Category Archives: Culture

(Neo-)Marxism is the one disease that liberalism could not defeat

The big question is: why?

Writes eugyppius:

For centuries, liberal European polities fended off all manner of political opponents, and if the states themselves did not always survive, liberalism itself demonstrated remarkable stability. It was a great filter that excluded all rivals, until it found one it could not sort out. Marxism and its successor movements proliferated as the one disease that liberalism could not defeat, in much the same way that antibiotic-resistant MRSA emerges from the antiseptic environments of hospitals. It is an opposition politics uniquely suited to liberalism, for it exploits the liberal impulses for equality and freedom in favour of a quite different, and far more terrible, project. In Western countries, the leftists took aim at the traditional institutions and culture of the European middle classes. There, they still struggle to impose not a socialist utopia, but a never-ending industrial and financial serfdom.

The leftist system is not meant to produce political stability or prosperity, and it feels a lot like it’s entering a death spiral. Getting these lunatics out of power, before they crash the entire West with no survivors, is the most urgent problem we face. Here MKH has the right idea: Respectable conservative politicians have failed above all, in neglecting those people who have suffered the most at the hands of globalisation, renewable energy, immigration, lockdowns and all the rest of it. We must defeat the leftist elite, not win them over; and to do this we must deprive them steadily of popular support, beginning among the lower classes and at the periphery, where the greatest gains are to be made, and working inwards. From the hysterical, crazed opposition men like Trump, Orbán and Salvini have inspired, you can measure the power of this approach.

If Corona restrictions return in the fall, populist political upsets will become our only hope.

Liberalism was susceptible to (neo)-Marxism because it lacked Christianity.

The BBC’s climate fake news

Time and again it has put the narrative ahead of the facts

Article by Fraser Myers on spiked-online.com.

Excerpts:

The BBC is very worried about ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ – especially when it comes to climate change, a cause close to Auntie’s heart. So much so that in 2020, it hired its first-ever specialist ‘disinformation’ reporter, who last year fronted an eight-part series for the World Service all about ‘climate disinformation’. The main theme of the show was that fake news about the climate could lead us to ‘catastrophe’.

Perhaps the BBC’s misinformation specialists should have been looking closer to home. Recently, the corporation’s very own climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, was found by the Beeb’s own editorial-complaints unit (ECU) to have made two ‘misleading’ statements in a Panorama documentary about climate change and extreme weather, broadcast last year.

The vast global reduction in natural-disaster deaths – tragically misreported by the BBC – tells an alternative, humanistic story. This is the story of human progress – of global economic development, industrialisation and innovation. This has allowed humanity to liberate itself from the vagaries and cruelties of nature. It is the simple reason why worsening weather does not translate into greater death and destruction. And it is this very progress and liberation that climate alarmists threaten to undo.

Following the Science is Impossible and Stupid

Institutional science follows politics; it will always endorse central regime policies

An article by “eugyppius”, who concludes:

Science isn’t some objective reasonable force outside of politics. Scientists spend most of their careers chasing government grant funding, and fighting for appointments and promotions in government-funded university systems. Science follows politics, and nobody knows this as much as the disingenuous politicians who claim that their policies are subordinate to scientific findings.

War Without End, Amen

Peace and rest are the enemy in the progressive war against the natural order.

This blog is dedicated to “progress with God”, as without Him, none is possible. We live in a time beset by the belief that progress without God is not only possible, but the only way it can happen. Anthony Esolen has written an article in the magazine Chronicle that refutes this mindset as completely as it does poetically.

Excerpts:

One who is a pioneer on principle is the Christian soldier gone wrong. The man who will not let his neighbors rest, but who must always be “transgressive,” is one who doubles down on Sodom, tears down a statue here and an institution there, and who lives in ceaseless and unforgiving hatred of anything that can claim to be permanently good and deserving of our honor. He is what you get when sin is transferred from your own heart, where it has settled, to social structures, conveniently vague, and traditions, stolid and defenseless.

Satan is like many an environmentalist who hates man more than he loves trees. He cannot let even the natural world alone if it means that Adam and Eve may enjoy their lives in peace and harmony with God. Satan knows that the world is beautiful, but its beauty, the peaceful tranquility of its varied and sweetly interchanging orders, goads him on to hatred. “The more I see / Pleasures about me,” he says, grumbling, “so much more I feel / Torment within me.” And when Adam and Eve fall, condemning the world to fall with them, Death, Satan’s incestuous son and grandson, is not satisfied, because his essential emptiness and nihilism admit no fulfillment, no peace. 

If art tells permanent truths about man, the progressive will not hear them, because he has set his face against anything permanent. It’s not that he produces bad art with drearily predictable political intent. The problem is worse than that. It is that the thing itself, art, suffocates. It needs air, it needs leisure, it needs vistas that span the ages. It needs a humble openness to the eternal. And to the extent that our minds are occupied territory, whether we oppose or cheer the occupiers, we too lose our humanity; we too can neither make nor receive good and great art. The progressive can say with Satan, “Only in destroying I find ease / To my relentless thoughts.” The rest of us can hardly remember what has been destroyed.

“We Are Human, We Are Free”

“The Great Reset” Must Be Defeated

Article by Anita McKone. Excerpts:

These elitists have become masters at co-opting all movements of self-respect, self-care and solidarity – their use of double speak means they claim to be supportive of community, fair wealth distribution, truth in the media, ecological sustainability, diversity, racial equality, women’s equality, freedom and nonviolence (for example) while working to implement an agenda that supports none of these things. And their increasing use over the past 70 years of NGOs that sound ‘friendly’ and ‘independent’, but which in fact pursue corporate, imperialist and other elitist agendas, has led to enormous numbers of ordinary ‘concerned’ people putting their money and energy into organisations and movements that dissipate their capacity to genuinely act in their own interests and the interests of life on the planet as a whole.

To take just a few examples – the environment movement has become dominated by the demand for a massive ‘green’ tech revolution that requires further rape and pillage of the peoples and natural environment of Africa and anywhere else rare minerals are found, union movements around the world have become utterly neutered and no longer act in the interests of their working members, medical ‘science’ is most likely to be a profit-making anti-scientific enterprise rather than one designed to further people’s health through use of genuine scientific methodology, and (particularly close to my heart) campaigns using nonviolent tactics have been used to simply achieve ‘regime change’ in centralised states, furthering the interests of transnational corporations, even though this was never the intention of the majority of activists involved.

The Propaganda Playbook

By Edward Bernays, published in 1928, is available for free online

Writes Ryan Matters:

The world is a volatile place right now. Things seem to change quickly and no one knows what might happen next. However, amid all this chaos there is one thing that has not changed and is unlikely to change any time soon, and that is human psychology.

Because of this, the tactics used to manipulate people’s thoughts, beliefs and actions have not changed either. In fact, most of them were outlined in detail 100 years ago by Edward Bernays in his 1928 book, Propaganda.

That’s right, the Puppet Master’s playbook isn’t a secret. It’s right there, freely available to anyone who cares to understand how the powers that be seek to influence them on a daily basis.

Propaganda by Edward Bernays has now been added to our Forbidden Library. Read it now, along with other forbidden books.

The Jews Who Didn’t Leave Egypt

A lesson from the past about choosing freedom over servitude

An article by Alana Newhouse. She basically says these kinds of people (and they are not just Jews) are still among us.

Excerpts:

Now when Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although it was nearer; for God said, ‘The people may have a change of heart when they see war, and return to Egypt,’” states Exodus 13:17. But it is in the next sentence that a mystery emerges: “So God led the people round about, by way of the wilderness at the Sea of Reeds. Now the Israelites went up chamushim out of the land of Egypt.

Wait—what? The Jews went out of Egypt how? What does “chamushim” mean? It is generally translated as “armed,” but nearly all commentaries note that its definition is, in fact, uncertain.

Into this breach arrives the legendary medieval Torah commentator Rashi, with a startling assertion. After acknowledging the “armed” option, Rashi offers, with casual sangfroid, another idea: That “chamushim” relates to the Hebrew word for five, and the text should be understood to be saying that only one-fifth of the Jewish people chose to leave Egypt.

Continue reading →

Criticising the Church of England’s Position in the Trans Debate

"There is no woke bandwagon senior clergymen will not jump on"

An article by Charlie Peters on spiked-online.com.

Excerpt:

Perhaps these governors of dwindling flocks have noticed that the only two growing religions in Britain today are Islam and progressivism. They can’t preach the former, so they have dived head-first into associating themselves with the latter at every available opportunity.

Re “dwindling flocks”, see also here.

The Inescapable Triad of Religions

Power, escape and dominion - of which power religion is currently dominant in the world

I’ve recently posted an article by Doug Wilson about Gary North. Now Bionic Mosquito (B. M.) has written an interesting article on Doug Wilson.

Quotes:

Who is Doug Wilson? Douglas James Wilson (born 1953) is a conservative Reformed and evangelical theologian, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, faculty member at New Saint Andrews College, and author and speaker.

What does he say about himself?

Theology that Bites Back: I want to advance a Chestertonian Calvinism on education, sex and culture, theology, politics, book reviews, postmodernism, expository studies, along with other random tidbits that come into my head. In theology I am an evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian, pretty much in that order.

Not someone the mainstream would embrace.  Also, not someone that many Christians would embrace.

Regarding the basic, inescapable triad of religions (that of power, escape, and dominion), B. M. writes (and quotes):

Continue reading →

What Exactly Did the Reformation Reform?

Article by Frank van Dun

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century reformed nothing but it changed everything. It was a crucially important factor in the demise of Medieval Latin Christendom and its rapid transformation in what we now know as Europe or, more generally, the West. Philosophically and religiously it rede­fined and revolutionized Western civilization, for, what characterizes a civiliza­tion is not so much what people do (which is pretty much the same always and everywhere) as what they conscientiously believe they ought to do: its fundamental scheme of justification and rectification — in a word, its conscience.

Continue reading here.