Category Archives: Culture war

New Survey: Fewer Germans feel free to express their political opinions in 2023

. . . than in any year since the early days of the Federal Republic

Article by eugyppius.

Excerpt:

The impression of a closed and stifling discourse is present across the political spectrum. Only 39% of centre-right CDU voters feel free to express their views, but for Die Linke, or the Left Party (the successors of the East German SED), that number falls to 36%, and for AfD voters it is lowest of all, a mere 11%. A clear majority (75%) of Greens alone feel that they can speak their minds, and so here we learn who feels best represented by our present discourse.

“Do you have the feeling, that you can freely express your political opinion today in Germany, or is it better to be cautious?” Blue: “I can speak freely.” Orange: “It is better to be cautious.”

No surprises lurk in the breakdown by education: 51% of those with university degrees or an Abitur feel their political expression is unhampered, while clear majorities of everybody else say they cannot speak their minds.

The historical perspective is sobering. The Federal Republic was only five years old in 1953; the Allied occupation and denazification were recent events, and even then Germans enjoyed a substantially greater subjective sense of political expression than they do today. This sense peaked under Willy Brandt during the Cold War, but has been in a state of decay since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. This would be good evidence in favour of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s thesis, that Western liberal states rapidly lose their enthusiasm for principles like free expression in the absence of competition from rival systems.

Yet it was not the end of the Cold War, but rather the chancellorship of Angela Merkel that saw the most dramatic decline in free political expression. Specifically, Merkel’s strategy of “asymmetric demobilisation,” via which she sought to disarm the leftist opposition by adopting central elements of their political programme, had a very perverse influence. German voters and hence the politicians who appeal to them have always had pronounced conservative tendencies, while the media here as everywhere else lean to the left. Before 2005, politicians provided an important counterweight to the line taken by our press, but Merkel’s triangulations created a new system of soft political enforcement sustained by establishment politicians and mainstream journalism alike.

The consequence is a system that has placed all of us in thrall to the whims of an eccentric minority. The opinions which govern German society, as I’ve written many times before, are not those of most people, but rather of an increasingly insular, university-educated urbanite class, who are relatively affluent, who vote overwhelmingly Green and who constitute no more than 15% of the population. I doubt the old socialist countries of the Warsaw Pact were any different in this respect. More and more, it feels like we defeated communism only to recreate an equivalent system, which threatens to be much worse, insofar as its informal nature and soft asymmetrical methods confuse everybody and thwart opposition.

4th Generation Devastation: The West Has Been Targeted in a Cowardly Globalist Mind War

Article by Brandon Smith.

Others might call it “spiritual warfare”. It’s basically the same.

Excerpts:

With the advent of civilian populations armed with military grade weaponry and familiar with the training required for combat, elitist groups realized (post American Revolution) that dominating the public with military might was no longer a sure bet. They had to engage in a new kind of warfare using psychological attacks until they could weaken and disarm the populace. The new system of oppressing was about mental coercion; to make people believe that the authoritarian ideal is inevitable.

A greater factor in the mind war, though, is the shift of the Overton Window by making cultural pillars into cultural villains. This is being accomplished through the creation of the deconstruction religion, or what we sometimes call the “Cult of Woke.”

Name any cultural value or principle that defines the western world, such as meritocracy, independence, self reliance, mental toughness, liberty (with responsibility), legacy through hard work and family, the protection of children from perversions, discipline over hedonism, logic and reason over fanaticism, conservation of heritage and history and for many people the tenets of Christian duty. These are all pillars of our society which the woke cult seeks to destroy. In every way I can imagine it is a psychological war on the west, all of it funded through billions of dollars in grants from globalist think tanks like the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and the Open Society Foundation.

The globalists view public manipulation and social engineering as their birthright. They think it’s their manifest destiny, and they suggest often that humanity would somehow decay and self destruct without their influence.

In a once obscure internal US Army document titled ‘From Psyop To Mindwar’, the military value of sabotage through 4th Generation methods is described in detail. The treatise outlines the idea of causing a target population to self enslave by undermining its core structures through psychological warfare. The paper was written in 1980 by Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino, a devout satanist, and Colonel Paul Vallely, who would later become a General.

Aquino’s theory was essentially that the US Army was under-utilizing psychological operations as a background to kinetic operations. He argued that psyops could be used as the front line weapon to destroy an enemy nation (or control a domestic population) without the exploitation of standard munitions.

The key to grasping the situation is to accept that a war is upon us. Woke is a psychological operation devised by globalists, and it is currently battling to become the one and only system of thought – A morally relativist system of thought. It relies on a specific circumstance in order to succeed: The idea that men of the west will not take on a fighting posture in the face of psychological attack. As long as we continue to see war only as fighting with guns, we will remain docile in the face of a more advanced cultural bombardment.

For 4th Gen Warfare to prevail the target population has to follow a certain set of rules while the other side operates without rules. They have to be allowed to pursue all-out destruction against their enemy while the other side is admonished for doing anything remotely defensive, including speaking up. But what happens when patriots stop caring about being admonished? What happens when the optics are no longer relevant? What happens when the goal goes from winning in politics or in the halls of public discourse to winning the actual conflagration in front of us?

When this happens, everything in America and the western world will change. For good or ill will really depend on who is left to rebuild once the smoke clears.

On the effects of the Pill

Jordan Peterson speaks with Dr. Sarah Hill.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down in-person with researcher, professor, and author, Dr. Sarah Hill. They break down sex-based differences in regret, competition, and academia; the balance between life exposure and safeguarding when raising a child; the practice of “mate-choice copying” among women; and why our hormones are a foundational part not just of our physical makeup, but also of who we are and who we have the potential to become.

Dr. Sarah E. Hill is a researcher and professor at TCU and author of “This is your brain on birth control: the surprising science of women, hormones, and the law of unintended consequences”. In addition to being at the forefront of research on women’s sexual psychology, Sarah is also a sought-after speaker, consultant, and media expert in the area of women’s hormones and sexual psychology.

Why I am now a Christian

Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war

Article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on UnHerd.com.

Quotes:

Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

[. . .]

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

[. . .]

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.