John C. Wright's Blog, page 3

I am Famous Now!

Mark Levin “The Great One” just read one of my columns on the air, thanks to Instapundit.

Of course, he got my name wrong (John C. Cartwright) and he caught a spelling error I had made (‘come’ should be ‘some’). Ah, well. The price of fame.

If you want to find a podcast of it, it is his Dec 07 show, right about an hour and a half from the end.

More to the point, the Superversive SF site asked me to do a podcast with them. You can listen to me talking over people, interrupting them, not listening, and disagreeing with everything, including ‘hello.’

It went this way. Him: “Hello, Mr. Wright!” Me (crossly): “What do you mean by ‘Hello’? Define your terms!”

Meanwhile, on another topic, those who want to repeal the Second Amendment do not seem to be able to base their conclusions on scientific evidence:

 

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

Stoicism and Christianity

In an earlier conversation, when someone said Nihilism leads to Hedonism, I made this comment:

What I do not understand is why philosophical growth does not work the other way:

Nihilism leads to Hedonism, and then, once a man is a hedonist, he realizes that short term pleasure leads to long term pain, so he becomes an Epicurean, and attempts to moderate his passions and govern them by reason.

Once he attempts to govern his passions by his reason, he realizes that he has control only over his judgment about and reaction to outside things, and that outside things are forever beyond the control of his will. True happiness, therefore, consists of nothing but iron self-control, and the limitation of the objects of desire toward one’s own mind: and this is the doctrine of the Stoics.

Once he becomes a Stoic, he realizes that no man can live up to this exacting doctrine, and would lose his humanity if he tried, whereupon he deduces that the human heart cannot be happy absent a transcendent cause to believe in.

After piddling with various political causes as a source of transcendent meaning, he realizes that these political causes are vanity […] If he looks at the roots of modern political movements, he finds, lo and behold, his old enemy, the Church spreading all the seeds from which modern ideologies grow: Marx was, after all, indistinguishable from a prophetic heresiarch: a Jeremiah of Evil.

If our man turns from false prophets from true ones, what started as a nihilistic pursuit of pleasure end with him seeking the eternal and inexpressible joys of the Beatific Vision, or, if he is oriental, the unruffled freedom from reincarnation of Nirvana.

(But a true nihilist would never become a hedonist because a nihilist thinks the pleasure principle, along with all other principles, is meaningless.)

I am not describing a process I think is inevitable. I am indeed asking a question–what is it about Nihilism that makes it a dead end rather than a starting point toward real moral growth? It is an infantile doctrine, and it is a condemnation of the corruption and folly of the post-Christian 20th Century that such doctrines are taken seriously among us.

kaltrosomos asks:

(quoting me) “Once he becomes a Stoic, he realizes that no man can live up to this exacting doctrine, and would lose his humanity if he tried, whereupon he deduces that the human heart cannot be happy absent a transcendent cause to believe in.”

I don’t see the connection between finding the Stoic philosophy too hard to live by and jumping to a transcendent cause. How does the one (impossibility of being a true Stoic) lead to the other (needing a transcendent cause)?

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

Pat and the Fourth Estate

An excellent and insightful piece by Pat Buchanan:

http://www.unz.com/pbuchanan/why-liberal-media-hate-trump/

In the feudal era there were the “three estates” — the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The first and second were eradicated in Robespierre’s Revolution.

But in the 18th and 19th century, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identified what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.”

Wrote William Thackeray: “Of the Corporation of the Goosequill — of the Press … of the fourth estate. … There she is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world — her courtiers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets.”

The fourth estate, the press, the disciples of Voltaire, had replaced the clergy it had dethroned as the new arbiters of morality and rectitude.

Today the press decides what words are permissible and what thoughts are acceptable. The press conducts the inquisitions where heretics are blacklisted and excommunicated from the company of decent men, while others are forgiven if they recant their heresies.

Pat then explains the inexplicable popularity of Donald Trump; inexplicable, that is, to the blinking Morlocks of the mainstream press, eyes watering at the light outside their troglodyte holes, cluttering with human bones and stained with the offal of lies their hermetically sealed echo chambers have become…

His popularity is traceable to the fact that he rejects the moral authority of the media, breaks their commandments, and mocks their condemnations. His contempt for the norms of Political Correctness is daily on display.

And that large slice of America that detests a media whose public approval now rivals that of Congress, relishes this defiance. The last thing these folks want Trump to do is to apologize to the press.

And the media have played right into Trump’s hand.

They constantly denounce him as grossly insensitive for what he has said about women, Mexicans, Muslims, McCain and a reporter with a disability. Such crimes against decency, says the press, disqualify Trump as a candidate for president.

Yet, when they demand he apologize, Trump doubles down. And when they demand that Republicans repudiate him, the GOP base replies:

“Who are you to tell us whom we may nominate? You are not friends. You are not going to vote for us. And the names you call Trump — bigot, racist, xenophobe, sexist — are the names you call us, nothing but cuss words that a corrupt establishment uses on those it most detests.”

http://www.unz.com/pbuchanan/why-libe...

http://www.unz.com/pbuchanan/why-libe...

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

Arthur and the Wall

I was working hard on my latest project, a yarn about a modern boy who wants to be a knight of King Arthur’s (who is not dead, you may recall, merely asleep), when a reader with the doglike name of Malcolm the Cynic wrote this note to a reader glum with the news of the times, seeing the barbarian everywhere victorious, and the forces of light everywhere confused, weak, and in retreat:

There is a scene in Stephen Lawhead’s novel “Arthur” that I found inspiring.

It is the legendary (and historical) Battle of Baedun Hill. Arthur and his men are outnumbered and backed up almost against the ocean; they have a route to escape (barely), but if they leave the enemy will become entrenched and they might as well give Britain up to the barbarians. The enemy is enclosed in a fortress, and has the high ground atop a hill. Arthur’s army survives only because of the onset of nightfall.

Throughout the book Arthur has repeatedly been winning incredible battles against impossible odds because he comes up with ingenious military battle plans – it is only because of his genius that they have made it to this “winner-take-all” battle. So the reader is waiting to read what brilliant strategy Arthur is going to come up with next.

Arthur tells his men to join him on the shore. He addresses them while standing in the ocean. Arthur declares to the group that the only way for them to win this battle is with the help of God, specifically, the Savior God Jesu. In front of his men, he adopts the Cross of Christ as his battle standard, then calls for all unbaptized to be baptized in the waters of the ocean that very night.

Merlin comes out and tells the army that the only way to win the battle is to build a wall of prayer. Arthur leads his men in prayer, then goes off to sleep.

When his men wake in the morning, they find a curious sight: Arthur is out lugging rocks around. The various kings and battle leaders don’t know what to do; one by one they go out to convince Arthur to come in, and after talking all end up joining him. Arthur is building a wall of prayer, and with the help of his men the city is surrounded by nightfall. The enemy, watching from their city fortress first mocks them, then becomes afraid, because they are blocking their own escape: Nobody blocks their own escape unless they know they’ll win.

Through a combination of mingled confusion and fear, as well as, presumably, divine intervention, the barbarians (lead by a British traitor) don’t leave the fortress until nightfall…as it so happens, the only possible time of day Arthur and his men can theoretically win the battle. The fight is extremely bloody, but when morning comes, Arthur and his men have won the day, as if by miracle, and Arthur is afterwards crowned High King of all Britain.

This is a longwinded way for me to say that the only way for us win – the culture war, the spiritual war, the war against the Jihadist terrorists who wish to destroy us – is to build a wall of prayer. That, right now, is our battle plan. And far from being hopeless, even faith the side of a mustard seed can move the very mountains.

So let us pray without ceasing. The Cross of Christ is our standard, and He is our King. And though we may suffer the long defeat, at the end of this Advent is the birth of a Savior; the victory of the world will not last. Eternity is on our side

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

Point Deer, Make Horse

The Federalist has an article stating that for the Left, their God is Caesar, that is to say, the State, that is to say, themselves.

After a disaster or lost battle, the Jews of old said it was it is the punishment rightfully delivered for not being faithful enough to Jehovah, not giving him what he demanded for their good: an upright heart and pure more sacred to him than any ritual sacrifice.

After every crime-spree or disaster or terrorist attack by persons who never turn out to be white rightwingers, the Left says that it is the punishment rightfully delivered for not being faithful enough to Caesar, not giving him what he demanded for our good: not giving Caesar enough power, property and control over our minds and souls to solve the problem.

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

Liu Cixin to Sci Fi: Drop Dead

Within the same fortnight that David Hartwell announced that the World Fantasy Award trophy would no longer be a bust of Lovecraft, but instead be the head of someone whose sole qualification to represent all of fantasy literature is her skin color, Liu Cixin, the first chinaman ever to win a Hugo Award has publicly spit in the face of those of us who voted for him.

He was interviewed in the Global Times. The statements are so graceless and so ungrateful, that I am studying his hands carefully to see if his fingers are crossed, a sign soldiers videoed by the enemy are supposed to make to show they are speaking under duress.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/939761.shtml

GT: Some Chinese fans have said they want to band together to vote on the World Science Fiction website next year. What’s your opinion on this?

Liu: That’s the best way to destroy The Three-Body Trilogy. And not just this sci-fi work, but also the reputation of Chinese sci-fi fans. The entire number of voters for the Hugo Awards is only around 5,000. That means it is easily influenced by malicious voting. Organizing 2,000 people to each spend $14 is not hard, but I am strongly against such misbehavior. If that really does happen, I will follow the example of Marko Kloos, who withdrew from the shortlist after discovering the “Rabid Puppies” had asked voters to support him.

GT: Many fans believe that even if The Three-Body Problem had benefited from the “puppies,” it still was deserving of a Hugo Award. Do you agree?

Liu: Deserving is one thing, getting the award is another thing. Many votes went to The Three-Body Problem after Marko Kloos withdrew. That’s something I didn’t want to see. But The Three-Body Problem still would have had a chance to win by a slim margin of a few votes [without the “puppies”].

After the awards, some critics used this – the support right-wing organizations like the “puppies” gave The Three-Body Problem – as an excuse to criticize the win. That frustrated me. The “puppies” severely harmed the credibility of the Hugo Awards. I feel both happy and “unfortunate” to have won this year.

I don’t see any crossed fingers.

That means that this man is gullible enough to believe either what his translator, or Tor Books, or the mainstream news told him, namely, that we who voted for him were motivated by race-hatred against non-Whites. So we voted for a non-White because his book was good, not because his skin color was correct. Because we treated the award as if it were for the merit of science fiction story telling, not as if it were a political award granted to whatever most helped the far Left. We ignored race. By Morlock logic, that makes us racist.

I realize, my dear readers, that if you read THREE BODY PROBLEM, and weighed its merits, and in your honest judgment you thought it was the best SF novel of the year, and vyour judgment does not matter because you are not the correct sort of people to have opinions.

Even though your opinion in this one case agreed with our Leftist insect Overlords, the mere fact that the opinion was your taints it.

You are wrongfans.

Your love of science fiction is insufficient to make you a real science fiction fan unless you also hold a wide and ever changing list of political opinions on topics unrelated to science fiction, to science, or to reality.

It seems our votes were malicious on the grounds that we are right-wing, and that when my fans ponied up forty bucks to vote for me, you were not doing this because you like my work, but only out of the terrible and dark hatred in your hearts against… well, I am not sure against whom you have so much hatred. Who is the Victim of the Week again, this Week? Eastasians? Oceanians? (Someone should ask Wendell the Manatee around to check).

I note our malicious votes were still counted, however.

And all this time, I thought we Sad Puppies were merely sick and tired of mindnumbingly dull novels about mind-swapping genderless AI’s in space rocketing straight to the highest echelons of science fiction’s critical acclaim, and that we wanted to rescue stories that were actually worth reading rise from the ashes of brainmeltingly absurd uber-leftist ideological cliques and bask in the glory of the coveted Hugo Award.

Hmmm. One would think that if this were our motive, we would have said so from the beginning. Oh, wait a minute. We did.

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

Batman v Vader

Since the production values on this fanmade film are better than all the science fiction films I saw in my youth, including FORBIDDEN PLANET, I would say that we live in the golden age of science fiction.

Skip to about 0.30 to see the action.

And this, of course, if my favorite type of science fiction, pure quill which pulp space opera of that kitchen-sink style that pits a 1930s Depression-era man of mystery against the psionic cyborg dark lord of the Sith.

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

Wiser Than God

Here is a reprint of my EveryJoe article provided here as a courtesy to those of my readers unable to go to that site and be exposed to the girly pictures adorning it.

WISER THAN GOD

When is the last time you saw a Pilgrim or an Indian?

My son brought home from school a project he had made in arts and crafts showing a smiling Mayflower Pilgrim with a buckle on his hat, and I realized, thunderstruck, that I had not seen any Thanksgiving decorations in the public square or shopping markets, schools or streets since the turn of the millennium. Instead, Christmas music begins to play on my local radio station immediately after the Eve of the Feast of All Souls.

Thanksgiving is nearly a perfect holiday, since by rights it combines the awesome and uplifting act of humiliating oneself to God in thanks for the bounties and blessings poured onto this nation by Providence, with the tradition of gathering the family and clan together in a feast of sumptuous proportions, a feast meant to remind us of the wealth the hard work of our fathers created for us, and to remind us of the hard-won liberty and wise laws protecting our rights to enjoy that wealth and worship that God.

Thanksgiving sums up the three greatest blessings of America. Our political system is a voluntary mutual compact of limited and equal government enshrining individual rights; our economic system is a free market protecting individual property; and our religious heritage is one of the liberty of the individual conscience, a principle found in only faith in the world.

The 3 Cs of America are Constitutionalism, Capitalism, and Christianity. At Thanksgiving, we give thanks for all three at once.

Or we once did.

The first foreshadowing of the Constitutional form of government on this continent was the Mayflower Compact. How is it remembered and honored?

I looked up two textbooks to see. The first was Triumph of the American Nation, published in 1986. If you read this textbook, this is the Mayflower Compact you remember. It is a purely political document with no mention of the central purpose of the pilgrimage (ellipses in the original):

We whose names are underwritten, …having undertaken … a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do … solemnly and in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

Keep in mind this was a deliberately pro-American textbook written in the days when Political Correctness was just getting started.

By way of contrast, my son’s textbook McDougal Littell The Americans, published in 2003, mentions the Mayflower Compact only in a sidebar, where it is described in two paragraphs, one of which says the Compact was written in response to the Pilgrim fear that the non-Pilgrims aboard the vessel would challenge their authority.

The textbook quotes but a dozen words from the charter, in this sentence:

The Mayflower Compact stated that the purpose of their government in America would be to frame “just and equal laws…for the general good of the colony.” Laws approved by the majority would be binding on Pilgrim and non-Pilgrim alike.

So if you read this more modern textbook, you remember the Mayflower Compact as something born of the fear of the Pilgrim’s losing their authority over the non-Pilgrims, and using the document to set the minority under their control. So it is not even a political document any more, merely a political sleight of hand.

Here is the original:

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc. having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

The observant reader will see in a trice what is missing from both textbook versions, or, rather, who is missing. The purpose of the expedition is explicitly stated to be glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith. The purpose of the expedition is missing.

Do not be puzzled that the Compact refers to New England is the ‘Northern Parts of Virginia.’ In those days, the First Virginia Company Charter issued by the Crown extended from the area between 34 and 41 degrees latitude plus fifty English miles beyond, that is, from present day South Carolina to the spot where, twenty years later, New Amsterdam would stand, and, forty years after that, New York. Practically the whole coastline north of Florida was called Virginia.

There being no local squire or royal governor set over them, the pragmatic Pilgrims did what religious orders since before the Middle Ages had done for the government of their monastic communities: they mutually agreed to follow the laws mutually enacted, and having an elected leader rather than an appointed one.

That this is a Catholic custom from time immemorial is usually omitted from histories written by English Protestants, who preferred to think that democracy was invented by the Greeks and independently reinvented ex nihilo, somehow, by German pirates and barbarians who raided the Roman Britain in the Sixth Century. (That the Germans never had any such traditions before being Christianized, and that Roman monasteries and chartered townships never ceased to have such a tradition does not deter truly partisan historians from overlooking the obvious.)

This same tradition reaching back from the Parliament of England to the Senate of pre-Imperial Rome is embodied in the Mayflower Compact. The various colonial constitutions and charters also drew from it, and eventually the US Constitution, which is the pinnacle and best example of the lawgiver’s art history has ever seen. All constitutions since then, as in Revolutionary France or Russia, have been markedly inferior, if not positively grotesque.

The Pilgrim’s story concerning constitutional government is plain and is inspiring. And so it is never repeated these days.

The economic side of the story is even clearer. It seems that the Pilgrims, having decided to share all property in common, and share all labor between themselves in the communal fashion of the first Apostles, found nothing but misery and poverty in the prospect.

In Bradford’s History of the English Settlement, Governor Bradford gives this account of the experiment in communism:

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince, the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s, and other ancients, applauded by some of later times that the taking away of property, and bringing in community into a commonwealth; would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.

For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion, and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.

For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time, and strength to work for other men’s wives and children, without any recompense.

The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak, and not able to do a quarter the other could, this was thought injustice.

The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalised, in labors, and victuals, clothes, &c., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity, and disrespect unto them.

And for men’s wives to be commanded, to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, &c., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.

Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so if it did not cut off those relations, that God hath set amongst men; yet it did at least much diminish, and take off the mutual respects, that should be preserved amongst them.

And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition.

Let none object this is men’s corruption; and nothing to the course itself; I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.

For those of you unfamiliar with archaic turns of speech, what the Governor is saying here is that under “community” that is, communist living, the unproductive is rewarded equally with the productive, the successful with the unsuccessful, wise greybeards with loud young sophomores, respectable people with those not so respectable. A woman might be a queen in her own house, but when forced to work in another’s wagelessly is indeed a slave. And communism destroys mutual respect between all these relations, inside and outside the family. No one like to wipe the bottoms of the children of other men.

He emphasizes that the failure of communism is not due to the folly and weakness of men. These men were stout and honest. The failure is not due to a lack of will or virtue in those who have attempted it.

I suggest that when someone tells you real communism has never been really tried, the best reply is to pitch him out an upper story window and tell him on the way down that holding oneself aloft by means of breathing out a jet-stream of high-velocity nonsense form the mouth has never been really tried, nor by means of sustaining a compete vacuum in the skull to provide buoyancy. But had that someone learned the lesson of the Pilgrims as a schoolboy, he might have saved himself a defenestration.

Give thanks that the Pilgrims were not so devoted to communism as the Socialists of the Twentieth Century, whose respect for their follow man was not merely destroyed, and turned into a murderous hatred, but indeed became a perverted sadism of death camps and gulags and orchestrated mass-starvations and mass-slaughters, a lust to destroy human life on a scale never seen before or since, so hellish that new words had to be invented to describe it: Holocaust, Genocide, Democide.

Bradford mentions the happier sequel:

SO they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done; that they might not still thus languish in misery.

At length, after much debate of things, the Governor, with the advice of the chiefest amongst them, gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other things to go on in the general way as before.

And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number… and ranged all boys, and youth under some family.

This had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted, than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content.

The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny, and oppression.

The moral of this story is that even after years of a foolish and godless scheme, the return of sanity can happen, and will have immediate results. When the corn is your own, even women and children will volunteer for work as hard as they can manage to do.

What the Progressives call “progress” is the descent down the slippery, sewage-covered slope of mutual envy and mutual recrimination and mutual hatred, to immorality, poverty, and tyranny to barbarism. They call this inevitable. Like everything they say, it is a lie. The lesson of the Pilgrims is the lesson of men humble enough to learn their lesson, and return to what works.

All we need do is stop listening to the cozening lies and bad leadership, the Madison Avenue antics and P.T. Barnum con-artistry of men who think themselves wiser than God.

What about the final and most important aspect of the Pilgrim’s story in America?

There has been a debate in recent years among the historically illiterate, educated from textbooks such as these, or, rather, brainwashed, on the question of whether America was founded as a Christian nation.

For the debate to go forward, the Christian parts of our history have to be as carefully removed out of the record as Trotsky was airbrushed out of photographs of Lenin. It is for this reason that the signers of the Constitution, including Charles Carroll of Carrollton (the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence) are now depicted as freemasons, freethinkers and Deists rather than as Christians. It is for this reason that the Mayflower Compact is not mentioned in textbooks but in passing. It is for another reason, and far more dramatic, that the economic experience of this, the second colony planted in North America, is not mentioned at all.

Most literate people of my generation know the story of Squanto and the Pilgrims. I will recount it in brief for those of you who went to public school.

The colonists were suffering a dramatic death toll due to disease and starvation. Half were dead, and the half a dozen hale and healthy folk in the colony tended to the others, dressing meat and cleaning and changing their soiled clothing for them: five or so nurses tending fifty or so sick and doing all the other labor of the colony besides.

They had seen no Indians save for a few who stood aloof, running away when approached, or who stole some tools left unwatched during dinner.

In March, an Indian came forth from the woods speaking perfect English. His name was Squanto. Befriending the Pilgrims, he showed them were to find fresh springs of water, where and when to fish, where and how to grow maize (which we Americans to this day call corn) and how to make popcorn.

His story is dramatic and terrible: for he and four others had been lured aboard an English ship, captured, enslaved, given away, used a native guide, and abducted a second time to be sold to the Spanish. Squanto was saved by a Franciscan friar and set free, and spent years looking for a way home from Europe.

Meanwhile his tribesmen back home had come across sailors shipwrecked on the American shores, whom they slaughtered, except for three, whom they enslaved, and sent around from chieftain to chieftain to be tortured for their amusement.

The Europeans, however, carried diseases to which the Northern Americans had never developed any immunities. Before ever the first Pilgrim set foot on Plymouth Rock, the Patuxet Indian villages were wiped out by plague so swiftly that the Pilgrims found their huts still standing, eerie ghost towns, with the dead unburied. The surviving Indians naturally feared a curse and fled the area, so that by mere happenstance the one spot in America that was unoccupied was where the storm-tossed Pilgrims were driven ashore.

Squanto had labored for a shipbuilder in London and eventually made his way back to Newfoundland, and, later (on John Smith’s ship) to New England. Here found all his family dead and his tribe practically extinct.

Squanto acted as a translator and ambassador between the Pilgrims and the Indians, and secured a peace treaty which latest twenty five years. He also saw to it that the stolen tools were returned. It is thanks to his intervention that the colony survived at all.

Governor Bradford gives this account of Squanto’s death while he accompanied them to Manamoick Bay:

“Here Squanto fell ill of Indian fever, bleeding much at the nose, which the Indians take as a symptom of death, and within a few days he died. He begged the Governor to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishman’s God in heaven, and bequeathed several of his things to his English friends, as remembrances. His death was a great loss.”

After the appalling way the English had treated his people, and after the appalling way his people had treated the English who fell into their hands, despite all the suffering and disease and woe those days brought into their lives, Squanto nonetheless turned to God, and heard the Christian word of salvation.

And, if heaven shows on him the mercy we know in our own lives, Squanto is now exalted in paradise in greater splendor than the pagan gods of Olympus, a creature both happy and divine.

Immortal, he will outlive the stars and outlast the heat death of the universe. The salvation of his soul was the only really important thing the Pilgrims accomplished. Everything else will pass away.

And that is the part of the story the Politically Correct modern world most desperately wants you to forget.

Political Correctness is a new religion as well as being a new political and economic system. It is alien to the American character in every way, but most especially because there is no room, in a worldview where everyone is a helpless victim or a ruthless oppressor, for the emotion of gratitude.

There will be no further giving thanks for anyone to anything once Political Correctness completes the spread of its choking darkness over our land, kills all hope, halts all industries, destroys all wealth, shatters all laws, burns all churches, reduces all art to rubbish, all men to eunuch and all words to jabberwocky.

There is no room in postmodern history showing peaceful cooperation between races, no room for decorations showing Pilgrims and Indians together. There is no room for gratitude toward an Indian for saving our ancestors, hence us.

We are not allowed to call them Indians, nor to show admiration for them, wear Halloween costumes or put up decorations depicting them, or name our ball teams after them.

We are not allowed to express any emotion toward these native peoples on whose generosity in the early days – (the Indian wars were much later) – the survival of our ancestors depended, except that contempt mingled with pity which the sole emotion Political Correctness allows toward the weak. Hatred is the only emotion allowed toward everyone else.

There is no room for Thanksgiving in the PC reaches of desolation occupying the land once called America.

Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/11/25/li...

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

Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and fans!

Hello, Folks. Jagi, here, shanghaiing John’s blog once again.

This time, I just wanted to say thank you to all of you for your incredible generosity and for making our summer a miracle instead of time of poverty.

God bless you all!

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

Open Gates

Unfortunately I cannot embed or link to the video. The Powers That Be are taking steps to keep you from seeing it.

This was deliberately edited to create a certain emotional effect. Do not assume the news and other sources trying to create the opposite effect are not edited as deliberately.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/11/watch-anti-migrant-video-going-viral-across-europe/

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