For a Canada in which we may once again freely measure, represent, debate and enact a shared reality

It's "Canada Day", and while I have not made much time recently for blogging, this will soon change. But to that end, maybe it's time for a little stock taking. Where are we, as a nation, going, given the political culture of this country? A recent Mark Steyn piece provides a useful glimpse, if only for a moment on a beautiful day not to be completely wasted by our culture's political insanities: Blazing Cat Fur: Hey Jennifer Lynch- Coming to a newstand near you....

Canada, it seems, has become a country where the policing of those who might say things mildly critical of the reigning religion are told to shut up, or else lose their jobs, reputation, etc. It's a country where parliamentarians cannot respond rationally - they cannot even begin to recognize - arguments that "human rights" commissions are actually destroyers not defenders of real human rights.I could and will in future expand on the Gnostic religion that is so afraid of hearing criticism, or even alternative conceptualizations, of its world view - lest the Gnostic's trips into an unreality where his Utopian desires must not, or so his faith tells him, be obscured by the lesser men who have come before him, be indeed exposed to some of the resistant facts of a fallen world that is not and cannot be as our Messianic or Maternal visions would remake it.But for the moment, for those who want to take up the question seriously, I will take my time for reflection and point you towards Tom Bertonneau's latest in the Brussels Journal, for he so ably takes up the task of elucidating the Gnostic mentality, its hysterical reactions to criticism, to those whose common sense presents stumbling blocks to the great visionaries. He takes us further in understanding the Gnostic's need for a puritanical speech code.

But, as Bertonneau concludes, a refusal of a political religion to come to terms with contrary realities cannot last forever. The world, as it actually is, wins out in the end. So this period in our national history may be coming to some kind of collapse into a future we cannot know and which we must prepare ourselves to meet, should we wish to live in a nation bound by covenants and not just one or another's dark and destructive will to power:

One can predict, generally, that the radical spasm through which Europe and North America are now passing will eventually remit. De-creation can only be called creation for so long before the fraud becomes undeniable and the masses become disenchanted with their formerly charismatic leaders.

The trouble for all of us is that, in the meantime, in “the weird, ghostly atmosphere of a lunatic asylum,” as Voegelin writes, the agitating elites can wreak enormous harm.
[...]
Quite apart from election results, the extremism and intolerance of those currently in power polarizes the society increasingly, day by day, with no terminus of the process in sight; nor will their polarizing activities cease, should they lose their majority. Gnostic propaganda is nowadays organized as a colossal communications-network. Certainly American society is therefore in the rhetorical phase of a civil war, or perhaps in the policy phase, now that liberals have the votes to justify their schemes and do as they please. Even if the USA did not advance to some kind of actual civil war, the damage to civic institutions and to trust among people will have been, as it already is, profound and lasting.

One might agree with Voegelin, who was writing sixty years ago, that, “the end of the Gnostic dream is perhaps closer at hand than one ordinarily would assume.” But this need not mean that the aftermath will resemble the status quo ante, or be in any way familiar to those who, during the period of nightmare, held fast to the truth of the soul.

...a thought with which to marshal our resolve on this Dominion Day.

Fine example of the idiocy of using "human rights" commissions to police thought

No doubt there is much in any discussion of cannibalism among the warring Maori tribes in pre-colonial New Zealand, or among many other tribes, that one can get wrong. But for a scholar to be hauled into bureaucratic hell simply because someone is offended at the mere recognition of what is now widely know among scholars - i.e. that cannibalism was once a common practise, not least in New Zealand - is absurd.
Racism claim over cannibal book - 27 Aug 2008 - Maori news - NZ Herald
The above-linked article notes:

Sent anonymously to Dr Moon, the complaint said This Horrid Practice "describes the whole of Maori society as violent and dangerous. This is a clearly racist view claiming a whole ethnic group has these traits".

Besides the obvious injustice of allowing accusers to go unknown to those who have to defend themselves, the complainant would have an academic point if Moon actually said that Maori society was only violent and dangerous: the whole point of human sacrifice, according to leading anthropological thinkers, Rene Girard and Eric Gans, was to defer social tensions, either to create a moment of peace through the act of sacrifice, or to sacrifice in the name of furthering a pre-existing sign of peace and the need it signified fairly to distribute the pieces of a victim at a sacrificial feast, thus acting to defer all the resentful tensions that had been previously focussed on the victim(s).

But to say, like this complainant, that it is wrong to suggest that a "whole ethnic group had these traits" is to show total disrespect for what a tribal culture actually is. In a tribal culture there are not free individual persons in the modern Western sense. There is no democracy where one is bound to consider more than one perspective and decide which one to vote for, independently of any necessary allegiance to clan or tribe. No, in the tribal world, everyone is bound to the collective myth and ritual sacrifice. It is compact. There is no opting out.

Moon's complainant, in misrepresenting the pre-colonial world, should be taken to the "human rights" commission and left to rot in bureaucratic limbo! And the bureaucrats should be left to rot in figuring out what to do with such a miscreant. This limbo should be permanent, almost tribal.

The article also notes:

Released in August, the book posits that consuming vanquished enemies' mana had little to do with the underlying reason for Maori cannibalism. Instead cannibalism, in pre-colonial times, was simply about "rage and humiliation".

I find this a dubious argument. As I understand it, the archeological evidence is that in their first few hundred years on the islands the Maori effectively hunted and exterminated much of the available big game animals. Human sacrifice, in New Zealand as elsewhere, went in hand with a turn towards a more sedentary, agrarian, militaristic, and hierarchical society. The resentment that such a centralized society creates, with tribal chiefs claiming more and more control over the collective ritual (by which production and warfare is organized, and the economic fruits of labour and warfare are distributed), encourages the development of awesome human sacrifice at the centre of society, as a way to mediate resentful tensions focussed on the centre. But to say it was simply about "rage and humiliation" towards/of the victim is to say there was no rational element to the practice, which would indeed be de-humanizing. The Maoris, even though bound to a fierce ritual code and mythic understanding, had some degree of rational thought about what they were doing. Even the most primitive human has a minimal degree of reason and conscious recognition of what he does. As noted, I would guess that the shortage of animal protein on the islands, and the need for more centralized military organization, had the arguably rational effect of encouraging and growing the practise of human sacrifice, as it did in pre-Columbian Mexico.

In any case, I remain firm in my belief that the human rights commissions are on the side of the cannibals and that what they are doing in feeding learned victims to the resentful masses is not ethically far removed from cannibalism. Indeed, since we no longer have the rational dietary need to eat our fellow humans for protein, nor the religious need, the humiliation and figurative dismemberment of writers, in an age when government people can and should know better, is arguably a much greater sin than anything the cannibals ever did.

Kiwis? hah! (HT: Blazing Cat Fur)

Everything old is tired again

Some good ideas have their day and then fade away. And then sometimes everything old gets tried again.

Censoring Nazis was a terrific idea.

I'm all for it. I think Nazis should be fought till they're defeated and the ones responsible for major crimes should be hanged. I'm a tad liberal when it comes to defining major crimes, but there is the legal system to even out my attitude. So we might see daylight while walking down the street after all. Courts are a moderating influence on folks like me. Except when folks like me are in charge. Then they're more like kangaroo courts with a strong bent toward revenge rather than sense and justice. Even worse than that, though, would be a court with a mission to seek out and destroy all hints of crime, even if those crimes haven't yet been committed. Thought Crimes. Crimes hunted down and expunged before they happen. Hunters in offices seething with righteous rage and moral fury. Clerks with fire in the eye and a determination to-- git 'em.

We got them already. Nazis are done. We got them years before I was even born, and I'm an old guy. They got got when Dietrich was one of the hottest babes on the planet. Getting Nazis was a great idea then. We got them. We hanged some. Not enough, but we hanged some and made a point. I like it. We got 'em. And then we moved on.

But now, way too many years later, we have people still hunting Nazis. There are lots of folks in the world who are bad enough to feel good enough about hanging, to feel some enthusiasm for it. But mostly we don't go after folks who deserve hanging. We find instead we have heresy hunters, creepy little clerks in offices who are so wrapped up in their little dramas of the mind that they've completely lost sight of the world the rest of us live in. We get the same drama with a whole new cast and a whole new set, and the plot doesn't make any sense at all.

Deitrich against Hitler. Yeah!

Cheri Blair against "discrimination"? Uh....

The BC Human Rights Tribunal Against Mark Steyn?

You get the picture.

Interesting Stories at Ironic Surrealism II: Thought crimes everywhere!

Gay Art: Jesus & Muhammad:

An Islamic group based in the UK has issued a death fatwa against a playwright whose London stage production depicts Jesus Christ as a homosexual.

Terrence McNally was sentenced to death by the Shari’ah Court of the UK as his play, Corpus Christi, opened in London on Thursday night.

…The religious edict was signed by Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, judge of the Shari’ah Court of the UK.

…The sheik added: “We do not believe in political assassination, but obviously he would face capital punishment.

“He will be arrested and there will be capital punishment.”

He said that under Islamic law, Mr McNally could only escape the fatwa by becoming a Muslim. If he simply repented he would still be killed - but his family would be cared for by the Islamic state.

And:

Woman artist gets death threats over gay Muslim photos

THE Dutch were debating the limits of freedom of expression last week after an artist who photographed gay men wearing masks of the prophet Muhammad was forced into hiding and her work removed from a museum exhibit.

Speaking on the telephone from an unspecified location in the Netherlands last week, the artist, an Iranian exile who goes by the pseudonym of Sooreh Hera, said she had been threatened with “execution”. She accused the director of the municipal museum in The Hague of cowardice for caving in to Muslim extremists.

Her story is a reminder of the tensions that have put the Netherlands and other European countries on the front line, sending dozens of people threatened by extremists into hiding since 2004, when a Dutch film-maker was murdered on the street and his collaborator driven into exile.

This leaves Hera, 34, in no doubt that she is in real danger. “They said to me, ‘We’re going to burn you naked or put a bullet in your mouth’,” she said, referring to menacing e-mails.

“They say, ‘Now you are locked in your home and you cannot go out any more’.”

She said that by photographing gay Iranian exiles in masks of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and Ali, his son-in-law, she had wanted to expose a “hypocritical” attitude towards homosexuality in countries such as Iran, where men can be hanged for homosexual conduct.

…Wim van Krimpen, director of the museum, initially praised Hera’s collection of photographs as “exceptional”. Last month, however, he announced that the masked men could not be included in the forthcoming exhibition because “certain people in our society might perceive it as offensive”.

Islamism fears kill Dutch display

“They condemn homosexuality but in countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia it is common for married men to maintain relations with other men,” says Hera. “Works of art can be provocative. It is not an artist’s job just to paint flowers. Art should shine a light on social issues.”

The photographs were part of an extensive collection of images by Hera of mostly Dutch gay men. Another part of her exhibit was a video featuring hard rock music and images of Iranian clerics interspersed with pictures of naked men.

Ironic Surrealism II also carries this story:

New Mexico, January 30, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The case of a Christian photographer who refused to photograph a same-sex “commitment ceremony”, was heard before the New Mexico Human Rights Division on Monday.

A same-sex couple asked Elaine Huguenin, co-owner with her husband of Elane Photography, to photograph a “commitment ceremony” that the two women wanted to hold. Huguenin declined because her Christian beliefs are in conflict with the message communicated by the ceremony.

The same-sex couple filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Division, which is now trying Elane Photography under state anti discrimination laws for sexual orientation discrimination.

Isn't it time we grew up and stopped trying to legislate thought crimes?

Powered by ScribeFire.