The seer

As a tyke, I sat in Catechism classes wearing the red neckerchief and Karl Marx pin of the socialist Young Pioneers, with Christ crucified on one wall and an Antichrist crucifier, Konstantin Rokossovsky, on the other. Perhaps this is why, fifty years later, I feel that life in the West is a moveable feast on a ship of fools.

A far greater man, Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, felt so too. On 8 June 1978, Solzhenitsyn stood in front a jubilant class of overfed, overconfident Harvard graduates, and told them that they and their culture were – to put it succinctly – full of shit.

The old artillery captain told these young alpha types that they were fools led by blind cowards, all wallowing in filth, decadence and spiritual blindness. And he did so just as they were counting their signing bonuses at Lehman Brothers or imminent good deeds at ACORN  -- ironically, the two opposite ends of the mega-iceberg that has just ripped apart the ship of state of the United States (1).

A quarter century before neocons highjacked the US Government and its money-printing press to promote mobocracy around the world, Solzhenitsyn told Americans that “the persisting blindness of superiority” generates the belief that Western pluralistic democracy is the best in theory and practice for all of humanity.

Thirty years before European archbishops rooted for sharia, and governments in a distinctly Christian civilization promoted the piercing of European skies by tens of thousands of minaret towers, the Gulag hero said:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?

Solzhenitsyn predicted also that former colonies would present a bill to the West of such magnitude that everything the West owns would be insufficient to clear this account. This has come to pass primarily in the form of the former colonized now doing the colonizing, and the supine West acting as though this were an irresistible force of nature that can be met only with capitulation.

In another permutation of this “unclearable account,” the United States has crashed its ship into the biggest imprudential rock of all time by showering onto its nonwhite minorities subprime and other fraudulent mortgages and preventing effective control of the scam , which has led to the crash of the US banking, mortgage, and stock market systems.  All that after having awarded, for decades,  some of the choicest and most important positions in society to mediocrities whose chief merit was their skin color, and after having confiscated trillions of dollars (2) from productive whites to redistribute them to less productive or nonproductive nonwhites.  

In his Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn also underlined the parody that the West had made of its own founding ideas, notably in the United States. The principle that governments are meant to serve man so that he can live free, has degenerated into the welfare state. The idea that man should be free to pursue happiness has been debased into voracious gluttony of material goods and physical pleasures that cannot possibly lead to true happiness (3).

Furthermore, said Solzhenitsyn, destructive and irresponsible freedom has rendered society defenseless against base individuals. The law, rather than a voluntary sense of self-restraint, or right and wrong, governs Western society.  As a result, “Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror.”

In 1978, Solzhenitsyn still couldn’t have known the fine detail, but since then, enterprising Third World minorities have been arriving in the countries of the West in order to use the framework of liberal law as a nutcracker with which to extract benefits, preferential treatment, and eventual domination of the broken societies that have given them shelter. And since the West abounds in idiots useful to the cause of self-destruction, such external forces of entropy are greatly fortified through deliberate actions of the host countries’ legislators, courts, executive authorities and civic “rights” organizations.

Wall Street robbers pilot their country and the world into the ground for the sake of generating eight and nine-figure annual incomes for themselves, and they manage to do so without breaking any laws. No laws avail the citizen who wishes to defend his culture and his children’s future from the flood  of alien – and in the case of Muslims, 7^th century -- primitives into his neighborhood. Laws have proved inadequate to protect individual freedom against the uncontrollable growth of government, and powerless to protect the taxpayer from depredations by the proliferating tax-eaters.

Solzhenitsyn understood that all of that wouldn’t have been possible, were it not for the power of modern mass media and their manipulation of the public’s attitudes and opinions. He said:

[F]ashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. An example is the self-deluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of petrified armor around people’s minds [snip]. It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events.

The crowbar of events did start prying the shutters off the West’s visors in New York on 11 September 2001 and in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004. And further blinders melted on Wall Street on 15 September 2008. But all that is not enough, and some of it has come too late. When up to 20% percent of France’s nuke-equipped military are Muslims of African origin, and mosques have been built both at West Point and Annapolis military academies, it’s a little late to start unwinding the demographic catastrophe, except at a great price. And when the gang-ho capitalism of America on the way up has turned into mega-socialism on the way down -- to the tune of about $1.7 trillion in direct government acquisition of toxic financial enterprises, so far -- what good is it to talk about “reform”?

Seeing the grotesque spectacle of Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd standing on the steps of the US Capitol to announce the $1-trillion bailout – of a ship that they have sunk with their own hands -- exhausts one’s store of adjectives. As does the sight of President Bush’s encomiums to the gargantuan bailout, when he is one of the primary causes why the bailout is needed in the first place.

How is such madness possible, for so long? Aleksandr Isayevich felt that something was grossly wrong. He told the Harvard celebrants:

You can feel [Evil’s] pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development?

Solzhenitsyn proposed that the root of the problem lay in the West’s rationalistic humanism, going back to the Age of Enlightenment. He called it, “anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.”

He did not propose his beloved Eastern Orthodoxy as a cure for the West’s ills, nor even Christianity. But he did say that human life has a higher meaning, and that a total engrossment in the procurement and carefree consumption of material goods is at best incidental to that meaning.

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die.

One wonders how the rest of that afternoon went for the Harvard faculty and Class of ’78, after that speech. But for me it triggers a sympathetic reflex that I can hardly detect in anyone whose father has not stood in line for three hours in sub-freezing cold, to buy his son two oranges.

 

The seer was blind

The Solzhenitsyn speech surfaced in my memory in early October, after receiving critiques from some readers that I was “banging a tin drum” and “too much of a rant.”

Conversely, I feel that the drum I bang is impossibly inaudible, and the rant inadequate to the task of even describing, let alone ringing the alarm on, the slow-motion undoing of the West that’s been advancing inexorably, in plain view, for 40 years now.

But to see clearly is no minor task. It requires a sincere personal commitment and arduous training, of a type that is hardly available but in some remote spots in Northeast Asia.

It seems strange that, in its vanity, the West, having witnessed how the East has risen by selectively adopting the West’s strongest features – its science, technology and industry – has for so long presumed that it has nothing to learn from the East. And the East’s strongest feature is its spirituality – one that is not based on disputatious concepts of a Deus to explain the machina, but that observes the machina to infer what divine principles keep its wheels spinning.

The West has turned to other cultures. But in its multicultural strain of moral vanity, it has denigrated its own greatness while injecting itself with the low, not the high, of what’s available in the world’s cultural supermarket. Tattoo borrowed from the Polynesians, piercings learned from India, Islam imported from the desert, and a dance-and-music culture that’s a debased and de-spiritualized pastiche of the best of Africa attest to the astonishing blindness of the West’s ruling elites, if not their intent to impair the West’s immune systems.

Solzhenitsyn himself could not see clearly. He saw the West as though through X-rays, but he did not see Russia. Talking about Western imperialism, he seemed unaware of Russian imperialism. Hammering Western materialism, he seemed blind to Russian materialism – of a scale and nouveau riche gaudiness not seen since Louis XVI.

Charging the West with the blindness of superiority, he skipped over ingrained strains of Russian supremacy. Laying much of the blame for the Russian revolution on Jews – with considerable basis in fact – he neglected to describe the tsarist persecutions and murders of Jews, which had caused them to flock to an ideology that promised fraternity and emancipation of all.

Thus will excess yang always bring about a counter wave of yin, which will generate a third – and usually destructive—force vector. Or, as Lao Tzu has put it 2500 years ago:

Tao begets one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad things.

The Black Hundreds spawned the counter-evil of Yagoda and Kaganovich. Hitler’s evil brought Europe’s suicide via Eurabia. Slavery and Jim Crow brought reverse racial discrimination and black Obamajugend (4).

Perceiving the dialectical monism (5) in the currents of history, or in one own’s life, restores sight even to a renowned seer who has blind spots.

 

The fallacy of good intentions

Solzhenitsyn’s biggest blindness, perhaps, was in accusing the West of lack of spirituality. He completely missed that it’s the excess of naïve spirituality that’s at the root of the West’s troubles.

What we have, however, belongs mostly in two mutant bins. We have morality that’s Judeo-Christian in origin but detached from genuine spirituality – that’s the basic left-liberal model, leading to mostly unintended evil consequences. Or we have genuine spirituality that’s detached from reality – that’s the right-liberal model, leading to decay and entropy. And in Europe there is a hybrid genus too, such as exemplified by the erstwhile British PM, Tony Blair.

In any political drama played out on the Western stage nowadays one can detect a thin layer of cowards and cynical manipulators at the top, riding on a foaming wave of citizens who, deeply motivated by moral or spiritual considerations, turn into saboteurs of their own societies and their own future.

Well known by now are videos and pictures of young, vicious “antifascist” hoods who on 20 September 2008 attacked a peaceful rally of middle-aged European patriots who just wished to protest their own ethnocide. Less analyzed have been pictures such as this, showing earnest faces of normal young Germans convinced beyond a doubt that they are on the side of goodness and virtue.  

A clue as to how such a massive self-deception is possible is imbedded in Reuters’s caption, for it does not refer to the fascist “antifascists” as “left wing,” but does refer to the organizers of the AntiIslamisation Congress as “right wing.”  And Der Spiegel’s pictures of the truly vicious punks refer to them as “demonstrators,” while the victims are branded “radical-right activists.”

This sinister charade was amply on display in utterances of deluded German quislings who, along with their predecessors, have engineered the inconceivable lunacy of bringing at least 3 million Muslims to Germany, and have been ramming that down the throats of an unwilling population while co-opting the young through brainwashing. Thus, Cologne’s Mayor, Fritz Schramma, called the September pogrom "a victory for the city of Cologne and a victory by the democratic forces of the city." Angela Merkel’s “Integration” Minister, Maria Boehmer, crowed about "far-right groups that pose as grass roots movements, but aim only to discriminate against minorities".

All this from people whose grandfathers, equally convinced of the righteousness of their cause, saluted Sieg Heil in front of giant banners reading, “Germans, the Jews are our misfortune,” and whose ancestors just three generations earlier stuck pitchforks into pregnant Jewish women.  And the Jews were a model minority in Germany and Austria, with a 2000-year tenure and an invaluable contribution in every area of life.

How is such madness possible? Then or now? Well, one who understands how the old yang generates the new yin, also knows what to do about it.

The fallacy of good intentions is destroying the West. A tide of compassionate yin is carrying all to the edge of the cliff, and beyond.

In Canada, for instance, bus passengers are now exposed to seemingly routine decapitation, stabbing, or tuberculosis infection -- all by immigrants from primitive, usually Muslim countries, who have as much business gallivanting with-or-without knives and spores in the frozen North as polar bears have diving for seals in the Arabian desert. And if you point it out, they have inquisition tribunals in Canada that will persecute you as they have Mark Steyn.

In the United States, well-meaning social engineers have thrown away the rules of sound banking going back to Roman times, and compelled financial institutions to grant brain-dead mortgages to the “poor” -- that is an American euphemism for “nonwhites” – who had no jobs, no income, no prospects, no education or discipline to improve prospects, no down-payment and no collateral.

Substituting wishful thinking for an accurate reading of simple reality is like driving a car with a blindfold. And it must invariably end with a monumental crash, such as the United States has just brought onto itself.

Europe is driving a different fancy car, with its own kind of blindfold, a keffiyeh pulled over its eyes. In the socio-political realm it manifests as, what Fjordman has called, “a slow-motion coup d’état conducted [by the EU] against dozens of countries simultaneously.”

Ethnocide, chaos, destruction of social capital and great losses of civic liberty have been foisted onto a complacent populace under the guise of unity, tolerance, perfecting society and prosperity. In the economic realm, Europeans prone to anti-US schadenfreude will take no solace from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of how the EU has mismanaged the European economy more than the US Govt. and Wall Street have America’s.  

Western society everywhere conducts itself now based on lies. Some are multicultural lies, others are racial lies (e.g. denial of IQ differences), and yet others are economic lies.

It is beyond belief that a group of some of the smartest people in the world – the CEOs of the major investments banks in the US and Europe – could have convinced themselves that the  financial ordure of subprime, no-money-down and other Alt-A  mortgages could have been  converted into the perpetual golden goose. But that’s what happens when the hubris of a “master of the universe” is fertilized by smarts divorced from wisdom. For all that was required was to remember that what goes up, goes down, and that dreck in, dreck out.

The West is paying a heavy price for its divorce from wisdom in finance. But we stand to pay an even heavier price for the criminal blindness of our conceited political elites. For, in their yin craziness, they have chosen to ignore an old Cameroonian proverb:

No matter how long a log bobs on the water, it will not become a crocodile.

 

(1) Quoted here are some excerpts.

(2)  If somebody knows the amount, they are keeping it a close secret, for this data that’s easily available with respect to China, is not with respect to the US, or any Western country, to my knowledge. Unreliable estimates I have seen range from $ nine to $ forty trillion in the last 40 years.

(3) For another take on this see Takuan Seiyo, “Kapital as Kapalit,” Quarterly Review, Autumn 2007, republished.

(4) It is a symptom of the deep, truth-averse decay of America that one who clicks on this link will find a caption, “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.” High-level pressure must have been exerted to suppress this footage of fat, thin-in-the-brain, paramilitary young black fascists swearing their fealty to Obama.

At present the footage is still available here. Moreover, this and this illustrates why the Hitlerjugend is not far from one’s mind when witnessing the pro-Obama brain washing being administered to the young by adult true-believers.

(5) This term will be elaborated in subsequent installments.