Ideology

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The brown scare goes after libertarians, endorses throwing rocks at Pope Benedict

                                             Once more
My quondam dean in University Hall
Stands in the breach of peace, whence he will call
Down fire on the bald, woolly heads of all
Professors of the other point of view,
Who, flanked and enfiladed and too few,
Will soon throw down their dated arms of course,
And yield themselves to a superior force
Of well-drilled intellectual police,
Sworn on honor to enforce the peace.

— L.E. Sissman, “Peace Comes to Still River, Mass.”

I got in trouble on Twitter the other day, for quoting a post by Henry Dampier. Jesse Spafford, a writer who has contributed to the flagship magazine of Brooklyn leftism, the New Inquiry, says I shared “an essay lamenting that the Nazis lost WWII.” Readers can decide whether the following passage “laments” that:

Imagining that the Nazis won World War II is a popular jumping-off point for a lot of speculative fiction. The reader is supposed to feel glad that the Nazis did not in fact, win. Unfortunately, a more brutal, cruel, and anti-human government won World War II — the Soviet Union.

This is a heterodox version of the story, maybe, but not that controversial, and certainly not the exclusive domain of Nazi apologists.’Yalta could have gone better’ is a fairly well-accepted point of view. That Dampier quote is straight out of Pat Buchanan, though by no means confined to the populist corner of the right. Or even just the right. The independent left Tribune, of which George Orwell was literary editor, objected to the Yalta agreement. And here’s Dwight MacDonald in the 1952 debate with Norman Mailer at Mount Holyoke:

… the only historically real alternatives in 1939 were to back Hitler’s armies, to back the Allies’ armies, or to do nothing. But none of these alternatives promised any great benefit for mankind, and the one that finally triumphed has led simply to the replacing of the Nazi threat by the Communist threat, with the whole ghastly newsreel flickering through once more in a second showing.

Who knew MacDonald was a Nazi apologist? I’m sympathetic to Christopher Lasch’s criticism of him famously, and grudgingly, “choosing” the West, which he lodges in The New Radicalism in America, that “to “choose” between the two, however, was to assume that conflict between Russia and the West could not be avoided. If one assumed such a conflict, one had to choose — as most people had felt obliged to choose between Hitler and the West.”

At this point, I suppose it’s worth noting that by the standards of the anti-colonial style that dominates the left today, to “choose” the West at all is to side with a kind of fascism. You’d have to ask Spafford about that one, but it is at least clear that, to our Pomona philosophy graduate, it is impossible to think both that Nazis are bad and the post-World War II peace conceded far too much to the Soviet Union; the only person who could possibly think that is a Nazi apologist. It went on like this for a while before I blocked him and he tweeted about it.

I’d go so far as to say there’s one thing about about all of this that resembles the way the Stalinist left in America behaved after Operation Barbarossa, insinuating pacifists and Trotskyites were on Hitler’s payroll. In his tweet, Spafford cc’d Michael Goldfarb, the registered foreign agent and chairman of the Free Beacon, a neoconservative website that publishes unverified, fake propaganda from Senate offices intended to gin up the case for war in Ukraine. Spafford, a committed leftist, is not only aping Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but making common cause with neoconservatives to do so. This is interesting not just because the Free Beacon is staunchly pro-Israel (Spafford thinks Israel is fascist too). It also speaks to the idea that the neoconservative and left-wing narratives about World War II are roughly the same.

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Anti-Work is the latest inane idea from left-libertarianism

I call myself a libertarian, but boy do libertarians get on my nerves.

The freedom philosophy used to be about trashing government aggression and poking fun at statism. But thanks to the rise of left-libertarian organizations, the philosophy has been infiltrated by ignorant hacks. Libertarianism is now chock-full of whiners who want smaller government for the wrong ends.

My friend Julie Borowski clued me in on one such specimen. His name is Nick Ford and he is a tad different from your run-of-the-mill leftist-libertarian. Ford backs a novel cause: abolishing work. From what I can determine, he detests working in a typical office setting and finds it stifling to his creative genius, or something.

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Opus Dei could school the neoreaction

I believe I first heard of Opus Dei in 1999 when I was working on a political campaign with a good friend who I would describe as a “devout” Catholic. I was interested in the Church at the time, mainly for its central place in the history of the West. My friend and I had numerous late-night discussions (beer for him, martinis for me) about history, politics and the Church. One night after we’d had a few he asked, “Have you ever heard of Opus Dei?” I hadn’t.

He told me a fairly amusing story about how Opus had tried to recruit him during his distinguished undergraduate career at Georgetown University. Someone invited him to an event at the Georgetown Opus Dei “Center for Men” and he hung out there a bit, but never seriously considered joining.

“Two interesting things about them,” he told me. “One, these guys would only drank one beer, then stop. Two, they had the Washington Post in the lounge, but the ads for women’s lingerie had been cut out.”

Despite his own intense faith, this wasn’t for him. He was at the School of Foreign Service studying to be a diplomat. Detractors of Opus Dei love to shout that it tries to recruit the best and brightest young Catholics who are planning to go into international relations, law, politics and journalism.

Of course, MSNBCBS, the Department of State, Senators and NGOs try and recruit the same set of people to work for them, but they’re Righteous Progressive Warriors for Peace and Justice, so that’s just fine.

My friend still had a copy of Camino they gave him, and he gave it to me to read. After that, I did some more research on the organization and its founder, Saint Josemaria Escriva.

At any rate, this post is not meant as a thorough history of Opus. The Wiki bio of Escriva is a pretty balanced presentation of the history and development of the movement. Some years later I read Dan Brown’s excrescence of a book and was much amused by the albino Opus Dei assassin. The traitorous FBI agent Robert Hannsen was a member, for what it’s worth.

At this point, the reader may fairly ask, what the hell has all this to do with Neoreaction? “NRx” is a mainly internet-based socio-politico-philosophical inquiry, not a religious order, has no leader that can be discerned, no structure, no history, no monuments or even office space. Opus has this:

opus-dei-hq-new-yorkBut here’s the crux (think about what that means): Neoreaction can only affect society if it gets elites to support its ideas, intellectually, financially and eventually physically. Right now, Western elites, the Princeton-Harvard-Yale-DC-Oxford-Davos-Brussels axis, are about 99.44% pure Cathedral Prog, (with a Ted Cruz thrown in for color). The tip of the NRx spear realizes that its real mission, at this point, is to recruit elites as supporters (or at least, sympathizers. Opus calls them “collaborators”). The Neoreaction doesn’t seek political power within the current liberal democratic nation-state systems of the West, nor is it a mass movement, nor is it interested in “members” who aren’t very intelligent. Like Opus Dei, NRx has a certain exclusivity that keeps it lean and focused, and at the same time seems to make even intelligent opposition lose objectivity.

Opus and the NRx bring out something primal in “Progressives,” because they’re impervious: men without shame or fear or guilt, at least of the kind that Progs use as a rhetorical hammer to threaten and bludgeon their opposition. “Conservatives” can’t stand for long against charges of racism or sexism or ableism or whate’er, because they’re liberals. Nothing enrages the Progs like a person who refuses to be intellectually cowed by charges of “hate.” A powerful, organized group of such people is their deepest secret fear.

Neoreaction isn’t there, yet, not by a long way. It might take some steps by imposing more demands on its followers, the same way that Opus does, and all the successful religions do. The “Mainline Protestants” have withered in direct proportion to their embrace of “inclusiveness” and their depiction of Jesus as your Special Boyfriend who won’t judge you, and who will always take you back despite the fact you cheated on Him.

Opus Dei demands you sleep on the floor once a week, arise the instant the alarm goes off and dedicate your every waking moment to excellence and to raising up your daily work to God.

There’s a hint of this in some Neoreactionary blogs, lately. While they have different forms, organization (or lack of it), and goals, Opus Dei and the Neoreaction have in common a distaste for the disgusting aspects of modernity and an ethos of raising up the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Of right reason guiding a right social order. Neoreactionaries need emulate Opus Dei in this way: to raise their standards, to conduct themselves as elites and to improve themselves physically, mentally and spiritually. The best way to spread the word is by living example.

Terrorists and hate speech at the Daily Caller

Over at the Daily Caller I got a piece published about the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. Take a look:

This use of violence to silence “offensive” speech is structurally identical to hate speech laws, the only difference is that it was vigilantes that executed “justice” this time. I’m not calling supporters of hate speech laws insensitive and I’m not saying that they support terrorism. I am saying that their goals are identical to those of the men in who committed this atrocity. Those goals are to suppress “offensive” or “harmful” or “hateful” speech through coercion and government action is inherently coercive. Progressives seem to only want to make this violent suppression more systematic through the use of the legal system.

Thanks a lot to the wise and handsome opinion editor over there.

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An open letter to a budding terrorist

Dear Budding Terrorist,

Greetings. You don’t know me, although perhaps you might be inclined to think that you do, but I thought that I might do something different and break the ice. I understand how unsettling it is for an infidel or mindless sheep or collateral damage or whatever to make the first move, but relationships in violence don’t seem any more or less complicated than relationships in love. And seeing as how we’re basically going to be getting off on the wrong foot no matter how we carry ourselves, I hope you will permit my indulgence.

First I want to offer my most heartfelt congratulations. I mean that sincerely. You’ve found something to believe in; you’ve found something far larger than yourself, and to which you have submitted your whole being in order to be defined by it so totally that it almost obliterates everything you were up until that point. That is not an easy thing to do, I imagine; to wholly dedicate yourself to this or that creed, however abstract on its face, however diluted or manipulated by cleverer but still lesser minds. This is more than I can say for most people I know and love, and I am very close to respecting you far more than I do them. Speaking for myself, living in a fog of unbelief has proven satisfactory and securing in only the most superficial sense, like going into a vast wilderness with nothing but a sharpened tree branch.

That you found something, a proverbial light penetrating an otherwise total darkness, in other words, is great. I am happy for you. You want something better than what you have, and moreover you want it spread as far and wide as possible so that, I presume, it gives others the feeling that it gave you. It’s on this point that I’d like to offer some advice.

In setting about with persuading people of the superiority of your beliefs, it helps to have a sense of proportionality when doing so. I know that this seems rich coming from a citizen of the United States, a country that never knew a disproportion it didn’t like, but be assured that I speak to you as someone thoroughly fatigued by any and all disproportion, not only those inflicted against my fellow countrymen but those inflicted in our names against others wholly undeserving. To put it bluntly, I speak as someone who is tired of seeing people get killed. I’ve not seen very many compared to others, I admit, but I’ve seen enough at a reasonable enough distance to know that whatever good anyone thinks will come out of it just won’t.

Perhaps you’d think it out of line of me to presume that you’d kill anybody. Perhaps you’re convinced that people you seek to persuade will very clearly see the very same light you saw and fall in line with no bloodshed or other force necessary. I think you and I both know that that is the highest order of bullshit. Whatever the content of your belief, your fervor will be stoked so early and often that it may well eclipse the former. It will very likely be stoked by people who casually disregard your worldview. It will certainly be stoked by people who willfully disregard it, indeed, who disregard it with vulgarity and vehemence, with insensitivity and antipathy. Perhaps they do not seek to harm you personally, but you may feel wounded all the same. How dare they persist in flouting The Truth? How dare they belittle and ridicule that to which you’ve so dedicated your time and energy? These people are beyond persuasion, you’ll conclude, they are beyond redemption, and so making an example of them will surely make more sense to you. Against vile words and images you’ll take action and your point will be made.

Even if you haven’t made up your mind on that point, I offer only this suggestion: don’t. Don’t make an example out of anyone for expressing this or that crude criticism. Don’t threaten and don’t kill, if not for the sake of your victims then at least for the sake of yourself and whose name under which you do it. It will not only fail, it will elicit negative results. Your cause, for one, will be regarded outwardly as unjust, even malignant if it isn’t already, but more crucially your actions will be responded to, and likely overtaken, by the very sentiment you hoped to stifle. Your vulgar, locally renowned target will go national, even international; its subversive infamy will be imbued with an almost knightly heroism. Innumerable people of all stripes, of all backgrounds and views, will go out, into the cold if necessary, to express solidarity with it and defend its right to be as vile as it wishes.

It’s perverse, really, that it would take you killing someone to remind everyone else of freedom’s presence. Freedom, don’t get me wrong, is every bit as abstract as the ideas to which you’ve clung, hell it might even be more so, yet therein lies its power. You come to us with a mind to impose rigidity and obedience, perhaps more than was intended at that, or worse if we refuse; freedom imposes generosity and presupposes at least some dignity in pretty much everybody. To some it is granted far more easily than others; it was to me and I’d hazard a guess that it was almost equally as much to you. I feel sorry for people who don’t quite grasp that feeling, but in the end there’s only so much time to give to people like you and me when there are others under more trying circumstances and with some responsibility for them attached to us.

You and I are not really all that impressive, valuable or memorable in the grand scheme of things. Maybe we should just be friends.

Sincerely,

Chris

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How sad it must be to be angry all the time

Well I didn’t call it.

The perpetually indignated lefties at Slate have declared 2014 “The Year of Outrage.” They aren’t wrong; and it’s more than a bit ironic the writers making the claim are also responsible for the madness that now defines the internet news cycle. A handful of the site’s reporters weighed in on the outrage phenomenon, some admirably taking responsibility for it. Jordan Weissmann, to his credit, lamented the “impulse to jump on the outrage cycle” and drive traffic to small pieces of life’s innumerable injustices. He defends the practice however, saying “viral hits help finance other less outraged, more important journalism.” Yes and drug-dealing can also be used to fund soup kitchen operations. The latter doesn’t make the former any less immoral.

Betsy Woodruff does a decent job highlighting the more embarrassing attempts to use outrage machinations by conservatives. But even while well-meaning voices on the right are apt to use harsh-worded demonization, the kind of determined vitriol progressives embrace is another matter altogether. For the left, outrage is a lifestyle instead of a seldom-felt emotion.

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