John C. Wright's Blog, page 117

The Prospects of Victory in Long War

Referring my previous essay, Teretia asks:

Do you have much hope that we will accomplish your last sentence? Or are we fighting the long defeat?

The last sentence to which this refers is the observation that when war comes upon you, the only options are to fight, or to surrender. We should fight because we have so much to fight for.

To quote a better man than I:

Actually I am a Christian and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’- though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

–Letter to Amy Ronald , 15 December 1956

As the Bard of Oxford says, all of history is a long defeat, But the end is not entropy, by victory and joy and power beyond all words to express and vision to imagine. What war, what childbirth, what worthy act is not this way? Before joy, sorrow; before triumph, loss; before the harvest, the plowing and sowing.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Saint James Matamoros, Lead Us in Crusade!

Perhaps there are readers who are shocked, or at least puzzled, that I and all men of good will call for a Crusade against the Islamist enemy currently troubling the peace of the world.

Part of this is merely verbal disorder. A generation raised with no ability to read or speak the English language, and who use Orwellian Newspeak in lieu of thought, cannot apprehend the meaning of a common sense proposition because they cannot understand the meaning of ordinary words. It is for this reason that their masters (let us call them “The Conditioners”) have trained them.

To the properly conditioned politically correct leftist moron, the word “Crusade” means “Racist Genocide” and their every reaction, emotion and rational, to the common sense proposition is false to facts. They are shocked and astonished that anyone would be advocating genocide, when, of course, no one is; no one, of course, save the antisemites among the enemy.

Part of this, a more sinister part, is historical. We in the West enjoy all the benefits of Christian civilization, from classical art to modern science, from democracy to free enterprise to the academic freedom of the university system. The Left has made an astonishing effort over the last two centuries, an effort which has proved to be astonishingly successful, to hide the Christian origin and Christian nature of all these institutions from the modern generation.

The effort has been so successful that it is the default assumption of the modern day that Christianity opposes freedom of religion (when indeed it is the only religion that insists upon it and always has) and opposes science and academic freedom (when indeed it is the only religion that invented and promoted the university system, and the only world view in which modern physics mades metaphysical sense).

Christianity, in short, is Western civilization. Western civilization is Christianity.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Loyalty to the Unknown Reader

I was giving writing advice to a friend of mine. Here is a snippet of the conversation I’d like to share in case it inspires another would-be author out there:

“But you will not do better unless you take up your pen and write. Set yourself a quota of a page count or a number of hours devoted to the novel. Eliminate all distractions during that time and hold it sacrosanct.

“You need your wife’s permission and cooperation to do this.

“If you feel writer’s block coming on, go out, away from all distractions, and do lawn work or chop wood or do pushups or other hard manual labor until the ideas start flowing again.”

I did not tell my friend, but this is the advice of Gene Wolfe, not my own. When I have writer’s block, I merely talk to my wife, my pet muse, and command her to solve it for me, imperiously snapping my masculine fingers. She then works out how to solve my writing problems, and I chain her up in the kitchen again, barefoot, until needed. (I think Neil Gaiman wrote an episode of SANDMAN about me. I come to a messy end.) 

((NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED: that was a joke. The guy in the Gaiman story kept his mused chained up in his attic, not his kitchen. Completely different person.))

“So called writer’s block is inevitably a sign that your muse is telling you something you don’t want to hear (usually, you don’t want to hear that   whatever you just wrote is going down the wrong track). When that happens, throw out the chapter and start again from ten or twenty pages ago.

“Write! Your future fans are weeping and waiting! Have pity on them!”

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

The 47% Solution

The news, both on the rightwing and leftwing channels, these last few days has been preoccupied with either attacking or defending a rather unexceptional statement by Mitt Romney, that 47% of the voters are addicted to the government teat and the cult of victimhood, and it is not worthwhile to seek their votes.

I would not have even wagered that the Left found this statement objectionable, except that they seem to object to all true statements just on principle.

I am flabbergasted: I honestly thought they would be pleased, and would have parades to celebrate the day when all men were beholden to the government. Everything for the state, nothing outside the state: that is the motto and the operating principle of the Left.

Don’t the communally-minded collectivists rejoice to hear the news that the collective has grown ever greater and stronger? Where is the insult?

What part of the obviously true and truly obvious statement does anyone have any objection to?

It astonishes me that commentators and pundits whose opinion I otherwise respect also find the statement objectionable or coldhearted or somehow ungood in some unspecified way. Some think it needs explaining or explaining away: others were actually, for some reason unclear to me, offended by it.

I don’t get it.

Why is anyone discussing Mitt Romney’s comment instead of discussing attacks by the Jihad against British, German and America embassies in embassy attacks Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Yemen?

That I do get: it is a sign of severe and radical civilizational decline. It is the Romans in the final days bickering and gossiping about the latest trivial scandal among the Patricians while the Goths are putting ladders up against the walls of the Eternal City.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

America Ended on 9/11

9/11 of Anno Domini 2012, I mean, when the nation submitted to Dar-al-Islam, the House of Submission, reacting to riots burning our consulates and killing our ambassador not with a Declaration of War (as would be the logical and just and minimally prudent retaliation for such a naked act of war) but instead with the sacrifice of a scapegoat and an apology for our freedom of speech.

America is ended when a full score of stormtroopers (I will not call them police officers) at midnight show up at a free man’s house to punish him for a use or misuse of the First Amendment; and the entire Executive Branch, from the President to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, humiliate and crush the offender, and offer his name and address to the vigilantes of the Dar-al-Islam.

Some imperium may continue for a time occupying the same terrain, and calling itself the United States of America for years and decades to come, but, in truth, the thing is dead when the spirit is dead.

I pass along these opinions to you as an expression, if understated, of my own.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Is CS Lewis a Science Fiction writer?

Sean Michael, one of the few men on the Internet who uses his real name, writes this comment:

My view is the reason why so many SF fans don’t seem to consider CS Lewis’ “Space Trilogy” to be SF is because Lewis was a convinced and devout Christian. IOW, some fans fell for the false line that Christianity is opposed to science.

“Fell for it” is putting it mildly. Anyone who falls for the line of argument that science fiction can only be written by secularists, or by or about secular topics, displays an alarming gullibility, not to mention an ignorance of the origins of the genre.

Jules Verne, the founder of the genre, was a Roman Catholic; HG Wells was a committed atheist and socialist, and delighted in penning desolate visions of a godless world drifting as a speck through an indifferent universe; but on the other hand Olaf Stapledon (the forgotten third of the trio of SF founders) put a monotheistic Creator-god of the Gnostic sort on stage as a character in STARMAKER, and made spiritual development one of the central themes of man’s future evolution (along with, risibly enough, communism) in his majestic LAST AND FIRST MEN.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Not another picture of Catwoman!

Expect no new posts this week. My dayjob has a looming deadline this month, and my next manuscript is due at the editor’s in January, so I have not had as much time to post editorial, rants, screeds, jests and drollery here.

I have been rereading CS Lewis’ PERELANDRA — and I can tell you it certainly reads differently sees as a grownup Christian than as a atheist teen, which was the last time I read it. The parallels between Perelandra and Milton’s PARADISE LOST are clear to all, but there are also parallels between this book and THE TIME TRAVELER by HG Wells, and A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay. Time permitting, I’d like to write a post on this next week.

No doubt readers expect me in such a situation to post yet another picture of the Catwoman in her evil skintight leather evilsuit. Not so! Am I as shallow as that? No, instead, I will post a picture of Rogue from the X-Men.

This is a picture of a statue taken from a Japanime-version of a Chris Claremont character. Our world is odd, Earthlings, no matter to what other world we compare it.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

A thousand roads lead men to Rome

I want to have one of my characters in AD 11055 discovering that the only language he has in common with the posthuman self-aware machinery covering the earth from pole to pole is Latin say to himself “All roads lead men forever to Rome.”

What is the correct grammatical way to say this? My untutored guess is

Omnes via ducunt homines per saecula Romam

– but if any of ya’ll Latin scholars out there can help me not embarrass myself before I go to press, I’d be grateful.

 

 

 

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

johncwright @ 2012-09-06T20:54:00

I want to have one of my characters in AD 11055 discovering that the only language he has in common with the posthuman self-aware machinery covering the earth from pole to pole is Latin say to himself “All roads lead men forever to Rome.”

What is the correct grammatical way to say this? My untutored guess is

Omnes via ducunt homines per saecula Romam

– but if any of ya’ll Latin scholars out there can help me not embarass myself before I go to press, I’d be grateful.

 

 

 

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

My Eldest Son Survived the Abortion Holocaust

My eldest child was diagnosed, before his birth,with spina bifeda. Rather than raise an inferior genetic product, the doctor gently suggested we “examine our options”, which included the modern equivalent of the Spartan practice of flinging the inferior births into a chasm on Mount Taygetos, called Apothetae.

Of course, I am white, and of Germanic descent, so the doctor who tried to talk me into murdering my unborn son did not try as hard as he might, and Thank God my wife who was a Christian (at that time I was not) would not even heed nor consider such a thing.

To this day I regret and with revulsion and horror that I even contemplated such a thing even for a moment; I despise and I hate — no softer word will do — that I live in a nation of Morlocks who make such conversations as I had with my doctor, and such temptations, possible.

I feel as you would feel if you were living among barbaric, savage and sadistic Aztecs, all of whom thought mass human sacrifice by means of grisly torture atop dark and smoking pyramids was not only tolerable, but right and just.

As it turns out, the doctor’s advice to murder my child was based on a faulty diagnosis. He was, and is, perfectly healthy.

At no point did the doctor suggest taking the fetus from my wife and frying it in grease with onions to consume on a sourdough bun with a pint of beer, albeit, logically, if the meat-product is not a human being, and if I have no fatherly duty to love, care for, and protect the meat-product before birth magically bestows humanity upon it, then there could be no objection in law or custom to such a feast.

If the mental image of such a meal revolts you, either your sense of revulsion is incorrect — for it is no crime to eat the flesh of livestock — or your belief that unborn human being are livestock owned by the mother is incorrect.

With all this in mind, with great interest I read the account of 11-year-old Zoe Griffin, who was driven to tears by pro-abort ‘activists’ as she stood praying outside the Democrat national convention.

I hope you will also read: http://www.standtrue.com/zoegriffin/

I am not interested in comments on this page. The time for civil  discussion is over. Aborticide must be destroyed. This is the last generation that shall suffer it.

Let the Apothetae consume our children no more.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.