Rod Dreher's Blog, page 53

Assabiya And The Collapse Of The US Elite

What a powerful analytical essay by Lee Smith, connecting the dots on why the Taliban beat America, the corruption of our elites, and the coming turmoil. Excerpts:

The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service. Losing Afghanistan then is the least of it. When you choose to adopt a foreign cohort’s cultural habits, customs for which the elders of your own tribe would ostracize and perhaps kill you, you have lost your civilization.

Yet military strategists, political pundits, foreign correspondents, and even historians will spend the next several decades wondering how a gang of rough Pashtun tribesmen galvanized by a fundamentalist version of Islam managed to defeat the most advanced military in the world. And that’s precisely the point: The problem with the American establishment is not simply that after 20 years in Afghanistan it did not understand the country or foresee what its opponents were likely to do after withdrawing forces. More importantly, our ruling class is so alienated from its own roots that it no longer understands the character of the country it purports to lead, and what makes it different, even exceptional. The evidence is that our elites sought to graft the effects of a civilization built by and for its own people—democracy, a military and police force, girls’ schools, etc.—onto a primitive society that had to be bribed to accept what we were offering.

There is no mystery about why the U.S. experience in Afghanistan ended in failure, embarrassment, and scandal. Nor is it a mystery why the Taliban took over Kabul so quickly. They were fighting for primacy. Their victory was foreordained.

Smith says it has to do with what the Arabs call assabiya, or solidarity. He cites the medieval Islamic chronicler Ibn Khaldun’s theory that a people’s sense of solidarity and purpose (often based in religious conviction) is the true engine of history. “With it, the most primitive tribe can overturn the mightiest of civilizations; without it, a people will wither in the desert,” writes Smith.Smith says that America’s decline began when the Democrats began to build their own power base on dividing Americans against each other:

For our elite, the fall began during the tail end of the Bill Clinton presidency when Democratic Party strategists augured that they’d soon have a permanent hold on power thanks to urban intellectuals, young single women, racial and ethnic majorities, and the LGBT community. What is described as a coalition is in fact a mélange of clients with varying and sometimes opposing interests that can only be held together by stoking a communal hatred of the national majority—the white middle class.

It was hardly a coincidence that this demographic was the source of the wealth that the establishment was busy transferring to themselves and abroad, through initiatives like the North American Free Trade Agreement. The elites rationalized their impoverishment of the white middle class by claiming that they were dying anyway. And when the American heartland didn’t die off quickly enough, the establishment credentialed themselves as progressives by calling the people who live there racists. Being racists, they deserved all the bad things the elite had decided for them. Thus, by betting on sectarianism as the path to permanent power, American elites polarized the United States.

The elite institutions that weren’t already part of the left establishment, like entertainment, the academy, the media, and the foreign policy and national security bureaucracy, were co-opted through party initiatives—as, for instance, the Beltway think tank Center for a New American Security vetted the rising ranks of U.S. military officers.

Owning all the institutions is a sign of great power and demoralizes opponents. So it was hardly surprising that much of the Republican establishment attached itself to the rising elite and reshaped its policies to fit. Take George W. Bush for instance: After 9/11 he invaded two Muslim countries for revenge and deterrence, but in time he changed the mission to promoting Middle East democracy, a pet theory of pro-Palestinian academics. When Sen. Mitt Romney marched with Black Lives Matter, and Gen. Mark Milley advocated for critical race theory, they were simply demonstrating that they had adopted the manners and belief system of the dominant power. The only problem with owning all the institutions and compelling obedience from all the elites is that there is no one left to warn you when you’re courting trouble.

And we have married it. One more bit:

Of course institutions like the press and intelligence bureaucracies would enlist in the project to split the country. The party owns them. And so there is no one left to question the wisdom of breaking with the more than 150-year-old compact that is the political and cultural foundation of America’s post-Civil War peace—racial equality.

Read it all. Seriously, this is important. Smith goes on to say that we are not looking at the end of America. We are just observing the end of one form of American leadership.

If the conservatives can produce a non-crazy, serious, competent, and determined candidate to be the standard-bearer — someone who can unite this nation under traditional American ideals, and who runs credibly (not just performatively) against the corrupt elites of the Establishment — we could see real change. For that matter, a populist of the Left who ran unambiguously and courageously against the woke identity politics that have conquered the Left would do surprisingly well, I think.

We are about to see incredible things happen in this country. The bankrupt old order is falling. The question is, to whom does the future belong? Who has the insight, the vision, the intelligence, and the fortitude to ride this tiger?

It could go very badly, you know. As I write in Live Not By Lies, it was the utter failure of the Tsarist government to handle the 1891-92 famine in Russia that struck a powerful blow against the middle class’s confidence in the regime. The loss of the 1903 Russo-Japanese War was another devastating blow that opened the door for normal people to consider that radicals might have a point after all. In 1917, Russia went totalitarian. Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins Of Totalitarianism that a collapse of institutional authority paves the way for totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism is not fated, though! We have free will, and are still a democracy. I believe that the regime (meaning both the government and private institutions — especially Woke Capitalism — that make up the structures of the ruling class) we have will end up manufacturing a crisis that justifies implementation of a social credit system). Be on alert, and as always, prepare. The Slovak Catholics organized by Father Kolakovic in the five years before Communism took over (I tell this story in Live Not By Lies) could not stop the coming of totalitarianism, which arrived riding Soviet tanks, but they were ready to resist it, and keep the life of the Church going throughout the repression. We are still at liberty to organize, we Christians. Do it now, while we can. History is happening very fast now.

The post Assabiya And The Collapse Of The US Elite appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why Hungary Matters To American Conservatives

I woke up this morning to four different people in two countries sending me this:

 

Second from top is the Hungarian translation of The Benedict Option. Not gonna lie, it’s cool to know a world leader has read one’s book.

Today I’m talking to a reporter for the New Yorker, who is coming to spend the afternoon with me to find out why wingers like me are interested in Viktor Orban. If you add up my blog posts, I have written a small book about that topic over the last month in this space. Still, I’ll go at it again. I expect to have to deal with the charge that we want to lift Orbanism, or whatever you call it, out of Hungary and implant it into American political life. No, no, no. It is not possible, even if it were desirable. As I have tried to say, over and over, here is what we like about Orban:

He values localism, particularity, and sovereignty, believing that each nation should have the right to decide its own way of life, in accord with its own valuesHe understands the Realpolitik of the current moment, and the barely-concealed illiberalism of liberalsHe grasps clearly the threats to social cohesion and societal thriving from racial and gender politicsHe defends the traditional family, and supports it with policies encouraging family formationHe believes in the free market, but will not defend its claims at the expense of the common goodHe understands immigration as a potential threat to the stability and cultural continuity of the nationAnd in all these things, he is willing to fight hard for the things he believes in

This is not very different from why conservative intellectuals who liked Trump did so. The problem was that Trump had no real principles, and certainly no genuine intention of fighting for these things (as opposed to appearing to fight for these things). He never had a real and consistent agenda, which is why the GOP Congressional establishment ended up doing the heavy lifting for him. And those who did share his agenda, like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he cast aside for petty personal reasons.

One interesting thing about all this is that the same illiberalism that Orban’s American critics accuse him of is pretty much a fact of life in contemporary America, under liberalism. It can sometimes be worse. In Orban’s Hungary, you are perfectly free to criticize the government’s stance on gender ideology, and you will not have to worry about being cancelled at your job or in any other way. Is that true in the US? Of course not, not for many millions of us.

Orban opposed the Hungarian national soccer team taking the knee, because he rejected attempts to bring American culture war issues to European sport. If you disagreed with him, it was no big deal. But prominent Americans who disagree with taking the knee had better think hard before speaking their mind.

He believes that traditional families having children is a good thing, and his government has adjusted tax policy to reward family formation. If we had this kind of debate in the US Congress, anyone who said that the policy should only target traditional families — that is to say, not families with same-sex parents, or polyamorous families — would be denounced as the worst kind of bigot.

Orban is widely criticized for the heavy hand he has taken in creating a space in Hungary for conservatives in media. From my point of view, this does indeed look bad. But here in the US, our major media is almost entirely in the hands of liberals (even Fox, on its reporting side, is not a friend to social conservatives), and it shows. I would not support Orban’s smashmouth politics that led to the creation of a more ideologically level playing field on Hungarian media, but most conservatives here would just roll our eyes at the idea that this is some kind of ghastly deed. We are quite used to our perspectives being ignored or misrepresented by our ideologically monochromatic national media. When Hungarian journalists told me this past summer that if not for what Orban did, there would be no voice for conservatives in their national media, I find that easy to believe.

Along those lines, when American liberals complain about Orban’s gerrymandering, I would remind them that we have been gerrymandering Congressional districts for decades to achieve court-ordered racial balance. A few years ago, I was living in an absurdly shaped Congressional district here in Louisiana, stretching from the south of the state, where I lived, to the very north. Why was it carved out like that? To put more black people in it. The left is perfectly happy to rig any system it has to for the sake of achieving what it calls Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I have very little interest in hearing them complain that Viktor Orban adjusts the rules to favor outcomes he likes.

You could turn that around, though: if I hate this kind of thing at home, why do I find it acceptable in Orban’s Hungary? Fair point. And this is where it gets down to the hard part. As I have said repeatedly, in most respects, I am an old-fashioned liberal. I don’t want a public square where people on the Left are treated the way they treat us on the Right today. I am in favor of defending the free speech of all. I am in favor of judging people on the basis of the content of their character and their ability to do the work, not on the color of their skin or any measure like that. I’m old enough to remember when those were things that both conservatives and liberals in America could agree on. We don’t live in that world anymore. I have lived to see an illiberal, even “soft totalitarian,” regime arise within the structures and language of liberalism, to inhabit it parasitically — and use that power against the liberties of people like me. And it’s getting worse.

I’m supposed to feel compelled to defend this decadent illiberal progressive system, one in the grips of a crackpot ideology that is destroying the country, and one led by elites who dragged America into two foreign policy catastrophes this century — and supposed to think that we are so much better than Viktor Orban? Please.

Writing in the Telegraph (paywalled), Allister Heath tells some harsh truths. Excerpts:

No empire is eternal: all eventually fall amid hubris and humiliation. The heart-wrenching, humanitarian calamity that is the botched Afghan retreat is merely the latest sign that the American era is ending: Washington is no longer the world’s policeman, and an unsettling future of clashes between expansionist, authoritarian regional powers beckons. …

Twenty years on, America’s global plan lies in ruins, its elites confounded on almost every issue, the stupidity and incompetence on display over the Afghan withdrawal confirming that they don’t understand the rest of the world, and aren’t fit to govern their own country, let alone the globe. Blinded by a simplistic universalism, they no longer understand religion, tribalism, history, national differences or why countries want to govern themselves.

Wherever one looks, America’s blueprint has failed. Take Washington’s support for a United States of Europe with its army, constitution and “eurodollar”. Brexit signalled the beginning of the end of that dystopian construct: others will leave the EU, because of the coming migration crisis – tens of millions will seek to move from Africa and the Middle East, and there will be toxic attempts at “distributing” migrants across the bloc – or because of a populist uprising or economic implosion.

More:

America’s internal problems are immense: its constitution is broken, its predilection for second-rate gerontocrats such as Biden unrivalled. Racked with self-doubt, its elites in the grip of a bizarre “awakening” centred around a nihilistic, ungrateful self-loathing, it no longer has values to sell, neither capitalism nor democracy nor the American dream. How can people who live in terror of “micro-aggressions” find it in themselves to defeat real evils? As to the public, it doesn’t want to know about the rest of the world: how, under such circumstances, can the US empire not be in terminal decline?

… The West has lost control: there will be mass population movements, currency wars and battles over natural resources. The American empire at least believed in freedom and democracy; what replaces it won’t even pretend to be liberal.

Are we really sure we can double down on the leadership that has brought us to this point — or failed to prevent us from reaching this point? I’m talking specifically about wokeness. Any nation could find itself in a series of normal crises — economic, foreign policy, etc. — and would then face the challenge of healing itself. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how we face multiple crises, without the political leadership — either on the Left or the Right — capable of meeting the challenges. And beyond politics, we have a ruling class that has taken poison like this, and insists that everybody has to drink the same Kool-Aid:

Bank of America Corporation has implemented a racial reeducation program that claims the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work,” instructing white employees in particular to “decolonize [their] mind[s]” and “cede power to people of color.”

Earlier this year, Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte market president Charles Bowman announced a new “equity” initiative called United in Action, in partnership with the United Way of Central Carolinas. According to documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, BOA executives launched the initiative by encouraging employees to participate in their “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge,” a race-training program funded in part by the bank and built on the principles of critical race theory, including intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.

One the program’s first day, Bank of America teaches employees that the United States is a “racialized society” that “use[s] race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression,” which “give[s] privileges to white people resulting in disadvantages to people of color.” According to the training program, all whites—“regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages”—are “living a life with white skin privileges.” Even children are implicated in the system of white supremacy: according to the program materials, white toddlers “develop racial biases by ages three to five” and “should be actively taught to recognize and reject the ‘smog’ of white privilege.”

Over the next three days, Bank of America teaches employees about intersectionality, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and systemic racism. “Racism in America idolizes White physical features and White values as supreme over those of others,” the program asserts. As a result of being part of the “dominant culture,” whites are more likely to “have more limited imagination,” “experience fear, anxiety, guilt, or shame,” “contribute to racial tension, hatred, and violence in our homes, communities, and world,” and, subsequently, “react in broken ways as a result.” People of color, on the other hand, cannot be racist, because “racism is used to justify the position of the dominant group . . . and to uphold white supremacy and superiority.” Therefore, the discussion guide claims, “reverse racism and discrimination are not possible.”

Read it all, and be grateful for Christopher Rufo for the work he does exposing this stuff. You should take whatever money you may give to candidates or political action committees, and redirect it to Chris, who is doing a lot of heavy lifting that Conservatism, Inc. won’t do.

We are seeding the next generation with insanity by normalizing this stuff. This comes from a preschool teacher in South Carolina. South Carolina! 

South Carolina preschool teacher makes her students call her Mx. instead of Mr. or Ms. because she’s non-binary pic.twitter.com/IYTG2hh1KG

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) August 19, 2021

You know where they are determined to stop this insane ideology before it takes hold and destroys their society? Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Hungarians can look to the West and see where it leads, and be grateful that they have politicians who are willing to accept the contempt of bien-pensant Western Europeans over it.

Seriously, though: as the Telegraph columnist avers, we don’t have a ruling class capable of guiding America out of this crisis. They all live by lies. Our civilian and military leadership have been on TV this week trying to avoid accountability for the disaster in Afghanistan. We had all better pray to God that the Americans that the Biden administration — I’m looking at you, Gen. Mark Milley and SecDef Lloyd Austin — left behind don’t get taken hostage by Taliban factions. We could be looking at Iran 1979 all over again. Michael Anton’s guide to regime propaganda explains well why we cannot take seriously what fools of the Cathedral say.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not opposed to our Constitutional system at all. I’m saying simply that we need a much stronger, more visionary, and determined leader who is able to right the ship. Hungary is not the United States. I get that. We need an American version of Viktor Orban: a small-d democrat who can read the signs of the times and has the wisdom and the fortitude to right the listing ship. If I were a conservative politician in this country who aspired to leadership in these crisis times, I would be reading and studying him. There’s an English-language manuscript of a book by Balasz Orban (no relation), a political strategist and top member of the Fidesz party, called The Hungarian Way of Strategy. It’s being looked at by publishers. Given the fast-changing circumstances, I think it could be one of the most important US political books of 2022, if it finds a publisher.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a piece I’ve been meaning to write about for a week or so. It’s by Erik D’Amato, an American journalist who lived in Budapest for fifteen years, and ran a small news service. He does not come off as pro-Fidesz. In it, he lists twenty things that Westerners don’t get about Hungary. Here are the most important ones, in my view:

2. The lingering presence of Western-fêted ex-Communist elites was tragically corrosive.

The other big mistake that I and other Westerners made during the transition was not foreseeing how much bitterness and cynicism would be produced by allowing communist apparatchiks to escape punishment. They then reinvented themselves overnight as “socialist” millionaire business figures—often on the basis of egregious self-dealing—while continuing to proclaim their leadership of the country’s Left. Indeed, many longtime Orbán-watchers believe his uncompromising style and hostility to the West partly flows from his unexpected electoral loss to a Socialist-led coalition in 2002 and 2006. The first of these defeats was at the hands of a communist finance minister-turned banker (Péter Medgyessy) and the second was to a communist-youth-league-organizer-turned-private-equity-honcho (Ferenc Gyurcsány), both of whom positioned themselves as favorites of the West. Today, there are Hungarians who intensely dislike Orbán but cannot bring themselves to pull the lever for an opposition still tied to servants of a genuine dictatorship who were never brought to justice.

His point is that Orban rose in opposition to these reconstructed Communists. If you’ve read the Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko’s great book The Demon In Democracy, you will understand this dynamic. Legutko talks about how the Communist elite refashioned itself into a Eurocrat-friendly liberal cadre. A lot of ordinary voters in those countries resented the hell out of this.

More:

5. Fears of demographic decline and “population replacement” should not be scoffed at.

In the mid-2000s, there was a big digital counter on the side of a building a few doors down from me in Budapest, which tracked Hungary’s population as it dropped toward the key milestone of 10 million. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but I should have, since the fear of demographic decline has clearly fed many Hungarians’ sense of becoming a vanishing people. So, while even many conservatives in the West tend to dismiss fears of a “great replacement” as a crude racist conspiracy theory, average people in societies with stagnating or declining populations are likely to think and vote differently. This is especially true if, as in Central and Eastern Europe, history is full of nearby examples of populations actually being replaced. Fidesz capitalized on this with an effective rhetorical campaign against mass immigration into Europe, and a lesser-known set of popular pro-natal incentives such as lifetime exemption from income taxes for women who have a certain number of children. These have helped increase the fertility rate by almost a quarter in the last decade, while nearly doubling the number of marriages. Knocking or mocking this concern won’t make it go away.

This is what all the Orban-haters do: construe his opposition to immigration as racist. They cannot imagine — sorry, they refuse to imagine what the world looks like to people who live in a small, culturally and linguistically distinct country, in a region with a brutal history (post-WWII) of population transfers. Again, this is one thing I like about Orban: he sees the world as it is, not as it appears through rose-colored ideological glasses. He risked the contempt of all of Europe to protect his country from Madame Merkel’s 2015 folly.

And:

7. It will also co-opt minority groups.

While routinely trafficking in forms of white nationalism, Fidesz has for years forged unlikely alliances with institutions and politicians representing various ethnic minorities, including Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) groups, having discovered that they (or their leaderships) often aren’t particularly liberal, either.

8. …and speech curbs initially cheered by the  Left.

In the months before Orbán returned to power in 2010, Hungary’s lame-duck center-Left government passed a law criminalizing denial or trivialization of the Holocaust. It ought to have been obvious that Fidesz would use this new form of criminalizing speech for its own devices (until then Hungary was unusual in Europe for having no official curbs on speech). Sure enough, within weeks of its return to power, Fidesz broadened the law to include denial of communist crimes. It isn’t difficult to see how the initial law helped the government’s later moves to degrade free expression.

Me, I don’t like criminalizing speech of any kind. I would oppose the Orban government on this (while admitting that I could be wrong; given the enormity of the crimes of the Holocaust and Communism, it is not crazy to ban speech denying either). But when the Left in Western Europe or the US comes down on Hungary for banning LGBT propaganda aimed at minors, it has no free-speech principles to stand on, given that it is perfectly happy to criminalize speech that it doesn’t like. This is another example of the Left’s hypocritical “who, whom” approach to Hungary.

This is good:

10. The West’s own example hasn’t always been exemplary.

Orbán was introduced to many in the West in 2015 when he tried to halt a wave of Syrian refugees traveling to Germany and other points in Western and Northern Europe via Hungary. While the move was widely denounced as lawless, it was actually German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s sudden decision to admit more than a million such migrants that was in stark contravention of EU law. This and similar cases in which Western governments or bodies have twisted their own statutes or regulationshave made protests against Hungary’s real rule-of-law abuses all too easy for Orbán and his supporters to brush off. Likewise, there’s more than a little truth to Orbán’s claims that multinational companies have gotten the better of Hungary, and even that the billions of euros in EU subsidies was just Brussels sending some money “back” to Budapest. As Thomas Piketty has pointed out, between 2010 and 2016, the flow of profits leaving Hungary to Western European companies as a percentage of GDP was more than 50 percent higher than the amount the country received in EU transfers. Meanwhile, some “multis” have operated in Hungary in ways that they never would have done in their own markets. Banks, in particular, have been doing things—such as pushing high risk residential mortgages denominated in foreign currencies—that left no one feeling sorry for them when Orbán dropped the boom on them.

11. It takes good lawyers to really mess with the rule of law.

Contrary to the image of populist movements being staffed by provincials unconcerned with legal niceties, Fidesz is actually manned by a vast cadre of skilled and creative lawyers, who pay great attention to making sure everything Orbán’s government does is technically legal. They are adept at finding ingenious ways of flatfooting their opponents.

12. The efforts of Western NGOs and media can backfire spectacularly.

The promotion by Western governments and NGOs of certain aspects of cultural liberalism—notably on gender identity—has had mixed results in post-communist and developing countries. An illiberal backlash was inevitable. Meanwhile, a crusading international media—the New York Times has gone so far as to print an exposé on EU subsidy fraud in Hungary in Hungarian—has left some centrists nodding along when Orbán claims their country is under attack from a biased foreign press.

Yes, an on that last point, all those US and Western European pundits screaming bloody murder about how poor old George Soros is being demonized because he’s Jewish, and because he only wants to do good in the world, ought to realize that the kinds of things Soros actually pays for — that is, the social and political change in which he invests his billions — are really bad from a nationalist conservative point of view. In other words, on Soros, Orban is not making it up.

This is a small but important point:

18. On the ground nationalist conservatism looks more liberal than you might think.

The Hungarian capital has changed a lot since it became a Mecca for global right-wingers—it’s more international and lively than ever. Most striking is the flourishing of the former Jewish quarter, home to Europe’s largest synagogue and now one of its most hopping bar scenes. Just as populist economics do not immediately cause market mayhem, rule by Christian nationalists doesn’t necessarily make everything drab and provincial.

Anybody who has actually been to Budapest lately — as you know, I lived there from mid-April until early this month — has to laugh at Westerners who assume that it’s an austere, buttoned-down conservative capital. It really is cosmopolitan. There are many reasons for liberals to criticize the government of Viktor Orban, but the supposed gloominess and repression of life in the capital city is very much not one of them. One night pub-crawling in the Jewish Quarter, or gadding about the fancy restaurants of downtown, will cure you of that mistake.

Anyway, read the whole thing. D’Amato is fairly critical of Orban in parts. The overall point you should take is that Hungary is a normal country, with its own history, its own strengths, and its own weaknesses. It is neither a national-conservative paradise nor an authoritarian hellscape. It’s a place led by a very talented and principled politician who is as flawed as anybody else. I believe strongly that the leaderless and depleted conservative politicians of the United States can learn a lot from studying this man, what he believes in, and how he has governed and campaigned. They can take the things he has done that have worked for Hungary, and figure out how to translate them into the very different American context, if that is possible. And they can discard the rest.

One of the first things they should do, though, is to look around them and to realize how broken our ruling class is, and how they continue to lead America into crisis. Something has to change. Something has to change now, and change in a big way. Who can doubt it?

The post Why Hungary Matters To American Conservatives appeared first on The American Conservative.

Needed: American Yellow Vests

One of my favorite correspondents is an Asian-American reader who does not share my religious beliefs, but who always makes me think. He wrote just now to say:

It’s nice having people like you to do the talking for the rest of us, largely because you say what many of us cannot afford to say. But, regarding the situation in Afghanistan, it’s not so much that I can’t afford to say anything about it, it’s that I have nothing to say.

The situation is utterly indescribable. I was, still am, and always will be a proponent of withdrawal. Current events prove that our efforts and sacrifices there served no purpose, whatsoever. This fact is something many veterans found difficult to confront over the years, but, as you wrote earlier, something’s changed. Many veterans are now very openly admitting that the entire effort was for naught. Maybe it’ll mean something, one day. But, for now, it means only defeat.

The fact we’re leaving in such disgrace is what’s most indescribable to me. The idea that this is in any way acceptable, even as the cost of being able to leave this war behind us, is unfathomable. Some folks apparently need to be reminded that thousands of Americans still lay in harm’s way and the Biden administration has all but abandoned them. Take a look at what the Defense Secretary had to say at today’s press conference:

Austin on folks that can't get to the airfield: "We cannot afford to not defend that airfield."

"I don't have the capability to go out and extend operations in Kabul."

— Kristina Wong (@kristina_wong) August 18, 2021

The Left wants this man to be remembered as a trailblazer, the first Black Secretary of Defense in American history. But what he really deserves to be remembered as is someone who abandoned Americans in a hostile country. Totally unbecoming of his post.

Of course, he deserves an utterly dishonorable president, so the apple clearly doesn’t fall far from the tree:

The White House is depending on the Taliban to give evacuating Americans “safe passage” to the Kabul airport just six weeks after President Biden said that he doesn’t trust the terrorist organization.

Get that? The commander-in-chief is banking on the good faith of our enemies to secure safe passage for his people. And nothing more needs to be said about how he and everyone else were AWOL during this entire crisis until now.

Meanwhile, our brave soldiers are dealing with Mission: Impossible at the Kabul airport. I don’t want to be in their shoes right now:

Things are so bad between US and UK forces at Kabul Airport, #Afghanistan, 2 Para have been tasked to observe US forces in case they leave at short notice.

2 Para OC had a screaming match with 82nd Airbourne CO.

Paras VERY unhappy at treatment of Afghans by US forces.

— Alex Tiffin (@RespectIsVital) August 18, 2021

But here’s the real crazy thing – Afghanistan isn’t even that big of a deal, not in the long run. Just as we survived the fall of Vietnam to the Communists, we’re going to survive the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. It’s just not that important to us. If we’d been able to get our people out without this turning into the disaster it’s become, it’d just be a story on the evening news nobody really pays attention to.

No, the debacle matters because it proves something we’ve known for some time now:  our leaders, our ruling class, our credentialed masters, are utterly worthless. They’re nothing. To even consider them people is generous, because who does what they do to us? They turn us against the thousands of White men who fought in these wars and deliberately sow racial division within society. They promote poisonous narratives about this country that lead to only one logical conclusion: national suicide. Their court jesters (Hollywood) release movies and TV shows that promote racial fear and hatred (mainly towards Whites), none of which can be reconciled peacefully or in unifying fashion.

Meanwhile, our country is being gripped by a snarling three-headed monster consisting of the border, the crime surge, and the economy. The Biden administration and the broader Left has shown no interest in securing the border and reducing illegal crossings. This, despite the fact leaked audio has proven the administration is aware a crisis exists. Regarding crime, take a look at some of the stuff that’s happened in this country in the last few days:

At least 16 people shot in 90 minutes in New York City.

New York man accused of setting 13 fires to outdoor dining structures, trash

Texas woman shot at nearly 50 times, killed while pulling into her garage, deputies say

Does this look like a stable country to you? The crime surge is real. Everyday, normal Americans of all races have turned against the sentiment of “defund the police” and concerns over crime are showing up in polls. There was an article from a week or two ago talking about how citizens, together with private security, have had to create an “underground government” because the real government has been totally absent in their city. One police officer even noted that it feels like the country’s at “civil war.” It’s worth nothing that both citizens and law enforcement point the finger at city officials. [Note: He’s probably talking about this article from Portland, Oregon. — RD]

As for the economy, don’t ever believe the Biden administration’s spin. Inflation’s here to stay and the economy isn’t doing well despite all the government spending:

The Misery Index rising is another worrying sign. Given the amount of stimulus and balance sheet expansion this should be at an all-time low. pic.twitter.com/wTmrm8FrxQ

— Financelot (@FinanceLancelot) August 15, 2021

Jeffrey Gundlach, a financial analyst, said a while back, that if not for government spending, the economy would likely suffer a double-digit decline in GDP. In other words, a collapse. This economy is hanging together by threads and it’s only a matter of time before the jig is up.

I know you observe current events from a cultural perspective, but the culture wars sure seem inconsequential in the fact of these very real, tangible issues, don’t they? And those in charge have no answer for it. I think they know it, which would explain why they’ve chosen instead to focus their ire on the American people. They certainly can’t blame a foreign country, that’d be xenophobic! No, we blame Americans, the most nationalistic and patriotic Americans, because they just wouldn’t surrender their country, culture, and way of life to the cosmopolitans and globalists.

I wrote to you a while back that I don’t favor a revolutionary approach to solving out problems, be it from the Left or Right. I still don’t. But, I can tell you’ve also become somewhat resigned to the fact it may very well come to that. I, too, at this point, feel like it wouldn’t bother my conscience one bit if, as you pointed out, the nationalist/populist Right would find themselves “a leader who means business.” A dictator is a step too far, but so is allowing these narcissistic clowns set this country ablaze in an act of righteous indignation.

It’s worth nothing that both citizens and law enforcement point the finger at city officials who implement lenient policies towards criminals, including violent ones. Parolees are being arrested, then released on bail. Since when do people who violate parole get to go anywhere besides straight back to prison?

And take a look at this interview between Pres. Biden and George Stephanopoulos. This is our president:

Biden dismisses Afghans falling out of planes by saying “that was 4-5 days ago.” It was 2 days ago. pic.twitter.com/jWaxaHXsMT

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 18, 2021

End of letter.

A reader in Ireland writes:

Regarding Ireland and Paul Kingsnorth’s sense of something changing in the national mood of the country, well I think that we have been on that slippery slope for a while.

Democracy has been a joke here since we were compelled to vote again on the Lisbon Treaty because we didn’t give the “right” answer the first time.

All our larger political parties are essentially singing from the same hymn sheet. There is no real opposition. The Church has been cowed. The mainstream media exist to set the cultural agenda, silence dissent and occasionally criticise the government on things like housing or the economy.

It has been said that Ireland as a nation is too small to hold more than one idea at a time. We haven’t got enough truly independent voices.

The ruling class all know each other personally.

At the present time they are following the same liberal woke agenda on everything from sex to immigration to climate change.

The only good thing is that we can now read columns like yours which wasn’t possible before. Maybe that’s why things seem to be becoming more oppressive. The ruling elite don’t feel quite so secure anymore. They are desperately trying to control the narrative.

When I was in Dublin two years ago, the Yellow Vests protests were going on in France. The cab driver taking me to the airport was listening to the news on the radio, which reported on it. He was a man who looked to be in his late fifties.

“We’ve got to do something in this country,” he said. “The people who run it are ruining the place. The inequality is something. They’re only out for themselves.” He denounced the ruling class bitterly.

“It could lead to a civil war,” he said. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. I asked him if he would join the Yellow Vests if they got going in Ireland.

“Yes,” he said.

Moving on, writing in the Telegraph (paywalled), Allister Heath tells some harsh truths. Excerpts:

No empire is eternal: all eventually fall amid hubris and humiliation. The heart-wrenching, humanitarian calamity that is the botched Afghan retreat is merely the latest sign that the American era is ending: Washington is no longer the world’s policeman, and an unsettling future of clashes between expansionist, authoritarian regional powers beckons. …

Twenty years on, America’s global plan lies in ruins, its elites confounded on almost every issue, the stupidity and incompetence on display over the Afghan withdrawal confirming that they don’t understand the rest of the world, and aren’t fit to govern their own country, let alone the globe. Blinded by a simplistic universalism, they no longer understand religion, tribalism, history, national differences or why countries want to govern themselves.

Wherever one looks, America’s blueprint has failed. Take Washington’s support for a United States of Europe with its army, constitution and “eurodollar”. Brexit signalled the beginning of the end of that dystopian construct: others will leave the EU, because of the coming migration crisis – tens of millions will seek to move from Africa and the Middle East, and there will be toxic attempts at “distributing” migrants across the bloc – or because of a populist uprising or economic implosion.

More:

America’s internal problems are immense: its constitution is broken, its predilection for second-rate gerontocrats such as Biden unrivalled. Racked with self-doubt, its elites in the grip of a bizarre “awakening” centred around a nihilistic, ungrateful self-loathing, it no longer has values to sell, neither capitalism nor democracy nor the American dream. How can people who live in terror of “micro-aggressions” find it in themselves to defeat real evils? As to the public, it doesn’t want to know about the rest of the world: how, under such circumstances, can the US empire not be in terminal decline?

… The West has lost control: there will be mass population movements, currency wars and battles over natural resources. The American empire at least believed in freedom and democracy; what replaces it won’t even pretend to be liberal.

It’s good to know that a major institution like Bank Of America has kept its head. Oh, wait … hang on … Chris Rufo is calling with news:

Bank of America Corporation has implemented a racial reeducation program that claims the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work,” instructing white employees in particular to “decolonize [their] mind[s]” and “cede power to people of color.”

Earlier this year, Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte market president Charles Bowman announced a new “equity” initiative called United in Action, in partnership with the United Way of Central Carolinas. According to documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, BOA executives launched the initiative by encouraging employees to participate in their “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge,” a race-training program funded in part by the bank and built on the principles of critical race theory, including intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.

One the program’s first day, Bank of America teaches employees that the United States is a “racialized society” that “use[s] race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression,” which “give[s] privileges to white people resulting in disadvantages to people of color.” According to the training program, all whites—“regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages”—are “living a life with white skin privileges.” Even children are implicated in the system of white supremacy: according to the program materials, white toddlers “develop racial biases by ages three to five” and “should be actively taught to recognize and reject the ‘smog’ of white privilege.”

Read it all. We are ruled by bad, crazy people. Where are our Yellow Vests?

UPDATE: Reader Jonah R. comments:

Today I got correspondence from both a local museum and our county school system referring to the “double pandemics” of COVID and “racial injustice.” The attempt at cultural revolution while everyone is scared, tired, and confused is really disgusting.

In Baltimore, where they’re no longer arresting or citing people for a wide range of antisocial crimes (at the direction of the police commissioner, the mayor, and the DA, all of them African Americans), they have such a huge cop shortage that the mayor is asking–practically begging–the federal government for 100 federal officers to help with violent crime, because they’re down 392 officers and 14 detectives. You’d think that would be major news. I doubt anyone outside of Maryland even knows it.

Meanwhile, in the city’s attempts to appear as if it’s “defunding the police” (rather than inspiring police to leave in droves), in bad neighborhoods they’re employing a corps of “Safe Streets” personnel trained in de-escalation. Two of them have been shot and killed so far this year, including one of the organization’s leaders, who devoted ten years of his life to trying to broker peace. His killer, who shot him in the head, had another homicide charge from 2012 but was apparently out roaming around.

In Washington DC, the mayor who pacified dupes by painting “Black Lives Matter” on a city street has now, in response to violent crime, lifted all overtime restrictions for DC cops and is adding 170 cops to the city force.

The mayor of Atlanta just unveiled a $70 million “violent crime” program that includes hiring 250 more police officers.

So, does anyone want to break it to all of the white, NPR-listening, yard-sign-planting fools who live in safe neighborhoods that the “defund the police” movement is over, the goals of “Black Lives Matter” are evaporating, and we have more pressing needs right now than–as they’re doing in my county–scrutinizing the names of every road and school for “racism”?

Now that we’re looking at another fall and winter of masks and other (or new) restrictions, people are angry and tired. People like Rod should take heart: this creepy neo-Maoist cultural revolution is far more fragile than it seems. The shame that is the botched Afghanistan pullout is sticking to Biden. Start sticking all of this violent crime on failed city, county, and state leaders. They won’t be able to refute it.

The post Needed: American Yellow Vests appeared first on The American Conservative.

Generals Of The Clown World

I hope you’re sitting down when you watch this:

“I think you have to be very careful using the word enemy”

Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir Nick Carter says “we have to be patient” and says the Taliban “want an Afghanistan that is inclusive for all”#KayBurley
Read the latest here: https://t.co/0PSyX5y0Mq pic.twitter.com/U9dZuxb0pp

— Sky News (@SkyNews) August 18, 2021

This is the most senior military officer in the United Kingdom speaking. This is the British equivalent of Gen. Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he’s talking about the Taliban being “inclusive.” I wonder if he thinks they are deep down committed to diversity and equity too?

A friend who is a veteran of the Afghan war and who saw a lot from the inside says that this podcast episode from Tom Joscelyn and Bill Roggio is the thing to listen to for understanding how everything went wrong in Afghanistan. He urged me to have my son, who is considering the military, listen to it. I listened to it myself. The hosts are unsparing in their evisceration of senior military leadership, as well as the Obama and Trump administrations. They both say at the outset that they do not blame our troops for what happened, but rather the commanders who sent them in to do impossible things. They also say that they both know men who have died in Afghanistan, so this is personal to them. Joscelyn and Roggio recount the lies upon lies upon lies that US military and civilian officials have told over the years.

Around the 41 minute mark, as they’re wrapping up, co-host Joscelyn says, “You should be angry about this war for a lot of reasons, but it speaks to a broader incompetence in the American elite. It’s total incompetence across the board.”

I am reminded of something I’ve mentioned here before, but should bring up again. It was back in 2005 or thereabouts when I met up with an old childhood friend who was super-smart, and who had risen high in the US military since we had last seen each other. He was depressed over the war. He told me that he had been part of the innermost ring around Defense Secretary Rumsfeld for a period, and had personally observed Rumsfeld repeatedly lying to the American people about the state of the Iraq War. Things were going very badly there, but Rumsfeld knowingly gave false positive information to the public. It disillusioned my friend about the government he served.

Joscelyn and Roggio say there has to be accountability for these failures. But what if there’s not? And what if we the people don’t care either, and keep voting for leaders who don’t demand accountability? What if we have become servile? Joscelyn and Roggio make it clear that this isn’t just a Democratic or Republican thing. There is plenty of fault to go around.

We have been humiliated as a nation. We have been failed by the leadership class. None of us have been failed more than the soldiers who fought in Afghanistan — soldiers like the Green Beret who wrote this. Excerpts:

Some of you Afghan Veterans out there are hurting, trying to make sense of what this all means. Including some of my peers, who are not immune to the feel bads coming out of this clusterf*ck. So allow me to give you a different perspective, one that will perhaps sooth the pain a bit. I shoot straight, and this isn’t all sunshine and roses. There is going to be some Grim Dark up front. But it does have a silver lining, hear me out.

Was this a foolish mission to start with? Yes. The only way to decisively win in Afghanistan was full scale genocide, which we knew from about 2003 forward. We don’t have the stomach for that, and that is probably a good thing.

Did we lose? Yeah, goddamn right we lost. Let’s just get that out of the way now, like ripping off a band aid. Do not get out the “ We were winning when I left” hats and slap a Ghan flag on them. Face the facts, and then act. If the goal 20 years ago was to remove the Taliban, and now the Taliban is back 100% in control without even requiring a name change, then the objective was not met.

Is it your fault? No. The failure here, while stunning, rests on the political class and the Generals. So like I said, the political class. Who, exactly, do you think lost this war? You, out slogging the mountains, and mowing down Taliban fighters with a machine gun, and surviving on fish sticks and MRE crackers at the firebase, and winning EVERY tactical level engagement for 20 years? Or the spineless General [David Petraeus — ed.] who didn’t hear a gun shot despite 9 tours, who was the architect of the grand strategy, and spent his time quite literally getting his d*ck sucked by his biographer in his office at Bagram instead of trying to win?

We can safely say at this point that the real goal in Afghanistan was a transfer of wealth from the tax payers to the MIC ( Military Industrial Complex) and the politicians they bought with the profits. $88 billion dollars ( for the ANA alone) is a staggering figure. For that much money, you could have paid half of Afghanistan to kill the other half. You could have paid China or India or even Pakistan to do it for you. That money was wasted, and we all knew that well over a decade ago.

Uh oh. The dude has been radicalized. More:

Yeah, it hurts. I feel you. We all lost friends. Had our brothers return home mangled and broken. Was it worth it? No. But those are sunk costs, so we might as well look at what we gained from the experience. They made a generation of us very, very fucking dangerous. We, especially the Enlisted class, learned how to make war in a manner not seen for decades. Perhaps ever. And while we would all trade that to have our boys back walking this Earth, the bargain can’t be reversed.

Read it all. 

Go ahead, Ruling Class. Take the sons of these men, and teach them to be daughters, and teach their daughters to be sons. Tell these men (the white ones) that they are bearers of privilege, and that they need to take the knee to their more virtuous social betters. Keep the system going by which your children rise into the heights, but their kids have no future. Your kids will have Italian loafers and Manolo Blahniks on their necks, and will feel good about that, because you will have taught your kids that they are virtuous and deserve it.

You are all going to be very, very sorry. You will find out that these embittered men have no more interest in being “inclusive” than the Taliban do. And we are all going to be in a world of trouble because of what you SOBs have done.

If I were a Ruling Class elite, I would hope that the populist right masses can be bought off with MAGA, which is one big performative grift. If they get wise to it, and start looking for a leader who means business, things might really change.

The post Generals Of The Clown World appeared first on The American Conservative.

Things Shift. Things Fall Apart

“Things have changed,” my friend said. “Things have definitely changed. Something has shifted.”

We were talking by phone yesterday. We had not spoken in months. We talked about how America seems to have lost its collective mind, and to be coming apart. It was a long conversation, but the thing I remember most was the news that someone who used to go to church with us back in the day had divorced her husband, taken up with a woman, announced it in a self-congratulatory series of Instagram posts, and also, on Instagram, celebrated her teenage daughter — sorry, “son” — injecting herself with her first testosterone shots, for the child’s sexual transition.

These were church people. But that was a long time ago.

In a different time, it would have been a stretch to connect the fall of Afghanistan to the general sense of imperial collapse into decadence, but in this context, it’s hard not to. Yes, the Taliban was bound to take over whenever and however we left. The decadence manifests first in the disgracefully haphazard way we left, and in what the failure of the nation-building project reveals about the corruption both in the senior officer rank of the armed forces, with their testifying over and over that things were ship-shape in Afghanistan, and in the revelation of the extent of American superpower hubris — that is, the belief that our wealth and our power enables us to control things that cannot be controlled. To rewrite the script of reality. For example, to make a primitive Islamic country into a 21st century liberal democracy.

Look at this publication by a Kabul-based, Western-funded think tank. It appeared two months before the Taliban conquered the whole country:

Good luck trying to deconstruct Mullah Baradar’s hegemonic masculinity, ladies! Tucker Carlson commented:

It turns out that the people of Afghanistan don’t actually want gender studies symposia. They didn’t actually buy the idea that men can become pregnant. They thought that was ridiculous. They don’t hate their own masculinity. They don’t think it’s toxic, they like the patriarchy, some of their women like it too, so now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.

This is not to defend what the Taliban do. God help the poor women of Afghanistan now. It’s simply to say that Western liberals and progressives are fools to think they can impose their crackhead ideologies onto a country and a people like that. Gender-critical feminists no more caused the collapse of Afghanistan than those who thought it was a good idea for the US Embassy in Kabul to signal its progressive bona fides by tweeting out pro-LGBT content two months before they had to flee the embassy to escape victorious Taliban barbarians. The fact that Americans and other ruling-class Westerners tried to impose cultural imperialism of that sort onto this primitive society, and thought it could work — that is what caused this disaster.

If we are fortunate, maybe enough people in this country will realize that we don’t have to put up with this crap here either. That there is nothing inevitable about it. That we are governed through our institutions by fools who are trying to dismantle what our ancestors have built. For example, here’s a cheerleading piece from Harvard about how folks in its law school have created a group to advocate for changing the law to permit polyamory. There’s a movement well underway to empty out our museums as repositories of vice. We are ruled by decadents. They are destroying us.

If we don’t revolt against it now — all of us, including commonsense liberals, commonsense moderates, and commonsense conservatives — the ruling class will use technology to make it unlikely that we can ever revolt. I’m talking about by instituting a social credit system. Read Live Not By Lies, and let’s start right now, this very day, building the networks we are going to need to withstand what is coming, if we can’t get rid of this corrupt ruling class. I would rather be ruled by liberals who live in the real world, who reject this crazy ideology, and are prepared to act firmly against it, than by Republicans who only look at the threat as a means by which they can gain power, then sit on their collective ass sending out fundraising letters and angry tweets.

If I’m honest, though, I don’t have a lot of faith that we will revolt successfully against these decadents. I hope I will be surprised! But no wise man or woman should put off preparing for the long winter ahead by hoping that somehow, a demoralized and divided people will rise up. We are not going to be able to vote our way out of this crisis.

You need to read this essay by Paul Kingsnorth, a visionary English writer who, in my view, excels at reading the signs of the times. Excerpts:

The West is a lot older than liberalism, leftism, conservatism or empire. It is at the same time a simpler, more ancient and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a particular religious story.

“There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church,” explained the medieval historian Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”

“The West”, in other words, was born from the telling of one sacred story — a garden, an apple, a fall, a redemption — which shaped every aspect of life: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe — its structure and meaning, and our place within it.

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless. And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul. The shape of everything — family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to the body to kin to duty — all of it will be up for grabs. Welcome to 2021.

Paul has been reading MacIntyre’s After Virtue, and explains the philosopher’s core thesis: that without a common commitment to a transcendent source of authority (reason alone has failed), the West is falling apart. More:

Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it, society would fall — as it has — into “emotivism”, relativism and ultimately disintegration. If every culture is cored around a sacred order — whether Christian, Islamic or Hindu, the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin — then the collapse of that order will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture it supported. There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force we take our instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — “the people” or “liberty” or “democracy” or “progress.”

I’m all for democracy (the real thing, please, not the corporate simulacra that currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign — Christ — who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order did not lead to universal equality and justice. It led — via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler — to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything — from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present — with no centre, no truth and no direction — we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the self and to the power of money; broken worshippers before the monstrous idol of Progress. “In the ethics of the West,” wrote Spengler, “everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.”

Read it all. I don’t get the sense that Paul has read The Benedict Option, but his conclusion inadvertently calls for it.

Paul has a Substack, The Abbey Of Misrule, that is consistently one of the most interesting things on the Internet. I suspect that his most recent essay is behind the subscriber paywall. I’ll quote it in brief, but trust me, you’ll want to subscribe to this newsletter. Though English, Paul and his wife and kids live in rural Ireland. He writes about how he is reaching a breaking point over Covid:

Perhaps it’s just me, but I feel that, in just the last week or so, something has shifted out there. Some deepening has occurred; some quickening. I can’t put a name to it, let alone ‘prove’ it. It’s a feeling; a hunch; sometimes a fear. But it’s there. It’s not the first time this has happened in these last few years, and it probably won’t be the last. Certainly here in Ireland, a Rubicon of sorts has been crossed, almost without comment.

He talks about how the Irish government is instituting what he calls “vaccine apartheid,” a kind of social credit system, against those who decline the vaccines. Paul explains that from his work as a journalist, and his wife’s medical career, they both have deep concerns about these vaccines, which were rushed into production, and whose long-term effects no one can know. He talks about how the Irish government and media have been managing the vaccine narrative tightly, memory-holing any information that contradicts the official line. He writes, “I can honestly say I have never seen anything like it in a democracy; and I’m old enough to remember the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction.’”

Paul goes on to talk about the lie in the injunction to “follow the science.” He says we have taken a method and turned it into an ideology. You really need to read his explanation of this. And then, he takes a turn:

Sherrard presents science as a modern enterprise built on a Christian rootstock that grew out of shape. He is not the only one to make this case, but as I was reading his book, another thought occurred to me; a thought that took me back to the time, not so long ago, when I used to practice magic.

When I say ‘magic’ I don’t mean fairground tricks; I mean the workings of what is sometimes called the Western Mystery Tradition, or, if we want to be spookier about it, the occult. The meaning of the word ‘occult’ is actually less sinister than it has been made to sound: occulted simply means hidden. A few years back, before I became, to my own surprise, an Orthodox Christian, I was a practicioner of Wicca, a nature religion founded by the eccentric Englishman Gerald Gardner back in the 1950s. Wicca is a form of modern ‘witchcraft’, though everyone involved will have a different explanation of what that word means. Being a modern path, Wicca is mostly undefined and eclectic. At its (usually American) extreme, you can basically make it up as you go along, which is why it has proved so appealing to millennial teenagers.

The Wicca I practiced was the more traditional variety: I was a member of a coven, whose workings and details were secret and into which you had to be initiated. The people in the coven were not dastardly devil-worshippers; they were basically good-hearted, interesting people looking for meaning in a society which offered none outside the marketplace. Wiccan covens do all sorts of things, but at the heart of the enterprise is the practice of magic: which, if you’re feeling mysterious or pretentious, you can spell magick.

There are all kinds of magick available to the practicing mage. There’s sympathetic magic, Hermetic magic, herbal magic, elemental magic, High (or ceremonial) magic, folk magic (or ‘cunning craft’), natural magic, Enochian magic (fun with secret Angelic languages) and – for the ultimate rush – Goetic magic, which involves the summoning of spirits to do your will. Faust, who did his famous deal with the devil, was practicing Goetia. At the heart of the practice is the notion that the spirits of the otherworld are ours to command. If we are knowledgeable, smart and well-trained enough, we can summon up the very forces of nature itself, and ‘bind’ them to our will.

Perhaps you can see where I’m going here. The history of magic in the West is a long one, but one thing it teaches is that what we call ‘magic’ and what we call ‘science’ are intertwined. Many of the pioneers of science we know today were also magicians of one sort or another. Bacon was said to be a Freemason and an alchemist. Isaac Newton wrote far more about alchemy than he did about physics, and many of the august founders of England’s Royal Society, still one of its foremost scientific institutions, were alchemists or mages. In the early modern period, today’s distinction between ‘science’ (real, good, objective) and ‘magic’ (fantastical, bad, superstitious) did not really exist. Both were branches of the same effort: to understand the mysterious forces of the universe, and ultimately to control them.

Here is Francis Bacon’s definition of science:

The knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

And here is the occultist Aleister Crowley’s definition of magic:

The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.

These could be swapped around without anybody really noticing. The thread that links them together is control. Both the scientific enterprise, and the magical quest which it was part of, spring from the same desire: to know the world, and to bend it to our will. Will, in both cases, is the key word. When Aleister Crowley, pioneering occultist, rampant self-publicist and self-described ‘Great Beast’, created his own occult religion, Thelema, in the early 20th century, he gave it its own famous commandment: do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Thelema wilted on the vine, but we could say that Crowley’s dictum lived on as the foundational basis of what our culture has become.

At this point, any scientists reading will be protesting. No, no! they might cry; that’s not what we do at all! We’re driven only by curiosity, by wonder, by a desire to understand the world! Maybe. But science, always and everywhere, is handmaiden to technology, and technology is, in this time, never innocent. Einstein bombed Hiroshima just as surely as the pilots of the Enola Gay, and he knew it.

My point is not that all magical workings, or all scientific experiments, are bad, let alone the people who carry them out. A magician might want to perform a working aimed at bringing good luck to a friend. A scientist may be searching for a cure for cancer. But the wider project of both carries hidden within it a telos: a direction of travel. It is the direction of the Machine that now envelops us, and the new world it is building.

Paul goes on, but that’s enough to give you a sense of what he’s writing about. If you subscribe, read the whole thing. I’ve been reading him long enough to be able to say with confidence that whenever Paul Kingsnorth publishes something new on his Substack, it will likely be the most important thing any of us will read that day. If you don’t subscribe, you really should. I gave a gift subscription to a friend, and she is completely delighted by it.

Paul is saying that our worship of Science has led us to believe that we can change Nature through sufficient application of force and intellect, through technology. What the Taliban victory shows us is that this is a lie.  We are playing a dangerous Faustian game. The proto-transhumanist project of transgenderism will fail, eventually, but the destruction in human lives it causes — and not just in the lives of those who submit to science’s potions and rituals, and the law’s incantations — will be vast. The progressives, in their wisdom, have decided that it would be a good thing to summon forth the spirits of race consciousness, certain that they can be controlled to build a more Equitable society. They will find that these are malicious spirits whose submission required many years of effort and great suffering, and who, once released, will work savagery in the land.

And so forth. There will always be people who will not take a knee before whatever the mages of Progress (one of the names of Scientism) manifest as divinity. These savages may show themselves as true barbarians, as the evil Taliban are. Or they may be like John the Savage in Huxley’s Brave New World, living in exile from a corrupt society, reading Shakespeare in their de facto Benedict Option lairs, and prophesying against the evil ones.

I know where we need to be. I know what we need to be doing. So do you. So let’s do it. This is not going to get better. MacIntyre:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead–often not recognizing fully what they were doing–was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another–doubtless very different–St. Benedict.

There are already people — military veterans — disgusted by what they’ve seen of the US military’s leadership, who are saying they will discourage their children from serving the Imperium of the Machine. I know this because they write to me. Let’s start thinking about how we can turn away from shoring up the Imperium, and build resilient moral community capable of withstanding the nemesis these Faustians have brought down on us. No, I’m not talking about abandoning politics completely. We have to fight in that field, if only to defend the space necessary to construct our long-term plans. I’m talking about doing two things at once. Fight politically — but at the same time, prepare as if you knew you were probably going to lose, and were going to have to live under occupation.

And by the way, check out this clip from Kingsnorth’s discussion with Jonathan Pageau (who has Covid now; pray for him!), in which they talk about how atheism is a luxury we can no longer afford:

UPDATE: A friend texts:

Your post interacting with Kingsnorth is great. His “breaking point” idea has been on my mind. It’s manifesting itself in so many ways from macro politics to individual church congregations. My daughter is wrapping up a summer working at an in patient mental health facility. She leaves Thursday to start a grad school program in this field. Despite the fact that she is just starting her program they offered her a full time position as soon as she graduates.

Of course as a dad I’d like to think this is evidence of how great she is :), but she is quick to say that they are simply overwhelmed by demand and simply can’t hire enough credentialed people to deal with the flood of patients. She has been doing patient intake and her shift is 4pm to 1AM, but she is often at work until past 3AM helping admit new patients. Many of them come because they have attempted or have been deemed a high risk of suicide. This is in the affluent suburbs.

Of course these issues are not completely new, but the people she is working with who are veterans in the field appear to be taken aback by what they are seeing. Something has changed indeed, and evidences of a breaking point moment seem to be all around us.

UPDATE.2: Wyoming Doc, from whom we haven’t heard in ages, comments:

I have been a physician for 30 years. I have given over 30000 vaccines in my practice in my life – flu, pnuemococcal, tetanus, MMR, you name it I have given it or recommended it. In that entire 30 years up until the past 6 months I have had a grand total of 4 vaccine reactions – all of which ended up being minor and not impactful of the patient’s life.

Since January – I have had directly related to these COVID vaccines – one death, 4 pulmonary emboli requiring hospitalization, one stroke within 30 minutes of the shot, 2 cardiac events in young healthy men, 3 cases of DVT, 8 severe local reactions to the vaccines, one requiring surgery, and many many dozens/hundreds of patients who could not go to work for days.

I have steadfastly tried my best to report these issues to the authorities and have gotten nowhere. They simply do not want to know. In the past the FDA would have been on the phone with me within hours of reporting. That is just not happening at all right now.

So when you quote all these articles about there being no problems with these vaccines, it is a clanging cymbal of white sound to me. I have had to deal with these patients and their families for months.

Quoting big media for information like this is a fools’ errand. You really have no idea what you are talking about. I would be really careful calling anyone else a liar based on information from these sources – who are known daily liars.

The very suggestion that there has been no severe problems with these vaccines should eliminate any other arguments you make.

The post Things Shift. Things Fall Apart appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Fall Of Imperial America

I woke up this morning to video clips of Afghanis falling to their deaths from the undercarriage of US Air Force cargo planes taking off from Kabul airport.

A better angle that shows the falling men from the US airplane while taking off from the Kabul airport pic.twitter.com/Yw59jQXJww

— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) August 16, 2021

A friend pointed out that this is a fitting, if horrific, bookend to the American adventure in Afghanistan. He wrote, of the Falling Man of 9/11, and the falling Afghanis today: “both accepting certain death as an escape for equally certain and lethal torment.”

And this:

They won’t forget that this is what we did. And we shouldn’t either. This is what betrayal looks like. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything like this, and now tens of millions across the globe have seen it too. We will not be able to pretend otherwisepic.twitter.com/lr7TSHuFta

— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) August 16, 2021

We have a lot to talk about today. But first, let me acknowledge that Patrick J. Buchanan, a co-founder of this magazine, told us so. He called it all back at the beginning. He warned us not to engage in nation-building. He warned us not to make war on Iraq. But our elites of the Left and the Right — especially the Right — treated him as a heretic. Today, we are living with an Iraq that is dominated by Iran, with a Syria that has been dismantled among the Assad regime, the Turks, and the Kurds, and with an Afghanistan that is once again ruled by the Taliban.

This is what has come of George W. Bush’s crusade. This is what has become of American leadership in the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Most important of all, this Afghanistan catastrophe is what has become of two decades of senior leadership at the Pentagon, the State Department, and elite foreign policy and national security circles. Biden owns the catastrophic exit from Afghanistan, no doubt about it, but let’s not forget that in that infamous press conference a month ago, where he said Kabul wouldn’t fall, he was just mouthing what he was told by the Pentagon.

I hope that the recriminations do not turn partisan, and end up with Republicans and Democrats blaming each other for this disaster. I hope that they will instead focus on the military brass and the State Department. Senators and elected officials don’t know much about war. They depend on expert advice. As the Washington Post documented in its publication of the Afghanistan Papers, the military brass lied. Excerpt:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

More:

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

A friend of mine who is a veteran of Afghanistan told me so this morning, his voice breaking with emotion recalling all his comrades killed in the fight. “For nothing,” he said.

This is on the elites. This is on elites like Carter Malkasian, senior adviser to the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2015-2019. In this piece from last month in Politico, he admits that it never really occurred to these American geniuses that the Taliban were really motivated by their religion. Excerpt:

The Taliban had an advantage in inspiring Afghans to fight. Their call to fight foreign occupiers, steeped in references to Islamic teachings, resonated with Afghan identity. For Afghans, jihad — more accurately understood as “resistance” or “struggle” than the caricatured meaning it has acquired in the United States — has historically been a means of defense against oppression by outsiders, part of their endurance against invader after invader. Even though Islam preaches unity, justice and peace, the Taliban were able to tie themselves to religion and to Afghan identity in a way that a government allied with non-Muslim foreign occupiers could not match.

The very presence of Americans in Afghanistan trod on a sense of Afghan identity that incorporated national pride, a long history of fighting outsiders and a religious commitment to defend the homeland. It prodded men and women to defend their honor, their religion and their home. It dared young men to fight. It sapped the will of Afghan soldiers and police. The Taliban’s ability to link their cause to the very meaning of being Afghan was a crucial factor in America’s defeat.

This explanation has been underappreciated by American leaders and experts, myself included. We believed things were possible in Afghanistan — defeat of the Taliban or enabling the Afghan government to stand on its own — that probably were not.

Gosh, you think? What the hell did these eggheads think that the Taliban were?! It’s like a senior American expert in 1945 writing that it was surprising to discover that the Nazis really cared a lot about race. This is what happens when you have an elite that is wholly secular, and incapable of thinking outside that narrow box. Why did they tap Ghani as president? Because he was the most secularized, technocratic Afghan politician — somebody American experts could understand, but also someone incapable of inspiring loyalty among Afghanis.

This is not going to get any better. I want you to recall something I’ve written about in this space before. It’s what a European friend told me was the upshot of his time doing graduate studies a couple of years ago at Harvard. He said it was shocking to him to see how so many students asked professors not to talk about issues and topics that triggered their anxiety — and how professors yielded to these crazy requests. My friend said this happened in class after class. It scandalized him. He said that not one of his fellow students doubted that they were destined to enter into the elite class of leadership. It shook him up. He said that his country depends on a strong USA, but he could tell that the next generation of leadership elites are going to be even more fragile and wrongheaded than the current one.

We are in serious trouble. Look at this:

The sergeant major continues:

The U.S. Army is focused on preparing for large-scale combat operations. Its training, equipment, experience in combat, and the quality of its Soldiers make it effective and lethal. The diversity within the U.S. military’s forces must grow and adapt to the diversity of the United States. The cultural and ethnic differences of its Soldiers are the unique assets that our adversaries lack. Diversity in the U.S. Army is its strength and combat multiplier.

How could that possibly be true? Our military is ethnically diverse, no doubt about it. The fact that it works in spite of people coming from so many different “tribes” is a great thing. But color me skeptical that diversity is a military “strength and combat multiplier.” That’s something a junior officer says to show the commissars that he is reliable.

Look at these guys. They lack diversity. You know what their strength was? Allah. Allah, tribalism, and nationalism.

 

This is how the world works. And look at what the US Embassy in Kabul was doing while the Taliban was preparing to close in on Kabul:

These idiots are more interested in waging the culture war than they are in waging actual war. Seriously, what possible benefit to America’s national interests can virtue-signaling for domestic Twitter consumption bring? We are such an unserious nation. I am a practicing Christian who hates the way Christians are treated in many Islamic countries. But I have enough common sense to know that it does not advance America’s national interest to give host countries the finger by displaying a symbol of Christianity to defy their local norms.

As a friend of mine put it this morning, how many meetings to plan an orderly evacuation of Afghanistan did our military brass miss so they could attend diversity training? Again, we are an unserious country, and the world knows it. A friend of mine whose son is headed to West Point told me that in the boy’s packet of information that just came in there is a rainbow-flag diversity sticker. America might not know how to win actual wars, but it sure is going to equip its troops to win the culture war against traditional morality and old-fashioned American values. A reader of this blog who is a Marine Corps veteran of Afghanistan wrote this morning to say he will be discouraging his son from military service. A friend who is a veteran sent me a tweet by one of his Air Force vet comrades, saying that after what he has witnessed these past few days, he will discourage his son from following in his father’s footsteps.

Can you blame them? Who can have confidence in the senior leadership of the US military? Of the senior leadership of our government? Not Third World people who are asked to cooperate with an American occupation, because America will take care of them. Not after this.

None of it had to happen. True, the Taliban takeover was inevitable, and we had to get out. But we handed over Bagram Air Field to the Afghans on July 1, thus making any evacuation far more difficult. It really seems that all the experts in Washington really didn’t think the Taliban would move so quickly. And here we are.

Daniel McCarthy writes about the lies of our generals, and the lies that our elites have told themselves, and the rest of us, about liberal democracy and the irresistibility of American liberal values. Excerpt:

As long as the Afghan war continued, America could not escape an epoch of failure. And the inability of our vision of the good life to prevail against the alternative represented by the Taliban – even with overwhelming force and wealth on our side – is a dire lesson. Religious zeal and fear for one’s life are far more powerful motives than the Western cult of individual pleasure or the freedom to vote for the likes of a Karzai or Ghani or Bush or Biden. The Taliban are not about to invade America. But we have lived too long by lies at home as well as abroad, and unless we confront the hollowness that grows in our own nation’s soul, and rediscover a nobler liberty in our own land, we will soon find that Afghanistan is not the only Potemkin village.

Speaking of Live Not By Lies, there is a historical parallel to this Afghanistan catastrophe that we had better note well. From the book:

At dinner in a Russian Orthodox family’s apartment in the Moscow suburbs, I was shaken by our table talk of Soviet oppression through which the father and mother of the household had lived. “I don’t understand how anybody could have believed what the Bolsheviks promised,” I said glibly.

“You don’t understand it?” said the father at the head of the table. “Let me explain it to you.” He then launched into a three hundred-year historical review that ended with the 1917 Revolution. It was a pitiless tale of rich and powerful elites, including church bureaucrats, treating peasants little better than animals.

“The Bolsheviks were evil,” the father said. “But you can see where they came from.”

The Russian man was right. I was chastened. The cruelty, the injustice, the implacability, and at times the sheer stupidity of the imperial Russian government and social order in no way justifies all that followed—but it does explain why the revolutionary Russian generation was so eager to place its hope in communism. It promised a road out of the muck and misery that had been the lot of the victimized Russian peasant since time out of mind.

The history of Russia on the verge of left-wing revolution is more relevant to contemporary America than most of us realize.

The Russia in which communism appeared had become a world power under the reign of the Romanov dynasty, but as the empire limped toward the twentieth century, it was falling apart. Though its rivals were fast industrializing, Russia’s agricultural economy and its peasantry remained mired in backwardness. A severe famine in 1891 shook the nation to the core and revealed the weakness of the tsarist system, which failed miserably to respond to the crisis. A young monarch, Nicholas II, came to power in 1894, but he proved incapable of meeting the agonizing challenges facing his government.

Past attempts to radicalize the peasantry went nowhere in the face of its profound conservatism. But by century’s end, industrialization had created a large urban underclass of laborers who were cut off from their villages and thus from the traditions and religious beliefs that bound them. The laborers dwelled in misery in the cities, exploited by factory owners, and unrelieved by the tsar. Calls for reform of the imperial structure—including the ossified Russian Orthodox Church—went ignored.

Few in Russian society, outside of the imperial court’s bubble, believed that the system could carry on. But Tsar Nicholas II and his closest advisers insisted that sticking to the proven ways of traditional autocracy would get them through the crisis. The leadership of the church also ignored internal calls for reform from priests who could see the church’s influence wasting away. Russia’s intellectual and creative classes fell under the sway of Prometheanism, the belief that man has unlimited godlike powers to make the world to suit his desires.

In retrospect, this seems almost unbelievable. How could the Russians have been so blind? It was, in a sense, a problem of the imagination. Reflecting on the speed with which utopian dreams turned into a grisly nightmare, Solzhenitsyn observed:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

It wasn’t just the tsarists who didn’t see it coming but also the country’s leading liberal minds. It was simply beyond their ability to conceive.

That’s how my chapter on “Our Pre-Totalitarian Society” begins. It starts too with this quote by the novelist Nadine Gordimer:

All the young are candidates for the solutions of communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation.

As I say in that passage, the 1891-92 Russian famine was a key event opening the door for the Bolshevik Revolution. For decades, Marxists in Russia had failed to win the confidence of the middle classes, who stuck by the regime. But the pathetic failure of the Tsar’s government to handle the famine made the middle classes question the viability of the system. Once they began to lose confidence, that gave radicals the opening they needed.

The same thing could happen here. We can’t unsee what we have seen in Afghanistan. We can’t fail to know the magnitude of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of American elites. We can’t pretend to have confidence in the judgments of these people simply because we see no plausible alternative. These are the people who are tearing our country apart by pushing neoracism and bizarre gender theories. These are the people who cannot control the southern border. These are the people who are destroying American education for the sake of a crack-brained Marxist idea of “equity.” These are the people who are failing to provide a decent future for most Americans, while making sure that their kids are taken care of.

They don’t care. They live in Clown World. The leftist commentator Freddie de Boer has a great column up today talking about how The New York Times, our paper of record, has no incentives left ever to tell its affluent white subscriber base — our ruling class — what it doesn’t want to hear. Do not be fooled, conservative readers. We are also led by Clown World figures. The conservative commentator Mark Steyn writes today:

The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network – the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese – is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians …as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).

No elites — neither Democratic nor Republican — get out of this with clean hands. If they had any honor, the Defense Secretary and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would resign. In June, while the Taliban was preparing its final offensive, Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs head, defended to Congress his expectation that US soldiers read Critical Race Theory books to understand “white rage.”

This beribboned clown-world decadent is the top officer in the United States military.

I’ll end with a reference to Pat Buchanan again. He was widely denounced by all right-thinking conservatives back in 2001 and 2002. He was a heretic of the “far right,” they told us. An “unpatriotic conservative,” as David Frum put it. But Buchanan was right, and they were all wrong. All of them. I say “them,” but it includes me too. Though I don’t recall even denouncing Buchanan, I certainly thought his views were wrong.

Many of us, though not all, have learned a lot in the last twenty years. A lot of the same people who denounced Buchanan as a dangerous far-right extremists back then are trying to stigmatize Hungary’s democratically-elected leader Viktor Orban in the same way. There is nothing we can learn from him, his political views, and his strategy. He’s a far-right dictator who doesn’t celebrate diversity. Et cetera.

You should consider the possibility, reader, that these elites are lying to themselves and lying to you about the way the world actually is. Again.

 

The post The Fall Of Imperial America appeared first on The American Conservative.

Kabul: The Dead End Of The Road

Woke up this morning to news that the Afghan president has fled the country. It’s over. Now the Taliban are going to slaughter every one of the people who helped us.

I read this by Laura Jedeed, a US veteran of the Afghan war. I found it to be quite powerful. It has an air about it that brings to mine Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, which, if you haven’t read it, find it and do so, today:

More:

 

 

You can read the entire thing on the original site and subscribe to Laura Jedeed’s Medium account here. I hope you do. I want to know more about what she will be writing and saying in the days ahead.

I had my 17 year old son read Jedeed’s reflection. He has been thinking about serving in the US military, but has lately begun to change his mind. “This is what the generals you would serve under would do to young men like you,” I said. Grind you up in service of crackhead ideological dreams and empires that never can be.

There has to be a reckoning for our failed military leadership. There has to be for the people who lied about what they were sending our soldiers into. Will there be? Was there for Vietnam?

I think Joe Biden deserves criticism for the terrible way his administration handled the endgame. But Joe Biden didn’t lose this war. This war was lost not the day George W. Bush decided to attack Afghanistan — the Taliban government deserved it for harboring Osama bin Laden — but rather on the day that George W. Bush decided that we were going to nation-build in Afghanistan. Obama and Trump contributed to that loss by not ending the bleeding on their watches.

Here are excerpts from a column published on July 10, 2002:

Days ago, in the bloodiest friendly fire incident of the war, U.S. air strikes reportedly killed 48 Afghans and wounded 117, including women and children. While U.S. officers have yet to locate all the wounded or the graves of the claimed dead, neither have they found the anti-aircraft gun that precipitated the attacks.

Fearing instability in Kabul, three U.S. senators Sunday urged a commitment beyond the 7,000 U.S. troops already in the country. Sen. Chuck Hagel even raised the specter of an American defeat: “If we lose there, if this goes backward, this will be a huge defeat for us symbolically in that region, in the world, for our word, confidence in Americans all over the world. We cannot allow this to go down.”

His call for deeper intervention and Karzai’s call for more American troops is echoed by Sen. Evan Bayh: “If all you do is secure the capital and allow instability to fester around the country, I think we’re running a real risk that the gains we made during the war could be lost by an insufficient peace. … My own view is, we went to war, we won the war, let’s not lose it now. And I think we need to take stronger security steps.”

The chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Bob Graham, said of Qadir’ s killing, it “may indicate that we are going to have to be more of a participant in some of the security activities … to create a climate in which the new government can be established.” We must, he added, “spend more effort figuring out how to do the final chapters of our involvement in nations and do them as well as we do the first.”

With due respect to Graham, no nation has ever done the “final chapters” of Afghanistan “well,” as the Afghans tend to want to write those chapters themselves, and turn savagely on outsiders who come to teach them how to live.

President Bush may soon face a decision as critical as that of Liberalism’s Best and Brightest to fight the Vietnam War.

Clearly, the days of easy victories are over. When the Taliban decided to stand and fight U.S. power, it was suicidal. Smart bombs guided to their targets by U.S. Special Forces destroyed the Taliban positions before they could engage the Northern Alliance.

But while crushing a Taliban army in conventional war may be a warm-up exercise for the United States, running down assassins and cells of Pashtun fighters in the countryside and the cities of Afghanistan and Pakistan will be a longer, bloodier assignment for U.S. ground forces, if Bush orders them to undertake it. He might ask the Israelis what it was like fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

In Phase II of this Afghan war, not all the odds favor the visiting team. The huge Pashtun tribe bitterly resents the Tajiks dominating the cabinet. The warlords who welcomed U.S. troops who came to crush the Tablian will not welcome U.S. troops who arrive to take away their warlord powers. Iran, China and Russia had no objections to the U.S. smashing a Taliban they detested. They do object to the permanent U.S. military presence we are establishing in Central Asia, where they live.

America is detested by many Pakistanis for having abandoned them after the Cold War, for what we did to their Taliban allies, for being an infidel superpower that dictates to the Islamic world. President Musharraf is mocked as “Busharraf” by many Pakistanis and is seen as a U.S. puppet who sold out both the Taliban and the Muslim “freedom fighters” seeking to liberate Kashmir” in return for Yankee dollars and a Bush blessing for his dictatorship.

Before heeding the bipartisan chorus to send more U.S. troops in, the president should reflect: The Soviet empire was defeated and collapsed because it intervened to set up and prop up an Afghan regime that ignited both a nationalist war and a holy war. On which side of nationalism and jihad will we Americans be, when we go in?

Almost twenty years ago, that columnist warned that we had better not go down this road — a road that burned through blood and treasure, and ended in this catastrophic humiliation in Kabul today. The author of that column was Patrick J. Buchanan, a co-founder of this magazine. Mad respect, sir. You lived to see it all happen as you prophesied. Vindication brings no joy, but at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that your haters were wrong, and brought our country to disgrace.

UPDATE: Empires fall.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

Thanks for writing the article as you did, telling the truth. I took the attached photo from my Humvee in Afghanistan in 2008. Those blurry objects are the rusted out hulls of Soviet era armored personnel carriers. The Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, two decades before I snapped that photo. Let that sink in.

The Taliban used to have a saying: “The Americans have the watches, but we have the time.”I, too, have a 17yo son. He will not be following in my footsteps to become a Marine officer.

According to the 2021 Gallup poll of confidence in US institutions, aside from Small Business (70 percent), the US military is the institution that more Americans (69 percent) have confidence in, and nothing else is even close. Once the American public starts to realize how Petraeus, McMaster, and the rest of them led us into this quagmire, and humiliating withdrawal, that number is going to slip, and it should.UPDATE.4: I’m surprised that some of you in the comments think I’m saying that the US Embassy in Kabul’s celebration of Pride Month caused Kabul to fall. Really? You think that? My point is that the US Embassy in an Islamic country whose government is menaced by Islamic fundamentalist fighters would do well to pay attention to the world around it, not the ideological priors of Foggy Bottom. I listened on NPR today experts saying that the US never really understood the mission there, or the country. That post in June, weeks before the same embassy had to be evacuated in advance of the Islamic hill people taking over the country, is an example of the imperial cluelessness of Washington.

The post Kabul: The Dead End Of The Road appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hungary, Holdout Of Sanity

As  I was going through my morning Twitter and news feed, I came across a reference to this, from a major health information website’s article about how lesbians have sex:

Do you see what’s happening? These totalitarians are rewriting the script for reality, in the name of wokeness. This is nothing to laugh at! This is utterly serious. From my book Live Not By Lies, this from a conversation with a Polish professor:

What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases—hierarchy, for example, or traditional family—with negative connotations.

Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using of words. If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

How did people keep hold of reality under communist conditions? How do they know not only what to remember but how to remember it? The answer was to create distinct small communities—especially families and religious fellowships—in which it was possible both to speak truthfully and to embody truth.

“They had social spaces where the real meaning of words was preserved,” he says. “For me, it’s less important to argue with such a view of the world”—progressivism, he means—“than to describe reality as it is. For example, our task is to show people what a normal, monogamous family looks like.”

To paraphrase Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not by winning an argument but by keeping yourself grounded in reality that you carry on the human heritage.

Yeah, I have a book to sell, but seriously, if you haven’t read Live Not By Lies, it’s something you really have to get your hands on to understand what to do in this Brave New World. It’s all there. The people who lived through Soviet Communism have experience with this stuff.

Everybody’s asking me to respond to Andrew Sullivan’s Friday jeremiad against Hungary and Tucker Carlson, and I will, though you have been reading me this summer will have heard most of it. Let me say here something you will not have read from me as a reason Anglo-American conservatives are looking towards Hungary with renewed interest: it’s because Hungary shows that you can be a modern, cosmopolitan Western society without surrendering to the crackpot pseudo-reality of gender ideology. What’s more, Hungary has a government and a society that is not willing to surrender its youth to these malignant lies.

Here in the US, we do not have a state-run media — but when it comes to propaganda of the cultural left, we don’t need one. They’re all taking the same line. You will only see happy-clappy stories about transgenderism. You will not see things like this:

Look at this. Do you ever see this reality on network television, or in the major media? Women who want surgeons to create for them a pseudo-penis have to undergo a graft from a forearm to give doctors material from which to build the fake phallus. This young woman’s arm will be mutilated for life. Hungarians don’t want their children to have their minds colonized by the ideology that convinces healthy young women to submit to these ghoulish procedures.

I found that image in this very powerful 2020 essay by someone named Kamilla V., which was shared with me by a reader. It begins like this:

No one confessed the machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole.

E. M. Forster’s novella, The Machine Stops, was published in 1909. It is set in the distant future. The human race lives underground in pod-like dwellings, their lives mediated by what we would now recognize as a kind of Internet of Things. The history of the world is constantly refalsified, and the main occupation of the populace is the cultivation of ‘ideas,’ which has replaced all previous forms of human endeavour. A Central Committee oversees the entire system. There is a tiny minority of isolated dissenters who have held on to the memory of the world as it was long ago, but they are considered outcasts and live in danger of punishment, the worst being death by exposure to the toxic air at the surface of the earth.

More:

Dissociation from the physical reality of one’s body, or any part of it, used to be recognized as a form of mental illness. Eccentric behaviour such as crossdressing in males was regarded as a more or less harmless fetish. Today ‘identities’ are proliferating, and they are publicly enforced and policed. Men declare themselves to be women, say that they always were women, and are rewarded with stylish photos of themselves on the covers of women’s fashion magazines. They may undergo chemical and surgical interventions that aim to create a ‘female’ body. But whether it is a male or a female body that is being tampered with, the manufactured pseudoparts do not work anything like the real ones. And Mother Nature recognizes them as wounds, and is constantly trying to heal them.

Trauma can drive us to take refuge in alternative, self-created worlds. It’s hard to cope with life in a society ruled by elites whose interests are served by keeping the masses in a state of confusion and anxiety, so that the latent possibilities of individual lives are not allowed to manifest. It’s easy to see why individual ‘identity’ has become a way of regaining some sense of power and control. Many of us know what it’s like to be confused and dissociated from our bodies. But the job of those who can help a person in such a state is to support them in healing from their trauma, to learn to love the body they have, and to reconnect and interact with their real environment. Instead, the whole world is expected to conform to the dictates of a mass delusion.

We are supposed to forget the historical record of what life has been like for women, and the real reasons they have to fear the invasion of male-bodied persons into their sex-specific spaces. Many of the sex-based rights and protections that women struggled for decades and even centuries to establish are now being annihilated with astonishing rapidity, as men and boys can declare themselves to be female, often without undergoing any form of body modification. Any suggestion that the danger to women and girls is real is likely to be met with accusations of bigotry or worse.

Kamilla talks about how language is being twisted and distorted to serve these lies. We are taught to ignore what is plainly in front of us:

It is no longer acceptable to believe our eyes, or the testimony of medical science, when it comes to the sex of a human being at birth. In order to avoid the trauma of being arbitrarily ‘assigned’ to the wrong gender, children are to be born as neither male nor female. Doctors and other health care professionals are supposed to ignore the evidence of their senses, to use ‘gender neutral’ words for what are clearly male and female body parts, or to pretend that the person they are treating is the opposite sex of the sex they actually are, if that is how they ‘identify’ themselves.

Organizations that used to represent women and mothers now refer to ‘menstruators,’ ‘uterus havers,’ and ‘birthing persons’. Women’s vaginas are called ‘front holes.’ It’s not breastfeeding, it’s ‘chestfeeding’.

History is blatantly falsified. Individuals who engaged in gender non-conforming behaviour are now regularly described as having been transgender. Women who wore ‘male’ clothing in order to survive in a hostile environment, or to follow a career that would otherwise have been closed to them, were “transmen.” Are we supposed to endorse the fate of such as Alan Turing, who was forcibly injected with artificial female hormones in an attempt to ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality?

I am told that I belong to a newly minted class of oppressors: the ‘cis,’ who enjoy some kind of privilege because they recognize that the sex they were born as is the sex they are. But I am not a ‘cis.’ My mother was not a ‘cis.’ My grandmothers were not ‘cis.’ There is no such thing as a ‘cis.’

Public criticism of these developments was permitted by the mass media for the equivalent of a nanosecond, and rapidly quashed around the time we were all told to call Bruce “Caitlyn.” One has to assume that the managers of the big media outlets got the memo from their bankrollers. And who are in the overwhelming majority of those now censored, banned from social media, ‘deplatformed,’ losing their friends and even their livelihoods, because they dissent from the new gender doctrine? Women. Actual, real women. Women who refuse to talk in UnicornRainbow Newspeak are doubleplusungood.

Kamilla goes on to show how transgender ideology is preparing us all to accept transhumanism, which is the end of man. She concludes:

The technologically sophisticated shadow play in which we are supposed to believe is less real than the dreams made visible in the early days of cinema. Transgenderism regards the human body, male and female, as the raw material of gender fantasies. Transhumanism turns the human body into a machine, and equates the measurable activity of the human brain with the human soul. Both are heavily promoted as a substitute for freedom, the kind of freedom that would enable human beings to fulfil their potential on earth.

When the fantasies of gender and of machine-humans both fail, where will the soul be? It is there, even if everyone forgets about it, in each individual and behind the universal human experience. Those who refuse to abandon reality will be here to pick up the pieces when the soul-denying dream dies.

Please read the whole thing — it will be the most important thing you’ve read all day. 

I’ve quoted in this space a couple of times something a young woman sharing a cab with me across Budapest said when I asked her why she was supporting Fidesz, Viktor Orban’s party, in spite of the corruption in its elite circles. She told me (I’m paraphrasing from memory) that all corruption is bad, but financial corruption is within the realm of the normal, and can be dealt with. But the kind of corruption evidenced by losing the cultural memory of what a family is, and what men and women are — that’s something far, far worse. Unlike the parties of the Left (and, she might have said, most parties of the Right in the West), Fidesz has not succumbed to this kind of corruption. This matters. 

She’s right: it does matter. I’ll get to Andrew’s passionate denunciation in due course (I really don’t look forward to starting another long Magyar apologia, but I will), but you should know that when he denounces the Orban government for hostility to LGBTs, you should not regard it as Western liberals (of right and left do): as nothing more than blind prejudice. These folks cannot understand why any conservative would reject their ideology regarding LGBT as anything other than bigotry. They are incapable of thinking beyond their rigid categories. Read Kamilla V. on the subject. For all I know, she is a lesbian; her complaint is not about homosexuality, but about the abuse of language to normalize transgenderism, and how this is preparing us for something even worse. One can be in favor of gay rights and the normalization of homosexuality and still oppose transgenderism (the TERFs are such people), but if one’s embrace of gay rights is on the basis that everyone has unlimited freedom to construct his or her identity, sexual and otherwise, then you have abandoned any ground from which you can criticize the trans phenomenon.

For now, a majority of Hungarians  — who, by the way, live in a country where gays can have civil partnerships — would prefer to keep this ideology out, having seen how it has corrupted the West. And people wonder why a certain kind of American conservative looks to Hungary as a holdout of sanity.

The post Hungary, Holdout Of Sanity appeared first on The American Conservative.

Moralistic Therapeutic Surrender

Advice from a neocon think-tanker:

I’d like to share the same advice I sent our incredible ISW team.

We’re all likely to ignore the symptoms and charge ahead. We shouldn’t.

These recommendations are a start. They build on policies that limit the sharing of graphic imagery, which I recommend you do as well. pic.twitter.com/X3UKonmq9s

— Jennifer Cafarella (@JennyCafarella) August 12, 2021

Patrick Deneen says:

We spent twenty years and at least a trillion dollars trying to prevent what is happening today — and what began to happen the moment the US began withdrawing the soldiers holding up the façades of the Potemkin village. This story in the NYT makes your heart break for Afghan soldiers. Those in this story were trying to fight, but their inept commanders and the civilian leadership failed them. All the money and force of the world’s No. 1 superpower couldn’t make these people willing and capable of fighting the Islamist berserker hill people.

Pat Buchanan comments:

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has summarized the situation:

“The complete, utter failure of the Afghan national army, absent our hand-holding, to defend their country is a blistering indictment of a failed 20-year strategy predicated on the belief that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars could create an effective democratic central government in a nation that has never had one.”

More:

The questions that need answering:

Was not the attempt to transplant Madisonian democracy into the soil of the Middle and Near East a fool’s errand from the beginning?

How many other U.S. allies field paper armies, which will collapse, if they do not have the Americans there to do the heavy lifting?

Is what we have on offer — one man-one vote democracy — truly appealing in a part of the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?

The Taliban’s God is Allah. The golden calf we had on offer was democracy. In the Hindu Kush, their god has proven stronger.

One of life’s unsolvable mysteries: how Allah’s hillbillies beat a modern military fighting for democracy and wokeness:

UPDATE: Australian analyst Gray Connally is a good person to follow on Twitter:

The post Moralistic Therapeutic Surrender appeared first on The American Conservative.

Living By Noble Lies

The traditionalist Catholic writer Steve Skojec (though I don’t know that he would accept the adjective “traditionalist” anymore) recently sold his trad commentary site One Peter Five, and is now doing powerful writing at his Substack newsletter, The Skojec Files. Here’s a long, challenging, and actually kind of brilliant essay he wrote, sparked by controversy over the depiction of the Blessed Carlo Acutis, a contemporary Italian teenager who died of leukemia, and who is on a fast track to sainthood.

Skojec explains that there’s an argument between Catholics over whether it’s right to depict the glorified Acutis as he was in real life — sneakers and jeans — or in a glorified manner, as he is presumed to be in heaven. He writes:

I think it’s actually quite normal to see this disparity of reaction. But that’s because I think it points to a deeper sort of unraveling of the Catholic mythos. This demythologizing of the Church, I think, is due not to a “Modernist campaign” to dumb religion down — although there may be some of that mixed in — but rather to a massive shift in perception.

And then Skojec explains what he means. He says that it is impossible to fairly compare the Catholic Church’s situation today with any other era in the past, not because the Church is different, but because living in the Information Age radically changes us. No one in history ever had to deal with the amount of information that we do. He writes:

One of the biggest issues with politics and religion in 2021 is that we know everything our leaders thinking and doing and saying almost instantaneously. Applied to Catholicism, this has been devastating. The Church has always been scandal-plagued, but we didn’t have our noses rubbed in it every day. And while some will use this reality as a means of diminishing the present suffering of a scandal-fatigued faithful — “Oh, don’t sweat it. It’s been bad like this before. Just look at history!” — this is cold comfort. It’s hard to imagine that the faithful would have weathered around the clock news of the papal pornocracy any better than we are.

He’s right about that. The reason the Catholic sex abuse scandal story exploded in 2002, and not before, was because of one big reason: the existence of the Internet. The entire world was able to learn at the same time what the Boston Globe reporters were finding. When the Boston judge in the Geoghan case refused the routine request of Church lawyers to seal evidence presented in the trial, and instead put them in the public realm, everyone could see the hellacious lies and abuse that cardinals and their minions had been perpetrating for decades. There was the evidence, sometimes in their own handwriting. This sparked reporters in other parts of the country, even the world, to do reporting that they would almost certainly not have done had they not learned in detail what happened in Boston — and if that detailed accounting had not given them a pathway to discovering how the phenomenon played out in their own dioceses.

And still, the Church managed to keep a lot of secrets. You well know the story about how many people knew that Cardinal Ted McCarrick was a lecher and abuser, and that the Vatican knew about it too, but still tolerated and promoted him. They all knew it, but the public didn’t know it, because the Church and its collaborators — including compliant liberal media who didn’t want to pursue allegations that made a gay cardinal look like what he was: a predator — kept that information from the public. It didn’t work forever, because it couldn’t work forever. In this information environment, everything that is hidden will eventually be revealed.

I’ve written about this phenomenon in this space before — that is, about how the Information Age makes it very hard for institutions to maintain authority. My wife was telling me last night that she is much less susceptible to conspiracy theorizing about institutions and Covid response because of her experience as an administrator in a small Christian school. She said that anybody who has administered an organization knows that any number of things can go wrong, not because people are conspiring to deceive the public and do bad things, but because life is complex, people are fallible, decisions have to be made in real time, and it’s impossible to know everything. This is not an excuse for wrongdoing, obviously, but it is a caution against jumping to conclusions.

Anyway, whether poor governance by an institution is because of deliberation or accident, it is difficult for a poorly governed institution to maintain the confidence of the people it governs, once they know the facts. This is universally true. Skojec says it is especially true for the Catholic Church, because of the claims the Catholic Church makes about itself. More Skojec:

I suspect very strongly that we read Church history with a 100-proof gloss, and it’s very much intended to preserve an image of a pristine Church, divinely protected and untainted by error, despite her weathering of many storms. It’s a romanticized vision of what Catholicism really is, was, and has been. A romanticism that leads to claims like this:

Vatican I clearly teaches that “the See of St. Peter always remains untainted by any error according to the divine promise of our Lord and Savior made to the prince of his disciples” (Denz.-H 3070; cf. Lk 22:32). This means that Christ and the Holy Spirit will insure that “in the Apostolic See” the Catholic religion will “always be preserved immaculate and sacred doctrine honored” (Denz.-H 3066; cf. the formula of Pope Hormisdas; Denz.-H 363–365). 

Can anyone today look at Rome and honestly say that the See of St. Peter “remains untainted by any error”? Of course not. Can anyone claim, with a straight face, that in the Apostolic See, the faith has been “preserved immaculate and sacred doctrine honored”? Please.

Skojec goes on to quote Pope St. Pius X, an anti-modernist, who declared that the Catholic Church cannot change its teachings. He goes on:

The Pian vision of the Church is essentially one trapped in amber, a fossil of praxis and belief that moves forward physically in time, but with total unblemished integrity and continuity. It not only never fundamentally changes — it is impossible for it to do so.

I think that for Catholicism to be what it claims to be — the one true religion necessary for salvation, divinely founded by Jesus Christ, entrusted to St. Peter and his successors, and protected from error by the Holy Spirit — the Pian understanding is the only workable one. Evolution of dogma is an impossibility for a Church that claims such origins, safeguards, and the possession of eternal, immutable truths.

But reality, now that we have so much more access to see the theological sausage being made, is proving quite challenging to this view. The old, unflappable Church has long since been eclipsed. Doctrines are seemingly overturned without consequence. Traditionalists are holding onto a memory, an echo of that thing that once was, hoping that it will be so again. Thus, every new deviation from what was perceived as the ideal stings like a slap in the face to folks desperately trying to hold the line before even that memory is lost.

This is why the papal motu proprio last month, restricting the old Latin Mass and reversing Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum, was such an act of cruelty and a traumatic event. It’s an unsubtle reminder to those who love the Church’s traditions and choose to believe that she is truly the “perfect society” have, in actuality, zero power to preserve or protect her. They are left, therefore, with no choice but to obey papal innovations and be crushed, or to rebel against them, and thereby become the very opposite of what they espouse. Obedience to everything but sin is what the tradition recommends; rebellion against an unjust but not immoral order is anything but traditional.

Read it all.

It was especially interesting to me to read Skojec, a man I’ve been following for years, consider that those non-trads who believe that there is something valuable in depicting the beatified young Acutis as he was in life might have a point. This is not the Steve Skojec of old. Something is changing within him.

What’s changing in him is something that is going to come for all of us, if it hasn’t already. It came for me back in 2005, and dissolved my ability to believe as a Catholic. I stagger onward, following the path towards God through Orthodoxy, but dramatically weakened in my ability to believe in an institution. Don’t get me wrong: I do believe that the Orthodox Church is what she claims to be. I believe with all my heart, soul, and mind that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and all the other things proclaimed by the Orthodox Church. It is true that the Orthodox Church does not make the same strong claims that the Catholic Church does, but as I have admitted many times in this space, my faith is not strong enough to endure a close and constant examination of the failures of the priests and the bishops. Is that intellectual cowardice? Yes, probably. But I have had personally, or have heard credibly, of too many mystical experiences of Jesus Christ to deny Him. Knowing my own weakness, and the anticlericalism that emerged within me from the betrayal of the near-total trust I had in the Catholic hierarchy, I choose both to stay away from examining the inner workings of the Orthodox institutional church, and to keep the institutions and its clergy at arm’s length. This is not a judgment on the integrity of individual priests or bishops; it’s a judgment on my own damaged soul.

If I’m going to keep my eyes on Jesus, I have to look past the Bride of Christ. The problem is that there is no doing away with the Bride of Christ, which is the Biblical term for the Church. The Church gave us the Bible, for one. The Church gives us the Eucharist. Protestantism is, to my mind, unsupportable. So where does that leave us? This is something I think about a lot. It is part of my struggle of faith. I am not the first Christian to have struggled like this. Yet the Church endures. She still produces saints. And anyway, even the most radical Protestants will not find a sinless church. They’ll end with just them and Jesus out in the woods on Sunday morning. If there is no Bride of Christ, there will ultimately be no children of God. This is a difficult mystery for us in the age of total information. Among the most important Christians to listen to today are those who have taken the full measure of the iniquity and corruption of the institutional churches, and come through with their faith intact.

As Skojec points out, we have only just begun to live in this total information environment. We have no idea how its constant churn is going to change us, and our institutions, and the way we relate to our institutions. Not just the churches — the government, the schools, the banks, the military, all of them. Now that I’m back in Louisiana, I find myself completely overwhelmed with information about Covid and the Covid response. I went from a local and national environment — Budapest, Hungary — where the government took a firm hand in dealing with Covid, and where everyone complied with government mandates, to one that’s chaotic, information-dense, and full of rage.

Last night my wife was in a Circle K convenience store, and a young man, in his early 20s, nastily defied the older women clerks who kept asking him to put on a mask, which state law now requires. He refused, repeatedly. My wife said the young man was really arrogant, and she felt bad for the clerks, who were only doing their job. These kinds of exchanges, I hear, are happening everywhere. I live in a part of the US where people are normally quite courteous and respectful in the public square. To see this happening indicates a fundamental breakdown of who we are.

Honest to God, I don’t know what to believe about Covid, vaccines, or any of it. I’m quite confused. I know that vaccines (I am vaccinated) are making a huge difference. I had qualms about taking the vaccine, but I am immunocompromised, and reckoned that the risk of remaining unvaccinated was greater than the risk of taking the vaccine. But I have friends who are intelligent and not crazy, whose concerns about the vaccines I can’t sweep away.

And it is certainly true that our governmental and health authorities have not covered themselves with glory in their management of information around Covid. Last weekend at the festival in Esztergom, I explained to my Hungarian interlocutor that when we saw last summer health authorities saying that it was okay to cast aside their warnings against public gatherings, for the sake of attending George Floyd protests, that instantly discredited them in the eyes of many of us. These things really do matter. At the same time public health authorities are giving warnings about Covid, and liberals are demanding that we TRUST THE SCIENCE, we are seeing things like the American Medical Association say that we should do away with “male” and “female” on birth certificates, because sex doesn’t exist. Now, it is perfectly possible that medical authorities could be telling the truth about how to deal with Covid, and be completely bonkers and politicized about sex and gender. But normal people see how quickly doctors are falling for the trendy ideologization of medicine, and wonder how much they can be trusted on anything.

Similarly, it is entirely possible that school systems are correct to mandate masks for students coming back to school in the time of the Delta variant. But when many school systems are also mandating teaching of radical neoracist ideologies based on Critical Race Theory, normal people can’t be faulted for doubting the judgment of those authorities.

I could cite examples all day. The point is this: authority is not the same thing as power. An institution that has squandered its authority has nothing left but power. And if it doesn’t have power to coerce others — as in today’s churches — what does it have? If it does have the power to coerce others, including those who don’t accept its authority, it risks being or becoming a tyranny.

You could say that the total information environment is good in that it compels institutions to become more honest and competent. Maybe. But humans are not machines. We are going to fail. If we live in a society where people regard all human failure as malicious, and freak out completely in the face of it, we aren’t going to make it. It’s going to be some form of a war of all against all. You can see it starting.

The unsettling (to put it mildly) question that Skojec’s essay raises goes beyond the Catholic Church. It is this: What if the truth is that in order to have civilization, we have to lie to ourselves, collectively and elaborately? What if it always has done, and we’re just now able to fully appreciate that? If that’s what it requires, then how do we do that? I keep hearing in my mind the voice of Caiaphas justifying the execution of an innocent man, Jesus Christ: “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” 

Is it better for us that there be one noble lie for the people than that the whole nation perish? Isn’t that what we’re talking about? But how can a good man live by a lie, knowing it’s a lie?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

In re your piece today (“living by noble lies”), and especially the last two paragraphs, remember Girard. This is what his whole mature thought is about. If you haven’t read “Battling to the End,” his final book, this is the main thrust of it. Noble lies are precisely what make civilization possible. Especially the noble lie about “foundational murders” or sacrifices. Remember the Lord’s words about building the tombs of the prophets, hiding their bones, etc. What is that hiding of bones except a great collective lie, i.e. that we haven’t murdered the prophets? Per Girard, the two things that make culture possible are violence and lying. Those are the key ingredients of the sacrificial mechanism. Is it a coincidence that the two things that characterize Satan, according to our Lord, are that he is 1) a liar and the father of lies, and 2) a murderer from the beginning?The proclamation of the Gospel is the exposure of this mechanism. But the sacrificial mechanism is precisely what made culture possible! So the trouble is, once it is exposed to be a lie, it loses its constructive power. Culture falls apart. Unless people become disciples of Jesus – in Girardian terms, shift the focus of their mimetic desire onto him. (The cross is thus, for Girard, anti-sacrificial, and the Eucharist is an unbloody sacrifice.) But that obviously isn’t happening. Not in the West anyway. But we can’t go back to sacrifice, because it has been definitively exposed as a lie and has lost its power. So, since we’re not going to turn to the Lord and be saved, we have the dissolution of our culture to endure – and the frantic effort somehow to get the impotent sacrificial mechanism going again, the frantic search for more victims. There is no other way (if Girard is right, as I believe he is). It’s some comfort that the Lord himself foresaw and foretold this, viz. the multiplication of “lawlessness” during the “time of the Gentiles,” which ends with cataclysmic violence and the immiseration of many. But he who endures to the end, not allowing his “love to grow cold,” will be saved.If you haven’t read “Battling to the End,” I highly recommend it. It’s not easy to understand, especially for Americans, as we have been largely isolated from the effects of the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath, but your recent saturation in European culture will help.

The post Living By Noble Lies appeared first on The American Conservative.