizure of power by a maniac in times of conflict to come. I've seen the bad guys win civil wars. I don't want to see it again, nor do you.
Our war will be a good thing if we conduct it rightly. We are given a rare chance in history to be great in our doings. We can fight for Human freedom and Modernity to set free those who will otherwise live in desperate poverty and ignorance forever, knowing nothing else but misery and suffering and violence if we do not win our struggles. We can wage war to bring the chance of mediocrity to all. Our greatness lies in our Modernity's calmness and boring living. People can just live their lives. If we lose, we will not have the chance to live our own lives; but if we win by evil we will lose our chance to do our good things. So do as Claude Reichman does, and meet your neighbours to chat and think ahead to the time when your calm reasonableness will be the difference between the charges of a screaming mob of terrorist demanding heads and a collection of men and women who are organising clean water for those who otherwise will swill sewage. Meet you neighbours at the library. It's a revolutionary act, but you can do it. You'll like yourself much better for doing so.
4 comments:
Yes, winning the wrong kind of victory is much to be feared because it would rip our society apart and many could not live with themselves, while the more aggressive inherit the earth. On the other hand, presently we do little precisely because of this fear. "White Guilt" rules us, along with all the leftist victimary blackmail this entails.
This ability of the forces of guilt and victimhood to throw into doubt every active stance we take, perhaps to the point where we are so weakened we won't put up much fight when it comes to the moment of truth, makes our need to articulate what we are fighting for so important, that we might become a positive force for western and global cultural renewal, and that we will not fear to assert ourselves in the face of moral blackmail, assert ourselves in the name of a universal modernity which I agree is the banner we should fly, because it is the most open-ended. However, there must also be room to fight for tradition, for it is the best in our tradition that makes us capable of putting our faith in an open-ended future without need of utopian or dystopian ideologies.
How we articulate the call to a universal modernity is key and I may have a few quibbles with what you say; for example, your suggestion that we must know in advance our missions and our favored positions. I would suggest
we have to anticipate the terms of peace, but not be concerned with more specific end positions. The terms will be those that support the dynamic modernity and respect for tradition we are fighting for.
We have to throw off all the "revolutionary" baggage that leads us to assume "revolutionaries" are fighting for some specific end; as we have learned from many failed "revolutionaries", the more you specify your end, the more utopian and fantastic you must become. We are fighting for open-ended freedom , for people and nations to be able to govern themselves in response to a changing world, as a necessary condition (pace the EU) for participation in free global markets.
We are fighting to open politics up to all kinds of would-be freedom fighters around the world, those lone voices now struggling to get a breath in the face of tyranny. So we cannot know, in any precise sense, where this will all take us. We just have to know that our mission is to undermine tyranny and fantasy ideologies and that right now we have a world scene which just doesn't work very well because the forces of white guilt stop anyone from doing anything new, from irrational fear of creating new imbalances and opening things up. We are fighting those who hate risk and uncertainty and prefer control, in the name of "equality" and moral relativism.
And to be able to be active, without allowing ourselves a vision of some utopian end, requires a lot of faith in the unseen and our ability to renew figures of transcendence.
Consequently we fight for real religious freedom, to the exclusion of those "religions", or parts thereof, which are really worldly political systems, a distinction we must fight to uphold. We must be able to do a better job of articulating the relationship and necessary distance between the the primitive religious sacred and the secular political or national sacred.
While conflict is inevitable, we are generally best advised to wait for it until it must be fought. Knowing when this time is arrived is of course no simple matter. This does not mean that we fiddle or appease in the meantime. We have a job to do in pre-figuring the outcome by creating new alliances and understandings. But, again, trying too precisely to define an end is a mistake: we fight for an open-ended modernity that will probably be informed and supported by a return to certain orthodoxies in civil society as we renew western traditions and throw off the Gnosticism that was so central to the first wave of modernity, the last 500 years.
The mistake of many a "revolutionary" is that they are not actually revolutionaries. They are resentful people who want to overthrow some tyrant, real or perceived. And, when they succeed in that, they have little more to bring to the table and so settle into being tyrants themselves, only worse because they have destroyed the cultural traditions that formerly mediated the tyranny. In other words, simply naming your enemy and warring violently is not nearly enough; and to the extent it must be done, it is something one need not be in a rush to specify in the most particular, final battle-line terms. One simply has to be ready to fight when there is no other choice but appeasement or blackmail. Being in a hurry to get to that point can be a mistake if it requires "dumbing down" the terms, or alliances, or future covenants, you are fighting for. Any pre-emptive actions must open up new possibilities where clear dead-ends presently rule. The true revolutionary is someone who can anticipate and promise terms of the future peace such that he can create a genuine movement to ally in the cause, dividing and conquering the enemy.
Dag, I share your sense of the paradox involved in our struggle to define our future. Calling on people to be serious revolutionaries for the cause of modernity and mediocrity makes sense to me, but it may not yet make sense to many and that's where our work lies.
I disagree with you that the "progressive" left is the only "significant force of reaction" and that the Jihadists are their proxies. I think the Jihadists are much the stronger party, and that the left is ever more adapting itself to play the role of servicing the Islamic leaders who are more and more leading all those in the world who take the side of hating modernity and the global free market system. This is not so apparent here at home in Canada where the Jihadists are yet weak and the universities and media belong to the old left. But the left is no longer capable of leading a "revolution"; they are addled "tenured radicals", living on public funds, have few appealing ideas, generally hate themselves, are full of guilt and nihilism, and desperately need to ally themselves with more virile forces, i.e. Islam, which is why rather few of them will speak out against creeping Shariafication and pressure to move towards a more complete Hijab for women.
But for all this generalization, there will be some room in our movement for people "on the left" who generally believe in expanding human freedom and realize that at times this means finding intelligent ways to regulate markets and insure that social inequality is not so pronounced that one cannot aspire to raise one's family up to a comfortable and respectable position with a lifetime's hard and intelligent work. I'm sure there are some people who still identify themselves as on the left with whom we may wish to ally. So we should be careful with our rhetoric, not to assume "the left" are all dhimmis.
II have no idea what I write about much of the time. "Tradition," for example, is a word I write about as if I mean what others mean when they use it. To my surprise and horor, I find I don't have any idea what others mean when they use the word. My understanding of tradition is so limited, and probably so wrong in its greater dimensions that I mean something totally different from what others mean. But until fairly recently I didn't know that. It's only form listening to those who meet on Thursday evenings that I became aware that my underestanding of tradition is limited and possibly wrong. One small word, and things can go wrong, an audience alienated, an alliance lost. Thank God for friends who can point out alterenatives and suggest new and better ways of thinking things through.
Now my day's work is cut out for me, responding to the points above if I can. This is the beauty and profit of our meetings. I see clearly that many of my positions are not as I thought they were. Yes, sometimes I'm genuinely wrong. What a great thing. Being wrong gives me a chance to find something better. I like it.
I don't think you are very much wrong, Dag. Being wrong has more to do with living in a fantasy world because of an inability to face up to certain existential realities that drown us in uncertainty, than it is has to do with not having all the means at hand fully to describe reality, which is an impossible task. It's just that, like all of us, you are a work in progress. And you're right we all need friends to fill in what we are missing in this impossible task...
I've made a bit of tongue in cheek response to your copy above, but I think I'll hold off posting it here to give room to our French friends's weightier concerns.
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